And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me : the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Or what know I but maybe some enemy of mine hath procured me this, whom she belike loveth and seeketh to oblige therein?'
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

She could do nothing else but laugh at silly talk of this kind; I knew it, but that laugh of hers displeased me.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

He will point to some mountain and tell you that some famous hero or beauty lived and sorrowed there, or he will tell you that Tir-na-nog, the Country of the Young, the old Celtic paradise—the Land of the Living Heart, as it used to be called—is all about him.’
— from The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. (Walter Yeeling) Evans-Wentz

William made no attempt to ignore the serious losses which the nation had incurred by land and sea, though of the former he said (not perhaps with perfect impartiality towards his own tactical errors) that "they were only occasioned by the great numbers of our enemies, which exceeded ours in all places"; while the latter he described as "having brought great disgrace upon the nation.
— from William the Third by H. D. (Henry Duff) Traill

what mines are laid open by love, art, science, the observation and the history of our own race, and, in the deepest deep of our souls, the pious reverential sentiment of God and his universal work!
— from Tour in England, Ireland, and France, in the years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829. with remarks on the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and anecdotes of distiguished public characters. In a series of letters by a German Prince. by Pückler-Muskau, Hermann, Fürst von

Gib, ever since me an' you first hooked up together, away back in the corner o' my head there's been lurkin' a suspicion that once before, a long time ago, you an' me have had some business dealin's, but for the life o' me
— from Captain Scraggs; Or, The Green-Pea Pirates by Peter B. (Peter Bernard) Kyne

Paul, not unwilling to be left alone, sat thinking of Barbara.
— from The Shadow of the Czar by John R. Carling

In saying this he had used a tone which prevented further conversation on the subject, but Lizzie, as she thought of it all, remembered his jocular remark, made in the railway carriage, as to the suspicion w
— from The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

The cover of the boiler is then closed and fastened by lugs, and steam turned on until the goods in the can are thoroughly heated through.
— from The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century. by Edward W. (Edward Wright) Byrn

There was little enough that he could do, but he came and looked at her with hungry eyes out of a hungry heart, speaking no word of his own love, but listening as she talked of her father.
— from When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry by Charles Neville Buck

For we know that there are operations now in progress, at great depths in the interior of the earth, by which both large and small tracts of ground are made to rise above and sink below their former level, some slowly and insensibly, others suddenly and by starts, a few feet or yards at a time; whereas there are no grounds for believing that, during the last 3000 years at least, any regions have been either upheaved or depressed, at a single stroke, to the amount of several hundred, much less several thousand feet.
— from The Student's Elements of Geology by Lyell, Charles, Sir

I have often admired how men who were happily born too late to witness the troubles of those times will make their own pictures of warfare, as though it changed at once the whole face of the country and tenour of folk's lives; whereas it would be raging two valleys away and men upon their own farms ploughing to the tune of it, with nothing seen by them then or afterwards; or it would leap suddenly across the hills, filling the roads with cursing weary men, and roll by, leaving a sharp track of ruin for the eye to follow and remember it by.
— from The Laird's Luck and Other Fireside Tales by Arthur Quiller-Couch