She listened, and bent her head as though meditating.
— from The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whereon old Norway, overcome with joy, Gives him three thousand crowns in annual fee, And his commission to employ those soldiers So levied as before, against the Polack: With an entreaty, herein further shown, [ Gives a paper.
— from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

Literary style except in Southern Leyte and Bohol where it is colloquial ( with the dialectal prefix a- substituting for paga- ).
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

During these long and blank intervals I suppose that the inhabitants of each region underwent a considerable amount of modification and extinction, and that there was much migration from other parts of the world.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

I listened, listened and —burst into sobs!
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

I was thanking my stars that I'd learned to make nice buttonholes, when the parlor door opened and shut, and someone began to hum, Kennst Du Das Land, like a big bumblebee.
— from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

“It seems that you are behaving like a blackguard, getting drunk and contracting debts.”
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

She wished he could love a ballroom better, and could like Frank Churchill better.—He seemed often observing her.
— from Emma by Jane Austen

As they re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original gospel of divine Fatherhood.
— from Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries by Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew) Jones

The scrubbing, indeed, looked anything but an inviting task.
— from Dandelion Cottage by Carroll Watson Rankin

Aunt Lisbeth touched the smoky yellow glass with a mincing lip, and beckoned Margarita to withdraw.
— from Complete Short Works of George Meredith by George Meredith

At last there came by an old, hobbling woman with a crutch stick; who first stopped a little, close to where we lay, and bemoaned herself and the long way she had travelled; and then set forth again up the steep spring of the bridge.
— from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 10 by Robert Louis Stevenson

“I’m afraid to speak or move for fear all this wonderful beauty will vanish just like a broken silence,” breathed Anne.
— from Anne of the Island by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

The theory which would lop off the strongest forces from life, and bend it before the passions of the multitude, would result in suppressing the advance-guard, and leaving the army without leaders….
— from Clerambault: The Story of an Independent Spirit During the War by Romain Rolland

The future ramifications of that noble genius were then closely shut in the seed, and greedily drinking in the moisture which made it afterwards burst forth so kindly into luxuriance and beauty.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

But just as that explanation for his non-appearance had satisfied me I saw, half across the plain, something moving slowly—a pack of horses it seemed, and so clear was the air of that late afternoon that I recognised the form of the mounted man who guarded them, could almost, with a lengthy and concentrated survey, descry his great beard like a bib upon his breast.
— from The Lost Cabin Mine by Frederick Niven

Went to St. Louis and bought me an automobile, and just I was a boy.
— from Warren Commission (06 of 26): Hearings Vol. VI (of 15) by United States. Warren Commission

Foiled, but not disheartened, sat the Inquisition, like a beldame, upon the border, impotently threatening the land whence she had been for ever excluded; while industrious as the Parcae, distaff in hand, sat, in Cologne, the inexorable three—Spain, the Empire, and Rome—grimly, spinning and severing the web of mortal destinies.
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley