"I am afraid of the gossip and scandal that may be set on foot against me later on; for the people here are very ill-natured, and some low fellow, if he met us, might say, 'Who is this fine-looking stranger that is going about with Nausicaa?
— from The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original by Homer

Usually the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his loin-handkerchief; his color a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his rounded muscles knobbing it as if it had eggs under it.
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

At the table she paused again, for books always attracted her, and here she saw a goodly array whose names were like the faces of old friends, because she remembered them in her father's library.
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott

’Tis gone, and will not answer.
— from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

The uneasiness which this account gave Ambrosio was not trifling:
— from The Monk: A Romance by M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis

O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Und was kein Verstand der Verständigen sieht / Das übet in Einfalt ein kindisch Gemüt —And what no intelligence of the intelligent sees, that is practised in simplicity by a childish mind.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!" "And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"
— from The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The springtime came and, once again, Clothed hills and valleys all in green; And wakened nature's creatures then, That frisky gambolling could be seen.
— from Bearslayer A free translation from the unrhymed Latvian into English heroic verse by Andrejs Pumpurs

He had put on his greatcoat and was now adjusting a white silk muffler.
— from A Knight on Wheels by Ian Hay

They held her hand a little longer than was their habit with modern girls, and with no sense of sheepishness either!
— from The Mystery Boys and the Inca Gold by Van Powell

His three great admirations were Napoleon, Bolivar, and Beranger.
— from Bureaucracy by Honoré de Balzac

The rest was mainly the natural consequence of this first piece of luck: new orders were added to that one, and as it never rains but it pours, Zibin, during the many leisure hours in camp, had gambled, and won not less than four hundred thousand roubles.
— from Anecdotal Recollections of the Congress of Vienna by La Garde-Chambonas, Auguste Louis Charles, Comte de

Then a friendly smoke took place, and a short council, in which the Indians agreed that they would withdraw in peace and go to their hunting grounds, and would not molest us any more.
— from Life of a Pioneer: Being the Autobiography of James S. Brown by James S. (James Stephens) Brown

He was, we are told, in the best of spirits, and marched gaily along with no ear for the surges beating on the beach, and never recking that, even then, other surges were drearily droning on the shores of St. Helena the melancholy music that was to be the doleful dirge of his dying days.
— from Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day by Abdullah Browne

As his hands were still pressed on his ears, he heard nothing of Phemy's approach, and she stood for a while staring at him in the vague glimmer, apparently with no anxiety as to what was to come next.
— from Malcolm by George MacDonald

It is probable that the result would have been failure, and it is almost certain that we should have provoked a "preventive war" on the part of Germany, a war not only with a very fair [19] prospect, as things then stood, of a German success, but with something else that would have looked like the justification of a German effort to prevent that country from being encircled.
— from Before the War by Haldane, R. B. Haldane (Richard Burdon Haldane), Viscount

"My glorious ancestors would never have consented to allow these upstart Republicans to lead in a warlike enterprise of this kind.
— from Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett Putman Serviss