Strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch

Oh, strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

And some men eased themselves like setting hens onto the nest of death.

History was secreted in the glands of a million historians. We must get out of this banged up century, some said, out of this cheating, murderous century of riot and secret death, of scrabbling for public lands and damn well getting them by any means at all.

J. Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952) 109

The only solution which at first seemed definitely excluded was the Bonapatist one

The only solution which at first seemed definitely excluded was the Bonapatist one. In 1871 the political and administrative personnel of the Second Empire had followed its predecessors into the increasingly overcrowded Valhalla of defunct regimes, whose memories filled the history books and whose ghosts haunted the French political scene.

A. Cobban, A History of Modern France Volume 3: 1871 - 1962 (1964), 11

You can't press your suit and another fellow's trousers simultaneously

If Catsmeat had been tied up with a lot of correspondence of this type [love letters], he wouldn't have had much time for attending to my wardrobe, of course. You can't press your suit and another fellow's trousers simultaneously

P.G. Wodehouse, The mating season (1949), 119

His brow was sicklied o'er

Yet now, as I say, he was low-spirited. It stuck out a mile. His brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and his air was that of a man who, if he had said 'Hallo, girls', would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that Gradpapa had hanged himself in the barn.

P.G. Wodehouse, The mating season (1949), 15

Mrs Elton was wanting notice, which nobody had inclination to pay

Emma doubted their getting on very well; for Mr Knightley seemed little disposed for conversation; Mrs Elton was wanting notice, which nobody had inclination to pay, and she was herself in a worry of spirits which would have made her prefer being silent

J. Austen, Emma (1816), 228