"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sunny pool, on which all the cloudy thoughts that moved in some unseen heaven cast exquisitely delicate changes of light and shade as they floated over it. Percivale strode on as if he bore a feather behind him. I did wish we were at the top, for my arms began to feel like iron-cables, stiff and stark—only I was afraid of my fingers giving way. My heart was beating uncomfortably too. But Percivale, I felt almost inclined to quarrel with him before it was over, he strode on so unconcernedly, turning every corner of the zigzag where I expected him to propose a halt, and striding on again, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... was my uninvited visitor, with scant ceremony I drew myself away from him. By the light which was streaming through the laboratory door I saw that Woodville was lying close beside me,—stark and still. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... of June, Gone like the rose the winter through, Save in the ribbed anatomy Of ebon line the moonlight drew, Stark on the snow, of tower or tree, Like letters of a ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... don't come a stark calm, I don't care," the captain replied. "That would be the worst thing that could happen, for we should have the frigate's boats after us; but a light ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... the hood of the carriage, his eyes half shut as he looked at some inward vision. 'It was not at the great milliner's. It was at the Hotel-Dieu, in Bouchereau's department. A rough, white-washed cell, an iron bedstead with all the clothes thrown off, and on it, stark naked, covered with sweat and foam, contorted and twisted like a clown with sudden springs and with yells that re-echoed through the fore-court of Notre Dame, a madman in the last agony. Beside the bed two women, one on either side, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... opera; a stark Spanish drama, too intense for any but Latins, foreign; debauched vaudeville, incredibly vulgar; or at the concert-hall, sentimental Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon songs, with an audience of grave uncritical exiles—a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... cities, castles stark and square Bastion'd with rocks that rival Nature's own; Red-furnaced baths, trim gardens planted fair With tree and flower the North ne'er yet had known; Long temple-roofs and statues poised on high With golden wings outstretch'd ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... could sight nothing at all in that direction to excite any attention. The distant mountains provided a stark, dark blue background. Up their foothills and lower slopes was a thick furring of trees with foliage of so deep a green as to register black from this distance. And on the level country was the lighter blue-green of ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... "This is stark madness," said Claverhouse; "I must do my duty to church and state. Here are a thousand villains hard by in open rebellion, and you ask me to pardon a young fanatic who is enough of himself to set a whole kingdom in a blaze! It cannot ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to evade the embarrassing dilemmas which my wife not infrequently thrust upon me at this hour. So for the moment I escaped. All day in the office I was fully occupied. From time to time the memory of Dundee lying stark in the basement obtruded itself upon my thoughts, but I dismissed the vision as one does a problem one has not the courage ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... up, wi' eerie bark; Cryin' I'm creepy, cauld, an' green; Come doon, come doon, he's lyin' stark, Come doon an' steek ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... had laid the gold beneath the pillory, we struck swiftly across the square, being in fear lest the watch should come upon us, and took the first lane that led toward the palisade. Beneath the burning stars the town lay stark in sleep. So bright in the wintry air were those far-away lights that the darkness below them was not great. We could see the low houses, the shadowy pines, the naked oaks, the sandy lane glimmering away ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... lying stark behind the barn, but he had no thought to spare for him; he peered for the traces of the horses' feet. There they were, stamped into the snow as into wax; Kasztan's large feet and the broken hoof of Wojtek; ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... is room for enterprise, for genius, and for skill; once and again there is room for daring, as in the first Atlantic flight. Yet that again was a thing of mathematical calculation and petrol storage, allied to a certain stark courage which may be found even in landsmen. For the ventures into the unknown, the limit of daring, the work for work's sake, with the almost certainty that the final reward was death, we must look back to the age of the giants, the age when flying ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... country's destiny and democracy. The ideal of the west was its emphasis upon the worth and possibilities of the common man, its belief in the right of every man to rise to the full measure of his own nature, under conditions of social mobility. Western democracy was no theorist's dream. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. [Footnote: P. J. Turner, "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," in Atlantic Monthly, XCL, 83, and "The Middle West," ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... them, they made their way onward across the Esplanade des Invalides, through the serried lines of trees, stark and formal against the January sky, to the rue Fabert. Here, in the rue Fabert, lay that note of contrast that is bound into the very atmosphere of Paris—the note that touches the imagination to so acute an interest. Here ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... after it was opened and the stones pulled away. Bender was then discovered lying only a few feet back from the entrance. He appeared to have dashed the kettle aside, as if seeking to quench the fire and smoke. Tige was close behind him, Watch farther back. Very stark and grim all four looked when finally they were hauled out with a pole and hook and given a ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... from early manhood to his grave." Nevertheless, his fiery nature kept him for a time with the Americans, and at the very outset he showed his independent spirit, having characteristically refused to "wait for proper orders." From New Hampshire came Stark, the hero of the frontier wars. And from all the towns came the militia leaders, who, gathering their companies into regiments, began the loose organization and crude subordination which should make ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... woman, who had been convicted on overwhelming evidence. There were persons present (a small minority only) who considered this want of composure on the part of the prisoner to be a sign in his favor. Self-possession, in his dreadful position, signified, to their minds, the stark insensibility of a heartless and shameless criminal, and afforded in itself a presumption, not ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... awaited us, as, in overhauling the sail-encumbered shrouds of the partially standing mast, we discovered several ice-bound figures rigidly hanging therein, which, being cut away and lowered to our boat, proved to be the body of a negro perfectly stark and dead, and three most pitiable white sailors, whose life was so far extinguished that they could neither move hand nor foot, nor utter more than the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gauzy wrappings that enveloped her from head to foot. There, too, standing near to her were the Khania Atene and her uncle the old Shaman, who looked but ill at ease, and lastly, stretched upon his funeral couch, the fiery light beating upon his stark form and face, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... broad belts of No Man's Land with only an occasional prostrate figure it would have had the reassurance that another time they might have easier going. Wherever the Germans had brought a machine gun into action the results of its work lay a stark warning of the necessity of silencing these automatic killers before a charge. Yet from Mametz to Montauban the losses had been light, leaving no doubt that the Germans, convinced that the weight of the attack would be to the north, had ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... curse of egotism! This was stark male egotism,—the instinct for domination. And defendants and plaintiffs were alike in spirit, struggling for position in the game. The weaker ones—if they had the hold—would pluck at the windpipe of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... only the supposition of the devils appearing, but the real society of all the devils in hell will be with thee howling and roaring, screeching and roaring in such a hideous manner, that thou wilt be even at thy wits' end, and be ready to run stark mad ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... just now, stark and bare of one commonsence idea. In the writing line, I was never so involved before and see no end to the ink-(an humorous voluntary provocative, I trust of much merriment)-creasing pressure ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... continuously buried him, so that his body, quite stiff and stark, disappeared under the incessant accumulation of their rapidly thickening mass, and nothing was left to indicate ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... is worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.' I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... know nothing about them, but if they're anything like me, I find it quite boring enough to see the people I do know; I'm sure if I had to see people I didn't know as well, even if they had 'fought like heroes,' I should go stark mad. Besides, except when it's an old friend like you, whom one knows quite apart from that, I'm not sure that 'heroism' takes one very far in society. It's often quite boring enough to have to give a dinner-party, but ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... one could well imagine. It is impossible even for those whose imaginations are most powerful, to infuse life into a thing so utterly dead as an embalmed body; and this fact is partly responsible for that atmosphere of stark, melancholy, sobriety and aloofness which surrounds the affairs of ancient Egypt. In reading these verses, it is imperative for their right understanding that the mummies and their resting-places should be banished from the thoughts. ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... whether moved by this, or was it chance, She past my way. Up started from my side The old lion, glaring with his whelpless eye, Silent; but when she saw me lying stark, Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale, Cold even to her, she sighed; and when she saw The haggard father's face and reverend beard Of grisly twine, all dabbled with the blood Of his own son, shuddered, a twitch of pain Tortured her mouth, and o'er her forehead past A ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the world be growing dark, And twilight cool thy potent day inclose! The sun, beneath the round earth sunk, still glows All the night through, sleepless and young and stark. Oh, be thy spirit faithful as the lark, More daring: in the midnight of thy woes, Dart through them, higher than earth's shadow goes, Into the Light of which thou art a spark! Be willing to be blind—that, in thy night, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... was evidently stark, staring mad. I still affected not to observe it, and asked him if that was why he ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... chairs; the light now fell full on her face. Had she deliberately challenged me to look into her secret mind if I could? Anything like the stark insensibility of that young girl to every refinement of feeling, to every becoming doubt of herself, to every customary timidity of her age and sex in the presence of a man who had not disguised his unfavorable opinion of her, I never met with ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... of mine doth tremble, and I feel A stark affrighted motion in my blood; My soul grows weary of her house, and I All over am a trouble to my self; There is some hidden power in these dead things That calls my flesh into'em; I am cold; Be resolute, and bear'em company: ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... tragedies and his comedies, his innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga. A portion of his troops were sent to Bennington to capture some stores collected there by the Vermont patriots. A vigorous defence of these stores by the intrepid Stark resulted in the repulse, first of the British, then of the Hessian troops. The next scene in the drama was what may be called the second decisive action of the war. Burgoyne, with his whole force of ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... He stared for a moment as I mentioned the amount, and then hastily deciding that I was stark mad, but that it was none of his business, put on his hat and led the ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lucifer, smiting the ball again, "here is the only symbol, my boy. So fat. So satisfied. Not like that scraggy individual, stretching his arms in stark weariness." And he pointed up to the cross, his face dark with a grin. "I was telling you just now, Michael, that I can prove the best part of the rationalist case and the Christian humbug from any symbol you liked to give me, from any instance I came across. Here ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... and common, He eats, he drinks, he takes his rest, he fears no man nor woman. Though Croesus compassed great wealth, yet he still craved more; He was as needy a beggar still as goes from door to door. Though Ovid was a merry man, love ever kept him sad; He was as far from happiness as one that is stark mad. Our merchant, he in goods is rich, and full of gold and treasure; But when he thinks upon his debts, that thought destroys his pleasure. Our courtier thinks that he's preferred, whom every man envies; When love so rumbles in his pate, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lying stark naked upon the floor of my cell. My head was racking and throbbing like a hammer. Raising my hand to my forehead I sharply withdrew it. It was quite wet, and as I looked more closely, I saw that it ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... a wild and melancholy glen, Made gloomy by tall firs and cypress dark, Whose roots, like any bones of buried men, Push'd through the rotten sod for fear's remark; A hundred horrid stems, jagged and stark, Wrestled with crooked arms in hideous fray, Besides sleek ashes with their dappled bark, Like crafty serpents climbing for a prey, With many blasted ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... on the day following the recapture of these three vessels, the weather being at the time stark calm, with an overcast sky, the signal to "shorten sail and prepare for bad weather," was exhibited on board the commodore's ship—the old Tremendous. It was very difficult to make out the signal, the flags hanging from the masthead in such close, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... to Bayes' tragedy [('vide The Rehearsal'), 'British Bards'], unfortunately takes away the merit of originality from the dialogue between Messieurs the Spirits of Flood and Fell in the first canto. Then we have the amiable William of Deloraine, "a stark moss-trooper," videlicet, a happy compound of poacher, sheep-stealer, and highwayman. The propriety of his magical lady's injunction not to read can only be equalled by his candid acknowledgment of his independence of the trammels of spelling, although, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "So stark and fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that none dared resist his will." His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he and no man dared speak to him" when the news reached him of Harold's seizure of the throne. It was only when he passed from ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... face of Silas Stark, President of the United States of the World, and nodded grimly. "I'll do my best, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... conditions of labor underground, and reported a condition of affairs which was heart-sickening. Children began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and worked alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, and these were often at night. Little girls of six or eight years of age made ten to twelve trips a day up steep ladders to the surface, carrying ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... gave him ten or twelve reals, which he pocketed with admirable nonchalance, saying, "Dios se lo pague." Taking leave of him, we rode out to the Indians' huts. The little children were running about among the huts, stark naked, and the men were not much better; but the women had generally coarse gowns, of a sort of tow cloth. The men are employed, most of the time, in tending the cattle of the mission, and in working ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Allan's mates with awe Heard of the visioned sights he saw, The legend heard him say; But the Seer's gifted eye was dim, Deafened his ear, and stark his limb, Ere closed that bloody day. He sleeps far from his Highland heath, But often of the Dance of Death His comrades tell the tale On picquet-post, when ebbs the night, And waning watch-fires glow less bright, And dawn ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... the petals of the roses in your hand, but leave the stark core of the rose to perish on ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... affair, having patiently carried him to and from the abode of his lady-love throughout the summer just passed. Jedediah was as brimful of happiness as mortal man could be, and his rosy thoughts flowed forth in a kind of triumphant chant which would have driven Selena stark distracted had she been within hearing distance. What he said too was but a poor expression of what he thought, but to the trees and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pollen apparently equal-sized. I have just examined Hottonia, grand difference in pollen. Echium vulgare, a humbug, merely a case like Thymus. But I am almost stark staring mad over Lythrum (On another occasion he wrote (to Dr. Gray) with regard to Lythrum: "I must hold hard, otherwise I shall spend my life over dimorphism."); if I can prove what I fully believe, it is a grand case of TRIMORPHISM, with three different pollens and three stigmas; I have castrated ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Vladimir and a crowd of nobles and officers supped at the 'Ermitaj' and when they were all good and drunk, one of Vladimir's guests, Prince Galitzin, bet the host the price of the supper and a champagne bath for all, that he could induce the famous danseuse Mshinskaya to descend the stairs stark naked and walk among the tables below ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... single fact to a page full of heroic sentiment, had not let us guess that, beyond the frontiers of France, the enemy was doing frightful damage, with a rapidity and ruthlessness which, after the check at Liege, was a tremendous menace to the Allied armies. I understood these things better, in a stark nakedness of truth, when I found myself caught in the tumult of a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... long and the short of it is,' Mr. Nixon said at last, 'she's gone stark, staring mad, and we had to ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... summer-time, and between the heat, her passions, hunger, and wretchedness, her head was turned, and she became so mad that she went out of the house stark naked, and ran up and down St. Peter's Place, asking those who stopped her to take her to my house. This sad story went all over the town and caused me a great deal of annoyance. The poor wretch was sent to an asylum, and did ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... folk in the world to whom the finding of a dead man, lying grim and stark by the roadside, with the blood freshly run from it and making ugly patches of crimson on the grass and the gravel, would be an ordinary thing; but to me that had never seen blood let in violence, except ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... were assembled, appearing to wait the upshot of the struggle. The doctor had fired at a bird, and stooped to pick it up, when the sea-lion growled, and showing his tusks, seemed disposed to attack my companion. From where I was posted I shot the animal stark dead, and at the report of my gun the herd, seeing their companion fall, fled along the coast. Several of them threw themselves into the sea with such haste, that they jumped ten or fifteen roods, straight upon the pointed rocks. But I do not think they hurt themselves much, for their skin is very ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... went out into the world but some object started a train of thought of keen interest. He could hear snatches of her talk. It was about the trees, stripped bare now, and their mood sad probably because of their denudement. Suzanna gazed with concern at their stark limbs stretching out, no longer able to shelter people or to sing softly when the ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... clad in red or black velvet, a bell on its neck, a bell on its feet. The godfather holds its head, the godmother its hinder parts. 'Tis the demon Sidragasum who hath the power to make wenches dance stark naked." ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... night. On Sunday morning Ike went to the barn later than usual and hesitatingly. Even then he was first to enter. He found the drunkard's body hanging here over the mow, just about where we are sitting, stark and cold. It was a gruesome end to ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... were discovered at the depth of sixty feet, on the hill opposite where I was working. The talk was soon Vulcanish through the land. Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other gold-fields are in dust. Diggers, whom the gold fever had rendered stark blind, so as to desert Ballaarat for Mount Alexander and Bendigo, now returned as ravens to the old spot; and towards the end of February, '53, Canadian Gully was ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... the main road, near Stark's Hotel, is a lane giving access to the Downs and leading to the Avenue, across which is a small wooden bridge connecting Lord Tennyson's grounds. A quiet, secluded spot yet visited by crowds of admirers ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... cut-throats. While they prayed I stood watching the shadows deepen in the Jordan Valley, as no doubt Joshua once watched them from somewhere near that same spot before he marshalled his invading host. You could understand why people who had wandered forty years in a stark and howling wilderness should yearn for those coloured, fertile acres between the Jordan and the sea: why they should be willing to fight for them, die for them, do anything ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... inflexible, rigid, firm, unbending, inelastic, stark, impliable, rigorous, unyielding, inductile; strong, violent, forcible, inopposable; pertinacious, obstinate, tenacious, uncompromising, incompliant; constrained, formal, starched, affected, unnatural, precise, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of Schisms and Sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims.... Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... armed with invitations, singly and in small parties, whilst dancing was in progress, and in a house open to such mixed society had been admitted without arousing suspicion. There was little that was obscure or inexplicable in the coup; it was an amazing display of force majeure, an act of stark audacity. It pointed to the existence in London of a hitherto unsuspected genius. Such was ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... hopelessness fed on the same germs which gave it birth, until it became senseless, vacant-eyed, unreasoning, incurable melancholy, when the victim would lie for hours, without speaking a word, except to babble of home, or would wander aimlessly about the camp—frequently stark naked—until he died or was shot for coming too near the Dead Line. Soldiers must not suppose that this was the same class of weaklings who usually pine themselves into the Hospital within three months after their regiment enters the field. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... this True Gentleman of his is at best a compromise, mainly holiness, but a tinted kind of holiness—goodness in clean cuffs and with something neat in ties. He renounces the flesh and the devil willingly enough, but he wants to keep up a decent appearance. Now a stark saint I can find sympathy for. I respect your prophet unkempt and in a hair shirt denouncing Sin—and mundane affairs in general—with hoarse passion and a fiery hate. I would not go for my holidays with nor make a domestic pet of such a man, but I respect ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... slightest chance of it," was the answer. "The wind has fallen, it will be stark calm in a few minutes; for what I can see it will be a calm all the night through and ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... wailing people, foremost one who swung An earthen bowl with lighted coals, behind The kinsmen shorn, with mourning marks, ungirt, Crying aloud, "O Rama, Rama, hear! Call upon Rama, brothers"; next the bier, Knit of four poles with bamboos interlaced, Whereon lay, stark and stiff, feet foremost, lean, Chapfallen, sightless, hollow-flanked, a-grin, Sprinkled with red and yellow dust—the Dead, Whom at the four-went ways they turned head first, And crying "Rama, Rama!" carried on To where a pile was reared beside the stream; ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... "Didn't fancy you'd go stark staring mad as fast as all that," chuckled Diana. "It didn't take you very long to push that ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... find his case reported in the reports of the Supreme Court, January Term, 1820, 1st Stark's Reports, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... and worn, the memory of the horrid fight he had seen by the camp fire, and especially the picture of those three stark, bloody forms that lay stretched upon the earth, seemingly watching every movement he made, followed and weighed him down like some smothering incubus. Then he saw, more vividly than ever before, the mountainous task ahead. With no horse, and the hundreds of miles of mountain ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... between it and Fiume." One of the principal plenipotentiaries addressed a delegate who is an acquaintance of mine approximately as follows: "I cannot understand the spokesmen of the smaller states. To me they seem stark mad. They single out a strip of territory and for no intelligible reason flock round it like birds of prey round a corpse on the field of battle. Take Silesia, for example. The Poles are clamoring for it as if the very existence of their country ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... two weeks since the last one was shot outside the Japanese lines at night, and now there is nothing but regular soldiery encamped around us. This last Boxer was a mere boy of fifteen, who had stripped stark naked and smeared himself all over with oil after the manner of Chinese thieves, so that if he came into our clutches no hands would be able to hold him tight. The most daring ones have always been boys. He had crept fearlessly right up to the Japanese posts armed only with matches and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... fortune by it. Detectives were put upon his trail in his roaming about the fields, but he managed to elude all efforts at discovery. Being an intemperate man, one cold night after indulging in his cups, he was found by the roadside stark and stiff. Many rude attempts and imperfect searches have been made upon the assurances of Holden to discover the existence of antimony, but thus far in vain, and the supposed suppressed secret of the existence of it in Saugus ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... however, we passed a sort of old adobe ruin, out of which crept two bare-headed Mexicans, so badly frightened that their dark faces were pallid; their hair seemed standing on end, and they looked stark mad with fear. They talked wildly to the guide, and gesticulated, pointing in the direction of the Pass. They had been fired at, and their ponies taken by some roving Apaches. They had been in hiding for over a day, and were hungry and miserable. We gave them food and drink. They implored ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... woods, in a windy sky, high-flying crows were buffeted and blown about. From the stark trees a few phantom leaves clung, fluttering; and the whole scene was possessed by sinuous, whirling forms—mere glimpses of supple, exquisite shapes tossing, curling, flowing through the naked woodland. A delicate finger ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... great, heavy doors, the godowns presented a singular aspect. Never, in all the years that young Withers had been associated as junior partner in Withers, Ltd., and never in the few years since he had become Withers, Ltd. himself, had the godowns presented such an aspect. They were empty. Quite, stark, utterly empty. Not a bale, not a box, not a yard of calico was to be found anywhere about. The sunshine slanted in through the open door, and not a moat of dust danced in the rays, for nothing had been disturbed for some time, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... "So there I lay, stark with fear. But my visitor seemed to be very harmless. She drew up a chair by the side of the bed and took her seat, muttering something I couldn't catch. Then she bent over me and I felt her warm ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... tortured to my view of the question. This lasts till a reaction is brought about by some of the usual means: as time, and love of novelty, etc. I am still very obstinate and persist in my practices. I do not think Stark is an instance of vegetable diet: consider how many things he tried grossly animal: lard, and butter, and fat: besides thwarting Nature in every way by eating when he wanted not to eat, and the contrary. Besides the editor says in the preface that he thinks his death was brought ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... his icy hands and limbs and bathed his forehead, but the interval was long and trying before the stark figure on the floor shuddered slightly and struggled weakly ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence. Things had all been stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before. Now they were actualities that ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... long known as "the squaw campaign." Hand was a competent officer, but was much pestered, at Fort Pitt, with the machinations of tories, who were numerous among the borderers. Succeeded at Fort Pitt in 1778, by Brig.-Gen. Lachlan McIntosh, Hand in turn succeeded Stark in command at Albany. We find him, in 1779, actively engaged on Sullivan's campaign against the New York Indians, and in 1780 he became adjutant general. A member of congress in 1784-85, he was in 1790 ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... were reduced to the sorest straits. Soon after dark, the cannonading ceased and a silence of death fell over the fort, broken only by the groans of some poor, wounded fellow. The people within the fort went about talking in whispers. Three bodies, which they had not had time to bury, lay, stark and silent under the shed, and there were nine fresh graves on the hillside. In addition, more than thirty of the defenders ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the priceless butler, with whom I have already made friends. I seem to have a taste for butlers, though I've never lived with one. He is fifty-two and a volunteer, in stark opposition to the Squire, who jeers at him perpetually. Forest takes it calmly, seems even in a queer way to be attached to his queer master. But he never misses a drill for anybody or any weather, and ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old man, this superstitious nonsense is becoming an obsession to you," it said one fine April morning. "Yes, I mean what I say—an obsession! You must pull yourself together or you'll go stark mad, and then you'll probably go and throw yourself over the Embankment. That legend is all bosh! You're in the twentieth century, and you're not a ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... o'clock, and we kept on the march till nine. Then we rested again and walked on farther till twelve o'clock, when we were again overcome by weariness and the burning heat of the day. In a sandy slope facing northwards Kasim digged out cool sand in which we burrowed stark naked with only our heads out. To protect ourselves from sunstroke we made a screen by hanging up clothes on the spade. At six o'clock we got up again and walked for seven hours. Our strength was giving way, and we had to rest more frequently. ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... inventions have they not made in machinery for working wood? Is not England daily importing some new improvement therein from the American shores? Look again at their perfect and beautiful invention for the manufacture of seamless bags, by Mr. Cyrus Baldwin, and which he has at work at the Stark Mills. There are 126 looms in operation, all self-acting and each one making 47 bags daily; the bags are a little more than three and a half feet long, and chiefly used, I believe, for flour and grain. When they are finished, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... very amusing. This morning four of them stripped stark naked under my window, put off in a boat, and thirty yards from the shore fished for cockle fish, which they do by diving like ducks, throwing their feet up in the air as the ducks do their tails. The creatures are perfectly ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... fashion of settling a difference of opinion with the six-gun had long fallen into disuse, but Saguache was still close enough to the stark primeval emotions to wait with a keen interest for the crack of the revolver that would put a period to the quarrel between Soapy Stone and young Flandrau. It was known that Curly had refused to leave town, just as it was known that Stone ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... source from which all beauty, pleasure, interest, imagination springs. I contend, on the contrary, that this very variety is good in itself, nor do I agree with him that the whole of nature as it exists in fact is stark naught, and that there is nothing worthy of the contemplation of a wise man but that ideal perfection which never existed in the world nor even on canvas. There is something fastidious and sickly in Sir ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... far I sped Down moonless lanes from doubt to doubt; With hasting, hungry tread Up slopes of frost unpitying Where the last star went out; There fell I in unlifting dark, And lying while an aeon's wing Dragged o'er me bare, wind-stript and stark, As leafless planets dream of Spring, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... thoughts. She sat straight as a lance, tense, alive, keen, staring into the narrow bore of the high ceiled cut, thinking feverishly. Was Kenset really alive? Had Courtrey been square with her? Or was he even now lying stiff and stark somewhere in the high cuts, his dark eyes dull with death, that beating heart forever stilled? She caught her breath with a whistling sigh, felt her head swim at the picture. If he was—if—he—was—! She fingered the big guns at her hip ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... a peculiar gleam in the watery old eyes that were enlarged so enormously by the thick lenses. It was fear of the supernatural that lurked there, stark ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... Bill; it's Joseph and Emily, stark and stiff, and they've on'y been married a week. 'Ow awful they look! Pore ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild-flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects,—one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... truth about the pretended enchantment of Dulcinea, in which he himself had been the enchanter and concocter of all the evidence, he made up his mind at last that, beyond all doubt, his master was out of his wits and stark mad, so he said to him, "It was an evil hour, a worse season, and a sorrowful day, when your worship, dear master mine, went down to the other world, and an unlucky moment when you met with Senor Montesinos, who has sent you back to us like this. You ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... breakneck speed, bearing with them an old man on whom the inertia of death was plain, came across the frontiers of their little town, they met them with the convenient stones of their rocky streets, with their savage, stark-ribbed dogs, with offal from kitchen heap and donkey stall and ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... need not tell what a pleasure it was to me to hear again the old English services that once I had thought so long, as a boy will. And on that day, for the first time, it came to me that my man, Erling the viking, was a stark heathen, Odin's man. Truly he came to the church with me, and there he stood and stared at all that went on, quietly and reverently enough, but in such wise that I thought that he had somewhere seen the like before. So presently when we came forth from the church ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... "Lumieres eteintes," and descended, locking the door behind him. Everyone composed himself for miserable sleep. Everyone except Judas, who went on talking to Rockyfeller, and Rockyfeller, who proceeded to light one of his candles and begin a pleasant and conversational evening. The Fighting Sheeney lay stark-naked on a paillasse between me and his lord. The Fighting Sheeney told everyone that to sleep stark-naked was to avoid bugs (whereof everybody, including myself, had a goodly portion). The Fighting Sheeney was, however, quieted by the planton's order; whereas Rockyfeller continued ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... him, he did not see and could not feel. And so as the century is old the booming tide is full, and John Barclay in his power—a bubble in the Divine consciousness, a mere vision in the real world—stands stark mad before his phantasm, dreaming that it is all real, and chattering to his soul, "Hanno ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... by a motion of his arm through the wind and rain, summoned a kind of little, white, wooden sarcophagus which was skipping near us on the waves, sculled by two yellow boys stark naked in the rain. The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... stark seemed the corpse of the swordsman, as one or two of the guests raised him from the ground; but, when they began to open his waistcoat to search for the wound which nowhere existed, the man of war collected, his scattered spirits; and, conscious ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... men spring for their haversacks and powder-horns. For those three guns summon the minute men to be on the march for Bennington. All the afternoon before, the roar of cannon has faintly sounded from the northward, and the people knew that Stark was meeting Baum and his Hessians, on the Hoosac. One detachment of Stockbridge men is already with him. Does this new summons mean disaster? Has the dreaded foe made good his boasted invincibility? No one knows, not even ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... ship' (Letter LXIX.). 'I thought it had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs He hath led me through!' (Letter CIV.) 'I may be a book-man and yet be an idiot and a stark fool in Christ's way! The Bible beguiled the Pharisees, and so may I be misled' (Letter CVI.). 'I find you complaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do. I am not against you in that. The more sense the more life. The more sense of sin the less sin' (Letter CVI.). ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... convent, that had been unbearable but an hour since, held all her hope of peace and safety now, unless her father could be saved from his fate by some miracle of heaven. But that was impossible. He had given himself up as if he were determined to die. He had been out of his mind, beside himself, stark mad, in his fear that Don John might bring harm upon his daughter. That was why he had killed him—there could be no other reason, unless he had guessed that she was in the locked room, and had judged her then and at once, and forever. ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... glanced around; found herself alone, and the next instant she had the book in her hands. The title-page—Professor Somebody's ANATOMY—carried no information to her mind; so she began to turn the leaves. She came at once upon a handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece—a human figure, stark naked. At that moment a shadow fell on the page and Tom Sawyer stepped in at the door and caught a glimpse of the picture. Becky snatched at the book to close it, and had the hard luck to tear the pictured page half down the middle. She thrust the volume into the desk, turned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... half, till, what between excitement and hope, that maketh the heart sick, I grew so weary that I was actually contemplating a descent from the tree and a moonlight stalk. Such an act in ground so open would have been that of a stark staring lunatic, and that I should even have been contemplating it will show you the condition of my mind. But everything comes to him who knows how to wait, and sometimes too to him who doesn't, and so at last those elephants, or rather one ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... yet! Just enough light to show him the dark flags and swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge—his favourite flower that had the night's own colour on its curving crumpled petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why should a man feel lonely? The answer—as to some idiot's riddle—was: Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty was harmony, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go to make life fell away from him and the stark roots of it stood out. This had been his mate, this fragile little thing lying there, her listless eyes not meeting his, her limp fingers not responding to any touch. She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being, and that she had been further ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... forget that it was here the fathers of the Republic achieved their most decisive victory. The battle was fought in the town of Stillwater, at Bemis Heights, two and a half miles from the Hudson. The defeat of St. Leger and the triumph of Stark at Bennington filled the American army with hope. Burgoyne's army advanced September 19, 1777. The battle was sharply contested. At night the Americans retired into their camp, and the British held the field. From September 20th to October 7th the armies looked each other in the face, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... Park can offer; and this is all the work of Nature. How clear the water is! We can see everything on the bottom with perfect distinctness. Rich green water plants bend their limbs gracefully to the force of the current. Old dead sticks lie stiff and stark, that once were living branches swaying and singing above their present burial places, not dreaming of death and decay, so beautiful were they. Great rocks heave their brown backs up to the very top of the water. Beds of gravel still and clear, glisten in the depths. ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... and discoursing with him do find that he and Tom have promised a joynture of L50 to his mistress, and say that I did give my consent that she should be joyntured in L30 per ann. for Sturtlow, and the rest to be made up out of her portion. At which I was stark mad, and very angry the business should be carried with so much folly and against my mind and all reason. But I was willing to forbear discovering of it, and did receive Mrs. Butler, her mother, Mr. Lull and his wife, very civil people, very kindly, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 14. Finish business, and in afternoon we come to Brother Sprinkel's, one mile from Canton, Stark County, where we stay forty-third night. Very fine weather, ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban; Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man. Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare; Stark as your sons shall be—stern as your fathers were. Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether, But we do not fall on the neck nor kiss when we come together. My arm is nothing weak, my strength is not gone by; Sons, I have borne many sons, ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... to put away the dark; A million lighted windows brilliantly Inlay with squares of gold the winter night, But to us standing here there comes the stark Sense of the lives behind each yellow light, And not one ...
— Love Songs • Sara Teasdale
... the tapioca workers in the woods near Singapore, we found them busily engaged, the children running about stark naked, the parents clothed in the usual loose rags. Our party attracted great attention. We asked our guide to tell the people that we came from a country where the water in such a pond as that before us would become ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... porch I found a school of dirty ragged children reading the Psalms from the small English printed edition; not, however, learning to read by means of the alphabet or spelling, but learning to know the forms of words by rote; boys and girls together, all very slightly dressed, and one of the boys stark naked. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... meet, when shall we be * Again united after severance stark? And I shall win my choicest wish and view? * Blame end and Love abide without remark? Were Nile to flow as freely as my tears, * 'Twould leave no region but with water-mark: 'Twould overthrow Hijaz and Egypt-land * 'Twould deluge ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... muscles and sinews of his body were seen in strain; and what was more, the contortion of his mouth showed what agony of haste he suffered, and how his whole frame laboured to the toe-tips. Then there were drummers and men with flying garments, who ran stark naked toward the fray. Strange postures too: this fellow upright, that man kneeling, or bent down, or on the point of rising; all in the air foreshortened with full conquest over every difficulty. In addition, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... now make what is known as a 'brilliant' marriage. Did you ever wonder—everybody else did, I know—why I never married? Simply, my dear, because the only man I cared for didn't ask me ... and now I am forty. (How stark and almost indecent it looks written down like that!) At forty, one is supposed to have got over all youthful fancies and disappointments, and lately it has seemed to me reasonable to contemplate a common-sense marriage. A politician, wise, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Hillsborough, in the State of New Hampshire, on the 23d of November, 1804. His native county, at the period of his birth, covered a much more extensive territory than at present, and might reckon among its children many memorable men, and some illustrious ones. General Stark, the hero of Bennington, Daniel Webster, Levi Woodbury, Jeremiah Smith, the eminent jurist, and governor of the state, General James Miller, General McNeil, Senator Atherton, were natives of ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sir. But he made such a noise at fust—awful! And now he's as still as a corpse. And I did peep through the keyhole, and he was stretched stark." ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
