"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.

A 6-word short story, by Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not wreck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights of the black west went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

Worlds brood with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Opening paragraph from: "My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George

I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter, and must be as old as the mountain itself. I came upon it last summer and dug and burned it out until I made a snug cave in the tree that I now call home.