By the time his analysis is ready, it will be badly dated and will necessarily be less interesting to the recipients than would a report which was up-to-the-week.
— from Psychological Warfare by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

No doubt the encouraged Mrs. Wilkins would be lurking in the top garden waiting to waylay her when she went out, and would hail her with morning cheerfulness.
— from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim

The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come, after old Jefferson Gryce's death, to take possession of his house in Madison Avenue—an appalling house, all brown stone without and black walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex that looked like a mausoleum.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities acquired.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

From Lignitz, the extreme point of their western march, they turned aside to the invasion of Hungary; and the presence or spirit of Batou inspired the host of five hundred thousand men: the Carpathian hills could not be long impervious to their divided columns; and their approach had been fondly disbelieved till it was irresistibly felt.
— 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

Ἡττάομαι , ῶμαι, 83 f. ἥττηθησομαι & ἡττήσομαι, p. ἥττημαι, ( ἥττων ) to be less, inferior to; to fare worse, to be in a less favoured condition, 2 Co. 12.13; by impl.
— from A Greek-English Lexicon to the New Testament by William Greenfield

These, I say, are things which one may well be pardoned for disbelieving; yet, taken collectedly, they form, perhaps, less of reasonable ground for suspicion, than the one startling circumstance of the articles’ having been left in this thicket at all, by any murderers who had enough precaution to think of removing the corpse.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

After that he never went into the woods without carrying the sling in his pocket and he spent hours shooting at imaginary animals concealed among the brown leaves in the trees.
— from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson

Give to a gracious message / An host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell / Themselves when they be felt.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

The blood of that poor man spouting up in the faces of the cruel men, while his body was shaking, and moving about as he tried to breathe, I shall never forget; and if only for that savage work of Tifum, who stood by laughing, I think Tifum the Wicked has been served right.
— from My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa by Henry M. (Henry Morton) Stanley

But before Ayscough could reply to this somewhat vexatious question, a man who had been left in the tearooms came hurrying up the staircase and burst in upon them.
— from The Orange-Yellow Diamond by J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

It may be that the discovery of Australia, for instance, will turn out to be less important than the discovery and the meaning of these tablets—
— from The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

Our "One Hundred Best Books" need not be yours, nor yours ours; the essential thing is that in this brief interval between darkness and darkness, which we call our life, we should be thrillingly and passionately amused; innocently, if so it can be arranged—and what better than books lends itself to that?—and harmlessly, too, let us hope, God help us, but at any rate, amused, for the only unpardonable sin is the sin of taking this passing world too gravely.
— from One Hundred Best Books With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading by John Cowper Powys

And the resemblance between the books lies in this, that when we open them these past experiences and conditions of life gleam visibly to us far down like submerged cities—all empty and hollow now, though once filled with life as real as our own—through transparent waters.
— from Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country by Alexander Smith

Probably, too, it was his boyish life in Turkey that inoculated him with the passion for all things Eastern, that so largely influenced his later life.
— from Love Romances of the Aristocracy by Thornton Hall

Finally, in such cases as trichinosis and tapeworm, there is usually but little inconvenience to the human being harboring them, except when their number becomes very large.
— from Rural Hygiene by Henry N. (Henry Neely) Ogden

We have a common form for all those things; as to foretelling the weather, we never meddle with that, but leave it to the printer, who takes it out of any old almanack as he thinks fit; the rest was my own invention, to make my almanack sell, having a wife to maintain, and no other way to get my bread; for mending old shoes is a poor livelihood; and,” added he, sighing, “I wish I may not have done more mischief by my physic than my astrology; though I had some good receipts from my grandmother, and my own compositions were such as I thought could at least do no hurt.”
— from The Battle of the Books, and other Short Pieces by Jonathan Swift

Probably much of the rotten wood work, and even some of the fine reliefs on the gold-leaf, will have to be left in the tomb, which will be closed with Portland cement."
— from The World's Progress, Vol. 01 (of 10) With Illustrative texts from Masterpieces of Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Modern European and American Literature by Delphian Society