I was good friends with all three of them but best of all with Ellador, long before that feeling changed, for both of us.
— from Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The sea was each little bird's great playmate.
— from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The few shops that had been kept open were now hastily closed, there being Chinese who even left bolts of cloth outside, and not a few women lost their slippers in their flight through the streets.
— from The Reign of Greed by José Rizal

Other lightnings plunge their forked streaks in every direction, and take the form of globes of fire, which explode like bombshells over a beleaguered city.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Scholars have been influenced to adopt the anacrustic theory in its widest extent largely by the fact that in most modern music a measure must commence with a downward beat, a rule which did not hold in ancient music.
— from A Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges by George Martin Lane

If their frugality," he goes on, "were the effect of the nakedness of the land, only the poor would eat little; but everybody does so.
— from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have often been favoured with the confidence of these select natures, and find them to concur in the experience that great men are overestimated and small men are insupportable; that if you would love a woman without ever looking back on your love as a folly, she must die while you are courting her; and if you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

I shall name but a few of these things; but sure they were so many, and so many wizards and cunning people propagating them, that I have often wondered there was any (women especially) left behind.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

The girl was well enough looking, but neither I nor the officer cared much about her.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by the feelings within him.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

"No, he was of English parentage, one of the finest English country gentlemen who ever lived, but born in America, and one of the greatest American scouts.
— from The Boy Scouts of Bob's Hill A Sequel to 'The Bob's Hill Braves' by Charles Pierce Burton

He chose to have this deal with English life because the critics of his time considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting.
— from History of American Literature by Reuben Post Halleck

At this sport one bear seemed to be the better, and sometimes would land so hard a cuff on his comrade as to knock the latter rolling down the hill, in which case the aggrieved one, recovering himself, with ears laid back would run up [Pg 231] once more at his antagonist and resume the half-playful combat.
— from The Young Alaskans in the Rockies by Emerson Hough

The men on the right were not firing, but being raw troops they were edging little by little towards the firing, in which I do not doubt they longed to be, for the sake of the noise.
— from Martin Hyde, the Duke's Messenger by John Masefield

From the beginning of the month, he said, he had been studying the heavens every morning before daybreak, when the constellation of Perseus was at the zenith; Agalah was scarcely visible; Algol was even less bright; Mira-Cetus had disappeared entirely; from all of which he augured the death of some man of great importance, to occur that very night in Machaerus.
— from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert

This was the only intimacy that Rico had, for he had no pleasure in the companionship of the other boys; and when they thrashed each other, or played at wrestling, or turned somersaults, he went away without even looking back at them.
— from Rico and Wiseli by Johanna Spyri

The mother, after that age, abandons the boys to the care of the father, on whom they attend and wait as servants; and the daughters are instructed in the several works which it will ere long become their duty to fulfil.
— from Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years' Residence in South America (Vol 1 of 3) Containing travels in Arauco, Chile, Peru, and Colombia; with an account of the revolution, its rise, progress, and results by Stevenson, William Bennet, active 1803-1825

If the great mounds of Niffer be the remains of a Babylonian city, as they probably are, it is evident that that city must have been completely destroyed, and its ruins covered with earth long before a people, afterwards inhabiting the country, could have buried their dead above them.
— from Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon by Austen Henry Layard