I allude, of course—" Here the latch of Madame Beck's chamber-door (opening into the nursery) gave a sudden click, as if the hand holding it had been slightly convulsed; there was the suppressed explosion of an irrepressible sneeze.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Candide was moved with pity; he had learned to fire a gun in the Bulgarian service, and he was so clever at it, that he could hit a filbert in a hedge without touching a leaf of the tree.
— from Candide by Voltaire

We talked without the slightest constraint, and I thought her husband a perfect gentleman.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

Indeed, my Lord, these eyes have no such power Over the past or present: but perhaps They brighten at your welcome to supply The little that a lady's speech commends; And in the hope that, let whichever be The other's subject, we may both be friends.
— from Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

If they themselves are shy and modest, she will gladly preserve the friendly familiarity of youth; their innocent conversation will be merry but suitable; if they become serious they must say something useful; if they become silly, she soon puts a stop to it, for she has an utter contempt for the jargon of gallantry, which she considers an insult to her sex.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The King's son had waited until she came, and instantly took her by the hand and danced with no one but her.
— from Household Tales by Brothers Grimm by Wilhelm Grimm

"I want to go," she cried again, in the high, hard voice, like the scream of gulls.
— from The Rainbow by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

And you would agree with me in saying that one of them is simple and has but slight changes; and if the harmony and rhythm are also chosen for their simplicity, the result is that the speaker, if he speaks correctly, is always pretty much the same in style, and he will keep within the limits of a single harmony (for the changes are not great), and in like manner he will make use of nearly the same rhythm?
— from The Republic by Plato

What took place was a marked change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale—a change that somehow, even in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house.
— from What Maisie Knew by Henry James

He was a wholesome, vivacious boy, this Willetts, with a breeziness which seemed to captivate even his sober companion, and if Tom had felt any slight annoyance at being thus overhauled by a comparative stranger, the feeling quickly passed in the young scout’s cheery company.
— from Tom Slade on Mystery Trail by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

He was down on his knees in a second, crawling about in the hole, feeling and smelling the ground.
— from Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods by Josephine Chase

The Sanitary Commission, after inspecting two hundred and seventeen regiments of the present army of the United States, and comparing the several corps with each other in respect of health, came to a similar conclusion.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 60, October, 1862 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

No writer of the nineteenth century affirms this more persistently than Hawthorne, and in none of his romances is the principle so conspicuous as in “The House of the Seven Gables.”
— from The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Frank Preston Stearns

The garden has had to take care of itself under such circumstances, and if the house has been pushing it back in one place, it has wormed itself in at another, and queer little lawns with flower beds of old-fashioned, sweet-smelling plants have crept in where you least expect them.
— from Dodo: A Detail of the Day. Volumes 1 and 2 by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

Not until this moment had the likeness between father and son shown itself so conspicuously, and in the handsome features and insinuating, beguiling velvet voice she found sickening resemblances that made her heart surge, until she seemed suffocating.
— from Infelice by Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans