And such abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey

But while she said it, madam—I was looking in her glass; of course, she didn't know I could see her—she put her little hand on her heart just like her dear mother used to, and lifted her eyes...
— from The Garden Party, and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

At the end of September she moved upstairs to a large room on the first floor of the house, whence a wide view could be had of the barren scenery of Hâvres-des-Pas, from the battery of Fort Regent on the right, to the rocks of St. Clément on the left; but Juliette’s peaceful contemplation was constantly disturbed by the violence of the proprietress, a drunkard, who was renowned all over the island for the vigour with which she beat her husband when in her cups.
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

Quis talia fando Myrmidonum Dolopumve aut duri miles Ulyssei Temperet a Lachrymis?
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

Still nobody woke; so my uncle took a little drop more—neat this time, to prevent the toddy from disagreeing with him—and, laying violent hands on his hat, sallied forth into the street.
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

The coat my uncle Toby gave the corporal;——Wear it, Trim, said my uncle Toby, as long as it will hold together, for the sake of the poor lieutenant——
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow contested the mortgagee’s right till he near had the head of me addled with his mortgagor under the act.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

My uncle, though a little lame, rose up when she came in, and setting a chair for her, desired she would sit down: then he asked if she would take a dish of chocolate, which she declined, with much acknowledgment.
— from The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by T. (Tobias) Smollett

For which reason my father played the same jig over again with his toe upon the floor—pushed the chamber-pot still a little farther within the valance—gave a hem—raised himself up upon his elbow—and was just beginning to address himself to my uncle Toby—when recollecting the unsuccessfulness of his first effort in that attitude—he got upon his legs, and in making the third turn across the room, he stopped short before my uncle Toby; and laying the three first fingers of his right-hand in the palm of his left, and stooping a little, he addressed himself to my uncle Toby as follows: H2 anchor Chapter 2.XLII.
— from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Which sages venerate and bards adore, As Pallas and the Muse unveil their awful lore!
— from The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

But at a call from Carmena, the skittish beast followed his mistress up the arroyo like a dog.
— from Bloom of Cactus by Robert Ames Bennet

If she had been made up to, at least, it was with an idea—the idea that had struck her at first as necessarily dangerous.
— from The Golden Bowl — Volume 2 by Henry James

Tramping by the Champs de Mars, we saw the sentinels in their faded blue coats of the fifth year and felt sorry for the men up there always listening in the pitiless cold.
— from Paris Vistas by Helen Davenport Gibbons

If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post.
— from The Wisdom of Father Brown by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

In his later years, too, there came a quarrel with his old friend Steele—cutting more deeply into the heart of this reticent man than it could cut into the much-scarified heart of that impressionist, the author of the Tatler ; there were stories, too, pretty well supported, that Addison in those last weary days of his—feeble and asthmatic—drank over-freely, to spur his jaded mind up to a level with the talk of sympathizing friends.
— from English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to Anne by Donald Grant Mitchell

But marriage unrolls the awful lot of numberless generations."
— from Stories of Authors, British and American by Edwin Watts Chubb

Fuensalida did his best by underhand means, frightening the German ambassadors of the sea-voyage from Genoa to Spain and back in the winter, and of the dreadful corsairs who infested the Mediterranean, until they at last, really alarmed, begged Maximilian in Fuensalida's presence XXIII to let them have a very big carrack for their greater safety.
— from The First Governess of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria by Eleanor E. Tremayne