The Hawkins family were settled there, and had a hard enough struggle with poverty and the necessity of keeping up appearances in accord with their own family pride and the large expectations they secretly cherished of a fortune in the Knobs of East Tennessee.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Charles Dudley Warner

“There is no help from you; the only hope is that, when I am in the country in the summer, I may go out into the fields and a storm come on and the thunder may strike me dead on the spot. . . .
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

For the perpetration of similar enormities, a vile plebeian might claim and abuse the sacred character of a member of the republic: but, on the proof or suspicion of guilt, the slave, or the stranger, was nailed to a cross; and this strict and summary justice might be exercised without restraint over the greatest part of the populace of Rome.
— 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

But it was impossible to create an arbiter between a superior court of the Union and the superior court of a separate State which would not belong to one of these two classes.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville

“Dear me, how everything comes together to-day!” she chattered on again.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But there is only a single conception of a thing possible, which completely determines the thing a priori: that is, the conception of the ens realissimum.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster.
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde

There was some catalepsy of a transient character, but no suggestibility of the hypnotic type.
— from Nervous Ills, Their Cause and Cure by Boris Sidis

She came out and stood in the doorway, shading a flickering candle with her hand.
— from The Strand Magazine, Vol. 07, Issue 42, June, 1894 An Illustrated Monthly by Various

And if our insulted tenor had known it, this artificial organ has a very old theatrical connection, for persona seems the earliest form of such a sounding contrivance, originally a megaphonic mouthpiece fitted to a mask which, as one of the classical stage properties, came to denote the personage thus represented; and in time the name gained respectability as the person or parson of a parish, who more or less loudly warned his convoy of souls from the rocks and shoals of ill-doing.
— from Isle of Wight by A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope) Moncrieff

Over this is sculptured on a block of stone the Spanish coat of arms, surmounted by the globe and cross, with a Maltese cross and lamb beneath.
— from A Guide-Book of Florida and the South for Tourists, Invalids and Emigrants by Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison) Brinton

She came over and sat on the edge of the bed, and taking one of my hands in hers, kept smoothing it while she talked.
— from We Ten Or, The Story of the Roses by Barbara Yechton