"Stench" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the observer could point out the exact measure of ground over which it rested. It hung low, and had the appearance of a light powdering of snow. In passing, it fell down on his small farm, and he smelt it very unpleasant, exactly like, he says, the bilge water of a ship—a sulphurous sort of stench. After the wind rose and cleared off those clouds or lumps of fog, there remained on the grass over which they had hung, as well as on the potato shaws, [stalks,] an appearance of grey dew or hoar frost. The next morning he noticed ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... throw the house down by the noise he made in it. To have witnesses to all this, the cure often sent for the beadle and other personages of the village to bear testimony to it. The spectre emitted, wherever he showed himself, an insupportable stench. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... out in the praise of French surgeons) came in while we were thus talking. I retired to the farther end of the room, and threw up a window for a little air, being half-poisoned by the effluvia arising from so many contaminated carcases; which gave me no imperfect idea of the stench of gaols, which, corrupting the ambient air, gives what ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... with the terrible stench of the other's foul breath and his filthy body. He teetered on his gnarled legs and side-stepped a vicious kick and then stepped in to gouge with straightened thumb at the other's eye. The thumb went true and ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... then in a rush and jostling, and left me alone; and most scared of all was the fool: never earned jester fairer his ass's ears. So rubbed I their foible, who first rubbed mine; for of all a traveller's foes I dread those giants twain, Sir Noise, and eke Sir Stench. The saints and martyrs forgive my peevishness. Thus I write to thee in balmy peace, and tell thee trivial things scarce worthy ink, also how I love thee, which there was no need to tell, for well thou knowest it. And oh, dear Margaret, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... foreman who was supervising it. It was a question which concerned only me and Mother Earth who seemed to be doing her best to balk us at every turn. I forgot the sticky, wet clay in which I had floundered for nine hours, forgot the noisome stench which at times we were forced to breathe, forgot my lame hands and back. I recalled only the problem itself and the skill with which the man they called Anton' handled his crow bar. He was a master ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... empty stomach into Steerage No. 1 was an adventure that required some nerve. The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves into their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... counter-mines, in which the enemy were either withstood at the point of the sword, or baffled by some other warlike contrivance; as by filling casks with feathers, which, being set on fire and placed in the mine, choked out the assailants by their smoke and stench. Where towers were employed for the attack, the defenders sought to destroy them with fire; and where mounds of earth were thrown up against the walls, they would dig holes at the base of the wall against which the mound rested, ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... fallen light and there rose that hot, sickening reek, that suffocating stench that is like unto nothing on earth save one of these floating hells, and the which, if a man hath but smelled it once, he shall ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... that snake-sacrifice began to pour clarified butter into the fire, terrible snakes, striking fear into every creature, began to fall into it. And the fat and the marrow of the snakes thus falling into the fire began to flow in rivers. And the atmosphere was filled with an insufferable stench owing to the incessant burning of the snakes. And incessant also were the cries of the snakes fallen into the fire and those in the air about to fall ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... answered Porringer. "Does he wish to die before his time of the fever, that he lets this graveyard mist and stench creep in ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... tiresome and wretched journey of nine days. At length we reached Fontainebleau, where we remained two days to rest ourselves as well as the horses. In passing through its forest, which is very fine, we were almost poisoned by the stench occasioned by dead men and horses. We saw the palace, and the ink on the table where Bonaparte had signed his abdication was so fresh that it came off by rubbing it a ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse—the agonized, twisted, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... be. Give her time," said Beetle. "She'll twine like a giddy honeysuckle. What howlin' Lazarites they are! No house is justified in makin' itself a stench in ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... very sore and could not be healed, but tormented him day and night with grievous pains, making him groan and cry aloud. And when men were troubled with his complainings, and also with the noisome stench of his wound, the chiefs took counsel together, and it seemed good to the sons of Atreus, King Agamemnon and King Menelaues, who were the leaders of the host, that he should be left alone on the island of Lemnos. This matter they committed to Ulysses, who ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... cannot hold a fouler form— A thing of more unholy loathsomeness! Its heavy eyes are dim and bleared with blood, Its jaws, by strong convulsions fiercely worked, Are clogged and clotted with mixed gore and foam! A nauseous stench its filthy shape exhales, And through its heaving bosom you may mark The constant preying of a quenchless flame That gnaws its heartstrings! while a harsh quick moan Of mingled wrath, and madness, and despair, Perpetually issues from its lips;— And with unequal ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... are heard in air; then swoops amain The covey well nigh in that instant, rends The food, o'erturns the vessels, and a rain Of noisome ordure on the board descends. To stop their nostrils king and duke are fain; Such an insufferable stench offends. Against the greedy birds, as wrath excites, Astolpho with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the flavour of this fruit which the real Sakai calls sumpa. I can but repeat that it is exquisite and far superior to any sweet dainty prepared by cook or confectioner. There is nothing to equal it, and in eating one does not discern the least smell as the disagreeable stench comes from the husk alone and the worse it is, the more delicate is the taste of ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... foot by the rapid movements of the buffaloes, or missing his footing in the cliff is urged down the precipice by the falling herd. The Indians then select as much meat as they wish; the rest is abandoned to the wolves, and creates a most dreadful stench. The wolves which had been feasting on these carcasses were very fat, and so gentle that one of them was killed ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... He ordered the overseer of the spectacles and wild beasts to be scourged in fetters, during several days successively, in his own presence, and did not put him to death until he was disgusted with the stench of his putrefied brain. He burned alive, in the centre of the arena of the amphitheatre, the writer of a farce, for some witty verse, which had a double meaning. A Roman knight, who had been exposed to the wild beasts, crying out that he was innocent, he called him back, and ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... We had sad stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... of Sudan, of the Shafia sect. Their country is a desert of two months' extent; the first part is termed Zayla, the last Makdashu. The greatest number of the inhabitants, however, are of the Rafizah sect. [7] Their food is mostly camels' flesh and fish. [8] The stench of the country is extreme, as is also its filth, from the stink of the fish and the blood of camels which ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... piquant accompaniment of comedy in "Pagliacci," the opera which followed so hard upon its heels. Since then piquancy has been the cry; the piquant contemplation of adultery, seduction, and murder amid the reek and stench of the Italian barnyard. Think of Cila's "Tilda," Giordano's "Mala Vita," Spinelli's "A Basso Porto," and Tasca's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... architecture from the ground up. You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug. I will spare nothing—for your sake. I will stir up the cesspool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious, hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture—the nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic architecture, I will show you also the kind of architecture our "cultured" people believe in. And why do they believe in it? ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wholly hide; his broken shoes were covered with dust; his coarse hair came in a plume through his tattered hat; his red, sodden face, at once fierce and timid, was rusty with a fortnight's beard. He offended the eye like a visible stench, and the wretched carrion seemed to shrink away from our gaze as if he were aware of ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... feast upon rich dainties of the land. When lo, with sudden dreadful rush from out the mountains hap The Harpy folk, and all about their clanging wings they flap, And foul all things with filthy touch as at the food they wrench, And riseth up their grisly voice amid the evilest stench. ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... cried, 'but the stench of these filthy wretches is enough to stap one's breath. It is, by the Lard! Smite my vitals if I would venture among them if I were not a very rake hell. Is there a danger of prison ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; "Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy's in the air; it's a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it's a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... humanitarianism. Self, and after self a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was the innermost stench of the humanitarianism, and Mr Swinburne holds his nose with one hand while he waves the censer with the other. Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr Gladstone, take refuge in humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is a pigsty, where liars, hypocrites, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... been placed above it. I should have observed that I had reason to congratulate myself the ship was new and well caulked, and that not a leak existed throughout her length, for had any bilge-water been in her the stench would have been insufferable, and would soon either have deprived me of life or produced a serious sickness. As it was, considering what ships' holds generally are, the air was comparatively pure, and I did not suffer much from the confinement. The fact ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... down the streets, not one of them has come to us to be buried. Though we should be loth to be any hindrance to our good friends the physicians, yet we cannot but take notice what infection Her Majesty's subjects are liable to from the horrible stench of so many corpses. Sir, we will not detain you; our case in short is this: Here are we embarked in this undertaking for the public good. Now, if people should be suffered to go on unburied at this rate, there is an end ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... me enter within that wall in order to drag out for her a spirit from the circle of Judas. That is the lowest place, and the darkest, and the farthest from the Heaven that encircles all. Well do I know the road: therefore assure thyself. This marsh which breathes out the great stench girds round about the woeful city wherein now we cannot enter ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... plateau spreads out before him. It is edged on one side by a sheer drop to unimaginable depths, on the other the uprising crags overhang in horrible menace. The plateau is strewn with bleaching bones, and from beneath the overhanging rocks comes a fetid stench. Now the figure is lost again, and the dreadful straining eyes search vainly for the fair face and beckoning hand. His heart labours and great pain is in his chest. For he is high up in the mountain air, and ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... seemed in another world, by being transported from Europe to America. Our senses had been changed from what they had been the night and day before, while listening to the hoarse sounds of the mariners, when the abyss of the sea was at our feet, and when we drank fetid water, and inhaled the stench of pitch. In the Prior's cell of the Convent of Vera Cruz, we listened to a melodious voice accompanied with an harmonious instrument, we saw treasures and riches, we ate exquisite confectioneries, we breathed amber and musk, with which he had perfumed his sirups and conserves. ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... tract. But at the moment I am lost in a desert; well, by the grace of God, so much the worse for me! How gladly I shall abandon this sort of thing, never to return to it to my dying day! Depicting the modern French bourgeois is a stench in my nostrils! And then won't it be time perhaps to enjoy oneself a bit in life, and to choose ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... and therefore is polluted (Psa 51: 5). 'Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?' (Job 14:4). The soul comes from God's hand, and therefore as so is pure and clean: but being put into this body, it is tainted, polluted, and defiled with the taint, stench, and filth of sin; nor can this stench and filth be by man purged out, when once from the body got into the soul; sooner may the blackamoor change his skin, or the leopard his spots, than the soul, were it willing, might purge itself of this pollution. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... paces in width, and about eight feet high—the roof being roughly arched. The walls and roof were covered with thick, black, greasy soot; and an indescribably horrible stench, which increased the further they advanced, made them almost vomit. They found that where the cave curved to the left, it ended in a circular chamber about eight paces in diameter, and at one side of this crouched the four old hags, ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... two months in that city, where I left a dozen louis, without either my health or understanding being the better for it, except from a short course of anatomy begun under M. Fitz-Morris, which I was soon obliged to abandon, from the horrid stench of the bodies he dissected, which I found it impossible ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... expect old heads on young shoulders, nor wonder if people, lifted from the dunghills of the world, have some stench and rags of their old vices hanging about them still. That thought should moderate our expectations of the characters of converts from heathenism, or from the degraded classes at home. And it should be present to ourselves, when we find in ourselves sad recurrences ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a diminutive shocking semi-occasionally, provided the act comes about as a natural course of events. There were many things about the college and clinic rooms that were, to me, gruesome and repulsive. The dissecting-room, with its stench and debris from dead bodies, was the crucial test for me. I wonder now that I stayed with it as long as ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... and hairy tarantula scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path. And the hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day's march and every detail of the day's fight; the stench of dead horse and dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the hill. And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping through long, green, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath of the woods, of the pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense of smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close rooms, and put the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole world of wild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city- dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-air objects; they are quick, delicate, and discriminating. When I go to town, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... have played, thought Hal; and waves of repulsion swept over him. He had come with love and curiosity, but both motives failed here. How could a man of sensitive nerves, aware of the refinements and graces of life, learn to love these people, who were an affront to his every sense—a stench to his nostrils, a jabbering to his ear, a procession of deformities to his eye? What had civilisation done for them? What could it do? After all, what were they fit for, but the dirty work they were penned up to do? So spoke the haughty race-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, contemplating ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... playing leaned forward, pipes or cigarettes in their mouths, their stomachs pressed against the table, their eyes narrowed and excited. The air was a stench of stale smoke; the ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... evillest of our nights instead of being nights of pleasure and marriage-joys. But what befel me was the greater evil because, instead of sleeping abed with my bride, I lay in the wardrobe, a black hole, frightful, noisome of stench, truly damnable; and my ribs were bursten with cold." In fine the young man told his father the whole tale, adding as he ended it, "O dear father mine, I implore thee to speak with the Sultan that he may set me free from this marriage. Yes, indeed 'tis a high honour for me ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... of the old world seems to have gone wild—Oscar Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went to jail!—a degenerate dynasty!—hiding the stench of spiritual rot with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking the unspeakable with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of modern culture. And, ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes, because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying and the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... atomic weight 79.96), a chemical element of the halogen group, which takes its name from its pungent unpleasant smell ([Greek: bromos], a stench). It was first isolated by A.J. Balard in 1826 from the salts in the waters of the Mediterranean. He established its elementary character, and his researches were amplified by K.J. Loewig (1803-1890) in Das Brom und seine chemischen Verhaltnisse ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... imagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them, that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most of them—their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperating trail of stench will not be rapidly fined away.[6] I do not think that it is asking too much of the reader's faith in progress to assume that so far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless, smooth-running, not obnoxious ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... frequently even in extreme cold weather, the greater part of the night, and this is kept up often for a month. No cremation or burying in a grave was practiced by them at any time. Pained by often coming on skeletons in trees and the stench of half-consumed remains in the brush, and shocked by the frequent mutilations visible, I have reasoned with the poor savages. In one case, when a woman was about to cut off a finger in evidence of her grief for the loss of ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... sun shining on the deck above them, the never-ceasing fire of the kitchen, which was situated alongside their place of confinement, created such a stifling heat, that the prisoners had to take off their shirts to relieve their agony. The horrid stench arising from so many persons being crowded together, and the entire want of the means of cleanliness, caused the inmates to become covered with vermin. They were also tormented by the intolerable thirst which no means were ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... enough and to spare had I seen Of hard and pinching want midst our quiet fields and green; But all was nothing to this, the London holiday throng. Dull and with hang-dog gait they stood or shuffled along, While the stench from the lairs they had lain in last night went up in the wind, And poisoned the sun-lit spring: no story men can find Is fit for the tale of their lives; no word that man hath made Can tell the hue of their ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... answered the merchant, laughing, 'and will not be burnt out for the next fifty years; it lies there a hundred fathoms deep in the earth.' When the Devil heard this he screamed awfully, and went off with a most intolerable stench." [119] ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... terrible eyes that flashed lambent fire like those of Cynna,(2) surrounded by a hundred lewd flatterers, who spittle-licked him to his heart's content; it had a voice like a roaring torrent, the stench of a seal, a foul Lamia's testicles and the rump ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... men worked well. By sunrise I was fighting the dogs and the stench in the Sacs village, and by eleven the same morning I was on my way again with eighty braves following. The Sacs were such clumsy people in canoes that I did not dare trust them on the water, so we arranged to make a detour to the west and reach the ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... sun grew intensely hot, and the stench drawn up by it from the marshes which the river drains was something too awful, and caused us instantly to swallow precautionary doses of quinine. Shortly afterwards the breeze died away altogether, and as rowing our heavy boat against stream in the heat was out of the question, ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... into foxed Drinks while they are working in the Tun or Vat, that its Fire and Salts may break the Cohesions of the Beer or Ale, and burn away the stench, that the Corruption would always cause; but then such Drink should by a Peg at the bottom of the Vat be drawn off as fine as possible, ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... carefully brushed his coat, put on a green satin necktie and a purple embroidered waist-coat, and walked briskly towards the house of the widow. But, alas! as he drew near to the dwelling a most horrible stench greeted his nostrils, a sense of great depression came over him, and upon pausing before the house his body began to tremble and his eyes rolled wildly in ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... which is done to her in making her swear and in proclaiming her publicly as an adulteress. Giotto has also expressed with great realism a man afflicted with sores, as all the women who are about him, disgusted by the stench, turn away with various contortions in the most graceful manner imaginable. Then again the foreshortening in a picture containing a number of lame beggars is highly praiseworthy, and should be much prized by ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... of the great stench that they smelt, and went up to the fire, where the gentleman drew out of his bosom a handkerchief all dyed with the melted sugar, and on opening his robe, lined with fox-skin, found it to be ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... improvements in travelling as compared with times within his recollection. He said that before the railways were constructed he went to London by boat from Gravesend, and the river was so bad that he had to keep his handkerchief to his nose all the way to avoid the stench. This was long before the days of Thames Embankments and other improvements in ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... about, exposed to the view of those who were awaiting a similar fate; and thus the dead were the means of destroying the sick, and the sick those who were in health, both by fear and by the filthy state and the noisome stench of their bodies. Some preferring to die by the sword, even rushed alone upon the outposts of the enemy. The violence of the plague, however, was much greater in the Carthaginian than the Roman army; for the latter, from having been a long time before Syracuse, had become more habituated to ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... sworn enemy. He fills himself up with cheap truths, with gnawed morsels of musty wisdom, and he exists like a storeroom where a stingy housewife keeps all sorts of rubbish which is absolutely unnecessary to her, and worthless. If you touch such a man, if you open the door into him, the stench of decay will be breathed upon you, and a stream of some musty trash will be poured into the air you breathe. These unfortunate people call themselves men of firm character, men of principles and convictions. And no one cares to ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... rue du Temple the three friends entered one of the oldest houses in that street and passed up a shaking staircase, the steps of which, caked with mud, led them in semi-darkness, and through a stench peculiar to houses on an alley, to the third story, where they beheld a door which painting alone could render; literature would have to spend too many nights in suitably ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... mire and stench of the street rise houses which seem to topple forward into the morass beneath; each storey overhangs the last, until the trowsy gables almost rub against each other at the top, and nearly shut out every breath of air or glimpse of sky. Close above the pavement, and ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary, secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga—all six, according to their turbans, followers of Islam—discussed matters that appeared to ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... advanced we saw the skeletons and carcasses of numerous mules; some perfectly blanched by the wind, others still partly covered with flesh, on which numberless galenachas, or black vultures, were busily feasting. The stench proceeding from others not long dead, close to which we had ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... words stench and stink in Old English meant merely "smell" or "odour." One could then speak of the "sweet stench" of a flower; but in the later Middle Ages these words came to have their present meaning of ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry, crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,—I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2]. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... was a thief) "did not amount to one shilling." In all these houses gin, moreover, was sold at a penny the quartern. Housed thus, in conditions destructive of "all Morality, Decency and Modesty," with the street for bed if they fall sick ("and it is almost a Miracle that Stench, Vermin, and Want should ever suffer them to be well"), oppressed with poverty, and sunk in every species of debauchery, "the Wonder in Fact is," cries Fielding, "... that we have not a thousand more Robbers than we ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... on the ceiling—no charm of ornament, no comfort of construction even, in the furniture. Here were no viciously-attractive pictures on the walls—no enervating sweet odors in the atmosphere—no contrivances of ventilation to cleanse away the stench of bad tobacco-smoke and brandy-flavored human breath with which the room reeked all night long. Here, in short, was vice wholly undisguised; recklessly showing itself to every eye, without the varnish of beauty, without the tinsel of wit, without even so much as the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... mosquitos, they breed in the mine and are carried up on the men's clothes. Often these pests were so bad that the men lay out in the yard at night instead of going to bed—anyway, in the hot weather the stench from the beds is ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... large item in my list of wonders: all of a sudden the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison-walls above, with their canopy of lurid smoke; the dreary, sloppy, broken pavement; the horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools; the utter want of form, colour, life, in the whole place, crushed me down, without my being able to analyse my feelings as I can now; and then came over me that dream of Pacific Islands, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... a few,— Because in half a score of haughty minds The night lay black and terrible, thy winds, O Europe! are a stench on heaven's blue. Thy scars abide, and here is nothing new: Still from the throne goes forth the dark that blinds, And still the satiated morning finds The unending thunder ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... and to purify with their light the atmosphere of the world. But, truth to tell, these brooms have been stirring up dust from the gutters of passion and sin, and these lamps have been offending men's nostrils by their smoky stench ever since man knew himself. And they shall continue to do service in the same cause as long as human nature remains what it is. But Christ did not bring His faith on earth to be destroyed by the lilliputian ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... addiction of the Dutch to tobacco. It is, he says, the succedaneum to purify the unwholesome exhalations of the canals. "A Dutchman's taciturnity forbids his complaining; so that all his waking hours are silently employed in casting forth the filthy puff of the weed, to dispel the more filthy stench of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... is my head," Towy said. "Near the Oven we are. Blow your noses of the stench. Young youths, herd ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... out of a window and behold, close by, the unspeakable rag-fair of that foul quarter, with its yells and cries rising up and stench of cheap cooking. We saw some small Renaissance closets, still with their ceilings and fire-places, where tradition says a last Savelli was stabbed. A feudal fortress this, and, like those of the hills round Rome which these ruins mimic, raising its ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... to be looked at; its effluvia is too fetid to be endured. What is to be done with the carcase? We cannot dwell in its neighbourhood. It would be impossible long to inhabit the same globe with it: its stench were enough to pollute and poison the atmosphere of our planet. It must be buried or burned. It cannot be allowed to remain on the surface of the earth: it would breed a plague, which would infect, not a world only, but a universe. It is in this ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... once if we would reach Ravellos (our Spanish town) before night. So I to Dawson's chamber, and he to Moll's, and in a little while we all shivering down to the great kitchen, where is never a muleteer left, but only a great stench of garlic, to eat a mess of soup, very hot and comforting. And after that out into the dark (there being as yet but a faint flush of green and primrose colour over towards the east), where four fresh ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... put it in the candle, which she very innocently did, to her and the whole room's astonishment. But when the first went off she threw the rest upon the tea-table, where, one after the other, they all went off, with much noise and not a little stench, to the real joy of most of the women present, who don't dislike an opportunity of finding fault. Lady Lucy, indeed, was plentifully abused, and Mr Hobart had his share; and common fame says he has never had a card since. Few women will curtsy to him; and I question ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... suffered myself, though not without regret, to be conducted out of this fresh sylvan scene to the dusty, pompous parterres of the Greffier Fagel. Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale, poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces, and retain the freedom of stinking in spite of their endeavours: but perhaps I am too ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... motor-cars an' scours the country, but they never sees it. They never 'ears the birds singin', an' they misses all the flowers. They never smells the vi'lets nor the mayblossom—they on'y gits their own petrol stench wi' the flavour o' the dust mixed in. Larst May I was a-walkin' in the lanes o' Devon, an' down the 'ill comes a motor-car tearin' an' scorchin' for all it was worth, an' bang went somethin' at the bottom o' the thing, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of coir is a dirty and offensive occupation. The husk of the cocoa-nut is thrown into tanks of water, until the woody or pithy matter is loosened by fermentation from the coir fibre. The stench of putrid vegetable matter arising from these heaps must be highly deleterious. Subsequently the husks are beaten and the fibre is separated and dried. Coir rope is useful on account of its durability and power of resisting ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, or houses so miraculously tall? What gloom their shadows cast upon the ground! It is well the swinging lamps in those endless colonnades are kept burning throughout the day; we should otherwise have the darkness ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... opinion of your charity and your love. Once before have I branded you as mockeries of the idea of Christianity. Now I say to you, you are hypocrites. You are like carrion birds who soar high up in the ether for a while and then swoop down to revel in filth and rottenness. The stench of death is sweet to you. Putridity is dear to you. As for you who have done this work, you need pity. Your own soul must be reeking with secret foulness to be so basely suspicious. Your own eyes must have cast unholy glances to so soon accuse the eyes of others. As for ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... their claws to convey the fragments to their mouths. Seizing whatever weapons were handy, such as stones or paddles, we commenced a war upon the monsters — whose numbers were increasing by leaps and bounds, and whose stench was overpowering. So fast as we cracked their armour others seized the injured ones and devoured them, foaming at the mouth, and screaming as they did so. Nor did the brutes stop at that. When they could they nipped ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the bottom, I discovered by the aid of the little light that came from above the nature of this subterranean place, it seemed an endless cavern, and might be about fifty fathom deep. I was annoyed by an insufferable stench proceeding from the multitude of bodies which I saw on the right and left; nay, I fancied that I heard some of them sigh out their last. However, when I got down, I immediately left my coffin, and getting at a distance from the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... an eating-house, with rows of natives squatted on benches, and with large kettles full of evil-smelling messes. The crowds in the streets vie with the crowds in the stores in the noise that they make; the air reeks with the odors of sweating men, the smell of unsavory food, the stench of open gutters. This panorama of naked bodies, of wild-eyed yellow faces drawn with fatigue and heat passes before ones' eyes for an hour. Then the senses begin to reel and it is time to leave this scene of Oriental life that is far lower and more repulsive than the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... pitched the tents, to our disgust, near the village, and with the stench of carrion not far off; much better places might have been taken, but this was selected probably in consequence of the invitation from the shaikh. Our short remainder of twilight was employed in viewing the inscriptions ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... a city pavement, By the ash and garbage cans, In the stench and rolling thunder Of motor trucks and vans, There sits my little lady, With brave but troubled eyes, And in her arms a baby That cries and cries ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... foulness of their speech and presence? When the aggregate filth of both sexes shall have met together at the polling stations, as it will be sure to do, we hardly think any chaste or modest home-loving woman will go near this stench unless compelled to ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... throwing spears that whizzed and whirred over the crouching crew. And ever the flames leaped higher. From a source unseen, but cunningly selected to utilize wind and stream, fresh oil was poured on the water; the sides of the brigantine crackled and blistered with an overpowering stench ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... dark dungeon, where the damp and stench were intolerable, and nothing could be seen until a light was procured, they found something lying on filthy straw that had human shape. The hair and beard were long and overgrown; the features, begrimed with filth, were such as the sharpest eye could not recognize; ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... on a noble plan To show us that a Judge can be a Man; Through moral mire exhaling mortal stench God-guided sweet and foot-clean to the Bench; In salutation here and sign I lift A hand as free as yours from lawless thrift, A heart—ah, would I truly could proclaim My bosom lighted with so pure a flame! Alas, not love of justice moves my pen To praise, or to condemn, my fellow ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... somewhere outside, and they heard him running down the garden. Some of the men snatched their rifles, rushed to the window, and threw it open. Four or five shots rang out simultaneously, and the stench of cordite was wafted back on the sharp morning air as the man from Stettin fell in a crumpled heap, his face buried in a clump of violets. The sergeant went ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... be squeezed by the heavy floes outside. It was snowing lightly all day long; but I went ashore, walking along the ice-foot to the next river, and up to the summit of Black Cape. An occasional walk on land was a relief from the stench and disorder of the ship, for the dogs kept the Roosevelt in a very unclean condition. Many persons have asked how we could endure the presence of nearly two hundred and fifty dogs on the deck of a small ship; but every achievement has its drawbacks, and it must not be forgotten ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... great inconvenience, and some disease, at the Asylum. This focus of effluvia, together with the general and copious use of similar materials in manuring the adjacent fields, occasioned an intolerable stench, and generated diarrhoeas, in the early part of the spring. When the grass and weeds, however, were grown sufficiently to protect the surface of the soil from the sun and wind, this effect entirely ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... time the Bluebottle and the Flesh-fly perch on the trellis-work, make a short investigation and then decamp. Throughout the summer season, for three whole months, the apparatus remains where it is, without result: never a worm. What is the reason? Does the stench of the meat not spread, coming from that depth? Certainly it spreads: it is unmistakable to my dulled nostrils and still more so to the nostrils of my children, whom I call to bear witness. Then why does the Flesh-fly, who but ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... I defie all Counsell, all redresse, But that which ends all counsell, true Redresse: Death, death, O amiable, louely death, Thou odoriferous stench: sound rottennesse, Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperitie, And I will kisse thy detestable bones, And put my eye-balls in thy vaultie browes, And ring these fingers with thy houshold wormes, And ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the first three streets which the Germans traversed there was not a single house left. There was not a house in the town but had been pillaged. All doors had been burst open. There was nothing, nothing left. The stench in the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... an indefinite period. A most horrible fate now stared the crew in the face, for although they had food enough to last them for many weeks, they only had a very limited supply of water, and the intense heat and terrific stench from the weeds ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... his dreadful work, and half-skeleton hands, with fingers spread and bent as if still clutching the foe in death-agony, protruded above the surface; mixed with these, and unburied, were the putrefying carcases of camels and mules—the whole filling the air with a horrible stench, and the soul with a fearful loathing, which ordinary language is powerless to describe, and the ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... ah! my proud beauty, the effervescence of hayseed is less noxious than the stench odors inhaled from dissipation and vice, notwithstanding the fact that they are perfumed over with all the garish compliments and ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... fine horses, and plenty of other cattle; but their way of life, whether rich or poor, is always the same. As we entered their tents they arose, and cast a sheep's hide over their bodies. The filth and stench of ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... indeed, without medicine, but they were without physicians." They used traditional family recipes, and had numerous gods and goddesses of disease and healing. Febris was the god of fever, Mephitis the god of stench; Fessonia aided the weary, and "Sweet Cloacina" presided over the drains. The plague-stricken appealed to the goddess Angeronia, women to Fluonia and Uterina. Ossipaga took care of the bones of children, and Carna was the deity presiding ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... emblems of senatorial debate. Let him remember that the swagger of Bob Acres and the ferocity of the Malay cannot add dignity to this body.... No person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least, on this floor. The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us. If manufacturing activity means Progress, the town must be more advanced than the country; and the field laborers ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... my flesh Was naked of me, when within these walls She made me enter, to draw forth a spirit From out of Judas' circle. Lowest place Is that of all, obscurest, and remov'd Farthest from heav'n's all-circling orb. The road Full well I know: thou therefore rest secure. That lake, the noisome stench exhaling, round The city' of grief encompasses, which now We may not enter without rage." Yet more He added: but I hold it not in mind, For that mine eye toward the lofty tower Had drawn me wholly, to its burning top. Where in an instant I beheld uprisen At once three ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... letters down to Tebuan by Velo that night, and then work went on with renewed energy—Barry with the boats, Rawlings and the Greek amid the stench of the decaying oysters on the sandbank; and Barradas, silent, grim, and determined, attended to the brig, and began to prepare her for sea again, assisted ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... to pillow their dying heads at last on wreaths of snow. To add to the unheard-of miseries of these poor people, scurvy in its worst forms attacked them; and the air of many of their camping places was heavy with the stench arising from the dead bodies of men and animals that had perished by ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... seemingly deserted. Yet I was sensible that eyes were furtively watching us from behind barred windows, and I fancied that I heard whispers—mere guttural sounds, that conveyed nothing to the ear, save, perhaps, a warning that we were on unholy ground. The path we trod was foul with refuse; the stench was sickening; the most forlorn cur would surely have slunk from such a kennel; and here, here, to this lazar-house of all that was unclean and infamous, came of ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... not wake easily; he conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet. Then he fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air. He kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin stove, sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... The stench of carbonized flesh scoured Jason's nostrils. Stupidly, he stared down at the headless, shoulderless, armless torso; black ... sooty ... against the snowy gleam of the floor; conscious of the sidelong, round-about approach of ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... The guests were unutterably shocked to observe that its expression had changed from the mysterious but fascinating smile to a vulgar, sordid, bestial grin, which cast a cold shadow of moral nastiness into every heart. The transformation was accompanied by a sickening stench of ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... round the place, I spied what seemed to me a little cupboard, over the mantel-shelf, and I told John to see if I was right. The lad mounted upon a chair, and pulled open a small door, but almost fell to the ground with the dreadful stench which seemed to ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... large, that they cannot carry it out of the hive, as they invariably do the bodies of the smaller insects which may have intruded, and it appears that their sense of smell is very acute. What, then, do they do to avoid the stench arising from the dead body of this large moth? Why, they embalm it, covering it entirely with wax, by which it no longer becomes offensive ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... will be accomplished, and the best man will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his back-alley for ever—his filthy back-alley, his beloved back-alley, where he is at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free will and with enjoyment. I've been talking foolishly. I've no words left. I use them at random, but it will be as I have said. I shall drown in the back-alley, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... fly over the highest Walls; I must therefore inform him, that their strong Holds have all the open Places cover'd with Canvass stretch'd from Side to Side; upon which is strew'd an Herb so venemous, that, in six Hours after it has been expos'd to the Sun, it emits so pestiferous a Stench, that no Fowl can approach it by many Yards, but what will fall dead; and this Stench, by the Effluvia mounting, is no way offensive to those below. This is the Reason their Sieges are rather Blockades, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... heaven-grasping ambitions seemed suddenly insecure and founded upon shifting sands. The incense the sycophant world burned before him became a stench in his nostrils. The fetishes he had tossed to the crowd now faced him as real gods; and they were not to be blinded with dust, nor bought with gold. The specious and tortured verbiage of twisted law never for one moment deceived the open ears of Justice, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... it is! Yet our lantern has not gone out. But it seems to grow darker and darker. And at night, when all is shut up, how one smells the odour of the oils in which the shrouds are saturated, and, more intolerable still, the sickly stealthy stench, almost, of all these ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... "Stench," answered Rames. "I smell nothing except the lilies on the water. Let us wake it up, it would be silly to go now. Surely you ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... low, black, miserable place; Its roof was rotting; and above it hung A cloud of murky vapor, sending down Intolerable stench on all around. The place was silent, save the creaking noise, The steady motion of a dozen pumps, That labored all the day, nor ceased at night. Methought in it I heard a hundred groans; Dropping of widows' tears, and cries of orphans; Shrieks of some victim ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... into the highway between the houses, where already there was not room for two carts to pass. How may I tell my anger and misery as I passed through that endless suburb, the great hooting engine of the train venting its stench, and smoke, and noise into the very windows of the houses, chasing me down the narrow way, round intricate corners, over tiny piazzas, from the very doors of churches. Yet, utterly weary at last, covered ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... a wooden bowl and was rushing past the king on my way to the brook. It was ten yards away. When I got back and entered, the king was within, and was opening the shutter that closed the window-hole, to let in air and light. The place was full of a foul stench. I put the bowl to the woman's lips, and as she gripped it with her eager talons the shutter came open and a strong ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one. A small degree of ambition warms the mind in pursuit of fame, through the paths of honor; while too large a portion tends to unfavorable directions, kindles to a flame, consumes the finer sensations of rectitude, and leaves a stench behind. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death; and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench, and poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... N. fetor[obs3]; bad &c. adj. smell, bad odor; stench, stink; foul odor, malodor; empyreuma[obs3]; mustiness &c. adj.; rancidity; foulness &c. (uncleanness) 653. stoat, polecat, skunk; assafoetida[obs3]; fungus, garlic; stinkpot; fitchet[obs3], fitchew[obs3], fourmart[obs3], peccary. acridity &c. 401a. V. have a bad smell &c. n.; smell; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget |
