“One morning, hardly two weeks ago, she came here at about lunch time, and, placing a roll of bills in my hand, said: 'My dear, you are an angel!
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

It is a common notion with landsmen that a ship is in her finest condition when she leaves port to enter upon her voyage; and that she comes home, after a long absence, "With over-weathered ribs and ragged sails; Lean, rent and beggared by the strumpet wind.
— from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana

This rule need not be put in practice, except where an uniform degree of the most striking sublimity is to be produced, and that in every particular; for it ought to be observed, that this melancholy kind of greatness, though it be certainly the highest, ought not to be studied in all sorts of edifices, where yet grandeur must be studied; in such cases the sublimity must be drawn from the other sources; with a strict caution however against anything light and riant; as nothing so effectually deadens the whole taste of the sublime.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke

The bishops and doctors of the church, whose evidence attests, and whose authority might influence, the professions, the principles, and even the practice of their contemporaries, had studied the Scriptures with less skill than devotion; and they often received, in the most literal sense, those rigid precepts of Christ and the apostles, to which the prudence of succeeding commentators has applied a looser and more figurative mode of interpretation.
— 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

She clutched his arms and leaned against him.
— from Little Golden's Daughter; or, The Dream of a Life Time by Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs.

She came back to a land which had by Act of Parliament prohibited the Mass and adopted a religious faith she considered heretical, and a land where Protestantism in its austerest form had become rooted, and where John Knox, its sternest exponent, held the conscience of the people in his keeping.
— from A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland by Mary Platt Parmele

He’d go over a set of them puzzle rolls that mean as much to me as a laundry ticket, and he’d point out where there was room for another clothes closet off some chamber here, and a laundry chute there, and how the sink in the butler’s pantry was on the wrong side for a right handed dish washer, and a lot of little details that nobody else would think of unless
— from Odd Numbers Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe by Sewell Ford

“Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more than a fair share of heaven.”
— from The Grandeur That Was Rome by J. C. (John Clarke) Stobart

Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various

She crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair, giving a single sharp nod.
— from Proof of the Pudding by Robert Sheckley

But he suddenly calmed himself, and added: "Leave me!
— from Serge Panine — Volume 04 by Georges Ohnet

He gently freed himself from her hold and tried to shape a soothing question; but she caught his arm and, laying a hand over his mouth, drew him across the garden and into the house.
— from The Valley of Decision by Edith Wharton