"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... begins. Each boat has her own special course to travel up, and her own special berth of safety, and she knows every jag that will gore her on the road, and every flint from which she will strike fire. By dint of sheer sturdiness of arms, legs, and lungs, keeping true time with the pant and the shout, steadily goes it with hoist and haul, and cheerily undulates the melody of call that rallies them all with a strong will together, until the steep bluff and the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... face half seen beneath his cowl, Intoned the quarter. Memory went not back When this was not a most familiar sound, Yet as each stroke on the dead silence fell Wyndham turned, startled. Now the sanguine moon, To clouded opal changing momently, Rose sheer above the pine-trees' ragged edge, And through the wide-flung casement reaching hand With cold and spectral finger touched the plates Of his dead father's armor till it gleamed One mass of silver. There it stood complete, That august panoply which once struck dread To foemen on the sunny plains ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... had been found by the natives of a Pacific island, comes into the story, being the person who found one of the ship's company who had been lost overboard in heavy weather. The latter had made his way ashore by sheer grit and determination (being a Sandwich Islander). They realise Harry is originally an English boy, and take him on board, and away from his savage masters who had been ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... boat she began rapidly to descend the 300 feet of cliff which separated her from the cove below. The path began in easy zig-zags, which, however, got gradually steeper, and the last thirty feet of the descent consisted of a sheer face of rock, in which were fixed two or three iron stanchions with a rope running from one to the other to serve as a handrail; and the climber must depend for other assistance on the natural irregularities of the rock, which provided here and there ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... salvation—nothing more natural, if such a method is indispensable; for no effort, no trouble, ought to be spared for so exalted an aim. But if the only point is the establishment of one opinion in the place of another, then the travelling expenses of even one single Infallible are sheer waste. If you want to spare the two most valuable things on earth, time and money, make all haste to write to Rome, in order to procure thence a lawful decision which shall declare the unlawful doubt. Nothing more is needed; policy asks ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic "admonition;" you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;—yes indeed, the ship's crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship's crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if the tack they unanimously ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... for the proffered coffee, then she thought better of it, and, much to Zephyr's surprise, again let loose the fountains of her tears. Zephyr glanced upward with a cocking eye, then down the steep pass to where the broken line of rock dropped sheer into Rainbow Gulch where lay ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... man without a tongue, my hunger gone from sheer happiness—and fright. And yet eating the breakfast with a relish because she had made it. She busied herself about the room, dusting here and tidying there, and anon throwing a glance at me to see if I needed anything. My eyes followed her hither ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Sheer audacity is at times the surest steed a man can bestride. Now at least it did me good service. With oaths and grunts of admiration the pirates stayed where they were, and went about their business of launching the boats and stripping the body of Red Gil, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... herself was Madelon Hautville, in a sheer white gown, which she had fashioned for herself out of an old crape shawl which had belonged to her mother, and cunningly wrought with great garlands of red flowers. She was going to Burr Gordon's wedding, not ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... discouraged now, were we to weaken and slack off, the whole structure we have built, these past eight years, would come apart and fall away. Never then, no matter by what stringent means, could our free world regain the ground, the time, the sheer momentum, lost by such a move. There can and should be changes and improvements in our programs, to meet new situations, serve new needs. But to desert the spirit of our basic policies, to step back from them now, would surely start ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... considerable numbers. A small fleet of gunboats from Mobile and New Orleans was ordered to move along the coast and intercept any fugitives, "white, red, or black." Upwards of two thousand friendly Indians joined the land expedition, and the invasion became from a military standpoint a sheer farce. The Seminoles were utterly unprepared for war, and their villages were taken possession of, one by one, without opposition. At St. Marks the Indians fled precipitately, and the little Spanish garrison, after a glimpse of the investing force, asked only that receipts ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... his head with a look of apprehension). The devil is a sly rogue. Their worships might perhaps desire my company a little longer than I should wish; and, for sheer farce sake, I may ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... exclusively upon the knowledge of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of the slightest inborn or acquired art of love, out of religious resignation or sheer stupidity. But that attitude is now becoming less common. As we have seen in the previous chapter, divorces are becoming more frequent and more easily obtainable in every civilized country. This is a tendency of civilization; it is the result of a demand that marriage should be ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ish no goot to sheer—to make te noise for dat. You vill shee old Van der Does's likeness ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... well again; even as kind Venus cured her beloved byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by Juturna, Turnus's sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them. Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses. Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame, and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... against him, and his opponent was declared elected. He instituted a contest for the office, and, being defeated in the court below, appealed to the Supreme Court. He then became very much exercised over his appeal, because I was one of the Justices. There were not wanting persons who, out of sheer malice, or not comprehending any higher motives of conduct than such as governed themselves, represented that I would improve the opportunity to strike him ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... to do more than double its consumption of others, or to exercise its increased purchasing power on some new thing. If so, the supply will adapt itself accordingly, and the values of things will continue to conform to their cost of production. At any rate, it is a sheer absurdity that all things should fall in value, and that all producers should, in consequence, be insufficiently remunerated. If values remain the same, what becomes of prices is immaterial, since the remuneration of producers does not depend on how much money, but on how much of consumable ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... "It must be of sheer white, with many flowing flounces, and with faint pink underneath like the almond bloom. And there must be a bit of heavenly blue in the hat, and a knot of green at the girdle—and a veil flung back—you see?—there'll be sky and field ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... was by this time half in love with a vision. The fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul. If she had had a little more self-control she would have attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning, and so have killed it off. If she had had a little less pride she might have gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights' premises at Blooms-End at any maidenly sacrifice until she had seen him. But Eustacia did neither ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... remain in your memory, and then it is not impossible that after this long rejection you may end by desiring me. If that should happen,—if at the end of many sad deceptions you should return, in sheer remorse, to the religion of art,—then, then, supposing that long years have not made love ridiculous between us, remember this evening. Now, let us part; it is already too late for ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Sidney's first kiss would have gone without her heart,—which was a thing she had determined would never happen,—gone out of sheer pity. But a tall figure loomed out of the shadows and approached ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Lord bless you, how Triplett could sail! It was wizardry, sheer wizardry; "devil-work," the natives used to call it. Triplett, blindfolded, could find the inlet to a hermetically sealed atoll. When there wasn't any inlet he would wait for a seventh wave—which is always extra large—and take her over on the ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... I had not known, O Dhananjaya, that the king had acted according to Kshatriya usage, then I would have, taking his hands together by sheer force, burnt them in a ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... wanton, toss them high; Race about, you know not why. Now stand still, from sheer excess Of exhaustless happiness. I, meanwhile, on this old gate, Sit sagely calm, and perhaps relate Lore of fairies. Do you know How they make the mushrooms grow? Ah! what means that shout of thine? You can't tell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... shutters—the window looked on the little back-yard I have before described; there was no ledge without—nothing to break the sheer descent of the wall. No man getting out of that window would have found any footing till he had fallen on the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... brook. Will you come with me to smoky London? Yes, and hate it as much as I shall. Sleep away your life by a city fire, and grow fat and old, instead of racing after me and Prince. But we shall not live long in a town, Frisk. We shall soon die of sheer laziness, and so much the better—for who will care for us? Lion and Jerry and even Gipsy will forget you; and every one has forgotten me already. Why am I so foolish as to cry so? I never knew how weak I could be until these last few days. But we must be strong, Frisk—we ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... was not opposing her through tyranny or pride of opinion or sheer prejudice; but she felt that this was another case of age's lack of sympathy with youth, felt it with all the intensity of infatuated seventeen made doubly determined by opposition and concealment. The next evening he and she were ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... ancient monasteries, nestling in green pastures, where still the bare-footed and bare-headed friar, his rope girdle tight about his loins, shepherds, with crook in hand, his sheep upon the hill sides; through rocky woods; between sheer walls of cliff, whose every towering crag stands crowned with ruined fortress, church, or castle; together with a blick at the Vosges mountains, where half the population is bitterly pained if you speak to them in French, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Tommy's letters, written in trenches or in billets. When Tommy was reported wounded, Miss Willmot had a bad day of it with an almost hysterical Nelly Davis. When the wound turned out to be nothing worse than a hole in the calf of the leg, made by a machine-gun bullet, Miss Nelly cried from sheer relief. When, by the greatest good luck in the world, Private 7432 Collins was sent down to 73 General Hospital, no more than a mile distant from the Camp, Miss Nelly went ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... dike which he had walled across with lava blocks, a tunnel beneath this obstruction affording the only exit toward the mountains. On the ocean front he had also built his forts of stone, although the sea boiled five hundred feet below and the plateau ended in an almost sheer precipice. Deep ravines on either side of the stronghold bent around it to the rocky neck, thus making the place almost an island. In these ravines were narrow paths by which his people descended to their boats, secreted on the dark and ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... as the exclusion of the sick and ailing is unchristian. Infinitely more important were it to keep the gates of birth free from undesirables. As for the exclusion of the able-bodied, whether illiterate or literate, that is sheer economic madness in so empty a continent, especially with the Panama Canal to divert them to the least developed States. Fortunately, any serious restriction will avenge itself not only by the stagnation of many of the States, but by the paralysis of the great liners which depend on steerage ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... humor, ingenuity and tact, officers and men adjusted themselves to their unusual surroundings, merging into the various billets allotted to them, along lines of least resistance. By nightfall Buddie owned the town! Meriting it by sheer force of good nature, gentlemanly deportment, and a willingness to follow the adage of the ancient poet: "Si fueris Romae ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... boys this time had tackled a task that was beyond them. They struck out rapidly, as did the man to whose aid they had rushed, but the sheer weight ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... 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 ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... slow-smoking fire, in the littered ashes of a thousand fires, was an old man who blinked apathetically at the invaders. He was extremely old—so old that his withered skin hung about him in loose folds and did not look like skin. His hands were bony claws, his emaciated face a sheer death's-head. His task, it seemed, was to tend the fire, and while he blinked at them he added to it a handful of dead and mouldy wood. And hung in the smoke they found the object of their search. Joan turned and stumbled out hastily, deathly sick, reeling into the sunshine and clutching ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... only, remembering her ill-usage in childhood by the cousin who, though younger, was stronger than herself, never wholly trusted her. Besides, out of sheer modesty, she would never have told her domestic sorrows to any one ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... had watched the whole proceeding. He could only hold on to a sail and, by the sheer strength of his hands and arms, save himself from being carried overboard, as sea after sea swept over them. He strained his eyes until it seemed as though they would burst, to follow the movements of that boat on which their lives depended. It seemed but a mere speck on the waves. ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... for a moment from sheer amazement. It had not occurred to her that this girl was married—there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... other; "there it is again; thrusting in sheer conjectures for evidence! I must call on the court to interpose with the stubborn and wilful fellow. Didn't I tell you, sir, I'd have no more of your guess-work? Facts, sir, facts, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... strikes at the root of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not, one and all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one or of something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull the bell handle at every street door in bitter weather, and scramble up to write ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... particular claim to personal beauty. Some players seem fairly to hypnotize their audiences—yes, hypnotize them. This is not done by practicing any species of black art, or by consciously following any psychological formula, but by the sheer intensity of feeling of the artist at the moment ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Scott, a greater soldier than Taylor, but a vainer man, who mistakenly broke with all precedent and went upon the stump for himself. The President who was elected, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... later the flotilla was again on its way, awnings spread, and flags flying. A breeze had sprung up, and when they were free of the Burano canals, they found the water delicately ruffled. It was the sweetest, gayest little breeze, and in sheer exuberance of shallow emotion, the tiny waves ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... force. The seventy-five Irishmen and Americans made as much noise with their guns as a Boer commando of a thousand men usually did, and the result was that the cavalry wheeled about and returned into Ladysmith. Botha and his men, dropping out of their saddles from sheer exhaustion and hunger, came up from Colenso a short time after the cavalry had been driven back and made their memorable journey to Joubert's new headquarters at Glencoe. It was one of the few instances where the foreigners were of any ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... houses, which these early sailors made it possible for them in other days and now to acquire, may regard many of the disciplinary methods of Drake and his sea contemporaries as sheer savage murder, but these critics are not quite qualified to judge as to the justice or injustice of the actions of one man who is responsible for the safe and proper navigation of a vessel, no matter whether on an enterprising voyage ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... policy he put off to the latest moment any decision as to the course which he should take with respect to the Bill when it came up to him for his sanction. As regards a dissolution, indeed, he felt from the beginning that it would be sheer folly, attended by no small risk. Was he to have recourse to this ultima ratio, merely because a parliament elected a year before, under the auspices of the party now in opposition, had passed, by a majority of nearly ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... 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 life ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Pali, the mountain becomes a sheer precipice for some miles, broken only by the gorge of the Pali, up which, if you are prudent, you will walk, letting your horses follow with the guide—though Hawaiian horsemen ride both up and ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... nervous system stronger to fight the battle out to its blessed end—by which processes of Nature may be slowed when they get too fiery-forceful for human courage to endure, or accelerated when the pull seems likely to be such a long one as to kill or drive mad through sheer exhaustion. I have spoken of bromide of potassium. This in connection with the pack may in many cases wisely be continued throughout the whole progress of the case, and often hastens the restoration of general nervous equilibrium by many days, removing to a very pereptible degree that ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of the episode in the Cyclops' cave. Penelope has not the glamour of Circe, and the song of the Sirens may sound sweeter than the whizz of the arrows of Odysseus as he stands on the threshold of his hall. Yet, for sheer intensity of passionate power, for concentration of intellectual interest and for masterly dramatic construction, these latter books are quite unequalled. Indeed, they show very clearly how it was ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... consequent upon that outraging of treaty faith. The deliberate initiation of the policy of "frightfulness" which had heaped such unspeakable horrors upon the Belgian people tore the veil from the face of German militarism and revealed in its sheer brutality the ruthlessness and lawlessness of ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... tremendous trial of strength between the sections which followed the rebel shot on Sumter the South was at the end of four years completely overmatched by the North, and by sheer weight of numbers and material resources was borne down at all points and forced back into the old Union, less its system of slave labor. For the destruction of the Southern Confederacy had involved, as a military necessity, the destruction of Negro slavery, which was its chief cornerstone. With ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... sheer surprise, and looked at the speaker in wonder. What could the man want with him? At a glance he saw the man was not English, though upon closer examination he could not place the type. The stranger's skin was ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... falls in with what are rum chaps," returned the other, who, from following the London trade, had caught a few cockneyisms. "If a man chooses to keep his hands in the beckets, why let him, say I; but I take it as a slight to the company to sheer out of the usual ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... enough altogether. I fancied that I was the lieutenant over there: and yet the thing was not very much to my taste after all. I missed my good old mother and the dear little ones; who almost tear me to pieces for sheer love." ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Armitage could read it there in the hard shrewd lines, the cold, heartless, vindictive lines, or the softer lines which the smiles could form when smiles were necessary, which was not so often now as in former years. And in place of the beauty now gone, she ruled by sheer power and wit, which time had turned to biting acidity,—and by the bitter diplomacy of ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... witness how sheer ignorance and callousness to the interests of the human race at large allow such people to multiply without let or hindrance. The unfortunate part about it all is that this species of humanity is on the steady increase. They really form the principal hearths whence emanate our criminal ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... and by they came to a place among the hills where the road was very rough and steep, and the Ass was at his last gasp. So he begged the Mule to relieve him of a part of his load: but the Mule refused. At last, from sheer weariness, the Ass stumbled and fell down a steep place and was killed. The driver was in despair, but he did the best he could: he added the Ass's load to the Mule's, and he also flayed the Ass and put ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... group result from volcanic activity associated with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... and that the capacity of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and running incessantly hither and thither as the water more ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... She flung out her arms, and would have fallen headlong into the greedy, crawling water, but he caught her and made his way back. The hot, bitter tears on her face brought her to herself, and with one great sob she broke down, clinging to him and crying till from sheer ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... counting came dropping in. A big green-baize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... and before him lay the two abysses full of stars, for they cut their way through the whole Earth and revealed the under sky; and threading its course between them went the way, and it sloped upward and its sides were sheer. And beyond the abysses, where the way led up to the farther chambers of the fortress, Leothric heard the musicians playing their magical tune. So he stepped on to the way, which was scarcely a stride in width, and moved along it holding ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... capered about him, while he stood and looked at her rather puzzled. He did not see anything to laugh at, and did not yet comprehend that here was a creature so joyous by nature that she must laugh and dance about from sheer spontaneous delight. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... as her eyes, and winsome as her wistful little smile. She had those four smiling with her in sheer sympathy before she had spoken three sentences; and the two who did not understand her words smiled just as sympathetically as the two who knew what she ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and Harry to inspect your stable: such conduct is to invite rebuff, to expose yourself to just animadversion. Keep the beast in its box. This is my ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... dangerous smile, that, if she met any one who bore that resemblance, she might be tempted to keep him with her,—a playfulness that brought the ready color to Rand's cheek. When she added to this the greater audacity of kissing her hand to him, the young hermit actually turned away in sheer embarrassment. When he looked around again, she was gone, and for the first time in his experience the mountain seemed barren ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with tiny shops on either side, where you could buy anything from an oil painting to a summer hat. In front was a gay little plaza with vines and a fountain, where lunch and tea were served by the prettiest girls in town in bewitching frilled caps with long black streamers and sheer lawn aprons over blue and green frocks. The Tired Business Men declined to lunch anywhere else, and there was a moment when we feared it might have to be given up, as there was some feeling in town on account of the vacant stools at their ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... and sword on the table, and threw himself on his bed, uttering a deep sigh, or rather one of those exclamations which we cannot tell whether they arise from discouragement or simply from fatigue. His Majesty's countenance was sad and careworn, nevertheless he slept from sheer weariness for many hours. I awoke him to announce the arrival of M. de Rumigny, who was the bearer of dispatches from Chatillon. In the condition of the Emperor's mind at this moment he seemed ready to accept any ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... antagonism between the Virtues and Vices, the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, an antagonism so inveterate that even if the temporary object of their struggle were removed, the strife would still break out again from the sheer viciousness of the Vices. This instinctive hostility between Virtues and Vices supplies the groundwork of the Interludes. They dismiss Humankind from the stage. He was always a weak, oscillating sort of creature. Sound, forceful Abstractions ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... is a popular excitement against any man, he had better leave this part at once and altogether. It is dangerous to tamper with popular prejudices; no man who has any value for his life ought to do so. It is a sheer act ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... want you to realize that he is simply enslaving you, ruining you, seeking to crush your personality out of sheer egoism. Oh, think of the Margaret you were in the old days! Think of the freedom you had to develop your ego when you loved me! Think of the choice spirits who were your associates then, of the disciples who gathered round me and were your disciples too. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the nature of the ground by which it was surrounded on all sides, supplied what was wanting in the courtesy of his pursuers. The sides of the glen were broken banks of earth and rocks of rotten stone, which sunk sheer down to the little winding stream below, affording here and there a tuft of scathed brushwood or a patch of furze. Along the edges of this ravine, which, as we have said, was very narrow, but of profound depth, the hunters on horse and foot ranged ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... o' them two mush-heads was tryin' to act the part of a ole cow which has had her calf took. They goes a-moonin' about the boat that mournful it 'ud make you yell jus' out o' sheer nervousness. First one 'ud up an' hold his head on his hand an' lean on the fence-rail that ran around the boat, and sigh till he'd raise his pants clean outa the top o' his boots. An' then the other 'ud go off in another part o' the boat an' he'd sigh an' moon an' take ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... had become aware that nothing was the same; that the women and the girls—so many of them in uniform!—that she met in the streets when she took her daily walk—were new creatures; not attractive to her as a whole, but surprising and formidable, because of the sheer life there was in them. And she herself began to get restive; to realize that she was not herself so very old, and to want to know—a hundred things! It had taken her five months, however, to make up her mind; and then at last she had gone to an agency—the only ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they both have—that is, hatred of mediocrity; but they have also both a great jealousy of the highest excellence; and, therefore, where they can neither be great themselves nor deny greatness in others, they, out of sheer desperation, fall into an outrageous strain of eulogizing. Thus they have bepraised Goethe, and thus they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... bosom-friend, young Lord Tamerton? And was not the beautiful golden-haired Lady Margaret Tamerton with her brother? Little marvel that Ralph tossed his rifle high in the air and caught it again and again from sheer exuberance of spirits. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... fortune in which every object was charmingly transfigured, and they were rewarded; for wherever they looked they met only friendly glances. This heart then embraced the whole world, and beat so quickly and joyously! I often did not know what to do with myself from sheer mirth and vivacity, and it seemed as if I must burst into a thousand pieces like an over-loaded firelock, only instead of scattering far and wide, mount straight up to Heaven. Those days were so happy, and yet so sad—I felt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... summers have fallen as leaves by the storms in their season thinned, Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer up the way of the south-west wind: Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with bastions of serpentine, Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred and twenty-nine, All filled full of the war, ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... thought—poor fools—that you had no grasp of etiquette. How gratified we were, we professionals, who could appreciate your virtuosity—when you placed matters on a comfortable basis by spurning the cats'-meat. It was sheer pleasure then, waiting, to see what form your compliment ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer
... forty-two rounds and lasted three hours. At the third round, and again in the seventh, Sam Mac Vea threw Joe Jeannette, and his victory seemed assured. But little by little Joe Jeannette revived, pulled himself together, defended himself, and through sheer nerve, began to attack. At the forty-second round, shoulder to shoulder, panting, dripping wet and covered with blood they struck the last blow. The resources of Sam Mac Vea were exhausted, and through the very assurance of his adversary he felt himself beaten.... Suddenly the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... I am endeavoring to get at, is this: Where you want a farm to be self-supporting—where you depend solely on the produce of the farm to supply manure—it is a sheer impossibility to adopt high farming on the whole of your land. I want to raise just as large crops per acre as the high farmers, but there is no way of doing this, unless we go outside the farm for manure, without raising a smaller ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... up and raised again the half-appeased want and sorrow. Again she dreamed that she was folding her little child in her arms, and woke to find them empty. She could not stand against this, and decided, in sheer desperation, to quit the field. She would go on the Continent to Justina; rest and change would help her, and she would send back the ring, when all was arranged, by ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... fond of showing that he could play in a way no one else could. Adolescence had turned his desire to play into a fury of passion for his art: he practised on single passages for ten or twelve hours a day, and would often sink in a swoon from sheer exhaustion. This deep, torpor-like sleep saved him from complete collapse, just as it saved Mendelssohn, and he would arise to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... has been hit by one of Eros' darts. You may turn red and white, and look at me as if I were your enemy, and talking contemptible nonsense. I have seen many strange things, but I never saw any one before you who was a coward out of sheer courage, and yet of all the women I know there is not one to whom fear is less known than my bold and resolute Klea. The road is a hard one that you must take, but only cover your poor little heart with a coat of mail, and venture in all ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... blackbird-catcher, should he pitch Into some open well, or gaping ditch; Tho' he call lustily "help, neighbours, help!" No soul regards him, or attends his yelp. Should one, too kind, to give him succour hope, Wish to relieve him, and let down a rope; Forbear! (I'll cry for aught that you can tell) By sheer design he jump'd into the well. He wishes not you should preserve him, Friend! Know you the old Sicilian Poet's ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... dared not go away lest the news from Nancy be delayed. I spent the hours in an exhausting mental state that alternated between hope and fear, a state of unmitigated, intense desire, of balked realization, sometimes heightening into that sheer terror I had felt when I had detected over the telephone that note in her voice that seemed of despair. Had she had a presentiment, all along, that something would occur to separate us? As I went back over ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with edged tools at some period of our lives, and cut ourselves accordingly. At first the cut hurts and stings, and down drops the knife, and we cry out like wounded little babies as we are. Some very very few and unlucky folks at the game cut their heads sheer off, or stab themselves mortally, and perish outright, and there is an end of them. But,—heaven help us!—many people have fingered those ardentes sagittas which Love sharpens on his whetstone, and are stabbed, scarred, pricked, perforated, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rallied to reform behind our beloved guns and noted the ridiculous brevity of our line—as we sank from sheer fatigue, and tried to moderate the terrific thumping of our hearts—as we caught our breath to ask who had seen such-and-such a comrade, and laughed hysterically at the reply—there swept past us and ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... thousands of years ago by visiting the village perched like the eyry of some wild bird about 200 feet up the side of the cliff at East cape, on the Asiatic side of the straits. This bold, rocky cliff, rising sheer from the sea to the height of 2,100 feet, consists of granite, with lava here and there, and the indications point to the overflow of a vast ice sheet from the north, evidences of which are seen in the trend of the ridges on the top, and the form of the narrow peninsula ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... nearly black, but she was so happy as to be absolutely oblivious of such trifles, while the awkward youths fell entirely under the spell of her sparkling, fun-filled eyes and the merry, bubbling laugh that seemed to overflow from sheer joy. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... scenes, Rembrandt such violent and yet attractive contrasts. Here everything is massive and dominating. The colors are vivid; the shadows are purple to blackness; the heights are towering; the depths are appalling; the sheer walls are as if poised in mid-air; the towers and temples dwarf into insignificance even the monster works of man on the Nile. Here are single mountains of erosion standing as simple features of the ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... a little. "No," he said. "Because you'll never grow up; you're a dwarf!" The tone of his voice was one of sheer envy. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sea, in that long series of wars which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those who fought for you—who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... was all she could say, as she threw herself into the arms of her aged relative and sobbed through sheer joy. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... lustily, out of his sheer joy in being alive, and was surprised to hear Dorothy's clear soprano, Margaret's pleasing contralto, and Crane's mellow tenor chime in from the adjoining room. Crane threw open the door ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... met SALLY STUBBS, at a husking party, she took his eye, and kept it. She filled his heart completely. A rosy-cheeked, buxom lass, healthy and hearty, dimples and dumplings combined, she captivated and carried, by sheer force of weight, the delicate ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... Gjert's friends, and indeed among the harbour people generally, she was so much the object of awe, that whenever the whistle sounded, it would darkly suggest the thought that another flogging was going to take place, and any boats that were near at the moment would sheer off to a more comfortable distance. There was just so much truth in all this that there was one very hot-tempered officer on board who was very much hated by the crew, and who had been unfortunate enough to single out for flogging just ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... of those damp June-hot caves galleried into the sheer yellow-clay sides of her deep-sunken streets, desolate streets where Porter's great soaring, howling, burrowing "lamp-posts" blew up like steamboats and flew forty ways in search of women and children, dwelt the Callenders. ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... from this danger he was rescued by a strong south wind, which sprang up and raised so high a sea, that the enemy's galleys could make little way. But his own ships were driving before it upon a lee shore of cliffs and rocks running sheer to the water, where there was no hope of escape, when all of a sudden the wind turned about to south-west, and blew from land to the main sea, where Antony, now sailing in security, saw the coast all covered with the wreck of the enemy's fleet. For hither the galleys in pursuit ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust foretelling ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... through the forest in an effort to reach one of the trenches two nights ago, passing from the pale shine of the snow upon the bare fields to sheer darkness. I found the staff established in a spacious dugout some 400 yards behind the actual first line. Here, as always, was a straw-padded, candle-lit interior, with an orderly waiting, with telephone to ear, and all those ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... sometimes, although the work is too hard for an old man alone; and I trade my furs off regularly at the settlements on the islands and even along the mainland,—a month's work for a little flour or sugar. Ah, how I have labored! I have felt my muscles crack, I have dropped like a log from sheer weariness. Talk of tortures; which of them have I not felt, with the pains and faintness of exposure and hunger racking me from head to foot? Have I stopped for snow and ice? Have I stopped for anguish? Never; I have worked, worked, worked, with the tears of pain rolling ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... contradictory orders were necessary, when, owing to some unexpected bend in the river, the Silver Queen would luff up suddenly and shoot her head athwart stream hard a-port, or else try to "take the bit between her teeth," and sheer into the shore on the starboard hand as if she wanted to run up high and dry on the mud, loth to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... her knees, was idly arranging books on one of the lower bookshelves. In sheer nervousness, Hilda also dropped to her knees on the hearthrug, and began to worry the fire ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... He was not simply writing a book; that might have been fairly easy. But he was telling about a friend of his, the friend of his life, his one dearest Friend. And when he remembers how they treated Him his eyes fill up, and his heart beats till it thumps, and his quill sticks into the paper in sheer reluctance ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... watching me—even the peasants have a feeling for paint over there—we heard a tap on the window. It was the padrona. I saw that she wanted to speak to me, and I went in. She was an old, crippled woman, holding to life by sheer will, sitting all day by the fire in one room. She spoke French, so we could talk. To my surprise she was very much interested in me—asked questions about my work, my family, and so on. I couldn't understand why. But when I left she began crying and told me that I reminded ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, weakness ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... modesty so much as sheer ignorance which kept the young girl silent; she had never heard of a painter's model; but the tone in which her new acquaintance spoke implied a compliment, and she looked more ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... been reading some miserable cant about Southern humanity, for there are people everywhere who take the wrong side of every subject, from sheer obstinacy. What can disprove the laws of human nature? They require that things should be at the South as our theories ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... red flag, and began firing, one on the Caesar's quarter and one astern. Soon the three other ships, two of which Wright styled the Admiral and Vice-Admiral, came up. The Admiral ranged up on the quarter and tried to board, but was obliged to sheer off, with the loss of many men and a bowsprit shot away. The Vice-Admiral tried to board at the bow, but with no better success, losing a foreyard and mizzen-mast. For five hours the engagement lasted, but the small-arm men in the Caesar's tops fired so well that the pirates ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... accomplished, with the help of a penknife alone. On another occasion, A. L. T. caught a baby curlew as yet unable to fly, but the cries of the parents as they whirled round and round us seeking their offspring, were so heart-rending, that in sheer pity he placed the little thing back on the ground, where it was instantly joined by the old birds, who uttered cries of delight, which we continued hearing until we were well ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... knew, of course, that Mr. James Allerdyke had sent those jewels direct to Mr. Fullaway, immediately on his arrival in Hull, and that they had fallen by sheer accident into Van Koon's hands. But I wanted to know more. I wanted to know if Van Koon had any connection with this affair, and if, when he saw that the parcel was from Hull, he had immediately jumped to the conclusion that it might be from James Allerdyke, and might ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... among the morning-glories, with the yellow blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead, watching the motes of men toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of them, slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell sheer ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... gone, the miser hung Himself in sheer despair: Thus each the other's wants supplied, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... present term on "The Results of the Science of Language;" but you will easily understand that to sum up in one course of lectures the results of researches which have been carried on with unflagging industry by three generations of scholars, would be a sheer impossibility. Besides, amere detailing of results, though it is possible, is hardly calculated to subserve the real objects of academic teaching. You would not be satisfied with mere results: you want to know and to understand the method by which they have been obtained. You want to follow step ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... which we grew from children into maidens ran past in sheer peace and gladness. Cousin Maud allowed us to have every pastime and delight; and if at times her face was less content, it was only by reason that I craved to wear a longer kirtle than she deemed fitting for my tender years, or that I proved myself ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as far as outward characteristics went, was offered by the other great orator of the same time. Sheil was very small, and of mean presence; with a singularly fidgety manner, a shrill voice, and a delivery unintelligibly rapid. But in sheer beauty of elaborated diction not O'Connell nor any one else could surpass him. There are few finer speeches in the language than that in which he took Lord Lyndhurst to task for applying the term "aliens" to the Irish in a speech on ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... cursed himself inwardly for a fool and a dolt—the more pitiable because he accounted himself cunning above others. Had he but kept his temper, had he done no more than maintain the happy pretence that he was a slave to the orders he had received—a mere machine—he might have gained his ends by sheer audacity. At least, his way of retreat would have remained open, and he might have gone, to return another day with force ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... history of Kerfol—I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before—but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only the sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a kind of majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more—a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... he exclaimed, "you certainly cannot ask this of Miss Morison! It would be sheer impertinence! I beg your pardon, but I cannot help saying it. Besides, there is something horribly cold- blooded in talking about what shall be done with the property of Mrs. Frostwinch when she is dead. Miss Morison would not listen ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards and played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when I had become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... easy to order the men down the cliffs, but not so easy for them to obey, for the rocks were almost perpendicular at the place, and descended sheer into the water. ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne |
