I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

He himself on that night had kept on rushing down and climbing up like a squirrel, directing, encouraging, watching all along the line.
— from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Know ye, verily, that the happiness of mankind lieth in the unity and the harmony of the human race, and that spiritual and material developments are conditioned upon love and amity among all men.
— from Selections from the Writings of `Abdu'l-Bahá by `Abdu'l-Bahá

The face of a cliff, for instance, will deflect a current upward, leaving a partial void at its summit; and into this void the air will rush in the form of a whirling eddy.
— from The Aeroplane by Claude Grahame-White

It was an old, old card, dingy and fretted with age, and dried and curled up like a dead leaf, and it had a little picture on it that had almost faded away.
— from The Three Miss Kings: An Australian Story by Ada Cambridge

Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open.
— from Then I'll Come Back to You by Larry Evans

Dogs all crippled up, like as not.”
— from Riddle of the Storm A Mystery Story for Boys by Roy J. (Roy Judson) Snell

He drew a chair up, lighted a cigar, eyed the young man from head to foot, and then said: “Pride, have you got any backbone?
— from At the Sign of the Eagle by Gilbert Parker

Unwashed dishes and cooking utensils lay all about, helter-skelter, some even broken, in the hurry with which they had been handled.
— from The Boarded-Up House by Augusta Huiell Seaman