It happening that nobody did, he remarked with a mysterious air that he had heard a medical gentleman as went down to Grantham last week, say how that snuff-taking was bad for the eyes; but for his part he had never found it so, and what he said was, that everybody should speak as they found.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

When we entered the little, unpretending church, the evening sunlight streamed through the open door on the burning lamp, and glittered on the golden picture frames.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen

Those enterprising spirits, so dangerous and so much admired, all those great ministers, whose glory is inseparable from the miseries of the people, are no longer regretted: public morality supplies what is wanting in the genius of the rulers; and the more virtue reigns, the less need there is for talent.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Thou art still the God of our black fathers and in Thy Soul's Soul sit some soft darkenings of the evening, some shadowings of the velvet night.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

As they sat down to eat, Roxy said to her father: "I don't hardly know, Poppy—She's a-sleepin' yit—been a-sleepin' like that ever sence she laid down thar.
— from The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage by Alice MacGowan

The εὐφήμει of the Greeks, and favete linguis , or bona verba quæso , of the Romans, evince the care with which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any word expressive or suggestive of ill fortune; not from notions of delicate politeness, to which their general mode of conduct and feeling had very little reference, but from bona fide alarm lest the event so suggested to the imagination should in fact occur.
— from A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive by John Stuart Mill

Judy was first to break the silence: “I took notice neighbor Tom brung you-all a right smart bunch of letter mail this evenin',” she said, curiously.
— from The Re-Creation of Brian Kent by Harold Bell Wright

Right glad were all they to hear the Emperor speak so honourably, and above all Gastiles and the Marquis because they should see the Endriago.
— from Amadis of Gaul, Vol. 3 of 4. by Vasco de Lobeira

It is interesting to thread the intricate narrative of intermarriages, treaties, wars, alliances, and successions, interspersed with deeds of heroic chivalry and of blackest treachery, composing the annals of the different northern states of Spain; until at length, the Christian domination having been borne onward by successive advantages nearly to the extreme southern shores of the Peninsula, a marriage unites the two principal kingdoms, and leads to the subjection of all Spain, as at present, under one monarch.
— from The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain Described in a series of letters, with illustrations representing Moorish palaces, cathedrals, and other monuments of art, contained in the cities of Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo, and Seville. by Nathaniel Armstrong Wells

They indicate, I think, another struggle of nature to expel a foreign and death-breeding substance out of the American body politic; they are each the protest of the self-preserving instincts against keeping the negro with us to counteract our progress, to debase our politics, to corrupt our blood, to injure us more than even successful secession could have done.
— from The Brothers' War by John C. (John Calvin) Reed