Ann Birner

“the cow crossly shook her head and craned her neck, mooing plaintively, and beyond the black barns of Meliuzeievo the stars twinkled, and invisible threads of sympathy stretched between them and the cow as if there were cattle sheds in other worlds where she was pitied. Everything”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“He was a wanderer by nature, and even if England and the nearer East were closed to him, the world was wide, the sun shone in many places, the stars wheeled over one, books could be read, women had beauty, flowers scent, tobacco its flavour, music its moving power, coffee its fragrance, horses and dogs and birds were the same seductive creatures,”
― John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, Complete Nine Novels

“she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.”
― Tessa Hadley, The Past

“No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace