It was like a Benneton's ad crossed with a game of Counter-Strike.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

For instance, when the Greatlakes of Chicago came to New York for a few weeks, Mrs. Norman asked both Mrs. Worldly and Mrs. Gilding to send them invitations; one to a musicale and the other to a ball.
— from Etiquette by Emily Post

They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of Combray.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

That the foregoing represents pretty much the gist of Chichikov’s reflections as he stood watching the company I will not attempt to deny.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol

We laid it under ground, of course, and it was all finished in a couple of hours or so.
— from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

This remote, and perhaps imaginary, danger was averted by the submission of the sultan of Egypt: the honors of the prayer and the coin attested at Cairo the supremacy of Timour; and a rare gift of a giraffe , or camelopard, and nine ostriches, represented at Samarcand the tribute of the African world.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Dada la naturaleza de este deporte, los que lo practican son más numerosos entre los militares que entre los civiles; aunque en realidad los aviadores que actualmente poseen el grado o cédula de pilotos en el ejército son aficionados que aprendieron el deporte en las escuelas militares de aviación en esos países, y luego fueron asimilados como clases u oficiales.
— from Heath's Modern Language Series: The Spanish American Reader by Ernesto Nelson

Sends Ambassadors to the Governor of Carolina, upon an impudent Demand , ib. Runs his Ship aground designedly , 74 .
— from A General History of the Pyrates: from their first rise and settlement in the island of Providence, to the present time by Daniel Defoe

[12] For example, Delli , which Polo does not name; Diogil (Deogír); on the Coromandel coast Setemelti , which I take to be a clerical error for Sette-Templi , the Seven Pagodas; round the Gulf of Cambay we have Cambetum (Kambayat), Cocintaya (Kokan-Tana, see vol.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

They always perched there before crossing the great seas, and for a week or two would fidget gently over clothes, guide-books, mackintosh squares, digestive bread, and other Continental necessaries.
— from A Room with a View by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

When we find ourselves wondering at the German people for having tolerated the military system for so long, paying taxes for its maintenance and giving their sons to it, we suddenly remember that we have paid taxes and given our children, too, to keep up the liquor traffic, which has less reasons for its existence than the military system of Germany.
— from In Times Like These by Nellie L. McClung

Paul and Gontran smoked in silence; the Marquis slept; Christiane gazed at the stars; and Charlotte found it hard to keep back her tears—for she had swallowed three glasses of champagne.
— from Mont Oriol; or, A Romance of Auvergne: A Novel by Guy de Maupassant

Gibbon says: “The religious tenets of the Galileans, or Christians, were never made a subject of punishment, or even of inquiry” (Rome, Vol.
— from The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidences of His Existence by John E. (John Eleazer) Remsburg

In his coat he had above six and twenty little fobs and pockets always full; one with some lead-water, and a little knife as sharp as a glover's needle, wherewith he used to cut purses; another with some kind of bitter stuff, which he threw into the eyes of those he met; another with clotburrs, penned with little geese' or capon's feathers, which he cast upon the gowns and caps of honest people, and often made them fair horns, which they wore about all the city, sometimes all their life.
— from Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 2 by François Rabelais

[ He goes out. Claude.
— from The Benefit of the Doubt; a Comedy in Three Acts by Arthur Wing Pinero

A Game of Checkers.
— from John Smith's Funny Adventures on a Crutch Or The Remarkable Peregrinations of a One-legged Soldier after the War by A. F. (Ashbel Fairchild) Hill

One of the chief values of fallowing lies in the liberation of the plant-food during the fallow year, which reduces the quantity of water required the next year for the full growth of crops.
— from Dry-Farming : A System of Agriculture for Countries under a Low Rainfall by John Andreas Widtsoe

Not silken robes, like courtiers', but a girdle of camels' hair, not delicate food, but locusts and wild honey, were his.
— from Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Luke by Alexander Maclaren