Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:29

Excerpt #1, from An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde

…we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike. You dislike me. I am quite aware of that. And I have always detested you. And yet I have come here to do you a service. LADY CHILTERN. [Contemptuously.] Like the service you wished to render my husband last night, I suppose. Thank heaven, I saved him from that. MRS. CHEVELEY. [Starting to her feet.] It was you who made him write that insolent letter to me? It was you who made him break his promise? LADY CHILTERN. Yes. MRS. CHEVELEY. Then you must make him keep it. I give you till to-morrow morning—no more. If by that time your husband does not solemnly bind himself to help me in this great scheme in which I am interested— LADY CHILTERN. This fraudulent speculation— MRS. CHEVELEY. Call it what you choose. I hold your husband in the hollow of my hand, and if you are wise you will make him do what I tell him. LADY CHILTERN. [Rising and going towards her.] You are impertinent. What has my husband to do with you? With a woman like you? MRS. CHEVELEY [With a bitter laugh.] In this world like meets with like. It is because your husband is himself fraudulent and dishonest…

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Excerpt #2, from David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

…I needed but the sound of his voice to be so madly enraged as I never was before, and never have been since. ‘You villain,’ said I, ‘what do you mean by entrapping me into your schemes? How dare you appeal to me just now, you false rascal, as if we had been in discussion together?’ As we stood, front to front, I saw so plainly, in the stealthy exultation of his face, what I already so plainly knew; I mean that he forced his confidence upon me, expressly to make me miserable, and had set a deliberate trap for me in this very matter; that I couldn’t bear it. The whole of his lank cheek was invitingly before me, and I struck it with my open hand with that force that my fingers tingled as if I had burnt them. He caught the hand in his, and we stood in that connexion, looking at each other. We stood so, a long time; long enough for me to see the white marks of my fingers die out of the deep red of his cheek, and leave it a deeper red. ‘Copperfield,’ he said at length, in a breathless voice, ‘have you taken leave of your senses?’ ‘I have taken leave of you,’ said I, wresting my hand away. ‘You dog, I’ll know no more of you.’ ‘Won’t you?’ said he, constrained by the pain of his cheek to put his…

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Excerpt #3, from On War, by Carl von Clausewitz

…sufficiently decisive character to be used as the foundation of a practical method; therefore, nothing but the whole of the relations in each individual case can decide. Only so much we may add, that favourable conditions are naturally more common in wide spheres of action than in small; more common, also, on the side of independent states than on that of weak ones, dependent on foreign aid, and whose armies must, therefore, constantly have their attention bent on the point of junction with the auxiliary army; lastly, they become most favorable for the defender towards the close of the campaign, when the impulsive force of the assailant is somewhat spent; very much, again, in the same manner as in the case of the lines of communication. Such a flank position as the Russians took up with such advantage on the road from Moscow to Kaluga, when Buonaparte’s aggressive force was spent, would have brought them into a scrape at the commencement of the campaign at the camp of Drissa, if they had not been wise enough to change their plan in good time. The other method of turning the enemy, and cutting off his retreat by dividing our force, entails the risk attending a division of our own force, whilst the enemy, having the advantage of interior lines, retains his forces united, and therefore has the power of acting with…

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Excerpt #4, from Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, by Arthur Conan Doyle

…who handed him a stoppered glass bottle and a cloth bag which contained something which clinked when you moved it. Johnson thrust the bottle into his pocket, seized the green bag, and pressing his hat firmly down ran as hard as he could set foot to ground until he was in the City Road and saw the name of Pritchard engraved in white upon a red ground. He bounded in triumph up the three steps which led to the door, and as he did so there was a crash behind him. His precious bottle was in fragments upon the pavement. For a moment he felt as if it were his wife’s body that was lying there. But the run had freshened his wits and he saw that the mischief might be repaired. He pulled vigorously at the night-bell. “Well, what’s the matter?” asked a gruff voice at his elbow. He started back and looked up at the windows, but there was no sign of life. He was approaching the bell again with the intention of pulling it, when a perfect roar burst from the wall. “I can’t stand shivering here all night,” cried the voice. “Say who you are and what you want or I shut the tube.” Then for the first time Johnson saw that the end of a speaking-tube hung out of the wall just above the bell. He shouted up it,– “I want you to come with me to meet Dr. Miles at a confinement at once.” “How far?” shrieked the irascible voice….

