It was chiefly at night, when he was not occupied in his loom, that he fell into this repetition of an act for which he could have assigned no definite purpose, and which can hardly be understood except by those who have undergone a bewildering separation from a supremely loved object.
— from Silas Marner by George Eliot

This may be enough to prevent any one from supposing, when we speak of the apostate angels, that they could have another nature, derived, as it were, from some different origin, and not from God.
— from The City of God, Volume I by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

He is found sometimes, speechless but quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?" He receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with the rest of his knowledge.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I reckoned on showing him a piece of sugar of our own making when he came home, and never dreamt of the possibility of disappointment.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

Since then his business people have never caught him again, never during the rest of his life would he hear speak of them.
— from Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete by Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de

Having shown what are the relations of the sails, hull, and rudder of a boat to the wind and water, and explained how a vessel requires either ballast or beam to prevent the wind from capsizing her, and needs draught to increase her lateral resistance and prevent her from being blown to leeward, it remains to add that the longitudinal resistance to the water must be diminished as much as possible, so that the boat can slip easily through the water and travel with speed.
— from Sailing by E. F. (Edward Frederick) Knight

Everybody knows that I wear that white muslin because I can't afford any other, I do wish I could have a new dress for Mrs. Alderson's: it will be a dreadfully select party.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1876 by Various

[576] In the celebrated episode of Nalas in the Mahâbhâratam , [577] the serpent Karkoṭakas, surrounded by the flames, asks Nalas, on the other hand, to deliver him from the flames; the serpent makes himself small in order that Nalas may be able to carry him away; Nalas does so, and the serpent bites him;
— from Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2) by Angelo De Gubernatis

Sudden terror clutched her; a nameless dread of the country—of the natives—which she had never been able to shake off; a paralysing sense that she was alone in their midst—alone on the verge of night.
— from Captain Desmond, V.C. by Maud Diver

It was just he ower her, and she ower him, whichever could win upmost, a’ through the east country here, and nae doubt through the rest o’
— from The Antiquary — Complete by Walter Scott

He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows—who, belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine—any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth.
— from Sophist by Plato

His body was swollen to nearly three times its usual size, and had burst the ragged garment that covered him, and now dangled in shreds behind him.
— from A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood by Elihu Burritt