I shall get it for eight o'clock, and if, you have to wait, I cannot help it; roast meat ought not to be burnt!”
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

‘And part of the roof came off, and ever so much thunder got in—and it went rolling round the room in great lumps—and knocking over the tables and things—till I was so frightened, I couldn’t remember my own name!’
— from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

6. Criticise this reasoning: Men ought not to smoke tobacco, because to do so is contrary to best medical opinion.
— from The Art of Public Speaking by J. Berg (Joseph Berg) Esenwein

Then spake number two: “I know more than that: even if the horse is slain, the young King will still not keep his bride: when they enter the palace together they will find a ready-made wedding shirt in a cupboard, which looks as though it were woven of gold and silver, but is really made of nothing but sulphur and tar: when the King puts it on it will burn him to his marrow and bones.”
— from The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life.
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain

Lamb recovered Margaret of Newcastle's Letters (folio, 1664), which is among the books in America, as is also the Fulke Greville (small folio, 1633).
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

“I could not write to him before I know whether he will receive me or not.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey

Special Kosher packages, bearing the seals of Rabbi Margolies of New York, and Rabbi Lifsitz of Cincinnati, are sold the Jewish trade.
— from The Story of Crisco by Marion Harris Neil

"I don't know," said I, "whether its reely myself or not, for I haven't seed myself—how do I look?"
— from Strange Visitors A series of original papers, embracing philosophy, science, government, religion, poetry, art, fiction, satire, humor, narrative, and prophecy, by the spirits of Irving, Willis, Thackeray, Brontë, Richter, Byron, Humboldt, Hawthorne, Wesley, Browning, and others now dwelling in the spirit world; dictated through a clairvoyant, while in an abnormal or trance state by Henry J. Horn

" Here Rodin directly touches a scientific truth—the relative monotony of Nature's productive forms.
— from Auguste Rodin: The Man - His Ideas - His Works by Camille Mauclair

I was trudging wearily along in the twilight through the public promenade of Strasburg, to restore my overwrought nerves, when I was suddenly taken aback by seeing on a theatre poster the word TANNHAUSER.
— from My Life — Volume 2 by Richard Wagner

I know not whether Mr. S. is aware that there is the head of a Dodo in the Royal Museum of Natural History at Copenhagen, which came from the collection of Paludanus?
— from Notes and Queries, Number 22, March 30, 1850 by Various

She would take it in hand at once, for she would rather make oath never more to permit a single ship of war to leave her ports than consent to such thieveries and villanies.
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley

Ireland is provided under the new constitution with the readiest means of nullifying the Restrictions.
— from A Leap in the Dark A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the Bill of 1893 by Albert Venn Dicey

The first coup d’œil, which was by night, reminded me of Namur, as it is seen from the right bank of the Maas.
— from Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826. v. 1-2 by Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Bernhard

You are overdrawn at Coutts’, you can raise money on nothing, your urgent debts to tradesmen and so forth amount, as you told me the day before yesterday, to over two thousand five hundred pounds.
— from The Man Who Lost Himself by H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole

Farther, I get into confusion by not always remembering my own nomenclature, and have allowed 'Gentianoides' to remain, for No. 16, though I banish Gentian.
— from Proserpina, Volume 2 Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew by John Ruskin