He could not be an understanding man, I felt sure.
— from My Reminiscences by Rabindranath Tagore

“Your appetite's been touched like by your accident,” said the landlord, glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The astonished garrison abandoned the walls, and their only hope of safety; the gates were instantly burst open; and the revenge of the soldier, unless it were suspended by lust or avarice, was satiated by an undistinguishing massacre.
— 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

On the morning you left Marygreen, when your goods were on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your scheme was to be a university man and enter the Church—that a degree was the necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a theologian or teacher."
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

It is better than going to sea again, and I shall earn more money than any position in Oakland can bring an unskilled man.”
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

Later still he was at Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the village where he was known; for he had a sensitive dread of being questioned as to his life and fortunes by those who had been acquainted with him during his ardent young manhood of study and promise, and his brief and unhappy married life at that time.
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Farther off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone, small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, was tossing in the breeze an ugly mane of red.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Is it not a pious and a pleasing office of my life to be always upon my friend’s obsequies?
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

It is the horse who speaks— Berg auf, ubertrieb mich nicht; Berg ab, ubereil mich nicht; Auf ebenen Weg, vershöne mich nicht; Im Stahl, vergiss mich nicht. which is, literally, Up hill, overdrive me not; Down hill, hurry me not; On level ground, spare me not; In the stable, forget me not.
— from Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, Vol. 2 (of 3) With Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected by Mrs. (Anna) Jameson

Needing money, he was on the point of becoming a Unitarian minister, when a small pension from two friends enabled him to live for a few years without regular employment.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

The dealer reappeared, followed by an unobtrusive man who carried a new stool.
— from Delay in Transit by F. L. (Floyd L.) Wallace

Not so is Hector Ratichon, the keenest secret agent France has ever known, the confidant of kings, brought to earth by an untoward move of fate.
— from Castles in the Air by Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness

He contemptuously reproaches slave-morality as being a utilitarian morality, [392] and he ignores the fact that he extols his ‘noble virtues,’ constituting the ‘morality of masters,’ only because they are advantageous for the individual, for the ‘over-man.’
— from Degeneration by Max Simon Nordau

I took a step forward—another and another, but she did not move; when, following the direction of her gaze, I found her eyes were fixed with a strange fascination at the great bough above her—a huge gnarled and knotted bough, with here and there a tuft of foliage upon it, while its great thick bark was tinted and shady with rich brown and umber mosses, and— “Good heavens!”
— from The Golden Magnet by George Manville Fenn

The first picture, attributed to Durer, is a portrait of a woman; the second, likewise a portrait, is of the Italian School; the third, a Dutch landscape by Breughel; and the fourth, a Holy Family by an unknown master of the Florentine School.” Remonencq’s receipt was worded in precisely the same way; a Greuze, a Claude Lorraine, a Rubens, and a Van Dyck being disguised as pictures of the French and Flemish schools.
— from The Works of Balzac: A linked index to all Project Gutenberg editions by Honoré de Balzac

The riddles of the painful earth were far too much with him to permit him to be an unembarrassed master or creator of pastime—not necessarily horse-collar pastime by any means, but pastime pure and simple.
— from A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century by George Saintsbury