"Much more, if first I floated free, As naked essence, must I be Incompetent of memory: "For memory dealing but with time, And he with matter, could she climb Beyond her own material prime?
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

I want to put an end to my life, because that’s my idea, because I don’t want to be afraid of death, because … because there’s no need for you to know.
— from The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So their actions and passions are intermixed, but of all other passions, sorrow hath the greatest share; [5305] love to many is bitterness itself; rem amaram Plato calls it, a bitter potion, an agony, a plague.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The surrounding country itself was pleasant, as far as fertile fields, flourishing trees, quiet green lanes, and smiling hedges with wild-flowers scattered along their banks, could make it; but it was depressingly flat to one born and nurtured among the rugged hills of ---.
— from Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Upon his requesting, ‘May I be invulnerable to the divine sages, the Gaundharvas, the Yakshas, the Rákshasas [pg 508] and the serpents,’ I replied ‘Be it so.’
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki

This fact may indeed be inferred from what has just been stated with respect to infants when doubtfully beginning to cry, or endeavouring to stop crying; for they then generally command all the other facial muscles more effectually than they do the depressors of the corners of the mouth.
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

Not that true contentment dignified this infatuated resignation: my work had neither charm for my taste, nor hold on my interest; but it seemed to me a great thing to be without heavy anxiety, and relieved from intimate trial: the negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Well; if all goes right now, that’s quite correct, and I don’t mind it; but if anything goes wrong, then times are altered, and I shall just say and do whatever I think may serve me most, and take advice from nobody.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

I was, therefore, obliged to give it up, as you may imagine, but I own I went away with rather a heavy heart, for the horse had looked at me affectionately, had rubbed his head against me
— from The Count of Monte Cristo, Illustrated by Alexandre Dumas

But when I say the Doctor was a great man in Belfield, I do not mean to aver, or to be understood, that, in person, he was of colossal bulk or stature; neither is it true that his intellect was of a quality so far superior to the average of human minds as to make him a giant in that respect.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 01, November, 1857 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

I only mention it because it seems to illustrate, like Anna Karenina, his instinctive evasion of the matter that could not be thrown into straightforward scenic form, the form in which his imagination was evidently happiest.
— from The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock

" Five hundred years, however, had to pass before the most implicit belief in hobs, wraiths, and boggles was to disappear, and even at the present day those who have intimate associations with the population of the North Yorkshire moors know that traces of the old superstitions still survive.
— from The Evolution of an English Town by Gordon Home

So the ladies, who had with much instance, but in vain, besought Gualtieri, either to let Griselda keep in another room, or at any rate to furnish her with one of the robes that had been hers, that she might not present herself in such a sorry guise before the strangers, sate down to table; and the service being begun, the eyes of all were set on the girl, and every one said that Gualtieri had made a good exchange, and Griselda joined with the rest in greatly commending her, and also her little brother.
— from The Decameron, Volume II by Giovanni Boccaccio

This made it both interesting and important to ascertain the exact status of the subject, by tracing it to and from the fountain source, a task I found comparatively easy through the calendars of Jefferson and Madison Papers, in the State Department, at Washington.
— from Browere's Life Masks of Great Americans by Charles Henry Hart

This question of the origin and causation of the forms of sponge-spicules, with which we have now briefly dealt, is all the more important and all the more interesting because it has been discussed time and again, from points of view which are char­ac­ter­is­tic of very different schools of thought in biology.
— from On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

He was brought back to a somewhat anxious consideration of his own affairs by being halted at the gate of a building which was more imposing, both in size and appearance, than the houses around it.
— from Blue Lights: Hot Work in the Soudan by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne