‘But what do the words mean?’ asked the wondering Mole. ‘That I do not know,’ said the Rat simply. ‘I passed them on to you as they reached me. Ah ! Now they return again, and this time full and clear ! This time, at last, it is the real, the unmistakable thing, simple--- passionate----perfect-----‘. ‘Well, let’s have it then,’ said the Mole, after he had waited patiently for a few minutes, half dozing in the hot sun. But no answer came. He looked, and understood the silence. With a smile of much happiness on his face, and something of a listening look still lingering there, the weary Rat was fast asleep.
from 'The Wind in the Willows' - Kenneth Grahame

‘When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinize this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realized his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.’
- Virginia Woolf from 'The Voyage Out'