"Touching that matter, you know, I really and truly am very sorry that my arrangements in life, combined with circumstances over which I have no control, should prevent a renewal of what was wholly terminated some time back," said Mr. Guppy to me forlornly and despondently, "but it couldn't be.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This so enraged them, that without a moment’s delay they first made a raid upon the money that was kept in readiness, and then arrested Gesco and the Carthaginians with him.
— from The Histories of Polybius, Vol. 1 (of 2) by Polybius

I did not then understand that all knowledge is relative, and that, au fond , his offense was the same as mine, that of thinking he had arrived at finality in the discovery of truth.
— from The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I by William James Stillman

I have known it rise almost to agony; but the tones of friendship and regard, of gentleness and tender kindness, to the ear of hatred and malice, must be more terrible still.
— from The Man in Black: An Historical Novel of the Days of Queen Anne by G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James

We may tell of Bute a more prosaic story, when a town-lady, going, as the Glasgow people say, 'doon the watter,' asked a lodging-house keeper in Rothesay about thunder, and received the very satisfactory rejoinder, more Scottice , in question form, 'Wha ever heard o' thunder in an island?'
— from Scottish Loch Scenery by Thomas Allan Croal

The different classes of work for which bodies of men could be consistently organized, might ultimately become numerous; these following divisions of occupation may all at once be suggested: I. Road-making.—Good roads to be made, wherever needed, and kept in repair; and the annual loss on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses, strained wheels, and time, done away with.
— from The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm by John Ruskin

Kipling is rough at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest.
— from My Contemporaries In Fiction by David Christie Murray

28 These are ungracious sentences, especially when we remember the letter to which Keats is replying; and they are also unfair to Shelley, whose tragedy cannot justly be accused of having an ultra-poetic purpose, and whose Count Cenci shows much more dramatic imagination than any figure drawn by Keats.
— from Oxford Lectures on Poetry by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley