With a name like yours you might be any shape, almost.

-Dodgson
Through the Looking-Glass, ch.6,'Humpty Dumpty'.

No princely pomp, no wealthy store, No force to win the victory, No wily wit to salve a sore, No shape to feed each gazing eye; To none of these I yield as thrall. For why my mind doth serve for all.

-Dyer, Sir Edward
  'In Praise of a Contented Mind'.

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd. 458

-Keats,John
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems, 'Lamia', pt.1, l.47^50.

OAttic shape! Fair attitude!

-Keats,John
  Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.  Agnes and Other Poems,'Ode on a Grecian Urn', stanza 5.

Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

-Lippmann,Walter
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.

-Lodge, David John
  Small World, pt.1, ch.1.

And Jesus and a nameless ape Collide and share the selfsame shape That nocht terrestial can escape?

-Grieve
  A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, l.2476^8.

   For Spirits when they please Can either sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure, Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their airy purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfil.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.1, l.423^31.

Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.681.

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, God-like erect, with native honor clad In naked majesty seemed lords of all.

-Milton,John
  Of  Adam and Eve. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.4, l.288^90.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before youöa tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streakof yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

-Monet, Claude
Attributed, in reminiscences written in1927 by the young American artist Lilla Cabot Perry.

He's the only person I know who's in worse shape than I am.

-Monroe, Marilyn pseudonym of  Norma Jean Baker
  On Montgomery Clift, her co-star in The Misfits.

O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes And Reason giv'n them but to study Flies? See Nature in some partial narrow shape, And let the Author of the Whole escape.

-Pope, Alexander
  The Dunciad, bk.4, l.453^6.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

-Rich, Adrienne Cecile
TheWill to Change,'Planetarium'.

I always claim the mission workers came out too early to catch any sinners on this part of Broadway. At such an hour the sinners are still in bed resting up from their sinning of thenight before, so they will be ingood shape for more sinning a little later on.

-Runyon, (Alfred) Damon
  Runyon a'   la Carte,'The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown'.

Democrats are fleeing in all directions. Reformers are going into hiding. A dictatorship is beginning, and no one knows what shape it will take or who will come to power.

-Shevardnadze, Eduard Ambrosievich
  On the increasing disarray in the USSR caused by failing Soviet reforms, rivalry between the Gorbachev andYeltsin factions and unrest in the Baltic states, in the SundayTimes, 23 Dec.

Capital accounting in its formally most rational shape†presupposes the battle of man with man.

-Weber, Max
  Collected in Guenther Roth and ClausWittich (eds) Economy and Society (1978), ch.1.

The Shape of Things to Come.

-Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge)
  Title of book.