She tried to wither him by a glance, but she had not yet got her bodily faculties under control, and the effort ended in a weak facial contortion.
— from Deficient Saints: A Tale of Maine by Marshall Saunders

I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life [Pg 141] long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household, where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp.
— from Ideas of Good and Evil by W. B. (William Butler) Yeats

London : T. FISHER UNWIN Colophon Availability This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
— from A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist by T. Baron Russell

The same want of dignity and serious work; the same position of ease, with feet on desk and hat on head; the same buzzing talk on indifferent subjects; often the very same men in the lobbies—taking dry smokes from unlit cigars; all these elements were there in duplicate, if somewhat smaller and more concentrated.
— from Four Years in Rebel Capitals An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death by T. C. (Thomas Cooper) De Leon