A curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only.
— from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

I was talking to Burne awhile ago, and he claims that it's a logical result if an intelligent person thinks long enough about the social system.
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald

Within that secret court discussed, In much his conduct stigmatized; For, from the outset, 'twas unjust To jest as he had done last eve, A timid, shrinking love to grieve.
— from Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] A Romance of Russian Life in Verse by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

He could no longer escape, and the saint came up behind him and gave him a furious kick, which shot him through space like a cannonball.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

"I begin to think," remarked the Tin Woodman as he looked earnestly at the Saw-Horse, "that wonders will never cease!
— from The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum

As our absence had been long enough already to seem strange downstairs, I returned at once and found Ada sitting at work by the fireside talking to her cousin John.
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Miss Dingwall in "Sketches by Boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young Nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic and very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy till he ran away to join the army and married Dolly Varden, perhaps the most exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens gallery; Martin Chuzzlewit, who also ran away, as did David Copperfield, perhaps the most true to adolescence because largely reminiscent of the author's own life; Steerforth, a stranger from home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change.
— from Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene by G. Stanley (Granville Stanley) Hall

Those of our party who did not visit Juarez last evening attended the State Firemen’s ball and banquet under the escort of Colonel Whitmore, Acting Mayor of El Paso, and Chief J. J. Connors, of the city fire department, and they all speak in the highest terms of {46} the royal treatment they received and the grand time they had.
— from Nine Thousand Miles on a Pullman Train An Account of a Tour of Railroad Conductors from Philadelphia to the Pacific Coast and Return by Milton M. Shaw

In consideration of which kind neighbourly office of Nicholas Frog, in that he has been pleased to accept of the aforesaid trust, I, John Bull, having duly considered that my friend, Nicholas Frog, at this time lives in a marshy soil and unwholesome air, infested with fogs and damps, destructive of the health of himself, wife, and children, do bind and oblige me, my heirs and assigns, to purchase for the said Nicholas Frog, with the best and readiest of my cash, bonds, mortgages, goods and chattels, a landed estate, with parks, gardens, palaces, rivers, fields, and outlets, consisting of as large extent as the said Nicholas Frog shall think fit.
— from The History of John Bull by John Arbuthnot

You affirmed that an equal number of devotees streamed formerly round the Irmensaeule and to Jupiter's temple; an equal number of votaries, with like exultation, ascended the stake kindled in honor of Brahma.
— from Philosophical Letters of Friedrich Schiller by Friedrich Schiller

hlaford- es , had, in Chaucer's day, become lord, lord- es ;—and that scur, (shower,) plural scur- as , of our distant progenitors had bequeathed to his verse—shour, shour- es .
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 by Various

[299] The custom of applying the nose to the cheek and drawing a breath, with closed eyes and a smacking of the lips, exists among the Southern Chinese, but only as an act of love.
— from The Races of Man: An Outline of Anthropology and Ethnography by Joseph Deniker

Cosimo Rosselli and Pier di Cosimo likewise employed at the Sistina, inferior in all essential parts to their competitors, owe the perpetuity of their names less to their parti-coloured glare and immoderate display of gold and azure, which attracted the vulgar eye of their employer the Pope, than to the luck of having been the masters of Bartolomeo della Porta, and Andrea del Sarto.
— from The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 3 (of 3) by Henry Fuseli

There is no such glowing light elsewhere along the south coast; these things are very local.
— from The Open Air by Richard Jefferies

"No danger, speak—what is amiss in London?" "Enough and to spare.
— from Beatrix of Clare by John Reed Scott