Robert Frost

"Then the boy saw all—Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man's work, though a child at heart—He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!' So. But the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

- Excerpt from "Out, Out" by Robert Frost

Joyce Carol Oates

"She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week that way, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother's way and thinking, dreaming, about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July."

- Excerpt from "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", by Joyce Carol Oates

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker tinge that saddens it."

- Excerpt from The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Po Bronson

"We are all writing the story of our life. We want to know what it's 'about,' what are its themes and which theme is on the rise. We demand of it something deeper, or richer, or more substantive. We want to know where we're headed ~ not to spoil our own ending by ruining the surprise, but we want to ensure that when the ending comes, it won't be shallow. We will have done something. We will not have squandered our time here."

- Excerpt from the Introduction to What Should I Do with My Life?, by Po Bronson