On the seventh day there was a sound from the distant mountains, and it came nearer and grew louder until a roar of thunder was all about the townhouse and they felt the ground shake under them.
— from Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology by James Mooney

This may come from the accidental fact that the English writings of the school have been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take for a positive profession a statement ad hominem meant as part of a reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation.
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James

I am unworthy of the honour you propose to do me, and I can only ask pardon for my boldness.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

“Well I did not, my dear mother, and I cannot go now.
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

,” he answered; “for I can’t live alone, because my own mind distracts me, and I can’t live with you, because you take the devil’s part against me.”
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

If such, then, be the meaning of the moral law, and if every Mason is by his tenure obliged to obey it, it follows, that all such crimes as profane swearing or great impiety in any form, neglect of social and domestic duties, murder and its concomitant vices of cruelty and hatred, adultery, dishonesty in any shape, perjury or malevolence, and habitual falsehood, inordinate covetousness, and in short, all those ramifications of these leading vices which injuriously affect the relations of man to God, his neighbor, and himself, are proper subjects of lodge jurisdiction.
— from The Principles of Masonic Law A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages and Landmarks of Freemasonry by Albert Gallatin Mackey

I knew Duclos was intimate with M. de Malesherbes, and I could not conceive how it was possible he should think so differently from him upon the same subject.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The preliminaries being thus settled, Joshua advanced for his use a thousand pounds, for which he would take neither bond, note, nor receipt, desiring only that the Castilian would mark it in his own pocket-book, that the debt might appear, in case an
— from The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete by T. (Tobias) Smollett

I am a desperate man; and I can play a desperate game, if need be.
— from Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

You won't drive me away; I can stay to-night, can't I?
— from The Trimming of Goosie by James Hopper

My armour bearer pointed out to me, on the opposite heights towards the south, many old castles and small villages, where the vine cultivators live, and told me the names of the different mountains, as I comfortably sat on the grass with his dog lying beside me.
— from L'Arrabiata and Other Tales by Paul Heyse

I will give, in its entirety, one more dirge—the death-chant of the tribe of Badagas, in the Neilgherry Hills—because it is unique, so far as I know, in reversing the rule de mortius , and in charging, instead, the dead man with every sin, to make sure that none are omitted of which he is actually guilty.
— from Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) by Martinengo-Cesaresco, Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington, contessa

He was one who, naturally full of decided and marked qualities, was, by the peculiar elements of our society, rendered a doubtful, motley, and indistinct character, tinctured by the frailties that leave us in a wavering state between vice and virtue.
— from Godolphin, Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

(Devine, Misery and its Causes , page 235.)
— from Problems in American Democracy by Thames Williamson

The artist's principle in the statue of a great man should be the illustration of departed merit; and I cannot but think that a skilful adoption of modern habiliments would, in many instances, give a variety and force of effect which a bigotted adherence to Greek or Roman costume precludes.
— from The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge