"Eyewitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gloomy reports which one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune. Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their peril,' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in the hour of their supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been released, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for lost and made ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of 1775, a year before the surrender of Fort Washington, yet his company may be taken as a fair sample of what the riflemen of the frontiers of our country were, and of what they could do. We will therefore give the words of an eyewitness of their performances. This account is taken from the Pennsylvania Journal of ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... fact, which can be placed beyond the region of dispute, and by which the truth of his narrative may be held to stand or fall. I shall confine myself for this purpose to what he states at first hand in his capacity as an eyewitness, and to two salient cases which may be taken to represent the whole. Among the rest some are in course of investigation, and so far as they have gone are promising similar results; the locality of others has been so chosen as to baffle ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... six colors bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his best friend stabbed in the back before morning; you see giddy poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-painted valentines; you catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and scent the plotting; you are an eyewitness to a slice out of the life of the most sinister, the most artistic, and the most murderous period of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... sorrow that even the nearest relatives neglected the sepulchral duties, sacred beyond all others in the eyes of a Greek. Nor is there any circumstance which conveys to us so vivid an idea of the prevalent agony and despair as when we read, in the words of an eyewitness, that the deaths took place among this close-packed crowd without the smallest decencies of attention—that the dead and the dying lay piled one upon another not merely in the public roads, but even in the temples, in spite of the understood defilement of the sacred ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... oak I see I mean to rend such another branch, large and stout like that, with which I am determined and resolved to do such deeds that thou mayest deem thyself very fortunate in being found worthy to come and see them, and be an eyewitness of things that will with ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Mr. Keith here, who was an eyewitness, to give his testimony as to the events of last ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the souls of the turbulent burghers. A brilliant train of "dukes, princes, earls, barons, grand masters, and seignors, together with most of the Knights of the Fleece," were, according to the testimony of the same eyewitness, in attendance upon his Majesty. This unworthy son of Ghent was in ecstasies with the magnificence displayed upon the occasion. There was such a number of "grand lords, members of sovereign houses, bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries going about the streets, that," as the poor soul protested ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... tatters, and trample it under foot, as he did upon one occasion, without remorse or compunction, because it was held by others to give property in man, though for himself he denied that it did so, or that it sanctioned slavery in any shape,—as he did, I say, though I was not an eyewitness of the outrage, and have only the report from others who were. If it was only a flourish, like that of Edmund Burke, when he suddenly lugged out the dagger before the upturned smiling eyes of his patient compeers, and Sheridan—or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... reverent words sound to you like the product of devout imagination, embellishing with legend the facts of history? To me their very restrainedness, calmness, matter-of-factness, if I may so call it, are a strong guarantee that they are the utterance of an eyewitness, who verily saw what he tells so simply. There is something sublime in the contrast between the magnificence and almost inconceivable grandeur of the thing communicated, and the quiet words, so few, so sober, so wanting in all detail, in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... though not actually, present. The search was over and the seekers gone, personally wiser than they would tell, and officially reporting that (to the best of their knowledge and belief, based on evidence, and especially on the assurances of an unexceptionable eyewitness, to wit, Monsieur Vignevielle, banker) Capitaine Lemaitre was dead and buried. At noon there had been a wedding in the little church. Its scenes lingered before Pere Jerome's vision now—the kneeling pair: the bridegroom, rich in all the excellences ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... explorer were new and important, that the aspect of every thing which he then saw would, under the influence and progress of civilization, soon be changed, and that it was historically important that a portrait Sketched by an eyewitness should be handed down to other generations. It was likewise necessary for the immediate and successful planting of colonies, that those who engaged in the undertaking should have before them full information of all ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... that for some days after Josephine's return Bonaparte treated her with extreme coldness. As he was an eyewitness, why does he not state the whole truth, and say that on her return Bonaparte refused to see her and did not see her? It was to the earnest entreaties of her children that she owed the recovery, not of her husband's love, for that had long ceased, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... canoes, burn down her house, and slay her family scatheless; but one thing you must not do: you must not lay a hand upon her sleeping-mat, or your belly will swell, and you can only be cured by the lady or her husband. Here is the report of an eyewitness, Tasmanian born, educated, a man who has made money—certainly no fool. In 1886 he was present in a house on Makatea, where two lads began to skylark on the mats, and were (I think) ejected. Instantly after, their bellies began to swell; pains took hold on them; all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was on board a Pasha's steamer under M. de Lesseps' command, and they passed a flooded village where two hundred or so people stood on their roofs crying for help. Would you, could you, believe it that they passed on and left them to drown? None but an eyewitness could have made ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... author tells us himself, that he was present at Agincourt, and "sat on horseback with the other priests, among the baggage, in the rear of the battle." We have, therefore, the evidence of an eyewitness; and by that testimony I have regulated the general representation of this noble play, but more ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... I hope?' he said quietly. 'I will tell it so that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of it.' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... relate the many extraordinary accounts of the unfortunate girl at New-Hackensack, your belief might, perhaps, be staggered. I shall therefore only inform you of what I was an eyewitness to. Last Sunday afternoon myself and wife went to Dr. Thorn's, and after sitting sometime, we heard a knocking under the feet of a young woman that lives in the family; I asked the Doctor what occasioned the noise—he could not tell, but replied, ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... statement addressed to the public, describing the interview with the Secretary of War, which he calls a "Council of War." I did not then deem it necessary to renew a matter which had been swept into oblivion by the war itself; but, as it is evidence by an eyewitness, it is ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... narratives of episodes in the Prophet's life from 608 onwards under Jehoiakim and Sedekiah to the end in Egypt, soon after 586; apparently by a contemporary and eyewitness who on good grounds is generally taken to be Baruch the Scribe: Chs. XXVI, XXXVI-XLV; but to the same source may be due much of Chs. XXVII-XXXV (see ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... summons. Again the general marched them ashore after another council of war, and then and there he abandoned his personal conquest of Canada. His army literally melted away, "about four thousand men without order or restraint discharging their muskets in every direction," writes an eyewitness. They riddled the general's tent with bullets by way of expressing their opinion of him, and he left the camp not more than two leaps ahead of his earnest troops. He requested permission to visit his family, after the newspapers had branded him as a coward, and ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Holland and coming out at Madrid). Mr. O. Howe Lurid, our special correspondent, writing from "Somewhere near Somewhere" and describing the terrific operations of which he has just been an eyewitness, says: ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... developments, the classic style is powerless to fully portray or to record the infinite and varied details of experience. It rejects any description of the outward appearance of reality, the immediate impressions of the eyewitness, the heights and depths of passion, the physiognomy, at once so composite yet absolute personal, of the breathing individual, in short, that unique harmony of countless traits, blended together and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was not one of the elect.—— I can only refer to the narrative which Wodrow has inserted in his history, and which he justly calls plain and natural. That narrative is signed by two eyewitnesses, and Wodrow, before he published it, submitted it to a third eyewitness, who pronounced it strictly accurate. From that narrative I will extract the only words which bear on the point in question: "When all the three were taken, the officers consulted among themselves, and, withdrawing to the west side of the town, questioned the prisoners, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the president, 'you have engaged to furnish the committee with some important particulars respecting the affair at Yanina, and you have stated that you were an eyewitness of the event.'—'I was, indeed,' said the stranger, with a tone of sweet melancholy, and with the sonorous voice peculiar to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... It seemed to an eyewitness of this encounter that the veteran statesman was decidedly worsted. "The House was divided between admiration for the new actor on the great stage of national affairs and reverence for the retiring chief," wrote a friend in after years, with more loyalty than accuracy.[229] The Whig ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... French Republic and Napoleon from one at least of the many unjust aspersions cast on them. I feel it also my duty to state on every occasion that I, belonging to an army sent to Egypt in order to expel them from that country, have been an eyewitness of the good and beneficial reforms and improvements that the French made in Egypt during a period of only three years. They did more for the good of that country in this short period, than we have done ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... here given of the mutiny, is nearly in the words of Pricket, an eyewitness of the event. It is difficult at first to perceive the whole enormity of the crime. The more we reflect upon it, the blacker it appears. Scarcely a circumstance is wanting, that could add to the baseness of the villainy, or the horror of the suffering inflicted. The principal ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... whom Mademoiselle de l'Enclos narrated her admission and interview at Versailles. In reproducing the whole of this scene, I have not altered the sense of a word; I have only sought to make up for the charm which every conversation loses that is reported by a third party who was not actually an eyewitness. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... where Ned and Conseil were waiting silently. Captain Nemo filled me with insurmountable horror. Whatever he had once suffered at the hands of humanity, he had no right to mete out such punishment. He had made me, if not an accomplice, at least an eyewitness to his vengeance! Even ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... only which is within, that all the tumult and all the trouble doth proceed. The next, that all these things, which now thou seest, shall within a very little while be changed, and be no more: and ever call to mind, how many changes and alterations in the world thou thyself hast already been an eyewitness of in thy time. This world is mere change, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... Sage and Saint-Simon, it is not, perhaps, the one who is instinctively thought of as a novelist who really was the greater romancer. They each wrote at the same time as Montesquieu. Saint-Simon narrated the age of Louis XIV as an eyewitness, both with spirit and with a feeling for the picturesque that were alike inimitable, expressed in a highly characteristic fashion, which was often incorrect, always incredibly vigorous, energetic, and masterful. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... hawk like its evil genius: it is most singular that so small a creature should thus overcome one that is the formidable enemy of so many of the feathered race. I should have been somewhat sceptical on the subject, had I not myself been an eyewitness to the fact. I was looking out of my window one bright summer-day, when I noticed a hawk of a large description flying heavily along the lake, uttering cries of distress; within a yard or two of it was a small—in the distance ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... writers—these draw you aside from your natural piety. Perhaps you have seen impious men growing old and leaving their children's children in high offices, and their prosperity shakes your faith—you have known or heard or been yourself an eyewitness of many monstrous impieties, and have beheld men by such criminal means from small beginnings attaining to sovereignty and the pinnacle of greatness; and considering all these things you do not like to accuse the Gods of them, because they are your relatives; and so from some ...
— Laws • Plato
... place this great fallen being was no doubt an eyewitness. He beheld God working in rearranging the chaos of the original earth produced by his revolt. He saw how God created man. He heard how God spoke to man and gave him to possess his former estate which he had lost by his rebellion. He beheld God putting man and woman into the garden of Eden. ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... correct the opinions of the modern Rabbins, who say that only one of the seven lamps burned in the day-time; whereas our Josephus, an eyewitness, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... him; we may even date his visit to somewhere about 450 B.C. He was not indeed the only Greek of his day, nor the first, to get so far afield. But his account nevertheless neither is nor professes to be purely that of an eyewitness. Like other writers in various ages,[8] he drew no sharp division between details which he saw and details which he learnt from others. For the sake (it may be) of vividness, he sets them all on one plane, ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... sails spread, cleaving the dark waters which reflected in their mirror a sight of armed men, who were marching along the side of the loch, in order to scour the coast. Never had anything been seen of the kind on Loch Lomond before. "The men on the shore," writes an eyewitness, "marched with the greatest ardour and alacrity. The pinnaces on the water discharging their patararoes, and the men their small arms, made so very dreadful a noise thro' the multiply'd rebounding ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... should like to know how the girl is carrying sail; how she eats, whether she seems contented. An eyewitness, now"— ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... I keep assuring you, as a competent eyewitness, that nobody snitched Angela from you during ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... up or not, you are all as good as dead," exclaimed the other in a burst of frankness. "Good Lord, boy, do you dream that they figure on letting any eyewitness escape to a town and set the officers of law on their trail? You can hold them off here until night, but when darkness comes you'll be wiped out like the blowing out of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... An eyewitness assures us that Pizarro was visibly affected, as he turned away from the Inca, to whose appeal he had no power to listen, in opposition to the voice of the army, and to his own sense of what was due to ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... come in. I have had the proper steps taken to collect all the men who are in the rear. If McClellan wants to fight in the morning, I will give him battle again. Go!" Without a word of remonstrance the group broke up, leaving their great commander alone with his responsibility, and, says an eyewitness, "if I read their faces aright, there was not one but considered that General Lee was taking a fearful risk."* (* Communicated by General Stephen P. Lee, who was present at the conference.) So the soldiers' sleep ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... capital instantaneous photographs illustrate Mr. Hemment's well-written record, and not the least of the book's recommendations is the outspoken simplicity of its style, and the strong impression it makes upon the reader of being the uninfluenced evidence of an eyewitness who 'draws the thing as he sees it' and without exaggeration or ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... the foundations of that encyclopaedic, if superficial knowledge, which in after years he so delighted to parade. On leaving Athens he set forth on lengthy travels, in the course of which he spent a large portion of his patrimony (Apol. 23). He speaks of the temple of Hera at Samos as an eyewitness (Florida 15), and elsewhere mentions a visit to Hierapolis in Phrygia (de mundo 17). Returning from the East he came to Corinth, where—if we may accept his identification of himself with the Lucius of the Metamorphoses—he fell into the clutches of the priests ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... in that country—the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the elephant, are described with considerable spirit and fidelity; and even the form and colours of the fabulous phoenix, are delineated with all the confidence of an eyewitness. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... there was an attempted rapprochement between the Germans and ourselves. The more famous gave the Division a mention by "Eyewitness," so we all ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... not to hear this. There was a glorious crash coming, and for his part he meant to be an eyewitness. Followed a marvelous silence, during which with fateful celerity the Minnie Williams stalked the unsuspecting Higgins house. The seaward end of the wharf on which it stood had rotted away and fallen in, and nothing now remained but the line of spiles, which rose out of the water like a row of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... on The Mountain was still uppermost in his mind. Of course he knew the common stories about fascination. He had once been himself an eyewitness of the charming of a small bird by one of our common harmless serpents. Whether a human being could be reached by this subtile agency, he had been skeptical, notwithstanding the mysterious relation generally felt to exist between man and this creature, "cursed above all cattle ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... furnished, in somewhat briefer language, the story I have just read to you, and many of its more important details have subsequently been verified by me on application to other sources, so that in that paper you have the testimony of an eyewitness to the facts, as well as the support of legal evidence. "Some forty years after Virginie's death, monsieur, family reasons obliged me to seek temporary release from duty and come to England; and, finding that circumstances would keep ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... with our idioms and unaccustomed to platform speaking. Whatever might be the subject, he always talked with an air of modest truthfulness, and gave the most dramatic and startling narratives, like an eyewitness on the stand, testifying under oath. Never shall I forget Warsaw, nor the battle of Navarino, as rapidly sketched by him in a sort of parenthesis, while he was lecturing upon a very different subject; he wanted an illustration, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... katapiptei]) from the golden to the iron age. It fades, as it were, into the light of common day in a double sense: for the events succeeding this reign Dio himself was able to observe as an intelligent eyewitness. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... that a single flake had yet been formed in the atmosphere, which, on closing of our shutters, looked through the clear-obscure, indicative of a still night and a bright morning. But we had not seen the moon. She, we are told by an eyewitness, early in the evening, stared from the south-east, "through the misty horizontal air," with a face of portentous magnitude and brazen hue, symptomatic, so weatherwise seers do say, of the approach of the Snow-king. On such ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... left Mannheim for the second and last time, when, in 1784, Christophine paid him a visit, escorted thither by Reinwald; who had begged to have that honour allowed him; having been at Solituede, and, either there or on his road to Mannheim, concluded his affair. Streicher, an eyewitness of this visit, says, "The healthy, cheerful and blooming Maiden had determined to share her future lot with a man whose small income and uncertain health seemed to promise little joy. Nevertheless her reasons were of so noble a sort, that she never repented, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... returning on its steps, the chariot which bore the royal standard was in the thickest of the fight. Ere long, however, the Saracens were unable to sustain the impetuous assault of the Franks. Boha-Eddin, an eyewitness, having quitted the Mussulman centre, which was put to the route, fled to the tent of the Sultan, where he found the Sultan, who was attended only by seventeen Mamelukes. While their enemies fled in this manner, the Christians, hardly ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... to take him from the breach, and that he did not know when the head was severed, which must have been done by one of the bullets of which there were so many whizzing about in all directions. Some may doubt the correctness of this story, but I, being myself both a hearer and an eyewitness to the scene at the surgeon's, can vouch for the accuracy of it. Certainly Filer's appearance was not altogether that of composure, for he was not only rather frightened at the fearful exposure of his own body at the breach and across ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... traveller, who was recently an eyewitness of the scene, is particularly entitled to be heard on this interesting subject, even at the risk of extending this note to a disproportionate length: "The Dead Sea below, upon our left, appealed so near to us, that we thought we could have rode thither in a very short space of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... seem to imagine that anarchy existed at Alton from the commencement of these disputes. Not at all. "No one of us," says an eyewitness and a comrade of Lovejoy, "has taken up arms during these disturbances but at the command of the Mayor." Anarchy did not settle down on that devoted city till Lovejoy breathed his last. Till then the law, represented in his person, sustained itself against its foes. When ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... Had an eyewitness described as he felt the event which Mr Etty has undertaken to paint, would he have told of or portrayed to the mind's eye, and prominently, the very houses, with all their real accidents of material and colours, so that, were a tile off a roof, your sympathy must be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... am reminded of a tragedy to which I was an eyewitness. Nearly every night for a week or more two of us dined at the same restaurant on the Rue de Rivoli. On the occasion of our first appearance here we were confronted as we entered by a large table bearing all manner of special delicacies and cold dishes. Right in the middle ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb |
