And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me.
— from The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

They called him Saint Anthony, because his name was Anthony, and also, perhaps, because he was a good fellow, jovial, a lover of practical jokes, a tremendous eater and a heavy drinker and a gay fellow, although he was sixty years old.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

He smelled again that polite stuffiness to be found only in church parlors; he recalled the case of drab Sunday School books: “Hetty, a Humble Heroine” and “Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;” he thumbed once more the high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast Zenith church he listened to: “Now, Edgar, you read the next verse.
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

She was lively, above the prejudices of rank, cheerful, full of jest, a lover of pleasure, which she preferred to a long life.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Those air-bred people, and their goat-nursed Jove; And learn, our power proceeds with thee and thine, Not as he wills, but as ourselves incline.
— from The Odyssey by Homer

Her mouth looked like just a line of pale red—her lips were thin and not their proper shape at all.
— from The Railway Children by E. (Edith) Nesbit

The Lord said again concerning Zion: "Wherefore I, the Lord, have said, gather ye out from the eastern lands, assemble yourselves together ye elders of my Church; go ye forth into the western countries, call upon the inhabitants to repent, and inasmuch as they do repent, build up churches unto me; and with one heart and with one mind, gather up your riches that ye may purchase an inheritance which shall hereafter be appointed unto you, and it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the Saints of the Most High God; and the glory of the Lord shall be there, insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it, and it shall be called Zion.
— from History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Volume 3 by Smith, Joseph, Jr.

"Lots of people enjoy Harold Bell Wright just as lots of people enjoy tripe.
— from The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley

There must be a khalîf, a deputy of the Prophet in all his functions (except that of messenger of God), who would be ruler and judge and leader of public worship, but above all amîr al-mu'minîn , "Commander of the Faithful," in the struggle both against the apostate Arabs and against the hostile tribes on the northern border.
— from Mohammedanism Lectures on Its Origin, Its Religious and Political Growth, and Its Present State by C. (Christiaan) Snouck Hurgronje

Even in the tongue, that “little member,” there may be found, according to St. James, a lake of pestilential and creeping things, a hold of every foul spirit, the cage of every filthy and hateful bird (Isaiah 13:21; Rev. 18:2), and, in a word, a “world of iniquity.”
— from True Christianity A Treatise on Sincere Repentence, True Faith, the Holy Walk of the True Christian, Etc. by Johann Arndt

For his want of judgment and lack of prudence in public affairs did not merit a death so cruel as he met with at Añaquito near the equator.
— from The War of Quito by Pedro de Cieza de León

This is not unnatural when we remember that nine foreigners in ten take their impressions of France as a nation, not only from the current journalism and literature of Paris alone, but from a very limited range of the current literature and journalism even of Paris.
— from France and the Republic A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 by William Henry Hurlbert