“Quite right; I should be sorry to hear you speak otherwise,” answered the tempter.
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

"Sidi-Nouman," he said, "do not think of me as the Caliph, but merely as a friend who would like to hear your story.
— from The Arabian Nights Entertainments by Andrew Lang

What's Satan done that him you should eschew?
— from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

Wouldn't have hurt a fly!' 'Ay, but I am afraid I shouldn't have beat you at all, unless I had meant to hurt you,' said Bella. '
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

And here we may remark with the historian, You should but give few cartridges to such Troops as are meant to march with greatest glory on: When matters must be carried by the touch Of the bright bayonet, and they all should hurry on, They sometimes, with a hankering for existence, Keep merely firing at a foolish distance.
— from Don Juan by Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron

“I should like to hear you say that I had done nothing but my duty, and that personally I have not done you any injury.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

I should be loath to have you suffer for me!
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

Now, said the generous man, will I, though reluctantly, make a proposal to my sweet girl.—If I have been too pressing for the day: If another day will still be more obliging: If you have fears you will not then have; you shall say but the word, and I'll submit.
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

Soon after the parish sexton came in for a gossip, so the father told him his troubles, and how that his younger son was such a simpleton that he knew nothing and could learn nothing.
— from Grimm's Fairy Stories by Wilhelm Grimm

"I am now about to hand you some of this wonderful discovery.
— from The Magic Pudding Being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and His Friends Bill Barnacle & Sam Sawnoff by Norman Lindsay

I cannot bear to hear you say such things, as though we were just trying him.”
— from David Fleming's Forgiveness by Margaret M. (Margaret Murray) Robertson

I don’t know when I’ve taken such a fancy to anybody–––” “You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that,” said Micky.
— from The Phantom Lover by Ruby M. (Ruby Mildred) Ayres

But Laura turned to her younger sister with enthusiasm.
— from All Aboard: A Story for Girls by Fannie E. (Fannie Ellsworth) Newberry

By climbing the rope that you will let down to me, of course, and then have you show me the same way out of the cavern that you take."
— from The Copper Princess: A Story of Lake Superior Mines by Kirk Munroe

Or–Stelling is a hospitable, pleasant man–he'd be glad to have you stay."
— from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth.
— from The Face of the Fields by Dallas Lore Sharp

Her short, ragged, scanty dress glowed like a chestnut-husk in the sunlight; in the hot yellow sunshine the tanned skin of her legs and feet gleamed ivory white.
— from Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers by William Sharp

It was, therefore, a hopeless attempt of Mr. Hitchcock’s (though he yet seems scarcely able to [36] understand how so much information got to the public), to keep his scheme to remove the Postoffice Department’s deficit by shunting the whole of it onto some twenty or thirty periodicals —it was, I say, a hopeless task for him to keep that scheme safely within the periphery of the corral where herded the “influenced” and the “influencing.”
— from Postal Riders and Raiders by W. H. Gantz