"Murk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it was ignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on that history, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnant the destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux, which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fated house. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror is that history; down the silent corridors ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Tennessee; hark, Bluebird, listen! Was that a bugle note far up the bend, Where the murk waters flush and the white bars glisten, Or dove cooing dove into love notes that blend? And Wood Thrush, sweet, tell me,—that throbbing and humming, Is it march at the double quick or wild bees that hum? And that rumble that shakes like an earthquake ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... looked it. His mare, too, appeared neither happy nor spirited. Except for some nebulous figures, indistinct in the yellow murk, little else was visible. Mac crouched scowling in the lee of the mare, who stood with drooping head and closed eyes, swaying occasionally to the violent buffetings of the desert storm, and patiently ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... smoke, blended with steam, and foul with the scent of roasting human flesh, poured into the cabin, turning the dimming light into yellow murk. Gasping for breath the while, Ben-Hur knew they were passing through the cloud of a ship on fire, and burning up with the rowers chained ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the genii out of the Fisherman's bottle. One supposes the Indians might have learned the use of smoke signals from these dust pillars as they learn most things direct from the tutelage of the earth. The air begins to move fluently, blowing hot and cold between the ranges. Far south rises a murk of sand against the sky; it grows, the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of earth. The cloud of small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out the neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing. Only man of all folk is foolish enough ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... myself, and everything answered this wonderful new mood. I knew that life was rapture, and, as I looked back at the fried-fish shop, swimming out of the drab murk, it seemed to me that there could never be anything of such sheer lyrical loveliness outside heaven. I could have screamed for joy of it. I said softly to myself that it was Lovely, Lovely, Lovely; and I danced home, and I danced to bed, and my heart so danced that it ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... in far lands. Thus, as he can tell you, my predecessor, Man-kau-ra, he who built the third of the great pyramids, the Pyramid of Her, sleeps, or rather wakes in a dark city, called London, across the seas, a place of murk where no sun shines. Others have been burnt with fire, others are scattered in small dust. The ornaments that were ours are stole away and sold to the greedy; our sacred writings and our symbols are their jest. Soon there will not be one holy grave in Egypt that ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... the road," she said. "They will keep me a few hours from the dark! When I die I will go straight up to God and implore his curse upon you, on your bed and board, your hands and tools, your body and soul. May your every prayer be lost in the wide murk, and never ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... said Gleam-o'-the-Murk, "I bring dreams, too. But my dreams are of the night, and they are full of the gentle, soothing music of the winds, of the pines, and of the crickets! and they are full of fair visions in which you shall see the things of Fairyland and of Dreamland and of all ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... before this great, dark future swept her away from him. And yet the latter rains came and went, the green faded from the ground, the mountains grew dimmer and duller, and at last disappeared in the summer murk, before he took in his own mind the next step—from lover to suitor, as before from vassal ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... through the greenish murk. They could barely make out a shadowy figure about half a block down the near-black canyon of the dismal, dust-blown street, into which the greenish moonlight hardly reached. It seemed to them that the figure was scooping something up from the pavement and letting it sift down along its ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... in late years, that they are not the remedy. It is not Parliaments, reformed or other, that will ever send Herculean men to Downing Street, to reform Downing Street for us; to diffuse therefrom a light of Heavenly Order, instead of the murk of Stygian Anarchy, over this sad world of ours. That function does not lie in the capacities of Parliment. That is the function of a King,—if we could get such a priceless entity, which we cannot just now! Failing which, Statesmen, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... put her into perfect sailing trim, her black hull with its painted ports showing up in strong contrast to the peasoup-coloured flood upon which she rode, her lofty masts stayed to a hair, and all accurately parallel, gleaming like ruddy gold against the dingy murk of the wild-looking sky. Her yards were all squared with the nicest precision, and the new cream-white canvas snugly furled upon them and the booms; the red ensign streamed from the gaff-end; and the burgee, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... Murk[FN123] of gender male, * Than feminines surpassing fair, Tirewomen they had grudged the bride, * Who made ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the helmsman, and you may know what the mystery and horror of utter gloom are really like. There is danger everywhere—a sudden wave may burst the deck or heave the vessel down on her side; a huge dim cloud may start shapelessly from the murk, and, before a word of warning can be uttered, a great ship may crash into the labouring craft. In that case hope is gone, for the boat is bedded in a mass of ice and all the doomed seamen must take the deadly plunge ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the vine Singing, "Heigho, my dearie! And will you hear this song of mine,— A song of the land of murk and mist Where bideth the bud the dew hath kist? Then let the moonbeam's web of light Be spun before thee silvery white, And I shall sing the livelong ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... in a sort of winding ditch between two low grassy banks; on both sides of me was the flatness of the Essex marsh, perfectly still. All I saw moving was a heron; he was flying low, and disappeared in the murk. Before I had gone half a mile, I was up with the building the roof of which I had seen from the river. It looked like a small barn. A row of piles driven into the soft bank in front of it and supporting a few planks made a sort of wharf. All this was black in the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... light was by no means an easy one. After confused wanderings through tangled hedges, and a struggle with obstacles of whose nature I received the most curious impression in the surrounding murk, I arrived in front of a long, low building, which, to my astonishment, I found standing with doors and windows open to the pervading mist, save for one square casement, through which the light shone from a row of candles placed on a long ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... other ships and boats and victims hurrying onward to their doom. Here, a stately barque, with disordered topsails almost bursting from the yards as she hurries her hapless crew—all ignorant, perchance, of its proximity—towards the dread lee-shore. Elsewhere, looming through the murk, a ponderous merchantman, her mainmast and mizzen gone, and just enough of the foremast left to support the bellying foresail that bears ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... Garth. A haggard misunderstanding rode between them on the trail. Denied the all-explaining, all-healing touch of hands—or lips, the unreasonable despair of lovers seized on each; and the sunny way was plunged in murk. They rode, and camped, and ate their supper in silence; and in silence they turned in for the night. But there was little sleep for either; they lay apart, each nursing a burden of unhappiness; unable to ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... divided channel of the St. Lawrence, between Orleans and the mainland. Montmorency Falls in a moment showed dimly white through the murk to our left, a great hanging veil of ice higher than Niagara. Further ahead, the lights of the little village of St. Anne de Beaupre were visible with the gray-black towering ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... bitter wind was blowing, and with such purpose that it had cleared the sky of the day's murk so that countless stars glittered with unwonted brilliancy from a purple-black heaven. Crowded before the entrance were the motors, pouring on in a steady stream, their lamps half dazzling the pedestrians as they ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... that we should not fall into as tender hands again; and amid the rain in the early morning, as the town clock tolled the hour of seven, we were driven amongst the flock that was going forth to the slaughter, down the street and into the cars for Brattleboro. Dark was the day with murk and cloud and rain; and, as we rolled down through the narrow vales of eastern Vermont, somewhat of the shadow crept into our hearts and filled them with dark apprehensions of evil fortune ahead; of long, hopeless trials; of abuse from inferior officers; ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... and to the fact that they were indifferent seamen at best. The man at the wheel in particular, a Limerick man, had had no experience with salt water beyond that of rafting timber on the Shannon between the Quebec vessels and the shore. He was afraid of the huge seas that rose out of the murk astern and bore down upon him, and he was more given to cowering away from their threatened impact than he was to meeting their blows with the wheel and checking the ship's rush ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... the shrieking inferno of the shops. The uproar and din were maddening. Overhead, huge cranes were swinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed to the other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; the floor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginable shapes. After a time we made our way into another area where there was more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such a rumpus and row I never saw; ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... down first, then, as conditions were ascertained, manned ships. Tulan took the flagship down once. Her coolers labored and her searchlights were swallowed in murk within a few feet. Sounds carried through the hull; the howl of great winds and the thumps of explosions. Once a geyser of glowing lava ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... to shadows, there In the wet woods they lurk, Greedy of human stuff to snare In webs of murk. ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... the mist and murk of a spring thaw. Wittemore never forgot that night's experience—the prayer, and the walk home again through the fog. The ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... star was in the ascendant, to go and seek out the Admiral, whose day was fast verging to night; it was one of those disinterested actions that live and have a value of their own, and that shine out happily amid the surrounding murk ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the houses of rich and poor, the murk of the grapes was boiled in a still and a somewhat bitter brandy thus manufactured. Whether in consequence of the brandy, or of the unusual amount of money about, or of both, the fact is that at that period a great passion ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of death approached with ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... were two cubes; one I judged in that uncertain light to be six feet high, the other half its bulk. From them a shaft of pale-blue phosphorescence pierced the murk. They stood, the smaller pressed against the side of the larger, for all the world like a pair of immense nursery blocks, placed like steps by some ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... came, I know not whither I go; But the fact stands clear that I am here In this world of pleasure and woe. And out of the mist and murk, Another truth shines plain. It is in my power each day and hour To add to ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... an interminable length of time they bore slowly on through timber, crossed openings where the murk of the night thinned a little, enabling her to see the dim form of Wagstaff plodding in the lead. Again they dipped down steep slopes and ascended others as steep, where Silk was forced to scramble, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... freakish glee! Twinkle with brilliant mockery! Glitter on ice-robed roof and floor! Jewel the bear-skin of the door! Gleam in my beard, illume my breath, Blanch the clock face that times my death! But do not pierce that murk so deep, Where in their sleeping-bags they sleep! But do not linger where they lie, They who had all the luck to die! . ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... faint-heart gave back and took to flight thinking the day would never come to an end nor the curtains of gloom would be drawn by the hand of Night; and they ceased not to battle with swords and to smite till light darkened and murk starkened. Then the kettle- drums of the Infidels beat the retreat, but Gharib, refusing to stay his arms, crave at the Paynimry, and the Believers in Unity, the Moslems, followed him. How many heads and hands they shore, how many necks and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... Murkison, 'let's get our gumption together and inoculate a plan for defeating the enemy. Suppose while I'm exchanging airy bandage with the gray capper you gents come along, by accident, you know, and holler: "Hello, Murk!" and shake hands with symptoms of surprise and familiarity. Then I take the capper aside and tell him you all are Jenkins and Brown of Grassdale, groceries and feed, good men and maybe willing to take a chance while away ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... and his comrades kept close to the crowd. One could not scout in such a morass, and it proved to be worse than they had feared. The day turned gray, and it was dark among the trees. The whole place was filled with gloomy shadows. It was often impossible to judge whether fairly solid soil or oozy murk lay before them. Often they went down to their waists. Sometimes the children fell and were dragged up again by the stronger. Now and then rattle snakes coiled and hissed, and the women killed them with sticks. Other serpents slipped ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the Lieutenant muttered, wrinkling his eyes in a vain endeavour to see through the murk. "We've been forty-eight hours on patrol, and now we're due to go into harbour this beastly fog comes down and delays us. It ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... Only one or two of the incandescent lights were on, and beyond that feeble glow there seemed a great void of darkness and storm. The gloom shut in the steamer's world as with a thick curtain; not a star was visible, but now and then a white swirl of foam gleamed for a second through the murk, and then, with a creaking and groaning as if in pain, the good ship lurched, trembled, and as the wave broke with an indescribable noise, steadied herself once more, to plunge onward as fast as steam could force her in the teeth of wind ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... power, with no result. A vast volume of space, roughly ellipsodial in shape, was closed to him by forces entirely beyond his experience or comprehension. But suddenly, while his rays were still trying to pierce that impenetrable murk, it disappeared instantly and, without warning, the illimitable infinity of space once more lay revealed upon his plates and his beams flashed on and on through the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... itself, or rekindled, in those years, in England first of all; and was now hovering about, a good deal, in Germany and other countries; pretending to be a new light of Heaven, and not a bog-meteor of phosphorated hydrogen, conspicuous in the murk of things. Bog-meteor, foolish putrescent will-o'-wisp, his Majesty promptly defined it to be: Tom-foolery and KINDERSPIEL, what else? Whereupon ingenious Buckeburg, who was himself a Mason, man of forty by this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... priesthood, godhood, and kingship must stand or fall with the unbearable cold greatness of the incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumed character of law-giver is altogether false to his real passionate nature, despises the rebuke; and the giant's ray of insight is lost in the murk of his virtuous indignation. