Twelfth Night,​ Duke Orsino’s Lovesick Diatribe (Shakespeare):

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough, no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity,
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Corps Values​, Casey’s Confession (Contemporary):

Go on! You wanted to take a look, take a look!

These are not magnesium burns. There never was a car bomb.
My C.O. claimed it to be so I wouldn’t be…
I was having a smoke with my best friend, Badger. In Fallujah.
We finally secured the area. The city was in ruin, quiet, motionless.
We fought for three days straight. We hadn’t slept in four.
We were leaning against a truck, happy to be alive.
It was early morning and we’d just finished a can of peaches.
He was telling me about his grandmother’s Swedish pancakes
and then, BANG, his skull exploded and my face was covered in his blood.
I couldn’t see anything for a few seconds. I heard two more shots.
I heard my squad members taking cover. I quickly wiped his blood from my eyes
And I saw this old woman charging at me, holding an AK-47.
I don’t know where she came from or how she got a hold of that rifle,
But she looked like an angry grizzly bear dressed in rags.
She pointed the rifle at me. I froze. She had the drop on me. I thought, ​this is it.
And then I heard a few clicks. It was empty. So, I grabbed my rifle and charged at her.
I cross-checked her to the ground. Knocked the wind out of her.
I grabbed her weapon and threw it behind me. I pointed my rifle at her,
And I said, “Don’t you move.” Then I heard someone say, ​Badger is dead.
Something came over me—I don’t know what. I didn’t care who this woman was;
She killed Badger. My best friend. My ​brother.​ So, I walked over to the truck
While she laid on the ground, gasping for air. I grabbed a five-gallon jerry-can out of the back,
Opened it, walked back over to her, and dumped the whole thing on her head.
Everyone watched me do it.
I told Prive Brady to hand me his book of matches. He did. Without hesitation.
I took it from him, opened it, struck a match, and threw it on her.
She went up so quick. Like a brush fire in a high wind.
She let out this ​scream… ​It shook my whole body. That scream…
It was the same scream I heard when I killed that young boy. It was his mother.
Her scream awoke something inside of me and, all of a sudden,
I was seeing this 50-year-old woman burning alive in front of me, rolling on the ground.
And I realized what I had done. And I wanted to save her. I wanted to ease her pain.
I should’ve just shot her, put her out of her misery, but—for some reason—
I thought I could put out the flames and save her.
So I hurled myself onto her, hoping to smother the flames.
That’s when I caught on fire. My men saved me before any serious damage was done,
But not before the flames left their mark. . . . . . . . .
Don’t look at me like you’ve never seen shit like this before. You’ve seen it.
You lived through Vietnam—​Vietnam​—and you still let this ​stupid fucking war happen… again!
Why didn’t you take a ​stand?​ How could you just ​let it happen?​ Did you learn nothing?
What does it take to get this fucking world to do what is right?!?!?
Merchant of Venice, ​Bassanio’s Caskets Test (Alternate Shakespeare):

So, may the outward shows be least themselves:

The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament.
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some march of virtue on his outward parts:
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who, inward search’d, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valour’s excrement
To render them redoubted! Look on beauty,
And you shall see ‘tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it.
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest. Therefore, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
‘Tween man and man: but thou, thou meagre lead,
Which rather threatenest than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence;
And here choose I; joy be the consequence!
 ​ ervyn’s History of Zoos (Alternate Contemporary):
A Behanding in Spokane, M

I wish I had a monkey sometimes, don’t you? I do.

Not so much a ​chimp​ as more of a kind of ​gibbon.
What would you do, let him climb up stuff? Yep.
Buy him a buncha bananas maybe? Do they really eat alotta bananas,
Or is that what people say about them, about the banana things,
And they don’t care either way about bananas? You wouldn’t know with the media
nowadays. Because I don’t go to alotta zoos, I gotta admit. I used to, in my teens,
When I didn’t have nothing else to do, but then I began to find them kinda depression.
So then I started going to zoos drunk, but that wasn’t right either.
So then I’d go to zoos drunk and think about doing a bunch of ​rescuing,
But I never rescued shit, man, that was just the booze talking.
What I would sometimes do, for instance if it was a gibbon,
I would put my finger thru the bars, and have him or her pull my finger.
I wasn’t even scared about my finger.
It was like the gibbon knew and cared that I was drunk and wondered why.
Then I thought, to the gibbon, “My god, look what they have done to you;
They have put you in this cage you don’t wanna be in and make you pull my finger,
When what you should be is at home, in a rainforest, and not pulling anything
You didn’t choose to pull.” More likely a banana from a tree or the tail of another gibbon.
Then I thought to myself, “My God, is every single monkey in every single zoo around
the world
Going to sleep tonight thinking, ‘Man, I don’t wanna be in this cage,
pulling some drunk guy’s finger, not knowing what the hell is going on.
I wanna be at home, in Africa, or wherever they have rainforests,
Swinging from tree to tree, having a banana, or what have you.”
And then I thought, “Oh no, every night when they’re asleep,
They’re probably dreaming, ‘I ​am​ back there, I ​am​ in the rainforest,
I ​am ​having a banana,’ and then bam! waking up each day in fucking Arizona.
And here comes that drunk guy.” Around then is when I stopped going to zoos so much
And I started taking a lot of speed.