"Stank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... record that the American continents were discovered because ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being no refrigeration, meat did not keep. But meat was not too easy to come by, so it had to be eaten, even when it stank. Therefore it was a noble enterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to put up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might get spices cheaper and thereby make the consumption ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... along the better for their loads having been lightened by sales in Edinburgh, where he had hardly obtained skins enough to make up for the weight. His headquarters, he said, were at Barnet, since tanning and leather-dressing, necessary to his work, though a separate guild, literally stank in the nostrils of ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pore about it. Won't trust hissel' to spake, and don't want to see nobody. But, as I tell'n, there's no call to be shamed; the fella took the belt in the las' round, and turned his man over like a tab. He's a proper angletwitch, that Wendron fella. Stank 'pon en both ends, and he'll rise up in the middle and look at 'ee. There was no one a patch on en but the Dane; and I'll back the Dane next time they clinch. 'Tis a nuisance, though, to have'n like this—with a big job coming on, too, over to ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... room," I replied, "stank with the fumes of hashish. It may have been some preparation of hashish that was used ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... average tramp would find almost luxurious. The bedclothes were coarse, as they had a perfect right to be, but they were clean; and the food, though scanty and of the plainest, was wholesome and nourishing. In one place, I remember, the bread actually stank, and the hungriest of the hungry crowd left it uneaten. The broth served out next morning was nothing more or less than the water in which bacon had been boiled. The beds were kennels. A long wooden bench was divided into compartments by upright boards; a ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... him for a time, until the decks stank with dead fish, and the men got mutinous. Then I refused to advance the interests of science any farther, and, in spite of his excitement and pleadings, refused to litter the decks any more. But he got all he wanted of the ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... and the stench of it stank to the sky. It might be thought that so terrible a savour would never altogether leave the memories of men; but men's memories are unstable things. It may be that gradually these dazed dupes will gather again together, and attempt again ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... past, were by no means relegated to the limbo of forgotten things. The boiled-up bones, hoofs, shanks, skull, etc., of each horse, though they failed to produce a sufficient quantity of oil to please us, yet in the cool of the night resolved themselves into a consistent jelly that stank like rotten glue, and at breakfast at least, when this disgusting stuff was in a measure coagulated, we would request one another with the greatest politeness to pass the glue-pot. Had it not been that I was an inventor of transcendent genius, even this last luxury would ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... ordained to survive and shed their undying beams for posterity. From these judicial pronouncements there was no appeal, and the pleasant spaces of the Sign of the Indian Chief, so innocuous to the uninitiated eye, was a veritable charnel house that stank in the nostrils of the rejected; but, inconsistent even as life itself, those melancholy graves were danced over by the sprightly young feet of the elect. Sometimes there was a terrifying upheaval in one ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stream of grace is never to stagnate, or it will lose all its character of blessing, as the manna hoarded for a second day "bred worms, and stank." Thus every single Christian becomes a living channel of blessing to all around, and the circle is now completed, by once more returning to the point whence it started, "Which causeth through us thanksgiving to God," and closes with no weary wail of ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... was also firm, out of which we plucked a great many teeth, two of them eight inches long and as big as a man's thumb, small at one end, and a little crooked, the rest not above half so long. The maw was full of jelly, which stank extremely. However, I saved for awhile the teeth and the shark's jaw. The flesh of it was divided among my men, and they took care that no waste should ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... and darnels rank, And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank, 55 Stretched out its long and hollow shank, And stifled the air till the dead wind stank. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... silent, with glazed eyes. It was difficult to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the trenches was still on them. They stank of the trenches, and the stench was in their souls. Presently they began to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes. They laughed!... Later, from this audience of soldiers there were yells of laughter, though the effect of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... risk of her beauty and health, Didine was to Lousteau what Mademoiselle Delachaux was to Gardane in Diderot's noble and true tale. But while sacrificing herself, she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress. She had her gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black. She stank of black, as Malaga said, making fun mercilessly ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... there was never a murmur from the men, and the Russian sisters sat with them all day and all night with a never-tiring devotion. The Commander and every one were strongly Russophile—won to them by personal contact with the Russians, and that although the ship "stank like a pole-cat" before it could ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... besiege it. He threw up a mound round about the city, he built wooden stages on it which he filled with archers and slingers, and these succeeded in killing the people of the city daily. After three days "the city stank," and envoys came bearing rich gifts to sue for peace. With the envoys came the wife of Nemart and her ladies, who cast themselves flat on their faces before the ladies of Piankhi's palace, saying, "We come to you, O ye royal wives, ye royal daughters, and royal sisters. Pacify ye for ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... ower again, Jeames! Shy at a stane, and fa' into the stank (ditch). That's the pairt o' a colt and no o' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... in Australia I had similar stories to these told me—of how those rushing into the death-trap to dig up gold were buried themselves instead. Every day I heard of the swindles as well as of the sewerage. Both the towns and the business stank. Bogus mines were foisted into the "new chum," and huge companies started to work them; businesses advertised as big affairs with tremendous capitals were in reality a paltry village hut or two, with a few pounds of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... we live upon water melons and iced water and figs and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience and felicity which really are edifying. We tried to make the monks of Vallombrosa let us stay with them for two months, but their new abbot said or implied that Wilson and I stank in his nostrils, being women, and San Gualberto, the establishes of their order, had enjoined on them only the mortification of cleaning out pigsties without fork or shovel. So here a couple of women besides was (as Dickens's American said) 'a piling it up rayther too mountainious.' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... slaughterhouses, but also the camping place of an army of fifteen or twenty thousand human beasts. All day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks, and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there were not merely rivers of hot blood, and car-loads of moist ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... it blind, for he did not know what had possessed him to take that line, but knew he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb No, if I stank like thee she ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... depth of Julian's degradation. He had now begun to play devilishly upon a pathetic stop, and sought every occasion to descant upon the social ruin that was overtaking Julian, and his deep concern in the matter. This hypocrisy was so transparent and so offensive that there were moments when it stank in the doctor's nostrils, and he could scarcely repress his horror and disgust. Yet to show them would be not only impolitic, but would only add fuel to the flames of Valentine's pyre of triumph. So the doctor, too, sought to play his part, and ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... done. Moreover, Rochard had a fractured skull as well. Another piece of shell had pierced his ear, and broken into his brain, and lodged there. Either wound would have been fatal, but it was the gas gangrene in his torn-out thigh that would kill him first. The wound stank. It was foul. The Medecin Chef took a curette, a little scoop, and scooped away the dead flesh, the dead muscles, the dead nerves, the dead blood-vessels. And so many blood-vessels being dead, being scooped away by that ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognised by society, he might have gone far as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he, "to buy ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saucepan we ledged a sooty swivel, and on the swivel a black tin kettle which leaked slowly into the flame. Tony and myself lay with our four feet cocked along the edge of the box for warmth. The smoke stank in our nostrils, but the flame was cheery. By that flickering light the boat looked a great deep place, full of lumber and the blackest shadows. The herring scales glittered and the worn-out varnish was like rich brown ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... that's what you are, thieves, dogs! You stole the money from him first, and then.... Didn't you make him eat out of the pig-pail? Adam is a witness that he had to pick the potatoes out of the pig-pail, ha! You've let him sleep in the cowshed, because, you said, he stank so that you couldn't eat. Fifteen acres of land and a dower-life like that... for so much property! And you've beaten him too, you swine, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... peace-warding Of his lord: then was lightly the hoard searched over, And the ring-hoard off borne; and the boon it was granted To that wretched-wrought man. There then the lord saw That work of men foregone the first time of times. Then awaken'd the Worm, and anew the strife was; Along the stone stank he, the stout-hearted found The foot-track of the foe; he had stept forth o'er-far With dark craft, over-nigh to the head of the drake. So may the man unfey full easily outlive 2290 The woe and the wrack-journey, he whom the Wielder's Own grace is holding. Now sought the hoard-warden Eager ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... guided me to. In this I lay and drank. I suppose it soaked into my system as rain in the earth after a drought. That stagnant pool was our salvation. The horses were brought up, and we drank, and drank again. Not until our thirst was slaked did we fully realize how the water stank! When the men were sufficiently refreshed they returned for the abandoned horses, which were found still alive. Had they scented water somewhere and drank? At the foot of the mountains, on the other side, we later discovered much better water, and there we camped, our horses ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... matter. I was then informed that there had been a whole lot of men gassed. Then Captain Andrews sent for me and questioned me about gas last night. I told him frankly that I had not smelt any. He said that it was very strange, because when he got back early this morning 'the place simply stank of it.' He said that there would be a devil of a row about it; there were about ten casualties already! But, as time went on, the numbers began to grow rapidly. Yet I had not smelt it; the sentry had not smelt it; and the Sergeant-Major had not smelt it! After ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... too alluring to admit of my remaining longer in discussion with him. I strode forward, therefore. The Auberge de l'Etoile was not an imposing hostelry, nor one at which from choice I had made a halt. This common room stank most vilely of oil, of burning tallow—from the smoky tapers—and of I know not ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates spiritually." I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave. "He received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are definite physiological phenomena ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair |
