A low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason, curdled everyone’s blood like the knocking in Macbeth.
— from The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

" "I ask you, then, what you mean by this liberty?" "Just the liberty to go, to come, to see, to observe even all that passes here save under rare circumstances—the liberty, in short, which we enjoy ourselves, my companions and I." It was evident that we did not understand one another.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne

After various ineffectual pullings and twitchings, just as the senator is losing all patience, the carriage suddenly rights itself with a bounce,—two front wheels go down into another abyss, and senator, woman, and child, all tumble promiscuously on to the front seat,—senator’s hat is jammed over his eyes and nose quite unceremoniously, and he considers himself fairly extinguished;—child cries, and Cudjoe on the outside delivers animated addresses to the horses, who are kicking, and floundering, and straining under repeated cracks of the whip.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The factory was cleansed, but the Shpigulins, for some unknown reason, closed it.
— from The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu Horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris auris; In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum Omnibus humanis esset, terraque marique.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

He surveyed the enormous beast with surprise, with disgust, and possibly with terror; and smiled at the vain industry of the Romans, who, in search of such useless rarities, could explore the limits of the land and sea.
— 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

Clearness and simplicity thus set up rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James

The sun shone, and the distant hills were visible, some through sunny mists, others in gloom with patches of sunshine; the lake was lost under the low and distant hills, and the islands lost in the lake, which was all in motion with travelling fields of light, or dark shadows under rainy clouds.
— from Dorothy Wordsworth: The Story of a Sister's Love by Edmund Lee

For the construction of the word involves not 4 yoke of oxen, but 4 oxen yoked abreast, as are the horses in the caruca so often seen upon Roman coins.
— from The English Village Community Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition) by Frederic Seebohm

For some unknown reason, Cetywayo, who was blown up with pride, was at first adverse to being thus nominated, and came down to the royal kraal with three thousand armed followers, meaning, it would see, to kill Mr. Shepstone, whom he had never before met.
— from Cetywayo and his White Neighbours Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

As the author of the previous volume quoted, so Urbanus Regius compares the exclamation of the Jews against our Lord: “What new learning is this?” with the objection, “What is this new doctrine?” made by the Catholics against the novel religious teaching of Luther and his followers.
— from The Eve of the Reformation Studies in the Religious Life and Thought of the English people in the Period Preceding the Rejection of the Roman jurisdiction by Henry VIII by Francis Aidan Gasquet

Several rare and useful books, the Assises de Jerusalem, Ramusius de Bello Constantinopolitano, the Greek Acts of the Synod of Florence, the Statuta Urbis Romae, &c. were procured, and introduced in their proper places the supplements which they afforded.
— from Memoirs of My Life and Writings by Edward Gibbon

The principal Chief, Montsoia, is an old ally and staunch friend of the English, a fact which the Boers were not able to forget or forgive, and they appear to have stirred up rival Chiefs to attack him, and to have allowed volunteers from the Transvaal to assist them.
— from Cetywayo and his White Neighbours Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

While the genetic engineering that creates the gynandri is contrary to Imperial law, the reason was because the Arriani wanted to retain the closest approximation they could manage to natural reproduction, so until research can provide a way for women to live on Arrian, the engineering of gynandri is excepted.
— from Concordance: A Terran Empire concordance by Ann Wilson

A snarling, unintelligible reply came back.
— from The Galleon's Gold; or, Frank Reade, Jr.'s Deep Sea Search. by Luis Senarens

And still more, the power of phrasing and shading music with feeling depends equally upon the training of the nerve-centres, upon the co-ordination of the muscular system, upon rapid communication between brain and limbs—in a word, upon the health of the whole organism; and it is by trying to discover the individual cause of each musical defect, and to find a means of correcting it, that I have gradually built up my method of eurhythmics.
— from The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze