"There's my supper," thought he, "if only I can find some excuse to seize it."
— from Aesop's Fables by Aesop

He closed his eyes, more to please her than to rest his weary head; but, by slow degrees as he listened to the great noise of the wind, he ceased to hear it, or it changed into the working of his loom, or even into the voices of the day (his own included) saying what had been really said.
— from Hard Times by Charles Dickens

I said in my deepest voice, on purpose to have it out in comfort, when she should be frightened; 'what can you want with ten pounds, child?'
— from Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore

The present flight of steps inside the front door, together with the doors in the long sides of the hall immediately opposite, is comparatively modern.
— from Early Renaissance Architecture in England A Historical & Descriptive Account of the Tudor, Elizabethan, & Jacobean Periods, 1500-1625 by J. Alfred (John Alfred) Gotch

They saw that the excess of sickness and death among the troops had its origin in circumstances and conditions which they could control, and then they began to feel the responsibility resting upon them for the health and life of their soldiers.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 60, October, 1862 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

But when it came to handin' it over I could never get him.
— from Poison Island by Arthur Quiller-Couch

L LEWELLYN , at p. 81., makes mention of several, but of the only two upon which he ventures to fix a date, prior to Henry IV., one is "commonly ascribed," &c., and the other is "vulgarly called," &c., so that I place no reliance upon the truth of his deductions.
— from Notes and Queries, Vol. V, Number 121, February 21, 1852 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. by Various

'They ought to have the money,' he said to himself; 'if only I could contrive that it should be paid to them.'
— from John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope

For almost all natural landscapes are redundant treasures of more or less confused beauty, out of which the human instinct of invention can by just choice arrange, not a better treasure, but one more fitted to human sight and emotion, infinitely narrower, infinitely less lovely in detail, but having this great virtue, that there shall be absolutely nothing which does not contribute to the effect of the whole; whereas in the natural landscape there is a redundancy which impresses only as redundance, and often an occurrence of marring features; not of ugliness only, but of ugliness in the wrong place .
— from Modern Painters, Volume 4 (of 5) by John Ruskin

'Ah!' sighed Rogers to himself, 'if only I could be like that!'
— from A Prisoner in Fairyland (The Book That 'Uncle Paul' Wrote) by Algernon Blackwood

He was a kind-hearted lively fellow when young, but what he is now that he is old I cannot tell.
— from Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould