"Torrential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she would probably throw herself away on the first man that offered! This was his chance, I told him; the one chance of his life; he was letting a piece of idiotic pride wreck the probable happiness of years. He agreed with me with moans and weeps. He had the candor of a child and the torrential sentiment of a German musician. Three hundred and four dollars and seventy-five cents stood between him and eternal bliss, and yet he waved my pocketbook from him! And all the while I saw myself ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... a true boiler, a torrential pool never at rest. It charges down amongst huge masses of rock, and just where the descent is comparatively easy the inevitable salmon trap is fixed. Sometimes the salmon takes in the very boil, if you cast fly right into the milky tossings, and believe me you need not strike. Hooking is quite ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... a heavy rain set in, and there was nothing for the baffled ape-man to do but wait in the partial shelter of a huge tree until morning; but the coming of dawn brought no cessation of the torrential downpour. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Temple appeared at once, for the torrential rains which annually since the deluge had fallen for forty days beginning with the month of Marheshwan, for the first time failed to come, and thenceforward ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... clamor—he could distinguish low pitched drums—brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously smiling, of Cytherea. He thought of that torrential discord rising around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender hand, the nails stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... take an active part in the fighting in the South, and therefore no surprise when we received orders to entrain. This was carried out in the early hours of Sept. 12th, at Calonne-Ricouart Station, and was rendered extremely uncomfortable by a torrential downpour, which made it specially difficult to get the transport vehicles up the steep ramps on to the trucks. C Company had to do the loading for the whole Brigade, and were at the station for nearly twenty-four hours, working ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... Bossuet; Saint Cyprian, full of unction, gentleness, and charity; Lactantius, skilful Christian philosopher, ingenious and possessing insinuating subtlety; Saint Hilarius, an ardent polemist, impetuous and torrential; Saint Ambrose, exalted, wise, serene, very well read, very "Roman," who may be styled the Cicero of Christianity; Saint Jerome, ardent, impassioned, possessing lively sensibility, an animated and seductive imagination, who—excluding all idea of scandal—suggests what ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... like asking Hotspur if he would kindly consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His "Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience" calls forth Mr. Cotton's "Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb;" and this in turn provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, "The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb." There is glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting sentences. But ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Suma retired to the cavity in the cottonwood while the torrential rains fell with a monotonous roar, and the craneflies with their lacy, whirring wings formed a curtain in the entrance to lend ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... his "Polar Star," but he expressed his usual fidelity to her. Miserable or fortunate, he was always the same to her; it was because of his unchangeableness of heart that he was so painfully wounded by her neglect. Carried away, as he often was, by his torrential existence, he might miss writing to her, but he could not understand how she could deprive him of the sacred bread which restored his courage and ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... mound opening into the subterranean burrow system, each hole from 4 to 5-1/2 inches in diameter. These holes are nearly all situated a little above the surface of the surrounding soil, and as Price has suggested (in Allen, 1895, 213), this is doubtless a wise provision against flooding, as torrential rains sometimes occur in ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... journey was monotonous enough, miles and miles of weary sandy plains, with alternate stretches of agabas or stony deserts, scored with shallow depressions, where torrential rains had recently soaked into the sand, leaving a glassy, clay-like surface, which had flaked or cracked into huge fissures under the heat of the fierce sun. And at every few hundred yards we came ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... the march occasional short halts were necessary; but at 2 a.m. there was a more serious check. The torrential rain had clogged Major Benson's compass, and he became uncertain whether the column had not trended away towards the left. Major-General Wauchope sent back for Lieutenant-Colonel Ewart. After a brief ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... patient expostulation that John Woolfolk had prepared disappeared in a sudden tyranny of emotion, of hunger for the slender, weary figure before him. Seating himself at her side, he burst into a torrential expression of passionate desire that mounted with the tide of his eager words. He caught her hands, held them in a painful grip, and gazed down into her still, frightened face. He stopped abruptly, was silent for a tempestuous moment, and then baldly repeated ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... storm was on them in earnest. This blast came with zigzag flashes of lightning that showed the heavens riotous with battalions of charging clouds; it came with deafening thunder and a torrential discharge of rain. One would have thought the power of the wind sufficient to set a steel battleship scudding before it like a wooden shoe. And yet the extraordinary Jasper B., although she shrieked and groaned and seemed to stagger with the force of the blow, did not move either ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... of Swift as opposed to his general view of politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize everything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the torrential sweat, the burning of the sun—all these culminated in the torment of which this ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... had time to soak into the earth from which it later emerges as springs. Nature forms basins on the heads of the rivers where a part of the water, instead of immediately flowing away, collects in the form of lakes. From these lakes the water runs away slowly instead of in torrential floods. ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... of northing. And when it was not blowing with hurricane strength it was usually just the opposite: a flat calm, with a black, lowering, overcast sky, moist, steamy, overpowering heat, heavy storms of thunder and lightning, torrential downpours of tepid rain—which, by the way, enabled us to re-fill all our water tanks and casks—and waterspouts ad libitum constantly threatening us ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... alkali and hunger gaunt and death),— And here is lost in shifting rifts of sand. Anon it lingers by a hidden spring That bubbles joy into the wilderness; Its pathway trenched that distant mountain side, Now grown to gulches through torrential rain. De Vaca gathered pinons by the way, Long ere the furrows grew on yonder hill, Cut by the creaking prairie-schooner wheels; La Salle, the gentle Frenchman, crossed this course, And went to death ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... N.E. by N., and marched alternately through sandy and fertile country, across mountains of no great height, and plains with herds of ostriches and fine cattle. The low grounds were frequently intersected by the beds of torrential streams. One day, we crossed a rocky plain with the soil strongly impregnated with salt, and pastured by large herds of camels which the Arabs here keep for their milk and flesh alone, seldom using them as beasts ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... set eyes on her begin to knock her about; but for sergeants suffering under a blight and characterless females masquerading as hospital nurses to come and ride rough-shod over an honest working woman was past endurance. Thus I paraphrase my memory of the lady's torrential speech. "Lay your hand on me," she cried, "and ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... here—disregarding serial significance—or mechanical, unintelligent, repulsive reflex—is that the fishes of India did not fall from the sky; that they were found upon the ground after torrential rains, because streams had overflowed ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Men bet and lost all the gold they had brought with them, then sold horse, serape, and sombrero to the men who neither drank nor gambled, but came prepared for close and profitable bargains. Reinaldo lost his purloins, won them again, stood upon the table and spoke with torrential eloquence of his wrongs and virtues, kissed all the girls, and when by easy and rapid stages he had succeeded in converting himself into a tank of aguardiente, he was carried home and put to bed by such of his companions as were sober ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... water except as a medium for quenching his thirst. He hated it because he connected it with the chill and discomfort of the torrential rains, and he feared it for the thunder and lightning ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... lots of houses and cottages are pink, a real Italian pink, so that whole villages blush as you look them in the face. Sometimes, too, there's a blue or a green, or a golden-ochre house; here and there a high, broken wall of rose or faded yellow, with torrential geraniums boiling over the top. And the effect of this riot of colour, in contrast with the silver gray of the velvety thatch, or lichen-jewelled slate roofs, under great, cool trees, is even more beautiful than Italy. If all England is ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... breaking of a twig not escaping our attention. First, I would take the advance and then the Sergeant. When we passed through cane-fields we found the plowed grounds but little less than marshes, for the rainy season had just begun with torrential showers. Our bodies were soon soaked to the skin, for the leaves of the cane and banana stalks were burdened with water. The cane was a trifle higher than our heads, and the wide-spreading leaves of the banana hid the sky ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... White Nile, which runs steadily from the perennial reservoirs of the great Central African lakes, the Lower Nile would assume the character of an intermittent wady, such as the neighbouring Khor Baraka, periodically flushed by the discharge of the torrential downpours from Abyssinia. Though there is a periodical increase in the flow of the upper waters of the White Nile, yet the effect of this, lower down, is minimised by the dense quantities of vegetable drift, which, combining with the forest ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Mrs. Gould that it was because he found there, in her absence, the relief of an atmosphere of congenial sentiment in old Giorgio's austere admiration for the "English signora—the benefactress"; in black-eyed Linda's voluble, torrential, passionate affection for "our Dona Emilia—that angel"; in the white-throated, fair Giselle's adoring upward turn of the eyes, which then glided towards him with a sidelong, half-arch, half-candid glance, which made the doctor exclaim to himself mentally, "If I weren't ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Terra's dust-filled air. As that mighty sun dropped below the horizon the sky would fill suddenly with clouds and rain would fall violently and steadily until midnight. Then the clouds would vanish as suddenly as they had come into being, the torrential downpour would cease, and, through that huge world's wonderfully transparent, gaseous envelope, the full glory of the firmament would be revealed. Not the firmament as we know it—for that hot blue sun and Nevia, her one planet-child, were many light-years distant ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... either of them to attempt a word they would make a sorry showing, and this would throw her into a torrential storm of tears. Of all three in the editor's office, her shoulders carried the heaviest burden. Each of the men was losing but one whom he loved; she was losing two—and, besides these two, there was Jeb! Jeb, who had thought more ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... rowed and sailed for days which grew into weeks, and then to months, from river into river, and then in and out of what was a great watery puzzle; but the canon with its golden city might have sunk right out of sight, for in spite of every effort the party were driven back at last when the torrential ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... of great size and length he sensed before him the thunderous rush of subterranean waters, and presently came to the bank of a great, underground river, tumbling onward, no doubt, the length of a world to the buried sea of Omean. Into this torrential sewer had unthinkable generations of ulsios pushed their few handsful of dirt in the excavating of their ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... broke loose, a great, torrential downpour. It came in sheets, with an impetuous, though genial, clatter. It seemed as though the valley was swiftly filling with water and in less than an hour's time it would reach the tops of the trees. I thought of Noah's flood. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... being exceedingly slow, as we reckon time. This is especially the case with meadows circumstanced like the one we have described—embosomed in deep woods, with the ground rising gently away from it all around, the network of tree-roots in which all the ground is clasped preventing any rapid torrential washing. But, in exceptional cases, beautiful lawns formed with great deliberation are overwhelmed and obliterated at once by the action of land-slips, earthquake avalanches, or extraordinary floods, just as ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... filly, the Ramblin' Kid forced her back toward the Cimarron, into its raging flood, multiplied a hundredfold by the torrential rain of the night; side by side she and Captain Jack swam the stream, and in the gray dawn, while the Quarter Circle KT still slept, he turned the mare and Captain Jack into the circular corral. He removed the saddle from Captain Jack, took the rope from the filly's neck, threw the horses ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... the very foundations of the earth had been riven asunder. So tremendous was the concussion of it that I quite distinctly felt the longboat quiver and tremble under its influence. And the next instant down came the rain in a regular tropical, torrential downpour, causing the sea to hiss as though each individual drop of rain were red-hot, and starting us to work at once in both boats with the balers, to save our provisions from being ruined. I happened to be looking away ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... travel far, penetrate the openings just indicated by the dark- blue shadows in the distance, and descend the lofty walls of the Causses to find silvery cascades, impetuous rivers, and fountains gushing from mossy clefts. The showers of spring, the torrential rains of autumn, the snows of winter, have filtered to a depth of ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... its generalship to the task of reducing the Germans in East Africa. It was formidable enough, not so much from the opposition of man as because of the obstacles nature placed in the way. A tropical climate, torrential rains which played havoc with transport, the tzetze-fly which slew beasts of burden in hundreds of thousands, impenetrable forests, impassable swamps, immense mountain masses, and an area almost ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... Travis would never have been able to track the clan. The drizzle alternated with slashing bursts of rain, torrential enough to drive the trackers to the nearest cover. Overhead the sky was either dull bronze or night black. Even the coyotes paced nose to ground, often making wide casts for the trail while ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... ourselves. But we don't, and—for the curious reason, based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular woman—we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... no more than a narrow slit or two midway below the battlements. He rode on towards the northern side, crossing a footbridge that spanned the river, and at last coming to a halt before the entrance tower. Here again the moat was formed by the torrential ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... Beach-Mandarin's crucial luncheon, his deliberate foreseeing mind had been planning such a retreat. Black Strand even at his first visit had appeared to him in the light of a great opportunity, and the crisis of their quarrel did but release that same torrential energy which had carried him to a position of Napoleonic predominance in the world of baking, light catering and confectionery, into the channels of a scheme already very ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to be observed, that the surface of this vast interior is entirely exempt from the coarse superficial drift that encumbers so many countries, as derived from lofty mountain-chains from which either glaciers or great torrential streams have descended. In this respect, it is also equally unlike those plains of Germany, Poland, and Northern Russia, which were sea-bottoms when floating icebergs melted and dropped the loads of stone which ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... blinded by the deluge of torrential rain, thoroughly confused beyond all recognition of his whereabouts in the tangle of bush through which he was thrusting his way, all his senses dazed by the fierce overhead detonations, and the streams of blazing fire splitting the black vault above, Big Brother Bill beat his way along the ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... is not the shift from winter to summer, from cold to heat, but from a long, arid, and barren season to a season short and often irregular in recurrence of torrential rain and sudden fertility. The dry steppes of Central Australia are the scene of a marvellous transformation. In the dry season all is hot and desolate, the ground has only patches of wiry scrub, with an occasional parched acacia tree, all is stones and sand; there is no sign of animal life save ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... than done! A big wave, that was just in time to overhear this conversation imperfectly, thought it would like to wet Sally through, and leaped against the bulwark of the jetty. But it spent itself in a huge torrential deluge while Sally waited a minute. A friend followed it, but made a poor figure by comparison. Then Sally got in between, followed by the doctor.... Well! they were really not so very wet, after all! Sally was worst, as she was too previous. She got implicated in the friend's last dying splash, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... misstatements. They were copious baroque, and encrusted with pleasing and unexpected tricks of ornamentation. That tropical redundancy for which her person was renowned reflected itself likewise in her temperament—in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... which constitute the group 4,015 belong to Hawaii. Except in temperature, which varies only about 11 degrees mean for a year, diversity marks the physical features of these mid-sea islands. Lofty mountains where snow lies perpetually, huge valleys washed by torrential freshets, smooth sand dunes, or fluted ridges, arid plains and rain-soaked forests, fringes of white beach, or abrupt bluffs that drop sheer into the deep sea, days of liquid sunshine or fierce storms ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... structure, as shown by the remarkable basalt columns of the profound Gorge of Itzala. Vari-coloured lichens cover these basalt pillars, affording singular contrast of light and shade. Through the gorge a torrential stream flows, and the floor of the valley is covered with fragments of obsidian, or volcanic glass, gleaming black and brilliant, which has been brought down by the waters from the Cerro de Navajas. This obsidian, or Itzli, was the material ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... end of July the weather, hitherto so fine, broke hopelessly. Torrential rains followed, which inundated the flat country far and wide. After several postponements the Third Battle of Ypres commenced on July 31. Some two weeks later the Battalion moved forward by train from Arnecke to Poperinghe. We awaited our share in the ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... toilsomely beneath the fall, working in rock fissured by the last explosion, through which the water poured in on them, while the river rose when the frost broke up and was succeeded by a week or two of torrential rain. The water swirled high among the boulders, and had crept almost to the mouth of the heading, when one evening Wheeler walked into the shanty. He said nothing of any consequence until supper was over, and he then took a newspaper out ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... the night a terrific gale raged in Manchester and surrounding districts, hail and sleet being accompanied by a torrential rainfall varied by Pendleton, Eccles, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various |
