Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

-Angelou, Maya originally MayaJohnson
  I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, ch.35

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

-Arnold, Matthew
  'Dover Beach', stanza 4.

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed Hisgrace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea.

-Bates, Katharine Lee
  'America the Beautiful', opening lines.

   Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain, Till, burst at length, each wat'ry head o'er flows,

-Rochdale
  Of Scotland and the Scots.'The Curse of Minerva', l.139^42.

Lo! all in silence, all in order stand, And mighty folios first, a lordly band: Then quartos their well-ordered ranks maintain, And light octavos fill a spacious plain; See yonder, ranged in more frequented rows, A humbler band of duodecimos.

-Crabbe, George
The Library (published1808), l.128^33.

   Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, tobe faced with philosophyand investigated by science.

-Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans
^2  Middlemarch, bk.1, ch.11.

Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.

-Ford, Anna
  In the Observer, 23 Sep.

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.

-Goldsmith, Oliver
  The Deserted Village, l.1^2.

Which I wish to remarkö And my language is plainö That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar, Which the same I would rise to explain.

-Harte, (Francis) Bret
  'Plain Language from Truthful James', stanza1. The poem became popularly known as'That Heathen Chinee'.

When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights, When the angry breakers roar As they beat on the rocky shoreö When storm-clouds brood on the towering heights Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore.

-Lear, Edward
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Dong with a Luminous Nose'.

Wildly o'er Desmond the war-wolf is howling, Fearless the eagle sweeps over the plain, The fox in the streets of the city is prowlingö All, all who would scare them are banished or slain!

-McCann, M(ichael) J(oseph)
  The Spirit of the Nation,'O'Donnell  Abu'.

But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few.

-McMurtry, LarryJeff
  Some Can Whistle, pt.4, ch.9.

Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath Day's azure eyes, Ocean's nursling,Venice lies,ö A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'Lines written amongst the Euganean Hills', l.90^7.

A gentle knight was pricking on the plain.

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Faerie Queen, bk.1, canto1, stanza1.

We are beginning to see now it is matter is the scaffolding of spirit; that the poet emerges from morphemes and phonemes; that as form in sculpture is the prisoner of the hard rock, so in everyday life it is the plain facts and natural happenings that conceal God and reveal him to us little by little under the mind's tooling.

-Thomas, R(onald) S(tuart)
  Frequencies,'Emerging'.

As we rush, as we rush in the train, The trees and the houses go wheeling back, But the starry heavens above that plain Come flying on our track.

-Thomson,James pseudonym 'BV',ByssheVanolis
^5  'Sunday at Hampstead', stanza10.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  In the Observer,15 Apr.

: I think Jack, for instance, a charming name. :Jack?† No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations† I have known several Jacks, and theyall, without exception, weremore than usually plain. Besides,Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment's solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
  JACKGWENDOLEN1895  The Importance of Being Earnest, act1.

Leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star; Image that, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain.

-Wordsworth,William
  'Influence of Natural Objects', l.49^52 (published in The Friend 28 Dec1809).