Then he broke into a loud laugh.
— from Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy

The space required for the road is first levelled, ditched, and drained, and then pieces of scantling, five or six inches square, are laid longitudinally on each side, at the proper distance for a road-way twelve feet wide, and with the ends of each piece sawn off diagonally, so as to rest on the end of the next piece, which is similarly prepared, to prevent the road from settling down unequally.
— from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire.
— from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Some fiew were a Shirt of Dressed Skins and long legins, & Mockersons Painted, which appears to be their winters dress, with a plat of twisted grass about their necks.
— from The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark

No one with any sense of self-respect will place himself on an equality in the matter of affection with those who are less lucky than himself in birth, health, money, good looks, capacity, or anything else.
— from Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler

Capped corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

Many a shock was Henry Adams to meet in the course of a long life passed chiefly near politics and politicians, but the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanently warp the mind.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

You'll leave me in sole custody of these Mounds till they're all laid low.
— from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

I found at Cassville many evidences of preparation for a grand battle, among them a long line of fresh intrenchments on the hill beyond the town, extending nearly three miles to the south, embracing the railroad-crossing.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. (William Tecumseh) Sherman

The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

“A little love would only have meant a little bitterness.
— from The Angel of Pain by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

Íyang gisahúan ug gamay nga putì ang lugum nga manikyur, She mixed a little light-colored nail polish into the dark polish.
— from A Dictionary of Cebuano Visayan by John U. Wolff

When he at length lost power to move his tail, the youth with the help of the ring took up a stone which twenty ordinary men could not have moved, and beat the Dragon so hard about the head with it that very soon the monster lay lifeless before him.
— from The Yellow Fairy Book by Andrew Lang

He could not understand why she should have lowered herself by declaring her love after all he had said regarding the constancy of his affection for his loved and lost Lily.
— from The Bride of the Tomb, and Queenie's Terrible Secret by Miller, Alex. McVeigh, Mrs.

The ball was twice as large as the one the men used on land; I should say a little larger than a baseball, but much lighter in weight.
— from Indian Scout Talks: A Guide for Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls by Charles Alexander Eastman

There may be two opinions about the other heroine, Madame de Rênal, Julien Sorel's first and last love, his victim in two senses and directly the cause of his death, though he was not directly the cause of hers.
— from A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century by George Saintsbury

There was a last, long, scratching slide.
— from More Jonathan Papers by Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris

"You've stood up and made a grand fight, Mr. Crewe," says another gentleman, a little later, with a bland, smooth shaven face and strong teeth to clinch Mr. Crewe's cigars.
— from Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill

The mathematicians might carry their calculations back as far as the fourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for the first time the standard measure of mechanical progress in western Europe; for not only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Dürer worked by mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to save trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration, or retardation, to the year 1400, with the help of Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a uniform rate during the whole four centuries (1400-1800), and leaving to statisticians the task of correcting it.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams