And, after all this passed Purgatory, Must sad divorce make us the vulgar story?
— from The Poems of John Donne, Volume 1 (of 2) Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts by John Donne

The other soldier shook with him, a small dark man with thinning hair.
— from Second Variety by Philip K. Dick

To her he spoke disdainfully: 'Miserable thing, why do you cry out?
— from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica by Hesiod

What did my sister say to you?”—“She took me by the hand,” answered he, “and, as she delivered me the letter, said, `I scarce know what I have written.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

[ As in this and the following chapter I shall display much Arabic learning, I must profess my total ignorance of the Oriental tongues, and my gratitude to the learned interpreters, who have transfused their science into the Latin, French, and English languages.
— 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

[3394] for the most part our speeches in the daytime cause our fantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: Et canis in somnis leporis vestigia latrat : as a dog dreams of a hare, so do men on such subjects they thought on last.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

“By the three strokes,” says one author who sees deep meanings in ordinary things, “is to be understood the signs of our mortality, representing our coming into the world, our passage through life, and our transit through the portals of death.”
— from English Monastic Life by Francis Aidan Gasquet

Man soon dies: man's name lives for ever.
— from Pausanias, the Spartan; The Haunted and the Haunters An Unfinished Historical Romance by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

“And when young men spoke of glory,” says de Musset, “the answer was, ‘Become priests!’
— from The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century by Richard Muther

It is nearly fifteen years since all the world went to Paris to see an Exposition Universelle and to gaze at the "sabre de mon père," and since a Russian emperor, going to hear the operetta, said to have been suggested by the freak of a Russian empress, sat incognito in one stage-box of the little Variétés Theatre, and glancing up saw a Russian grand duke in the other.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880. by Various

Dexie replied, with flashing eyes, "and since you are going to be so disagreeable, Mr. McNeil, I guess I will leave you," and she joined a group near the table.
— from Miss Dexie A Romance of the Provinces by Stanford Eveleth