"Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up the whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

One half of his proficiency in the art of Negro breaking, consisted, I should think, in this species of cunning.
— from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

They were more excited than they need have been, that is to say, more excited than any one need be by the announcement of the suicide of a chief scene-shifter.
— from The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and, when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading, until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero through the pages of my book.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Guide your ship to the mouth of that river and ye shall behold the towers of Cytaean Aeetes and the shady grove of Ares, where a dragon, a monster terrible to behold, ever glares around, keeping watch over the fleece that is spread upon the top of an oak; neither by day nor by night does sweet sleep subdue his restless eyes.
— from The Argonautica by Rhodius Apollonius

For the term per se we use commonly the word “simply,” and so, in a way, it is opinion of any kind soever by which the two characters respectively abide or not, but he is “simply” entitled to the designations who abides or not by the true opinion.
— from The Ethics of Aristotle by Aristotle

—Now you see, brother Toby, he would say, looking up, 'that christian names are not such indifferent things;'—had Luther here been called by any other name but Martin, he would have been damn'd to all eternity—Not that I look upon Martin, he would add, as a good name—far from it—'tis something better than a neutral, and but a little—yet little as it is you see it was of some service to him.
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

“We have not thought about it yet, madame,” answered D’Artagnan, with that Gascon effrontery which had in him the appearance of naivete; “but if we four had resolved upon it we should do it most certainly.”
— from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

Some teach that we must love all our neighbours but make an exception of soldiers, criminals, and lunatics.
— from The Duel and Other Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

I am obscure: Rivers is an old name; but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn the dependant’s crust among strangers, and the third considers himself an alien from his native country—not only for life, but in death.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

Three months later he was shot at one night by a mysterious person, and the belief prevails in this neighborhood that it was an assassin sent over to this country by Bismarck for the single purpose of butchering the inventor of the Imperishable Army Sausage.
— from Elbow-Room: A Novel Without a Plot by Charles Heber Clark

And one night, by the camp fire, and with very little preamble, he told me the following strange story, which I have set down as nearly as possible in his own words.
— from A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari And Other Tales of South-West Africa by Frederick Carruthers Cornell

Besides which, children are often named by the medicine-man, and the name is thus endowed with a charm which may roughly be analogous to the halo round a name confirmed by baptism to one simply recorded in the office of a Registrar of Births.
— from Myths and Dreams by Edward Clodd

Snook is an old name, but it is doubtful whether it is used in the Old World for the same fish.
— from Austral English A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages with those aboriginal-Australian and Maori words which have become incorporated in the language, and the commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia by Edward Ellis Morris

He may call himself Mervyn, or Fitzgerald, or Thompson, Sir, or any other name, but it won't do, Sir.
— from The House by the Church-Yard by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

In these days a man is as much ashamed of not being able to row as, fifty years ago, he was ashamed of not being able to ride.
— from Armorel of Lyonesse: A Romance of To-day by Walter Besant

Since they contain images of the five superhuman Buddhas and of numerous Bodhisattvas, they can hardly be called anything but Mahayanist.
— from Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 by Eliot, Charles, Sir

The site of the house of refuge is within a few hundred yards of Ray's old house and near the village, and its keeper, Captain Borden (an old New Bedford whaler) was busy in putting his house in order before the autumn should come on.
— from The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., No. 3, July, 1890 by Various

Between sixteen and twenty years of age there is apt to come a time when a young man is as much ashamed of not being able to deliver an oath as he is of the dizziness that comes from his first cigar.
— from The Abominations of Modern Society by T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt) Talmage

“The changes to which everything in this world is subjected are changes not only of form and of nature, but they are changes also of bulk, and even of situation.
— from Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution His Life and Work by A. S. (Alpheus Spring) Packard