‘And is that right, sir? Have I not proven to you how wrong it is—how contrary to Scripture and to reason, to teach a child to look with contempt and disgust upon the blessings of Providence, instead of to use them aright?’
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

In actual life each historic event, each human action, is very clearly and definitely understood without any sense of contradiction, although each event presents itself as partly free and partly compulsory.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Stuffs that will take a bend, such as all linen and cotton textures, can be folded in four, like the paper, the folds ought then to be pinched and pressed down so that the lines may remain clear and distinct until the tracing be finished.
— from Encyclopedia of Needlework by Thérèse de Dillmont

During that long tete-a-tete I had no difficulty in abstaining from bestowing any caresses upon her; I did not even take her hand, for what I felt for her was a tender pity; and I was very happy when at the end of two hours I saw her calm and determined upon bearing misfortune like a heroine.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Then Caderousse sat astride the coping, and drawing up his ladder passed it over the wall; then he began to descend, or rather to slide down by the two stanchions, which he did with an ease which proved how accustomed he was to the exercise.
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

After nine years service he was promoted to be a vice-consul, but by this time the Japanese had become so impressed with his value as a surgeon and physician that they begged him to accept a salary more than four times what he received from the Foreign Office, and he went where his great qualities were likely to be of more use than in trying petty police cases and drawing up trade reports of a city which never had any foreign commerce.
— from A Diplomat in Japan The inner history of the critical years in the evolution of Japan when the ports were opened and the monarchy restored, recorded by a diplomatist who took an active part in the events of the time, with an account of his personal experiences during that period by Ernest Mason Satow

He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings are chronicled and discussed under all the globe’s meridians, and whose speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention with an eclipse.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

As he was between the columns of porphyry there and the tombs in question and the door of the church, which was shut, Messer Betto and his company, coming a-horseback along the Piazza di Santa Reparata, espied him among the tombs and said, 'Let us go plague him.' Accordingly, spurring their horses, they charged all down upon him in sport and coming upon him ere
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

Not being able to call the authority to mind, she extinguished her candle, and drew up the window-blind to admit the light of morning, which had, by this time, begun to dawn.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Will the reader bear in mind, that these military criticisms are not made by the author of the present work, although they fully commend themselves to his judgment, but are the calm and deliberate utterances of Ulysses S. Grant, by all consent the ablest general that ever commanded a Federal army, and a general minutely familiar with every detail of the situation which presented itself after Shiloh?
— from The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) A Narrative and Critical History by George Cary Eggleston

"I did not say she was a gentleman," retorted Kindelon, "though her general deportment has more than once cast a doubt upon her sex."
— from The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel by Edgar Fawcett

The next day (20 July) they returned and dined with the mayor, sitting in council, after dinner, until four o'clock in the afternoon, whilst the church bells rang all day long.
— from London and the Kingdom - Volume 1 A History Derived Mainly from the Archives at Guildhall in the Custody of the Corporation of the City of London. by Reginald R. (Reginald Robinson) Sharpe

No one who is concerned for the immediate future of Europe should neglect the omen: half a million men, with leaders chosen rapidly by themselves, converging without disaster, with ample commissariat, with precision and rapidity upon one spot: a common action decided upon, and that action most calculated to defeat the enemy; decided upon by men of no exceptional power, mere mouthpieces of this vast concourse: similar and exactly parallel decisions over the whole countryside from the great towns to the tiny mountain villages.
— from On Something by Hilaire Belloc

The bumble-bee, of course, is strong enough to slip into these traps and pull her legs out as a routine thing, but many small moths and butterflies are not, and these get caught and die upon the blossoms.
— from Book of Monsters Portraits and Biographies of a Few of the Inhabitants of Woodland and Meadow by Marian Fairchild

Except on the banks of the torrent there was little vegetation to be seen, for among the pine stems the needles lay close and deep upon the ground, and nothing could live in such a soil or in such a chill and dank air.
— from Frey and His Wife by Maurice Hewlett

Instead of remaining simply an agent charged with urging a petition which brought him in conflict only with private persons, like himself subjects of the king, he found his position rapidly change and develop until he became really the representative of a disaffected people maintaining a cause against the monarch and the government of the great British Empire.
— from Benjamin Franklin by John Torrey Morse

His own are always of the right shape, having plenty of compact bone showing every curve and denture under thin, shining skin, and with clean-cut, powerful back sinews at an unhampered distance from the suspensory tendons.
— from The Welsh Pony, Described in two letters to a friend by Olive Tilford Dargan

Besides, his name isn't Rigo but Max, and he's a seedy sort of chap, absolutely dependent upon his friends."
— from Atlantis by Gerhart Hauptmann

C. C. Gibbs) in front and two in support (C and D, under 2/Lieuts, Y. C. Prince, M. C., and G. C. Ewing, M.C.).
— from The War History of the 4th Battalion, the London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 1914-1919 by F. Clive Grimwade