Shakespeare
The Weird Sisters
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about:
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
I am for the air; this night I'll spend
Unto a dismal and a fatal end:
Great business must be wrought ere noon:
Upon the corner of the moon
There hangs a vaporous drop profound;
I'll catch it ere it come to ground:
And that distill'd by magic sleights
Shall raise such artificial sprites
As by the strength of their illusion
Shall draw him on to his confusion:
He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear
He hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear:
And you all know, security
Is mortals' chiefest enemy.
Hamlet
I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space
were it not that I have bad dreams.
Fie on't! Oh fie fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
possess it merely. That it should come to this!
O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Am I a coward? Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat as deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha? ’Swounds, I should take it. For it cannot be but I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ha’ fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal – bloody, bawdy villain, Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. O, vengeance!
Oh Lord, how painful it was to drown—with the dreadful noise of water in my ears and the ugly visions of death in my eyes.
Richard III
I seemed to see a thousand shipwrecks; ten thousand men whose bodies had been gnawed by fish; bars of gold; huge anchors; heaps of pearls; and vast amounts of priceless jewels, all scattered on the bottom of the sea.
Some of the jewels lay inside of dead men's skulls. And they had crept into their empty eye sockets—so that they looked like false eyes. The gems reflected the slimy bottom of the ocean floor, and mocked the dead bones that lay scattered around.
With that it seemed like a legion of foul demons surrounded me and howled in my ears, and their cries were so loud and horrible that I woke up trembling.
And for a long time afterward I still believed that I was in hell—that was how terrible an impression this dream made on me.
Richard II
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, let's choose executors and talk of wills.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings; how some have been deposed; some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd; all murder’d.