"Half-light" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Fergus glanced over his shoulder, saw the other hurrying, and hurried himself in order to take up a good position for seeing the cashier's face. He was in the middle of the treacherous floor before he perceived that it was not Macbean in the half-light behind the counter, but a good-looking man whom he had ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... lighted by the moon that night, as it shone through one of the three arrow-slits of windows at the east end. There was little wealth of marble there, I trow; little time had those fighting men for stone-smoothing. Albeit, one noted many semblances of flowers even in the dim half-light, and here and there the faces of BRAVE men, roughly cut enough, but grand, because the hand of the carver had followed his loving heart. Neither was there gold wanting to the altar and its canopy; and above the low pillars of the nave hung banners, taken from the foe by the men of that house, ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... of unreality, especially on a moonlight night. It is like a Gustave Dore drawing of a bewitched forest. The Guardsman splashed about in the shallow water, but never a sign of an alligator did we see. Giant tortoises crawled lazily about, just visible in the half-light under the trees; innumerable land-crabs scurried to and fro, and unclean reptiles pattered over the fetid ooze, but we saw no more alligators than we should have ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Nailles was not sufficiently uneasy about her to be always at her bedside. Usually the sick girl stayed alone, with her window- curtains closed, lying there in the soft half-light that was soothing to her nerves. The silence was broken at intervals by the voice of Modeste, who would come and offer her her medicine. When Jacqueline had taken it, she would shut her eyes, and resume, half asleep, her sad reflections. These ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... a handkerchief on the point of his sword. Jack could barely make it out in the half-light. At the same moment the officer commanding the Germans opposing Frank's ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... points of similarity with the "St. Paul Preaching," by Raffaelle. I may also mention here what we often perceive in the works of Rembrandt—in place of having the light hemmed in by a dark boundary, it is spread out into a mass of half-light; and the same treatment is adopted with regard to his extreme darks, they communicate their properties to the surrounding ground. These qualities are the foundation of breadth and ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... dark night. In the half-light Ben was able to see a considerable distance. The height of the opening from the ground was probably not much over twelve feet, as well as the boy could estimate. There would have been no difficulty in his getting out and swinging to the ground, ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... more likely than that Matilda, in her amazement, should reveal the house's secret? But the half-light of the room was a very obliging ally against ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... a while, and then I got a match and lit the lamp that stood ready on the table, for the half-light began to grow dreary, as it is apt to do when one has a short week ago buried the hope of one's life. Next, I opened a cupboard in the wainscoting and got a bottle of whisky and some tumblers and water. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... of slender feet to ground as though preparatory to flight. One fine brown hand pushed back a misty veil before the face, which shone wanly in the half-light. A strange, dreamy, cruel face, with crimson laughing mouth, hawk-nose, pointed chin, and eyes of grey-blue-green: eyes in which the pupils never close and which under the shadow of the coarse black hair a-grit ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Anatole from the half-light of the hall in which I had been pacing into the salon overlooking the terraces and the river, where Roxalanne awaited me. She was standing at the farther end of the room by one of the long windows, which was open, for, although we were already in the ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... ahead, I could picture her there behind me, the wind whipping the color to her cheeks and playing with her hair, her eyes bright and gay in the half-light. Save for the steady plodding of the horse, it was very still. I fancied that she had leaned nearer, that her shoulder was touching mine, that I could feel her breath on my cheek. Then she spoke, and her ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... to stop it. He reached them as they stood about the little porch of the house, packed closely around Barney and Sam, who said nothing, but followed Barney like his shadow. If the sun had been shining, it might not have happened as it did; but there was a semi-obscurity, a weird half-light shed by the thick sky and falling snow, which somehow encouraged the enraged ruffians, who pounded on the door just as the pleading voice of the constable ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... away from them and hurried back to his room. Having opened and closed the door softly, he went to a chest of drawers near the window and fumbled in the half-light of the low-burning lamp. He slipped a small leather case into the breast pocket of his coat, and then stole back toward the door, as softly as before. With his hand on the knob, he paused and looked back. For all he knew, Sinclair ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... back to Willett," said Mount quietly. "As for me, my errand is done, and the strange, fishy smells of New York town stifle me. I'm stale and timid, and I like not the shape of the gallows yonder. My health requires the half-light of the woods, Mr. Renault, and the friendly shadows which lie at hand like rat-holes in a granary. I've drunk all the ale at the Bull's-Head—weak stuff it was—and they've sent for more, but I can't wait. So we're off ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... crept down to breakfast, Jaquetta and I, feeling very dreary in the half-light, and as if desolation had suddenly come on us; and when we heard her fly drive up to the door, Jaquetta cried out almost angrily, "Torwood, how could you!" and we would have run away, but he said, "Stay, dear girls; it is better to have ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the ghostly half-light of the tall bamboo where the moonlight trickled through, to listen to the song of the Mysterious Bird of the Spirit Land. The bird is seldom seen alive, but if separated from its mate, at once it begins the search by a soft appealing ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... marked east, but over all else there lay only starlight, as, lantern in hand, he swung down the frozen path. With the opening barn door there came a puff of warm animal breath. As the first rays of light entered, the stock stood up with many a sleepy groan, and bright eyes shining in the half-light swayed back and forth in the narrow stalls, while their owners waited patiently for the feed they ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... naked candles. Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains, revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he lost the air; ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Immediately after, to use a slang term, they "mixed." Presently Cal, stretched the long length of him in the grass, with Pink sitting comfortably upon his middle, looked up at the dizzying swim of the moon, saw new and uncharted stars, and nearer, dimly revealed in the half-light, the self-satisfied, ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... last tiny red tongue of the fire. The men stood about in awkward silence, panting with heat and weariness. Sir Redmond was ostentatiously filling his pipe. Beatrice knew him by his straight, soldierly pose. In the drab half-light they were all mere black outlines of men, and, for the most part, she could not distinguish one from another. Keith Cameron she knew; instinctively by his slim height, and by the way he carried his head. Unconsciously, she leaned down from the high seat and ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... afternoon of April third. By dawn of that day the whole household was astir, gravitating, for the first time in many a year, wholly about the bedroom of the mistress of the house. Madame Gregoriev, lying motionless in the half-light of her room during the morning hours, preceding the impending ordeal, was filled with a sense of unreality, of wonder at the stir that was suddenly being created about her. For years she had been accustomed to a life of systematic neglect. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The air is heavy with incense, and women in mantillas kneel in the half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... delight . . . was to plunge into the darkening mere at eventide, his great head and heavy shoulders ruddy in the rays of the sun. Here he hissed and roared and spluttered, sometimes frightening the eel-catcher sailing home in the half-light, and remembering suddenly school legends of river-sprites and monsters of the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... ravine and cry about the house. The folk sprang to their feet startled, and the eyes of many turned towards the little dark window, expecting to see wild eyes and a pale face set in black hair gazing in. Some who were nearest saw in the half-light—for it was whitening towards day—a wall of gray water travelling up the ravine. Before they could cry a warning it had encompassed the house, had driven door and window before it, and the living and the dead were in ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... commemorated by paintings, evidently by a native artist—to suit the same barbaric taste; while a larger picture of San Francisco d'Assisis, under the choir, seemed to belong to an older and more artistic civilization. But the sombre half-light of the two lamps mellowed and softened the harsh contrast of these details until the whole body of the church appeared filled with a vague harmonious shadow. The air, heavy with the odors of past incense, seemed to be a part of that expression, as if the solemn ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... oblong in shape, three high narrow windows admitting the light through small, old-fashioned panes. Just at present there was not much to admit, for it was raining hard, and the afternoon was wearing on to dusk; but even the wet half-light showed you solid mahogany furniture, old-fashioned as the windows themselves, black and shining with age and polish; a carpet soft and thick, but its once rich hues dim and faded; oil paintings of ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... dozed, his head resting on his knees. He awoke, roused out of a vivid dream, a dream so detailed and so deeply impressed in a picture on his mind that he was confused when he blinked at the riverbank visible in the half-light of early dawn. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... about sixteen hours long on this dying planet. It was toward midnight when they started out from the ship toward the violet dome. The strange half-light still hovered over the ground. In the sky, splinters of mauve tore at curtains of purplish flame. Something like northern lights, they glinted and gleamed, wrestled and writhed. There was no peace up there in that abandoned sky. But there was enough of that unearthly light ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... reached Knapfs' door-step. The short winter day was already drawing to its close. In the half-light ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... pained me. In the first place, it took from me a hope long cherished,—that of recovering a mother as loving as yours, of whose adorable tenderness, dear friend, you have so often told me. After all, it was a half-light thrown upon the fogs of my life without even allowing me to know whether I was or was not the child of a legitimate marriage. It also seemed to me that such paternal intimations addressed to a man of my age were much too despotic and imperious. Was it not a ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the surface. There are no mysteries per se, but only to the ignorant. Yet ignorance itself, disparagingly as we talk of it, has its favorable side,—as it is pleasant sometimes to withdraw from the sun and wander for a season in the half-light of the forest. Perhaps we need be in no haste to reach a world where there is never any darkness. In some moods, at least, I go with the partridge-berry vine and the lady's-slipper. It is good, I think, to live awhile longer in the shadow; to see as through a glass darkly; ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey |
