I expected every wave would have swallowed us up, and that every time the ship fell down, as I thought it did, in the trough or hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; in this agony of mind, I made many vows and resolutions that if it would please God to spare my life in this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a ship again while I lived; that I would take his advice, and never run myself into such miseries as these any more.
— from The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

If the creditors of the public, indeed, were generally much in debt to other people, they might in some measure compensate their loss by paying their creditors in the same coin in which the public had paid them.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

At that moment, it struck midnight.
— from The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

For this purpose bands of people roam through the streets knocking on doors, firing guns, beating drums, blowing on horns, ringing bells, clattering pots and pans, shouting and hallooing with might and main, in short making all the noise it is possible for them to raise.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

[2] Campidoglio Veneto of Cappellari (MS. in St. Mark's Lib.), quoting "the Venetian Annals of Giulio Faroldi."
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

Thus much out of that book have I noted concerning the privilege of that place challenged in these days, since the which time, to wit, in the year 1457, the 36th of the said Henry VI., an ordinance was made by the king and his council concerning the said sanctuary men in St. Martin’s le Grand, whereof the articles are set down in the book of K., within the chamber of the Guildhall, in the lease 299.
— from The Survey of London by John Stow

He was waving his arms and, breathing heavily, muttered: “In sin my mother bore me!
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

are not these mad men, as [310] Scaliger concludes, qui in praelio acerba morte, insaniae, suae memoriam pro perpetuo teste relinquunt posteritati ; which leave so frequent battles, as perpetual memorials of their madness to all succeeding ages?
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

"May I see Madame Beck?" I inquired.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

In my fitful school-days I had written the usual compositions, which had been praised in the usual way, and while working in the jute mills I still made an occasional try.
— from The House of Pride, and Other Tales of Hawaii by Jack London

Not that she ever told me, in so many words, to go away—but just as if I didn't know what she meant!
— from Aunt Madge's Story by Sophie May

Vines and creepers had grown over its surface and the forest trees had met in solid mass above it, but still it lay intact, a triumph of road building, as solid and strong as when built.
— from The Boy Chums in the Forest; Or, Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades by Wilmer M. (Wilmer Mateo) Ely

I was a little dismayed to find myself in some measure anticipated both in subject and incident.
— from Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle by Clement King Shorter

My father was expecting a visitor from England——” She stopped abruptly, and fixing her beautiful blue eyes on me with a strange expression, asked— “Leopold, have you been in the society of women much?” “When I lived with my mother I saw many of her friends and visitors; but since——” “That’s not the question.
— from Major Frank by A. L. G. (Anna Louisa Geertruida) Bosboom-Toussaint

“They mostly remain at home during winter, but as soon as the weather becomes tolerably mild, in spring, most of them, men, women and children, set out on their peregrinations over the country; and live in a state of vagrancy, until driven into their habitations by the approach of winter.
— from A History of the Gipsies: with Specimens of the Gipsy Language by Walter Simson

It is of course true, that “All men are mortal” is equivalent to “Every man is some mortal.”
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2) by John Stuart Mill

All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other’s fingers, if one’s pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
— from The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes: An Index of the Project Gutenberg Editions by Oliver Wendell Holmes

On the following morning, in order to satisfy myself positively that this man had committed the murder, I sent my first sergeant, the famous Mickey Free, with a picked party of trailers, back to the walnut-tree, with orders to go carefully over the trail and run down the mare and colt, or find the girl, dead or alive, wherever they might.
— from Crooked Trails by Frederic Remington