We followed the men and the dogs, but they outrun us, and we lost them; but we thought we heard them on the water, so we got a canoe and took out after them and crossed over, but couldn’t find nothing of them; so we cruised along up-shore till we got kind of tired and beat out; and tied up the canoe and went to sleep, and never waked up till about an hour ago; then we paddled over here to hear the news, and Sid’s at the post-office to see what he can hear, and I’m a-branching out to get something to eat for us, and then we’re going home.”
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, ‘if one only knew the right way to change them—’ when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
— from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

For the emotions, whereby we are daily assailed, are generally referred to some part of the body which is affected more than the rest; hence the emotions are generally excessive, and so fix the mind in the contemplation of one object, that it is unable to think of others; and although men, as a rule, are a prey to many emotions—and very few are found who are always assailed by one and the same—yet there are cases, where one and the same emotion remains obstinately fixed.
— from Ethics by Benedictus de Spinoza

I like to go to work by a road that'll take me up a bit of a hill, and see the fields for miles round me, and a bridge, or a town, or a bit of a steeple here and there.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

On each side of the trench, the earth was cut out to a breadth of about two and a half feet, and this did duty for bedsteads and couches.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man.
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James

What are become of all the provisions we have so many years laid up against the accidents of fortune? Is Nero’s cruelty unknown to us?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

as but one, and that one, as God, (for the words are, "Lot said unto them, Oh not so my Lord") be understood of images of men, supernaturally formed in the Fancy; as well as before by Angel was understood a fancyed Voice?
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

They were all light gray or reddish colored: not a black one among them.
— from Nelly's Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life by Helen Hunt Jackson

My success was variable; but I congratulated myself that at length I had found a stimulus, and I anxiously awaited the return of the hour when the doors would again be opened, and the rooms lighted up for the reception of company.
— from Frank Mildmay; Or, the Naval Officer by Frederick Marryat

Hirt's definition, of course, gives no more precise information as to what is to be characterized and what is not, in the artistically beautiful, or about the content of the beautiful, but it furnishes in this respect a mere formal rule, which nevertheless contains some truth, although stated in abstract shape.
— from The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The coin in question is a bronze one, and the "Monogram of Christ" occurs in the centre of a Greek inscription surrounding a representation of the Sun-God Bacchus; and, apparently, as an amalgamation or contraction of the two Greek letters equivalent to our R and CH, viz.: the Greek letters Ρ and Χ .
— from The Non-Christian Cross An Enquiry into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion by John Denham Parsons

We look at them all, little ones and big ones, and then we go watch the birds.
— from It's like this, cat by Emily Neville

Several Europeans have lost the little money they had by having to freight unsuitable craft for transport to the place of delivery, and by only advancing to the native fellers just when they wanted logs brought down to the beach, instead of keeping them constantly under advance.
— from The Philippine Islands A Political, Geographical, Ethnographical, Social and Commercial History of the Philippine Archipelago, Embracing the Whole Period of Spanish Rule by Foreman, John, F.R.G.S.

“They are building one, aren't they?”
— from A Fool for Love by Francis Lynde