"Stifling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hold of me, as if to draw me back, kissing my hands as he did so, but his gross misinterpretation of my resistance and the immoral position he was putting me into were stifling me, ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... needed. The sovereignty of the end must yield, if necessary, before the sovereignty of numbers. A cause like that of slavery is only defended in the heart of a democratic nation, by teaching it contempt of scruples, and the stifling of the conscience. Every thing is allowable, every thing is good, provided that we succeed in our ends! This is the rule which it designs shall prevail in political contests. A single question, seeing nothing but itself, determined to spare nothing, offering itself ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... knew the implacability of this man, and my death meant the death of the Countess,—death in the dark, mouldy basement of the tower, death by stifling and starvation while she waited in vain for me, a slow and solitary death, rendered the more agonizing to her mind by suspense and fears. And this horrible fate must needs be hers just when the cause of her sorrows and dangers had been removed! ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... in the ashes, were buried alive, clinging closely to each other, destroyed there by suffocation, or, perhaps, by hunger. Arrius Diomed had tried to escape alone, abandoning his house and taking with him only one slave, who carried his money-wallet. He fell, struck down by the stifling gases, in front of his own garden. How many other poor wretches there were whose last agonies have been disclosed to us!—the priest of Isis, who, enveloped in flames and unable to escape into the blazing street, cut through two walls with ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... had worked away from the fire, and Wildfire, free of the stifling smoke, began to break and lunge and pitch, plunging round Nagger in a circle, running blindly, but with unerring scent. Slone, by masterly horsemanship, easily avoided the rushes, and made a pivot of Nagger, round which the wild horse ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... lovely landscape smiled peacefully in the dreadful glare, with its last rich glow of beauty. She tore it from its fastenings, pressed her lips fervently against it, regained the street, but with dress on fire. She staggered forward a few steps in the hot stifling air and smoke, and then fell upon her burden. Spreading her arms over it, to protect it even in death, the mother's heart went out in agony ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... I thought, so I said, when I knew not what I thought or said. Chagrin and stifling rage had enveloped my whole soul; love itself, in the full blaze of happiness, could not illumine it. But it has sent its daughter, Pity, more familiar with gloomy misfortune, and she has dispelled ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... times without number in story and history. It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne—the modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers from the trail and insolent messages ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... England and Scotland suffered grievously from the result of the battle of Bannockburn. English invasions of southern Scotland and Scottish invasions of northern England spread desolation far and wide, stifling the germs of nascent civilisation. Morally, both nations were in the end the gainers. The hardihood and self-reliance of the Scottish character is distinctly to be traced to those years of struggle ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... next. He caught only snatches of the letter, just enough to know it was a description of a hunt in England, of a damp, cold, cloudy day, of an invigorating run—the contrast struck him forcibly—the stifling, hot little hut, and the jealous, half-savage woman standing there, her eyes aflame with anger at the slight she ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... that by this time I was gone; but how could I go? I felt like a rat in a trap: and if I had been a nervous woman I should have imagined myself stifling in the small, hot room with its closed doors and windows. As it was, I was uncomfortable enough. My forehead grew damp, as in the first moments of a Turkish bath, and absent mindedly I felt in pocket after pocket for my handkerchief. ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... make sure that private enterprise works as it is supposed to work— on the basis of initiative and vigorous competition, without the stifling ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his head under the coverlet; but, ashamed and vexed at his own foolish weakness, he soon emerged from the stifling darkness, and an inward voice scornfully asked him whether he still believed that the soul of the great Macedonian inhabited his body. There was an end of this proud conviction. He had no more connection with Alexander than Melissa had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were going to a definite spot of which he knew. He walked fast, but in spite of the oppressive atmosphere and the thickness of the growth he grew neither hot nor out of breath; on the contrary, he took pleasure in the motion, and the stifling, sweet air seemed to invigorate him. He walked steadily on for over three hours, choosing his way nicely, avoiding certain places and seeking others, following a definite path and making for a definite goal. During all this time the stillness continued unbroken, nor did he meet a single living thing, ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... jacket, assuring herself that her purse and her own personal jewelry were where she had forehandedly placed them. As she glided to the window, she jammed the pins into a small black hat of felt. Then she peered over the ledge. She started back, stifling a cry with her hand. A man's head had almost come in contact with her own as she leaned out. A man's hand reached over and grasped the inner ledge of the casement, and then a man's face was dimly revealed ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... the overcrowded state of the city, especially among those who had come in from the country, and were living in stifling huts through the intense heat of a southern summer. Here the harvest of death fell thickest, and the corpses lay heaped together, while dying wretches crawled about the public streets, and encumbered ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today. But let us also establish an effective work incentive ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... contiguous industry, and drawing it under the control of its monopoly, is one of the most important evidences of the rapid growth of the system in America. The rapidity with which the whole railway system is passing into the hands of the two great monopolist syndicates with the necessary result of stifling competition is in some respects the most momentous economic movement in the United States at the present time. The magnificent distances which separate the great mass of the producers of agricultural and other raw products from their market makes ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... doubt; more than that, she sometimes broke down, and delivered herself over to the devil. At such times a strange yearning would take possession of her; the atmosphere of exalted religious emotion in which she lived would begin to feel stifling; at all costs, she would have to get out of this hot-house, and gain a breath of brisk sea air. And then she would steal away like a guilty thing on one of her long land cruises along the coast; and she would patiently talk to the old shepherds on the downs, and wait ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... a very dusty room. The air in it was stifling, it oppressed her breast. The walls were covered with bookcases filled with books. The tables were also covered with books—all new, slender, with bright covers. The title-pages were for some reason ponderous, terrible to look at. ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... History to take the habits and instincts of animals as fixed points, and to consider their structure and organization, as specially adapted, to be in accordance with these. This assumption is however an arbitrary one, and has the bad effect of stifling inquiry into the nature and causes of "instincts and habits," treating them as directly due to a "first cause," and therefore, incomprehensible to us. I believe that a careful consideration of the structure ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... men looked at each other, ludicrously enough; and Martin, stifling his disposition to laugh, whispered in John ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... at the pretty stars and feel at home, and he was getting out a roll of blankets when the guest said he didn't want to make the least bit of trouble and for one night he'd manage to sleep inside four stifling walls in a regular bed, like common people do. So Lon bedded him down in the guest chamber, but opened up the four windows in it and propped the door wide open so the poor fellow could have a breeze and not smother. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... He did not sing the Laird of Windy-wa's any more, for he felt a stifling about his heart; but he often repeated to himself, "She's a very fine woman!—a very fine woman indeed!—and to be walking here by herself! I ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like, had I any mornings; but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... went out by Jan's favourite way, the back, and plunged into a dark lane where neither ear nor eye was on him. He uncovered his head, he threw back his coat, he lifted his breath to catch only a gasp of air. The sense of dishonour was stifling him. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... deep draughts from the wine jug to cool their parched throats, their shirts open in front, sweating in streams, panting from the lifeless sultry calm, enviously watching the gulls that sailed by just above the water, as though afraid of the stifling muggy air on high. After their meal, the men walked about on deck for a time, lazily, and with heavy eyes, drunk with sunlight rather than with wine; then they went below, one after the other, throwing themselves ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... possessed him earlier in the day. Graham, at least, was stanch and steadfast, not a weathercock like Cutler. Graham had given him soothing medicine and advised his strolling a while in the open air—he had slept so much of the stifling afternoon—and now, hearing the sound of women's voices on the dark veranda nearest him, he veered to the left, passed around the blackened ruin of his own quarters and down along the rear of the line just as the musician of the guard ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... these caravanserais is very fine. The cool, quiet halls, their domed roofs, embellished with delicate stone carving, and blue, white, and yellow tiles, dimly reflected in the inevitable marble tank of clear water below, are a pleasant retreat from the stifling alleys and sun-baked streets. Talking of tanks, there seems to be no lack of water in Teheran. I was surprised at this, for there are few countries so deficient in this essential commodity as Persia. It is, I found, artificially supplied by "connaughts," or subterranean aqueducts flowing from mountain ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... his hand down the delighted animal's back until he reached his tail. Then, stifling with an effort all the finer feelings which should have made such an act impossible, he administered so vigorous a tweak to that appendage that Thomas, with one frenzied yowl, sprang through the bush past the two masters and vanished at full speed ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... automobiling is knowledge of one's own land. The confines of a city are stifling to the sport; the machine snorts with impatience on dusty pavements filled with traffic, and seeks the freedom of country roads. Within a short time every hill and valley within a radius of a hundred miles ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... than once already tried a way he knew for stifling his anger, and turning all that seemed dark right again, and he tried that way now. He watched how Mishka strode along, swinging the huge clods of earth that clung to each foot; and getting off his horse, he took the sieve from Vassily and started ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... warm and stifling almost as the day. The window of Loring's room opened on the crude wooden gallery that ran the length of the hotel, and he kept it open from the bottom for such air as could be obtained. A note lay on the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Justice Bodmin in the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by warders and policemen, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... In a few minutes the worst was known. The underground approach had been advanced as far as Christie's quarters, which were immediately set on fire. Only a narrow space separated this building from the blockhouse, and with the fierce blaze of its pine logs the stifling heat in the latter became almost unsupportable. It seemed to the men that the time to yield had come; but their commander was not yet ready to acknowledge the situation as hopeless. Even when the scorched and smoking walls ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... But she soon saw that love went for little with Philippe, a studious man, much more interested in mental speculation and social problems than in any manifestation of sentimental feeling. She therefore loved him as he wished to be loved, stifling within herself, like smothered flames, a whole throbbing passion made up of unsatisfied longings, restrained ardours and needless jealousies and allowing only just so much of this to escape her as was needed to give him fresh courage at times of ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... see it very well. That belief accounted for his mysterious air while he interfered in favour of the girl. He was the only protector she had. It was as though Flora had been fated to be always surrounded by treachery and lies stifling every better impulse, every instinctive aspiration of her soul to trust and to love. It would have been enough to drive a fine nature into the madness of universal suspicion—into any sort of madness. I don't ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... passionately—then; but we don't now." She laughed a little bitterly. "Poor Nat! I am only another trial added to your long list. Your beliefs, your ideals are meaningless to me—mere narrow-minded dogmas, stifling thought. Nellie was the wife Nature had intended for you, so soon as she had lost her beauty and with it all her worldly ideas. Fate was maturing her for you, if only we had known. As for me, I ought to have been the wife of an artist, of a poet." Unconsciously a glance from her ever ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... candle. She was late at the store, and that meant a fine; her head ached, and her feet felt like lead as she climbed the stairs to her department—a hot, dark, stuffy corner behind the shirtwaist counter. It was warm and close at any time, but today it was stifling, and there was already a crowd of customers, for it was the day of a bargain sale. The heat and noise and chatter got on Marcella's tortured nerves. She felt that she wanted to scream, but instead she turned calmly to a waiting customer—a big, handsome, richly dressed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is ordinarily automatic and needs no preparatory reactions, simply because air is so easy to get. But let breathing be difficult, for any reason, and the stifling sensation is as impulsive as hunger or thirst. The stuffy air in a cave or in a hole under a haymow will lead a child to frantic escape. Possibly the delight in being out of doors which shows itself ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... in the day and the atmosphere of the room had become stifling; but no one seemed to be conscious of any discomfort, and a general gasp of excitement passed through the room when the coroner, taking out a box from under a pile of papers, disclosed to the general gaze the famous white ribbon with its dainty bow, lying on top ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... she was first aware of a heavily beamed cobwebbed roof, of a dim lantern beside her, of the stifling nearness of kegs and bales and boxes, and then of a very familiar figure kneeling beside her on ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... again, and her soul appeared to wrap itself in denser gloom. The air of the room seemed to Amy stifling. The next moment she felt as if she were pierced with sharp spears of ice. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... o'clock, means that people, often all without exception, both men and women, sleeping in a damp cellar, must rise, and hasten to that building buzzing with machines, and must take their places at their work, whose end and use for themselves they do not see, and thus toil, often in heat and a stifling atmosphere, in the midst of dirt, and with the very briefest breathing- spells, an hour, two hours, three hours, twelve, and even more hours in succession. They fall into a doze, and again they rise. And this, for them, senseless work, to which they are driven only by necessity, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... to prove my soul! I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, I ask not: but unless God send His hail Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, His good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... mortal strife I marked the eternal harmony of the scene. Truly death had never stage more fitting whereon to play its last stern drama of dissolution. Hemmed in by four massive walls of granite, ghastly grim and desolately gray, we wrestled in a stifling stillness, while hell stood umpire at the game. No sound of trumpet, no warlike cry, no strains of martial music were there to thrill the nerves and taunt men on to glory. We fought to the scrape and scratch of shuffling feet, the labored gasp, the rattle in the throat, while echo hushed ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... she found out the subjects that were interesting to him, and reviving his faith in his own intelligence, led his mind through sunny, breezy ranges of thought that made the time he spent with her like an escape from the narrow walls and stifling air ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings, raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Stifling a somewhat weary sigh, I returned the book to its place and lingered looking out of the open window into the deepening dusk. Mentally my mood was a restless one, but it did not reflect itself physically; for I stood there leaning against the window whilst a procession of all the figures associated ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... occupants of the room crowded around him, and greeted most of the score of swarthy men and women by name. Tony masterfully stripped him of his overcoat and cap and placed them in the kitchen from which emanated odors of strange things cooking. The room was stifling with heat and with smells—beer, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... that life is beautiful. Yes, if only it seems so! The life of us three hasn't been beautiful yet; it has been stifling us as if it was weeds... I'm crying. I oughtn't.... [Dries her tears, smiles] We must work, work. That is why we are unhappy and look at the world so sadly; we don't know what work ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... averse to visiting London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel—all these seemed to him insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun, filled with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... intense oppression—perhaps due to the stifling air and the lower elevation (1,950 ft.) at which Goyaz city lay—we entered the capital of Goyaz. At the sound of our mules upon the pavement, timid men, timid women and children cautiously peeped from each window through the half-closed Venetian blinds. We only had to turn round to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... change. The exile of Ovid was a blow to the muses. We have seen how it injured his own genius, a decline over which he mourns, knowing the cause but impotent to overcome it. [2] We have seen also how it was followed up by other harsh measures, stifling the free voice of poets and historians. And when we reflect how the despotism was entwining itself round the entire life of the nation, gathering by each new enactment food for future aggression, and only veiled as yet by the mildness or caution of a prince whose one object was to found ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... A stifling Southern September sun beat down upon the mountains and valleys. The thrush and the mocking-bird had been driven to cool places, and their songs were not heard in the trees. The hotel was crowded with refugees from Memphis. A terrible scourge was sweeping through Tennessee, ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... is pointed against us. The guns are shotted to their lips. The arrows are poisoned. Fighting against such an array, we cannot afford to confine ourselves to any one weapon. The cause is not ours, so that we might, rightfully, postpone or put in peril the victory by moderating our demands, stifling our convictions, or filing down our rebukes, to gratify any sickly taste of our own, or to spare the delicate nerves of our neighbor. Our clients are three millions of Christian slaves, standing dumb suppliants at the threshold of the Christian world. They have no voice but ours ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... The change from the stifling fumes below to the soft night-air was delightful, and the men leaped along the deck after their young leader, their cutlasses flashing in the faint light cast by the lanterns swung aloft and astern; but no enemy was to ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... who cannot trust his happier instinct, but perforce believes that beyond the sepulchral line of mortality he shall know no more of his friends, may find, as helps to a willing acquiescence in what is fated, either one of two possible contemplations.8 He may sadly lay upon his heart the stifling solace, There will be no baffled wants nor unhappiness, but all will be over when hic jacet is sculptured on the headstone of my grave. Or, with measureless rebound of faith, he may crowd the capacity of his soul with the mysterious presentiment, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... rather exceptional being was desirous of love. Not the shape which clothes its diseased body in soiled robes of imitation something at one and elevenpence three farthings per yard, and under ferns in conservatories, in punts up back-waters, in stifling tea-rooms, hotels, theatres and night-clubs, exchanges sly look for sly look and soiled mouth for soiled kisses, in its endeavours to pass itself off as that wonder figure which, radiant of brow and humorous of mouth, deep of breast and profound of thought, stands motionless ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... the laundry did not even occur to Maslova now. She looked with compassion on the life of drudgery led by these pale, emaciated washerwomen, some of whom showed symptoms of consumption, washing and ironing in a stifling, steam-laden atmosphere with the windows open summer and winter, and she was horrified at the thought that she, too, might be driven to ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... especially the timid and shy, who have that awful feeling of repression and stifling of thought, when they make an effort to say something and cannot. Timid young people often suffer keenly in this way in attempting to declaim at school or college. But many a great orator went through the same sort of experience, when he first attempted ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... excellent, all things airy and tasteful, and making one feel as if in one of the chapels in Paris. The Cathedral of St. Mary, which I afterwards visited, where the Irish attend, was a contrast indeed, and more like one of our stifling Irish Catholic churches in Boston or New York, with intelligence in so small a proportion to the number of faces. During the three Sundays I was in San Francisco, I visited three of the Episcopal churches, and the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... ought to have been laid in a quiet little nest hours ago, instead of being exposed to the close, hot, stifling air of the theatre through all the long hours of ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... furred cloak that is enfolding her with a little rapid movement, as though stifling. It falls in a loose mass at her feet, and leaves her standing before him a very picture of beauty perfected. Beauty ripe, ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... of the equatorial summer penetrated the embrasures of the fort, and made stifling even the dim, whitewashed room where Lawrence Teck was sitting. Dusky from the sun, and seeming more aquiline than ever in his gauntness, he remained like an effigy in the suit of white duck that hung round him in loose folds, without so ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... extended to the very lowest officers of the government, and applied by the electors in their choice of all officers of all descriptions; and this he deemed persecution—tyranny—despotism. But he surely is mistaken in representing the effect of this system of terror as stifling all complaint, silencing all opposition, and inducing "enemies and friends to yoke themselves alike to the triumphant car of the majority." He mistook a temporary state of parties for a permanent and ordinary result, and he was carried away by the immense majority that then ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... divided command and jealous counsels, presided over by a whimsical, despotic court favorite. Many as were the vexations encountered by Jones in the inefficient resources, the shifts and expedients of foreign allies, and the straits of the American commissioners, they were light compared with the stifling restraints of Russian tyranny. Jones did much fighting, in his command of the Wolodomer, on the Black Sea, against the Pasha, but retired with little glory. Persecution followed at St. Petersburg—there was an assault upon his moral character, which was triumphantly disproved—various ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... Bermudo, affecting surprise, "cannot you guess my motives? Certainly, I do not pretend to deny that by assisting you now, I chiefly mean to serve myself. You surely cannot expect more from a perfect stranger, as you call me. Look at me, Christian!" he added, stifling the conflict which was working in his bosom at the very sight of his foe; "behold, I am a Moor—a miserable Moor. And what else but interest could prompt a destitute, a desperate man to proffer his services to the proud and rich ones of the land?—Love, or esteem, or gratitude, think you? No, ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... said, 'I have had a growing sensation of suffocation in life. It's stifling me. When I look ahead and see nothing but this kind of life—visiting, visiting, entertaining, entertaining, listening to that endless talk in London—well, I think I understand why some women go to the devil. At least there's something ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... cellars as it had before been on the breach. By the light of torches, in an atmosphere heavy with the fumes of gunpowder, surrounded by piled-up barrels of wine, the defenders and assailants maintained a terrible conflict, men staggering up exhausted by their exertion and by the stifling atmosphere while others took their places below, and so, night and day, ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... the Summer Garden on a seat under a tree, and his mind dwelt on the matter. It was about seven o'clock, and the place was empty. The stifling atmosphere foretold a storm, and the prince felt a certain charm in the contemplative mood which possessed him. He found pleasure, too, in gazing at the exterior objects around him. All the time he was trying to forget some thing, to escape from ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... event: "This anti-Nebraska speech of Mr. Lincoln was the profoundest that he made in his whole life. He felt burning upon his soul the truths which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice came near stifling utterance. He quivered with emotion. He attacked the Nebraska Bill with such warmth and energy that all felt that a man of strength was its enemy, and that he intended to blast it, if he could, by strong and manly efforts. He was most successful, and the house approved his triumph by ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... rain to which the country is subject at certain seasons of the year, and was also a pretty effectual protection against the scorching rays of the sun; consequently the interior temperature of such a structure, stifling though it frequently was, was not nearly so great as that of the outer air. In this particular case, too, the doorway, unlike that of the usual Kafir hut, was high enough to permit a full-grown man to enter without stooping; but, like other Kafir huts, this was entirely destitute of ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... through stifling dust and then through pelting rain, past Hawkinstown, Woodstock, Edenburg, Mount Jackson, brought us to New Market. On the march Colonel Brinton of a Pennsylvania regiment, a new arrival, planned with me an escape. He had campaigned through the valley, was familiar ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... introducing the six brandy bottles into the ship; five of which he sells at eight dollars a bottle; and then, with the sixth, between two guns, he secretly regales himself and confederates; while the helpless cockswain, stifling his rage, bitterly eyes ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... I merely suppose so, as I might suppose anything else," replied Villefort with a look so fixed, it indicated that his powerful mind was on the verge of despair and madness. "Ah, my child, my poor child!" cried the baroness, falling on her chair, and stifling her sobs in her handkerchief. Villefort, becoming somewhat reassured, perceived that to avert the maternal storm gathering over his head, he must inspire Madame Danglars with the terror he felt. "You ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... facilitated by carefully guarding it from the evil effects of excessive rains and strong winds; this may be easily done by placing an inverted bell-glass over the plants, invariably lifting this off on fine and warm days, and whenever there is no fear of damage from sudden winds or rains. Stifling hardy plants by keeping them in a confined atmosphere, whether indoors or out, is the worst possible plan to follow in ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... in this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as high a relative place as in his earlier works. The old convictions reappear at pages 182-3 of vol. xvi., when he asserts the danger in which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling its insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the "sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. He still, however, maintains that the true offender against ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... head, under the great church spire. With this clew to go upon he stumbled and groped forward, now breathing more freely in the open places where there was a good slice of sky overhead, now feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... stuff, not half a mile, but several miles, not on level pavement, but over broken rocks, up banks, through quagmires and brush—in short, across ground that would be difficult walking without any burden, and not in cool, clear weather, but through stifling swamps with no free hand to ease the myriad punctures of his body, face, and limbs whenever unsufficiently protected from the stingers that roam in clouds. It is the hardest work I ever saw performed by human beings; the burdens are heavier ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... veins and pink below the skin, like a baby's. He did not know before what keen eyes he had. But this was as though a breath of the old home when he had been a child, one of the dewy Bourbon roses in his father's garden, had followed him to the stifling town. It made the station different—even the morning. Fresh damp winds blew pleasantly from the reddening sky. The white marble steps and lintels of the street shone clean and bright; the porters going by to the freight depot gave him good-day cheerfully. In the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... who was a plethoric, sanguineous man felt as if he were stifling. But he took off his wrappers, and resigned the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... heavy, now it became stifling. Rendered torpid by long days of quietness and seclusion, I felt a weight on my forehead and eyes. The approach of a thunderstorm lay heavy on me. I let my arms hang down, and, with head thrown back, and eyes closed, I glided into a doze full of golden Egyptians and lustful shadows. In ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the contemplation of her charms. She complied with all; from belly to side, from side to back I turned her; she smiled as if pleased, curious, and astonished; and when I turned to quench my passion in her, she met me with an ardour less demonstrative, but more stifling and satisfying than Charlotte; it was a worry to think that I had twice fucked her, and seemed to have finished each time before I had ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... with ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations; there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain impressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Yes; the son of the Emperor struggles with all his strength against a premature death. With his eyes turned towards France, he waits—he waits—and no one comes—no one—out of all the men that his father made as great as they once were little, not one thinks of that crowned child, whom they are stifling, till he dies." ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... again, flapped duskily about him, torturing in their multiplicity alike to his senses and his brain. He fought with them, striving to beat them off in a madness of disgust, half suffocated by the fanning of their foul and stifling wings. Then, exhausted by the conflict, he stumbled and fell, while they closed down on him. And he, losing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... at my father: I felt stifling with confusion and rage. He leant over to her, imparting some ecstatic news about a great lady having determined to call on her to regulate the affairs of an approaching grand Ball, and under cover ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... great streams of sweat were coursing down his face. A quick glance told him that every member of the crew was the same way; and then, suddenly, he was conscious of a wave of intense heat—heat which quickly became terrific. The control room was stifling! ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... on the bloody deck, when the red ball of the setting sun glared through a crimson haze and filled the motionless sea with liquid fire. For the first time that day I became sensible of personal sufferings. A stifling sensation made me gasp for air as I sat down on the taffrail of my captured schooner, and felt that ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... plunder, 'mid rain and thunder That burst with the lull of our cannonade, We vamped the streets in the stifling air - Our hunger unsoothed, our thirst unstayed - And ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... memories of those times cluster around this old place," he said, violently stifling a yawn. He had risen early and run far. Hunger and slumber ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... in Babylon yonder, By the gas-lights' dull red glare, In a stifling room—a living tomb, With never a breath of air, A slender girl is sitting; At her feet a silken cloud, Which music makes, while her young heart aches, As she stitches the rustling shroud. And this is the song the glistening silk Sings, out in ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... their heads, and wring their many hands in sympathy. Night, growing pale before it, gradually fades out of the church, but lingers in the vaults below, and sits upon the coffins. And now comes bright day, burnishing the steeple-clock, and reddening the spire, and drying up the tears of dawn, and stifling its complaining; and the dawn, following the night, and chasing it from its last refuge, shrinks into the vaults itself and hides, with a frightened face, among the dead, until night returns, refreshed, to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... on his quick and comprehending mind saw and suffered things that formerly never affected him. The hard and sometimes cruel discipline, toil from sunrise to sunset, scant food, the stifling of ambitions—all these began now to be perceived and felt, and the impression they left sank into the soul of this rebellious boy. He saw a slave killed by an overseer, on no other charge than that of being "impudent." "Crimes" of this nature were committed, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... a position of great esteem as early as Luzzatto's day. He lost little time in initiating his pupil into the mysteries of the Kabbalah, and so the early childhood years of our poet were a sad time spent in the stifling atmosphere of the ghetto. Happily for him, it was an Italian ghetto, whence secular learning had ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... screaming. Akh, if I could only get away from here! How stifling it is! How oppressive!... But ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Treffy seemed no worse than before,—he was able to sit up, and Christie opened the small window before he went out to let a breath of fresh air into the close attic. But there was very little fresh air anywhere that day. The atmosphere was heavy and stifling, and poor Christie's heart felt depressed and weary. He turned, he hardly knew why, to the suburban road, and stopped before the house with the pretty garden. He wanted to see those merry little faces again,—perhaps ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... is sitting; Peel is just down; Lord Palmerston is speaking; the heat is tremendous; the crowd stifling; and so here I am in the smoking-room, with three Repealers making chimneys of their mouths under my ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... passed; the air below, which had all day been increasing in closeness, was now almost stifling; but our men lost no courage. Some sang as they worked; and the cadence of their voices, mingling with the roar of waters, sounded like a defiance to Ocean. Some stationed themselves on top of the turret, and a general enthusiasm filled ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... by murdering or cursing all who resisted its advance. It exterminated scepticism by stifling knowledge, and putting a merciless veto on free thought and free speech, and by rewarding philosophers and discoverers with the faggot and the chain. It held its power for centuries by force of hell-fire, and ignorance, and the sword; ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... custom. I flung the money, as an asp that had stung me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds. Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sorrow came heavily down upon all other emotions, stifling and replacing them. At the mouth of the lane I halted. I shrank from the thought of the crowded streets beyond; I shrank yet more from the routine of duties, which stretched before me in the desert into which daily life ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... borne. His clumsy caresses, his foolish, halting words of tenderness became a horror to her. She wondered whether to laugh or to strike at his upturned face. His tactless devotion filled her life as with some sickly perfume, stifling her. If only she could be by herself for a little while to think! But he was with her night and day. There were times when, as he would cross the room towards her, he grew monstrous until he towered above ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... had been hired by St. Victor, at once spread her sails; Mrs. Labadie conversed with the captain while the countess took the Queen below into the stifling crowded little cabin. It was altogether a wretched voyage; the wind was high, and the pitching and tossing more or less disabled everybody in the suite. The Queen was exceedingly ill, so were the countess and Mrs. Labadie. Nobody ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ugly commercial grasping, to which his father had been sacrificed. A gulf opened between him and his brother and James Saltonstone; he was as different from them as the sea was from the land, as the wind-swept deck of the Nautilus was from this dry building with its stifling papers and greed. He might be in the service of the firm—Gerrit was not incorporated in the partnership—he might carry their cargoes for the multiplication of the profit, but his essential service and responsibility, his life, were addressed to another and infinitely ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of an almost land-locked harbour, was unfavourable for salubrity, although in other respects judiciously chosen. Occasionally for days together the seabreeze has not reached as far up as the settlement, and the heat has been almost stifling; usually however the seabreeze set in during the forenoon, and after blowing for some hours was succeeded by a calm, often interrupted by a gentle land-wind. Within 400 yards of the hospital a great extent of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... that of a nightmare of impossible duration. It was possible to move and possible to see. One could breathe, with difficulty, and with titanic effort one could speak. But there was the same feeling of stifling resistance to every movement that comes ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... the storm without, rendering the scene awful beyond description. All rushed pell-mell for the street. The crackling flames burst through the broad windows on the side of the judges' platform, rolling a dense volume of smoke and stifling heat into the interior of the building. In the wild excitement and terror, the prisoners were forgotten. They stood in the box where they had received sentence. The flames were rapidly approaching them. Sumpter turned a glance full of hatred and vengeance on Hardin. "You swore revenge on Sheldon," ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... The clouds were completely overhead now, from north to south, from east to west. There was not a patch of blue to be seen. The panting earth waited in abject fear. A puff of wind came, hot and stifling, as if an oven door had suddenly been opened. It passed over the mulgas, making them sigh and moan, and then was gone again, leaving the same breathless stillness. Another puff, this time cool and fresh. It also passed away and left the men ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... swallowing insult and stifling my sense of decency as far as possible, in order that I might serve you and prove myself worthy to be your friend," replied Surigny, with such earnestness that Darrin now found himself staring in open-eyed ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... him. Nothing availed. Complaints and silence succeeded each other in the midst of tears. Then, suddenly falling upon the Duc de Beauvilliers and the King, and accusing the defects of his education: "They thought only;" he exclaimed, "of making me stupid, and of stifling all my powers. I was a younger son. I coped with my brother. They feared the consequences; they annihilated me. I was taught only to play and to hunt,: and they have succeeded in making me a fool and an ass, incapable of anything, the laughing-stock and disdain of everybody." Madame ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... costly pottery, reached from floor to ceiling. The polish and the colors flashed already in the fierce light of the closely neighboring flames. Great drifts and clouds of smoke against the windows were urging in and stifling the air. The first rush of water from the ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... but cannot reply; his love knows not where to fix itself, and falling back on itself, threatens to become a barren egotism; in short, fill his being aspires to another self, but his other self does not exist. At this time, when the desire for communion was stifling him, he slept, and from his side God took a rib and made woman, and brought her to him. Behold Adam. He sees her, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... not disturb them.' Each regiment, if not each man, felt competent for the work. One glorious day in June, accompanied by an officer of the 8th Missouri, I set out for the rifle-pits. When I reached them, I found the heat stifling; and as I bent to avoid the whizzing minies, and the falling branches of the trees, cut off by an occasional shell, I felt that war was a terrible reality. The intense excitement of the scene, the manly, cheerful bearing of the veterans, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... of the exercise-ground lay at a high elevation; in the valley below the air had felt hot and stifling, but up here a soft breeze was blowing, and with gentle caressing touch it brushed back the golden tendrils of hair from the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... which men worship is a theological hypothesis, not a moral ideal. The prophets, in substance, if not always in form preach the opposite doctrine. They are constantly striving to free the moral ideal from the stifling embrace of the current theology and its concomitant ritual. Theirs was not an intellectual criticism, argued on strictly scientific grounds; the image-worshippers and the believers in the efficacy of sacrifices and ceremonies might logically have held their ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and dry and vivify; and I would warn all good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees within a foot of each of their front-windows, that these trees will grow and increase till their front-rooms will be brooded over by a sombre, stifling shadow fit only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... opera-glass tightly, for it was in danger of falling. She felt as if she were stifling, the great place, with its sea of faces and its rings of electric light, swam before her eyes, and she felt sick and giddy. It seemed to her that Stafford was looking straight at her, that he could not fail to see her, and she shrank back ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... in more sultry and warm than August had been; even out in the open streets, towards the mountain, the motionless air was hot and stifling. It was a trying day in the narrow alleys and in the low parts of the city, where many an invalid lay moaning and wishing for ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... but stifling his emotion, he exclaimed, "Athenians! if ye would know what it is that thus unmans a soul capable of meeting death with calmness, behold, and judge ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... was no hint of early summer freshness in the noxious air of the sleeping-car as it toiled like a snail over the infinity of prairie. From behind the green-striped curtains of the berths, now the sound of restless turning and now a long-drawn sigh signified the uneasy slumber due to stifling air ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... marshal to a little village called Ebersdorf, on the bank of the river, and near the field of battle. At the house of a brewer they found a room over a stable where the heat was stifling, and was rendered still more unendurable from the odor of the corpses by which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... therein of evenings, and a grand promenade commenced of all the young Federals in the town. The streets were pleasantly shaded, and a leafy coolness pervaded the days, though sometimes, of afternoons, the still heat was almost stifling. A jaunt after supper often took me far into the country, and the starlights were softer than one's peaceful thoughts. To be a civilian was a distinguished honor now, and I enjoyed the staring of the citizens, who pondered as to my purposes ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... only a moment afterwards that he awoke with a faint consciousness of some arrested motion. To his utter consternation, the sun, three hours high, was shining in the wagon, already hot and stifling in its beams. There was the familiar smell and taste of the dirty road in the air about him. There was a faint creaking of boards and springs, a slight oscillation, and beyond the audible rattle of harness, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... untoward circumstance known to human experience has united to increase Negro crime: the slavery of the past, the sudden emancipation, the narrowing of economic opportunity, the lawless environment of wide regions, the stifling of natural ambition, the curtailment of political privilege, the disregard of the sanctity of black men's homes, and, above all, a system of treatment for criminals calculated to breed crime far faster than all other available agencies could repress it. Such a combination of circumstances is as ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... bed I was lying in; a four-post bed, of all things in the world to meet with in Paris—yes, a thorough clumsy British four-poster, with the regular top lined with chintz—the regular fringed valance all round—the regular stifling, unwholesome curtains, which I remembered having mechanically drawn back against the posts without particularly noticing the bed when I first got into the room. Then there was the marble-topped wash-hand stand, from which the water I had spilled, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... age—concentration, classification, order; the reduction of friction between the parts of the social organism. The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness. Between the two, night ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London |
