"Tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bent on achieving the job which he had set himself to perform; and the faces, although somewhat tense and set and grave, were inexpressive of emotion. I noticed only three persons overcome, two Italian women, very poor, embracing an aged fellow countrywoman, and all weeping. Physical fatigue and seriousness were the only inner states that ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... them to spend the same amount of time on more immediately practical subjects. The reply was that the boys needed to have the drill in English in order to gain clear methods of thought: that the sharp distinctness of the English sentence, with its personal pronouns and tense and number, affords a mental drill which the Japanese can get in no other way; and that even if the boys should never make the slightest after-use of English in reading or conversation, the advantage gained was well worth the time expended. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... to pound furiously. His muscles twitched and tense. He felt extraordinary symptoms like an extreme of agitation. Calhoun was familiar enough with tear-gas, used by police on some planets. But this was different and worse. Even as he helped and urged Maril onward, he automatically considered ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... McGuire lurched heavily against him. The flyer had taken note of the tense, attentive attitude of the one in scarlet; the man was leaning forward, his eyes focused directly upon the scientist's face; he seemed absorbing both ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... grow up I'll have no nurse, Nor yet a governess; And lessons will not bother me When I grow up, I guess. I'll pay no heed to proper nouns, Nor yet to mood nor tense"— Here nurse put in: "When you grow up Let's ...
— Pages for Laughing Eyes • Unknown
... himself. Both of these are traits common enough in a Frenchman, but in Mons. Margot their excesses rendered them uncommon. He was a most ultra specimen of le chevalier amoureux—a mixture of Don Quixote and the Duc de Lauzun. Whenever he spoke of the present tense, even en professeur, he always gave a sigh to the preterite, and an anecdote of Bayard; whenever he conjugated a verb, he paused to tell me that the favourite one of his female ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fact, Wilson could not go ahead. The situation with Carlotta had become tense, irritating. He felt that she stood ready to block any move he made. He would not go back, and ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Mackenzie, who made their escape from the battle," that the tidings "unraised his melancholy, and so died in the latter end of September, 1651." The Letterfearn MS. is also contemporary, for the author of it speaks of Earl Kenneth as ""now" Earl of Seaforth," and of George of Kildun in the present tense, while he speaks of his father in the past tense, and he say's that "He (Earl George) left "ane natural son," who "is" called John, who "is" married with Logie's daughter." That John of Gruinard was married to Christina, daughter of Donald Mackenzie, III. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... in a circle, with the boy in their midst, and they pleaded. I remember the throb of that moment now. A single pulse seemed to beat in the room, so tense was the tension, until he spoke out bravely. "I will not ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... see the change which had come over the looks and actions of the company at the mention and appearance of the violin. The faces that had shown indifference and the look of languid weariness freshened and became tense in all their lines; and on their heads again animation sat crowned. Those who were seated jumped to their feet. The conversationalists broke their circle and swung suddenly into line. Eyes sparkled. Little happy screams and miniature war-whoops from the boisterous ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... vexation Miss Wharton almost snatched the letter from Grace's hand. There was a tense stillness in the room while she read it. Jean kept her gaze steadily turned from Grace. At last the dean looked up from the letter. "This letter is, by no means, an explanation, although I am well aware of the excellent reputation Miss Lipton's school bears. What I am determined ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... not a voice was raised; anxious faces; twitching fingers; the whole crowd tense as a stretched wire. A false turn, a wilful sheep, a cantankerous judge, and the gray dog would be beat. And not a man there but ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Careni-Amori and Olga Obosky, and at some distance by the whispering, gesticulating Jews. The great soprano was profoundly agitated. Obosky, a pace or two behind her, was tense and silent. Her head was slightly bent. There was a strange, dog-like expression in her eyes as they regarded ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... fled with steps uncertain On a thousand-year long race, But the bellying of the curtain Kept me always in one place; While the tumult rose and maddened To the roar of Earth on fire, Ere it ebbed and sank and saddened To a whisper tense as wire. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... in these naval officers beside me, there is the same tense yet disciplined expectancy. As we lunch and talk, on this cruiser at rest, messages come in perpetually; the cruiser itself is ready for the open sea, at an hour and a half's notice; the seaplanes pass out and come in over the mouth of the harbour on their voyages of discovery and report, and ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stopped, so that only a dull, slow throb came up from below, instead of the swift thud-thud of the screw that had pounded for many weeks. It was late; so late that most of the ship's lights were extinguished. But all through her was a feeling of pulsating life, of unrest, of a kind of tense excitement, of long-pent expectation. There were low voices everywhere; feet paced the decks; along the port railings on each deck soldiers were clustered thickly, looking out across the grey, tossing sea to a winking light that flashed and twinkled out of the darkness like a voice that ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... the broad upper intercostal spaces, an interesting feature, due to the tense and rigid nature of the muscles closing the intervals, and their large admixture of fibrous tissue, was sometimes noticed. The bullet, especially if passing obliquely, was apt to cut a slit in the muscles far exceeding in size the opening in the overlying ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... they cannot help contributing the slight initial impulse which gathers force as it goes. These nervous subjects cannot sit a quarter of an hour perfectly still without a twitching of the muscles, while the tense state of expectation which subtly transforms itself into a wish to see the table move and not have the experiment in vain, finally compels them, despite themselves, to start the "manifestations." Indeed, to think of a thing is half to do it. Every idea has a tendency to ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... lady's proximity keeping him from carrying his high-handed measures a little further. Mr. Landale, livid, with eyes suddenly black in their orbits, moistening his white lips while he quivered from head to foot with a passion so tense that not even his worst enemy could have attributed it ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... "I wasn't afeared of you at all, 'cept fer what you mought find out. You couldn't do no harm to nobody without a gun, and I knowed thar wasn't no still up that crick. I know—I knowed whar it was." Hale noticed the quick change of tense. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... to shoulder, the pulsing moments passed. Every muscle tense, she sat there for a while, fearful that he could hear her heart beating. Her palm, doubled in his, seemed to burn. Then little by little a subtle relaxation stole over her; dreamy-eyed she sank back and looked into the darkness. A sense of delicious well-being possessed her, enmeshing ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... tense silence while Julia Cloud struggled for words to break through her unwilling lips, and then quite softly ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... wouldn't want that over again. [Then changing the subject abruptly.] But why have you been putting all our life into the past tense? It seems to me the most interesting part is still ahead ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... foot restlessly upon the floor. The atmosphere was surcharged with expectancy, then grew tense with waiting. Alden's eyes never swerved ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... other. Like fencers' swords their glances crossed and fell apart, and each girl turned her back pointedly upon the other. Broken threads of conversation were picked up by the group around them, shouts of laughter came from the group surrounding Pom-pom, who was reciting a funny poem, and the tense moment passed. ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... Let them compare the patient finish, the complete thought given to every detail in the works of the greatest painters, the accumulated light and depth, the abounding life, with the hasty, jagged, contemporary manner of painting, straining into harshness from want of patience, tense and angular from want of real vitality, exhausted from the absence of inward repose. They will comment for themselves upon the pessimism to which so many surrender themselves, taking with them their religious art, with its feeble Madonnas and haggard saints, without hope or courage or help, painted ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... in every shop and tavern parlour in Scarnham Market-Place that despite the town-crier's announcement, and the wild rumours of the night before, Chestermarke's Bank was all right, and Chestermarkes were already speaking of Horbury in the past tense—he was (wherever he might be) no longer the manager of that ancient concern; ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... a man," she said, and her voice was tense, "if I were a man and loved a woman, I would be ready to give up everything for her. My riches, my pride, my life, my honor, my soul even,—they would be as nothing, as less than nothing to me,—if ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... through the listener, making every nerve and muscle tense as steel; his breath came thick and fast, and the dull, heavy throb, throb of his heart sounded loudly in his brain—so loudly that he held his breath and would have checked the pulsations ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... previously removed three of the tubers and cut off several long rhizomes. When, on the thirty-fifth day, the earth in the pot was turned out, it appeared as dry as the dust on a road. All the tubers had their surfaces much wrinkled, instead of being smooth and tense. They had all shrunk, but I cannot say accurately how much; for as they were at first symmetrically oval, I measured only their length and thickness; but they contracted in a transverse line much more in one direction than in another, so as to ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... had also risen from his seat, and for the briefest possible space the three men stood thus, facing each other, as if uncertain how to act. Then the tense silence of the dining-room was broken by the loud report of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... sound, almost indistinguishable, echoed up the gulch to him. Miraculously his nervousness vanished. Every nerve was keyed up, every muscle tense, but he was cool as water ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... success was thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in the past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had been stupendous. On the other hand, however—and this was what wasn't for Densher pure peace—they insisted enough that stupendous was the word. It ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... and switch until he breaks his heart—but if he has any real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaiting the invention of an improved piano-player, which shall give equally free expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit—the operator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... demanded Bob in a tense voice. "Name somebody. I suppose the fact that Germany has murdered a lot of Americans has nothing to do with our going ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... man's face!" she panted. "He will die if I touch him. Take away his hands." It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils, and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... seemed to embarrass the guest, for in Chichikov's face there dawned a sort of tense expression, and it reddened as though its owner were striving to express something not easy to put into words. True enough, Manilov was now destined to hear such strange and unexpected things as never ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... so on, down the line. The object of this was apparent: by the time the left of the regiment had emptied their guns, the right would have reloaded, and thus a continuous firing would be maintained. With guns cocked and fingers on the triggers, we waited in tense anxiety for the word to fire. Maj. Ohr was standing a few paces in the rear of the center of the regiment, watching the advance of the enemy. Finally, when they were in fair musket range, came the order, cool and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... some concern to the German emperor. Health trips of more than one statesman in or about the same locality are looked upon with much suspicion and promptly investigated; more so when there is any extra political tension. At that time—it was in 1910—the air was tense, Germany was in the dark, unable to distinguish ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... logs lit up a ring of tense, pale faces—not one of which, Silvestro saw, would rest content with that. The interrogatories began, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... is sweet, and mortality blind, And youth is hopeful, and Fate is kind In concealing the day of sorrow; And enough is the present tense of toil— For this world is, to all, a stiffish soil— And the mind flies back with a glad recoil From the debts not ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Hill, as if that were the very admission he had been waiting for. And then he did what for him was a very curious thing. He went down upon one knee on the dusty floor, bringing his face on a level with hers, clasping her tense hands between his own. "You don't trust yourself, and you won't trust me," he said. "Isn't that it? Or ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... charged with the electricity of an excitement so tense, so suppressed, that it struck her like some living force as she rode through the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... with an unknown dread. There was something terrifying in the tense body, so still, so mute. He licked the pallid face, the cold hands, and placed a gentle paw upon the man's breast, scratching softly to see if he could not gain some response. There was no answer to his loving appeal; and throwing back his head, there broke from ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... cannon-shot, lifted its head sidewise from the ground and neighed piteously. Madwell stepped forward, drew his revolver and shot the poor beast between the eyes, narrowly observing its death-struggle, which, contrary to his expectation, was violent and long; but at last it lay still. The tense muscles of its lips, which had uncovered the teeth in a horrible grin, relaxed; the sharp, clean-cut profile took on a look ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... spying head; its face dead-white against the dense green of the verdure, with shocks of long white hair hanging down on each side, framing between them a pair of eyes that gleamed from cavernous sockets, like black glowing beads. There was unmistakable fear, a tense anxiety in those glittering eyes as Captain Plum walked toward the paper, but when he paused and stretched himself, the sole of his boot carelessly trampling the discarded letter, the head disappeared again and there came another satisfied ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... pulled down many years since. [p] And sloth's bland opiates shed their fumes in vain. [q] The garret and the gaol. [r] See Gent. Mag. vol. lxviii. p. 951, 1027. [s] This was first written, "See, when the vulgar scaped;" but, as the rest of the paragraph was in the present tense, he altered it to scapes; but again recollecting that the word vulgar is never used as a singular substantive, he adopted the reading of the text. [t] Ver. 133—146. [u] ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... and again he was startled to note the transformation in his face. Where there had been glowing pride there was now bitter savage hate. For that hour at least the half-breed was all Sioux. His father's blood was the water in his veins, the red was only his Indian mother's. With face drawn tense and lips bared into a snarl, with eyes gleaming, he gazed fascinated upon the face of the singer. In imagination, in instinct, in the deepest emotions of his soul Jerry was harking back again to ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... end of the yard, and was crossing the roof when a Yellow Cat rose up. The Black Torn glared and growled, so did the Yellow Tom. Their tails lashed from side to side. Strong throats growled and yowled. They approached each other with ears laid back, with muscles a-tense. ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... young man to the other. Doug with his long face entirely expressionless, sitting easily sidewise in his saddle; Scott, face flushed, eyes angry, standing tense in the stirrups. There came an ugly twist to Charleton's lips, but after a moment he ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... shrilly in their joy or wept or prayed. Alonzo, his eyes snapping with excitement, wrenched his wheel with hands no longer tired, and Bernal, the sneer for once absent from his lips, gazed with tense face toward ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... tense, listening, her fingers spread toward the stops to push them in and close the organ and be gone before they arrived if they contemplated coming in, for she had no mind to talk to them just now. Then coldly, ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... effort. It was the most foolhardy of undertakings. Only the tree, with its questionable hold upon the cliff-side, held her above the gorge. She strained her arms to the utmost; their finger-tips touched and she clasped his hand. There was a tense moment; then her aid making it possible, he dug his feet into the little crevices of the rocky surface ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... air, he told himself, but it was hardly to be expected that he should do more. He yawned, dozed, and surveyed his line without curiosity; beside him sat "Mistah Breckenridge," every muscle of him tense, and a light in his eyes that was not ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... going at the pace she exacted. She knew by her instincts where the herds of ponies ran. It was easy to catch and halter any one she chose; no forest beast went in fear of her who had the wild-wood savour in her hair—but it meant more contriving and another stretch for her tense brain. For herself, she hardly dared stay at all. Prosper's breast under a dagger! If she had stayed she would not have slept. The fever and the fever only kept her up; for a slim and tender girl she went through incredible fatigues. But while the fever ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... luminousness of the sky-line. Once, far over there to the left, a gun was fired, the flame splitting the night asunder, and against the distant reflection a black figure rose up between, only to be instantly snuffed out again. Hamlin put down his uplifted foot, and waited, in tense, motionless silence, but nothing happened, except the echo of ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... up and whirled within the big dumb wonder that was on him: that here was he, a lad not yet twenty-two, with a dead wife on his hands, while his shipmates were off with the laughter of young women in their ears after the silent and tense watches of the sea. His captain had gone home to Newry to where his wife awaited him, the tall, graceful woman with the hair like black silk and the black eyes and the black ear-rings and the slim, white, enigmatic hands. And the first mate had gone to Rostrevor ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... blood-red on the polished floor. A great tiger skin stretched in front of a massive, claw-legged davenport, and in the corner of it, away from the cheerful, crackling fire, a black-haired woman sat, tense and silent, her eyes fixed in a brooding stare. She was all in delicate, cunningly mingled tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains on her long ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... hands shaking, his face convulsed; but as he groped forward she snatched one of the electric candlesticks from among her toilet articles and swung it above her head. The fixture was of heavy brass, and its momentum ripped the connection from its socket; her arm was tense with the strength of utter loathing as she brought the weapon down. Hayman reeled away, covering his face with his hands and cursing wildly; then, profiting by his retreat, Lorelei was at the door, had turned the key, and was in the hall before he could prevent her. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... good deal about Clara while she was dressing. A good many times lately she had looked forward to the fall, the time of her marriage, when their rather tense relationship would be ended. This house in the country, which was to be her last little bachelor fling, was to be Clara's last ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... reached. It was wide, marshy, edged with cowslips. It would take a long jump to clear it. Gething felt the back gather beneath him, the tense body flung into the air, the flight through space, then the landing well upon ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... window was to her eyes like the glare of the sun at noonday: the ticking of the clock on the wall fell on her ears, each tick like a sharply pointed hammer seeming to bruise the nerve. A keen thrill ran like a knife through her tense frame when the infant stirred and moaned in his sleep. The lion roused himself in an instant, and fixing his eyes upon the bed came towards it arching his back and yawning. He rubbed himself against the bedstead and stood for a moment so near that Mrs. V. could have touched him with ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... mettlesome canoe, and his watchful comrade in the stern, all form part of the concentrated energy with which he brings his every faculty to a single point of instantaneous action. There, for one fateful moment, he stands erect, his whole tense body like the full-drawn bow before it speeds the arrow home. He throws: and then, for some desperate minutes, it is often a fight to a finish between the whale's life and ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... lieutenant looked down into the water over the stern, and saw that the schooner was already raising the mud in her wane. Then he went forward along the deck. His men were crouching down along by the low rail, and there was a tense quietness of expectation about them. The lieutenant looked them over as he passed them. "Johnson," he said, "do you take the lead and line and go forward and sound a bit." Then to the others: "Now, my men, the moment we run her aboard, you get aboard of her as quick as you can, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... politics into the school-room and the whole tense life of the capital was extremely undesirable, and, if continued, could not fail to have an injurious influence upon immature lads; so my mother hastily decided that, instead of waiting until the next year, we should go to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... And a growling gun when the fight was won, and the twilight flickered gray, I have seen men die with their chins raised high, and a curse that was half a prayer— I have fought alone when a comrade's groan was tense ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... made up wholly of action, hence its very real place in drama. The greatest moments in life are manifested not in words but in action. Dramatists are coming to realize that a gesture may be more expressive and natural at tense moments than speech. We have ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... to San Francisco. Then they have to make their way further up the coast to their destination. On the way they encounter various characters, some good and honourable, and others very much the reverse. Finally they arrive and set to work seeking for gold. Of course there are more adventures and tense situations, as you would expect ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... moment has arrived, and I take him at once into the country—(Summer: The Storm). This is the first of the four out-of-door scenes, and the lad's first real experience with nature. It impresses him crudely but violently; and in the tense excitement of the tempest he is inspired to temporary eloquence; and at the close is much softened. He feels in a way but does not know that he has been a participant in one of Nature's superb dramas. (Thus do I insidiously prepare ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Dunwody began to edge in upon the accumulated winnings of his neighbor on the right. An hour passed, two hours, more. The boat plowed on down-stream. Presently the colored boy began to light lamps. There came to the faces of all the tense look, the drawn and lined visage which is concomitant to play for considerable stakes. A frown came on the florid countenance of the young officer. The pile of tokens and currency before him lessened steadily. At last, in fact, he began to show uneasiness. He thrust ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... in denial Rosie could only oppose a heart more imperiously exacting in its demands. Her tense little spirit didn't know how to do otherwise. From lines of ancestry that had never done anything but toil with patient relentlessness to wring from the soil whatever it was capable of yielding, she had inherited no habit of compromise. In them ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... me away!" cried the prisoner in a tense voice. "Paul, Paul, my own little Paul!" The woman's breath came and went in gusts, and her child cried from the convulsive pressure to ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... David breathed the prayer: "Lord, take us through safe! Lord, take us through safe!" His face was set, but his nerves were iron. Andy and Jamie, tense with the peril and excitement of the adventure, crouched in the bottom of the boat. As they drew near the ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... is in those words, thou hast been! when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth, have vanished with our ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... almost hissed. On reaching the wreck, however, this shriek became hoarse with rage, and howled as it shook the rigging. It used the shrouds and stays of the still upright mainmast as an aeolian harp from which to draw horrible music. It made the tense ropes tremble and thrill, and tortured the spars until they wailed a death-song. Its force as felt by the shipwrecked ones was astonishing; it beat them about as if it were a sea, and bruised them against the shrouds and bulwarks; it asserted its mastery ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... met, in old Mr. Carpenter's office, and Billy came home to Susan and Mrs. Cudahy, and sat for a tense hour playing moodily ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... encountered, and it is often the woodcraft and ingenuity of these men that gets them out of them, sometimes in extremely (for you and me) unexpected ways. This results in a series of tense incidents, and, though the literary style is a bit unusual, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... spot, and her own desolate condition. She had wanted the horse to stop and let her get down to solid ground, and now that he had done so and she might dismount a great horror filled her and she dared not. But with the lessening of the need for keeping up the tense strain of nerve and muscle, she suddenly began to feel that she could not sit up any longer, that she must lie down, let go this awful strain, stop this uncontrollable trembling which was quivering all ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... with one eye at the slight opening gained a glimpse of the lighted room beyond. A moment, motionless, he stared in on the scene; then straightened up, and, with revolver in hand, signalled to the others to close in closer. They stood there for a tense instant, poised and eager; then the doors were flung crashing back, and they leaped recklessly forward, out of the darkness into the light. It was a furious fight—sharp, merciless, uncompromising. The ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... words I overheard reminded me of the unpleasant truth that I had recently made a great many senseless blunders, over which I chafed in merciless self-condemnation. For weeks and months my mind had been tense under the strain of increasing work and responsibility. It was my nature to become absorbed in my tasks, and, as night editor of a prominent city journal, I found a limitless field for labor. It was true I could have ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... concrete; cement. V. render hard &c adj.; harden, stiffen, indurate, petrify, temper, ossify, vitrify; accrust^. Adj. hard, rigid, stubborn, stiff, firm; starch, starched; stark, unbending, unlimber, unyielding; inflexible, tense; indurate, indurated; gritty, proof. adamant, adamantine, adamantean^; concrete, stony, granitic, calculous, lithic^, vitreous; horny, corneous^; bony; osseous, ossific^; cartilaginous; hard as a rock &c n.; stiff as buckram, stiff as a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... splendours! I did not follow the counsels of friends of Jamadagni's son, of the celestial rishi Narada, and of island-born Krishna, while they offered me counsel. In the midst of the assembly, Krishna told me what was for my good, saying, "A truce (tense) to hostilities, O king! Let thy son take the whole kingdom! Give but five villages to the Pandavas!" Fool that I was, for not following that advice, I am now obliged to repent so poignantly! I did not listen to the righteous counsels of Bhishma. Alas, having ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... wound steeply down from here to the rocks below, and on it, just under the concealing crest of the land, stood the padrone with Maddalena. Their hands were linked together, as if they had caught at each other sharply for sympathy or help. Their faces were tense and their lips parted. But as they saw Gaspare's light figure leaping over the hill edge, his dancing eyes fixed shrewdly, with a sort of boyish scolding, upon them, their hands ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... at the last instant in a frantic leap that ended as before in the maelstrom of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of joy to the tense nerves of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... she could reach David's heart. If she had looked up then and seen his white, drawn look, and the tense grasp of his hands that only the greatest self-control kept quiet on his knee, perhaps even her mercilessness would have been softened. But she did not look, and she felt her part was well taken. She sobbed quietly, and waited, and his hoarse voice asked ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... saws themselves are subsequently tightened by forcing home the keys until a certain amount of tension has been attained, this is ascertained only by the peculiar sound which emanates from the blade on being drawn considerably tight and tense. Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are quite sufficient to ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... (I am speaking of the 25th of March, A. D. 1839, in the present tense,) I succeeded in persuading my father to gratify my predilection for the sea, by putting me on board of the Gentile, under the particular care of Captain Smith, to try one voyage—so I became the ship's cousin. Contrary to the predictions ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... ancient than the matters it speaks of, refers to, them as facts; for in the case of pursuing them unto Dan, and of the kings that reigned over the children of Israel; not even the flimsy pretence of prophecy can be pleaded. The expressions are in the preter tense, and it would be downright idiotism to say that a man could prophecy in the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... be attacked in front. Horble's face plainly showed discomfiture at this move, and his right hand went hurriedly behind his back. Gregory was conscious of a belaying pin being whipped out of sight, and in an instant he was roused and tense, his nostrils vibrating with a sense of danger. The two men stared at each other, and then Horble backed into the stateroom, remarking with furtive insincerity, "There's a power of dirt to windward!" This said, the door went shut behind him. Gregory sprang to his feet and burst ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... their tails, and all facing the same way, namely, toward the spot where I had observed the suspicious motion of the grass. But the motion had ceased now, and for nearly a quarter of an hour we all stood there tense, waiting ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... abruptly. He could hear tense voices shouting that the Wolves were out of it. He came to a stop in front of ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... rap something!" "mal one lif unartig sein." "What is the meaning of 'lif'? do you mean 'when you ran'?" (lief ran, the past tense of laufen to run). "no." "Did you learn that word from me?" "yes." "Then explain yourself." "ich rante in wald zu re" ( I ran in the wood after deer). Apparently she was in no mood for explanations, and it was only after wrestling ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... think that is in the future tense? But I am afraid," added Faith,—"she thinks too much of ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... floor. Standing motionless, he glanced keenly about in the dull red gloom. All silence—no stir save the regular rise and fall of the breathing of the slumbering Indians. Nevertheless, with his keen perceptions all alert and tense, he felt an eye upon him. He looked back warily over his shoulder through the lucid red gloom, like a palpable medium, as one looks, through ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and shining in the moonlight, leaned out of the buggy toward the retreating vaquero. "Don't you dare hurt my father! Don't you dare!" she warned. The words choked in her tense throat. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... upper cut of the military man brought blood freely from his opponent's mouth the lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Nobody seemed to be impressed by my splendid silence, but it was there all the same, and somebody was going to be very sorry before he got home. I touched my tie and lit a fresh cigarette. The air was tense. I could almost see my electric moment walking down the compartment to meet me. We were nearing a station. I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... still awake when the midnight accommodation whistled its impending arrival from the north. She listened, tense, as the train came to a stop in the town. A brief halt, then it sounded its underway, the pistons accelerated their chugging beat and it passed out of Crampville into ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... Laura resumed, with the complacency of one who saw a goodly portion of the festival she was enjoying still before her. "I was going to say, Mr. Pericles had poor Mr. Pole in his power; has him, would be the correcter tense. And Wilfrid, as you may have heard, had really grossly insulted him, even to the extent of maltreating him—a poor foreigner—rich foreigner, if you like! but not capable of standing against a strong young man in wrath. However, now there can be little doubt that Wilfrid ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his face went white. He compressed his lips with an effort and choked back the words. Leverage, leaning forward in tense eagerness—knowing the verbal trap that Carroll had been ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... rein; and then sat silent and motionless on the back of his horse, his eyes on his comrade, waiting in tense expectancy for the moment when he would reach the clump of bushes and look down into the valley beyond and see the cause of those strange and terrible cries that had so suddenly and so fearfully ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... was why each had cried out at Aix-les-Bains against the merry little tune. It was interesting. I saw however that it must have jangled horribly on tense nerves. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... until they were met by another cyclone that drove them back again. They filled the street as well as the narrow sidewalks, they poured out of the doorways as if impelled from behind, and Madeleine wondered they did not jump from the windows. No one sauntered, all rushed along with tense faces; there were many collisions and no one paused to apologize, nor did any one seem to expect it. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of offices in those buildings high for their day, and every profession, every business, every known or unique occupation, ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... cocked on the stairway, nobody appeared. The wind was still, the sea like glass; not a sound anywhere. Struck by something of strangeness in the uncanny silence, Jim sat up and called "Ahoy, Chamberlain!" There was no answer. But in the tense stillness there was a sound, and it came from below—the sound of a ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... not, like the German, lie in disciplined idealism. The Englishman is an Anarchist and a grumbler: he has no such word as Fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic song. Also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head. But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... start as she thought of Peter Noyes. She turned away from the mirror as if—as if ashamed. She sprang to her feet, with an odd, tense expression about her mouth. It was as if she were looking into his dark, earnest eyes. Peter had always been so intensely in earnest about everything. In college he had worked himself thin to lead his class. In the law ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... truth, Vaniman was conscious of a feeling of comradeship with the three rapscallions at that moment. They were merely seeking loot. He was seeking the re-establishment of his honor and his love. He waited in the tense silence, straining every nerve to hear. No sound came to him. He wondered whether Britt, cowed, was ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... thought—she could take a hint. But she felt tense and uncomfortable now. Something was going ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... The suffering, contempt, and death of the Servant of God are here, throughout, represented as past, since in chap. liii. 1-10, all the verbs are in the Preterite. It is the glorification only which appears as future, and is expressed in the Future tense. The writer, therefore, occupies a position between the sufferings and the glorification, and the latter is still impending. But the stand-point of the Prophet is not an actual, but a supposed one,—not a real, but an ideal one. In order to distinguish between condition ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... of tense waiting I tried to collect my thoughts. I told myself that I must keep steady, that I must keep my mind clear. I struggled to get a grip on myself; the light, the steady flying without power, the boundless, horrible silence had shaken me. But there was more to come. I knew it. We ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... strange emotions in my breast. I heard Swank gasp and Whinney's face was white and drawn, his favorite expression when deeply moved. She stood close to her husband, half-twined about him with the grace and strength of an eva-eva vine while her kindling eyes burned questioningly, her lithe body tense and protective. "He is to be christened," said Baahaabaa, with a magnificent ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... toward it to wrench it open again, for something in the uncanny movement of the thing and the tense and almost palpable silence of the chamber seemed to portend a lurking evil lying hidden in this rock-bound chamber within the bowels of ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scraps of Latin which Aramis sported and which Porthos pretended to understand. Two or three times, even, to the great astonishment of his friends, he had, when Aramis allowed some rudimental error to escape him, replaced a verb in its right tense and a noun in its case. Besides, his probity was irreproachable, in an age in which soldiers compromised so easily with their religion and their consciences, lovers with the rigorous delicacy of our era, and the poor with ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... then did she weep. Can here is the Northern dialect form for the middle English gan, past tense of ginnen, to begin, which ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... permit these two young and impressionable beings to enjoy this pleasure on a lonely road just as the day was dying and the tense energies of the world were relaxed? There are times when her indifference to her own most inviolable laws seems anarchic. There are moments when she appears wantonly to ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... braid on his cuffs streaked with oil and rust, then had but one thought in his mind—to hit the target. He looked neither to right nor left but was still at the periscope. The warship was there. We were there, and one could imagine the tiny periscope just above the water. The situation was tense, even if the vessel to be fired at was not ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... must indulge me in a long parenthesis. I beg him to bear me witness that I never made one before. This parenthesis is on the tense that I am obliged to use in sending to the press these minutes. The reader observes that the last transactions mentioned happen in April and May, 1871. Those to be narrated are the sequence of those already told. Speaking of them in 1870 with the coarse tenses of the English ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... altered her determination. She was like a statue of justice, fixed and demanding the right. Dick had rushed forward to try and dissuade her from further speech, and stood at the end of the desk in the halo of light from the lamp, and there was a tense stillness in the room which rendered every outward sound more distinct. The voice of a boy driving mules to their stable and singing as he went, the clank and jingle of the chain tugs across the animals' backs, and the ceaseless monotone of the mill, all came through the open windows, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... grips with the uncrippled hand; but now two stout young arms, tense with rage, soon twist and break the one unaided limb. Then with limp arms the beaten brute turns to flee; but swift hate is upon him, and clutches him by the throat; and pressing him down, the hero of Kaala holds his ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... outstretched hand fell to his side. The expression of eagerness with which he had approached Josephine disappeared from his face. He confronted Phipps, who had also risen to his feet, as a right-living man should confront his enemy. There was a second or two of tense silence, broken by Phipps, who was ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... groups of Bantu languages, the arrangement followed being probably founded on a fundamental system common to the original Bantu tongue. The exception alluded to may be a method of forming the preterite tense, which seems to be shared by a great number of widely-spread Bantu languages. This may be illustrated by the Zulu tanda, love, which changes to tandile, have loved, did love. This -ile or -ili may become in other forms -idi, didi, -ire, -ine, but is always referable back ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... notes are further reenforced by an Idiomatic Commentary, to be studied in connection with the text. By frequent reviews and by oral drill in translating the idioms from either language to the other, with changes of person, tense, etc., wherever possible, the Commentary should enable the student to attain to a real mastery of the idioms ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... grasping the heavy revolver at his hip. Crouching like a startled tiger, with not a muscle moving, he peered anxiously into the darkness, his arm half extended, scarcely venturing to breathe. There came a plain, undisguised rustling in the grass,—some prowling coyote, probably; then his tense muscles immediately relaxed, and he cursed himself for being so startled, yet he continued to grasp the "45" in his right hand, his ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... I reached the shut-in staircase and carefully unlocked its narrow door. But by the time I had reached the fourth floor, and unlocked, with the same key, the only other door that had a streak of light under it, I had gained a certain degree of tense composure born of the desperate nature of the occasion. The calmness with which I pushed open the door proved this—a calmness which made the movement noiseless, which was the reason, I suppose, why I was enabled to suppress the shriek that rose to my lips as I saw ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... her fury. He saw her eyes contract to the gleam of a new idea. She was silent a moment, while her vibrant, tense body swayed in front of ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... every Latin writer is apt to fall, since the rules on which the true practice is built are among the subtlest in any language. [70] We have poetical constructions, as tollere consilia iniit; popular ones, as infitias it, dum with the perfect tense, and colloquialisms like impraesentiarum; we have Graecizing words like deuteretur, automatias, and curious inflexions such as Thuynis, Coti, Datami, genitives of Thuys, Cotys, [71] and Datames, respectively. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... released the brake and turned about for the next order, he cast his glance out upon the bay, and there, not a hundred and fifty yards away, her spotless sails tense, her cordage humming, her immaculate flanks slipping easily through the waves, the water hissing and churning under her forefoot, clean, gleaming, dainty, and aristocratic, the Ridgeways' yacht "Petrel" passed like a thing of life. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Mrs. de Tracy wanted to be urged to ask her niece to Stoke Revel, or whether she wanted to be supplied with a really plausible excuse for not doing so. Those of you who have seen a hound at fault can imagine the companion at this moment: irresolute, tense, desperately anxious to find and follow up the right scent. Compromise, that useful refuge, ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... interesting. George Brown continued to fight for representation by population with undiminished vigour, and although both he and his Lower-Canadian colleague, Dorion, were defeated in the general elections of 1861, he was gaining ground. The antagonism between Upper and Lower Canada yearly became more tense, and there were signs of the approach of that deadlock which ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... checked in headlong speed—startled, almost stunned. The blood rushed in a tumultuous flood to his thin cheeks, then receded, leaving his face mottled red and white. His steel-gray eyes suddenly glowed like hot metal. There was a moment of tense silence; then he said, his voice steady and controlled, his manner stiff but not without dignity, "Pray do not allow that to discompose you. She ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... panorama unreeling beneath them. Earth's crescent sank behind them, and by the time they flashed out over the great fresh-water sea, the sun was rising like a flaming eye from behind it. Land sank from sight behind and the green men were silent, tense, as they saw stretching beneath only the gray waters that for ages had been the base of the dread frog-men. But still ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... my needed rest to read and ponder on our human fate. Sundays! Things after a day's labour incomprehensible to my stunned brain were easily grasped on a glorious morning of religious leisure. The apathy of my fellows—how well I understood it when, with nerves unstrung and muscles relaxed, after a tense twelve hours of toil, I fell asleep over my beloved books! And how well, too, I understood their amusement—the appeal of the poor man's club!—when in gay carousal we tried to forget what we were. Even in the saloon and dance-hall we told tales of the shop! Oh, the irony of it! Was there no escape ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... notice of the tense of which Morris made use, for the reason that it seemed natural to him that he should employ it. Their strange habit was to talk of Stella, not as we speak of one dead, but as a living individuality with whom they chanced for a while to ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... his feet. The footsteps were close at hand now upon the tessellated pavement. Then through the drooping palm boughs they saw him. Julien was standing tense and prepared, his uninjured arm was ready ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in—a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... in the jungle announced the arrival of the convoy. Messengers, in advance, shouted the news. Men from Yugna went out to inspect. The atmosphere grew tense. The air ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... left him in the corner. Remember that you are a stranger in the place, and they take more notice of what you do, so you must be careful. Now let's have our conjugations. Give me the verb 'to be,' potential mood, past perfect tense." ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... No, there are no cross-purposes in nature; it all seems in perfect harmony," murmured Mrs. Seabrook, her eyes glowing with keen appreciation of the exquisite picture before her. "It is only poor humanity that seems all out of tune," she went on, the tense lines coming back to her face. "Oh, Phillip! what is this mystery of suffering that we see all about us? If God is tender, and loving, and supreme, why—oh! why—is the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... "Divorce Colony." We all bunched together and said "What's the use," and if it hadn't been for the old man who eats his soup out loud, we would have bolted in a mass to suggest "Free Love" to our respective "Fiascos"—Dakota's past tense for "Fiance." ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... to settle down over the old laboratory which had so often been the scene of such events, tense with human interest. I could scarcely conceal my amazement, as I watched Kennedy quietly restoring to their places the pieces of apparatus ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve |
