They are ghosts on horseback, or with coloured faces, or of huge and monstrous form; or they indulge in strange gymnastics, in whirling, throwing stones, or whistling.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

He had caught glimpses of the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

When the top of the hill was reached, the former pupil, with a glow of happiness on his face, exclaimed, "I am so glad that I have been permitted to do something that was real hard for the General before he dies!"
— from Up from Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington

He wrote, as he himself says, the lives and times of the kings of Norway from the report of Od Kolson, a grandson of Hal of Sida.
— from Heimskringla; Or, The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson

He lodged at Montmorency, whence he came in the night with his wife and children to take away the fruit he had concealed in the daytime, and which he sold in the market at Paris as publicly as if he had brought it from a garden of his own.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

For experience seems to show that an example of this kind is more likely to be potent negatively than positively; that here, as elsewhere in human affairs, it is easier to pull down than to build up; easier to weaken or destroy the restraining force that a moral rule, habitually and generally obeyed, has over men’s minds, than to substitute for it a new restraining habit, not similarly sustained by tradition and custom.
— from The Methods of Ethics by Henry Sidgwick

The girl admired it, and, having a grievance of her own, took satisfaction in berating her mistress.
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott

Were I always Grave, one half of my Readers would fall off from me: Were I always Merry, I should lose the other.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

‘“When Laura is walking through a passage-way, with her hands spread before her, she knows instantly every one she meets, and passes them with a sign of recognition: but if it be a girl of her own age, and especially if it be one of her favourites, there is instantly a bright smile of recognition, a twining of arms, a grasping of hands, and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny fingers; whose rapid evolutions convey the thoughts and feelings from the outposts of one mind to those of the other.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

The area round it, which was sufficiently ample, was formed by buildings, generally of a very mean character: the long back premises of a carpenter, the straggling yard of a hackney-man: sometimes a small, narrow isolated private residence, like a waterspout in which a rat might reside: sometimes a group of houses of more pretension.
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

The fact that she had grasped it so quickly was a guaranty of her own metal.
— from The Snowshoe Trail by Edison Marshall

‘And Count Alexey Grigorievitch’ (oh, how often I used to hear this story!)
— from A Desperate Character and Other Stories by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
— from Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens

She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, and then stayed where she was, gaunt, pale, fever-eyed, the wreck and ghost of her old self.
— from Robert Elsmere by Ward, Humphry, Mrs.

This does not mean the elation which comes to a man when he feels that he can call his work good: such gratification he shares with the painter and the sculptor, the poet and the dramatist; nor does it mean the sensation that, after working at what he loves best and perhaps winning honour and riches from it, he is possibly leaving behind him something that may endure when the tongue of the statesman is silent and when the hand of the surgeon is cold; alone in all the world of art, the novelist, working in rivalry to the first creator, fashions men and women in whosesoever image he pleases and sets them in a garden of his own planning, where with the knowledge of good and evil and with the [258] power of life and death he controls their destinies and makes the span of their existence long or short.
— from While I Remember by Stephen McKenna

One day, while playing with a girl of his own age, he succeeded in overcoming her shyness and induced her to expose herself, at the same time uncovering his own sexual parts.
— from Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women by Havelock Ellis

It will probably be thought the greatest waste of effort for a woman thus to exhibit what the newspapers call her personal advantages to a group of her own sex; but Miss Lance was a very clever woman, and she knew what she was about.
— from The Sorceress (complete) by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

He who says, whenever he pleases, "Accept this," has a genius of his own.
— from Ars Amatoria; or, The Art Of Love Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes by Ovid

He is rough, abrupt, immoderate, incapable of smoothing the way, almost ferocious, with a grace of his own which resembles the flowers in wild places, less haunted by nymphs than by the Eumenides, of the faction of the Titans; among goddesses choosing the sombre ones, and smiling darkly at the Gorgons; a son of the earth like Othryx and Briareus, and ready to attempt again the scaling of heaven against that parvenu Jupiter.
— from William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo