"his bountiful inner life would have shielded him from his bountiful inaction"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"The PTA Disbands," The Simpsons (1995)

"... discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to the embarrassing myths about himself -- everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Drool -- although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live ..."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"... the hobble / of too much replaced by the common limp / of too little. But I almost got there."

"The Seekonk Woods," The Past, Galway Kinnell

"I have read it and each time I have heard / his voice saying it under my voice, / and in fact in those auditoriums / that don't let you 'hear yourself,' sometimes / I hear only his voice, ..."

"The Last Holy Fragrance (In memoriam James Wright)," The Past, Galway Kinnell

(it's about a) doggone

"... she scribbles her spine's / continuation into immaterial et cetera, ..."

"The Angel," The Past, Galway Kinnell

An Angel at My Table (1990)

"Ruth had been brought up to believe in revelations, in words of awful import spoken on special occasions, in strange languages or other unusual ways. The doctors might call it delirium, but how could they be sure? Things that were hidden from the wise were revealed to babes and sucklings."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--Ruth was back in those childhood days on the lonely hills of Paradise, when Paul had been her only childhood friend, a refuge from a family of fanatics, with a father who beat her to make her think like him. Back there she had known that Paul was a great man, and had followed him all these years; she had watched his mind unfolding, and learned everything she knew from it--and now, to see it destroyed by a brute with a piece of iron pipe!"

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--but the more it changed, the more it was the same thing."

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

"This was Big Magic."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair