I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig- tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet†I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

-Plath, Sylvia
  The BellJar, ch.7.

I never mentioned a man but with the view Of selling my own works. The tip's a good one, as for literature It gives no man a sinecure.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
  Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,'MR NIXON'.

   What money is better bestowed than that of a school- boy's tip?

-Thackeray,William Makepeace
^5  The Newcomes, vol.1, ch.16.