Women are from their very Infancy debarred those advantages, with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect brick where theyafford no straw.

-Astell, Mary
  A Serious Proposal to the Ladies For the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest,'By a Lover of Her Sex', pt.1.

Year's endö still in straw hat and sandals

-Basho, Matsuo
c.1689  On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, no.126 (translated by Lucien Stryk).

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? Do you remember an Inn, And the tedding and the spreading Of the straw for a bedding, And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees And the wine that tasted of the tar?

-Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre
  'Tarantella'.

   Trust your editor, and you'll sleep on straw.

-Cheever,JohnWilliam
Favourite axiom, quoted in Susan Cheever Home Before Dark (1984).

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  'The Hollow Men'.

My aim all along has been (in Ezra Pound's term) the most drastic desuetization of Scottish life and letters, and, inparticular, thede-Tibetanizationofthe Highlands and Islands, and getting rid of the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white-mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps calls Medlar Novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe),Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles o the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery.

-Grieve
  Lucky Poet, ch.3,'The Kind of Poetry I  Want'.

Theyare sped; And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 578 Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw, The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread, Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said, But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

-Milton,John
  Lycidas, l.122^31.

   In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaister, and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies.

-Pope, Alexander
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Bathurst', l.229^35.

And he that strives to touch the stars, Oft stumbles at a straw.

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Shepherd's Calendar,'July', l.99^100.

Alone until she dies,Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn't looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.

-Thomas, Dylan Marlais
  Under MilkWood.