And you are a much pleasanter creature, in every point of view, than I. You are perfectly pleasant; I am imperfectly pleasant; then, if I never allude to an unpleasant matter, how much less should you!
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Finally he came over to me and said: "Are you a physician, Professor Aronnax?"
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit.
— from Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville

He might be dreaming some golden dream of youth and pleasure; perhaps he was far away in the world of fancy, seeing scenes, and feeling delights, which cold reality never can bestow.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

And so I think Solon wrote the lines quoted above 'in his hot youth,' as Plato puts it; but when he became older wrote these other lines, 'Now I delight in Cyprus-born Aphrodite, and in Dionysus, and in the Muses: all these give joys to men': as if, after the heat and tempest of his boyish loves, he had got into a quiet haven of marriage and philosophy.
— from Plutarch's Morals by Plutarch

"You are prospering, please the Powers?"
— from Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The book attributed to Longinus will not have missed xxv its mark if it reminds us that, in literature at least, for conscience there is yet a place, possibly even a reward, though that is unessential.
— from On the Sublime by active 1st century Longinus

However, don’t let me disturb your meditation; you are possibly planning some pastoral dialogue.”
— from Evelina, Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney

Edward will come with you, and pray, Put on with speed your woodland dress, And bring no book, for this one day We'll give to idleness.
— from Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) by William Wordsworth

“But where is the use of going on,” I asked, “when you are probably preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain to fetter your heart?”
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

It was between five and six when he came to the iron gates of The Spaniards, and the sun was setting behind the hills yonder above Penmorval, poor deserted Penmorval, where the pictured faces looked out upon empty floors, and where the housekeeper sighed as she went from room to room, attending to fires that warmed desolate hearths.
— from Wyllard's Weird: A Novel by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

" You are pale, Peggie," said Prue, looking fixedly at her.
— from The Imprudence of Prue by Sophie Fisher

"'I say, neighbor,' rejoins Mr. Sam Blowaway, a leader of the national Young American party, 'pears how, if your old chap over there attempts that game, he'll get himself boots deep into a scrape he'll not find it so easy to claw out on.'
— from The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth by Timothy Templeton

The works of Cornelius are the products of a civilised yet artistically poor period.
— from The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century by Richard Muther

Nearly every one will tell you how healthy the people are; yet a prominent physician admitted that there was a great deal of fever, and that he feared there would be more as the country became more populous.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, July 1883 by Chautauqua Institution

“Didn’t you adore ‘Peter Pan’?” and a thousand other questions.
— from Polly's First Year at Boarding School by Dorothy Whitehill

“What is this make-believe feebleness? That you are pale, poltroon, I do not wonder!
— from Bardelys the Magnificent Being an account of the strange wooing pursued by the Sieur Marcel de Saint-Pol, marquis of Bardelys... by Rafael Sabatini

Whether the original trees would yield a pure progeny if fertilized by their own pollen has as yet not been tested.
— from Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation by Hugo de Vries