I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.
— from Dracula by Bram Stoker

Balimbin is a fruit of an acid taste, agreeable when ripe, serving the same uses for food as the camia.
— from The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines by T. H. (Trinidad Hermenegildo) Pardo de Tavera

The mother looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother's complexion was pink, and the daughter's was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity, and the daughter for theology.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The only man in Norway who has stood up freely, frankly, and courageously for me is Björnson.
— from Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

This being so, nothing can secure us from falling away altogether from our ideas of duty, or maintain in the soul a well-grounded respect for its law, but the clear conviction that although there should never have been actions which really sprang from such pure sources, yet whether this or that takes place is not at all the question; but that reason of itself, independent on all experience, ordains what ought to take place, that accordingly actions of which perhaps the world has hitherto never given an example, the feasibility even of which might be very much doubted by one who founds everything on experience, are nevertheless inflexibly commanded by reason; that, e.g., even though there might never yet have been a sincere friend, yet not a whit the less is pure sincerity in friendship required of every man, because, prior to all experience, this duty is involved as duty in the idea of a reason determining the will by a priori principles.
— from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant

Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the clocks in the house before the tempest subsided or she unknowingly fell fast asleep.
— from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

But somehow all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant.
— from The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories by Logan Pearsall Smith

From the sharply defined edge of bank of clouds below, bands and streamers of white and pale green stretched upwards, flashing, flickering and changeable.
— from The Island of Yellow Sands: An Adventure and Mystery Story for Boys by Ethel C. (Ethel Claire) Brill

An ugly barrage of A.-A. shell-bursts separated us from friendly air, the discs of black smoke expanding as they hung in little clusters.
— from Cavalry of the Clouds by Alan Bott

There were other faces, not so usual; for far away, in a purposely chosen obscurity, May saw Weston Marchmont and the Dean of St. Neot's.
— from Quisanté by Anthony Hope

We are the sport of some malignant Power Who nails us to our crosses, hard and fast, Who sees us flutter for a little hour, Struggle and suffer ... and grow still at last; Who hears untouched the ceaseless, cosmic groan Wrung from his creatures' tortured lips alway; He will not hear or heed!
— from The Path of Dreams Poems by Leigh Gordon Giltner

He must set up, forsooth, for a molester of women,—the most silly, the most villanous, the most insane conduct in the world.
— from The Betrothed From the Italian of Alessandro Manzoni by Alessandro Manzoni

Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclippèd woodland, This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the scrubwood Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire’s fury rageing, So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened, Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field, Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were outstretched Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.
— from A Reading of Life, with Other Poems by George Meredith

This liberty is not the kind that raises us above the power of nature, and that sets us free from all bodily influence, but it is only the liberty which we enjoy as men, without issuing from the limits of nature.
— from Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller by Friedrich Schiller

“I don’t think that I will ever again complain of being shut up from friends and playmates because of this whooping-cough,” cried Lucius.
— from The Children's Tabernacle; Or, Hand-Work and Heart-Work by A. L. O. E.