"Drowsing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... degrees, till it settled into a measured, soothing murmur, like the breathing of some vast monster asleep. Condy's cigarette was a mere red point in the half-darkness. The smoke drifted out of the open window in long, blue strata. At his elbow Blix was leaning forward, looking down upon the darkening, drowsing city, her round, strong chin propped upon her hand. She was just close enough for Candy to catch the sweet, delicious feminine perfume that came indefinitely from her clothes, her hair, her neck. From where Condy sat he could see the silhouette of her head and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... powerful money-making agent. These men are the hand by which it keeps its hold on the world,—or the market, perhaps I should say. They are intelligent and able; honorable too, we are glad to know, for the sake of the quiet creatures drowsing away their little remnant of life, fat and contented, driving their ploughs through the fields, or smoking on the stoops of the village houses when evening comes. I wonder if they ever cast a furtive glance at the world and life from which Rapp's will so early shut them ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... becoming suddenly aware that it had gone, he rose from his knees and returned home mentally weary and sad at heart; but sitting on his bedside the remembrance that he was to meet Jesus in the morning at Capernaum called up the ghost of a departed ecstasy, and his head drowsing upon his pillow he fell asleep, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... meal, Presley once more mounted his bicycle, and leaving the restaurant and the Plaza behind him, held on through the main street of the drowsing town—the street that farther on developed into the road which turned abruptly northward and led onward through the hop-fields and the Quien Sabe ranch toward ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... on; and day followed day, until August came, and north—still farther north they went into the illimitable wilderness which reached out in the drowsing stillness of the Flying-up-Month—the month when newly fledged things take to their wings, and the deep ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... in spite of himself when a muffled boom suddenly answered him, jarring even the sunken walls of the room. Then he remembered that voice of the drowsing city, bursting out with the pent-up ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... first in the line at Morgan's right hand as he turned from the fire with the branding iron red-hot in his hand. Near the Dutchman stood Morgan's borrowed horse, drowsing in the sun with head down, its weight on three legs, one ear set in its inherited caution to catch the least alarm. From the first moment of his encounter with these scoundrels Morgan had not lowered himself to address them a single word. Such ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom. Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising the deafening uproar ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... silence for some time, Kessler intent on the evening flood of traffic, Margaret almost drowsing in the evening sunlight and the cool of the breeze in her hair. When Kessler pulled up at a drug ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... What about English wateringplaces? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... boys going to the University of Kansas, others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia manor houses, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... "high complectioned Leam," as Drayton calls it,—after drowsing across the principal street of the town beneath a handsome bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without any perceptible flow. Heretofore I had fancied the Concord the laziest river in the world, but now ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... loves thee, Idleness; For when his sheep are browsing, His open eyes enchant and bless A mind divinely drowsing; ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... to-day a swineherd drowsing in the sun, as yesterday you were a baby squalling in the cradle, but to-morrow you will be neither of these if there by any truth whatever in the talking of the Norns as they gossip at the foot of their ash-tree beside the door of the ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... found Sam's mother's white cat drowsing on a desk in the library, the which coincidence obviously inspired the experiment of ascertaining how successfully ink could be used in making a clean white cat look like a coach-dog. There was neither malice nor mischief in their idea; simply, a problem presented ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... a morass of sleep and tobacco. But while Sandy was ranging afield he lay on the edge of the basin drowsing and watching the valley, for he did not intend to be ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the wheel, covered the tired man with blankets from below, and went fishing in the lazaretto for something to eat. But by the day following he found himself forced to give in, drowsing fitfully by the wheel and waking ever and anon to take a look ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... of Absalom coughing a note of summons. Grandemont stirred. This time he had not been asleep—only drowsing. