"Startlingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the public; there are no violent situations with which to (what is called) "bring the house down." Even the climax of the piece, the trial scene, I should call, as far as Portia is concerned, rather grand and impressive than strikingly or startlingly effective; and with the exception of that, the whole character is so delicate, so nicely blended, so true, and so free from all exaggeration, that it seems to me hardly fit for a theater, much less one of our immense houses, which require ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... down the river from it, one saw level flats waving with long grasses, in which the solemn cattle waded knee-deep. Here and there clumps of willows and stately poplars waved in the breeze. In the clear, dry air all colours were startlingly vivid, and round the nearer foothills wonderful lights and shadows played and shifted, while sometimes a white fleece of mist would drift slowly across a distant hill, like a film of snowy lace on the face of a beautiful woman. Away behind the foothills were the grand old mountains, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... less pleasant than before, but Caroline felt dismissed. The vague impression of that first, odd moment became startlingly vivid again. But even now she could not be sure that it was not all imagination—the effect of her own self-consciousness, after what had passed ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... jutted this way and that with no apparent rhyme or reason. In its center there was a transparent globe that looked like an upside-down goldfish bowl, and in the center of the bowl there was an object that startlingly resembled a goldfish, but which, of course, was nothing of the sort. Whatever it was, though, it kept growing brighter and brighter each time Francis added another attachment, and had already attained a degree of incandescence so intense that he had been forced ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... ordinary-looking people to so heroic an intention. Remember that the defence of Mafeking had been one big bluff, that there was nothing to prevent the Boers, with determination and careful arrangement, from taking the place at almost any time, and you will realise how startlingly that question asserted itself. I like to think that there were many men in Mafeking whose courage alone would have disdained surrender; but there was one man in whose face one found the answer to the riddle. Brains ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... go!—The house, moreover, when her father was absent, always reminded Damaris of an empty shrine, a place which had lost its meaning and purpose. To-day, though windows and doors were wide open letting in a wealth of sunshine, it appeared startlingly lifeless and void. The maids seemed unusually quiet. She heard no movement on the staircase or in the rooms above. Neither gardener nor garden-boy was visible. She would have hailed the whirr of the mowing machine or swish of a broom on the lawn.—Oh! if only her poor dear ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... ether must now reach the public. We must send messages back. The case is out of private hands; it has become important to the people. Will you agree on your honor faithfully to transmit?" He leaned forward, his indolent frame startlingly tense. ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... so warmed to his subject that he might have discoursed upon it indefinitely, had he not been startlingly interrupted. He and his wife were retracing their steps toward the house, and, as before, the Scotch maid, with her toddling charge, was some paces behind them. At a wild scream from the girl those in advance turned in time to see the flying form of a young Indian, who had just emerged ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... big, piteous tears, the fawning affection and noble fidelity of the dog, the architectural skill of the beaver, the wise aspect of the owl, the sweet plaint of the nightingale, the shrieks of some fierce beasts, and the howls of others startlingly like the cries of children and the moans of pain, the sparkling orbs and tortuous stealthiness of the snake; and the hints at metempsychosis are obvious. Standing face to face with a tiger, an anaconda, a wild cat, a monkey, a gazelle, a parrot, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a startlingly sudden repose. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... much struck by this thought, and, instead of continuing the discourse further, he carefully folded up the licence, went out, and walked up and down the garden. It was startlingly apt what his father had said; and, worse than that, what people would call him might be true, and the liquefaction of his brains turn out to be no fable. By degrees he became much concerned, and the more he examined himself by this new ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... lessons, too, were by no means distasteful. She had a great deal of quick wit and ready perception. Hitherto she had been taught anyhow, but now she was all keen to receive real instruction. Her intuitions were rapid indeed; she could come to startlingly quick conclusions, and as a rule her guesses were correct rather than otherwise. Kathleen had a passion for music; she had never been properly taught, but the soul of music was in her as much as it was in David ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... down the street at double time. For a moment or two after they came into sight, only the massed uniforms caught the eyes of the intrenched Hollmans, and an alarmed murmur broke from the court-house. They had seen no troops detrain, or pitch camp. These men had sprung from the earth as startlingly as Jason's crop of dragon's teeth. But, when the command rounded the shoulder of a protecting wall to await further orders, the ragged stride of their marching, and the all-too-obvious bearing of ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... knowledge told us what it must be, and with one accord we turned to on the foresail. With the peak of it hoisted we moved a trifle faster, though the schooner lay over at a perilous angle. A moment later the fogs parted to show us the cliffs looming startlingly near. There were the donkey engine and the works we had constructed for wrecking—and there beside them, watching us reflectively, stood ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the soul its clay. Can I forget the hand I took in mine, Pale as pale violets; that eye, where mind And matter met alike divine?—ah, no! May God that moment judge me when I do! O! she was fair; her nature once all spring And deadly beauty, like a maiden sword, Startlingly beautiful. I see her now! Wherever thou art thy soul is in my mind; Thy shadow hourly lengthens o'er my brain And peoples all its pictures with thyself; Gone, not forgotten; passed, not lost; thou wilt shine In heaven ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... disagreeable bustle and petty complication of intrigue you may remark in the author's drama of "Richelieu." "The Lady of Lyons" was a much simpler and better wrought plot; the incidents following each other either not too swiftly or startlingly. In "Richelieu," it always seemed to me as if one heard doors perpetually clapping and banging; one was puzzled to follow the train of conversation, in the midst of the perpetual small noises that ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... power here broke through in a mountain snow- storm; and there her glory in a sunny southern day. An expression in this portrait proved clear insight into character; a face in that historical painting, by its vivid filial likeness, startlingly reminded you that genius gave it birth. These exceptions I loved: ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... tranquil, cold creature with dark red hair and a thin face, the dull pallor of which emphasized the impressively vivid lips of her large mouth; it seemed as if all the sensuality and colour of the face had poured themselves into the lips and made them startlingly and painfully vivid and suggestive of sin. She had married and had parted from her husband. She had a son, who lived with her. She was an S.D.[14] and worked in the organization, but all this was merely incidental in her life. She met Trirodov in party work. Her comrades understood as ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... long, lithe limbs covered with a rug of crimson and black and dull, dull green. She was dangling gently, sensuously, the great cluster of scarlet roses that she held, now and again bringing them to where their fragrance would reach her delicately-chiseled nose, imperious, haughty.... They looked startlingly red against her cheek—like blood upon the snow.... She was looking at him.... There was no movement, save the even, languorous swing of the crimson blossoms. Lips, vivid red, were motionless, half parted in a little, inscrutable ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... natural lines and do no probing. And now,—this brother whom all had thought dead, come to life with menace in his acts and conversation! Also a sister,—but this sister he had no belief in. The coincidence was too startlingly out of nature for him to accept a brother and a sister too. A brother or a sister; but not both. Not even Mr. Harper's assurances should influence his credulity to this extent. "Money! money is at the bottom of it all," was his final decision. "She knows it and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... interruption was the report of a gun, sounding startlingly distinct on the quiet air. That, so far as could be judged, came from near the spot whither was sent the ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... dress upon her rounded form till she seemed like the statue of a goddess—a goddess of freedom, loveliness, and joy, sculptured in the living flesh—a figure vibrant with glowing health and youth, startlingly set in the desert's gray austerity. With the sunlight flinging its gold and riches upon her, what a marvel of color she presented!—such creamy white and changing rose-tints in her cheeks—such a wonderful ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... they had fought with sharks, and each time they had killed them. They had found the shore, the very spot where we had put her back into the sea. Then there was a momentary flash of the picture she had called up, of Mercer and I putting the shark-faced hordes to rout, and then, startlingly, I was conscious of that high, pleading sound—the sound that I had heard once before, when she had begged us to return ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Science has found evidence that known substance is not less a product of evolution than mind,—that all our so-called "elements" have been evolved out of "one primary undifferentiated form of matter." And this evidence is startlingly suggestive of some underlying truth in the Buddhist doctrine of emanation and illusion,—the evolution of all forms from the Formless, of all material phenomena from immaterial Unity,—and the ultimate return of ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the fire, in the solitude ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... came a trifle quick as she contemplated Lady Calmady with the same enigmatic smile, her chin carried high—the finest suggestion of challenge and insolence in it—her eyes still unusually wide open and startlingly bright. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... foliage, traveling through the tree-tops was almost as easy as by day, while the earth below them, with its prowling and battling monsters, was buried in inky gloom. When day broke, there were the rounded hills startlingly close ahead, as if they had crept forward to ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... turned west, at right angles to the main road, and took a track that was deserted except for one farm and on every alternate Sunday. He passed the lonely little slab bush "chapel" of the locality, that broke startlingly out of the scrub by the track side as he reached it; and left the news at Southwick's farm at the end of the blind track. At more than one farm he left the bushwoman hurriedly looking up her "black things;" and at more than one, one of the boys getting his bridle to catch his horse ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... taking, good-looking fellow he was, they say—and he'd a decent lodging. But in spring 1904 he was living on the proceeds of chance betting, and was sometimes very low down, and in May of that year he disappeared, in startlingly sudden fashion, without saying a word to anybody, and since then nobody has ever seen a vestige or ever heard a word ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... higher animals perform with intricate organs and parts—heart, stomach, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc., etc.—this tiny creature performs without organs, and with its entire body, or any part thereof. The function of reproduction is startlingly simple in the case of the Moneron. It simply divides itself in two parts, and that is all there is to it. There is no male or female sex in its case—it combines both within itself. The reproductive process is even far more ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Animals," and "Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons," appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: "Sam Stone Must Leave Town." Beneath was the additional information: "Further issues of the Bulletin will tell why." Above and below this was nothing but startlingly white blank paper, two solid columns of it ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... there was in that likeness a providential instruction which the king ought to have heeded; I say that your mother committed a crime in rendering those different in happiness and fortune whom nature created so startlingly alike, of her own flesh, and I conclude that the object of punishment should be only ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... congenial to him, for it was deliberately chosen by himself, and it comprised the most tremendous problems ever tackled by man born of woman. The means by which he set to work to solve them were startlingly simple: the regeneration of the human race was to be compassed by means of magisterial edicts secretly drafted and sternly imposed on the interested peoples, together with a new and not wholly ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that went on, in the noiseless movements of the nurses, in the arrival of a new case, in the visit of the doctors and the chaplain, and the friends of the other patients. Let the pessimists say what they may, there is a lot of good in human nature; and it comes out quite startlingly in the ward of a hospital. Ida was amazed at the care and attention, the patience and the devotion which were lavished on herself and her fellow-sufferers; a devotion which no money can buy, and which could not have been exceeded if they had one and all been princesses ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... her to the museum and showed her the moths. She instantly decided on the yellow. Because she knew the shades would make her more startlingly beautiful than any other colour. To him she said: "A moon lady seems so far away and cold. I would be of earth and very near on that ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... pitiless price; and the woman influence would always be, for Roy—as for most men of genuine gifts and high purpose—his danger point or salvation. The dim and distant prospect of parting was thinkable—though perturbing. But all this talk of steamers and outfits startlingly illumined the fact that in October he was actually going—to the other end ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... disillusioning revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been necessary to assist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with. Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such grim ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... before the Israelitish exodus. Nabonidos, the last king of the later Babylonian empire, who had a fancy for antiquarian exploration, tells us that Naram-Sin reigned 3200 years before his own time, and therefore about 3750 B.C. The date, startlingly early as it seems to be, is indirectly confirmed by other evidence, and Assyriologists consequently have come to accept it as ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... not changed his position; he had not apparently stirred a limb for an hour and a half. He got up heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc's taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... that he'd not spoken with a soul except a man he knew slightly, a Congressman from California named O'Reilly. He supposed that O'Reilly didn't interest her? Upon this, with a desperate blush, she had made her startlingly frank reply. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was as good as her word. She didn't—that is, as long as Ernest could see her. She kissed him good-bye and gave him a playful box on the ear. She threw kisses, smiling as the group at the car window slid by, then the lump in her throat grew startlingly bigger. ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... hitherto unpublished church records, gathered from as many typical Massachusetts towns, which throw an undeniable and unflattering light on the social habits of that early period. As explicit and public confession before the church congregation was enforced, these church records contain startlingly graphic statements of drunkenness, blasphemy, stealing, and immorality in all ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... life this face had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and the past had been shadowy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of membership to be observed by both Neophyte and Initiate, as well as High-degree Master. Understanding this, one may imagine the disgust inspired in John by the amorous solicitations of Salome, which caused him to lose his life rather than to break the vows of his Order, as is so startlingly pictured in the stage productions of ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Perhaps it was his fleeting air of weakness combined with daring that drew her to him. She could not tell. She only knew, as she walked among the shy roses, that the casual touch of his hand—a hand, too, that was very like a girl's—had communicated to her quite a startlingly strong emotion. Alas! the motherly feeling seemed to have had its little day, and to have been swept off the stage on which her mental drama was being acted. It had played a principal part, but now an understudy appeared, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... different climate, and feed upon different food. It is therefore not surprising that the two avifaunas should exhibit great divergence. Nevertheless few people who have not actually been in both localities are able to realise the startlingly abrupt transformation of the bird-fauna seen by one who passes from the plains to ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... cropped heads of the prisoners, many of which showed mutilations by the hand of the executioner, which had barely healed, formed, as separated only by the iron bars, they protruded above, below, and beside one another into the open air, a mosaic picture, startlingly repulsive in appearance; for savage greed glittered in the eyes of most, and showed itself in the movements of the long, thin hands extended for gifts. Bitter need and passionate longing gazed defiantly, beseechingly, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... type is the tattling talker. He always has something startlingly personal to impart. It is a sacred secret for your ear. He is a wholesale dealer in gossip. He fairly smacks his lips as he relates the latest scandal. He is an expert embellisher. He adroitly supplies missing details. He has nothing of interest in his own life, since he lives wholly in the ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... hiding their faces in a fold of blanket, slunk silently away like dogs that have been whipped and told to go. Even Hagar drew back a pace, hardy as was her untamed spirit. She looked at Evadna clinging to his arm, her eyes wide and startlingly blue and horrified at all she had heard. She laughed then—did Hagar—and waddled after the others, her whole body seeming to radiate contentment with ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Manuel. He merely listened and smiled his startlingly sunny smile, and afterwards repeated Manuel's words almost verbatim to Jack. Later, he recounted as much as he considered politic to Don Andres himself, just to show how bitter Manuel had become and how unjust. Valencia, it must be admitted, was ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... before he moved there came a long cry from overhead, startlingly beautiful and piercing, and, as he lifted his eyes from the glimpse of the steady river which alone had refused to be transformed, he saw high above him against the heavy illuminated clouds, a long slender object, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... startled; for, from the waxen face on the pillow, almost it seemed the eyes of Isabel herself were looking at him: never before had the resemblance between mother and son been so strong—and Eugene knew that now he had once seen it thus startlingly, he need divest himself of no bitterness ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast—it had turned completely ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the summerhouse and dropped himself into a rustic chair without even waiting for Pollyanna to seat herself—a most unusual proceeding on the part of John Pendleton. Pollyanna, stealing a nervous glance at his face found it so startlingly like the old stern, sour visage of her childhood's remembrance, that she uttered an ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... was to move aside to let him pass out. It was as though Garstaing's expression of sympathy had at last found a weakness in his armour of reserve. His movement had been abrupt—startlingly abrupt. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... dressed as anybody, and no one would stare any more. In one window there were displayed, not only gowns, but hats and cloaks, and exquisite furs, all shown on wax models with fashionably dressed hair and coquettish faces. One pink and white creature with a startlingly perfect figure wore a filmy robe of that intense indigo just taken on by the sea. Underneath a shadowlike tunic of dark blue chiffon there was a glint of pale gold, a sort of gold and silver sheath which encased the form ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... attempt to open contact. The tape sent a series of cardinal numbers—one to five. Then an addition table, from one plus one to five plus five. Then a multiplication table up to five times five. It was not startlingly intellectual information to be sent out in tiny clicks ranging up and down the radio spectrum. ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... him at the farther extremity of the great altar, calmly enjoying a quantity of cold meat he had discovered. He was squatting upon the floor, in close proximity to the motionless, extended figure of a savage arrayed in the black garments of the priesthood. They formed a picture so startlingly grotesque I could but ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... cartridges, wishing he had more in his clothes. When he had left the hotel that Tuesday evening he had thrust the loaded revolver in his pocket, but he had already discharged it twice at the beginning of their flight.... And then he startlingly reflected that the Captain could easily cause their arrest for stealing those camels, and wild and dreadful thoughts of native jails and mixed tribunals darted into his harassed and anxious mind. As a long ridge of sand intervened between them and their ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day before had become crushed and she put on a fresh one she had not worn at all. It was thin and soft also, and black was quite startlingly becoming to her. She would wear this one when Lord Coombe came, after she wrote to him. It was silly of her not to have written before though she knew he had left town after the ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... assembled there to the number of about two thousand, were accoutred in blue cloth jackets, (which rarely have the owners' arms in the sleeve, but are worn as cloaks,) red waistcoats of startlingly crimson color, and blue small clothes, while conical black felt hats, adorned here and there with flowers, served for head-coverings. A large assemblage of children, dressed and undressed, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... from it, to another, sweeter work—not of building, but of destroying—not of Heaven, but of Hell—not of self-denial, but of reddest orgy. Constantinople—beware!' I tossed the chair aside, and with a stamp was on my feet: and as I stood—again, again—I heard: the startlingly sudden wrangle, the fierce, vulgar outbreak and voluble controversy, till my consciousness could not hear its ears: and one urged: 'Go! go!' and the other: 'Not there...! where you like, ... but not there...! ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... had been comfortable, carefree ones. In the natural order of her pleasantly migratory, luxurious life, she had rarely come into close contact with careworn or strained faces; this contact through the small, clear lenses seemed startlingly close. Stefana's lean and anxious face, the child's baby-bent little back, like the back of an old woman—it was at these Miss Theodosia looked through her pearl glasses. She forgot to look at the garment the children examined so troubledly. ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... complete gravity and entire contempt that in a sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... A rattling sound, startlingly akin to the agitated contents of over-ripe vegetables, came from somewhere in the internal mechanism of the small man. Inferentially, the inquiry was amusing to the questioned, likewise the immediately surrounding listeners who became suddenly silent, gazing at the stranger with the wonder ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... sought even less heroic means of surrender by tumbling into bed with the considerate help of unsmiling stewards. The great ship went up and the great ship came down: when up so high that the sky seemed to be startlingly near and down so horribly low that the bottom of the ocean was even nearer. And it creaked and groaned and sighed even above the wild monody of the wind, like a thing in misery, yet all the while holding its ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... said quickly. Cousin William followed, "For God's sake, Cary, what has happened?" Edward spoke from beside the piano, "Has it come, father?" With his words his hand fell upon the keys, suddenly and startlingly upon the bass. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... all the power of his burly calves. The cords cut into his bulging muscles, cut into and through his skin. The veins stood out on his forehead, his neck was a corded pillar, his teeth bit through his lip as he stifled a scream of pain. Then, startlingly, the fibers snapped. His legs at least were free! He could fight, die fighting, and take these others with him ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... other tidbit. Others would come from the outside, and they, too, were mostly old women. They always wanted to pat Keith, and he objected passionately to all of them. His especial aversion was a gaunt old woman with a big hooked nose and a pair of startlingly large, sad-looking eyes. She always smiled, and her smile was hopelessly out of keeping with the rest of her face. The very sight of her made Keith forget all his manners. Time and again his mother rebuked him and tried to bring him around ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... It was a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... life which will bear favorable comparison with Ben-Hur and other high-class books of the same style. The description of the flight of the children of Israel from Egypt, and their subsequent wanderings in the desert, are placed before the reader in a startlingly realistic manner. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... such a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its construction, a ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... few moments they faced each other so, eyes burning into eyes with mute soul-probing and questioning. The sun had disappeared, leaving a stain of fiery red to mark his grave; the weird, radiant light was startlingly vivid and clear. Little crisp puffs and flakes of foam scurried over the point like elfin things. The fresh wind, blowing up the bay, tossed the lustrous rings of hair about Magdalen's pale face; all ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... who has far outrun his fellows what he thinks of the race seems a superfluous question. Yet, in answer as to what he would say of literature as a profession, M. Daudet gave a startlingly clear and decided answer. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the dead, or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed. There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hollow as that of a corpse, saving for the fever spot that burned in either cheek. Gradually his mind was drifting from his danger and his sufferings—it was fashioning strange images, mere dreams, but startlingly realistic. From the first one or two he reverted to sanity and to a fleeting sense of his position, and then the images trooped in again, the visions reappeared—beautiful visions of coolness, and sweetness, and shade that, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... At that moment she struck her father as startlingly grown-up-so composed, swaying above that young man at her feet, whose sunny face was all adoration. 'No longer a child!' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had been made by Sandy McQuarry's teams hauling logs up to the mill, and being sheltered, was comparatively free from drifts. The doctor turned into it, and passed into the breathless silence of the cedar swamp. His horse's bells sounded startlingly clear in the tense Stillness. To his right lay the cold, drear stretches of the Drowned Lands; the gaunt tree-trunks were but dimly discernible against the gray landscape, and looked more ghostly than ever, standing there, stark and silent, like an army ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... remember—like a lunatic, who, having heard only the wrangle of fiends in his delirium, suddenly in a conscious moment, perceives the familiar voice of love. But who could this be, to whom mere human sympathy was so startlingly sweet? ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... question Edith took time to think. Because she was so startlingly cool and clear she was aware of feeling like one who stands with the revolver at her breast or the draught of cyanide in her hand, knowing that within a few seconds it may be too late to reconsider. And yet, she had never in her life felt more perfectly ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... seemed dreary and forlorn by day, it was far more so by night. The faded figures in the tapestry had an uncanny look; especially one, a hunter, who might have passed for an assassin, just taking aim at his victim. The smile on his startlingly red lips, in reality only a self-satisfied smirk, was fairly devilish in that light, and his ghastly face horribly life-like. The lamp burned dimly in the damp heavy air, the wind sighed and moaned along the corridors, and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... strangely loud, bright, and alive. Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time. There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must surely mean something, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... as he saw the instant he unlocked the door and pulled it open, for the first lifting of the lantern made the cause of the darkness startlingly plain. The shallow glass globe which should have been in the centre of the ceiling had been smashed, ragged fragments of it still clinging to their fastenings, and the three electric bulbs had been ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... many minutes. The sound they make is like heavy thunder, with a prolonged roar after deep thudding sounds—a perpetual thunderstorm easily heard three or four miles away. The roar in our tent and the shaking of the ground one or two miles distant from points of discharge seems startlingly near. ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... white ribbon and black lace of the cheap straw bonnet, far back upon the rippling hair turned back from her temples, and falling in profuse ringlets. It was her ordinary unpremeditated appearance, but she perceived that to these good people it was startlingly stylish, and she was prepared for the confused intimation that there was no need for entering upon the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and dust again. Mountains never ceased, and lay fantastically heaped up on every side. We rose ever higher, though the train kept a moderate speed. At one station the bleating of a great truckload of kids, their legs tied, heaped one above the other, was startlingly like the crying of babies. We steamed upward through a narrow pass, the mountains crowding closer on either hand and seeming to grow lower as we rose higher among them. The landscape became less arid, half green, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to state that these little tales are deduced from every day life, as they are easily recognizable. To those not yet favored by a residence in this Northland I would say that I have written each tale with a well defined purpose. With truthfulness could each one have been more vividly, yes startlingly, told; but I have no wish to unduly disturb my readers. It has been my aim, however, to picture not only character, but also the vast and wonderful gold producing region, so plainly that even the young may better know Alaska, and ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... closed his eyes as if to shut out too painful pictures. And when he opened them again it was darker, and the moon made misty shadows through the trees, and out of them he seemed to see Halcyone's face quite close to him. It was tender and pitiful and full of love. The hallucination was so startlingly vivid that he almost fancied her lips moved, and she whispered: "Courage, beloved." Then he knew that he was dreaming, and that he was ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... procession of wounded moved slowly. It was easy to distinguish them, and even to pick out in most cases where they were wounded, because in the dusk the bandages of the first field dressing showed up startlingly white and clear on the shadowy forms against the shadowy background. Some, with the white patches on heads, arms, hands, and upper bodies, were walking; others, with the white on feet and legs, limped and hobbled painfully, leaning on the parapet or using their rifles crutch-wise; and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... anti-Catholic, just before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... last spoken words that night, so that thought was uppermost in her mind as she fell asleep shortly after her cropped head touched the pillow. And next morning when she woke early with a startlingly delightful idea, it almost caused her to bound from her upper berth as if it had been a bed in the middle of a stationary floor. For it came not in embryo, not in the egg, so to speak, but full-fledged. It seemed as if she couldn't possibly wait until ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... big man would rise to his feet as soon as the door was closed. The picture became startlingly real to John Gaspar. Sinclair would slip out that window, no doubt, and circle around toward the horse shed. There he would wait until his prisoner came out on Meg, and then without warning would come a shot, and there ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... A small boy who learnt English and German simultaneously evolved, at the age of two, the word spam (sponge x Ger. Schwamm). In a college in the English midlands, a student named Constantine, who sat next to a student named Turpin, once heard himself startlingly addressed by a lecturer as Turpentine. People who inhabit the frontier of two languages, and in fact all who are in any degree bilingual, must inevitably form such composites occasionally. The h aspirate of Fr. haut, Lat. altus, high, can only be explained by the influence ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... to recollect how she had looked on him that day in Hyde Park, when she "bade him take care of his own life, while so devoted to that of his dying friend!" and how she "blessed him in his task," with a voice of tenderness so startlingly sacred to his soul in its accents, that in remembering her words now, when so near the moment of his again seeing and hearing her, his soul expanded towards her, agitated, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... years old, and the girl had long since given up thinking of it. She had married and had many cares of her own. In the beginning, she had told Hannasyde that, "while she could never be anything more than a sister to him, she would always take the deepest interest in his welfare." This startlingly new and original remark gave Hannasyde something to think over for two years; and his own vanity filled in the other twenty-four months. Hannasyde was quite different from Phil Garron, but, none the less, had several points in common with that far ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... at her strange little daughter. She sometimes did that on Saturday mornings when she left early for the store and Fanny slept late. This morning Fanny's black hair was spread over the pillow as she lay on her back, one arm outflung, the other at her breast. She made a rather startlingly black and white and scarlet picture as she lay there asleep. Fanny did things very much in that way, too, with broad, vivid, unmistakable splashes of color. Mrs. Brandeis, looking at the black-haired, red-lipped child ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... predominance may therefore, by those who adopt it, be considered as much less costly than a mixed one. Does not this fact, then, deserve to be taken into consideration and compared—startlingly illustrative—to the ingenious calculation recently made by Lefevre in his examination of vegetarianism? One acre of land planted for the purpose of breeding cattle produces three times less living strength than ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... the large, loose-lipped mouth, the long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that; gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the writer of The Angel in the House. Certainly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... did not look about to see the actuality of Pierre's silence. She thought that he had dropped the brand and was sitting near the table with his face hidden. How long the stillness of pain and fury and horror lasted there was no one to reckon. It was most startlingly broken by a voice. "Who screamed for help?" it said, and at the same instant a draught of icy air smote Joan. The door had opened with suddenness and violence. With difficulty she mastered her ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the sudden flood of light, two men stood looking at each other curiously. They were so startlingly alike, in height and carriage and every feature, that there was something weird and unpleasant in their action—in ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... not with eagerness. They change occupations: the Brat stirs, and she fishes for almonds. Ten minutes pass: the taffy is done, and what is more it really is taffy. The upshot of our cookery is in general so startlingly indifferent from what we had intended, that the result in the present case takes us by surprise. We all prove practically that, in the words of the receipt-book, it "breaks clear between the teeth without sticking to them." ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... something about you," she said shyly. "Remember that I have dined with your friends. I could not help seeing that they were good people, especially that delightful old man, the Judge. He looked startlingly like my dear father. I saw how they all honored and loved you. And then what you have done for me, and the way that you treated an utterly defenceless stranger, were equal to years of mere acquaintance. I feel that I know a great deal ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined them sitting motionless: and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own hearts, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself—trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease—for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation—my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of Empedocles (about 492-432 B.C.) and Democritus (about 460-370 B.C.) we meet with many speculations respecting the constitution of matter and the origin of things which are startlingly similar to some of the doctrines held by modern scientists. Empedocles, with the evolutionists of to-day, taught that the higher forms of life arise out of the lower; Democritus conceived all things to be composed of invisible atoms, all alike ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... name o' Simon Girty," replied Younker, in a deliberate and startlingly solemn tone, "I al'ays call down God's curse upon the fiendish renegade—and I ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... every other feeling" in the soul of Matilda, her eyes "scintillate with a fiend-like expression." Incidents follow one another with a wild and stupefying rapidity. Every moment is a crisis. The style is startlingly abrupt, and the short, disconnected paragraphs are fired off like so many pistol shots. The sequence of events is mystifying—Zastrozzi's motive for persecuting Verezzi is darkly concealed until the end of the story, for reasons known only to writers of the novel of terror. Shelley's ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... baked potatoes in their skins, a melancholy glass dish containing celery, and a salad bowl startlingly empty, lay ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... care brought it to another. I am left wondering how this denouement would have been affected if Avery had been, say, a dentist, or of any other calling than the one that so obviously loaded the dice in his favour. I repeat, however, a distinctly well-written and human story, almost startlingly topical too in one place, where Dr. Avery observes, "There's a lot of grippe in town, and it's a thing that isn't reported to the Health Department." The obvious inference being that it ought to be. Avery, you observe, had more practical sense than the majority of heroes, few of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... to which the man must return. The two poems are fully discussed in Poet-Lore, Volume VII, April, May, June-July. The poems are noteworthy for the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery and for the startlingly specific phrasing of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... his voice rang out, startlingly loud because of the almost oppressive stillness, Mrs. Stevens appeared from beneath the flap of the canvas covering, and an expression of most intense disappointment passed over her face as she saw that ...
— Dick in the Desert • James Otis
... from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... organs of matutinal birds, that hopped and blinked, plumed their diamonded breasts, and scattered brilliants enough to set a tiara; and profound silence brooded over the scene, until rudely broken by a cry of dismay which rang out startlingly from the parsonage. The alarm might very readily have been ascribed to diligent Hannah, who, contemptuous of barometric or thermal vicissitudes, invariably adhered to the aphorism of Solomon, and, arising "while it is yet night, looketh well to ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... that distinguish him, and which we have already admitted. Ecstatic praise and groundless detraction go hand in hand, bewildering to any one not possessed of the key to the mystery of the art of blowing hot and cold, which Mr. Froude so startlingly exemplifies. As it is our purpose to make what he says concerning this Colony the crucial test of his veracity as a writer of travels, [54] and also of the value of his judgments respecting men and things, we shall first invite the reader's ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... all awe and makes my old and empty heart long to serve her. Her eyes are gray and her hair a reddish brown, with kinks and curls in it like— But, pshaw! there comes that dream again! Was Honora Urquhart's hair so very unique that a head of wavy brown hair should bring her up so startlingly to my mind? ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing startlingly white teeth. Then ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... him and run for help—but did she dare? Even as she considered it, there was a rustling in the underbrush, and startlingly near at hand sounded the eerie cry that had frightened her earlier in the night. It did not frighten her now, oddly enough. She regretted the pistol she had left in the cabin. Her hand tightened on the pocket-knife, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... muskrat fur, with flaps that pulled down well over the ears. The cold, which iced their eyelashes, turned the tips of their up-turned coat-collars and the edges of their mufflers to board, and made the old trees snap startlingly, had no terrors at all for their hardy frames. Once well under way, and the camp quite out of sight, they fell to chatting happily of the surprise they would give the home folks, who did not expect them home ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... face, out of which the sun-colours had faded. Her hair of raven hue was gathered in massy coils over her head and fastened there by a spiral torque of gleaming gold. Her mantle, entirely black, which fell to her feet, made her features seem more strangely young, more startlingly in contrast with the monastic severity of the room. It was draped round with some dark unfigured hangings. A couch with a coverlet of furs, single chair of carved oak, the little table, and a bronze censer from which a faint aromatic odor escaping filled the air and stole on the sense, completed ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell |