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Excerpt #5, from Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, by John Wesley Powell

…and one also upon each succeeding day until four baths, as a ceremony of purification, have been indulged in. On the evening of the day before the meeting his preceptor visits him at his own wig´iwam when, with the assistance of friends, the presents are collected and carried to the Midē´-wigân and suspended from the transverse poles near the roof. The officiating priests may subsequently join him, when smoking and singing form the chief entertainment of the evening. By this time numerous visitors have gathered together and are encamped throughout the adjacent timber, and the sound of the drum, where dancing is going on, may be heard far into the night. Early on the morning of the day of the ceremonies the candidate goes to the sudatory where he first awaits the coming of his preceptor and later the arrival of the Midē´ priests by whom he is escorted to the Midē´wigân. With the assistance of the preceptor he arranges his gift of tobacco which he takes with him to the sacred inclosure, after which a smoke offering is made, and later Midē´ songs are chanted. These may be of his own composition as he has been a professor of magic a sufficient lapse of time to have composed them, but to give evidence of superior powers the chief, or some other of the officiating priests, will perhaps be sufficiently inspired to sing. The following was prepared and chanted by one of the Midē´ priests at the third-degree meeting at White Earth,…

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Excerpt #6, from The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

…grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse. This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master. Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it. And he saw further. He never forgot a kindly greeting or a cheering word, and to sit down for a long talk with them (“gas” he called it) was as much his delight as theirs. He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his…

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Excerpt #7, from Essays of a Biologist, by Julian Huxley

…direction in which he desires to go coincides with the resultant, the main direction of organic evolution. There are no ideals, there is no purpose, in fish or ant or tree: but man’s ideals and purposes are the outcome of the blind interplay of forces in which fish and ant and tree play their unwitting rôles. True again that further analysis shows that the methods of evolutionary progress are often crude, wasteful, and slow: that some of our values are unreal or artificial: but this does not destroy the main fact, and only means that each side can here learn something from the other. The main fact abides–that progress is an evolutionary reality, and that an analysis of the modes of biological progress may often help us in our quest for human progress. The next great problem on which biology has something to say to sociology is that eternal one of the relation between individual and community. As it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist for the State, or the State for the individual? In all non-human biological aggregates–cell-colonies, second-grade aggregates or metazoan organisms, third-grade aggregates like Siphonophora and insect communities–the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its biological efficiency and success, depend upon a permanent division of labour between its members, upon their thoroughgoing specialization….

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Excerpt #8, from The Pursuit of the House Boat, by John Kendrick Bangs

…[Picture: Kidd’s companions endeavouring to restore evaporating portions of his anatomy with a steam-atomizer] X A WARNING ACCEPTED “IT is with no desire to interrupt my friend Cassandra unnecessarily,” said Mrs. Noah, as the prophetess was about to narrate her story, “that I rise to beg her to remember that, as an ancestress of Captain Kidd, I hope she will spare a grandmother’s feelings, if anything in the story she is about to tell is improper to be placed before the young. I have been so shocked by the stories of perfidy and baseness generally that have been published of late years, that I would interpose a protest while there is yet time if there is a line in Cassandra’s story which ought to be withheld from the public; a protest based upon my affection for posterity, and in the interests of morality everywhere.” “You may rest easy upon that score, my dear Mrs. Noah,” said the prophetess. “What I have to say would commend itself, I am sure, even to the ears of a British matron; and while it is as complete a demonstration of man’s perfidy as ever was, it is none the less as harmless a little tale as the Dottie Dimple books or any other more recent study of New England character.” “Thank you for the load your words have lifted from my mind,” said Mrs….

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Excerpt #9, from The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle

…Watson,” said he; “but I have never seen a place to compare with it.” “I never saw a Devonshire man who did not swear by his county,” I remarked. “It depends upon the breed of men quite as much as on the county,” said Dr. Mortimer. “A glance at our friend here reveals the rounded head of the Celt, which carries inside it the Celtic enthusiasm and power of attachment. Poor Sir Charles’s head was of a very rare type, half Gaelic, half Ivernian in its characteristics. But you were very young when you last saw Baskerville Hall, were you not?” “I was a boy in my teens at the time of my father’s death and had never seen the Hall, for he lived in a little cottage on the South Coast. Thence I went straight to a friend in America. I tell you it is all as new to me as it is to Dr. Watson, and I’m as keen as possible to see the moor.” “Are you? Then your wish is easily granted, for there is your first sight of the moor,” said Dr. Mortimer, pointing out of the carriage window. Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a…

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Excerpt #10, from Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War, by Charles L. Graves

…[Illustration: PERFECT INNOCENCE CONSTABLE WOODROW WILSON: “That’s a very mischievous thing to do.” SWEDEN: “Please, sir, I didn’t know it was loaded.”] In Russia the Provisional Government has been dissolved and a Republic proclaimed. If eloquence can save the situation, Mr. Kerensky is the man to do it; but so far the men of few words have gone farthest in the war. A “History of the Russian Revolution” has already been published. The pen may not be mightier than the sword to-day, but it manages to keep ahead of it. With fresh enemy battalions, as well as batteries, constantly arriving from Russia, the Italians have been hard pressed; but their great assault on San Gabriele has saved the Bainsizza plateau. The Italian success has been remarkable, but the Russian collapse has prevented it from being pushed home. On the Western front no great events are recorded, but the mills of death grind on with ever-increasing assistance from the resources of applied science and the new art of camouflage. Yet the dominion of din and death and discomfort is still unable to impair our soldiers’ capacity of extracting amusement from trivialities. [Illustration: TRIALS OF A CAMOUFLAGE OFFICER SERGEANT-MAJOR: “Beg pardon, sir, I was to ask if you’d step up to the battery, sir.” CAMOUFLAGE OFFICER: “What’s the matter?”…

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Excerpt #11, from Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne

…had quickly pushed them aside, when the whole scene suddenly changed. A cry of terror arose. The whole multitude prostrated themselves, terror-stricken, on the ground. The old rajah was not dead, then, since he rose of a sudden, like a spectre, took up his wife in his arms, and descended from the pyre in the midst of the clouds of smoke, which only heightened his ghostly appearance. Fakirs and soldiers and priests, seized with instant terror, lay there, with their faces on the ground, not daring to lift their eyes and behold such a prodigy. The inanimate victim was borne along by the vigorous arms which supported her, and which she did not seem in the least to burden. Mr. Fogg and Sir Francis stood erect, the Parsee bowed his head, and Passepartout was, no doubt, scarcely less stupefied. The resuscitated rajah approached Sir Francis and Mr. Fogg, and, in an abrupt tone, said, “Let us be off!” It was Passepartout himself, who had slipped upon the pyre in the midst of the smoke and, profiting by the still overhanging darkness, had delivered the young woman from death! It was Passepartout who, playing his part with a happy audacity, had passed through the crowd amid the general terror….

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Excerpt #12, from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories, by Chekhov, by Chekhov

…flickered. It was cold. I felt that my sister would come in in a minute, and bring me supper, but at once I remembered that she was ill and was lying at Radish’s, and it seemed to me strange that I should have climbed over the fence and be lying here in this unheated shed. My mind was in a maze, and I saw all sorts of absurd things. There was a ring. A ring familiar from childhood: first the wire rustled against the wall, then a short plaintive ring in the kitchen. It was my father come back from the club. I got up and went into the kitchen. Axinya the cook clasped her hands on seeing me, and for some reason burst into tears. “My own!” she said softly. “My precious! O Lord!” And she began crumpling up her apron in her agitation. In the window there were standing jars of berries in vodka. I poured myself out a teacupful and greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us as children into the kitchen, and put us in the mood for hearing fairy tales and playing at “Kings” . . . “Where’s Kleopatra?” Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her breath; "and where is your cap, my dear? Your wife, you say, has gone to…

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