The country was then experiencing what he would later call "a sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines."
— from Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson

I found out where Lieutenant Charpentier was, took two officers with me, and arrested him.
— from A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

In the courtyard the first objects that met Vronsky’s eyes were a band of singers in white linen coats, standing near a barrel of vodka, and the robust, good-humored figure of the colonel surrounded by officers.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

But even the Shakers emigrated from England; our country is not unknown to Mr. Joseph Smith, the apostle of Mormonism, or to his benighted disciples; I have beheld religious scenes myself in some of our populous towns which can hardly be surpassed by an American camp-meeting; and I am not aware that any instance of superstitious imposture on the one hand, and superstitious credulity on the other, has had its origin in the United States, which we cannot more than parallel by the precedents of Mrs. Southcote, Mary Tofts the rabbit-breeder, or even Mr. Thorn of Canterbury: which latter case arose, some time after the dark ages had passed away.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens

Lord Shelburne, influenced probably by the example and the traditionary precepts of his eminent father-in-law, appears early to have held himself aloof from the patrician connection, and entered public life as the follower of Bute in the first great effort of George the Third to rescue the sovereignty from what Lord Chatham called “the Great Revolution families.”
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless in the light as they would fain hide themselves.
— from The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore

"Your Cousin Will 'll come with you," said the father.
— from The Rainbow by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Utterly worn out by the walk but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least idea.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas.
— from A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens

"Watching and praying and fasting alone, there has been given me some little gift of prophecy, my son; now and then it comes, but never with light cause.
— from A Thane of Wessex Being a Story of the Great Viking Raids into Somerset by Charles W. (Charles Watts) Whistler

We trust we shall not be deemed discourteous, either, on the one hand, to those who value themselves on their powers of reflection, or, on the other, to those who lay claim to what, in modern phrenological jargon, is called the Organ of Locality, when we venture to surmise that the two are rarely found in combination; nay, that it seems to us a very evident truism, that in proportion to the general activity of the intellect upon subjects of pith and weight, the mind will be indifferent to those minute external objects by which a less contemplative understanding will note, and map out, and impress upon the memory, the chart of the road its owner has once taken.
— from The Last of the Barons — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

Adultery, inhuman cruelty to wife; lying, charged by wife in divorce suit.
— from Crimes of Preachers in the United States and Canada by M. E. Billings

There were more pretty girls with long canes, from which flew ribbons of yellow and maroon—Randall’s colors.
— from A Quarter-Back's Pluck: A Story of College Football by Lester Chadwick

When you see a black or dark-brown beetle running swiftly from under some stone or log whirls you have just turned over and which makes faces with its jaws as though it would chew your fingers when you pick it up, you can be quite sure in eight times out of ten that it is one of these carabidæ or predaceous ground beetles, and if you let it drop from your fingers you may be saving the life of a friend, because some day it may eat the worm which, lying close to some pet flower of yours, had planned to cut it off beneath the ground.
— from Book of Monsters Portraits and Biographies of a Few of the Inhabitants of Woodland and Meadow by Marian Fairchild

Are the wild lands cursed perchance of time, or blest, Sad with fear or glad with comfort of the sea?
— from A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne