I found that Père Silas (himself, I must repeat, not a bad man, though the advocate of a bad cause) had darkly stigmatized Protestants in general, and myself by inference, with strange names, had ascribed to us strange "isms;" Monsieur Emanuel revealed all this in his frank fashion, which knew not secretiveness, looking at me as he spoke with a kind, earnest fear, almost trembling lest there should be truth in the charges.
— from Villette by Charlotte Brontë

The seagulls and the loons and I had now all one trade: we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds.
— from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Yet, though the young woman came up for soup, she had never sold any of her dresses, and one of these even had a long train—a fact which Alyosha had learned from Rakitin, who always knew everything that was going on in the town.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The magistrate observed me with a keen eye and of course drew an unfavourable augury from my manner.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Such words as king, emperor, war, conquest, law, and revolution are easily put into their mouths; but when it is a question of attaching clear ideas to these words the explanations are very different from our talk with Robert the gardener.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The girls go out into a birch-wood, wind a girdle or band round a stately birch, twist its lower branches into a wreath, and kiss each other in pairs through the wreath.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

It’s always called so when a king escapes, f’rinstance.
— from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Thus strychnin, which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc.
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James

Whenever this powdered and courteous old man, who never missed a Sunday at the convent chapel at Hammersmith, and who was in all respects, thoughts, conduct, and bearing utterly unlike the bearded savages of his nation, who curse perfidious Albion, and scowl at you from over their cigars, in the Quadrant arcades at the present day—whenever the old Chevalier de Talonrouge spoke of Mistress Osborne, he would first finish his pinch of snuff, flick away the remaining particles of dust with a graceful wave of his hand, gather up his fingers again into a bunch, and, bringing them up to his mouth, blow them open with a kiss, exclaiming, Ah!
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

I thought of De Quincey's celebrated Essay upon "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," and of the field which a Korak encampment would afford to his "Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.
— from Tent Life in Siberia A New Account of an Old Undertaking; Adventures among the Koraks and Other Tribes In Kamchatka and Northern Asia by George Kennan

He was a spare and roughly clad man of thirty, unmarried, with a kindling eye, a handsome nose, and a ragged dark moustache; and when his head was bowed by the side of his harp, all the life of him seemed to run out into the lean and roughened fingers on the strings.
— from Mushroom Town by Oliver Onions

Unseen powers are crossing their meshes here around us,—and, what am I—Powers?—there's but one Power, and that— —"He careth for the little bird, Far in the lone wood's depths, and though dark weapons And keen eyes are out, it falleth not
— from The Bride of Fort Edward: Founded on an Incident of the Revolution by Delia Salter Bacon

Looking straight at Carleton, but with a kindly expression replacing the stern look on his face, he went on: “And when you came in, was Miss Van Norman just as we see her now?” “Practically,” said Carleton.
— from The Clue by Carolyn Wells

And finally, we have discussed our compositions and have obtained our result, just as the physicist gets his ultimate results by discussing work and kinetic energy and momentum.
— from The Science and Philosophy of the Organism by Hans Driesch

is that the way you treat ladies who are kind enough to nurse you, sir?
— from Castle Blair: A Story of Youthful Days by Flora L. (Flora Louisa) Shaw

Whatever subject was touched upon—-very cautiously, for the Baron mistrusted all subjects with Herr Dremmel—he instantly dragged it off the dangerous shoals of the immediate and close up to a cosmic height and distance, a height and distance so enormous that even what the Kaiser said last became a negligible tinkling and Conscience and Dogma quavered off into silence; and he explained to the Baron, who guardedly said "Perhaps," that though people's opinions might and did vary seen near, if one spread them out wide enough, pushed them back far enough, took them up high enough, bored them down deep enough, got them away from detail and loose from foregrounds, one would come at last to the great Mother Opinion of them all, in whose huge lap men curled themselves up contentedly like the happy identities they indeed were and went, after kissing each other, in placidest agreement to sleep.
— from The Pastor's Wife by Elizabeth Von Arnim