The Golden Dustman, with his hands folded on the top of his stout stick, with his chin resting upon them, and with something leering and whimsical in his eyes, gave a nod, and said, 'Quite so, Venus.' 'That proposal, sir, was a conspiring breach of your confidence, to such an extent, that I ought at once to have made it known to you.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

He sought one by one the traces of their amours ; his eccentric genius admired nature’s grand indifference, which had failed to preserve them intact for his honour and pleasure, and, deploring this ingratitude concerning outward things, he composed that masterpiece, La Tristesse d’Olympio .
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

Ah! curse it, if we, too, had only had a hundred and twenty thousand men, if we had only had enough guns and not quite such duffing officers!'
— from The Downfall (La Débâcle): A Story of the Horrors of War by Émile Zola

They lay against their food like stupendous slugs, huge, greasy hulls, eating greedily and noisily, with a sort of sobbing avidity.
— from The First Men in the Moon by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

She had it all sorted and handed each girl a neat stack.
— from Mimi at Sheridan School by Anne Pence Davis

For nearly twenty years I had been hampered with having notes of my own or of other parties to pay; but of all the farmers I had visited, only one had ever given a note, and he had made a vow never to give another.
— from Ten Acres Enough A practical experience, showing how a very small farm may be made to keep a very large family by Edmund Morris

I thought I was an honest English gentleman, and now I find [284] that at a turn of the screw I am only a pitiful scoundrel.
— from Hard Pressed by Fred M. (Fred Merrick) White

Since, however, my most gracious Lord Frederick, Duke of Saxony, Elector and Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire, your Grace's brother, has not despised, but graciously accepted my slight book, dedicated to his electoral Grace, and now published—though such was not my intention, I have taken courage from his gracious example and ventured to think that the princely spirit, like the princely blood, may be the same in both of you, especially in gracious kindness and good will.
— from A Treatise on Good Works by Martin Luther

Carewe rode stiffly, like a man frozen upon his horse, and his face was like that of a frozen man; his eyes glassy and not fixed upon his course, so that it was a deathly thing to see.
— from The Two Vanrevels by Booth Tarkington

A new grace invested his every gesture; a new sonorousness rang in his voice; a simple and manly pomposity marked his very walk as he passed from curio to curio.
— from Penrod by Booth Tarkington