That is my husband who, by secret cruelty Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty; Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth, And with broken pride and shameful humility, I sank into the grave.
— from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

It is likewise called ether, or sky, the extreme bounds and limits of the universe, in which the stars perform their appointed courses in a most wonderful manner; among which, the sun, whose magnitude far surpasses the earth, makes his revolution round it, and by his rising and setting causes day and night; sometimes coming near towards the earth, and sometimes going from it, he every year makes two contrary reversions 165 from the extreme 293 point of its course.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

All one has to do is not spoil children, not to distort their nature, and they’ll be delightful.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

She could not think what she would have done.
— from A Room with a View by E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster

What little there was must at any rate be husbanded to the utmost; she could not trust herself again to the perils of a sleepless night.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

I have heard her, in her Wrath, call a Substantial Trades-man a Lousy Cur; and remember one Day, when she could not think of the Name of a Person, she described him in a large Company of Men and Ladies, by the Fellow with the Broad Shoulders.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essays by Steele, Richard, Sir

She could not take back her letters without returning me mine.
— from The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How Mr. Darcy looked, therefore, she could not tell.
— from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The fall of the second, and the rise of the third, appears so enormous, that several critics, notwithstanding the unanimity of the Mss., have suspected some corruption of the text of Livy.
— 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

Neva lingered, though she could not trust herself to speak.
— from Light-Fingered Gentry by David Graham Phillips

For now that sudden challenge neither thrilled nor agitated her.
— from The Wire Tappers by Arthur Stringer

Black snakes and king snakes come next, the latter the nearest to handsome of any snake I ever saw.
— from Diary of an Enlisted Man by Lawrence Van Alstyne

She grew cold and distant, for she could not trust herself; and, while her royal lover fancied himself further from his object, he was on the very verge of attaining it.
— from The Prime Minister by William Henry Giles Kingston

There was something ahead; but she could not take him with her.
— from Honeycomb: Pilgrimage, Volume 3 by Dorothy M. (Dorothy Miller) Richardson

When the young people went in-doors again it was only seven o'clock: the girls proposed a game at hide-and-seek, and Bessie seconded the proposal; for you see it would have been rather a formidable business to sit down and entertain Mr. Forrester all the evening with conversation, rational or otherwise; and although at the moment she was in the dignified position of lady of the castle, she could not the less enjoy a game amazingly.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875 by Various

“So, you see,” she concluded, “not to speak of several other times—we’re very well acquainted.”
— from The Squirrel-Cage by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The ladies had sought their apartments and the downy couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step of the surrey, between the fenders; the old dog snored on the veranda floor, and Mrs. Keene's special attendant, who was really more a seamstress than a ladies' maid, dreamed that for some mysterious reason she could not thread a needle to fashion in a vast hurry the second mourning of her employer, who she imagined would call for it within a week!
— from The Raid of The Guerilla, and Other Stories by Mary Noailles Murfree