And she said all this with her air of good sense, like a person resolved on coming to a decision.
— from Doctor Pascal by Émile Zola

The reader will not care for any personal record of convalescence; though, among the general military laudations of whiskey, it is worth while to say that one life was saved, in the opinion of my surgeons, by an habitual abstinence from it, leaving no food for peritoneal inflammation to feed upon.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various

In fact I always rejected the proposal (warned by recent volumes of pestilential reminiscences) and would none of it; not only from its apparent vainglory as [Pg 2] to the inevitable extenuation of one's own faults and failures in life, and the equally certain amplification of self-registered virtues and successes,—but even still more from the mischief it might occasion from a petty record of commonplace troubles and trials, due to the "changes and chances of this mortal life," to the casual mention or omission of friends or foes, to the influence of circumstances and surroundings, and to other revelations—whether pleasant or the reverse—of matters merely personal, and therefore more of a private than a public character.
— from My Life as an Author by Martin Farquhar Tupper

A principal reason of coming to anchor, was in hopes to overcome our leaks, being exceedingly desirous to hasten to Bantam, as without absolute necessity we wished not to return to Tekoa.
— from A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 08 by Robert Kerr