The corporal redoubled the attack,—my uncle Toby smiled,—then looked grave,—then smiled for a moment,—then looked serious for a long time;—Give me hold of the ivory pipe, Trim, said my uncle Toby—my uncle Toby put it to his lips,—drew it back directly,—gave a peep over the horn-beam hedge;—never did my uncle Toby's mouth water so much for a pipe in his life.—My uncle Toby retired into the sentry-box with the pipe in his hand.—
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Competitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leading different lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are incited by their mutual understanding to rise above that material ambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

When I pronounced these words with some vehemence, Strap looked at me for same time with a grave countenance, and then went on: “I'm very sorry to see such an alteration in your temper of late; you were always fiery, but now you are grown as crabbed as old Periwinkle the drunken tinker, on whom you and I (God forgive us!) played so many unlucky tricks while we were at school—but I will no longer detain you in suspense, because (doubtless) nothing is more uneasy than doubt—Dubio procul dubio nil dubius.
— from The Adventures of Roderick Random by T. (Tobias) Smollett

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But you'll get it all back—you'll get it all back, with your face.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Try to adapt your taste to the dishes, and if you find that impossible, remove those articles you cannot eat from your plate, and make your meal upon the others, but do this silently and quietly, endeavoring not to attract attention.
— from The Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman's Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society by Cecil B. Hartley

haud n leader, a short length of material used to attach a lure or hook to the end of a fishline.
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

They had ridden four days out of the very limits of the world into this desolate place, short of water, with nothing but a strip of dried meat under their saddles, over rocks and mountains, where surely none but these fugitives had ever been before—for that !
— from The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

"All these questions and answers passed through my mind in a moment; but the oaths of Don Fernando, the witnesses he appealed to, the tears he shed, and lastly the charms of his person and his high-bred grace, which, accompanied by such signs of genuine love, might well have conquered a heart even more free and coy than mine—these were the things that more than all began to influence me and lead me unawares to my ruin.
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

'I 've heard of stories of a cock and bull; But visions of an apple and a bee, To take us from our natural rest, and pull The whole Oda from their beds at half-past three, Would make us think the moon is at its full.
— from Don Juan by Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron

It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

It is of those performers that I write: of the hole-and-corner work, of the little thumb-nail sketches which go to make up the big battle panels so ably depicted over the matutinal bacon and eggs.
— from No Man's Land by H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

"This place we're goin' to Mr. Hale is about five miles up the lake, and about two miles in on the other side.
— from Death Points a Finger by Will Levinrew

The rain, in fact , made things far more uncomfortable than the Spanish bullets.
— from The Philippine Islands by Ramon Reyes Lala

By the exclusion of the South, in 1820, from all that part of the Louisiana purchase lying north of the parallel of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, and not included in the State of Missouri, by the extension of that line of exclusion to embrace the territory acquired from Texas; and by the appropriation of all the territory obtained from Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, both north and south of that line, it may be stated with approximate accuracy that the North had monopolized to herself more than three fourths of all that had been added to the domain of the United States since the Declaration of Independence.
— from The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1 by Jefferson Davis

For he knew they needed the road and, since he could salt a crevice anywhere, he had located his mine up their canyon.
— from Wunpost by Dane Coolidge

We must remember that when History, with steady hand and calm eyes, free from the passions of the past, comes to make up the final account, she will call as her principal witnesses the contemporaries of the man or the event awaiting her verdict.
— from Theodore Roosevelt An Address Delivered by Henry Cabot Lodge Before the Congress of the United States by Henry Cabot Lodge

My governess would not loose her clasp when we got to the house; but kept fast hold and led me upstairs to my own room.
— from Daisy by Susan Warner

My uncle Toby , as I said, loved the man;——and
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Mercifully some faint instinct of self-preservation made her muffle up the bronze beauty of her hair and hide some of the perfection of her face under a thick veil.
— from A Sovereign Remedy by Flora Annie Webster Steel