He asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter—" my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my own existence in Swann's mind; far more than that, of my existence in so complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter's playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connections, the place in which we lived, certain details of our past life, all of which I myself perhaps did not know.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

You are talking of Mrs. Erlynne, I suppose? I only met her six months ago.
— from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

The “old masters” (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there.
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

I therefore once more engaged in service shortly after my return, and continued for the most part in this situation until 1784.
— from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African Written By Himself by Olaudah Equiano

With the tail of my eye I saw that it was a Corona Corona.
— from The Brother of Daphne by Dornford Yates

But the old man, encased in senility, was ill to disturb; he was intent on nothing but the work before him; it was mechanical and soothing, and occupied his whole mind.
— from The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown

Nordman was a Scandinavian name, and hence it is I think that we have the name, which seems to occur more especially in Scotland and the Danish districts of England.
— from Surnames as a Science by Robert Ferguson

The spinster had so strongly and constantly impressed it upon him that it was a low and vulgar and wicked place, that the boy, growing vastly inquisitive in these years, was curious to find out what shape the wickedness took; and as he walked by, sometimes at dusk, when thoroughly infused with the last teachings of Miss Eliza, it seemed to him that he might possibly catch a glimpse of the hoofs of some devil (as he had seen devils pictured in an illustrated Milton) capering about the doorway,—and if he had seen them, truth compels us to say that he would have felt a strong inclination to follow them up, at a safe distance, in order to see what kind of creatures might be wearing them.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

Roy declares that his cousin approves heartily of our engagement—that he said many pleasant things of me, else I should fear that he had taken a dislike to me, from the beginning, that he thought Professor Fordham might and ought to have done better.
— from Jessamine: A Novel by Marion Harland

All in a flash I saw these things, and in that same flash I saw, taking shape and impulse, a groundswell of men, all wearing red buttons, rolling toward the stage, with the picked bad men of the city wards for its crest; and out of the tail of my eye I saw too, stealing out from the rear of the stage, a small, compact wedge of men wearing those same red buttons; and the prow of the wedge was Fighting Dave Dancy, the official bad man of a bad county, a man who packed a gun on each hip and carried a dirk knife down the back of his neck; a man who would shoot you at the drop of a hat and provide the hat himself—or at least so it was said of him.
— from The Escape of Mr. Trimm His Plight and other Plights by Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury) Cobb

Lyeskóff's "At the End of the World," a tale of missionary effort in Siberia, which is equally delightful in its way, though less great.
— from A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections by Isabel Florence Hapgood

Her story agreed with that of Marion, except in some embellishments, which serve to show how thoroughly untrustworthy were all such confessions, of which the sole object was to satisfy the merciless ministers of justice.
— from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III by Henry Charles Lea