He was not strong enough to push both me and the chair away, so he would stand twisting his body and face into the most grotesque and singular contortions—laughable, no doubt, to an unconcerned spectator, but not to me—and uttering loud yells and doleful outcries, intended to represent weeping but wholly without the accompaniment of tears.
— from Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

She thought so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir James sometimes; but he is so kind, he never noticed it.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

But if you, who are the most eminent man, abandon the cities, all their ornaments will be taken from them, and the Median power will be more dangerous to them.
— from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

return Footnote 10: Romance, Id. , v.: "Then Sir Bedivere departed and went to the sword and lightly took it up and went to the waterside, and then he bound the girdle about the hilt and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and then came an arm and a hand above the water, and met it and caught it and so shook it thrice and brandished it, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water."
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

He slew in battle a lieutenant of the Abbassides, who had invaded his dominions with a fleet and army: the head of Ala, in salt and camphire, was suspended by a daring messenger before the palace of Mecca; and the caliph Almansor rejoiced in his safety, that he was removed by seas and lands from such a formidable adversary.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Now the little trembling hare, which the dread of all her numerous enemies, and chiefly of that cunning, cruel, carnivorous animal, man, had confined all the day to her lurking-place, sports wantonly o'er the lawns; now on some hollow tree the owl, shrill chorister of the night, hoots forth notes which might charm the ears of some modern connoisseurs in music; now, in the imagination of the half-drunk clown, as he staggers through the churchyard, or rather charnelyard, to his home, fear paints the bloody hobgoblin; now thieves and ruffians are awake, and honest watchmen fast asleep; in plain English, it was now midnight; and the company at the inn, as well those who have been already mentioned in this history, as some others who arrived in the evening, were all in bed.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

I would have no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his affections from me.
— from She by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in remembrance more than things long past.
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Probably the closest approach we shall ever make to a satisfactory classification of races as a basis of antipathy will be that of grouping men according to color, along certain broad lines, the color being accompanied by various and often widely different, but always fairly persistent, differentiating physical and mental characteristics.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

The movement of an ordinary telephone diaphragm for a barely audible sound is, measured at the centre, about 10 -6 of a c.m.
— from Wireless Transmission of Photographs Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged 1919 by Marcus J. Martin

The sanguine “Lama of Jehovah” does not say, however, who were the five foreigners who appeared in Tibet in the year 371 of our era, to disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they came, after leaving with King Thothori-Nyang-tsan instructions how to use certain things in a casket that “had fallen from heaven” in his presence precisely fifty years before, or in the year a.d. 331.
— from The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3 of 4 by H. P. (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky

Once, in one of those hushes which will fall upon every crowd, he heard a coyote wailing sharply and far away, as though the desert had sent out this voice to mock at The Corner and all it contained.
— from Gunman's Reckoning by Max Brand

There was enough of the mix in the form to make a thousand cats, and more was being mixed in a portable cement mixer.
— from The Egyptian Cat Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story by Harold L. (Harold Leland) Goodwin

Even before his rank was discovered, his fame had spread for miles around the country; and all who had spirit enough to throw off the Danish yoke, who preferred a life of freedom in the woods and wilds and had sufficient courage to abandon their homes for the love of liberty, gathered around and fought under the banner of the island stranger.
— from History of the Anglo-Saxons, from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest Second Edition by Thomas Miller

One may moralize about these conditions as long as he likes; however, changes occur very slowly in India, and as Kipling so pertinently puts it in one of his poems, it's only a fool "Who tries to hustle the East.
— from Modern India by William Eleroy Curtis

"You see, he and Nappy Martell and that crowd are all down on the Rovers.
— from The Rover Boys at Colby Hall; or, The Struggles of the Young Cadets by Edward Stratemeyer

During my stay, he gave me singular proofs of his regard: he himself conducted me around the city, and to the palace of the viceroy; and more than once paid me a visit at my lodgings.
— from An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works, the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty. by John Milton

To the visitor who steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the reading man and the clever artificer.
— from The New North by Agnes Deans Cameron

Jeffries and I both feel there’s been a lot of unnecessary hard feeling between the Morgans and the company, and we want to ask you to accept this to show some of it’s ended.”
— from Nan of Music Mountain by Frank H. (Frank Hamilton) Spearman