Freud, forgive me

    "The freud will see you now," said the nurse, and Mrs. Garvy tottered into his office.
    His traditional glasses and whiskers were reassuring. She choked out the ritual. "Freud, forgive me, for I have neuroses."
    He chanted the antiphonal, "Tut, my dear girl, what seems to be the trouble."

C. M. Kornbluth
"The Marching Morons" (1951)

The verb at the end comes

    I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1899)

"He was small and thin..."

He was small and thin, next door to a runt, but wiry-looking, and had black eyes and hair and a moustache which pointed due east and west. He looked and acted harassed, and as soon as he shook hands with me darted off elsewhere. His wife, in spite of her New York clothes and her 1938 hair-do, looked like one of those colored pictures in the National Geographic entitled "Peasant Woman of Wczibrrcy Leading a Bear to Church."

Rex Stout
Over My Dead Body (1939)

Ironing

   I looked for ironing, but there was none. When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don't need ironing.

Janet Evanovich
Three To Get Deadly (1997)

Not to put too fine a point on it...

   "A girl by the name of Eva Raymond. She's a lady of leisure."
   "Professional?"
   "Well, what you might call a gifted amateur with commercial tendencies."

Erle Stanley Gardner
The Case Of The Smoking Chimney (1943)

Weather matters

    And then, to add to Mr. Merrill's appeal, we pitied him for his family. His wife was from California, the sunny part. My grandmother used to speculate that she had been one of those permanently tanned, bouncy blondes -- a perfectly wholesome type, but entirely too easily persuaded that good health and boundless energy for good deeds were the natural results of clean living and practical values. No one had told her that health and energy and the Lord's work are harder to come by in bad weather. Mrs. Merrill suffered in New Hampshire.

John Irving
A Prayer For Owen Meany (1989)

Not to talk like

    Before the man had a chance to shut him out, Riley said, "May I come in?" He said it carefully, proud of his deep and strong voice, one which was only slightly tainted by his years in the South. He'd worked hard to keep the cracker out of his voice, feeling that he had had enough problems without the added weight of a redneck voice, but there were some things Riley did not know, and one of them was that, even though he no longer talked like a redneck, what he did talk like was a redneck straining hard not to talk like a redneck.

Gordon Eklund
"White Summer In Memphis" (1972?)

The consensus on smiling

"I have researched all the memoranda about smiling," General Toad said, riffling the pages stacked before him, "and the consensus at policy is that smiling is not in accord with national sentiment. So that issue must be ruled closed."

Philip K. Dick
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1974)

Intangibles

     "Probably we will take him on an inspection tour of the ship before it takes off and give him, absolutely free, a picture of himself standing in front of it, with the pilot's own signature signed across the bottom by some female clerk."
    "Chiseling from kids. Bah!"
     "Not at all," answered Montgomery, in hurt tones. "Intangibles are the most honest merchandise anyone can sell. They are always worth whatever you are willing to pay for them and they never wear out. You can take them to your grave untarnished."

Robert Heinlein
The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949)