"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... left him under a hedge, and dragged himself another half-mile till he could get help. When he was brought into the hospital, he was so exhausted from pain and loss of blood that no one thought that he could live for more than a few hours, but by sheer pluck he had pulled through. Even now he was desperately ill with as horrible a wound as a man could have, but nothing was going to depress him. I am glad to say that what is known in surgery as a short circuit was an immediate success, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... less attentive to their pleading than to the inner voice, guarding herself by distance against too ardent a wooing, whilst she awaited ... Chapdelaine were not drawn to her by any charm of gracious speech, but by her sheer comeliness, and the transparent honest heart dwelling in her bosom; when they spoke to her of love she was true to herself, steadfast and serene, saying no word where none was needful to be said, and for this they loved her ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... answered with his little chuckle: "Of course! Don't you see that he gets everybody to do what he wants? It's almost sheer will, and he's ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... this kind it is often the custom to begin by making apologies. In my case I feel it to be a sheer necessity. In the first place what is here printed is for the greater part copied word for word from private letters that I wrote in very simple language in Dayak or Negrito huts, or in the lonely depths of tropical forests, in the far-off islands of the Southern Seas. I purposely ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... I struck him was a deep well-hole, and I was perched upon a log that spanned it ten or twelve feet above the water. The situation was all the more interesting because I saw no possible way to land my fish. I could not lead him ashore, and my frail tackle could not be trusted to lift him sheer from that pit to my precarious perch. What should I do? call for help? but no help was near. I had a revolver in my pocket and might have shot him through and through, but that novel proceeding did not occur to me until it was too late. I would have taken a Sam Patch leap into the water, ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... barely discernible outlines on the walls. Nor did any thought enter his mind of the exactness of the reflected color in the stereo cube. Hands clenched into aching fists, he stood leaning forward; striving by sheer will-power to span the void of space and force the scanner lens closer to the truncated pyramid of steps atop which, on a block of plain black stone, a dessicated mummy sat erect, hands folded in its reedy lap and on its head a ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... pasture without fear of raids, for there are no longer marauders near at hand to cross the river; the cry of the sentinels is heard no more in the night: 'Halt, thou that comest, thou that comest under a name which is not thine own—sheer off!' and men no longer exclaim on the following morning: 'Such or such a thing has been stolen;' but the towns fall once more into their usual daily routine, and he who works in the hope of the harvest, will nourish himself upon that which he ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... up so hot a fire on the first ship which had attacked us, that we had at length knocked away her main-topgallant mast and had done considerable damage to her rigging. To our great satisfaction we saw her sheer off ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... might call its infinitely fugacious quality, contrasts effectively with the deliberate, somewhat mannered beauty of the setting. Mr. MACKENZIE is an overlord of words, old and new, bending them to strange and unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for the matter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... and although we were spurred on to almost superhuman efforts by sheer desperation to thwart the fate we knew would be ours should we falter by the way, gradually our strength failed us, and although we tried to encourage each other to quicker progress, it took every vestige of our ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... unawares, Jack North did not allow his enemy to get very much the advantage of him. As the other rushed forward, expecting to overpower him by sheer force, he met him squarely in a hand-to-hand struggle for ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... opened her skinny jaws with a fearful gape, and uttering a shriek that made all the house yell, and every one within it to tremble, she fell back lifeless and rigid on the floor. The gentlemen both fled, out of sheer terror; but a woman never deserts her friends in extremity. The lady called her maids about her, had her old nurse conveyed to bed, where every means were used to restore animation. But, alas, life was extinct! The vital spark ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... from 1720 to 1742 by sheer corruption—there was no other way open to him. He laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[68] But he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. His ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... would have been invisible, for a hundred yards or so and came to the bed of a dry stream which issued from between two great rocks. Behind one of these rocks there opened out a grassy plot a few yards square, and beyond the grass a little lifted platform of rock against a sheer cliff. Here they camped, picketing their horses on the grass and cooking their supper upon the platform of rock over a tiny fire of dry twigs, for the wind was blowing down the canyon and they knew that they could cook ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... self-confident, and the round fur cap that he wore was cocked ever so slightly to one side. I did not want to see him, but I was caught. I fancied that he knew very well that I wanted to escape, and that now, for sheer perversity, he would see that I did not. Indeed, he caught my arm and drew me out of the Market. We passed into the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... ordered to perform the last offices towards a Samurai who died by hara-kiri. To slay his enemy against whom he has cause of hatred, and then to kill himself, is the part of a noble Samurai; and it is sheer nonsense to look upon the place where he has disembowelled himself as polluted. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, seventeen of the retainers of Asano Takumi no Kami performed hara-kiri in the garden ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... laugh," exclaimed Jacky, smiling up into his face. "Your arguments are so characteristic of you. I believe it is nothing but sheer indolence that makes you sit down night after night and hand over your dollars to that—that Lablache. How much have you lost to ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... not been equalled by any other nation. But the most atrocious part of the ceremony, as practised on some occasions, was that of the serving up of the body of victims at a repast, where they were eaten!—sheer cannibalism, which is vouched for as their practice ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... to drop his own work at their entrance and give attention to what took place. Half a dozen other officers, with little or no business to transact at that hour, made it their business to be present, drawn thither from sheer sympathy, as some declared, and downright curiosity, as owned by others. The office building was large and roomy; the colonel's desk was close to the door; beyond it were tables spread with maps, magazines, and papers; a big stove stood in the middle, and ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... many people, though they feel the tremendous significance of form, feel also a cautious dislike for big words; and "reality" is a very big one. These prefer to say that what the artist surprises behind form, or seizes by sheer force of imagination, is the all-pervading rhythm that informs all things; and I have said that I will never quarrel with that blessed ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... that as soon as they saw the enemy's crew fairly disembarked and dispersed along the shores of the Chersonesus (a practice, it should be mentioned, which had grown upon them from day to day owing to the distance at which eatables had to be purchased, and out of sheer contempt, no doubt, of Lysander, who refused to accept battle), they were to begin their return voyage, and when in mid-channel to hoist a shield. The orders were punctually carried out, and Lysander at once signalled to his ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... man to throw himself into the river from sheer love befo' marriage," said Solomon, "an' two weeks arter the woman had taken him, to fall out with her because she'd put too ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... but had to give it up. They got into the coffee, they stuck fast in the soft, melting butter, until at length, feverish, bitten, bleeding, and hungry, I sought refuge beneath the gauze curtains in my cabin, and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... owner was the supreme type of that sheer individualism which had burst forth from the restraints of feudalism. He stood alone fighting his commercial contests with persistent personal doggedness. Beneath his occasional benevolence and his religious professions was a wild ardor ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... the top storey—the eighth—and from it you had a view sheer to the ground. Twenty feet below ran a narrow cornice about a foot wide; three feet or so above the window another and wider cornice jutted out, and above that was the high steep roof of the hotel, though you could not see it from the window. As Racksole ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Rick knew the kind of stuff Steve meant, because he had once watched Zircon getting an electrocardiogram. The big scientist had fainted from sheer overwork, and possible heart complications were suspected. The technician squeezed the paste from a tube and applied it to wrists, ankles, and chest, under the metal terminals of the machine. Its purpose was to allow a ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags of chimneys, with a crevasse between them to which I can see no bottom. But a roadway is there. From an acute angle of the window a cornice overhangs a sheer fall of cliff. That is as near the ground as can be got from my outlook. Several superior peaks rise out of the wilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middle distance, where smoke dissolves ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Uncle walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer over Monte Calvano, and I felt the fruit against my face, the little ragged bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so well—'Niursi—sorbi!' No, no,—does not all Naples-bay and half Sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the Piedigrotta fete only ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... compelled to dismount; and the president, with the rest, performed the journey on foot, so hazardous, that, even in later times, it has been no uncommon thing for the sure-footed mule to be precipitated, with its cargo of silver, thousands of feet down the sheer sides of a precipice. *8 [Footnote 8: Cieza de ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... taken by Kenkenes when he discovered it. A wall built between it and the north would bar the sand and form a nook, wholly closed on two sides and partly closed at each end by stones. All this made itself plain to the mind of the young sculptor at once. With a laugh of sheer content, he turned to retrace his steps and began ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... garrison, was not proof against the seductive offers made him. Disregarding the remonstrances of his companions in arms, who pointed to the fact that the enemy had from day to day, through discouragement or from sheer exhaustion, relaxed their assaults, he consented (on the thirty-first of August) to surrender Bourges to the army that had so long thundered at its gates. D'Ivoy returned to Orleans, but Conde, accusing him of open perfidy, refused to see ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... and the bright tears sprang quickly into Virgie's blue eyes, as she thought of the nights she had wept herself to sleep from sheer homesickness and a feeling of utter desolation. "But," she continued more brightly, and winking rapidly to keep the tell-tale drops from falling. "I can bear loneliness, or almost anything else, for ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... gorge that gives the stars at noon-day clear— Up the pass that packs the scud beneath our wheel— Round the bluff that sinks her thousand fathom sheer— Down the valley with our guttering brakes asqueal: Where the trestle groans and quivers in the snow, Where the many-shedded levels loop and twine, So I lead my reckless children from below Till we sing the Song of ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... Kwasind made no answer, To their challenge made no answer, Only rose, and slowly turning, Seized the huge rock in his fingers, Tore it from its deep foundation, Poised it in the air a moment, Pitched it sheer into the river, Sheer into the swift Pauwating, Where it still is seen in Summer. Once as down that foaming river, Down the rapids of Pauwating, Kwasind sailed with his companions, In the stream he saw a beaver, Saw Ahmeek, the King of Beavers, Struggling with the rushing currents, Rising, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... we come to an awful yawning chasm in the earth, called La Creux Terrible. Its sides are so sheer that one shudders to approach its crumbling brink for fear a slip should mean a step into eternity. No man could fall here and live to tell the sensation. Standing near the brink one can just discern the bottom, and ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... to this is that the later Christian slavery represented a distinct retrogression, deliberately revived from motives of sheer cupidity, and accompanied by more revolting features than the slavery ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... had been captured in their rooms, and dragged by sheer force into the school-room, to be examined on the charges to be preferred against them. Poodles looked timid and terrified, while Pearl was ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... seized the poker. All the passion of her wild little nature was roused. She stole up behind him as he knelt before Tommy, and lifted the poker to strike. A pair of terrified blue eyes arrested her. Tommy forgot to cry, in sheer amazement at what she was about to do. Ashamed of herself, she threw the poker aside, and taking advantage of Mr. Stubbins's crouching position, she thrust him suddenly backward into the closet. The ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... sheer want of room, much has to be taken for granted which might readily enough be proved; and hence, while the adept, who can supply the missing links in the evidence from his own knowledge, discovers fresh proof of the singular ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... and Miss Duckworth did not happen to be looking. A sudden spirit of mischief seized her, and hastily stooping and catching up a handful of snow, she kneaded it quickly, and threw it at Mollie Simpson to attract her attention. It was done on the spur of the moment, in sheer fun. But, alas for Marjorie! her aim was not true, and instead of hitting Mollie her missile struck one of the soldiers. He chuckled with delight, and promptly responded. In a moment his companions were kneading snowballs and pelting the school. Now ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... wearisome. Nevertheless, the scenery was beautiful. The valley was green and level, and a meandering stream formed many little lakes. On one side was a steep hill of sage and aspens, and on the other a black, spear-pointed spruce forest, rising sheer to a bold, blunt peak patched with snow-banks, and bronze and gray in the clear light. Huge white clouds sailed aloft, making dark moving shadows along the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... she interrupted, "declares that only the eye of Omniscience can possibly distinguish between what passes for philanthropy and what is sheer egotism." ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... masters may decide. I harm no man, and no woman; but neither do I pause to weep over any man or any woman who flings himself or herself upon my steady spear. I try to be courteous and considerate to all; but I do not stop when some fellow who has something that belongs to me shouts "Rude!" at me to sheer ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... likely she is to slip into victory; the more she assumes, and the less she argues, the slighter the hold she gives her opponents. She is either perfectly good-humored or blankly innocent; she either smiles you into indulgence or wearies you into compliance by the sheer hopelessness of making any impression on her. She may, indeed, if of the very vociferous and shrill-tongued kind, burst out into such a noisy demonstration that you are glad to escape from her, no matter what spoils you leave on her hands; just as a mastiff will slink away from a bantam ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... to our evolutionists, because when he was a cod, a few milliards of years back, he chose the right side to begin lying down on, that his descendants in the thirty-millionth generation might get flat. His wife, from sheer perversity, lay down upon the other side, and this explains how some of their descendants pulled their eyes through their heads to one side, and some (though comparatively few) to the other. And the worst of it is that the fittest for the frying-pan did not survive this well-intended ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... dear, never mind," he coaxed, "you were really not responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,—whatever you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes for dinner at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... more and more divorced from society, and our personal interest in it fell away, the newspaper lost its charm. It lay sometimes untouched upon the table. Astraea relinquished it first; and although I dawdled over it every day out of sheer inanition, it only yielded me a sort of excuse for silence. Astraea saw that I used it as a refuge against a tete-a-tete after breakfast, and had the good sense to provide herself with other occupations, so that she should not seem to be deserted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Spider, his square jaws immobile from sheer astonishment. "Say, you ain't crazy, are ye—I mean you ain't dippy or cracked in the dome, are ye? Because d' Kid's goin' ten rounds with Young Alf, d' East Side ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... themselves, in the field of dispute. They, therefore, resort to false accusations; and, unable to find any thing upon which to put a false construction, they have, at last, thrown aside all attempts to discover the means of misrepresentation, and have had recourse to open, unblushing, to sheer invented falsehoods. That love of fair play, for which all orders of Englishmen in all ages have been so famed, finds no place in the bosoms of these degenerate men.—They enter the ring with seeming bravery, but being, round ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... soldiery. For this purpose, it will be well to look in at the encampment, with the eyes of some persons from the city who visited it on Sunday the 29th of June—the very day on which McClellan, from sheer lack of troops, abandoned the White House, necessarily destroying so much valuable property, losing for the time the last hope of the capture of Richmond, and falling back on the line of the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the dawn of 1893 the financial difficulties in which the New Tabernacle had been reared confronted us. It had arisen from the ashes of its predecessor by sheer force of energy and pluck. It had taken a vast amount of negotiation. A loan of $125,000, made to us by Russell Sage, payable in one year at 6 per cent., was one of the means employed. This loan was arranged by Mr. A.L. Soulard, the ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... have been fairly conjectured from the depth of water inside the Goodwins, down to the chalky bottom being nine or ten fathoms, while the depth close outside the Goodwins, where the outer edge of the sands is sheer and steep, is fifteen fathoms, deepening a mile and a half further off the Goodwins ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There he "carried some to heaven in holy raptures and led others to amend their lives," and as he leans over the pulpit with intense earnestness ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... surrounding a moss-grown pool, but they were quite unapproachable. One clump above we did manage to reach and bear away a few roots of, in triumph; but at one time there was only two inches of stone for the foot to rest on, with sheer rocks below; and consequently, without a rope, the experiment would hardly be worth repetition. However, without mishap we started on our return journey, and all went smoothly till the Villa Noailles was again reached; but at this point we suddenly noticed that ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... resting-place for the roof of a lower building, which, sloping outward, broke to the view the vast height unobscured otherwise save by a high and massy balustrade, composed of bronze, which, to the havenward, sunk sheer down ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... because the Anglicans would not keep them, so the Christians, not because they planned to, but because the synagogue was not large enough to hold them, had to leave the synagogue. They began building creeds; they had to. Every one of the first Christian creeds was written in sheer self-defense. If we had been Christians in those first centuries, when a powerful movement was under way called Gnosticism, which denied that God, the Father Almighty, had made both the heaven and the earth, which said that God had made heaven indeed but that a demigod had ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... In sheer desperation the entrapped youth attempted the task, but he had not bungled five minutes before Mr. Ludolph said, sharply, "Mr. Berder, you did ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... such a sovereign is a sheer impossibility. I agree with Hobbes, of two evils choose the least. A nation without superstition would be a nation of philosophers, and philosophers would never obey. The people will only be happy when they are crushed and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... must have misunderstood my theory of life. When a woman elects to marry, and does so from sheer love and regard for the man, she should certainly make her duty to him the first motive of all ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... generalization a priori is fully as common; which is properly called false theory; conclusions drawn, by way of deduction, from properties of some one agent which is known or supposed to be present, all other co-existing agents being overlooked. As the former is the error of sheer ignorance, so the latter is especially that of semi-instructed minds; and is mainly committed in attempting to explain complicated phenomena by a simpler theory than their nature admits of. As when one school of physicians sought for the universal principle of all disease in "lentor and morbid viscidity ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... of continuing in that difficult path, Nathan had fallen, out of sheer necessity, into the powder and patches of eighteenth-century vaudeville, costume plays, and the reproduction, scenically, of ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... over to see your neighbor?" The girl's clear eyes gave no hint that she knew—as she well did—the trouble between the houses, and the widow stared in sheer amazement, for mountaineers do not talk with strangers of the ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... she scarcely heed that he (to stay her steps) has dropped the cub in her path, but, casting at it a glance of recognition, bounds with a wilder howl after the robber, the incident is purely bestial, an exhibition of sheer brute fury, and as such repulsive and most unpoetical. But let her, instantly drawing her fiery eye from the robber, stop, and for the infuriated roar utter a growl of leonine tenderness over her recovered cub, and our ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... give Tenney the intimacy of that name, now she looked so sweetly calm. She started from her dream, glanced up at him and, to his renewed discomfort, broke into a little laugh. It was sheer amusement, loving raillery too, of him who could give her the priceless gift of a God made man and then ask her to forsake the arena where the beasts were harmless now because she no longer ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... I say, Mrs. Bilton, but listen. Listen now. I can't stand seeing those children in there. It sheer makes my gorge rise. I want you to fetch them in here—now don't talk—you and me'll do the confounded waiting—no, no, don't talk—they're to stay quiet in here till the last of those Germans have gone. Just go and fetch them, please Mrs. Bilton. No, no, we'll talk afterwards. I'll stay here ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... a sneak-thief;" "This is a pickpocket;" "This man has just been released from the State prison;" "This one is a gambler, stool-pigeon," etc., etc.; being guided in his judgments by certain indications which the criminal involuntarily displays by the sheer force of habit. ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... fights in all the horrid records of that war. Hurling his immense masses against the rapidly dwindling Confederate line; only to see them reel back shattered and broken—McClellan strove to crush his adversary by sheer strength. No sooner would one attacking column waver, break, retreat—leaving a writhing and ghastly wake behind it—than a fresh host would hurl against the adamantine line that sunk and shriveled under the resistless fire, but never wavered. In ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... of Section D. Below them yawned a huge pit with uneven walls sheer from top to bottom. Fronting them, on the river side, solid piles went down into an abyss that ended in black water; these were a barrier—a support to the wedge of earth that the mighty river pressed against their backs. From ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... precisely similar to that of the English officers. It was agreed that no attack was likely to be made by the ships, as they would almost certainly be sunk by the plunging fire of the battery as they came along the channel; while an assault by the boats would be sheer madness. ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... off, Master Bumppo, cried Benjamin, your top-light frightens the fish, who see the net and sheer off soundings. A fish knows as much as a horse, or, for that matter, more, seeing that its brought up on the water. Haul oil, Master Bumppo, haul off, I say, and give a ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... many older, sir," was the reply of the first lieutenant. "Jump in, Mr Keene." I did so, with my telescope in my hand. "Lower away, my lads—unhook, and sheer off;" and away went the frigate in pursuit of the pirate vessel, leaving me in the boat, to go on ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... fastenings were all giving way; the water on each side was lashed into foam by the tempest of flying bolts that she shed at every pulsation of the cargo. She was quietly wrecking herself without assistance from wind or wave, by the sheer internal ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... all night long with the bravest captains of his people was devising in his halls sheer treachery against the heroes, with fierce wrath in his heart at the issue of the hateful contest; nor did he deem at all that these things were being accomplished without the knowledge ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... and he laugh'd, and we roar'd a hurrah, and so The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe, With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below; For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen, And the little Revenge ran on thro' the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... lapsed into sheer anarchy. The barons on either side broke loose from all restraint. "They fought amongst themselves with deadly hatred; they spoiled the fairest lands with fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile of counties they destroyed almost all the provision of bread." All goods and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... squadrons to cut off his retreat. They formed their line several ships deep and when the hour of battle came, advanced directly at their best speed against the enemy, endeavoring to run down his vessels by sheer force, and never showing any acquaintance with or predilection for manoeuvres of a skilful antagonist, who avoided or successfully withstood this first onset, they were apt through their very numbers to be thrown into disorder: ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... sheer of the boat caused him to turn to the left, and then they whirled round an angle of the precipice, and found themselves in a reach of the river, between steep declivities, running at right angles ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the distance or the exact direction, and stopping occasionally to inquire the way, she plodded on, the exhaustion of hunger and weariness becoming more and more unendurable. All that she did now was done by the sheer force of will; but yield she would not. She would die cheerfully when she had attained her object, but not before. The winds became more wild and boisterous; they loosened and tossed her black hair about her wan face; they beat against her person and drove her back. Every step ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... said they was fighting all creation and hadn't time to argue. The next English frigate we escaped with no more than a shot in our quarter. Then we was chased two days and a night by a French privateer, firing between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men. That's how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... a school teacher of you." I don't know why he should have called me lazy; I suppose it must have been on account of my awkwardness. Lazy, why, I could sit all day and fish in one place and not get a bite, while my more industrious companions would, out of sheer exhaustion of patience, be compelled to move about; and I hold that patience is ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... it does not displease him. Lord Cedric says thou shalt talk to him the balance of his days." The maid shrunk further from him in sheer loathing. At the moment Janet entered, and the rough Scot turned upon her, and in a voice of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... you keep her memory so bright, that the picture never fades," said Christina gently, and Auntie Elspie kissed her for sheer gratitude. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... liberal as possible to secure their confidence ourselves. We are in St. Mary's paying the highest rate of wages in the island; 1s. 8d. currency per day nett, with allowances, are generally offered; I am giving here, from sheer necessity, 2s. 6d. currency per day, without charging any rent in the mean time. In the present state of things when so few estates are doing anything at all, I have much satisfaction in saying that the people here, on ——, a good proportion of them were at work last week, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... second angle was a large flat rock, jutting out northward, overlooking the deep valley from which the road ascended. The rock capped a high cliff; a stone dropped from its outer edge would have fallen sheer downward one thousand feet to the tops of the pines. The angle where the soldier lay was on another spur of the same cliff. Had he been awake he would have commanded a view, not only of the short arm of the road ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Dickie something that was nearly happiness. The very look of him had changed; he looked driven rather than harried, keen rather than harassed, eager instead of vague, hungry rather than wistful. Only, sometimes, Dickie's brain would suddenly turn blank and blind from sheer exhaustion. This happened to him now. The printed lines he was studying lost all their meaning. He put his forehead on his hands. Then he heard that eerie, light tapping above him on the skylight. But he was too ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... with the plan of Ulysses, and, as two birds happened to fly away on the right hand, he declared that the stratagem would certainly be lucky. Neoptolemus, on the other hand, voted for taking Troy, without any trick, by sheer hard fighting. Ulysses replied that if Achilles could not do that, it could not be done at all, and that Epeius, a famous carpenter, had better set about making the horse ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... end of the wedge, the broad end of which you never reached, but might infer. This gave momentum to everything he said. He was in the true sense what Chalmers used to call a "man of wecht." His mind acted by its sheer absolute power; it seldom made an effort; it was the hydraulic pressure, harmless, manageable, but irresistible; not the perilous compression of steam. Therefore it was that he was untroubled and calm, though rich; clear, though deep; though gentle, never dull; "strong without rage, without ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... to count up my theories, to count them and pile them up like money, in heaps, according to their value. Theories are such beautiful things, there must be some use in them. Or perhaps they are like money from a distant country, and not in currency here. Yet just as sheer metal, they must have some value.... It is wonderful that such happiness should come to me, and that it should last. I have the Sea and a Friend; there is nothing in the world I lack, and ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... and at last positive fear. But one thought possessed his mind, to win at any cost, by fair means or foul. His rushes, which had slackened, grew more violent. He came at Percy head down; he tried to crowd him into a corner, to throw his arms around him, to overpower him by sheer, brute strength. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... of thirty thousand dollars' worth of jewels. Her shoes, stockings, hats, and accessories in general were innumerable. Because of all this Cowperwood was rather proud of her. She had such a capacity for life. His first wife had been pale and rather anemic, while Aileen was fairly bursting with sheer physical vitality. She hummed and jested and primped and posed. There are some souls that just are, without previous revision or introspection. The earth with all its long past was a mere suggestion to Aileen, dimly visualized if at all. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... swinging the whip over Bengal's nose, the cruel lash cutting the tender snout with every blow. But he was not doing it from sheer cruelty, as many of the spectators who raised their voices ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... too deep for words, Rhoda obeyed the young chief's stern eyes. She clambered down the rough trail to a break in the canon wall, then, clinging with hands and feet, down the sheer side. The tall figure, beautiful in its perfect symmetry, stood immovable, the face never turning from her. Rhoda knew that she never was to forget this picture of him. At the foot of the canon ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... France for the past fifteen years had directed against the Lancastrian throne, its encouragement of every enemy without and of every traitor within. Henry may fairly have regarded such a ceaseless hostility, continued even through years of weakness, as forcing him in sheer self-defence to secure his realm against the weightier attack which might be looked for, should France ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... a wheen o' sunken rocks beyond the Head. No one that didn't know would ever think to keep out beyond them, for the cliff itself goes down sheer. He's a gallant soul yon; an' it's a sore pity he's goin' to his death. But it must be! God can save him if He wishes; ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... by the little I glean from the manner you sheer about in your discourse, I wish to know nothing. Do young men study law merely ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... and Jerry dived after him. He followed Paddy in at one of the three doorways under water and up a smooth hall right into the biggest, nicest bedroom Jerry had ever seen in all his life. He just gasped in sheer surprise. He couldn't do anything else. He couldn't find his tongue to say a word. Here he was in this splendid great room up above the water, and he had been so sure that there wasn't any room at all! He just didn't know what to ...
— The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver • Thornton W. Burgess
... hastily examined the ground and saw no way of getting him down except by the steep glacier gully. After scrambling to an outstanding point that commands a view of it from top to bottom, to make sure that it was not interrupted by sheer precipices, I concluded that with great care and the digging of slight footholds he could be slid down to the glacier, where I could lay him on his back and perhaps be able to set his arms. Accordingly, I cheered him up, telling him I had found a way, but that it would ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... of nature or of art, rocks, caves, or mountains, in ruined castles and abbeys, or ancient but still flourishing cathedrals, the same invariable love of pilfering and mutilating is to be found: some knock off a nose or a finger, others deface a frieze or a mullion from sheer love of havoc, others chip off some unmeaning fragment as a relique or object of curiosity; but the most general taste seems to be that of carving names or initials, and some of the ancient figures are completely ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... love, only a hope of ultimate heaven; how the ban is taken off him, and he wakes from the vision on the grey plain as Easter-morn is breaking: this, with its profound and convincing moral lessons, is told, without a didactic note, in poetry of sustained splendour. In sheer height of imagination Easter-Day could scarcely exceed the greatest parts of Christmas-Eve, but it preserves a level of more equable splendour, it is a work of art of more chastened workmanship. In its ethical aspect it is also of special ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... and practice her forte. Brilliancy in speech ever remained her only seriously attempted accomplishment. Clever of speech, from childhood, she had early learned to utilize this ability to attain any desired end. And talk she could, and talk she did, and as she grew older, by sheer talking she domineered every situation. It was her opinion when she married that at any time, with any listener, she could talk cleverly on any subject. As the years passed, during which she added little to her asset of knowledge, this art of fine speech gradually, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... left, and saw two of them toppling down. Then, like a flash, he turned to Lazarre, who was trying to fight off three of the Lodorians. Seizing one of them by the waist, Dirk hurled him backward and he disposed of another one in the same manner. His sheer desperation seemed to have given ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... "Oh, I meant sheer deliciousness," corrected her sister. "I 'fawncy'" - and she imitated the dainty tones used by Belle - "they have ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... sheer nonsense. Joy smiles in good earnest, and many an aching heart knows too well ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... nodded and held on the same course until abreast of the perch, which was only a forked stick. The men came aft and hauled in the mizzen sheer. Chambers put up the helm. The mizzen came across with a jerk, and the sheet was again allowed to run out. The jib came over with a report like the shot of a cannon, and at the ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... New Haven on June 12, and for forty-eight hours there was no disorder. German siege guns were placed on the sheer precipice of East Rock, ranged alongside the grey shaft of the Soldiers' Monument, dominating the city; machine-guns were set up at the four corners of the Green, at points surrounding the college buildings, and at other strategic points. Students ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... necessary matter, always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure to him." ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... magnificent brushwork in a Rubens or a Velasquez. Browne's 'brushwork' is certainly unequalled in English literature, except by the very greatest masters of sophisticated art, such as Pope and Shakespeare; it is the inspiration of sheer technique. Such expressions as: 'to subsist in bones and be but pyramidally extant'—'sad and sepulchral pitchers which have no joyful voices'—'predicament of chimaeras'—'the irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey |
