"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gleam of treacherous sunshine, followed by more and heavier dashes. The wind was in the southwest, and to rain seemed the easiest thing in the world. From fitful dashes to a steady pour the transition was natural. We stood huddled together, stark and grim, under our cover, like hens under a cart. The fire fought bravely for a time, and retaliated with sparks and spiteful tongues of flame; but gradually its spirit was broken, only a heavy body of coal and half-consumed logs in the centre holding ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... gloomy ranges, at the foot of an ironbark, The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark; For the Reckless mare had smashed him against a leaning limb, And his comely face was battered, and his merry ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have yielded one inch of ground ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... see the Beecham's house, stark white in the early morning light. It was after seven o'clock, he thought, and the family would soon be at breakfast. A small stream of smoke drifted up from the kitchen chimney, wavering and drooping ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... from, off the quarter-deck, for they kept no look-out from the mast-head, and we presently observed they were in chace of us. The French and Spaniards on board now began to grow a good deal alarmed, when it fell stark calm, but not before the ships had neared us so much, that we plainly discerned them to be English men of war, the one a two-decker, the other a twenty-gun ship. The French had now thoughts, when a breeze should spring up, of running the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... lips whispered to themselves—"midnight, and for three hours I have endured this maddening agony of suspense! Another day is given to the world, and before its close all I love best may be cold and stark in death! Oh, my God! have mercy, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... of mind, or the amount of sleep one has had. It is sometimes present in physical weaklings, and men of great daring may entirely lack it. A man's behavior when suddenly attacked and overpowered is a test of his nerve rather than his true nature. Still, at the last, he was always faced by the stark, ugly fact that he had been tried and found wanting. Conversation with Neri he found rather ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... make his fortune by it. Detectives were put upon his trail in his roaming about the fields, but he managed to elude all efforts at discovery. Being an intemperate man, one cold night after indulging in his cups, he was found by the roadside stark and stiff. Many rude attempts and imperfect searches have been made upon the assurances of Holden to discover the existence of antimony, but thus far in vain, and the supposed suppressed secret of the existence of it in Saugus died ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... Erde Gibt uns Mut zu frischem Tun, Gibt uns Muesse, um am Herde Sonder Sorge auszuruhn. Aus des Bodens Scholle ziehen Wir des Lebens bestes Mark, Aus des Bodens Kraft erbluehen Die Geschlechter frei und stark. ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... company, one or other, did offer insult to any of their women, and yet we saw many hundreds, and had many in our power, and of those very young and excellently favoured, which came among us without deceit, stark naked. Nothing got us more love amongst them than this usage; for I suffered not any man to take from any of the nations so much as a pina (pineapple) or a potato root without giving them contentment, nor ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... when they made no answer to her complaint; but when she found that they were stark dead, and placed in this way to mock her, her fury was very great indeed. She ran after the tracks of the young man and his mother as fast as she could; so fast, indeed, that she was on the very point of overtaking ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... Another no less forward than he, at his return from thence, could add thus much: "He is a fool that maketh account of any religion, but more fool that will lose any part of his wealth or will come in trouble for constant leaning to any; but if he yield to lose his life for his possession, he is stark mad, and worthy to be taken for most fool of all the rest." This gay booty got these gentlemen by going Into Italy; and hereby a man may see what fruit is afterward to be looked for where such blossoms do appear. "I care ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... tithe of the actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a thousand roofs—cottage roofs and palace roofs—little children ask for 'father.' The pattering feet shall never run to meet, upon the threshold, his feet, who lies stiffening in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... brought her to the Nuns' Chapel, her orisons had been concluded, for she had turned her back upon the altar, and sat gazing sorrowfully down at her lap, where lay in pathetic pose a white rabbit and a snowy pigeon,—both dead, quite stark and cold,—laid out in state upon the spotless linen apron, around which a fluted ruffle ran crisp and smooth. One tiny waxen hand held a broken lily, and the other was vainly pressed upon the lids of the rabbit's eyes, trying to close ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... with an imaginary conversation of two dogs. Sometimes the king deigns to laugh, sometimes to question or jest with them, his voice sounding shrilly from the cabin. By his side he may have the heir-apparent, Paul, his nephew and adopted son, six years old, stark naked, and a model of young human beauty. And there will always be the favourite and perhaps two other wives awake; four more lying supine under mats and whelmed in slumber. Or perhaps we came later, fell on a more private hour, and found Tembinok' ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a huge crevasse was illumined to a depth far below any point to which the rays of the sun penetrated. On the neighboring slope of Monte Roseg the crimson and green and yellow mosses were given sudden life against the black background of rock. Every boulder here wore a somber robe. They were stark and grim. The eye instantly caught the contrast to their gray-white fellows piled on the lower moraine or in ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... the palace and found the king stark upon his couch, and his huge limbs all cramped and crippled by the pangs of death, and his hands clenched as if in menace of a foe—the ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... but he now came out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see the killing he was certain would take place. He smirked greasily up into the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him. But the Cockney was unabashed, though mad, stark mad. He turned ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... roads, first under overhanging greenery and then, almost suddenly, remote, in blue ether. We hung on precipices overlooking the rock-filled valleys of old volcanic desolation. Basaltic cliffs rose up from their bed of yellow cornfields, bare and stark, yet, in the noontide shimmer, hesitating in their eternal defiance of God and man. We ascended to vast tablelands of infinite scrub and yellow broom, and the stern peaks of the Puy de Dome mountains, a while ago seen like giants, appeared like ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the peer of swift Ares, quickly bare the spear of bronze from the hut, and went after Idomeneus, with high thoughts of battle. And even as Ares, the bane of men, goes forth into the war, and with him follows his dear son Panic, stark and fearless, that terrifies even the hardy warrior; and these twain leave Thrace, and harness them for fight with the Ephyri, or the great-hearted Phlegyans, yet hearken not to both peoples, but give honour to one only; like these gods did Meriones ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Leute schon gegeben, die waren stark in dem Bestreben, Durch Bcherschreiben zu bereiten sich gut Gercht fr alle Zeiten; Und darauf auch gerichtet war ihr starkes Sehnen immerdar, Dass man in Bchern es erzhlte, wie ihnen Tatenlust nicht fehlte. Dazu verlangte ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... vileness of that purpose; could say, at one time, that my forgiveness of Mrs. Jewkes should stand me in greater stead than I was aware of: could tell her, before me, that she must for the future shew me all the respect due to one he must love; at another, acknowledged before her, that he had been stark naught, and that I was very forgiving; again, to Mrs. Jewkes, putting himself on a level with her, as to guilt, "We are both in generous hands: and, indeed, if Pamela did not pardon you, I should think she but half forgave me, because you acted by my ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... trenches; and along the crest of the hill the big men in blue were toiling, toiling, toiling at theirs. All through the night anxious eyes would be strained for Chaffee, and at dawn the slaughter would begin again. Wherever he looked, he could see with his mind's eye stark faces in the long grass of the valley and the Spanish-bayonet clumps in the woods. All day he had seen them there—dying of thirst, bleeding to death—alone. As he went down the hill, lights were moving along the creek bed. A row of muffled dead lay along the bed of the creek. Yet they were ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... how it is," interrupted Archee with a scream; "the man hath been driven stark wud by ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... money, and yet on the faces of these frontier refugees I saw stark hunger, the weakness come of long weeks of famine. One man, one fortunate man from Verviers, told me he could purchase as much as 2s. 8d. worth of food for himself, his wife, and ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... seventy years before, they had received under those very walls. They had exterminated the people of Walcheren; they had taken prisoner Count Regnier; they had burnt Ghent, Bruges, and St. Omer itself, close by; they had left naught between the Scheldt and the Somme, save stark corpses and blackened ruins. What could withstand them till they dared to lift audacious hands against the heavenly lord who sleeps there in Sithiu? Then they poured down in vain over the Heilig-Veld, innumerable as the locusts. Poor monks, strong in the ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... There had been a stark calm since the commencement of the middle watch. The sails still hung up and down ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble. Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... instituted—(to thin the drawing-rooms)—stiff-bodied gowns and bare shoulders. What dreadful discoveries will be made both on fat and lean! I recommend to you the idea of Mrs. Cavendish, when half-stark; and I might fill the rest of my paper with such images, but your imagination will supply them; and you shall excuse me, though I leave this a short letter: but I wrote merely to thank your ladyship for the medal, and, as you perceive, have very little to say, besides that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... wend afield; an host not to be withstood, save by the ancient God-folk, if any of them were left upon the earth, as belike none are. And as to the name of our said city, it hight the City of the Stark-wall, or more shortly, Stark-wall. Now as to the fashion of our king-making: If our king dieth and leaveth an heir male, begotten of his body, then is he king after him; but if he die and leave no heir, then send we out a great lord, with knights and sergeants, to that pass of the mountain whereto ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... knotted be. Leave to the multitude their riot! Here will we house ourselves in quiet. It is an old, transmitted trade, That in the greater world the little worlds are made. I see stark-nude young witches congregate, And old ones, veiled and hidden shrewdly: On my account be kind, nor treat them rudely! The trouble's small, the fun is great. I hear the noise of instruments attuning,— Vile din! yet one must learn to bear the crooning. Come, come ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... boy, but as we would be stark naked before we got it finished, I fear the turnkey would suspec' there wos somethin' ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... chimed in with these praises, and added: "It will fall out now and then that one or other of us gets maimed in this way; for fire is not a thing to be jested with: but God has blest us in giving us our old master; for even if a fellow were to become stark blind, he would never let him ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark mad in metaphysics. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... care of her. Heaven and earth should not restrain me,—no, they should not,——But her least frown should still me, tame me, and make me a calm coward: say this, say all, say any thing to charm her rage and tears. Oh I am mad, stark-mad, and ready to run on business I die to think her guilty of: tell her how it would grieve her to see me torn and mangled; to see that hair she loves ruffled and diminish'd by rage, violated by my insupportable grief, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... first-born son Oliver, and ever since there had been an Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards. Then I told how one of these later Olivers, which one a matter of no consequence, had written verses and put them into the mouth of the doughty Smite-and-spare-not, sitting his horse, stark and strong, at the head of his men on Naseby Field, and gazing with grim, grey eyes on the opening movements of the fight. And, nothing loth, I trolled them out roundly across the meadows, till the peewits screamed and a ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... thought Deems this side always right, and that stark naught; He foams with censure, with applause he raves,— A dupe to rumors, and a tool of knaves: He'll want no type his weakness to proclaim While such a thing as ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... as the Envoy of the Lord. Nicholas learned from it that there was no necessity of anything connected with faith, and that we must live in sin in order that grace may abound. Sympson pretends to find in the Scriptures an ordination that men should walk in the streets stark naked, to teach the rich a lesson that they must divest themselves of everything. Richard Hill justified, with the Bible in hand, adultery and manslaughter as deeds never failing to work out some good purpose, especially when joined to incest, in which case ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... the gray heads, the old medicine-men, the great-grandmothers of the tribes, huddling in the frowzy, foul-smelling tepees, were legends of no such bitter, biting cold as this. Cattle lying here and there stark and stiffened, hardy ponies, long used to Dakota blizzards, even some among the Indian dogs had succumbed to its severity, while over at the agent's, behind double-listed doors and frost-covered sashes, around roaring coal fires in red-hot stoves, the employes and ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... in great straits while the Spaniards resided among them, as many had died and the survivors strictly observed the custom. The houses in the island were of mats, and strewed with oyster shells, on which they lay at night stark naked round the fire. The inhabitants of the province of Tegesta[136], reaching from the Martyrs to Cape Cannaveral, feed better than those Indians among whom Cabeza resided, being extraordinarily expert ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Giant! stiff, and stark, and grim, Open thy lips of stone, thy story tell; And by the wondering crowd who pay thee court In thy cold bed, and gaze with curious eyes On thy prone form so huge, and still so human, Let now again be heard, ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... aback, and there was something slightly hysterical in her laugh, but she answered frankly enough, "I go to Dr. Stark's, Mr. Spottiswoode. Dr. Stark attends my mother, and is at Blackfaulds every day. I wait in his laboratory till he comes there before setting out; he goes his rounds early, you know. He lets me know how mother ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... grey dawn, and we were working up in shore, without dreaming of breaking the blockade, when it fell stark calm. Presently the Spanish squadron, anchored under Punto Canoa, perceived us, when a corvette, two schooners, a cutter, and eight gunboats, got under weigh, the latter of which soon swept close to us, ranging themselves on our bows and quarters; and although we showed our colours, and made the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... arrow-slit, looking down into the moonlight of the circus, these chains were slackened (though men stood by the windlass of each), and the great striped brutes were prowling about the circus with the links clanking and chinking in their wake. Lying stark on the pavement were the bodies of some eight men, dead and uneaten; and though the cave-tigers stopped their prowlings now and again to nuzzle these, and beat them about with playful paw-blows, they made no pretence at commencing a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... workers in the woods near Singapore, we found them busily engaged, the children running about stark naked, the parents clothed in the usual loose rags. Our party attracted great attention. We asked our guide to tell the people that we came from a country where the water in such a pond as that before us would become solid at this season of the year and we could walk upon it and that sometimes ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... swam in rum to kingdom come, Full many a lusty fellow. And since they're sped, all stark and dead, They're flaming now in hell O. So cheerly O, Hey cheerly O, They're ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of a half articulate appeal, he crushed her against his face. Whatever that had filled her with hope, she thought, was being torn from her. A sickening aversion over which she had no control made her stark in his arms. The memories of the painted coarse satiety of women and the sly hard men for which they schemed, the loose discussions of calculated advances and sordid surrenders, flooded her with a loathing for what she passionately needed to ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like, And the world's wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod: We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight, And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... all events, that he had had enough of it, as he looked along the deck and saw numbers of the men who had been slightly hurt binding up each other's wounds. Several lay stiff and stark, whose bodies were dragged on one side, while not a few, severely hurt, had been carried below to the cockpit, where the surgeon and his mates had ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... with here and there a black ridge of granite thrusting wind-cleared fangs high above the far-flung shroud. But, if the crests of peak upon peak were thus clothed in white, their bases wore a garment of different texture. Save on the seaward terraces of stark rock, with their tide-marked base of weed-covered boulders, the densest vegetation known to mankind imposed everywhere a first barrier to human progress far more unconquerable than the awesome regions beyond. Pine forests of extraordinary ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... in what he considers the chemise is the genius of Liberty holding out an olive branch with one hand, while upon her shoulder rests an American eagle screaming defiance at the enemies of his country, who are seen fleeing in the distance. Canary bird! small boys! ballet-girl! The man is crazy, sir; stark, staring mad. And now I want you to write up an explanation for me. This kind of thing exposes me to derision. I can't stand it, and, by George! I won't! ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... and grew, and grew, Till at high noon to-day 'twas heard Throughout the house; and men flocked through The echoing halls, with faces blurred With pallor, gloom, and fear, and awe, And shuddering at what they saw— The quiet lodger, as he lay Stark of the ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... first I saw nothing under them but a coarse canvas cloth. The dripping of the rain on it was audible in the dreadful silence. I looked up, along the cloth, and there at the end, stark and grim and black, in the yellow light—there was his ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... disgrace of the douche. She had seen grown young women stripped stark naked before five hundred girls and have a bucket of ice-cold water thrown over them. One of them had been ill and was unable to do her work. She had ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... couch, and stark, Like the sea-rejected thing Sea-sucked white, behold their King. Attila, my Attila! Beams that panted black and bright, Scornful lightnings danced their sight: Him they see an oak in bud, Him an oaklog stripped of bark: Him, their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... poorest part of it. As our ancestors landed on the most desolate part of the continent, so we took the worst part of Ohio. If you were to see the wheat-fields of Stark, or the corn on the Scioto, and the whole of the region about Xenia and Dayton, and on the Miami, you would want ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... I lay, stark with fear. But my visitor seemed to be very harmless. She drew up a chair by the side of the bed and took her seat, muttering something I couldn't catch. Then she bent over me and I felt her warm breath on ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... LETTERS. Being a Series of Twelve Letters written by Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... killed in ordinary accidents in a single week was greater than the total number killed by the Nipe in the last decade, but nowhere were men banding together to put a stop to that sort of death. Accidental death was a known factor, almost a friend; the Nipe was stark horror. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... languorous, enervating room hermetically sealed against the war. Then he remembered the tones of her voice as she had told her Belgian adventures.... Was it love? Was it tenderness? Was it sensuality? The difference was indiscernible; it had no importance. Against the stark background of infinite existence all human beings were alike and all their passions ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... He listened to her stark with anguish, yet in utter submission. Her every word cut him to the heart so sharply that he felt he should die. She did not so much as notice his suffering and continued delightedly to revenge herself on him for the annoyance ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... a Phadhrig?' (How d'ye do, Pat?) 'Slan, go raimh math agut!' (Pretty well, thank you,) says the bear. The people were surprised to hear how plainly he spoke—but the mayor ordered him directly to be ripped up; and after some opposition, and a good deal of difficulty, Pat stepped forth stark naked out of the bear's-skin wherein he had been fourteen or fifteen days most cleverly stitched. The women made off—the men stood astonished—and the mayor ordered his keepers to be put in goal unless they satisfied him; but that was presently ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... you'd go stark staring mad as fast as all that," chuckled Diana. "It didn't take you very long to push that ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... all round the edges of the Boer main position, and the day was spent in resting the weary men, and in determining at what point the final assault should be delivered. On the right front, commanding the Boer lines on either side, towered the stark eminence of Spion Kop, so called because from its summit the Boer voortrekkers had first in 1835 gazed down upon the promised land of Natal. If that could only be seized and held! Buller and Warren swept its bald summit with their field-glasses. It was a ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cloying luxury with which he had surrounded himself. The bedroom, of all rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actual furniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had been the fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarlatan danseuse who finds herself in a monk's cell. None of those wall pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... a bygone age! He stood there, ludicrous and unreal in his stark black nakedness, his frayed robes of crimson whipping to tatters in the breeze. Yet he had forgotten his wounds—Horab was standing upright—and Garry's hand that held the pistol fell loosely at his side. The hate melted from his heart as he watched where ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... a kind of compassion in his wide-set brown eyes, "You, sir, have caused a sweet and innocent lady to marry you against her will—Oho, beyond doubt, your intentions were immaculate; but the outcome remains in its stark enormity, and the hand of an inquisitive child is not ordinarily salved by its previous ignorance as to the corrosive properties of fire. You have betrayed confiding womanhood, an act abhorrent to all notions of gentility. There is but ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... kindred; besides, possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a headstall of sheep's leather; which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... studied severely; United States histories were in great demand, and the pages of Shakespeare were turned over for inspiration. Each boy was to compile his own speeches, and many hurried consultations were held over back fences, and in haylofts; one boy, who represented General Stark, selected Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.' A companion objected to the lines as inappropriate, but General Stark replied, "Well, I know the piece because I've spoken it in school, and I ain't going to learn another, I can tell you! I don't see why ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... we faced one another in stark understanding. . . . Then she plumped back to the chest of drawers, and her wet pocket-handkerchief, and I knew she sought ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... was the counsel they agreed to follow: to let out the womenfolk to meet the youth, namely, thrice fifty women, even ten and seven-score bold, stark-naked women, at one and the same time, and their chieftainess, Scannlach ('the Wanton') before them, to discover their persons and their shame[b] to him. [2]"Let the young women go," said Conchobar, "and bare their paps and their breasts and their swelling bosoms, and if he be a true ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... "Don't ask me! I shouldn't have said it! I knew I'd let it out if you came here with me! I'll be telling you everything in a minute, and you'll go stark ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the rebels. The message was carried to him secretly, and his answer was that I should meet him at a certain spot by night. I sent my messenger instead of myself, and he was found in the morning stiff and stark, with more holes in his doublet than ever the tailor made. On this I sent again, raising my demands, and insisting upon a speedy settlement. He asked my conditions. I replied, a free pardon and ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not very hot to the touch, nor pale in its appearance, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But internally it burned so that the patient could not bear to have on him clothing or linen even of the very lightest description; or indeed to be otherwise than stark naked. What they would have liked best would have been to throw themselves into cold water; as indeed was done by some of the neglected sick, who plunged into the rain-tanks in their agonies of unquenchable thirst; though it made no difference whether they drank ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... atmosphere that hangs about a death chamber; and he watched the grey shadow of Azrael's wing creep across his face. Then he saw the sheet and the stiff form beneath it; and knew that they were his features that were hidden; and that they were his feet that stood up stark below the covering. Then he visited his own grave, and saw the month-old grass blowing upon it, and the little cross at the head; then he dug down through the soil, swept away the earth from his coffin-plate; drew the screws and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... time, as Odo had hoped, they were putting off from the shore in a blunt-nosed fishing-boat which was the lightest craft the village could provide. The lake was stark calm, and the two boatmen, silhouetted against the moonlight, drove the boat forward with even vigorous strokes. Fulvia, shivering in the autumnal chill, had drawn her hood close about her and sat silent, her face in shade. Measured by their secret apprehensions the boat's progress ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the dark—in the blinding dark; Away from the sunshine bright above: Away from the gaze of those they love, They are lying stony and stark. ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... wounds deep into the dense gray ranks. Still, the wave broke; and, from its storm-blown top, one furious tongue surged over the breastwork and through the hedge of bayonets. It came from Armistead's brigade of stark Virginians. He led it on; and, with a few score men, reached the highwater mark ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... that she dropped back through years of carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark simplicity of childhood. "Why—is my face dirty?" she ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... reached the crest of a ridge up which they had been climbing for hours. Before them lay a vast and fertile valley, much of which seemed to be under cultivation, and down it flowed a broad and placid river. Opposite to him and facing west a great tongue of land ran up to a wall of mountains with stark precipices of black rock that seemed to be hundreds, or even thousands, of feet high, and at the tip of this tongue a mighty waterfall rushed over the precipice, looking at that distance like a cascade of ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... comedies, his innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes they stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose themselves in the midst of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your faculties ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... could escape Siegfried. Swift was his steed as the tempest, and whether it was bear or boar he soon came up with it and slew it. Once he encountered a stark and mighty lion. Aiming an arrow at the monster, he shot it through the heart. The forest rang with acclaim at ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... and sufficiently agreeable companion; and had no higher tastes, unless a collection of coins, well mounted and arranged and at times added to, may claim that title. He therefore considered Haviland stark mad in spending so much money and brains upon nonsense; and the subject made him testy when he reviewed his refusal to accept some arrangement by which they could share the local political ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us. Upon ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore more decent. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness impelled him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would set his imagination to make that duchess appear, in Legrandin's eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would be drawn towards the duchess, assuring ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... time with John on Smutty-Nose; with headlong haste they reach the house, other men accompanying them; ah, there are blood-stains all about the snow! Ivan is the first to burst open the door and enter. What words can tell it! There upon the floor, naked, stiff and stark, is the woman he idolizes, for whose dear feet he could not make life's ways smooth and pleasant enough—stone dead! Dead—horribly butchered! her bright hair stiff with blood, the fair head that had so often rested on his breast crushed, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... brain to find the gentlest, most reassuring phrases that would alarm her least and keep up her courage. But there was the stark, hideous fact that could not be blinked or dodged, and when at last his lagging steps returned, he was no nearer a solution of his ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... the Maumee, and asked us rudely where we were going. They had no right, of course, but they were our elders, to whom it is necessary to be respectful, and they were rather terrifying, with their great bows, tall as they were, stark naked except for a strip of deerskin, and their feathers on end like the quills of an angry porcupine. We had no weapons ourselves, except short hunting-bows,—one does not travel with peace on his mouth and a war weapon ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... the daughter, a lass of sixteen, sat stark-naked before us, sucking at a milk-pot, on which her father kept her at work by holding a rod in his hand; for as fattening is the first duty of fashionable female life, it must be duly enforced by the rod if necessary. I got up a bit of flirtation with missy, and induced her ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Stiff and stark seemed the corpse of the swordsman, as one or two of the guests raised him from the ground; but, when they began to open his waistcoat to search for the wound which nowhere existed, the man of war collected, his scattered spirits; and, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... deadly poison. We all can live here for the next nineteen minutes in perfect safety, then at the first breath we draw we expire instantly. It is a lovely death. There is no pain, no contortion of the countenance, but we will be found here in the morning stark and stiff in our seats. I propose, gentlemen, that we teach London the great lesson it so much needs. No cause is without its martyrs. Let us be the martyrs of the great religion of Anarchy. I have left in my room papers telling just how and why we died. At midnight these sheets will be distributed ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... one power—one weapon, still left to me unimpaired: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God! And the proposition is just this: whether to be stark honest, even against the apparent interests of the very cause you are out to plead, is not in the long run the surest way—if it be of God— to help it make good: whether defeat, with the whole truth told, isn't better than defeat hidden away and disowned, in the hope that something ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... beating to arms, and a company rushed out of the barracks to protect the patrol. Washington's troops had begun the fight with an attack upon the outermost picket on the Pennington road, and Stark, with the van of Sullivan's party, gave three cheers and rushed upon the enemy's pickets near the river with their bayonets, and they, astonished at the suddenness and fury of the charge, were seized with a panic and fled in confusion ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... started out and in the pale moonlight they came upon the body of poor Denny lying stark and stiff under the telegraph line, his left hand grasping the instrument and the key open. A bullet hole in his head mutely told how he had met his death. Beside him lay the Indian, dead, one hand grasping Hogan's scalp lock, the other clasping a murderous-looking ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... little farther open on its rusty hinges and climbed inside. It was very dark and still and smelled like a stable, but suddenly he was aware of a movement not far from him. He did not exactly hear it, but he felt that something was moving. For a moment a cold shudder went over him and he stood stark still, not daring to move. Then, believing that his imagination had played a trick, he fumbled in his duffel bag, found his flashlight and sent its vivid gleam about the car. A young fellow in a ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... face of a sheer rock a single sheet of light cotton duck covered the abode of a woman with a nursing baby. They were the only persons at home. The three boys and a father comprised the remainder of the family. We soon found the two small boys. They were practically stark naked, but fat as curlews, being full of wild berries with which their bodies were stained bright blues and reds. They were a jolly little couple, as unconcerned about their environment as Robinson Crusoe after five years on his island. Soon the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... remember but very few of the exact words of the burial service. When I stood up at broad day, all knew what was going to be done, and I noticed that my poor fellows made the motion of uncovering their heads, though their heads had been stark bare to the sky and sea for many a weary hour. There was a long heavy swell on, but otherwise it was a fair morning, and there were broad fields of sunlight on the waves in the east. I said no more than this: "I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He raised the daughter ...
— The Wreck of the Golden Mary • Charles Dickens
... to him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... on the north side of the creek, and held up a long pole, with a white bit of cloth on it, for a signal of peace to them. We found they understood us presently, for they came flocking to us, men, women, and children, most of them, of both sexes, stark naked. At first they stood wondering and staring at us, as if we had been monsters, and as if they had been frighted; but we found they inclined to be familiar with us afterwards. The first thing we did to try them, was, we held up our hands to our mouths, as ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... oyster-shell, which when open to the tide, his mouth very much resembled. As for his neck, it was so long that no portion of dress at that time discovered was capable of covering more than one third of it; so that there were always two parts out of three left stark naked, and helplessly exposed to the elements. Whenever he smiled he looked as if he was about to weep. As the squire said, he was dreadfully round-shouldered—had dangling arms, that kept napping about him as if they were moved by some machinery that had gone out of order—was ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... abruptly at this point. The reader put on his hat and rushed round to Tressamer's chambers. It was too late. He found him sitting in a chair, stark and dead, with a dagger driven through ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... you may touch up the story. You will not want to leave it so stark and bare. "They grow in a little place just made for them to grow in. It's in here, the place is, in mothers," and you give a friendly pat against your side. Many children ask where the place is, and many think it is the stomach. Other children have ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... having thus got vent, was diffused like Air; every body suck'd it in, and let it out again with their Breath to the next they met withal; and in half an hours time it was talked of in the House where our Adventurers were lodged. Aurelian was stark mad at the News, and knew what search would be immediately made for him. Hippolito, had he not been desperately in Love, would certainly have taken Horse and rid out of Town just then, for he could make no longer ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... One of the strangers started from his seat, And stood, and upward, downward, with a beat His head went, and he groaned, and all his arm Trembled. Then, as a hunter gives alarm, He shrieked, stark mad and raving: "Pylades, Dost see her there?—And there—Oh, no one sees!— A she-dragon of Hell, and all her head Agape with fanged asps, to bite me dead. She hath no face, but somewhere from her cloak Bloweth ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... closed his eyes. He was tired and he conceded it, which was a stark admission for Brent Taber. And he wondered: Was it worth it? Banging your head against a stone wall. It would be so easy to say, Okay, it's your world, too. If you aren't worried why should I bother? Maybe it's not worth it. Why not ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... stout-mettled as she deemed him, or else the all-consuming thirst of life, youth's stark horror of death, made him a temporizing craven in ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Lowry's and Beach's breasts. Then Charley Osgood, son of our Lieutenant, a quiet, fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and earnest as his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the door behind him. Everyone composed himself for miserable sleep. Everyone except Judas, who went on talking to Rockyfeller, and Rockyfeller, who proceeded to light one of his candles and begin a pleasant and conversational evening. The Fighting Sheeney lay stark-naked on a paillasse between me and his lord. The Fighting Sheeney told everyone that to sleep stark-naked was to avoid bugs (whereof everybody, including myself, had a goodly portion). The Fighting Sheeney was, however, quieted by the planton's order; ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... stark mad!" cried the earl. Then he went on, "Konrad, I have wronged thee deeply. In my youth I loved one who neglected me as cruelly as thou hast been neglected, and since then a mischievous spirit of vengeance, as it were, has led me to make women ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... long, winding trail and over another summit to Yucca Pass Casey dreamed, while the stark, scarred buttes on either side regarded him with enigmatic calm. Since the first wagon train had worried over the rough deserts on their way to California, the bleak hills of Nevada had listened while prospectors dreamed aloud and cackled over ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... none of the watch was near. The ship was dark, save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been. The issue was, Could these rights be restored by coercion? The Conservatives and the Church said Yes. True to his political faith, Mr Laurier said No. Up and down the province of Quebec he was denounced by the ultramontane leaders. Here was sheer, stark Liberalism of the brand the Church had condemned. Bishop Lafleche declared that no Catholic could without sin vote for the chief of a party who had formulated publicly such an error, and Archbishop Langevin called upon every true son of the Church ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... assurance turned into stage-fright as he thought how absurd it would sound to say what was in him about the place of reason in politics. Those sentences in book five of the Republic were hard even for Plato to speak; they are so sheer and so stark that men can neither forget them nor live by them. So he makes Socrates say to Glaucon that he will be broken and drowned in laughter for telling "what is the least change which will enable a state to pass into the truer form," [Footnote: Republic, Bk. V, 473. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... even more remarkable if it had been of a less generous bulk. Her style is beyond reproach and she has nothing whatever to learn in the mysteries of a woman's heart. The principal scenes are placed in Glasgow, and the Bannermann family are laid stark before us. Mrs. Bannermann was so intent on the next world that for all practical purposes she was useless in this. Having been left a widow with two sons and two daughters, she was incapable of managing the easiest of them, let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... nor its cause, but it would be equally disconcerting if he attributed her low spirits to the arrival of Hohenhauer. What a fool she had been to have made more than a glancing reference to that last old love-affair, almost forgotten until that night of stark revelation. She must have enjoyed talking about herself more than she had realized, unable to resist the temptation to indulge in imposing details. Or self-justification? Perhaps. It didn't matter, and he must have "placed" Hohenhauer at once this morning, and would imagine that ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the short of it is,' Mr. Nixon said at last, 'she's gone stark, staring mad, and we had to put her ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... discovered a new torture for her heart. She thought to solace her life with a love-episode! Sweet little epicure that she was! She shall have her little crooked lover, shan't she? Oh, yes! She shall have him, cold and stark and livid, with that great, black, heavy hunch, which no back, however broad, can bear, Death, sitting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a dewdrop," when he ought to be seeking Mildred's presence in profound stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where he has passed the night with Ottima, while her murdered husband lies stark in ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Grist agreed, hoarsely. "He is a stark, starin', ravin', roarin' lunatic! And the ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... though a small man, had a large soul, and it swelled with satisfaction at the consciousness of being the greatest man in the little world about him. He loved to tell long stories about the stark old warriors whose portraits looked grimly down from the walls around, and he found no listeners equal to those who fed at his expense. He was much given to the marvellous and a firm believer in all those supernatural tales with which every mountain ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... thy soul, it is thou also that must bear the blame. It made Cain stark mad to consider that he had not looked to his brother Abel's soul. How much more will it perplex thee to think, that thou hadst not a care of thy own? And if this will not provoke thee to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... give Those last lone moments, careless of your pain, Knowing that only so must England live And win, by sacrifice, the right to reign— Be glad, that still the spur of your bequest Urges your heirs their threefold way along— The way of Toil that craveth not for rest, Clear Honour, and stark Will to punish wrong! The seed ye sow'd God quicken'd with His Breath; The crop hath ripen'd—lo, ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... we deny that all our sweetest hours are those of self-forgetfulness? The language of emotion, religious, aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white heat. Not only in the speechless, stark immobility of the pathological "case," but in all the stages of religious ecstasy, aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced what we know as the loss of the feeling of self. Bernard of Clairvaux dwells on "that ecstasy of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... with bare decks, stark as gladiators, sombre and terrible, they conveyed a relentless significance heightened by the desolation of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... in stark silhouette, in the electronic "light" of the radar scope. Two perfect discs, joined by a fine filament. As we watched, their relative positions slowly shifted, one moving across, half ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... overtook the Tibetans who had preceded us, and who had halted here to feed their sheep. A good-looking girl of the party came to ask me for medicine for her husband's eyes, which had suffered from snow-blindness: she brought me a present of snuff, and carried a little child, stark naked, yet warm from the powerful rays of the sun, at nearly 14,000 feet elevation, in December! I prescribed for the man, and gave the mother a bright farthing to hang round the child's neck, which delighted the party. My watch was only wondered at; but a little ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... of his invisible coat, so that Jack, coming up close to the monster, struck a blow with his sword at his head, but, missing his aim, he cut off the nose instead. At this, the giant roared like claps of thunder, and began to lay about him with his iron club like one stark mad. But Jack, running behind, drove his sword up to the hilt in the giant's back, so that he fell down dead. This done, Jack cut off the giant's head, and sent it, with his brother's also, to King Arthur, by a waggoner he hired for ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... it was done or who did it nobody quite knew, but Potts, still clinging by one hand to the bucket-rope, was hauled out and laid on the ice before it was discovered that he had Kaviak under his arm—Kaviak, stark and unconscious, with the round eyes rolled back till one saw the whites and ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond) |
