But these leaves conning you con at peril, For these leaves and me you will not understand, They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Could you copy a small paper for me this morning?
— from Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville

Words which carry that Terror with them, that considering your Circumstances and your Guilt, surely the Sound of them must make you tremble; For who can dwell with everlasting Burnings?
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

considering your circumstances at that time, I don't think this such an unreasonable contract.
— from The History of John Bull by John Arbuthnot

Can you correctly answer these questions without having the coins in sight?
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney

Can you come at once?”
— from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

——You Messrs. the Monthly Reviewers!——how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did?——how did you know
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Can you crumple a sheet of galvanized iron with your hands?
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

He was, as has been said, although a clever, yet certainly at present a briefless young barrister.
— from How It All Came Round by L. T. Meade

Why were you going to change your clothes at your mother's and dad's house?
— from Warren Commission (12 of 26): Hearings Vol. XII (of 15) by United States. Warren Commission

Now the thing that is brown like a cent, is bigger than a cent, is worth less than a cent, yet costs a cent, is a cent's worth of molasses taffy—which the Terrapin will now pass around for sale, along with my photographs, for the benefit of my family."
— from Harper's Round Table, December 3, 1895 by Various

Certainly young children are as ignorant of the sense as of the language.
— from When We Were Strolling Players in the East by Louise Jordan Miln

Merely because the excellent superintendent determined, two or three years ago, to leave this important point and enter into secular business, to provide for a growing family; and because the attraction of foreign fields carries young clergymen abroad, to the detriment of the home field, it does not, I think, fulfil the highest requisitions of duty to abandon the field, and thereby to leave it to be said that the Board doubts God's purposes with regard to the red man.
— from Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

There was something very galling to the proud spirit of Albert, in the supposition that Learmont had pitched upon him, as thinking him weak enough to believe anything, and never to suspect that the employment he was set upon was far different from what it purported to be, and he longed to say, “But I am not so simple and foolish as you may imagine me, and have my doubts, and grave suspicions concerning your conduct and the truth of words;” but then he could not bring himself to say so much, because all as yet was merely made up of doubt and suspicion, and he considered how ridiculously foolish he would look by allowing his imagination to run riot in creating apprehensions, perhaps after all, to be completely dissipated by the result, and arising only, possibly, from his young and uninstructed fancy and ignorance of the ways of the world.
— from Ada, the Betrayed; Or, The Murder at the Old Smithy. A Romance of Passion by James Malcolm Rymer

"I clamped your coronary artery shut for a few seconds.
— from Card Trick by John Berryman