A little ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the night was about done.
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

This school, reputedly capricious, became bankrupt, and was followed by a return to nature, which made itself known in genre pictures and scenes of life of every description, even though it strayed sometimes into vulgarity.
— from Essays of Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer

But if the primal germs themselves be soft, Reason cannot be brought to bear to show The ways whereby may be created these Great crags of basalt and the during iron; For their whole nature will profoundly lack The first foundations of a solid frame.
— from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus

They soon drove the rebel cavalry back beyond Corbin's Bridge.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

"Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean, dry, ill-colored … and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot

She says her dad says you raised Cain by boosting old Seneca Doane.
— from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

“They are Roman Catholics by birth, infidels by necessity, and Protestants by history and inclination,” he said.
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis

The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Señor Soarès is the manager of a railway company besides being devoted to land and its fruitful joys.
— from South America To-day A Study of Conditions, Social, Political and Commercial in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil by Georges Clemenceau

For example: up the river crude rubber can be bought for twenty-five cents a pound; the trader pays twenty-five cents an arroba (thirty-two pounds) for transportation to Pará from Santarem, exclusive of canoe hire and shipping; thirteen per cent.
— from The Andes and the Amazon; Or, Across the Continent of South America by James Orton

But she forgot him the next instant, for returning consciousness brought back like a blow the memory of the death of her father.
— from The City of Delight: A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem by Elizabeth Miller

There was a desk at the other rear corner, but Brian Taggert wasn't a desk man.
— from What The Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett

We are bound, of course, to ask how she worked out in life this beautiful vision of her adolescence—bound to ask how she realized in practice the “infinite (potential) worth and content” of that first radiant consciousness; but before we attempt to answer the question, we must take into full account the extent and the difficulty of the task that fell to her share, and we must give full weight to the natural attributes which were the tools placed at her disposal.
— from The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake by Graham Travers

It has increased the sum of human happiness, not only by calling new pleasures into existence, but by so cheapening former enjoyments as to render them attainable by those who before could never have hoped to share them: the surface of the land, and the face of the waters, are traversed with equal facility by its power; and by thus stimulating and facilitating the intercourse of nation with nation, and the commerce of people with people, it has knit together remote countries by bonds of amity not likely to be broken.
— from The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated (Seventh Edition) With an Account of Its Invention and Progressive Improvement, and Its Application to Navigation and Railways; Including Also a Memoir of Watt by Dionysius Lardner

Geology, in short, has shown us that the world is what it is, not by virtue of a single sudden creative act, nor by virtue of successive terrible and recurrent cataclysms, but by virtue of the slow continuous action of causes still always equally operative.
— from Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science by Grant Allen

They saw the Scots had a better army than we had—bold and ready, commanded by brave officers—and they foresaw that if we fought we should be beaten, and if beaten, they were undone.
— from Memoirs of a Cavalier A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648. by Daniel Defoe

About the centre of the enclosure stand two ancient ruins, the one a tower built by the Romans, thirty-six years after Christ, and the other a rude church built by the Saxons in the sixth century.
— from Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals In Two Volumes, Volume I. by Samuel Finley Breese Morse