As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

It advances with a gentle but gradually accelerated velocity, while the slight ripples it creates seem to break about the ivory side in divinest melody-seem to offer the only possible explanation of the soothing yet melancholy music for whose unseen origin the bewildered voyager looks around him in vain.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

I want to see you permanently well connected, and to that end it will be advisable to have as few odd acquaintance as may be; and, therefore, I say that if you should still be in this country when Mr. Martin marries, I wish you may not be drawn in by your intimacy with the sisters, to be acquainted with the wife, who will probably be some mere farmer's daughter, without education.”
— from Emma by Jane Austen

‘You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me.
— from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Evidently this is a picture of one side of social life; but the difference between Bunyan and Thackeray is simply this,--that Bunyan made Vanity Fair a small incident in a long journey, a place through which most of us pass on our way to better things; while Thackeray, describing high society in his own day, makes it a place of long sojourn, wherein his characters spend the greater part of their lives.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

And therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give myself to a hundred panniersful of fair devils, body and soul, tripes and guts, in case that I lie so much as one single word in this whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony’s fire burn you, Mahoom’s disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your side and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the cursed sharp inflammations of wild-fire, as slender and thin as cow’s hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into your fundament, and, like those of Sodom and Gomorrah, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall relate unto you in this present Chronicle.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

I swear by all that is sacred, I fully believe in the explanation of the murder I have just put forward.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry.
— from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

There was a long silence, and then suddenly the journalist began to be aware that, in some way or other, the whole aspect of the room was altered.
— from The Angel by Guy Thorne

“Louisa,” she began, but at this instant she heard a step, which, by its quickness, she knew to be Cecilia’s, coming along the passage.
— from The Parent's Assistant; Or, Stories for Children by Maria Edgeworth

I heard the postman, and I ran out into the hall to see the letters drop in the box, and then I saw this one with the stamp, and the box wasn't locked, so I took it out and tore the stamp off.
— from The Giant's Robe by F. Anstey

Hidden in a dark corner Psyche found the temple-sweeper's broom, and, taking it, she swept up the floor of the temple.
— from Children of the Dawn : Old Tales of Greece by E. F. (Elsie Finnimore) Buckley

Onlookers said that the plane narrowly missed hitting the tops of the buildings and that it several times almost dove into the crowds in the streets.
— from Test Pilot by James Collins

Not being historiographers for Mr. Frith, R.A., we do not intend to give any account of the persons whom he truly, but not with such intense artistic effect as in the “Derby Day,” depicts, as those who fill a railway platform just before a train is starting.
— from Rambles on Railways by Roney, Cusack P., Sir

It may be added that in some parts of the world the suitor has to throw the girl in a wrestling-bout in order to secure her hand.
— from Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women by Havelock Ellis

At the beginning I couldn't take part in the singing: I was afraid all the time I should scream too loud; but after that I sang with the rest.
— from Villa Eden: The Country-House on the Rhine by Berthold Auerbach