The lawyer must have noticed that K. was offering him more resistance than before, as he became silent, giving K. the chance to speak himself, and then, as K. also remained silent, he asked, "Did you have a particular reason for coming to see me today?"
— from The Trial by Franz Kafka

But as that old foster-father in the comedy, being now to take his leave doth with a great deal of ceremony, require his foster-child's rhombus, or rattle-top, remembering nevertheless that it is but a rhombus; so here also do thou likewise.
— from Meditations by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

The clemency of the emperor was extorted from his weakness; and Ricimer suspended his ambitious designs till he had secretly prepared the engines with which he resolved to subvert the throne of Anthemius.
— 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

From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

Uncle Jasper, with his clever and experienced hand, had driven that shadow away, and in her first feeling of intense thankfulness and relief, she had almost disliked the woman who had come to her with so cruel a tale.
— from How It All Came Round by L. T. Meade

Here a deserted bandstand, there a railway station, here a dead haunt for pierrots, there a closed and barred cinema house, here a row of stranded bathing-machines, there a shuttered tea-house—and not a living soul in sight.
— from The Captives by Hugh Walpole

"All right," said he, and drove off.
— from California, 1849-1913; Or, The Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four Years' Residence in that State by L. H. (Lell Hawley) Woolley

As he helped his guests up the side of the vessel and listened to the delightful laughter of the girls, saw the dancing eyes of even the haughty and reserved Santiago, he also dismissed the morrow from his thoughts.
— from Rezanov by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

"Well, that's a comfort, at any rate," says her affianced, dimly conscious of a dawning civility in her last remark.
— from Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 12, June 18, 1870 by Various

But I fortified it with thoughts of the past, and regularly set him at defiance, my only regret—I think, I will not be sure upon that point—my only regret being that the poor exiles of whom he had written to me would suffer from this estrangement, for I knew that he could not do a great deal for them.
— from A Fluttered Dovecote by George Manville Fenn