Inasmuch as nothing of this sort had ever occurred, though indeed she must often have pondered the success of such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen facts, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imagining other, minor catastrophes, which she would follow up with passion.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

In a letter to Mr. Grindal, (afterward archbishop of Canterbury,) he mentions with affection those who had preceded him in dying for the faith, and those who were expected to suffer; he regrets that popery is re-established in its full abomination, which he attributes to the wrath of God, made manifest in return for the lukewarmness of the clergy and the people in justly appreciating the blessed light of the reformation.
— from Fox's Book of Martyrs Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs by John Foxe

Who’s afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil kidnapped, he’d roast for him?
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

[28] That play, however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned simplicity,—a Roman simplicity perhaps.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

And if some person offers to give them advice who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself; or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the command of the prytanes.
— from Protagoras by Plato

I had, however, other friends at Eton; but it is not to all that wear that name in prosperity that a man is willing to present himself in distress.
— from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

This voice put him into disorder; so he awaked immediately, and told the story to his wife; and when his son was born, he called him Izates.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

To gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at least till I could give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I resolved to write a certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided: First.—That I would studiously avoid every action which might be construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object.
— from Roughing It by Mark Twain

When the nursing-woman brought her To papa, his infant daughter, How papa's dear eyes did glisten!
— from The Home Book of Verse — Volume 1 by Burton Egbert Stevenson

It would be ungenerous in you to take advantage of a lover’s attachment, to plunge him into distress; and if he has any honour, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to enter into any connexion which will render you unhappy.
— from A Father's Legacy to His Daughters by John Gregory

That the process of production has its delusions, scarcely needs saying.
— from Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 3 of 3 Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions. by Herbert Spencer

I spoke to her through the bedroom door, I called out to her, I as nearly as possible howled; I daresay I rapped as many as twenty times--I know I made my knuckles sore
— from A Master of Deception by Richard Marsh

“All the same,” said Clephane, pursuing his subject, “if they don’t play him, I don’t see who they’re going to get.
— from The Gold Bat by P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse

A day or two later she set out for a walk, carrying her parasol, holding it downward.
— from The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise by Albert Bigelow Paine

It must be premised that, for the purpose, Hamburg is divided into two parts: the city proper, and the suburb of St. Paul.
— from The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World by William W. Sanger

"Pardie, he is dead, I do think!"
— from A Maid of the Silver Sea by John Oxenham