... a utopia.

Both Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State official. The way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down the intervening valley.

—H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, 1905.

... an essay.

Our public schools and universities play the beneficent part in our social scheme that cattle do in forests: they browse the seedlings down and prevent the growth of all but the luckiest and sturdiest.

—Samuel Butler, "The Aunt, The Nieces, and The Dog," from Essays On Life, Art, and Science.

... a novel.

He felt how hard it was to be a secret agent, to go in disguise as a member of his own family, trying to so insinuate himself among them that, without his ever asking a question (that would expose him instantly) the truth would be spilled in his presence because they would have no reason to doubt he was already privy to it.

—John Crowley, Little, Big, p. 277.

... a review of a reviewer.

She seems at time to have a form of prose hypochondria, palpating herself all over to see if she has a thought, and publishing every word of the process by which she checks to see whether or not she has one ...

—Renata Adler, writing of Pauline Kael, in “House Critic,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980.