He didn't know what a vacuum would do to a subject of Levantman shock, but he had hopes, nor did he quite understand what a real estate dealer was, but it might have something to do with pottery.
— from The Marching Morons by C. M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth

Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands, which are renewed every day, occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream.
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald

It was all right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

She kept on hitting at it at last with fury and with all her strength, as if it were a real enemy deliberately trying to madden her; and it elegantly skimmed in and out of her blows, not even angry, to be back again the next instant.
— from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Then followed an endeavour on both sides to ascertain whether the inclination was a real earnest desire, or only fancy for the romance of mission work.
— from Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

Annie had been thinking fondly of it all day as a place of human well-being and geniality, free from continual sights and sounds of pain and sorrow, where everybody got up and sat down, went out and came in, worked and read, even dawdled and dreamt at will, subject to a few simple household rules.
— from A Houseful of Girls by Sarah Tytler

It was a regular “embarras de richesses.”
— from Nuts and Nutcrackers by Charles James Lever

It was a recent Earth discovery and invention.
— from Brigands of the Moon by Ray Cummings

Our struggle is with our environment, not with one another; and those [Pg 279] who talk as though struggle between the parts of the same organism must necessarily go on, and as though impulses which are redirected every day can never receive the particular redirection involved in abandoning the struggle between States, ignorantly adopt the formula of science, but leave half the facts out of consideration.
— from The Great Illusion A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage by Norman Angell

'Imagine, my dear Mr. Pleydell,' continued Lucy, 'how much Miss Mannering and I were alarmed when a ruffian, equally dreadful for his great strength and the sternness of his features, rushed out upon us!'
— from Guy Mannering, Or, the Astrologer — Complete by Walter Scott