"On the Marionette Theatre" by Heinrich von Kleist

http://www.southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm

"A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." by Carson McCullers

http://www.osu.cz/ffi/kaa/dokumenty/kolar/tree_rock_cloud.htm

Ecclesiastes 6:11

The more the words,

the less the meaning;

and how does that profit anyone?

Opening paragraph from: "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of those Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me.