She waited intently to catch his eye.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Plutarch's lives of great commanders furnish convincing instances of the fact: the soldiers were in the constant habit of freely addressing their general, and the general listened to and answered whatever the soldiers had to say: they were kept in order by language and by example, far more than by constraint or punishment; the general was as much their companion as their chief.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

The next moment the old sailor rose, muttering, and, followed by his subordinate negroes, removed to the forward part of the ship, where in the crowd he disappeared.
— from The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville

‘Mrs. Squeers intended to say ‘foundling,’ but, as she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence; with which axiom of philosophy, indeed, she was in the constant habit of consoling the boys when they laboured under more than ordinary ill-usage.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

In the general conversation which followed, I remember taking a large map of the United States, and assuming the people of the whole South to be in rebellion, that our task was to subdue them, showed that McClellan was on the left, having a frontage of less than a hundred miles, and Fremont the right, about the same; whereas I, the centre, had from the Big Sandy to Paducah, over three hundred miles of frontier; that McClellan had a hundred thousand men, Fremont sixty thousand, whereas to me had only been allotted about eighteen thousand.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

Statements were made by Plato and Porphyry singly, which if they could have seen their way to hold in common, they might possibly have become Christians.
— from The City of God, Volume II by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo

At last we all parted, but within a quarter of an hour after they were gone, and my wife and I were talking about buying of a fine scallop which is brought her this morning by a woman to be sold, which is to cost her 45s., in comes the German back again, all in a goare of blood, which I wondered at, and tells me that he is afeard that the Captain is killed by the watermen at Towre Stayres; so I presently went thither, and found that upon some rude pressing of the watermen to ply the Captain, he struck one of them with his cane, which they would not take, but struck him again, and then the German drew his sword and ran at one of them, but they were both soundly beaten.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

But all her energies rallied the instant she saw Becky smiling roguishly under a pink bonnet, and giving her a glance of scorn such as would have shrivelled up most women, she walked into the Custom House quite unsupported.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

This Dog wore a collar of gold, and sat on a throne, but, for all his wisdom and power, seems to have been a dog still; for when some wolves invaded the cattle, he attacked and was torn to pieces by them.
— from Demonology and Devil-lore by Moncure Daniel Conway

It was midwinter, and he was obliged to be at home; so, with intent to cheer her up and take her mind off the blues, he said to her, “Would you like to see me make some butterflies?”
— from Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Faries by Yuk Yi

Although she had been guilty of such a quixotic action as to rescue a man, a vagabond, who obviously was flying from the police, so soon as she was in the car her interest in him had seemed to cease.
— from Violet Forster's Lover by Richard Marsh

But she was indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world.
— from Diana of the Crossways — Complete by George Meredith

When, having regained some of her senses, Violet Champion found herself in the street, she was inclined to call herself hard names for having gone near the court at all.
— from Miss Arnott's Marriage by Richard Marsh

She was in great excitement when she was invited to come here; in great triumph when she returned.
— from The First Violin A Novel by Jessie Fothergill

D’Effiat, without losing countenance, asked his pardon, and said, that being thirsty, and knowing there was some water in the cupboard, he could not resist drinking.
— from Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency — Complete by Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de

John of Salisbury would, in that case, have followed his lectures in the cloistral school in 1136, and would have remained faithful to the abbey, following Abélard’s successor, a Master Alberic, when Abélard was, for some unknown reason, constrained to move his chair to the chapel of St. Hilary, also on the slope of St. Genevieve.
— from Peter Abélard by Joseph McCabe

The tall apartment houses which had begun to creep in even before she left the city, the electric cars now dashing through Charles street, were innovations that cut her to the heart.
— from Miss Theodora: A West End Story by Helen Leah Reed

So many were killed that had the white men so wished it they could have fallen upon the survivors and exterminated them; but such was not their intention.
— from The Nameless Island: A Story of Some Modern Robinson Crusoes by Percy F. (Percy Francis) Westerman

The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,—when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that vantage ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to history,—to som
— from The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 by Charles Lamb