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| Pastor Manders: Because when you were out of your senses, and came to me crying, 'Here I am, take me,' and I said, 'Woman, go home to your lawful husband' - was that a crime? Mrs Alving: I think so. [Henrik Ibsen (trans Peter Watts) ,Ghosts,1881,locate] |
| "O wind, blow Conrad's hat away, Make him run after as it flies, While I with my golden hair will play, And twist it up in seemly wise." [the Brothers Grimm (Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm) (trans Lucy Crane, illus Walter Crane) ,Household Stories: The Goose Girl,1882,locate] |
| Then the first human skull came to light, and after it many skeletons. The bones were identified as those of young girls--the many brides of the rain god Yum-Chac. [Robert Silverberg,Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations,1962,locate] |
| This has never happened to me before, with women or men. I have fallen in love like a flash, committing myself utterly to devotion. I have liked girls instantly, if they looked at me with pleasure instead of appraisal. With Kate, it was different. She looked at me without moving her head while her father was telling mine what a bad girl she was. Her eyes were pale and blue, unsuited to the Cleopatra make-up. She looked at me for a second as if I were the only familiar thing in that courtroom, then slid her eyes back and shut them, the lashes flickering. [Monica Dickens,Kate and Emma,1964,locate] |
| Laura Beauchamp rose. "Lieutenant, I must be blunt," she said. "This is a quiet, homey village. Our daughters have been gently reared. What will happen to these pure, innocent girls when the town is full of soldiers?" [Max Shulman,Rally Round the Flag, Boys!,1957,locate] |
| 'Oh, I read somewhere that you can always ask the police for a night's lodgings. So I did. They were very nice. They gave me a cup of tea, and one of them played draughts with me until it was time for him to go off duty. Then he took me home with him and his wife gave me another cup of tea and put me to bed. Really,' she said, 'outside schools, people are quite decent.' [Howard Spring,I Met a Lady,1961,locate] |
| Petruchio: O monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou- Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant; Or I shall so bemete thee with thy yard As thou shall think on prating whilst thou liv'st! I tell thee, I, that thou has marr'd her gown. [William Shakespeare,The Taming of the Shrew,1594,locate] |
| The butler, recognizing her ladyship's only surviving brother at a glance, as he afterwards informed his less percipient subordinates, favoured Sir Horace with a low bow, and took it upon himself to say that my lady, although not at home to less nearly-connected persons, would be happy to see him. [Georgette Heyer,The Grand Sophy,1950,locate] |
| How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race. [Thomas Dixon, Jr.,The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,1905,locate] |
| "He ran," the unicorn said. "You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention". [Peter S. Beagle,The Last Unicorn,1968,locate] |
| "Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex, by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art." "Undoubtedly," replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed, "there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable." Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to contine the subject. [Jane Austen,Pride and Prejudice,1813,locate] |
| "Hell, it's gone! It's gone! Look at it for Christ's sake!" Wheeling round the valley side Martin had seen the concrete face abruptly split and crumble under the weight of water. Gibson swung in close and was staggered. A ragged hole 100 yards across and 100 feet deep split the dam and the lake pouring out of it, 134 million tons of water crashing into the valley in a jet 200 feet long, smooth on top, foaming at the sides where it tore at the rough edges of the breach and boiling over the scarred earth where the power-house had been. [Paul Brickhill,The Dam Busters,1951] |
| Two good men who made fun and helped people. Valuable men. But somebody killed them. There has to be a reason. Everything is connected. So you have to look for something outside of them. Something evil that somehow both of them touched. [Tony Hillerman,Sacred Clowns,1993,locate] |
| In fact, the first corn-field sown with a single grain had prospered admirably, thanks to Pencroft's care. It had produced the ten ears foretold by the engineer, and each ear containing eighty grains, the colony found itself in possession of eight hundred grains, in six months, which promised a double harvest each year. [Jules Verne and (trans W. H. G. Kingston) ,The Mysterious Island,1875,locate] |
| They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie. [H.G. Wells,The Island of Doctor Moreau,1896,locate] |
| "Help! Help!" she called. "This way! Across the island!" And then the brown hand of her jailer closed over her mouth. Like a tigress she fought to free herself, or to detain her captor until the rescue party should catch up with them, but the scoundrel was muscled like a bull, and when the girl held back he lifted her across his shoulder and broke into a run. [Edgar Rice Burroughs,The Monster Men,1929,locate] |
| She gave me the impression, when we parted, of being a bit pensive, which I could well understand, and I wasn't feeling too unpensive myself. There's a touch of the superstitious in my make-up, and the way the Basset Ménage seemed to be rasing its ugly head, if you know what I mean, struck me as sinister. I had a ... what's the word? ... begins with a p ... pre- something ... presentiment, that's the baby ... I had a presentiment that I was being tipped off by my guardian angel that Totleigh Towers was trying to come back into my life and that I would be well advised to watch my step and keep an eye skinned. [P.G. Wodehouse,Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves,1963,locate] |
| He gestured, and cowled figures leapt forward. Until that moment their presence had somehow gone unnoticed by all. They wore long robes the ghostly gray of dense fog, the color of the House of Grizhni. Little of their faces could be seen beneath the deep hoods, but Verran caught a glimpse of thick fur and white fangs. Her husband's servants did not appear to be human, but what they might be was almost impossible to judge. [Paula Volsky,The Sorcerer's Lady,1986,locate] |
| What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibah's tone, at that moment, there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words, commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart. [Nathaniel Hawthorne,The House of the Seven Gables,1851,locate] |
| The voice went on and on, mild and deliberate, inflexibly gentle: the small girls listened intently, framing in their minds little pious sentences with which to surprise their parents, and the boy yawned against the whitewash. [Graham Greene,The Power and the Glory,1940,locate] |
| They clapped her. I listened in amazement to the tribute from the most cynical bunch in the world, and she came into the library with a real laugh in her eyes. I saw in a flash what her fame was all about: not just talent, not just courage, but style. [Dick Francis,The Danger,1983,locate] |
| "And--dammit, I don't want you to think I've been associating with the wrong class of women. I haven't. This is a nice girl, a sweet little thing, pure and fresh..." "What's the question?" Mason interrupted. "Mason, can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant?" [Erle Stanley Gardner,The Case of the Vagabond Virgin,1948,locate] |
| Ten years ago I would never have dreamed that someday I would be drinking a bottle of wine with my father confessor--but then, neither would I have dreamed that I would someday kill men and be decorated for it instead of being hanged--nevertheless, that is what happened. [Erich Maria Remarque,The Black Obelisk,1957,locate] |
| The carronades roared out, sweeping the Frenchman's quarterdeck with grape on top of the roundshot. Hornblower saw the officers there dashed to the deck like lead soldiers, saw rigging parting, and the big stern windows of the French ship disappear like a curtain jerked from its pole. [C.S. Forester,A Ship of the Line,1938,locate] |
| Very rarely, but now and then, a perfect corpse came down the river to the whirlpool. With all the unreliability of chance it slid around murderous rocks and avoided currents destined for sharp branches. As if it knew the river well and could navigate its course. [Jane Urquhart,The Whirlpool,1986,locate] |
| By then she had read enough and seen enough to recognize the symptoms of infatuation, but also to know that what she was experiencing was very far from the consuming passion of literature or poetry. She rather hoped that this would come her way eventually, since she had every intention of living a thoroughly robust and ample life, but she was in no hurry. Clearly, that particular eclipse of reason was a hazardous process and you needed to be in the peak of condition to cope with it. Love could wait. [Penelope Lively,Cleopatra's Sister,1993,locate] |
| Almost two hundred years passed between the arrival of the Spaniards to Western Mexico and the conquest of Gran Nayar in 1722. During this period of time indigenous people from the region incorporated many aspects of Catholicism into their religious system. This was a voluntary process, not led by missionaries and was a response to the need of having dieties for all the new tools and techniques that had been arriving from the old world since the 16th century. Up to this day the Gran Nayar still venerate Christ mainly as the creator of cattle, metal tools, and money. [ Placard in the Gran Nayar ethnology section of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City ,El Sincretisme Religioso,2001] |
| Akhenaten was an artist himself. He recited poetry, painted, and even tried his slender hand at carving stone. I will tell you a secret that few people know. He carved a sculpture of Nefertiti that was by all standards an ideal of beauty. It may still be in the abandoned palace, or in Nefertiti's palace, or perhaps it was destroyed with everything else. When the queen abandoned him unexpectedly, he took out the left eye of the sculpture to express his disappointment, but left the rest intact as a token of eternal love. [Naguib Mahfouz (trans Tagreid Abu-Hassabo) ,Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth,1985,locate] |
| "I wish you to pay attention to what I am going to say to you. The colts who live here are very good colts, but they are cart-horse colts, and of course they have not learned manners. You have been well-bred and well-born; your father has a great name in these parts, and your grandfather won the cup two years at the Newmarket races; your grandmother had the sweetest temper of any horse I ever knew, and I think you have never seen me kick or bite. I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play." [Anna Sewell,Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse,1877,locate] |
| He spent several hours in the area searching and questioning, walking slowly along the alleys and through the passages up and down stairways, deeper into the older part, unchanged in generations. Water dripped off rotting eaves, the streets were slimy, wood creaked, doors hung crooked but fast closed. People moved ahead of him and behind like shadows. One moment it would be strange, frightening and bitterly infectious, the next he thought he recognized somwthing. He would turn a corner and see exactly what he expected, a skyline or a crooked wall exactly as he had known it would be, a door with huge iron studs whose patter he could have traced with his eyes closed. [Anne Perry,The Silent Cry,1997,locate] |
| 'Have you a light?' 'A lighter...I never use matches....' The Chief Inspector's eye seemed to rest on three bits of greenish wood, burnt at the ends, lying in the hearth near the burnt paper. 'Of course!' he said. But there was no knowing to whom this comment was addressed. [Georges Simenon and (trans Margaret Marshall) ,Maigret Stonewalled,1931,locate] |
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