He cultivated to perfection the sneer which he used like an oyster-knife, inserting it into the shell of his victim, exposing him with a quick-turn of the wrist, and finally flipping him over and inviting his audience to discard him as tainted and inedible.

-Annan, Noe«  l Gilroy, Baron
  On the critic F R Leavis. English Intellectuals Between the World Wars.

Every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty†likea dryshell onthebeach, waiting for thetide to come in again.

-du Maurier, Dame Daphne
  In the Ladies Home Journal, Nov.

And what you thought you came for Is onlya shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.1.

Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv'st unseen Within thy airy shell By slow meander's margent green, And in the violet-embroidered vale.

-Milton,John
  Comus,  A Mask, l.230^3.

I know not what I mayappear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-Newton, Sir Isaac
Quoted in D Brewster (ed) Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol.2, ch.27.

The skin and shell of things Though fair are not Thy wish nor prayer but got My meer despair of wings.

-Vaughan, Henry
  Silex Scintillans,'The Search'.