"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saw in a san-benito and mitre a figure which resembled that of Pangloss! I rubbed my eyes, I looked at him attentively, I saw him hung; I fainted. Scarcely had I recovered my senses than I saw you stripped, stark naked, and this was the height of my horror, consternation, grief, and despair. I tell you, truthfully, that your skin is yet whiter and of a more perfect colour than that of my Bulgarian captain. This spectacle ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... all, alert, But somewhat cowed, There sits a stark-faced fellow, Beetle-browed, Whose black soul shrinks away From a lawyer-ridden day, And has thoughts he ...
— Songs of Action • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the forenoon, a man came to Emain Macha. He was grim and swarthy, with great hands and arms. He made no reverence to Concobar or to any of the Ultonians, but standing stark before them, spake thus, not fluently:—"My master, Culain, high smith of all Ulster, bids thee to supper this night, O Concobar; and he wills thee to know that because he has not wide territories, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... the stumbling-block, it proved to be the rigid body of a man, and that man was Ormiston, stark and dead, with his face ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... from the body in this life; he must see the Past as it is in its great disembodied minds; he must behold the famous heroes of Troy as they are in reality, not as they are in the glamor of poetry. As tested by their life and deeds he sees them below in the Netherworld; Greek souls stark naked in Hades he beholds, and then ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to its savage heart; now, exerting all its magic of illusion in delicate and exquisite mirages, all of its luring fascination which has drawn men to it from the beginning of the world; and now revealing itself desolate and unashamed in all of its repulsive, stark aridity. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... just as I was about to enter, a human corpse sprang into the doorway. It had motion, but I knew that it was a tenant of that dark and windowless abode, the grave. It opened full upon me its dull, glassy, lustreless eyes; stark, cold, and hideous it stood before me. It lifted a stiffened arm and struck me a blow in the face with its icy and almost fleshless hand from which reptiles fell and writhed at my feet. I turned to ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... to kneel, Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight, A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together, The maim'd and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there, Some half-kill'd attempted to crawl ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether worthy of notice, and ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... impression left on my mind by my experiences in the Great Republic. It may well be that a long list of inconsistencies might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... into the face of Silas Stark, President of the United States of the World, and nodded grimly. "I'll do ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... hid our men; but our men were clever and did not show, but moved away and away, always south; and the noise of the battle withdrew itself southward, where we could hear the sound of big guns. So it fell stark dark, and Sikandar Khan found a deep old jackal's earth amid rocks, into which we slid the body of Kurban Sahib upright. Sikandar Khan took his glasses, and I took his handkerchief and some letters and a certain thing which I knew hung round his neck, and ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... rather potent eyes. His features in profile were pure Greek, and on his low forehead there was a touch of gold. His particular followers or disciples had the silly expression of a mesmerist's subjects; they sat in the dust stark naked and unashamed, and looked happy and ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... was a piece of cocoa-nut cloth tied round his middle. Why he wore it at all, goodness knows, for he would as often as not be running about stark naked. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... end. No regret, no remorse visited him. He was just alone again, that was all—alone, as in reality he had always been alone, without having the sense or power to see or to acknowledge it. All he had said had been the mere flotsam of the moment, and now it stood stark and irrevocable between ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... with bare decks, stark as gladiators, sombre and terrible, they conveyed a relentless significance heightened by the desolation of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... mind. You always did find out our secrets and give us a lift. Well, I never cared much for books, you know; but down yonder when the devil tormented me I had to do something or go stark mad, so I read both the books you gave me. One was beyond me, till that good old man showed me how to read it; but the other, this one, was a comfort, I tell you. It amused me, and was as pretty as ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... day-tale men(7) to feight for t' land, Then tell us we mun keep our staggarths(8) full. What's lasses, gauvies,(9) greybeards stark(10) i' t' hand, To strip wer kye, an' ploo, an' tew ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... that "the canker of peace" had sapped, if it had not destroyed, the virile qualities of the race, that luxury and learning had dried up at their source those primitive virtues of courage and hardihood which had been the leading characteristics of those stark fighters who had borne the banner of the Prophet from Mecca even to Cadiz. Tom by faction, by strife among themselves, they had succumbed to the arms of the Northern chivalry; by its warriors they had been driven out, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... fawn upon me. I heard him cry that he would try to love me, - not that he did, - and then I saw him running back towards the house. The next I saw was my own sword naked in my hand, and he lying at my feet stark dead, - dabbled here and there with blood, but otherwise no different from what I had seen him in his sleep - in the same attitude too, with his cheek resting upon his ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... singing Nonny, nonny' and see to-morrow, what a vengeance I will take for your 'mere suspicion in that kind'! But to the serious matter ... nay, I said yesterday, I believe—keep off that Burgess—he is stark staring mad—mad, do you know? The last time I met him he told me he had recovered I forget how many of the lost books of Thucydides—found them imbedded in Suidas (I think), and had disengaged them from his Greek, without loss of a ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... said I, as he turned his terrible eye to me, 'I bear you no malice, but we must try to get on in the world, you know.' The captain grinned and gave up the ghost. I went upon deck,—what a sight! Twenty bold fellows stark and cold, and the moon sparkling on the puddles of blood as calmly as if it were water. Well, signor, the victory was ours, and the ship mine; I ruled merrily enough for six months. We then attacked a French ship twice ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his bright shining sword, cleared of its ten years' rust, and struck him so strong a blow that his head was cleft asunder, and he fell stark dead to the ground. Thereupon Peter Unticare went in and told the rest how it was with the keeper, and at once they came forth, and with their weapons ran him through and cut off his head, so that no man should know who ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... little narrow street, a sad mixture of a military trench and a West of England cobbled court. And instead of going alone to my shady nook by that silvery stream, 1 was accompanied by nine adult members of the unemployed band, three boys, and sundry stark-naked urchins who seemed to be without home or habitation. One of these specimens of fleeting friendship was one-eyed, and a diseased hip rendered it difficult for him to keep pace with us; one was club-footed, one hair-lipped fellow had only half a nose, and they were nearly all goitrous. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... helpless; no luck worse than his. In the evening, Cossacks came round him; stript him stark-naked; threw him, face foremost, into the nearest swampy place, and went their way. One of these devils had something so absurd and Teniers-like in the face of him, that Kleist, in his pains, could not help laughing at remembrance of it. In the night some Russian ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... courage with mirth in De Aquila and Hugh, but stark mad courage of Rahere's sort I ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... we had no letters from home. We were actually marooned on Lemnos Island: as literally marooned on a barren desert isle as any buccaneer of the old Spanish galleon days. We went suddenly back to a savage life. We went down to bathe stark naked, with the sunset glowing orange on our sunburnt limbs. Here it was that Hawk proved himself a wonderfully good swimmer. He was lithe and supple and well-made—an extraordinary specimen of virile manhood—and he spent his fiftieth birthday ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... giving the crowning effect of orange and cornucopia in each one, and arranging the large packages below, after tiptoeing down the stairs with them so as not to wake the officially sleeping children, who were patently stark awake, thrashing or coughing in their little beds. The sturdy George had never been known to sleep on Christmas Eve, always coming down the next day esthetically pale and with abnormally large eyes, to the ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting
... of this arrangement he was very much troubled, for he felt that he had been the unwilling cause of the young wife's unhappiness, although entirely innocent of any wrong intention. So when Mrs. Robards had fully determined to undertake the journey to Natchez, accompanied only by Colonel Stark and his family, he offered to go with them as an additional protection against the Indians who were then especially active, and his escort was very gladly accepted. The trip was made in safety, and after seeing the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... peasant is added many a gewgaw, worn with a careless jaunty grace that fails not to carry with it a certain charm in spite of unkempt locks and dirty faces. The women wear a minimum of clothes and a profusion of beads and trinkets, and the children go stark naked or partly dressed. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... parallel hecatomb. There is something awful and dreadful about the orderliness of a great offensive, for while one's imagination is grasped by the grandeur and the organization of the thing, all one's faculties of intellect are revolted by the stark brutality of death ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity of flesh as could ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... parish of Portincross my father was the minister, lies on a hillside above the little bay of Caple, and looks squarely out on the North Sea. Round the horns of land which enclose the bay the coast shows on either side a battlement of stark red cliffs through which a burn or two makes a pass to the water's edge. The bay itself is ringed with fine clean sands, where we lads of the burgh school loved to bathe in the warm weather. But on long holidays the sport was to go farther afield among the cliffs; for there there were many deep ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... the Eldon Hole, where a falling stone was never heard to strike the bottom. This had been visited in the time of Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester, who caused an unfortunate native to be lowered into it to the full length of a long rope; when the poor fellow was drawn up again he was "stark mad," and died eight ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... stark mad—and stark naked—on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t'other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting card. She had been informed, it appeared, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... jes' like people sell hosses now. I saw a lot of slaves sold on de auction block. Dey would strip 'em stark naked. A nigger scarred up or whaled an' welted up wus considered a bad nigger an' did not bring much. If his body wus not scarred, he brought a good price. I saw a lot of slaves whupped an' I was whupped myself. Dey whupped ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... in the Niger Delta), it is, or was, customary for young women to go about completely nude before they were married. In Swaziland, until quite recently, unmarried women and very often matrons went stark naked. Even amongst the prudish Baganda, who made it a punishable offense for a man to expose any part of his leg above the knee, the wives of the King would attend at his Court perfectly naked. Among the Kavirondo, all unmarried girls are completely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... to confer, leaving her sitting before the fire, a stark figure that seemed to detach itself entirely from its surroundings and their companionship. At last, the coroner came to her side and touched ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... a bloodsucker of many a Christian's blood, and now thou shalt know what thou hast deserved at my hands," wherewith he lift up his bright shining sword of ten years' rust, and stroke him so main a blow, as therewithal his head clave asunder so that he fell stark dead to the ground. Whereupon Peter Vuticaro went in and certified the rest how the case stood with the keeper, and they came presently forth, and some with their spits ran him through, and the other with their glaves hewed him in sunder, ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... 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 ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... baneful night air. In the main room a drop-light with shade flung its radiance on a table and lit up the anxious faces of the few men gathered round it. It showed one poor fellow bolt upright, unspeaking, unmoving, his fixed white eyeballs staring into space, as though he would go stark mad. Those eyes have forever burned themselves into my brain, a pitiful protest against a ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... of this matter, in came Esquire South, all dressed up in feathers and ribbons, stark staring mad, brandishing his sword, as if he would have cut off their heads, crying "Room, room, boys, for the grand esquire of the world! the flower of esquires! What! covered in my presence? I'll ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... day, who should come in but Elliott, who was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott stared, and all ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... husband, and he had left his roots behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed not wisely but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white bowlders. But instead he moped about, fretting for his fair green fields, and few proudly cherished beasts,—especially the little old Kerry cow. And at his funeral the neighbors said, "Ah, bedad, poor man, God help ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... but 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... gentleman of over twenty years' experience, as governor of a lunatic asylum, assured the writer that next to drink, overdrawn tea was the most responsible agent for insanity. That week he had received a farmer's wife and five strapping sons all stark mad from the poison stewing by ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... "but fancy wasting any little sweetness one may possess on the desert air of Sandbay. I should simply go mad—stark, staring mad. Carrissima," she continued, "I suppose you know heaps and heaps of people. So did I when my father was alive—people who do things, whose names you read in the papers, who think for themselves and make others ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... happy wise, in ancient years, Dwelt the old nations in the age of gold; Nor had the fount been stirred of mothers' tears For sons in war's fell labour stark and cold; Nor trusted they to ships the wild wind steers, Nor yet had oxen groaning ploughed the wold; Their houses were huge oaks, whose trunks had store Of honey, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... rain. The tumbling hill streams were reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted timber, showing everywhere the scars of the wasting rapacity of man, stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen away into the depths of ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... wander through the world under a curse of laughter, praying only for the gift of tears to release her weary soul. Klingsor has gained a magic power over her, and, to use the language of modern theosophy, can summon her astral shape at will to be the queen of his enchanted garden, leaving her body stark and lifeless; but when not in his power she serves the ministers of the Grail in a wild, petulant, yet not wholly unloving manner. Gurnemanz tells the young esquires the story of the Grail, and together they ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... in the loft will be long enough,' whispered the rustic; 'but fetch the longest of the two ropes, and make haste. Oh, he's stark!' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... being charged with some deceit in a matter that had been committed to him, in order to his own vindication, horridly wished 'that the devil might put out his eyes if he had done as was suspected concerning him.' That very night a rheum fell into his eyes so that within a few days he became stark blind. His company being astonished at the Divine hand which thus conspicuously and signally appeared, put him ashore at Providence, and left him there. A physician being desired to undertake his cure, hearing how ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... ready to march; the muffled sound of breathing could be heard; the square was full of that glistening shower of pale sparks which bayonets give forth at night time. Above this abyss of shadows rose up black and stark the Column of July. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... her sudden brightness but hid a black abyss of bitterness and apprehension. What she had told me had somehow stricken me dumb. There seemed a stark sordidness in the situation that repelled me. She had arisen and was about to step over the fluke of the great anchor, when I ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... of the Druids— Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids; 840 Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs, Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease. I have seen my little lady once more, Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it, For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before; I always wanted to make a clean breast of it: And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... became visible a something floating in the circular pool formed by the wash of centuries; the pool he was intending to make his death-bed. At first it was indistinct by reason of the shadow from the bank; but it emerged thence and took shape, which was that of a human body, lying stiff and stark upon the surface ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... God that ever I chaip, Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip, But I in hell for geir wald be. The Devil said, 'Welcome in a raip: Renounce thy God, and cum ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the short of it is,' Mr. Nixon said at last, 'she's gone stark, staring mad, and we had to put ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... breeding in endeavouring to accommodate ourselves to the tastes and habits of those we were about to visit. "Do at Rome as the Romans do," is the essence of all politeness. As our friends were accustomed to be in naturalibus—vulgice, stark naked, we adopted their Adamite fashion, and, undressing, in we plunged. Our success was greater with the finny, than was that of any exquisite with the fair tribe. We captivated and captured pailfuls. We drove our entertainers into the narrow creeks in shoals, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... tendencies John Randolph set himself stark and grim. "The question is," said he, replying to Calhoun's new nationalism, "whether or not we are willing to become one great consolidated nation, or whether we have still respect enough for those old, respectable institutions [the States] ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... when he went away, 'Take care of my Rose, and I'll take care of your Phebe,' and not another thing could I get out of him, for I did ask questions. He stood by me like a hero, and kept Aunt Jane from driving me stark mad with her 'advice.' I don't forget that, and burned to lend him a hand somewhere, but he begged me to let him manage his wooing in his own way. And from what I see, I should say he knew how to do it," added Archie, finding it very delightful to gossip about ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... review. The fellows hadn't a rag on. Thus, in Nature's garb, we gave three cheers for the German flag on the Choising. The men on the Choising told us afterward 'we couldn't make out what that meant, those stark naked fellows all cheering!' The sea was too high, and we had to wait two days before we could board the Choising on Dec. 16. We took very little with us; the schooner was taken in tow. In the afternoon we sunk the Ayesha and we were all very sad. The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... sight from the scene of the disaster, and they had alight that night because somebody was sick; and they supposed the man saw the light and tried to reach it, but was too much exhausted by fatigue and the dreadful cold, for it seemed his clothes had all been torn off him by the waves; he was stark naked when found, and lying on the ground, which showed that he had struggled hard to get up after ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... her guide him to his chateau and there kept her. The woman pays in such affairs, be she white, brown, or black, all the complexions I have seen, and that Indian lass came to a sad end, being found stark one morning in bed, with a knife through her ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... squadron of trawlers for the protection of the Dogger Bank Fleet. At present prices—let alone the chance of the paying submarine—men would fish in much warmer places. His flagship was once a multi-millionaire's private yacht. In her mixture of stark, carpetless, curtainless, carbolised present, with voluptuously curved, broad-decked, easy-stairwayed past, she might be Queen Guinevere in the convent at Amesbury. And her Lieutenant-Commander, most careful to ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... you may touch up the story. You will not want to leave it so stark and bare. "They grow in a little place just made for them to grow in. It's in here, the place is, in mothers," and you give a friendly pat against your side. Many children ask where the place is, and many think it is the stomach. Other children have said ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... good of others when he frequently met with unsuitable returns? "I could tell you, sir," says Macklin. "Well do sir; you are a man of sense and observation, and I should be glad of your definition." "Why then sir, the cause is impudence—nothing but stark-staring impudence." ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... counsel they agreed to follow: to let out the womenfolk to meet the youth, namely, thrice fifty women, even ten and seven-score bold, stark-naked women, at one and the same time, and their chieftainess, Scannlach ('the Wanton') before them, to discover their persons and their shame[b] to him. [2]"Let the young women go," said Conchobar, "and bare their paps and their breasts and their swelling bosoms, and if he be a true warrior ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... perspiration, and my heart thumped wildly. For either I was stark, staring mad, or these were lines from Searles's "Lady Larkspur," the manuscript of which was carefully locked in ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... test of the utility of knowledge, is its promoting the happiness of mankind."—Dr. Stark on Diet, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... chalky white, the brass plate on the lintel glittered with the inscription, "Gregory Sartorius, M.D." Beside the gate a mimosa shook out its yellow plumage against the sky. Mimosa—in February! ... New York, reflected Esther, was in the clutch of a blizzard. She could picture it now, with its stark ice-ribbed streets, its towering buildings, a mausoleum of frozen stone and dirty snow. As for flowers—why, even a spray of that mimosa in a frosty florist's window would be absurdly expensive; one ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly, she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin hand nerveless. Her face was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely motionless, lying on her back with closed eyes. At the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... I would do it again, and twice as much, for freedom. Think of being cooped up in four stifling walls, shut in from the blessed sunshine and fresh air of heaven. I tell you that man would have kept me there until now, and should have gone stark, staring mad in half the time. Oh, dear!" cried Mollie, impatiently, "I wish I was a gypsy, free and happy, to wander about all day long, singing in the sunshine, to sleep at night under the waving trees, to tell fortunes, and wear a pretty scarlet cloak, ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... little to the wind, smiling faintly as if he rejoiced in its fine strength, as handsome as the horse he rode, as cleanly cut, as finely bred. The moon shone a little brighter on him than on any others of the six stark riders. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... she zee'd 'em come in—that they was dressed finer by half nor any of the family, with all their neckses and buzoms stark ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... our peoples melt In covert to abide; Now, crouched and still, to cave and hill Our Jungle Barons glide. Now, stark and plain, Man's oxen strain, That draw the new-yoked plough; Now, stripped and dread, the dawn is red Above ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... at the crudity of my methods. As a matter of fact a good deal of international misunderstanding could be avoided if the truth were always blurted out at once. The Italian thought I was stark mad. The Englishman, having a sense of humour, laughed and said, as I well recollect: "Your mission in life seems to be to tell home truths to the Balkans. It is very good for them. But I wonder that they put up with it." Both gentlemen commented on the grim matter-of-factness of ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... listening attentively to every word at the register at his side: "Ransom, if you don't want me to go stark ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king." Indeed, democracy is ever dreaming of "a nation of kings." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics," p. 268.] And that characteristic is truer of the democracy that came stark out of the forests and out of the furrows than of the democracy which sprang from protest against and ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... ranks. Lord Essex, however, after waiting a day and burying his dead, drew off from the field, and we, remaining there, were able to claim the victory, which, however, my son, was one of a kind which was scarce worth winning. It was a sad sight to see so many men stretched stark and dead, and these killed, not in fighting with a foreign foe, but with other Englishmen. It made us all mightily sad, and if at that moment Lord Essex had had full power from the Parliament to treat, methinks that the quarrel could ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... only the tips of his fingers when Barter had finally closed the sutures in the skull-pan of the ape, renewing again the ape's skull, with the brain of Keller inside. Keller was finished. He had not moved on the table. Even his chest stood still, stark and lifeless. Barter had not troubled to restore Keller's skull-pan. What was ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... according to his opinion, and in moral value, but in real effect commonly rob, sometimes murder, ever exceedingly wrong his neighbour. It is often the sole reward of a man's virtue and all the fruit of his industry; so that by depriving him of that, he is robbed of all his estate, and left stark naked of all, excepting a good conscience, which is beyond the reach of the world, and which no malice or misfortune can divest him of. Full then of iniquity, full of uncharitableness, full of all wickedness is this practice; and consequently full it is of folly. No man, one would think, of any ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... were ordered into the "brig," a jail-house between two guns on the main-deck, where prisoners are kept. Here they laid for some time, stretched out stark and stiff, with their arms folded over their breasts, like so many effigies of the Black Prince on ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... his crazed work, raised his head and listened. "My God!" he gasped hoarsely, "am I stark mad?" He thought he must be, for the voice of a human being came ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... "Stick—stark—staring madness," said the professor. "I, who have been out there for years, and who can be quite at home with the people, should have hard work to get through by the skin of ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... I have put myself in a passion once already with that abominable hussy, La Cibot, a porter's wife that sets up to judge her lodgers, forsooth, and insists that you have filched the money from the heirs; you locked M. Pons up, she says, and worked upon him till he was stark, staring mad. She got as good as she gave, though, the wretched woman. 'You are a thief and a bad lot,' I told her; 'you will get into the police-courts for all the things that you have stolen from the gentlemen,' ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... devils, I have discovered a new torture for her heart. She thought to solace her life with a love-episode! Sweet little epicure that she was! She shall have her little crooked lover, shan't she? Oh, yes! She shall have him, cold and stark and livid, with that great, black, heavy hunch, which no back, however broad, can bear, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... waves. Smooth forests of beech-trees, round and gray, swept over the knolls and slopes of land in a mighty ground-swell. But most of all, the multitude of pines and firs, innumerable and monotonous, with straight, stark trunks, and branches woven together in an unbroken flood of darkest green, crowded through the valleys and over the hills, rising on the highest ridges into ragged crests, like the ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Friederich Stark relates an incident that illustrates his abstraction. He called on Beethoven early one morning, and, being a friend, was given the privilege of looking him up. He went from room to room, and finally found him in his bedroom. He was just beginning to dress, his face thickly lathered with soap that ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... never so rough that we left its purpose dark; Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... the world,' replied Fagin. 'Are you mad, my dear, stark mad, that you'd walk into the very place where—No, Charley, no. One is enough ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... incomparable tea, snuff, and Hungary water, but impregnated the air of the country with such sober and salutiferous steams as very much comforted the heads and refreshed the senses of all that breathed in it. A discarded statesman that, at his first landing, appeared stark, staring mad, would become calm in a week's time, and upon his return home live easy and satisfied in his retirement. A moping lover would grow a pleasant fellow by that time he had rid thrice about the island: and a hair-brained ...
— English Satires • Various
... shrugged his shoulders and addressed his conversation to Jaime. His brother was crazy; he had a good head, a heart of gold, but he was mad, stark mad! With his exalted ideas, and his loud talk in the cafes, it was largely his fault that decent people felt a certain prejudice against—that they spoke ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... days without a token from her multiplied he came in as well for hours—and these indeed mainly on the bench of desolation—of sitting stiff and stark in presence of the probability that he had lost everything for ever. When he passed the Royal he never turned an eyelash, and when he met Captain Roper on the Front, three days after having been introduced to him, he "cut him dead"—another privileged consequence of a social ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... O, this is admirable! here I ha' stolen one of Doctor Faustus' conjuring-books, and, i'faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use. Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure, stark naked, before me; and so by that means I shall see more than e'er I ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... and John Barclay's whole consciousness was turned toward it; the real things of life about 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 ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... taste of their quality by pouring their broadsides into her; but, in consequence of the heavy sea which was then running, very few of their shot had taken effect. Two, however, which had struck her hull, had passed through the bulwarks and killed two of her men, whose bodies now lay stark and stiff on the main-deck, near where they had stood as their mates were now standing, full of life and manly strength. Paul's eyes fell on them. It was the first time he had seen death in its most hideous form. He shuddered ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... create a scandal. All the principal inhabitants were assembled in the cell, with his stark black corpse in their midst, when one of them made the following sensible suggestion: "We never could understand him when he was alive; it was easier to trace the flight of the swallow than to guess at his thoughts. Now that he is dead, let him still ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... stript stark naked in the Morning at Sunrising, and bound to a Post, so that he could not stir Hand nor Foot, but as he was mov'd; and was placed with his Face Eastward against the Sun. In the Afternoon they turned his Face toward the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... of oil aboard. They seemed to take a pleasure in learning our names, and, these known, they let pass no opportunity of using them, slipping them into sentences in the oddest manner. They themselves had few surnames—Adams, Fletcher, Christian, and Hobbs (the names of their forefathers, the stark mutineers of the Bounty)—but their Christian names were many and curious, sometimes days of the week or even dates. They told us that there was a child named after our Old Man, who had called off the Island the day after it was born, five ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actual furniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had been the fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarleton danseuse who finds herself in a monk's cell. None of those wall-pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed military brushes ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... receive grain before January first, unless they wished to deliver a vast amount of December wheat? Before Bannon's train came in he understood it all. A clique of speculators had decided to corner wheat, an enterprise nearly enough impossible in any case, but stark madness unless they had many millions at command. It was a long chance, of course, but after all not wonderful that some one in their number was a power in ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 breath on ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... des Beaux Arts, then, and all the good its students have done, as students, it is stark naught. When the men did anything, it was after they had left the academy, and began thinking for themselves. There is only one picture among the many hundreds that has, to my idea, much merit (a charming composition of Homer singing, signed Jourdy); and the only good that the Academy ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... delightful sensation to know that we could loll about in the glorious weather, secure a small string of stark, varnished trout with chapped backs, hanging aimlessly by one gill to a gory willow stringer, and then beat our train home by two hours by letting off the brakes and riding ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... grey 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, ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... seeing her. But just as he passed abreast of her hiding-place something prompted Benny to jerk up his head. He saw her and stopped suddenly; she saw his eyes. And she knew on the instant that if the man were not stark mad, at least he was not entirely sane. She lifted her rifle, cold all over; if he came another step ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... took it up slowly as though his deft and nervous fingers had gone numb. Before he opened it he looked at Joan and, in one sense, it was the last time he ever did look at her; for at that moment his stark spirit looked straight into hers, acknowledged its guilt, and bade her a ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... brigadier-general at the outbreak of the Revolution. He secured command of the Northern army, which had gathered to resist the great force which was marching south from Canada under John Burgoyne. He found the field already prepared by General Schuyler, a much more able officer. Stark had defeated and captured a strong detachment at Bennington, and Herkimer had won the bloody battle of Oriskany; the British army was hemmed in by a constantly-increasing force of Americans, and was able to drag along only a mile a day; Burgoyne and his men were disheartened ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... old lady said, smiling up at her. "I'm just so very happy. I am about to get my reward, my well-deserved reward at last, from all of my loyal subjects. You'll see." She paused and Malone felt a faint stirring of stark, chill fear. ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... time it was grey dawn, and we were working up in shore, without dreaming of breaking the blockade, when it fell stark calm. Presently the Spanish squadron, anchored under Punto Canoa, perceived us, when a corvette, two schooners, a cutter, and eight gunboats, got under weigh, the latter of which soon swept close to us, ranging themselves on our bows and quarters; and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was some quarter of a mile away, approaching him, leading the mustangs. Cleaving the horizon on four sides was a vast plain. On it was not a tree, nor even a hut. Here and there were clumps of palms and cacti, as stark as if cut from pale green stone. At vast intervals were short, isolated mountains, known in the vernacular as "buttes." On the ground was not the withered remnant of a blade of grass; but there were many fissures, and some of them were deep and wide. Of the things ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... and important is A. C. Flick, Loyalism in New York (1901); it is the result of exhaustive researches, and contains an excellent bibliography of printed and manuscript sources. Other studies in a limited field are James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (1910), and G. A. Gilbert, The Connecticut Loyalists (American Historical Review, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... tried again to plead with her; but in his mind's eye he saw that stiffening corpse below, lying stark and bloody on ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... three months should finish them. During the pursuit from Kongyin the Imperialists and villagers killed in one village 3000. I will say this much—the Imperialists did not kill the coolies and boys. The villagers followed up and stripped the fugitives stark naked, so that all over the country there were naked men lying down in the grass. The cruelties these rebels had committed during their raid were frightful; in every village there were from ten to sixty dead, either women—frightfully ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... as they were gone Odysseus walked slowly up and down the hall to see if any of the wooers still survived. But there was no sound or motion, save the tread of his own feet, to break the awful stillness in that chamber of death. There they lay, stark and silent, heap upon heap, like a great draught of fishes which have been hauled to shore in a drag-net, and have gasped out their lives on the beach. Having assured himself that he had not done the work negligently, he ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... heart in his mouth. The minutes, he knew, were precious, but he could not move. The wind in the trees moaned like some lost soul, and in his stark fear the beating of the drops on the leafy carpet startled him. He heard these because he was standing still, and the ceasing of his own footfalls emphasized the steady patter. Somewhere, in all that stormy ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... "Gone stark mad as any Tom o' Bedlam!"—then collared him once more, and said with a coarse laugh and an oath, "But mad or no mad, I and thy Gammer Canty will soon find where the soft places in thy bones lie, or I'm no ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fight was over, They found him stark and dead, Where all the bamboo thicket Was splashed and stained and red. No name was missed at roll call, Not one among them knew The slender, boyish figure ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... white ring-barked tree, or dead white stump starting out here and there, and the ragged patches of shade and light on the road that made anything, from the shape of a spotted bullock to a naked corpse laid out stark. Roads and tracks through the Bush made by moonlight—every one seeming straighter and clearer than the real one: you have to trust to your horse then. Sometimes the naked white trunk of a red stringy-bark tree, where a sheet of bark had been taken off, would start ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... kneel at the foot of the bush. Then the crisp, echoing report of Roscoe's rifle rang out, and on the instant the officer and the remaining soldier disappeared behind the leaf-covered hogshead. Tom was aware of the one German lying beside the bush, stark and motionless, and of Roscoe jerking his head and screwing up his mouth in a sort of spontaneous vexation. Then he looked suddenly at Tom and winked unmirthfully with a kind of ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the God, Newly the hills adorning, Told him mamma wou'd be stark mad, She missing prayers that morning; Damon, his arm around her waist, Swore tho' nought should 'em sunder, Shou'd my rough dad know how I'm blest, T'would make him ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... few days, perhaps, many of those light-hearted boys would be lying in the trenches, or in some ditch, stark and dead, or in some hospital ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... though faint, emaciated, and stark, He buoyed his boyish limbs, and strove to ply With the quick wave, and gain, ere it was dark, The beach which lay before him, high and dry: The greatest danger here was from a shark, That carried off his neighbour by the thigh; As for the other two, they could not swim, So nobody arrived ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the matter with you this morning? You moan and sigh as if you were in great agony! Are you really suffering so acutely? You seem to be all battered and bruised, like the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, after he had capered stark naked, for a love penance, among the rocks in the Sierra Morena, in humble imitation of his favourite hero, Amadis de Gaul. You look as if you had not slept at all last night, and had been lying upon hard sticks, rods, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... stretch of the bay, dwindling with the glint of two blades that flashed with clock-like regularity in the afternoon sun. Soon it reduced to a speck and was out of sight. Clark turned to his office, still contemplating the dignity of his visitor, the stark simplicity of this archaean aristocrat. How soon, after all, he pondered, might not he himself and his works look aboriginal beside the achievements which science had yet to unfold to the world? Then, glancing ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... Two little hours could span The gloom that bound me stark and grim (No melancholy pierced me through Before the 7.32 Had ravished Barbara from view), And yet I brooked it like a man Until ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... fruchtgetraenkte Erde Gibt uns Mut zu frischem Tun, Gibt uns Muesse, um am Herde Sonder Sorge auszuruhn. Aus des Bodens Scholle ziehen Wir des Lebens bestes Mark, Aus des Bodens Kraft erbluehen Die Geschlechter frei und stark. ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes. Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder high; other sections were lifted ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer |
