How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

According to the papers, the Japanese boycott is spreading, but the ones we see doubt if the people will hold out long enough—meanwhile Japanese money is refused here.
— from Letters from China and Japan by Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey

He was the first to bring to an end the quarrels between the two taverns, which had often led even to bloodshed, by leasing them both.
— from Pan Tadeusz Or, the Last Foray in Lithuania; a Story of Life Among Polish Gentlefolk in the Years 1811 and 1812 by Adam Mickiewicz

“This was the first time in her long life that she had ever uttered her husband’s name, for in India no woman, high or low, ever pronounces the name of her husband.”
— from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

I am afraid it would have been better, if we had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and forgotten it.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Having still some purchases to make, I returned on shore, with two of my friends, about four o’clock, but we had soon reason to repent of our temerity, for on passing the mole we were noticed as enemies and threatened severely, so that we found it necessary to pass into the more private streets, in order to avoid the malignant and hostile taunts of those very men who had of late expressed themselves our friends and well-wishers.
— from Travels in the interior of Brazil with notices on its climate, agriculture, commerce, population, mines, manners, and customs: and a particular account of the gold and diamond districts. by John Mawe

These agreeable anticipations, which had taken the place for the moment of the sterner purposes which had of late engrossed him, were only thrust out by something which happened just then and brought him abruptly to himself.
— from The Fifth of November A Romance of the Stuarts by Charles S. Bentley

[xix] the Glimmerglass will wait till another year brings round another spring-time—the spring-time that will surely come to all of us if only we hold on long enough.
— from Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals by William Davenport Hulbert

These, taking the place for the moment of the anxious calculations and stern purposes which had of late engrossed me, were only ousted by something which, happening under my eyes, brought me violently and abruptly to myself.
— from Historical Romances: Under the Red Robe, Count Hannibal, A Gentleman of France by Stanley John Weyman

But we men—the woman we have once loved, even after she rejects us, ever has some power over us, and your eloquence, which has so often roused me, cannot fail to impress a nature yet more excitable."
— from Ernest Maltravers — Volume 08 by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron

Perhaps the storm would hold off long enough to allow them to complete the conditions of the event.
— from The Airplane Boys among the Clouds Or, Young Aviators in a Wreck by John Luther Langworthy

This illumination, however, remained with him only long enough to impress itself upon his mind as a flash of lightning impresses itself upon the sight, and was instantly succeeded by a rush of most extraordinary and tumultuous emotion at the young queen’s extreme distress.
— from In Search of El Dorado by Harry Collingwood

He is not alone on the branch; beneath him, around him, on a level with him, other buds shoot forth, born of the same sap; but he must not forget, if he would comprehend his own being, that, along with himself, other lives exist in his vicinity, graduated up to him and issuing from the same trunk.
— from The Ancient Regime by Hippolyte Taine

I have sent that rascal up the road, with orders to feel the enemy; and I'll undertake he'll clink it back when he once lays eyes on them, as fast as four legs will carry him.
— from Horse-Shoe Robinson: A Tale of the Tory Ascendency by John Pendleton Kennedy