Why is suus called a reflexive possessive?
— from Latin for Beginners by Benjamin L. (Benjamin Leonard) D'Ooge

She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of divorce and remarriage during a husband’s lifetime, and the priest told her that it was impossible, and to her delight showed her a text in the Gospel which (as it seemed to him) plainly forbids remarriage while the husband is alive.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

Forced and long-continued toil became the rule of life, the old ties of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and instead of the family appeared a new polygamy and polyandry, which, in some cases, almost reached promiscuity.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.
— from The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The book was open at a hymn not ill adapted to their situation, and in which the poet, no longer goaded by his desire to excel the inspired King of Israel, had discovered some chastened and respectable powers.
— from The Last of the Mohicans; A narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper

One day at the fire, when all clear was the coast, The pair were both spying some chesnuts at roast: [Pg 596] To steal a good meal is its pleasure to double; Besides, it would bring the cook's man into trouble.
— from The Fables of La Fontaine Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury and Illustrated by Gustave Doré by Jean de La Fontaine

Sugríva ceased, and Ráma pressed The grateful Vánar to his breast;
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki

The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

"In the same manner," says he, "as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients; who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted."
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

This idea is so plausable that it might be placed in the same catagory as rocket propulsion, which is fact.
— from Futuria Fantasia, Winter 1940 by Ray Bradbury

Old and young, of both sexes, pass days and nights in these symposia, at which special customs and rules prevail.
— from The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1 of 28 by Project Gutenberg

He tried some clergymen and religious people; but they know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy.
— from Three John Silence Stories by Algernon Blackwood

Such creatures are rather plentiful here, for a man living close by showed me on his thigh the marks where he had been seized by one close to his house.
— from The Malay Archipelago, Volume 2 The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise; A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature by Alfred Russel Wallace

A monarch of such great prudence, valour, and talent as Philip, could now give all the world to understand that those who dared to lose a just and decorous respect for him, as this good lady had done, would receive such chastisement as royal power guided by prudent counsel could inflict.
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley

The lightning struck the flag-staff, ran down the leg of a man who was repairing the electric light, took a chew of his tobacco, turned his boot wrong side out and induced him to change his sock, toyed with a chilblain, wrenched out a soft corn and roguishly put it in his ear, then ran down the electric light wire, a part of it filling an engagement in the Coliseum and the balance following the wire to the depot, where it made double-pointed toothpicks of a pole fifty feet high.
— from Bill Nye's Red Book New Edition by Bill Nye