“I should get a respectable locksmith, and set him to work to pick the lock for me.”
— from Dracula by Bram Stoker

By the beginning of the sixteenth century the administration of the Church throughout Europe had become so corrupt, the economic burden of the religious orders so great, and religious teaching and belief so material, that the best and noblest minds in all countries were agitating for reform.
— from A History of the Philippines by David P. Barrows

He was sometimes gloomy and reserved, and there was an unnatural wildness in his eye which gave indications of incipient madness.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

Father, ’tis thus: yourself and all the world That talk’d of her have talk’d amiss of her: If she be curst, it is for policy, For she’s not froward, but modest as the dove; She is not hot, but temperate as the morn; For patience she will prove a second Grissel, And Roman Lucrece for her chastity; And to conclude, we have ’greed so well together That upon Sunday is the wedding-day.
— from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

The faint glimpses of consciousness that visited his brain, lighted up such an abyss of horrors, such gloomy and revolting pictures, that it would have been better for him not to have returned to consciousness.
— from Short Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Whether she gives a return feast or not," Pao-yü rejoined with an apathetic smirk, "is no concern of mine!"
— from Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel, Book I by Xueqin Cao

"Say, Bill, on the dead, you're sure generous, all right, all right.
— from Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World by Clifton R. (Clifton Rodman) Wooldridge

His steward Gaveston, a rogue, who has taken away the only son of the Count in the child's earliest days, brings the castle with all its acres to public sale, hoping to gain it for himself.
— from The Standard Operaglass Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas by Annesley, Charles, pseud.

She sent these letters, but not more than once in six months did she get a reply, and she had not had one in a whole year.
— from The Right of Way — Complete by Gilbert Parker

Selene was always busy in the house before any one, even before the slaves; and the approach of day this time seemed to the sleepless girl a real release.
— from The Emperor — Volume 03 by Georg Ebers

Thus then—Thou, dear Frank , shalt to my Uncle, tell him, that Sir Nicholas Gett-all , as he knows, being dead, and having left, as he knows too, one only Daughter his whole Executrix, Mrs. Charlot , I have by my civil and modest Behaviour, so won upon her Heart, that two Nights since she left her Father’s Country-house at Lusum in Kent , in spite of all her strict Guards, and run away with me.
— from The Works of Aphra Behn, Volume II by Aphra Behn

he asked, to which she gave a response in the affirmative.
— from The Minister of Evil: The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia by William Le Queux