No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

-Auden,W(ystan) H(ugh)
Quoted in Time, 29 Dec1961.

Ay, now the plot thickens very much upon us.

-Buckingham, GeorgeVilliers, 2nd Duke of
  The Rehearsal, act 3, sc.1.

Father declared he was going to buya new plot in the cemetery, a plot all for himself.'And I'll buy one on a corner,' he added triumphantly,'where I can get out.'

-Day, Clarence Shepard
  Life With Father, penultimate paragraph.

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in historya plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. Those harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another, as wave follows upon wave; only one real fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations.Only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

-Fisher, H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens)
  History of Europe, introduction.

On the 5th November we began our Parliament, to which the King should have come in person but refrained, through a practice but that morning discovered. The plot was to have blown up the King†at oneinstanttohaveruinedthewhole estateand kingdom of England.

-Hoby, Sir Edward
  Letter to the British  Ambassador to Brussels, describing the Gunpowder Plot,19 Nov.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

-Keats,John
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode to a Nightingale', stanza1.

The beginning of a plot†is the prompting of desire.

-Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher Charles Herbert
  On Peter Brooks Reading for thePlot (1984). In the NewYork Times,11  Jul.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme ö whyare they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

-Lowell, RobertTraill Spence,Jr
  Day by Day,'Epilogue'.

My soul; sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes, every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.

-Quarles, Francis
  Epigram, Respice Finem.

Women enjoyed (whatsoe'er before they've been) Are like romances read, or sights once seen: Fruition's dull, and spoils the play much more Than if one read or knew the plot before; 'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear; It were not heaven, if we knew what it were.

-Suckling, SirJohn
  'Against Fruition'.

   Autumn is desolation in the plot Of a thousand acres, where these memories grow From the inexhaustible bodies that are not Dead, but feed the grass, row after rich row.

-Tate, (John Orley) Allen
  Poems1922^1947,'Ode to the Confederate Dead'.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

-Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens
  TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn,'Notice'.