At first Miss Mills thought it was a quarrel, and that we were verging on the Desert of Sahara; but she soon found out how matters stood, for my dear affectionate little Dora, embracing her, began exclaiming that I was ‘a poor labourer’; and then cried for me, and embraced me, and asked me would I let her give me all her money to keep, and then fell on Miss Mills’s neck, sobbing as if her tender heart were broken.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and explosive force; his hands were immensely large, hairy, sun-burned, freckled, and very dirty, and garnished with long nails, in a very foul condition.
— from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

I spent a pleasant day with Yusuf, and when I left him, I ordered my janissary to take me to Ismail’s.
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova

I left him in bed, being very weary, to come to my house to-night or tomorrow, when he pleases, and so I home, calling on the virginall maker, buying a rest for myself to tune my tryangle, and taking one of his people along with me to put it in tune once more, by which I learned how to go about it myself for the time to come.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

“Nobody can find my external soul,” said one famous wizard, “it lies hidden far away in the stony mountains of Edzhigansk.”
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Let no one of the Israelites keep any poison 29 that may cause death, or any other harm; but if he be caught with it, let him be put to death, and suffer the very same mischief that he would have brought upon them for whom the poison was prepared.
— from Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus

With him to Whitehall, where I left him and went to Mr. Holmes to deliver him the horse of Dixwell’s that had staid there fourteen days at the Bell.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

The peace-loving major did not object to a piety which, while it left his own conscience free, imparted a respectable religious air to his household, and kept him from the equally distasteful approaches of the Puritanism of his neighbors, and was blissfully unconscious that he was strengthening the antagonistic foreign element in his family with an alien church.
— from A Sappho of Green Springs by Bret Harte

“But I promise you when I leave here I won’t come back.”
— from The Bigamist by F. E. Mills (Florence Ethel Mills) Young

I confess I am not very fond of the poplar tree with its pale lilac-colored trunk and its grayish-green, metallic leaves, which it lifts high and spreads in the air like a trembling fan—I do not like the constant shaking of its round, untidy leaves, which are so awkwardly attached to long stems.
— from The Rendezvous 1907 by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Talk has taken the place of action, which goes very much against the grain with men who are accustomed to marching orders, as I said to the Marshal when I left him.
— from Poor Relations by Honoré de Balzac

By those attended, who in life had loved, Had worshipped, following in his steps to Fame, ('Twas on an April-day, when Nature smiles,) All Rome was there.
— from Walks in Rome by Augustus J. C. (Augustus John Cuthbert) Hare

I shall not have any more use for music when I leave here.
— from The Hippodrome by Rachel Hayward

“An anecdote which, though only told by Mrs. Pilkington, is well attested, bears, that the last time he was in London he went to dine with the Earl of Burlington, who was but newly married.
— from Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges by William Makepeace Thackeray

Wady I left him, and afterwards he sent me a Koran from Jeddah, and later, on his return to Stamboul, he wrote to me, saying that he had spoken favourably of me to the Sultan, and afterwards I received a letter dictated by the Sultan to Sheykh Mohammed Dhaffar telling me what I know.
— from Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt Being a Personal Narrative of Events by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt