I did so; and he looked at me very steadily, and pressing my hand all the time, at last said, I will now talk to you in a serious manner.
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

'Soon I should be a man?' 'Very soon.'
— from Peter and Wendy by J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie

In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, a man very sensitive on the score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the following judgment, after getting to know Alyosha: “Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave alone without a penny, in the center of an unknown town of a million inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not die of cold and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he were not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him no effort or humiliation.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By raising up too hastily one species of industry, it would depress another more valuable species of industry.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private.
— from The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale by Joseph Conrad

115 A miserable village still preserves the name of Salona; but so late as the sixteenth century, the remains of a theatre, and a confused prospect of broken arches and marble columns, continued to attest its ancient splendor.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Thro’ Elis and the Grecian towns he flew; Th’ audacious wretch four fiery coursers drew: He wav’d a torch aloft, and, madly vain, Sought godlike worship from a servile train.
— from The Aeneid by Virgil

The Coroner asked other questions, and received more or less satisfactory answers, as Mrs. Vence seemed anxiously eager to be frank.
— from The Red Bicycle by Fergus Hume

I saw him once or twice look at me very strangely; and he has certainly been a long time out of the room.”
— from The Two Destinies by Wilkie Collins

Ever since they landed the sky has been overcast, and the distant mainland is barely visible through a misty vapour spread over the sea between.
— from The Land of Fire: A Tale of Adventure by Mayne Reid

[40] Leonard, the Loyalist, with "abhorrence pronounced it the foulest, subtlest and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition."
— from The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution by James Henry Stark

Indeed, there are persons in whom the presence of a rose occasions no sensation of redness such as is known to me, but a much vaguer sensation, not distinguishable from what I should at once distinguish as greenness.
— from The Philosophy of Natural Theology An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present day by William Jackson

Above the awful subterranean groan of coming destruction I heard a mighty voice shouting the word ‘Erminia!’
— from A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad

Even among jurists who consider themselves liberal, the oldest and most valuable significance of punishment is still misunderstood—it is not even known.
— from The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Father and Mother Vedder sat down at the little round table and bowed their heads.
— from The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins