“You will see my appetite at supper,” added I, to calm her fears, “I have had nothing to eat since dinner yesterday.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night there were even seven degrees of frost.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Sé cuándo dar un paso atrás para reconocer los errores que pude haber cometido con este instrumento y para prevenir de su mal uso evitando el síndrome del ex-combatiente.
— from Entretiens / Interviews / Entrevistas by Marie Lebert

"I am ALSO DETERMINED," she wrote, "that NO ONE person—may HE be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants—is to lead or guide or dictate TO ME.
— from Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey

Round the table stood a dozen or more solid Windsor wheelback chairs that were warranted to stand firm, though the fattest gentleman that ever sat down to dessert tipped perpetually back on them to the utmost limit of his balance.
— from The Passionate Elopement by Compton MacKenzie

Mr Elliott sat down beside the bright wood fire in the kitchen, with Marian on one knee and the little stranger on the other, and listened to the exclamations of one and all about the sleigh-ride.
— from Janet's Love and Service by Margaret M. (Margaret Murray) Robertson

On the whole, it is very often remarked that an evil spirit dwells in a sick body.
— from Philosophical Letters of Friedrich Schiller by Friedrich Schiller

"Why, Missus, old sinner just sinkin in de grave, but God let me old eyes see dis blessed sun."
— from The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 2 of 4 by American Anti-Slavery Society

In the centre was a broad platform, on which the bather was rubbed and shampooed, occupied, just then, by two or three dark-skinned Turks, lying on their backs, with their eyes shut, dreaming, if one might judge by their countenances, of Paradise.
— from Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean on board an American frigate by Nathaniel Parker Willis

In his embarrassment a moment ago the idea of taking an equally sudden departure had flashed upon him.
— from Snow-Bound at Eagle's by Bret Harte