Wolf Hall - pg. 516

But in the same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at the sack of Rome but there are nights when he dreams of it as if he had been there: the black guts spilled on antique pavements, the half-dead draped in the fountains, the chiming of bells through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists' torches leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it; it was not invaders but Pope Julius himself who knocked down old St Peter's, which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site where the Emperor Constantine himself had dug the first trench, twelve scoops of soil, one for each of the apostles; where the Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of wild beasts, had been torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to lay his new foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of fishbones and ash, his workmen's shovels powdering the skulls of saints. In the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble, waiting for Michelangelo.

Moby Dick - pg. 444

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou!, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator, keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peters, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!