Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine—the son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.
— from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

But, added he, I'll find some way, if I can, to turn them off, after dinner.—Confound them, said he, in a violent pet, that they should come this day, of all the days in the year!
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend.
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

‘There, what did I tell you?’ exclaimed the Rat in great triumph. ‘Absolutely nothing whatever,’ replied the Mole, with perfect truthfulness.
— from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

It won’t do, I tell you!
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Then home to dinner (and did drink a glass of wine and beer, the more for joy that this is the shortest day in the year,—[Old Style]—which is a pleasant consideration) with my wife.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

Also Ralph Baldocke, Bishop of London, in his lifetime gave two hundred marks to the building of the said new work, and left much by his testa [292] ment towards the finishing thereof: he deceased in the year 1313, and was buried in the Lady chapel.
— from The Survey of London by John Stow

But did I tell you that an education according to nature would be an easy task?
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quotations every day in the year.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

‘Dead?’ said I. ‘He dined in town yesterday, and drove down in the phaeton by himself,’ said Tiffey, ‘having sent his own groom home by the coach, as he sometimes did, you know—’ ‘Well?’
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

There is the uncertainty of what will be done in the year 1870, when the runs lapse to the Government.
— from A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler

Mr. John Coxeter, a then well-known cloth manufacturer, the owner of Greenham Mills, at the above-named village, remarked in the course of conversation one day in the year 1811, to Sir John Throckmorton, Bart., of Newbury, "So great are the improvements in machinery which I have lately introduced into my mill, that I believe that in twenty-four hours I could take the coat off your back, reduce it to wool, and turn it back into a coat again."
— from The Strand Magazine, Vol. 17, February 1899, No. 98. by Various

The great diamonds of the world are the following:— The Kohinoor , or “Mountain of Light,” weighing 106 carats, came into the possession of Queen Victoria on the annexation of the Punjaub in 1849; the Mattan (367 carats) belongs to the Rajah of Mattan; the Orloff (194 carats) preserves the family name of Catherine II. of Russia, who purchased it in 1775; the Shah (86 carats), presented by Chosroes I., Shah of Persia, who died in the year 579, to the Czar of Russia; the Star of the South (254 carats), discovered in Brazil by a poor negress in 1853; the Sauci (106 carats), originally the property of a French gentleman of this name, and bought by the Russian Czar for half a million roubles in 1835; the Regent , also known as the Pitt (137 carats), first [245] acquired by Mr. Pitt, the grandfather of the Earl of Chatham, and subsequently sold to the Duc d’Orleans, Regent of France, for £135,000; the Pigott (82¼ carats), brought from India by Lord Pigott sometime previous to 1818, when it came into the possession of Messrs. Rundell and Bridge; the Dudley (44½ carats), found at the Cape by a black shepherd in 1868, and, after various changes of ownership, bought by the Earl of Dudley for £30,000; and the Twin Diamonds , both found in the bed of the river Vaal at the Cape in 1872.
— from Names: and Their Meaning; A Book for the Curious by Leopold Wagner

If your worship will promise me that if I get out of Kilmainham, and if I tell you how I do it, then you’ll get me a free pardon, I’ll try hard but what before three months are over I’ll be a prisoner at large.
— from Tales and Novels — Volume 09 by Maria Edgeworth

"Then I'll tell you what it is, Doctor; if this young fellow's fretting about the girl, we'll do all we can to help him.
— from Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and Yorkshire by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

His brother Drusus, to whom he was much attached, died in the year 9 B. C. when he was in military service on the banks of the Rhine.
— from Under Cæsars' Shadow by Henry Francis Colby

I don't want to die, I tell you that straight," he said.
— from Fanny Goes to War by Pat Beauchamp Washington

“But I declare I think you judge him too harshly.
— from Tales and Novels — Volume 05 Tales of a Fashionable Life by Maria Edgeworth

What did I tell you?
— from The Governess by Julie M. Lippmann