jour en un tenant, Tout chiaus c'on encontroit par la chité passant, Pour tenir compaingnie leur ségnor soffisant.
— from The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1 by Rustichello of Pisa

If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now.
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

They came, they cut away my tallest pines, My dark tall pines, that plumed the craggy ledge High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Foster'd the callow eaglet ­ from beneath Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat Low in the valley.
— from The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron

# You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Goody Liu adjusted their dresses, and, having impressed a few more words of advice on Pan Erh, they followed Chou Jui's wife through winding passages to Chia Lien's house.
— from Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I by Xueqin Cao

pitlagung n 1 bamboo stick with a tufted end used to clean the palm toddy containers left in the tree ( sugung ) (so called from the sound produced by using it).
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

"At every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned first to the law; he seems almost to have thought in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end of his pen."
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain

Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

Sesellius in his commonwealth of [699] France, gives three reasons why the French nobility were so frequently bankrupts: First, because they had so many lawsuits and contentions one upon another, which were tedious and costly; by which means it came to pass, that commonly lawyers bought them out of their possessions.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

"Oh, it isn't my place to criticise," laughed Joey gaily.
— from The Daughter Pays by Reynolds, Baillie, Mrs.

Let us place the creatures liable to vivisection and taken into a laboratory on a plane of equal importance with bags of silver coin taken into a banking-house.
— from An Ethical Problem Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals by Albert Leffingwell

We are certainly both Traitors, both despisers Of thee and of thy goodnesse: I am Palamon, That cannot love thee, he that broke thy Prison; Thinke well what that deserves: and this is Arcite, A bolder Traytor never trod thy ground, A Falser neu'r seem'd friend:
— from The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare (spurious and doubtful works)

It is not probable that Columbus looked to that posthumous fame of which he is now the subject.
— from Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 by George S. (George Sewall) Boutwell

But for the present, make thy tongue fluent in praising thy clement Lord at every moment and time, so that thou mayest attain to all good under the shadow of the Lord of Generosity and Beneficence.
— from Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas by `Abdu'l-Bahá

General Sir R. Abercromby and the Army at large, if he will communicate to the Royal Navy, and particularly to Captains Lane, Ryves, and Stephenson, and the other Officers who acted on shore; and to the Corps of Marines, the great obligation which they consider themselves under to them.
— from An Historical Review of the Royal Marine Corps, from its Original Institution down to the Present Era, 1803 by Gillespie, Alexander, Major

[42] “I beg your Lords pps to consider likewise the difficulty I lye under, with respect to opportunity’s of writing into England, which is thus—The post that goes through this place goes Eastward as far as Boston, but Westward he goes no further than Philadelphia and there - 12 - is no other post upon all this Continent, so that I have any letters to send to Virginia or to Maryland I must either send an Express who is often retarded for want of boats to cross those great rivers they must go over or else for want of horses, or else I must send them by some passengers who are going thither.
— from The Early History of the Colonial Post-Office by Mary Emma Woolley

He was in full training for the profession that cultivates literature for and upon literature, and neither for nor upon truth.
— from Home Again by George MacDonald

Faust Brooch Presented to Clara Louise Kellogg In 1878, on a Western trip, I remember my making a point, in some place in Kansas, of singing in an institute on Sunday for the pleasure of the inmates.
— from Memoirs of an American Prima Donna by Clara Louise Kellogg