You're fit to cry just this minute, for nothing else but because you've sat still the whole day.
— from Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

If you know not this, at least your new friends know it; for like the hyena, they seldom attack a full-grown man, but for the most part children or imbeciles; and to the best of their power they would destroy reason saying (like so many Metragurtæ, or Mithræ, or Sabbadii) ‘Do not examine, but believe,’ ‘Your faith will save you,’ ‘The wisdom of the world is evil, foolishness is good.’
— from Onesimus: Memoirs of a Disciple of St. Paul by Edwin Abbott Abbott

I could not explain before; but you understand, do you not?"
— from Mrs. Day's Daughters by Mary E. Mann

"Was I a bad girl, Mother?" "Not exactly bad, but you frightened us," her father said.
— from The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair by Laura Lee Hope

They occupy, however, a middle ground between reality and non-reality; they are unreal, because nothing exists but Brahm; yet in some degree real, inasmuch as they constitute an outward manifestation of him.
— from Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by Albert Pike

When he came out of the gaol, like a blackguard as he was, he said to me, “You must not let the case go off at the next examination, because both you and I ought to have some costs out of it.”
— from Secret Service; or, Recollections of a City Detective by Andrew Forrester