My joy was great, for I thought that I had found a royal mummy, but what was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite labor, to find nothing more than this box, which you may examine.” He handed the box to those in the front row.
— from The Reign of Greed by José Rizal

"There was one odd Fellow in our Company—he was so like a Figure in the 'Pilgrim's Progress' that Richard always called him the 'ALLEGORY,' with a long white beard—a rare Appendage in those days—and a Face the colour of which seemed to have been baked in, like the Faces one used to see on Earthenware Jugs.
— from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyam

The tendency of mind is economical, it loves to form habits and move in grooves which save it the trouble of thinking anew at each of its steps.
— from Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore

He is likely to fly out as if you insulted him.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and urged on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck, was to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and every time I looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily began thinking of the legendary life of the remote past, before men knew the use of fire.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Many are the women who have told me, with tears in their eyes, of the cold insensible conduct of their husbands, who, never fucking them but when their sluggish natures felt the want, then turning upon them without the slightest preparatory handling or embracing, mount, shove it in, give a few in-and-out movements, spend, and then withdraw, just as they have done enough to excite their poor wives’ passions without satisfying them, and thus leaving them a prey to inordinate longing that forces them to seek the relief to their passions the selfish brutes of husbands had only raised without allaying.
— from The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous

I fled, and I left the firm shore, and wearied myself in vain on the yielding sand.
— from The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books I-VII by Ovid

I learned that for six months he had lived on a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk a day.
— from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham

the ears and eyes are remarkaby small, particularly the former which is not an inch in length thick fleshey and pointed covered with short hair.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

In less than five minutes, Phoebe’s tears were dried, and her lover had his arm round her waist again, in the character of a cherished and forgiven man.
— from The Fallen Leaves by Wilkie Collins

In our banking operations I learned the full address of our excellent hostess, which she had been too modest to name to me: “Senora Serafina Moliner de Jorrin.”
— from The Red Cross in Peace and War by Clara Barton

Men tell me that since those days a part of this same cliff has slipped into the sea, and that more is like to follow.
— from In Taunton town : a story of the rebellion of James Duke of Monmouth in 1685 by Evelyn Everett-Green

Yon sister that sang o'er his saftly rocked bed Now rests in the mools where her mammie is laid; The father toils sair their wee bannock to earn, An' kens na the wrangs o' his mitherless bairn.
— from The Home Book of Verse — Volume 1 by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Mubaklíad gánì ang bátà hayan mahúlug, If the baby bends too far back, it is likely to fall.
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

"Oh no," he answered; "I lived there for thirty years, but now for some time I have been in Berlin.
— from Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè by Giovanni Duprè

Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the nominal, and the Indian the real, master; and with a more immediate longing they fiercely coveted the creole province at the mouth of the river.
— from The Winning of the West, Volume 4 Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 by Theodore Roosevelt

Oh, I don't mind telling you now, it was just that faith, Hugh, that faith you had in life, that faith you had in me.
— from Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill

So, having received useful admonition, I left that forest and went to the city of Ujjayiní, for which I knew you were making, to find you.
— from The Kathá Sarit Ságara; or, Ocean of the Streams of Story by active 11th century Somadeva Bhatta