MindProbe

“To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case – six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum.’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps – scum, they are. You don’t want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum.’
It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.”
― George Orwell, Essays

“The rhetoric of this sequence converges to the third couplet, where the parallel structures and the use of the same word – ‘me’ – as the rhyme enact the same collapse of difference that the play develops elsewhere. Linguistic and rhetorical doubling, through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme, show us the way that Shakespeare’s language is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art: what happens at the level of a sentence or speech often miniaturizes a wider theme or debate.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The epilogue is a distinctly Shakespearean genre: a concluding moment when the play is both brought together and dissolved, a paradox of completion and dispersal.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“If you find yourself writing a lengthy denouement, rethink your structure. The story's finished, dammit. Your reader may enjoy a bit of additional information, or a final visit with your characters, but if you've done your work well, there's really very little left to interest them.”
― Dennis O'Neil, The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics