He was nice-looking, fashionably dressed, and behaved unaffectedly like a well-bred youth, but Nadyezhda Fyodorovna did not like him because she owed his father three hundred roubles; it was displeasing to her, too, that a shopkeeper had been asked to the picnic, and she was vexed at his coming up to her that evening when her heart felt so pure.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

When we stopped to breathe, and I had time to see all about me, the clearness and sweetness of the night, the shapes of the hills like things asleep, and the fire dwindling away behind us, like a bright spot in the midst of the moor, anger would come upon me in a clap that I must still drag myself in agony and eat the dust like a worm.
— from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Meade's ideas and mine being so widely divergent, disagreements arose between us later during the battles of the Wilderness, which lack of concord ended in some concessions on his part after the movement toward Spottsylvania Court House began, and although I doubt that his convictions were ever wholly changed, yet from that date on, in the organization of the Army of the Potomac, the cavalry corps became more of a compact body, with the same privileges and responsibilities that attached to the other corps—conditions that never actually existed before.
— from Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army — Complete by Philip Henry Sheridan

It was not till past two o'clock in the afternoon that a long, toilsome defile of rugged rock brought us on the edge of a steep descent, and before us lay the winding Khor of Ariab, with its mass of green fresh foliage throwing gentle shadows on the silver sand of its dry watercourse.
— from Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 by Various

To save himself from the sense of dying and being utterly lost, he had to hate her.
— from Narcissus by Evelyn Scott

“O gracious Lord God, look down, merciful Father, on us, two erring, weak, sinful boys; look down and bless us, Lord, for the love
— from Eric, or Little by Little by F. W. (Frederic William) Farrar

Beyond Bayonne, the country is exceedingly picturesque; the chain of the Pyrenees becomes more distinct, and beautifully undulating lines of mountains vary the aspect of the horizon, while the sea appears frequently to the right of the road.
— from Wanderings in Spain by Théophile Gautier

If the future were no more amenable to our wills than the past; if our precautions, our sanguine schemes, our hopes and fears were of as little avail in the one case as the other; if we could neither soften our minds to pleasure, nor steel our fortitude to the resistance of pain beforehand; if all objects drifted along by us like straws or pieces of wood in a river, the will being purely passive, and as little able to avert the future as to arrest the past, we should in that case be equally indifferent to both; that is, we should consider each as they affected the thoughts and imagination with certain sentiments of approbation or regret, but without the importunity of action, the irritation of the will, throwing the whole weight of passion and prejudice into one scale, and leaving the other quite empty.
— from Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners by William Hazlitt

Some inquisitive person sends down a dredge, and brings up lovely creatures, so delicate in structure that the daintiest touch must proceed with circumspection.
— from Astronomy for Amateurs by Camille Flammarion