Nothing escaped her; and, like a prudent steward, she found a use for everything.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

While on the deck the chief in silence lies, And pleasing slumbers steal upon his eyes.
— from The Odyssey by Homer

The shallowest and least American persons seem surest to push abroad, and call without fail on well-known foreigners, who are doubtless affected with indescribable qualms by these queer ones.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

She had sensibilities which, to Lily, would have seemed comic in a person with a freckled nose and red eyelids, who lived in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room; but poor Grace's limitations gave them a more concentrated inner life, as poor soil starves certain plants into intenser efflorescence.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Stephen presently turned to a duet which he insisted that Lucy and Philip should sing; he had often done the same thing before; but this evening Philip thought he divined some double intention in every word and look of Stephen's, and watched him keenly, angry with himself all the while for this clinging suspicion.
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Come home with me to supper; I will lay A plot shall show us all a merry day.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

"You stand there like a post," she said.
— from The Undying Past by Hermann Sudermann

She was like a plump, saucy, sweet-throated bobolink, perched on a swaying bough and singing a joyous and daring “catch me if you can.”
— from With Hoops of Steel by Florence Finch Kelly

To the workers the difference was as if they had passed out from under the capricious personal domination of innumerable petty despots to a government of laws and principles so simple and systematic that the sense of being subject to personal authority was gone.
— from Equality by Edward Bellamy

"Oh, it's just like a pink story," she cried, clapping her hands.
— from The Little Colonel by Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston

Hundreds of dollars have been taken at a time; though, with that redeeming moderation so common in Polynesian theft, the Marquesan burglar will always take a part and leave a part, sharing (so to speak) with the proprietor.
— from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 18 by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Yes; and a rose-bud tinge in the cheeks; hands like lilies, and perfectly seraphic smile.”
— from The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Treasure these happy hours of a first, pure love; hold them fast in the chambers of memory, for to every human being there must come, sooner or later, a present so sad and desolate, that the beautiful past is all he has to live upon.
— from An Egyptian Princess — Volume 04 by Georg Ebers