This island rock in space turns flowering endlessly To peaks of cloud still mounting where you took Your last high passage and your faltering luck.

-Cicero full name MarcusTullius Cicero
  'Elegy for Kurt Porjescz, Missing in  Action,1  April,1945'.

There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide; Where the small eels that left the deeper way For the warm shore, within the shallows play; Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud, Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood.

-Crabbe, George
  The Borough, letter 22,'Peter Grimes', l.185^91.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.1.

And I'm afraid, reading this passage now, That everything I knew has been destroyed By those whom I admired but never knew; The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat And I'm afraid most of my friends are dead.

-Fenton,James
  'In a Notebook'.

   We used to say that a passage of good style beganwith a fresh, usual word, and continued with fresh, usual words to the end; there was nothing more to it.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
  Joseph Conrad,  a Personal Remembrance, pt.3.

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Remark, 30  Apr, quoting an old college tutor. Collected in James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

-Salinger,J(erome) D(avid)
  'Seymour: An Introduction'.

There is a North-west passage to the intellectual World.

-Sterne, Laurence
^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.5, ch.42.

Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
  A Child's Garden ofVerses, XLI,'North-West Passage', pt.1, 'Good Night', stanza 3.

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

-Vaughan, Henry
  Silex Scintillans,'Man'.

Have you not learn'd great lessons fromthose who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?

-Whitman,Walt(er)
  Leaves of Grass,'Sands at Seventy','Stronger Lessons'.