A tiny room with diminutive casements which were never opened, summer or winter; an invalid father in a dressing-gown lined with lambskin, and with an ailing foot swathed in bandages—a man who was continually drawing deep breaths, and walking up and down the room, and spitting into a sandbox; a period of perpetually sitting on a bench with pen in hand and ink on lips and fingers; a period of being eternally confronted with the copy-book maxim, “Never tell a lie, but obey your superiors, and cherish virtue in your heart;” an everlasting scraping and shuffling of slippers up and down the room; a period of continually hearing a well-known, strident voice exclaim: “So you have been playing the fool again!” at times when the child, weary of the mortal monotony of his task, had added a superfluous embellishment to his copy; a period of experiencing the ever-familiar, but ever-unpleasant, sensation which ensued upon those words as the boy’s ear was painfully twisted between two long fingers bent backwards at the tips—such is the miserable picture of that youth of which, in later life, Chichikov preserved but the faintest of memories!
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just as the Mænads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights, dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what that institution was like.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Again Erzá and Mílka were abreast, running like a pair of carriage horses, and began to overtake the hare, but it was easier for the hare to run on the balk and the borzois did not overtake him so quickly.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

—A pailful of lye, with a piece of copperas half as big as a hen's egg boiled in it, will color a fine nankin color, which will never wash out.
— from Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million Containing Four Thousand Five Hundred and Forty-five Receipts, Facts, Directions, etc. in the Useful, Ornamental, and Domestic Arts by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale

A well matched pair of horses of good all-round action, of desirable color and perfect manners and suitable age will sell in the Eastern cities (I am not sufficiently acquainted with the other sections of the country to know values there) at from eight hundred to two thousand dollars, but with a pair of carriage horses able to win on the tan bark, the price will be regulated by the comparatively few people who have sufficient money to spare to purchase this fashionable luxury, and ten times the amount paid for the first mentioned pair would be a reasonable price to pay for the prize winners.
— from The Boston Terrier and All About It A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog by Edward Axtell

One thing only is astounding, that class prejudice and preconceived opinions can hold a whole class of human beings in such perfect, I might almost say, such mad blindness.
— from The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892 by Friedrich Engels

In 1757 he received a commission from the Crown as Professor of Church History at St. Andrews, but he did not obtain induction for several years; his appointment, on account of the rumours at Cortachy, being resisted both by the university and the presbytery.
— from Boswelliana: The Commonplace Book of James Boswell, with a Memoir and Annotations by James Boswell

" This supports the quaint remark of a tourist that one of the great delights of travelling is the thought and anticipated pleasure of coming home again.
— from Home Lyrics: A Book of Poems by H. S. (Hannah S.) Battersby

With a profusion of compliments, he acknowledges the receipt of a copy of the acts of the Pan-Anglican Synod, and of the Anglican Prayer-Book, and then proceeds to condemn the latter as heretical and insulting to the Eastern Church in a manner which cannot be very palatable to those who have sought to win from him a nod of recognition.
— from The Catholic World, Vol. 10, October, 1869 to March, 1870 by Various

On the opposite side of the ward there is a picture of Christ healing a blind man, which we used to look at.
— from Zigzag Journeys in the Camel Country: Arabia in Picture and Story by Samuel Marinus Zwemer

I learned the value of carrying proper credentials during the war, when every frontier and police official constituted himself a stumbling-block to progress.
— from An African Adventure by Isaac Frederick Marcosson

Four small keys on a piece of ribbon; two pocket-handkerchiefs, each with an embroidered D in the corner; the remains of a packet of chocolate; half a cedar lead-pencil; a pair of shoe-laces.
— from Between the Dark and the Daylight by Richard Marsh