"Pitch-dark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figure tripping lightly along through the morning sunshine and morning dew. I had a sort of instinct that he would be there now; so I climbed up the shortest way, often losing my footing; for it was a pitch-dark night, and the common looked as wide, and black, and ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... black, heavy waves rolled mountains high, and heaved the ship up and cast it down by turns; the mast came down with a crash; the sea stove in a plank; the pumps were no longer of any avail. It was a pitch-dark night. The ship sank; but at the last minute the young mate wrote on a slip of paper, "In the name of Jesus—we are lost!" He wrote down the name of his bride, his own name, and that of his ship; then he thrust the note into an empty bottle that was within reach, pressed in the cork tightly, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... a little further, and a face looked out—the face, of course, of Sir Christopher. All the house that showed through the crack of the door didn't, as Mabel said afterwards, show at all, because it was pitch-dark. ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... Dick who roused up first, to find all pitch-dark around him. Bringing out a match, he lit the candle and looked ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... dark, and the rain was coming down so fast, that they could see next to nothing at all. Long before they reached their new home, Saffy and Mark were sound asleep, Hester was sunk in her own thoughts, and the father and mother sat in unbroken silence, hand in hand. It was pitch-dark ere they arrived; and save what she learned from the thousand musics of the swollen river along which they had been driving for the last hour, Hester knew nothing of the country for which she had left the man-swarming city. Ah, that city! so full of fellow-creatures! so many of them ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... head to foot. At length, all was still as death in the wood; and the world seemed as if it never would wake again. The Child bent forward to see whether it were as dark abroad as in the cave, but he saw nothing save the pitch-dark night, who had wrapped everything in her thick veil. Yet as he looked upwards his eyes met the friendly glance of two or three stars, and this was a most joyful surprise to him, for he felt himself no longer so entirely ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... a pitch-dark night that it occurred. I had occasion to go to a neighbouring village at a considerable distance, and borrowed a horse from ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... was out of my state-room, at the bulwark, holding fast to a stanchion, and looking over the side at the white and seething water caused by her sudden and violent stoppage. The sea was comparatively smooth, the night pitch-dark, and the fog deep and impenetrable; the ship would rise with the swell, and come down with a bump and quiver that was decidedly unpleasant. Soon the passengers were out of their rooms, undressed, calling for help, and praying as though the ship were going ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... could not see anything, as it was pitch-dark; but the piercing cries of the cats told the whole tale, and his heart overflowing with gall now ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... was low and narrow—up on the fifth floor of one of the huge tenement houses in the Rue Jolivet in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. A narrow stone passage led to it—pitch-dark at all times, but dirty, and evil-smelling when the concierge—a free citizen of the new democracy— took a week's holiday from his work in order to spend whole afternoons either at the wineshop round the corner, or on the Place du Carrousel to watch ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... twenty rods or so, moored to the boulder-strewn shore, was a shanty-boat. In the bustle of landing, last night, we had not noticed this neighbor, and it was pitch-dark before we had time to get our bearings. I think it is the most dilapidated affair we have seen on the river—the frame of the cabin is out of plumb, old clothes serve for sides and flap loudly in the wind; while ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... It was pitch-dark, but this I liked, as it lessened the probability of the Indians' seeing me unless I stumbled on them by accident. My greatest danger was that my horse might run into a hole and fall, and in this way get away ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... the hand, the marshal opened the window of the balcony over the Danube. The river at this moment, trebled in volume by the strong flood, was nearly a league wide; it was lashed by a fierce wind, and we could hear the waves roaring. It was pitch-dark, and the rain fell in torrents, but we could see on the other side a long line of bivouac fires. Napoleon, Marshal Lannes, and I being alone on the balcony, the marshal said, "On the other side of the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... on the trail of those ahead. This was a rather difficult task, for the lantern had been put out, and it was pitch-dark tinder the trees. More than once their steeds went into a hollow with a jounce that threatened to throw one ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... of all who were then present, and led them up-stream, in single file, by a fisherman's path which curved round and came out on top of the Heights behind the single British gun there. Progress was very slow in this direction, though the distance was less than a mile, as it was still pitch-dark and the path was narrow and dangerous. The three hundred left at the landing were soon reinforced, and the crossing went on successfully, though some of the American boats were carried down-stream to the British post at Vrooman's, where all the men in them were made prisoners ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... Anthony came into the apartment and groping through the little hall, pitch-dark in the winter dusk, found Gloria sitting by the window. She turned as he ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of great idleness, he never failed to be ready for all sorts of adventures and excursions. One pitch-dark rainy night we landed about ten o'clock at the mouth of a salmon stream when the water was phosphorescent. The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow, wonderfully beautiful and ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... and besides, it was pitch-dark outside. When the fever-fit passed, he murmured, "Oh, how lovely you are ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... cut sandals, and bound them under their feet, with the hoofs of the reindeer feet trailing behind. But before they set off they set fire to a large corn barn which was close by, and then ran out into the pitch-dark night. The barn blazed, and set fire to many other houses in the village. Thorod and his comrade travelled the whole night until they came to a lonely wood, where they concealed themselves when it was daylight. In the morning they were missed. There was chase ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... him scraping at the snow crust. I put on my 'pesk' (a fur blouse), got hold of my double-barrelled rifle, and went on deck. The whole crew were collected aft, gazing out into the night. We let loose 'Ulenka' and 'Pan,' and went in the direction where the bear was said to be. It was pitch-dark, but the dogs would find the tracks if there was anything there. Hansen thought he had seen something moving about the hummock near the ship, but we found and heard nothing, and, as several of the others had by this time come out on the ice and could also ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... black of the swamp was split by the light's white sword, and softer beams from its sharp radiance illumined the pitch-dark gloom for a few yards to either side of the tortuous path. The shadows of the man and the woman were cast in monstrous grotesquely floating shapes behind them as ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... as she stood in the stern of the ship, in a pitch-dark, rather blowy night, feeling the motion of the sea, and watching the small, rather desolate little lights that twinkled on the shores of England, as on the shores of nowhere, watched them sinking smaller and smaller on the profound and living darkness, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... ill with fever, nevertheless we went down to the work-shed. It was a pitch-dark night, the air was like that in a hothouse, smelling of earth and mould. The surf boomed sullenly on the beach, and heavy squalls flogged the forest. Sometimes a rotten branch snapped, and the sound travelled, dull ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Niagaras; and perhaps these cataracts of blue ice are full as beautiful as the moving ones of water. By night we reached the western part of the channel; but the water was so deep that no anchorage could be found. We were in consequence obliged to stand off and on in this narrow arm of the sea, during a pitch-dark night of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... there is no wonder, that the Indian maiden felt some tender palpitations on his account. Once again, when, owing to some misunderstanding, Powhatan had decreed the death of all the whites, Pocahontas spent the whole pitch-dark night climbing hills and toiling through pathless thickets, to save Smith and his friends by warning them of the imminent danger. Smith offered her many beautiful presents on this occasion, evidently not appreciating the sentiment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... any attention to where I was. I'd left my bags in the station. The first thing I knew, I was on Manniston Road, in front of Number Nine—your house. I felt tired, and I sat down on the bottom step. I had on a raincoat. It—it was pitch-dark there. ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... watched like me, on that terrible night. No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,—a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying aloft; it took the house by the four corners ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... of the spoons. "You told me once you knew all the roads within twenty miles of New York in the pitch-dark. I think it's very funny you don't know where you've been. You couldn't have ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the gentleman groaned. "I eat my meals in a pitch-dark room, in deadly fear and horror of the regiments of flies that swarm in and settle on everything the minute one raises the ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... we had got to do was to keep straight on, and to mind we did not turn to the right or the left along any of the by-roads lest we should get lost on the moors. It was not without some feeling of regret that we bade the landlady "Good night" and started out from the comfortable inn on a pitch-dark night. Fortunately the road was dry, and, as there were no trees, the limestone of which it was composed showed a white track easily discernible in the inky darkness which surrounded it. As we got farther on our way we could see right in front a great illumination in the mist or clouds ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... of the demonstration was the shadowed, pitch-dark part of the floor of a crater twenty miles across, with walls some ten thousand jagged feet high. The furnace-like sunshine made the plain beyond the shadow into a sea of blinding brightness. The sunlit parts ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Here all was pitch-dark, and for the moment he stood still, not knowing in what direction to move next. All around ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... went back to his fireside and lay down. Hendrick and Ruyter lay on one side of the fire under one blanket, and John Stofolus lay on the other. At this moment I was sitting taking some barley-broth; our fire was very small, and the night was pitch-dark and windy. Owing to our proximity to the native village the wood was very scarce, the Bakalahari having burnt it ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... little is seen either of the dogs or the game. The woods, let the moon shine ever so bright, are pitch-dark; and the dogs rely on their scent and the hunter ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon |