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... disappeared into the murk amidships when Terence Reardon rolled groggily down the companion after him. Terence had no means of ascertaining which alleyway the skipper had charged into—and he did not care. Blind with fury he lurched into the port alleyway; in consequence of which the fugitive, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture Pain—and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope? What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle? Back must I fall, confess 'Ever the weakness I fled'? No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed! Zeus was Zeus—not Man: wrecked by his weakness I whirl. Out of the wreck I rise—past ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... murk or sun of undurn sheeny bright, * Which is she hight who all the three hath might to place in pauper plight, ah! Where on the bending branch alight with grace of stature like to hers * Tho' be the branch by Zephyr deckt and in its ornaments bedight, ah! And how can fellowed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should 'remember'! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... shook her head at the moon, and as she stared, moody and quiet, it seemed that the moon had slid beyond her vision and she was looking into great caverns of space, bursting with blackness. Some horror of emptiness was reaching to roll her in pits of murk, where her screams would be battered ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... pursuing Indians? For two days we watched, and the water was unflecked by sign of life. We listened in the murk of night and strained our eyes in the sun's dazzle. But we found nothing but forest and sky and mystery. We were ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... the long-sought queen, Stolen with violent hands from grassy fields And delicate airs of sunlit Sicily, Pensive, gold-haired, but innocent-eyed no more As when she laughing plucked the daffodils, But grave as on fulfilling a strange doom. And low at Ades' feet, wrapped in grim murk And darkness thick, the three gray women sat, Loose-robed and chapleted with wool and flowers, Purple narcissi round their horrid hair. Intent upon her task, the first one held The tender thread that at a touch would snap; The ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... grey beside her tresses blacker than the murk midnight, While the little hand that presses each coquettish curl ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... Through the murk the girls saw the heads and flaunted manes of the coming horses. Just what harm they might do to the motor-cars, which could not be driven rapidly on this rough trail, Ruth and her two chums did not know. But the threat of the wild ponies' approach ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... the town. Here we had almost our first glimpse of industrial Scotland as opposed to picturesque Scotland, which was in these August days becoming the playground of Britain and America. Falkirk is a coalfield as well as a battlefield, and the murk of collieries and iron works darkens the sky as once did the smoke of gunpowder: but the place holds its old interest for the mind; and not far off we came to the Wallace Monument; then to Bannockburn. Because of Barrie's love for the Bruce, we got out and walked ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... been nearly at the full, but I could not guess its position behind the even murk of cloud that muffled the whole face of the sky. Yet, it was not very dark. The broad masses of the garden through which Jervaise led me, were visible as a greater blackness superimposed on a fainter background. I believed that we were passing through some kind ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... with her glance. And one and all dissolve before her silent splendour of reproof, all save Aristophanes. She bids him welcome. "Glory to the Poet," she cries. "Light, light, I hail it everywhere; no matter for the murk, that never should have been such orb's associate." Aristophanes changes as he sees her; a new man ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Amidst the murk and gloom of those dark days in Washington, when the suspense was breathless and the heart of the nation responded in muffled beats to the dull booming of the cannon of Meade and Lee at Gettysburg, an episode occurred, with Lincoln as the central figure, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and wine that maketh the red blood of mankind? Cometh it not of the toiler? Is it not told in ancient song that those of white robes dwell on thrones of gold in Mount Olympus while their vaulted dome doth rest on the shoulders of the slaves and humble, whose red robes have grown dun and murk and brown with soil and toil? Verily there are blood makers and devourers of that blood. Thy father, Jael the fisherman, didst know that the way of hope is the way of Brotherhood. So did he bind himself with others. The hand of Rome ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... word from the mouths of men who could apparently see as well in the dark as in daylight, that the second lifeboat was close to the pier. And then everybody momentarily saw it—a ghostly thing that heaved up pale out of the murk for an instant, and was lost again. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... hoofs or wheels; spectral horsemen flitted by, soundless; in the shadow of hissing hedgerow and raving, wind-tossed trees crawled miserable, nebulous shapes, seen but to be lost again, swallowed in the howling murk. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of murk and mist Fairy folk are coming To the mead the dew has kissed, And they dance where'er they list To the ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... August night, when half-visible heat lightning turned the murk of the western horizon to pulses of dirty sulphur, Lad awoke from a fitful dream of chasing squirrels which had never learned ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak: Such ending is not Death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is murk ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp |
