Him saw I at thee from the bridge-foot aim A threatening finger, while he made thee known; Geri del Bello [739] heard I named his name.
— from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

“No; I never heard a thing like that!”
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

"There is no human history in the world, I suppose," said Don Quixote, "that has not its ups and downs, but more than others such as deal with chivalry, for they can never be entirely made up of prosperous adventures."
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

I do not know where to turn—I never have been down so low before, I never have seen things so dismal.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

I sat down and wrote a few brief lines, which told her that I never had loved her better than now, when I seemed to desert her; that I was going to try my fortune in the new world, and that if I succeeded I should come back to bring her plenty and happiness; but that if I failed I should never look upon her face again.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

Segnor, till yesterday I never had the good fortune to see Madrid; and at Cordova we are so little informed of what is passing in the rest of the world, that the name of Ambrosio has never been mentioned in its precincts.'
— from The Monk: A Romance by M. G. (Matthew Gregory) Lewis

"There is no hope for me," she said sadly, "for Oz will not send me home until I have killed the Wicked Witch of the West; and that I can never do.
— from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum

Skvortsov, in nervous haste; and not without malignant pleasure, rubbing his hands, summoned his cook from the kitchen.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The half-sobered recruit glanced round for a moment, as if his first impulse were to express some gratitude for his preservation, but seeing them with this air of total unconcern, and having his wet pipe presented to him with an oath by the soldier who had been by far the most anxious of the party, he stuck it in his mouth, thrust his hands into his moist pockets, and without even shaking the water off his clothes, walked on board whistling; not to say as if nothing had happened, but as if he had meant to do it, and it had been a perfect success.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

There is no hurry in these parts.
— from The Dreadnought of the Air by Percy F. (Percy Francis) Westerman

These things I weighed carefully in my mind, and prayed for counsel and power to enable me to judge of my duty aright; until, finally, believing it to be my duty, I accepted the [Pg 91] call of my brethren in New Hampshire, and accordingly removed to Portsmouth."
— from Biography of Rev. Hosea Ballou by Maturin Murray Ballou

If nature has set limits to the produce of this grain to the acre, and if our farmers have come up to that limit, there is no use in their trying to do any better.
— from Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming by Henry Ward Beecher

But little information is furnished by observing the course of the transformation, although it is at least established that this 569 Axolotl in its native habitat does not undergo metamorphosis or does so as exceptionally as in Europe.
— from Studies in the Theory of Descent, Volume II by August Weismann

Cooking is not her profession.
— from A New Atmosphere by Gail Hamilton

'Then you should talk grammatically; it is not "him being friends" but "his being friends.
— from A City Schoolgirl and Her Friends by May Baldwin

Was it her duty, or was it not her duty, to tell Peter at this moment all that she had heard to-day?
— from Linda Tressel by Anthony Trollope

It was not long since I was like one of these beardless aspirants; when my boy shall have obtained the place I now hold, I shall have tottered into a grey-headed, wrinkled old man.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the [
— from Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche