Koeppen, to whose work this note is much indebted, says the Tibetan days are the 14th, 15th, 29th, 30th, and adds as to the manner of observance: "On these days, by rule, among the Lamas, nothing should be tasted but farinaceous food and tea; the very devout refrain from all food from sunrise to sunset.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

“Your narrative is most interesting,” said Sherlock Holmes.
— from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

To make retreat out of human nature seem a possible vocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented as unnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come from elsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finer than this sublunary fog.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

I myself in the sea (here the reciter’s name is mentioned), I shall drift away, well.”
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea by Bronislaw Malinowski

Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

When I was on earth, and made those proposals to ladies which, though universally condemned, have made me so interesting a hero of legend, I was not infrequently met in some such way as this.
— from Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy by Bernard Shaw

In the afternoon to my Lord Treasurer’s, and there got my Lord Treasurer to sign the warrant for my striking of tallys, and so doing many jobbs in my way home, and there late writeing letters, being troubled in my mind to hear that Sir W. Batten and Sir J. Minnes do take notice that I am now-a-days much from the office upon no office business, which vexes me, and will make me mind my business the better, I hope in God; but what troubles me more is, that I do omit to write, as I should do, to Mr. Coventry, which I must not do, though this night I minded it so little as to sleep in the middle of my letter to him, and committed forty blotts and blurrs in my letter to him, but of this I hope never more to be guilty, if I have not already given him sufficient offence.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

But it is naughty, like a young child; and if I hold not its mouth, it screameth too loudly.
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The fact that light travels at so many hundred thousand miles an hour does not interest me; I should accept the information and then ask him my next question, “How did they find out?”
— from If I May by A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne

Though this opera is far from being a novelty in Milan, it still retains a great share of popularity.
— from The Harmonicon. Part the First by Various

This was gracefully done, but, nevertheless, it made Ippolít Sergyéevitch grin inwardly.
— from Orlóff and His Wife: Tales of the Barefoot Brigade by Maksim Gorky

It does not appear, from Metschnikoff’s figures of Geophilus, that any of the anterior segments are without appendages, and it is very probable that Newport is mistaken in supposing that the embryo has a segment without appendages behind that with the poison claws, which coalesces with the segment of the latter.
— from The Works of Francis Maitland Balfour, Volume 2 (of 4) A Treatise on Comparative Embryology: Invertebrata by Francis M. (Francis Maitland) Balfour

If it will not inconvenience Monsieur, I should be obliged if he will defer sleeping, for the present.
— from The Pursuit by Frank (Frank Mackenzie) Savile

E. Northumberland I., marked 'i', S. 60 40
— from A Voyage to Terra Australis — Volume 2 Undertaken for the purpose of completing the discovery of that vast country, and prosecuted in the years 1801, 1802 and 1803, in His Majesty's ship the Investigator, and subsequently in the armed vessel Porpoise and Cumberland schooner by Matthew Flinders

"Nor I, madam," I said, "in that of making a show of myself.
— from Led Astray and The Sphinx Two Novellas In One Volume by Octave Feuillet