To speak in a parable: I dispatch a pot of jam in order to get rid of a bitter experience.... Let anybody only give me offence, I shall "retaliate," he can be quite sure of that: before long I discover an opportunity of expressing my thanks to the "offender" (among other things even for the offence)—or of asking him for something, which can be more courteous even than giving.
— from Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like Dr. Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp—their maker being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity.
— from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The desire for destruction, for change, for Becoming, may be the expression of an overflowing power pregnant with promises for the future (my term for this, as is well known, is Dionysian); it may, however, also be the hate of the ill-constituted, of the needy and of the physiologically botched, that destroys, and must destroy, because such creatures are indignant at, and annoyed by everything lasting and stable.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I gasped, I shuddered with the agony of intense pleasure, and at the moment when the grand and rapturous finale approached, I actually brayed exactly like a donkey, which, in after cooler moments, amused all of us.
— from The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous

In spite of all this, towards the end of that day, everyone except the princess, who could not pardon Levin’s action, became extraordinarily lively and good-humored, like children after a punishment or grown-up people after a dreary, ceremonious reception, so that by the evening Vassenka’s dismissal was spoken of, in the absence of the princess, as though it were some remote event.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

One of them, the elder, thin, pale, very handsome, with masses of chestnut hair and a little stubborn mouth, looked rather prim and scarcely glanced at me; the other, who was quite young—seventeen or eighteen, no more, also thin and pale, with a big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise, as I passed, said something in English and looked confused, and it seemed to me that I had always known their dear faces.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The “little uns” addressed were Marty and Tommy, boys of nine and seven, in little fustian tailed coats and knee-breeches, relieved by rosy cheeks and black eyes, looking as much like their father as a very small elephant is like a very large one.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

On the other hand, many a one more nobly and delicately endowed by nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the manner described, could tell of the unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted on him: except that perhaps every warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct, like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy.
— from The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

At this point, again, I should like Erasistratus himself to answer regarding this small elementary nerve, whether it is actually one and definitely continuous, or whether it consists of many small bodies, such as those assumed by Epicurus, Leucippus, and Democritus.
— from Galen: On the Natural Faculties by Galen

By the light of his linguistic studies A. H. Snellman [716] has elucidated the origins of the Baltic Finns, the Proto-Esthonians, the now all but extinct Livonians, and the quite extinct Kurlanders, from the time when they still dwelt east and south-east of the Baltic lands, under the influence of the surrounding Lithuanian and Gothic tribes, till the German conquest of the Baltic provinces.
— from Man, Past and Present by A. H. (Augustus Henry) Keane

The blond head turned, and blue eyes looked at him, startled, across a bowed shoulder.
— from Ride Proud, Rebel! by Andre Norton

A slight movement of the leaves on a [Pg 293] branch of birch shows that something living is there, and presently the little head and neck of a whitethroat peers over them, and then under, looking above and beneath each leaf, and then with a noiseless motion passing on to the next.
— from The Toilers of the Field by Richard Jefferies

Kennedy, who worried about bills and who dreaded the coming of the new baby, could stop making a pie to administer punishment and a lecture to her oldest son, stop again to answer the telephone, stop again to kiss her daughter's little bumped nose, and yet find in her tired soul and body enough love and energy to put a pastry "A. M." on the top of her pie, to amuse the head of the house when he should cut into it that night.
— from The Story of Julia Page by Kathleen Thompson Norris

He had Buntingford's hair and brow; every line and trait in those noticeable eyes of his father seemed to be reproduced in him; and there were small characteristics in the hands which made them a copy in miniature of his father's.
— from Helena by Ward, Humphry, Mrs.

At present you close against men of talents that broad, that noble entrance which belongs to them, and which ought to stand wide open to them; and in exchange you open to them a bye entrance, low and narrow, always obscure, often filthy, through which, too often, they can pass only by crawling on their hands and knees, and from which they too often emerge sullied with stains never to be washed away.
— from Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 4 by Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron

"A banished exile, landless and poor—a pretty match I am.
— from The Red City: A Novel of the Second Administration of President Washington by S. Weir (Silas Weir) Mitchell