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... oblivion drowsing love and pain Into dull slumber; still we can retell How young blithe valour broke the powers of hell; We grope for hands that will not stir again In ours, hear still in every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... the Orchard of Palms by the mountains at set of sun left no sweet margin time of violet sky and drowsing earth between the day and night. The latter came early and swift; and against its glooming in the tent this evening the servants brought four candlesticks of brass, and set them by the corners of the table. To each candlestick there were four branches, and on each branch a lighted ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... why myself and all drowsing? What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters, Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol? What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!) Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President? ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... shut her eyes and seemed to be drowsing off, she opened them to say, this time with ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... troublesome within the fold; but he might also prove more dangerous without. Verily, it was a triumph for the cause of righteousness! And after the final disposition, the good Archbishop had sat far into the night in the comfort of his sanctum, drowsing over his pleasant meditations on the rewards which his unflagging devotion to the cause of Holy Church was sure some ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... cot, carefully out of his range of vision, her own gaze out across the drowsing countryside. A veil of haze was beginning to thicken, whole schools of crickets whirring ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... windy sunshine and the shadow of cloud Quicken the heavy summer to new birth Of life and motion on the drowsing earth; The huge elms stir, till all the air is loud With their awakening from the muffled sleep Of long hot days. And on the wavering line That marks the alternate ebb of shade and shine, Under the trees, a little group is deep In laughing talk. The shadow as it flows Across them ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... thwarts with tump-lines, and rigged the tarpaulins, used to cover the packs, into sails. Again the paddles were shipped, save those of the steersmen; and the crews lounged about, either smoking or drowsing. The men were weary. Last night they had danced both hard and long, with dusky maids—as all true voyageurs do on the eve of their departure. To voyageurs stern winds are blessings. Mile after mile the wild flotilla swept along. ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... caste—all save that—was hers when she stretched out her hand for it—hers by right of succession, of descent; hers by warrant unquestioned, by the unuttered text of the ukase to be launched, if necessary, by that very, very old lady, drowsing, enthroned, as the endless pageant wound like a jewelled river at ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... silence. They ceased to address me except with an occasional command. By reason of my youth, I was in bed and asleep before my companions arrived upstairs, and in the morning I was always routed up and packed about my business while they still were drowsing. But the fact that I had been cut off from my coevals by night, cut me off from them also by day—so that I was nothing to them, neither a boarder nor a day-scholar, neither flesh, fish nor fowl. The loneliness of my life was extreme, and that I always went home on Saturday afternoon and returned ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... came, and days of melting snow. But they served only to increase Bud's activities at the woodpile and in hunting small game close by, while Lovin Child took his nap and Cash was drowsing. Sometimes he would bundle the baby in an extra sweater and take him outside and let him wallow in the snow while Bud cut wood and piled it on the sheltered side of the cabin wall, a reserve supply to draw on ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... and made a show, at least, of manufacturing. It was somnolent (a slave town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep—that is to say, dead—and it was tranquilly content. Mark Twain remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,... the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along;... the dense forest away ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in a sea of emerald and opal, Down a dazzling gulf of dreams I sank and sank away, Wound about with twenty thousand yards of silken rope, all Shimmering into crimson, glimmering into grey, Drowsing, waking, living, dying, just as you regards it, Buried in a sunset-cloud, or cloud of breaking day, 'Cording as from East or West yourself might look towards it, Losing, gaining, lost in darkness, ragged, grimy, gay, 'And-cuffed, not to say Gagged, but ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... sat together and thought, rather than uttered, the memories of the past: they weighed me down, but they were precious freights. When I looked once more, and for the last time, upon the darling village drowsing in the sunshine, I felt that I had learned the burden of the hearth: Not length of days is given, but the sweetness and strength thereof: their memory shall live even though the dead be dust. Out of the loam of this corrupting body springs heavenward the invisible blossom of the soul. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... in its entirety lay there in full view, drowsing in the torrid heat of mid-September. Not a human being was in sight. Only a brindled dog slept in a small patch of shade beside the store; and fastened to the hotel hitching-rack, two burros, motionless save for twitching tails and ears, were almost hidden beneath stupendous ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... sickly refinement which abhors colour, but it suited her tall figure and her hale and exuberant good looks. As he came up the shaft the picture she made standing in the sunlight, with a background of sun-splashed, vari-coloured tips, and one drowsing gum-tree fringed with the gold and purple of young growth, gave him a thrill of joy, so vivid she seemed, so fresh. She had occupied his mind little since the departure from Diamond Gully; but seeing her again so radiant, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... his flowers Long since in golden showers. The elm has robed her height In green, and hangs maternal o'er the bright Starred meadows, and her full-contented breast Lifts and sinks to rest. Shades drowsing in the grass Beneath the hedge move but as the hours pass. Beech, oak and beam have all put beauty on In the eye of the sun. Because the hawthorn's sweet All the earth is sweet and the air, and the wind's feet. In the wood's ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... land. Immediately beneath them lay a broken shelf of ground shaped like a horseshoe, the sides of which were sheer cliffs, the gloomy base of which, many hundred feet below, were swept by the coldly gleaming, blue waters of the mighty Saskatchewan. Beyond that, drowsing in a pale blue haze, lay the broad valley, and beyond that again the vast purpling panorama of rolling prairie and black pinewoods until earth and sky were merged in indistinctness and became one. It resembled a perch on the side of the world, a huge eyrie with cliffs above and cliffs below, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... accepted by many; and rumor carried it far beyond the borders of the village, so that after a while the nobility heard of it, and the burghers in the walled towns where beautiful tapestries were always drowsing into wonderful life on looms that could weave dreams. The result was that it grew quite fashionable to journey to the tree to make a test of one's character, as people go to physicians to have their blood examined. In the bright summer evenings long processions could be seen winding like ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... the village, making one forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, I felt it less ominous. The scent of the flowers, the street lined in one place by arching giant fronds drowsing and nodding overhead—there seemed a strange exotic romance to it. The sultry air might ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the blazing torch, who had shown them the road regardless of all else—he sat there drowsing as though it meant nothing to him! Apparently he had broken down under his ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... I do but bear within my hand (For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken) A simple bugle such as may awaken With one high morning note a drowsing man: That wheresoe'er within my motherland That sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide Like pipes of battle calling up a clan, Trumpeting men through ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... or trouble that oppressed him, Mr. Wilkins seemed to lose all wish for much active exercise, and rather sought a stimulus to his spirits and circulation in wine. But of this Ellinor was innocently unaware. He seemed dull and weary, and sat long, drowsing and drinking after dinner. If the servants had not been so fond of him for much previous generosity and kindness, they would have complained now, and with reason, of his irritability, for all sorts of things seemed ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to want to know Sally myself." Bruce let his eyes go drowsing toward the pale river up which the slow rain was beating, and talked foolishness idly: "Red-cheeked Sally! Freckled Sally! Roly-poly Sally! What's a Missouri girl like ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... chair by the stove and drowsing after a while in a reactive sweep of exhaustion, awakened with a terrified jerk. A boy was banking the red-hot stove, his white face like ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... labor stirred her with new emotions; the early milkman with his cans, casual artisans with their tools, a grimy sweep, a work-girl with a paper lunch-package, an apprentice whistling. Great sleeping houses lined her path like gorged monsters drowsing voluptuously. The world she was leaving behind her grew alien and repulsive, her heart went out to the patient world of toil. What had she been doing all these years, amid her books and her music and her ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as a single drop from the cloudless heavens since their first impress on the sinking soil. Here and there along the right of way—a right no human being would care to dispute were the way ten times its width—some drowsing lizards, sprawling in the sunshine along the ties, roused at the sound and tremor of the coming train to squirm off into the sage-brush, but no sign of animation had been seen since the crossing of the big divide near Promontory. ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... a cold, damp current of air seemed to sweep around the curve of the bluff along with the rush of the river. As he climbed he came to a warmer wave of air, and the dusk closed softly around him, as if nature were casting a friendly curtain over the drowsing earth; and the roar of the river came up to him, no longer angrily, but in a ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the daytime would be apt to interfere with your night's rest. I want you all to have sufficient sleep in the twenty-four hours to keep you in health of body and mind, but should be very sorry to have you become sluggards,—so fond of your beds as to waste time in drowsing there, that should be spent in the exercise and training of body or mind. What have ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... of sister Adeline and the doll's hair, but she was glad to hear the brief tale told again in the pleasant drowsing afternoon. ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine, Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine. The morning planet poised above the sea Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid; Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity Shall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid, That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes, Cushion his knees, and ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... their play Then I would lead you further into land Where, with their ragged walls, the stately rocks Shunt in smooth courts and paved with quiet sand To silence dedicate. The sea-god's flocks Have rested here, and mortal eyes have seen By great adventure at the dead of noon A lonely nereid drowsing half a-swoon Buried beneath her dark and ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... later Four Bits pounded down the main street of Los Robles. Almost simultaneously Yeager brought the horse slithering to a halt and with one lithe swing of his body landed on the ground in front of the hotel porch. He ran up the steps and into the lobby. Behind his cage the night clerk was drowsing. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... dusty road, feeling strangely anxious for some adventures; adventures as heroic as his father often related before the fire on winter evenings. His mother might have thrown up her hands in despair had she seen the dreamy look in his large eyes. True, he was no longer drowsing on the settle, but as he swung along under the soft spring sky, he saw himself the hero of a hundred fantastic tales—the captain of a trading-vessel bound for the Indies; the commander of a company of daring youths of his own age, all ready to resist the Indians when they should seek ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... away, and she heard his hesitating step through the kitchen and on the stairs. Then, as if this had been as commonplace an interlude in her night as the baby's waking and drowsing off again, she felt herself surging happily ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the skin. Hillock, scrub that brushed against the horse's belly, unmetalled road where the whip-like foliage of the tamarisks lashed his forehead, illimitable levels of lowland furred with bent and speckled with drowsing cattle, waste, and hillock anew, dragged themselves past, and the skewbald was labouring in the deep sand of the Indus-ford. Tallantire was conscious of no distinct thought till the nose of the dawdling ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... tent; it stood at the entrance to the camp, where a path turned in from the road. In front, under the shade of an oak, were two or three splint-bottom chairs. And chained to the oak by a staple driven into the trunk, drowsing in the heat of the summer mid-afternoon, lay ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... kept drowsing, drowsing still, My fingers were awake; Yet why so little sound myself Unto ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... our own lives have been spent in a sheltered age. But in the past, epochs of disturbance have been commoner than epochs of calm. What is taking place to-day is horribly abnormal for those alone who were drowsing in the abnormal peace of a society equally devoid of foresight and of remembrance. Let us call to mind those whom the past has known. Let us think of Buddha, the liberator; of the Orphics worshipping Dionysos-Zagreus, god of the innocent who suffer ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... drowsing days of summer had come. Business was almost suspended; heat made energy impossible. Court was not in session, farmers were busy with crops. From early morning to late afternoon the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... could you let me waste time sleeping? I've not been really asleep—only drowsing. I knew I was sitting beside you all ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... wooden ploughshare lay forgotten; dark chasms scintillant with the treasures of the chemist, if not of the lapidary; outlooks that opened upon great seas of billowing forest, whence blue mountains peered up, sank and rose again like ocean monsters at play; glens where the she-bear suckled her drowsing cubs to the plash of yeasty waterfalls that leapt and whimpered to be in human service, but wherein the otter played all day unscared; crags where the eagle nested; defiles that echoed the howl of wolves unhunted, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... Devon, and such as befall have never brought me a moment's tedium. The long, wild winter of the north would try my spirits; but here, the season that follows autumn is merely one of rest, Nature's annual slumber. And I share in the restful influence. Often enough I pass an hour in mere drowsing by the fireside; frequently I let my book drop, satisfied to muse. But more often than not the winter day is blest with sunshine—the soft beam which is Nature's smile in dreaming. I go forth, and wander far. It pleases me to note changes ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... lips, and with the mark between his brows. Passion was having its way with him, such passion as had lived with him, now drowsing, now fiercely awake, in the days at Richmond between his return from Williamsburgh and the close of the trial. He saw Roselands and Jacqueline beneath the beech tree, but he also saw, and that with more distinctness, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... after tasks too closely plied, My Delia, drowsing near the harmless dame, All sweet surprise, will find me at her side, Unheralded, as if from ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus |
