That which provides the fire, the pot, the dinner, the table and the knife and fork for the anarchist; the part of the repast that himself supplies is the disgrace before meat.
— from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

During 1850 came Mrs. Ole Baker with son P. O. Baker (b. 1838), Mons Ness, Elling Stamn, Ole Skuldt and Lars Halvorson from Hallingdal, Knut and Jens Olson from Stavanger, Lars L. Kolve and family from Voss and Knut Baardson (Bowerson) and family from Sætersdalen.
— from A History of Norwegian Immigration to the United States From the Earliest Beginning down to the Year 1848 by George T. (George Tobias) Flom

"Crook-foot," she cried, "my child, be up and doing, for I deem it is with you that Xanthus is fain to fight; help us at once, kindle a fierce fire; I will then bring up the west and the white south wind in a mighty hurricane from the sea, that shall bear the flames against the heads and armour of the Trojans and consume them, while you go along the banks of Xanthus burning his trees and wrapping him round with fire.
— from The Iliad by Homer

During his dark days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept aloof, Frau Förster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those bounds were marked by crosses.
— from The Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

He went and lodged at a khan appointed for foreign merchants; and, having learned that there were four principal divisions where merchants of all sorts sold their commodities, and kept shops, and in the midst of which stood the castle, or rather the King’s palace, he went to one of these divisions the next day.
— from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

Mr. Pickwick’s knife and fork fell from his hand.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

" [54] On the platform or in the audience were to be seen the beloved Quaker, Mrs. John J. Merrit, of Brooklyn, Margaret E. Winchester, Mrs. Theodore Tilton, Mrs. Edwin A. Studwell, Catharine Beecher—her plain face illuminated with the fire of indignation—Jenny June Croly, writing rapidly for the New York World, Cora Tappan, Hannah Tracy Cutler, president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association, Phoebe Couzins, Mrs. Benjamin F. Butler, Mrs. James Parton, better known as Fanny Fern, Charlotte B. Wilbour, Elizabeth B. Phelps, two nieces of Mrs. U. S. Grant, Laura Curtis Bullard.
— from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years by Ida Husted Harper

After this, he said he would not venture to trespass upon my kindness any further for the present, and urged me to take his place, which, excited as I was by his performances, I was very well disposed to do.
— from Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover by Anonymous

Similarly, he dealt us clean plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

She kept a fine flock of yellow chickens, sketched a little, certain rose-trees in the garden were committed specially to her care; and what with the care of the house, the care of the chickens, and the care of the poor, she scarcely knew what it was to have an idle minute.
— from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

Yet the treatment of the sacrilegious slayer seems to resemble so closely the treatment of hunters and fishermen who have killed animals for food in the ordinary course of business, that the ideas on which both sets of customs are based may be assumed to be substantially the same.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

They washed and put away the dishes, straightened the kitchen, and finally found themselves standing in the reception room, Julia still talking.
— from The Story of Julia Page by Kathleen Thompson Norris

In the morning dawn, after our usual remembrance of Him who ruleth earth and sea, we went on our way, having had but little food, as cooked provisions were scarce, and we dared not kindle a fire, for fear of attracting attention.
— from Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux by Stephen Return Riggs

With humble hope to bend the knee, And, free from folly's leaven, Confess that we have strayed from thee, Thou righteous Judge in heaven!
— from Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People by Eliza Lee Cabot Follen

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
— from Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays by Robert Louis Stevenson

The bill somewhat cylindrical; the feet long, bare above the knee, and formed for wading.
— from Lives of Eminent Zoologists, from Aristotle to Linnæus with Introductory remarks on the Study of Natural History by William MacGillivray

Then he crumpled and dropped to his knees and fell forward into hands outstretched to catch him.
— from The Man in the Twilight by Ridgwell Cullum

I didn't know a fracture from a fraction.
— from The Planet Savers by Marion Zimmer Bradley