Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.
— from The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The cottages are not near each other; gardens and fields lie between; and at the gable of every house is a wooden horse or horse's head; from the old Saxon times, you know.
— from Pine Needles by Susan Warner

I feel, still, as though the old place in the hills were my real home, and every summer, when nearly every one goes away from Fairlands and there is nothing for me to do, Myra Willard and I go up there, for as long as we can.
— from The Eyes of the World by Harold Bell Wright

From the terrace of the great yellow palace built upon a natural elevation, one gets a fine though distant view of the coast of Finland,—a portion of the Tzar's dominion which alone exceeds in size Great Britain and Ireland, a wide-spread barren land of lakes and granite rocks, but peopled by over two millions of souls.
— from Foot-prints of Travel; Or, Journeyings in Many Lands by Maturin Murray Ballou