In uttering these words I looked up: he seemed to me a tall gentleman; but then I was very little; his features were large, and they and all the lines of his frame were equally harsh and prim.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

He then told me, mixing in his speech a few insolent compliments and ill-timed expressions of tenderness, to which I listened with perfect indifference, that my daughter had acquainted him with some circumstances concerning herself, Sir James, and me which had given him great uneasiness.
— from Lady Susan by Jane Austen

While I was hard at it comes Sir W. Pen to towne, which I little expected, having invited my Lady and her daughter Pegg to dine with me to-day; which at noon they did, and Sir W. Pen with them: and pretty merry we were.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise—pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others—and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

I heard all this the next day from the Marquis Capponi, who said that someone had asked him if he knew me, whereat he answered that when I left Venice he was at college, but that he had often heard his father speak of me in very high terms.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

For that nobody is well, or that nobody can be well, is in effect the same thing; and, in my opinion, that no man is truly wise, or that no 348 man can be truly wise, is likewise the same thing.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth by Marcus Tullius Cicero

In heaven may he always reign, For there's no sorrow, sin, nor pain: Unto the world I leave the rest, For to pronounce Lord Dexter blest.
— from A Pickle for the Knowing Ones by Timothy Dexter

I parted with the woman I loved—how could I condemn her to share my disgrace?
— from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Oracle said-- “Hermione is innocent, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.”
— from Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

He has written what is by general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion, and of the Union to which it led.
— from The Life of Froude by Herbert W. (Herbert Woodfield) Paul

Whence they derived such a sense of duty, unless immediately from God, I cannot tell; but it was wonderful to observe the expression of responsibility in their deportment, the anxious fidelity with which they discharged their unfit office, the tender patience with which they linked their less pliable impulses to the wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide them whithersoever it liked.
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863 A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics by Various

The old sailor did not speak for a minute or two; and then, after a sharp puff at his pipe, he told me the following story, of which I have but slightly altered the wording: I lived with mother at Tregannock.
— from Sturdy and Strong; Or, How George Andrews Made His Way by G. A. (George Alfred) Henty

To my two eldest sisters, one sister-in-law, and my devoted wife through whom I learned the desperate struggle and what it means to live clean.
— from Treading the Narrow Way by Robert Emmet Barrett

Now that he had seen his faithful Morar Gopal fall under the blows of some Mohammedans he felt that they were irretrievably lost.
— from The Coming Conquest of England by August Niemann

Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea, and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty!
— from The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol 1 (of 2) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Bare-armed, splashed to the neck, bare-headed, out-at-heels, she rinsed and pommelled, wrung and dipped again, laughed, chattered, flung her hair to the wind, her sweat to the water, in line with a dozen other women below the Ponte Navi; and if no one thought any the worse of her, none, unhappily, thought any the better—at least in the way of marriage.
— from Little Novels of Italy by Maurice Hewlett