Sir Walter Scott
- Ivanhoe
He had not the usual resource of bigots in that superstitious period, most of whom were wont to atone for the crimes they were guilty of by liberality to the church...
Sir Walter Scott
- Ivanhoe
Farewell! I envy not thy blood-won honours; I envy not thy barbarous descent from Northern heathens; I envy thee not thy faith, which is ever in thy mouth but never in thy heart or practice.
C.S. Lewis
- The Magician’s Nephew.
On the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of gray dust.
C.S. Lewis
- The Magician’s Nephew.
The wind that blew in their faces was cold, yet somehow stale. Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. It was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon the world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group.
Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned western kind. It was on a hill, about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board fence around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and weeds grew rank over the whole cemetery. All the old graves were sunken in. There was not a tombstone on the place; round-topped, worm eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.
H. Rider Haggard
- King Solomon’s Mines.
The lamp grew dimmer yet. Presently it flared up and showed the whole scene in strong relief, the great mass of white tusks, the boxes of gold, the corpse of poor Foulata stretched before them, the goat-skin full of treasure, the dim glimmer of the diamonds, and the wild, wan faces of us three white men seated there awaiting death by starvation. Suddenly the flame sank and expired.
H. Rider Haggard
- King Solomon’s Mines
There he sat, the dead man, whose directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot... there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there probably he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if ever such should come again to invade his loneliness.
Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the center of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak. There was not even a zephyr stirring; the dead noonday heat had even stilled the songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound.
