"Writhing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had happened meanwhile to his body. For a long time he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street, writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry because his time had been so short and because of the painmaking violent movements and casting ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... her neck as he sought her mouth. She threw her head back and to one side, fighting desperately and silently, tearing at him with her hands, writhing her body, lowering her head as he forced her around, kicking at his shin. The man's strength was as horrible as it was unexpected. The efforts to which she was giving her every ounce did not appear to have the slightest effect on him, His handsome weak face continued ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... they had forsworn themselves to no purpose, sate, bowed down by shame and writhing with vexation, while Montgomery, who had deceived himself and them, and who, in his rage, had utterly lost, not indeed his parts and his fluency, but all decorum and selfcommand, scolded like a waterman on the Thames, and was answered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... last of a countless series of reflections! How swiftly would not my feet have carried me over the restless soil, had I known that, if still within their range when her lamp ceased to shine on the cursed spot, I should that moment be at the mercy of such as had no mercy, the centre of a writhing heap of hideousness, every individual of it as terrible as before it had but seemed! Fool of ignorance, I watched the descent of the weary, solemn, anxious moon down the widening vault above me, with no worse uneasiness than the dread of losing my way—where as yet ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... cry she leapt, striking at me wildly, but ducking in under the blow, I caught her in my arms. For a moment she struggled fiercely, then her writhing body grew soft and yielding in my clasp, and she burst into a passion ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... ought to send those children to school, Mrs. McAravey?" asked the clergyman, whose kind heart had been touched, on the occasion of a recent pic-nic, to see the half-drowned little ones toiling amid the heaps of wet and writhing sea-wrack. ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... he saw something hostile in the manner of the other, he commenced grunting dismally again, and writhing ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... upon a writhing mass of miserable human beings who were blind with wine and stupid with rage against the unknown thing that had made them fall. She shrank to Gilbert's side, almost ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... which I had labored so hard, for another to enjoy, would that better the matter? Great God! would anything help me? Before me in terrific vision rose a dim vista of future ruin, of ineffectual years writhing in the inescapable power of the law, of long trial, of horrible suspense, of garish publicity, of my name handed from mouth to mouth, a forlorn, duped, degraded thing, whose blighted life was a theme of newspaper comment and cavil. These thoughts swept over me as a tempest sweeps over the young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and saw the writhing twisting, coils of a huge carpet snake, which had wound its body round and round the bell-wire on top of the wall plate. Its head was downwards, and it did not seem at all alarmed at our presence, but went on wriggling and twisting ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... did not know what fighting was in those days. I had never seen blood drawn—human beings in the pride of manhood, shot down, and mangled and torn by shot and shell and langrage fired by brethren's hands, writhing and shrieking in their death agony. Fighting may be a necessary evil, but an evil it is, and a dreadful one too. Mr Kelson hearing what had occurred, agreed to come, and he jumping in with his men, off we shoved ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... The present writer had not the least suspicion of whom he had to name. When the demand was often repeated, and the noise had somewhat abated, he came forward, and, with evident reluctance, pronounced, 'It was Mr. ——,' who by this time had placed himself in front of the hustings, and with writhing contortions uttered some ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... Mazarin, writhing beneath this simple eloquence, "your majesty does not understand me; you judge my intentions wrongly, and that is partly because, doubtless, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it against half a dozen cocoanut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into the lagoon, where it floated off ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... with feverish animation and impotent apprehension, five writhing fingers leaped from their futile search, like scotched reptiles, into the opposite pocket and withdrew the two useless keys with which he fastened his abortive ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... all done so quickly that the quadrille party were only just becoming aware that a couple had dropped out; and the non-dancers were beginning to wonder if Miss Oliphant had been taken poorly, when Robert Ratman was writhing in the clutches of his ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... itself had become a serpent of fire, writhing here below in endlessly intricate coils; up there along the steps and parapets, a long-drawn, slow-moving line; and from the whole incalculable number came gusts and roars of singing, for each carried a burning torch and sang with his group. The music was of ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... distance, the closely following trains reminded one of a great serpent passing over the country, that—when it encountered a hummocky section requiring the trains to turn from side to side, and to glide up and down—seemed to be writhing in pain. Near the end of the swamp an open hillside rose before us, and upon its snowy slopes the sun showed thousands of rabbit-runs intersecting one another in a maze of tracks that made one think of a vast gray ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... cried the captain. "Hold on all!" And then there was a shock that threw them prostrate, a writhing and twisting of every plank beneath them, and the tornado had struck the yacht and knocked her on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... heard that he had become the idol of the Salvation Army. She was, therefore, quite calm. Now she had come to hear him. And she understood him. He was not speaking of Uria; he was telling about himself. He was writhing at the thought of his own sacrifice. He tore bits from his own heart and threw them out among the people. She knew that rider in the desert, that conqueror of brigands. And that unappeased agony stared at her like an open ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... it out o' the old un's pocket, you young villain?" answered the maintainer of order, as he shoved the book into his bosom, and stood with one foot on his writhing victim, a complete ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... and yet division after division, with no abatement of courage, marched in good order over the naked plain, dashed forward with ever-thinning ranks, and then, receding sullenly before the storm of fire, left, within a hundred yards of the stone wall, a long line of writhing forms to mark ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the sleeves of the green robe fell back to the elbows. He clutched at his head and the black cap fell behind him. He began to utter short, guttural cries; he swayed backward—to the right—to the left—then lurched forward right across the cage. There he lay, writhing, for a moment, his baneful eyes turned up, revealing the whites; and the great grey rats, released, began leaping about the room. Two shot like grey streaks past the slim figure in the doorway, one darted ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... a wild man of me." The refrain sang itself over in Denis's mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... upon his vision, it was the action of Teeka which filled him with the greatest wonder, for at the moment that he saw her, the she-ape leaped upon the glistening body of the snake, and as the mighty folds encircled her as well as her offspring, she made no effort to escape, but instead grasped the writhing body in a futile effort to tear it from ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that it may not be made a very good translation.' Here nothing whatever in favour of the performance was affirmed, and yet the writer was not shocked. A printed Ode to the Warlike Genius of Britain, came next in review; the bard was a lank bony figure, with short black hair; he was writhing himself in agitation, while Johnson read, and shewing his teeth in a grin of earnestness, exclaimed in broken sentences, and in a keen sharp tone, 'Is that poetry, Sir?—Is it Pindar?' JOHNSON. 'Why, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Writhing with anguish and contempt, she turned away from the wrought stone whose semblance had beguiled her to her mortal loss; and as she passed from the step, another hand lit a consuming blaze beneath her staff and scrip, sending a sword of flame ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... diffidence reaps laughter and is alone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy what sufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be sure there is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is dragged onward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But I lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist without horizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to which no positive suffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce provocation to quicken into Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... writhing and twisting, she said, with a deep groan, 'O my God, I am killed!' but would ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the Judas boat had just bumped Univ., exactly opposite the Judas barge. The oarsmen in either boat sat humped, panting, some of them rocking and writhing, after their wholesome exercise. But there was not one of them whose eyes were not upcast at Zuleika. And the vocalisation and instrumentation of the dancers and stampers on the towing-path had by this time ceased to mean aught of joy in the victors or of comfort for the vanquished, and ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... instant he would crouch, as if to lie down, and then bound up several feet in the air, with a toss up of his haunches that almost sent me over the head. At another he would spring from side to side, writhing and twisting like a fish, till the saddle seemed actually slipping away from his lithe body. Not only did I resist all these attacks, but vigorously continued to punish with whip and spur the entire time—a proceeding, I could easily see, he was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... room the heavy breathing and struggling of the men on the floor seemed to Elmur loud enough to alarm the whole Castle, in spite of the furious screaming of the gale. He sprang to the writhing heap and tried to pinion Colendorp, but as he touched him the wounded man fell back. In a moment Sagan was on his feet calling on Elmur to bring the lamp. He seized Colendorp under the arm and shoved him roughly towards the wall, where throwing back a curtain he opened a door and thrust the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... charming manoeuvres. Each detachment walked round its stretcher twice, then stood at ease again, then at attention, then dressed up and arranged itself, and brushed, itself down. All this while their wounded comrades lay writhing, and appealing for help in vain. It was with difficulty that, lame as I was, I could be restrained from dashing to their aid. But at last everything was in order. Stretchers were solemnly lifted. The detachments marched slowly forward, and deposited their stretchers each beside a wounded man. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... hysterically, "look at it now," for the hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... that interview into the hall of kings, writhing with anguish; so that began to start the ardent warrior's iron-woven sark off from ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... last words, suddenly the room becomes full of people, and Lucian Davlin is writhing in the grasp of the two officers; struggling hopelessly, baffled completely, maddened with rage and shame. When at last he has ceased to struggle, because resistance is so utterly useless, he turns his now glaring eyes upon the brave girl whose life he had sought ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Mab' (1812-13), an over-long rhapsody, partly in blank verse, partly in loose metres. The spirit of Ianthe is rapt by the Fairy Mab in her pellucid car to the confines of the universe, where the past, present, and future of the earth are unfolded to the spirit's gaze. We see tyrants writhing upon their thrones; Ahasuerus, "the wandering Jew," is introduced; the consummation on earth of the age of reason is described. In the end the fairy's car brings the spirit back to its body, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Master indeed meant to break his plighted faith, Brian never knew. Cathbarr took a single step forward, his curly beard writhing and standing out, and his whole face so terrible to look on that all laughter was stricken dead in ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... from a garret over the two rooms forming her dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately come to lodge in this attic—which had been vacant for three years—was committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push with her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed in the convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door was open, the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when Lisbeth had put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... apply a harsher judgment to my conduct than I feel it deserves; but I am crushed already. You will not trample the prostrate. In a few hours my body will be buried in the dust. My soul is already there. But, though writhing, I do not curse; and still loving, I yet repent. In my last moments I implore you ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... have devised a more intolerable situation. So thought Steele Weir as he strode away from the dwelling, still laboring under the emotions provoked by the girl's disclosure, wincing at his own biting thoughts and writhing at his own helplessness. It needed only this revelation to cap ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... she softly replied. I could feel it coming as she spoke. As I watched I saw it take that sky and tear jagged rifts in it for the sun, and then as those two columns of smoke began twisting and writhing like monster snakes they took on purple and greenish hues and threw ghostly reflections of themselves down on the oily water around us, filled with ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... there are those to whom virtue meaneth writhing under the lash: and ye have hearkened ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... magic castle. There, in the centre of an iron hall of vast dimensions and sombre hue—the only light emitted from a lurid torch burning at the further end—on iron beds, of which a countless number appeared ranged around, lay writhing the victims which the fell Magician's cruelty had left bound. There, for many years, till the full term of seven was accomplished, we, too, will leave them, daily visited by the Enchanter Ormandine, who came to mock at, and ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... and cubby-holes, and so to a crack of light, and clapping my eye thereto, espied two fellows rolling dice and beyond them the boy, his hands lashed miserably to a staple in the bulkhead, his little body writhing under the cruel blows of a rope's-end wielded by ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... which the main strength of Grenville lay. The official drudge, even on his own chosen ground, was utterly unable to maintain the fight against the great orator and philosopher. When Chatham reappeared, Grenville was still writhing with the recent shame and smart of this well-merited chastisement. Cordial cooperation between the two sections of the opposition was impossible. Nor could Chatham easily connect himself with either. His ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... open the door and threw himself, with a scream, into the library. I ran to him but he waved me back. His eyes were glaring horribly. I had just reached his side when he fell, writhing, upon the floor. He seemed past speech, but as I raised him and laid him upon the couch, he gasped something that sounded like 'The red hand!' Before I could get to bell or ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... window she had seen beautiful Paris writhing under the pitiless lash of the demon of terror which it had provoked; she had heard the rumble of the tumbrils, dragging day after day their load of victims to the insatiable maker of this ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... lover did not return. Wondering a little what the telegram could contain, she arose and walked to the window, drew the curtains and looked out. There was no moon, but the stars were numberless, and lit dimly the park. As she stood watching the trees, writhing in the autumnal gale, she heard a step behind her. She glanced over her shoulder with a half smile—a smile that died on her lips as she saw the grave pallor of Sir ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... the man threw up his hands, fell backward, and disappeared. After a second's hesitation, both lads ran to the wall, climbed up, and looked over. In an unmistakable fit, the man was writhing on the ground. Johnny and Albert ran quickly across lots and into Rev. Paul Brighton's study. After learning that the boys had found a man in a fit, Johnny's father hailed two passing neighbors, and the little party ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... o'ermaster'd and cut down; His blood was running on the very floor Where late he trod, her beautiful, her own; Thus much she view'd an instant and no more,— Her struggles ceased with one convulsive groan; On her sire's arm, which until now scarce held Her writhing, fell she like ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... a wild boar impaling a hound with his tusk, and the other walls were occupied by Herodias smiling at the contents of her charger, Judith dropping the gory head into her bag, a brown St. Sebastian writhing among the arrows; and Juno extracting the painfully flesh and blood eyes of Argus to set them ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the woodbine spray, cut it savagely and then shut the window. She came back with the spray in her hand, took off the stove cover and thrust it in, twining and writhing as if it had life and rebelled against ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the lorry reached the summit of the pass the sea-breeze from the Gulf of Corinth cleared the air and he saw for the first time the peaks on one side and the gulfs on the other, with the road writhing down canyons and gorges ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... a peculiarity of this remarkable sovereign that he was ever wont to accomplish his darkest crimes, whether murders or stratagems, as if they were acts of virtue. Perhaps he really believed them to be such, for a man, before whom so many millions of his fellow worms had been writhing for half a century in the dust, might well ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the gate of Heaven, but that thou mayst hide thyself beneath from the eye of the Living God! By-and-by His Day shall come! His Terrible Lightning shall flash from the East to the West! His Dreadful Flaming Thunder-bolt shall fall, riving thy secret fastnesses to atoms, and leaving thee, poor worm, writhing in the dazzling effulgence of His Light, and shrivelling beneath the consuming ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... call on the tortured soul To stand close by the sinking heart, While the nervous mesh of the writhing flesh, Shuddering and shivering in every part, Its strange anguish renews as the hot, bloody dews Follow the track of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... green, A palsied hag he roasted, And what took place, I ween, Shook his composure boasted; For, as the torture grim Seized on each withered limb, The writhing dame 'Mid fire and flame Yelled forth this ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... him as the Veiled Woman bent, and as I sought gently to raise him, he turned his face, fiercely faltering out, "Touch me not, rob me not! YOU share with me! Never, never! These glorious drops are all mine! Die all else! I will live, I will live!" Writhing himself from my pitying arms, he plunged his face amidst the beautiful, playful flame of the essence, as if to lap the elixir with lips scorched away from its intolerable burning. Suddenly, with a low shriek, he fell back, his face upturned ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... steps, so that he must have fallen unconscious, or whether it was the fall and the shock that had caused the fit in Smerdyakov, who was known to be liable to them. They found him at the bottom of the cellar steps, writhing in convulsions and foaming at the mouth. It was thought at first that he must have broken something—an arm or a leg—and hurt himself, but "God had preserved him," as Marfa Ignatyevna expressed it—nothing ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... unskilful and obnoxious minister of state, unable to escape from the eminence to which he had presumptuously ascended, he continued to pour forth piteous prayers for mercy, which no one heard, and to skip to and fro, writhing his body into all possible antic shapes to avoid the balls which he conceived to ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... had caught a glimpse of the Earl running down the main staircase, and had guessed that the trouble was on the ground floor. As he reached the end of the long dark passage, Fenwick leaped in by the back entrance, of which the door was open. What Logan saw was a writhing group—the Prince of Scalastro struggling in the arms of three men: a long white heap lay crumpled in a corner. Fenwick, at this moment, threw the landing-net over the head of one of the Prince's assailants, and with a twist, held the man half choked ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... youth exclaimed. In all the tortures of a mind inflamed Almost to madness—"by that sacred Heaven, "Where yet, if prayers can move, thou'lt be forgiven, "As thou art here—here, in this writhing heart, "All sinful, wild, and ruined as thou art! "By the remembrance of our once pure love, "Which like a church-yard light still burns above "The grave of our lost souls—which guilt in thee "Cannot extinguish nor despair in me! "I do ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... disconcerting point was lacking in the power of movement in his lower limbs and progressed at a pace little advanced to that of a shell-cow upon two slabs of wood. Tan-yung was subject to a disorder which without any warning cast him to the ground almost daily in a condition of writhing frenzy; the one who had opposed him was paralysed in all but his head and feet, while those who stood about were either blind, lame, camel-backed, leprous, armless, misshapen, or in some way mentally or bodily deficient in an insuperable degree. "Alas!" exclaimed one, as the true understanding ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... to sweep around the chasm and hug the shore, as if in mortal terror, despairing of escape, rushed upon each other like two storm fiends. The war of waters was most terrific. The very earth shook. Locked in deadly embrace, and writhing as if in direst agony, the mighty floods plunged the abyss, while far above floated the white plume of the presiding genius of old Niagara. The impression upon me was overwhelming. I saw Niagara Falls from the right stand-point. ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... but only by prodigious effort, his neck bristling and his lips writhing clear of his teeth as he passed the mate. For the first time there was a whimper in his throat; but it was not the whimper of fear, nor of pain, but of outrage, and of desire to continue the battle which he struggled to control ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... child, and a crowd gathered round him; I happened just then to come up, room was immediately made for me and my hat, and I was asked to give my opinion as to what ought to be done with the culprit. I suggested kicking, and as I walked away, I saw him writhing under the boots of two sturdy executioners, amid the applause of the spectators. "The style is the man," said Buffon; had he lived here now he would rather have said "the hat is the man." An English doctor who ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... horrors of slavery which, I believe, no one has ever attempted to delineate. I wonder not at it; it mocks all power of language. Who can describe the anguish of that mind which feels itself impaled upon the iron of arbitrary power—its living, writhing, helpless victim! every human susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and bleeding—always feeling the death weapon in its heart, and yet not so deep as to kill that humanity which is made the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... human sounds which rose, As I was darted from my foes, Was the wild shout of savage laughter, Which on the wind came roaring after A moment from that rabble rout: With sudden wrath I wrenched my head, And snapped the cord which to the mane Had bound my neck in lieu of rein, And, writhing half my form about, Howled back my curse; but 'midst the tread, The thunder of my courser's speed, Perchance they did not hear nor heed; It vexes me—for I would fain Have paid their insult back again. I paid it well in after days: There is not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage. "A servant of servants shall she be," must have been spoken of ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Talbot to his young friend, who, fretful from pain and writhing beneath his mortification, walked to and fro his chamber with an impatient stride; "my dear Clarence, do sit down, and not irritate your wound by such violent exercise. I am as much enraged as yourself at the treatment you have ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her abode at the dugout now, nursing him tirelessly, while Seth walked the floor, back and forth, back and forth like some caged and helpless animal writhing in pain; for from the first he had read death in the ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... no heart for talking. I have returned to the country from Sechelis, where I had to fly from Boer oppression. Our hearts are black and heavy with grief to-day at the news told us. We are in agony; our intestines are twisting and writhing inside of us, just as you see a snake do when it is struck on the head. We do not know what has become of us, but we feel dead. It may be that the Lord may change the nature of the Boers, and that we will not be treated like dogs and beasts of burden as formerly; but we have no hope of such a change, ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... shouted he. "Throw us a hammer down, men. Hark! there's an English voice!" There is indeed. From amid the wreck of broken oars and writhing limbs, a voice is shrieking in broadest Devon to the master, who ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... is nothing to you or me. Afterwards means the time when you and I are buried, and the next generation are writhing in hair shirts of their own making, and prickly girdles which they put ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Semyonitch, kill me, wretched sinner as I am; beat me, don't heed him," cried Avdotya, writhing convulsively at ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... sound tannun," he said. He plied the strap in perfect silence upon the writhing man, who swore and yelled, but dared ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... a difference. Hello! there they go through tackle-guard hole again. Lord, six yards if an inch!" Blair groaned and rolled over in despair. The whistle sounded, and as the pile of writhing youths dissolved it was seen that Tom Warren was hurt. Out trotted the rubber. The players sank exhausted to the ground and lay stretched upon the sward, puffing and panting. Two minutes went by. ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... many a life ere now, and will cost more. And I am sorry to tell you, my little man, that even now too many people have no more sense than they had, and die in consequence. If you could see a battle-field, and men shot down, writhing and dying in hundreds by shell and bullet, would not that seem to you a horrid sight? Then—I do not wish to make you sad too early, but this is a fact that everyone should know—that more people, and not strong men only, but women and little children too, are killed and wounded in Great Britain ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... though a big fellow enough, was never over ready to put his head in chancery. He stood in the street, shaking his fist, and writhing his face into ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... with her tinkling feet, writhing and undulating like some beautiful cobra, while the players worked themselves up to yet higher and ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... was celebrated the feast of Huitzel, that was held with sacrifice, songs, and dances in the great court of the temple, that court which was surrounded by a wall carved over with the writhing shapes of snakes. It chanced that on this morning before he went to join in the festival, Guatemoc, the prince, came to see me ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... flinging, writhing and wringing, Eddying and whisking, spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting Around and around, with endless rebound, Smiting and fighting, a sight to delight in, Confounding, astounding. Dizzying and deafening ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... and then raising my piece to my shoulder, I fired again at something writhing and twining among the ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... stomach a medical man should have! The delusion of the para is that these squirming, writhing objects are delightful! Paras develop an irresistible craving for them! It is as if men on an Earth-like world develop an uncontrollable hunger for vultures and rats and—even less tolerable things. ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... say, seized with religious horrors at the approaching confiscation of Canterbury property, and has in vain tendered back his 6s. 8d. for taking the oath. The Archbishop refuses to accept it; and feeling himself light and disencumbered, wisely keeps the saddle upon the back of the writhing and agonized scrivener. I have talked it over with several Clergymen, and the general opinion is, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... England plunged the Pilgrims to blaze a path for civilization in the New World. They were perfect pioneers down to the minutest detail. Sturdy, grimly resolute, painfully honest, industrious, patient, moral and seeing God's hand in every affliction, they smothered their groans while writhing in the pangs of starvation and gasped in husky whispers: "He doeth all things well; praise to his name!" Such people could not fail ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... not strip thee to that hide of thine As bare as thou wast born, and whip thee hence Home to thy galley, sniveling like a boy. He ceased, and with his sceptre on the back 320 And shoulders smote him. Writhing to and fro, He wept profuse, while many a bloody whelk Protuberant beneath the sceptre sprang. Awe-quell'd he sat, and from his visage mean, Deep-sighing, wiped the rheums. It was no time 325 For mirth, yet mirth illumined every face, And laughing, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the snaky wave, upflung With writhing head and hissing tongue; The weed whose tangled fibres tell Of some inviolate deep-sea dell; The faultless, secret-chambered shell, Whose sound is an epitome Of all the utterance of the sea; Great, basking, twinkling wastes of brine; Far clouds of gulls that wheel and swerve ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the edge of the forest that hemmed us in. A forest that now was lashing and writhing as though in the grip of some terrible hurricane, trunks bending and whipping, long branches writhing, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... at the first alarm tried to wrench loose, writhing in startled effort like a pronged snake, with all his smooth, vicious face clenched in violent fear. Raleigh gave a twisting jerk to the skinny wrist and the struggle was over; the lad uttered a yelp and collapsed back on ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... I stood, still holding my father's hand, to watch the flames. I can see them now, crackling and writhing as they gained on the wood, licking it and fawning, as it were, till it caught and sent up a rush of sparks and fire. At last the whole pile was one huge blaze. Then, suddenly, out of the heart of the flames an eagle rose. The creature flapped its broad wings in the air, which was golden with sunshine ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... forming an arcade above us. As we swept into the shadow the lamps of the coach threw the gnarled trunks into fantastic shapes, that seemed to live and move. It was as if we raced between two rows of grisly phantoms, things of air, that vainly reached forth long, writhing arms to stay us, only to sink back and dissolve into the gloom ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... would hold automatically to the direction and speed that had been established. The hand of the master-pilot found it quickly. They were in dangerous territory now—a vast void under a ceiling of black, star-specked space. No writhing, darting wraith-forms caught the rays of the distant sun. Their ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... his body writhing about, and experienced pain that was—mortal. A bluish-green light dazzled his pupils and made ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... head of its opponent with its wide open jaws, sucking in a part of its huge body, gradually unwinding it from the tree. It had attempted, however, a dangerous operation. Suddenly down came the tail, throwing its coils round the victor, and the two monsters lay twisting and writhing in the most terrific manner, till both were dead. I have given the account as well as I could make it out, but of course I could not ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... gazing in silence at the unwonted spectacle of a man who had lately been mincing with the gait of a worldling or a military fop now writhing in dishevelment and despair as he poured out upon the hostile forces by which human ingenuity so often finds itself ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... with the scrutinizing eyes of affection, whose gaze sometimes is so difficult to bear. And she felt that something within her was writhing ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... the Bible teaching, no one can turn this parable into actual narrative, representing that the saved in glory are now looking over the battlements of heaven and talking with the lost writhing before their eyes in agony amid the flames of unending torment. This is not the picture that the Scriptures give us of heaven, nor of the state of the dead, nor of the time and circumstances of the final ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... time the sight of a coiled rope made me jumpy and I dreamed of snakes writhing, coiling, moving in undulating lines. At noon one day I was alone, making up the paper. I stood at the form table working, when I turned abruptly. A snake's slimy head was thrust through a big knothole in the floor. Its beady eyes held me for a moment, as they are said ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... hero for whose love her secret heart, unknown to herself, is crying, and who has withdrawn himself for the time from smiles and benevolence? Leam somehow felt as if every compliment paid to her by Alick was an offence to Edgar; and she repelled him, blushing, writhing, uncomfortable, but adoring, with a coldness that nothing could warm, a stony immobility that nothing could soften, because it was the coldness of fidelity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... vast mass of earth, a slice of the mountain side that had been torn loose by that last mighty writhing of tortured nature and that now held him as securely a prisoner as though he were in the center ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... thousands of the monstrous little beasts. They were trying frantically to bring down the being that was so effectively thwarting their plans, jabbing viciously with their upthrust beaks. The expanse of sand that was the valley looked like a pincushion, with the writhing needles ploughing through the ground one after another. Wayne kept the orifice of his beam pistol hot as he cut his way back and forth from the base of ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... Michael's lips scourged her anew throughout the long hours of the night. "Women like you make this world into plain hell," he had said. "You're like a blight—spreading disease and corruption wherever you go." And the essential truth which each sentence held left her writhing. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... hurt it. For all time to come It stands there, firm as marble and as pure. They can do nothing that the sun and rain Will not erase at last. Not even Voltaire Can hurt that noble memory. Think of him As of a viper writhing at the base Of some great statue. Let the venomous tongue Flicker against that marble as it may It cannot wound it. I am far more grieved For you, who sit there wondering now, too late, If it were some suspicion, some dark hint Newton had heard that robbed him of his sleep, And almost broke his ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... the woes of Actual Human Life— If thou could'st see the serpent strife Which the Greek Art has made divine in stone— Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek, Note every pang, and hearken every shriek Of some despairing lost Laocoon, The human nature would thyself subdue To share the human woe before thine eye— Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... introduced. Mr. ——— is a young-looking man, dark, with a mustache, rather small, and though he has the manners of a man who has seen the world, it evidently requires an effort in him to speak to anybody; and I could see his whole person slightly writhing itself, as it were, while he addressed me. This is strange in a man of his public position, member for the county, necessarily mixed up with life in many forms, the possessor of sixteen thousand pounds a year, and the representative of an ancient name. Nevertheless, I liked him, and felt as if I ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the Government most bitter. What is so lamentable in the history of those times is the undisciplined wildness and feebleness of the attempts made by the people to better themselves. Nothing is more saddening than the spectacle of a huge mass of humanity goaded, writhing, starving, and yet so ignorant that it cannot choose capable leaders, cannot obey them if perchance it gets them, and does not even know how to name its wrongs. The governing classes are apt to mistake the absurdity of the manner in which a popular demand expresses ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... With cuffs and blows these were dragged to waiting trucks where they were lifted by the ears to the body of the machine and knocked prostrate one at a time. Sometimes a man would be dropped to the ground just after he had been lifted from his feet. Here he would lay with ear drums bursting and writhing from the kicks and blows that had been freely given. Like all similar mobs this one carried ropes, which were placed about the necks of the loggers. "Here's and I.W.W." yelled someone. "What shall we do with him?" A cry was given to "lynch ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... almost terrified, he reeled to a chair, tears, hot and bitter, coursing down his cheeks. A smile was hovering on the beautiful lips of the goddess, parted as if by living breath, and at her feet a luckless victim was writhing. A single moment revealed a world of misery. Driven by a consciousness of his fate, Heine wrote in his "Confessions": "In May of last year I was forced to take to my bed, and since then I have not risen. I confess frankly that meanwhile a great change has taken ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... she wanted, had allowed her to do what she pleased and had let her think that, through his miraculous handling of her resources, she was doing it all herself. And the result was natural. For the past two years he had been harassed with debt, racked with worries, writhing this way and that, concerned only with the soul-tormenting catastrophe that had overtaken him. About all else he had grown careless. He had not been to see her the last year, he had written seldom, and it appalled him to look back now ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... voice recalled. "Behold it here dyed once again! 'tis done." Dalica stepped, and felt beneath her feet The slippery floor, with mouldered dust bestrewn; But Myrthyr seized with bare bold-sinewed arm The grey cerastes, writhing from her grasp, And twisted off his horn, nor feared to squeeze The viscous poison from his glowing gums. Nor wanted there the root of stunted shrub Which he lays ragged, hanging o'er the sands, And whence the ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... unconscious all That any danger might befall. But suddenly the song-birds fled From all the branches overhead. Then on her startled hearing rang The sharp and vengeful bow-string's twang A whizz—a yell—a writhing mass Fell on the path she thought to pass— A tawny panther from whose side An arrow drained the living tide. With shrinking eyes she saw the beast Rolling in agony, until At last the sensate struggles ceased, And all that mighty ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... from the mail-order house to-morrow. And a brassiere—for I saw what looked like the suspicion of a smile on Dinky-Dunk's unshaven lips as he watched me struggling into my corsets this morning. It took some writhing, and even then I could hardly make it. I threw my wet sponge after him when he turned back in the doorway with the mildly impersonal question: "Who's your fat friend?" Then he scooted for the corral, and I went back and studied my chin in the dresser-mirror, to make sure ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... unlike either Imogen or Desdemona, who are portrayed as much more flexible in temper; but then the circumstances under which she is wronged are very different, and far more unpardonable. The self-created, frantic jealousy of Leontes is very distinct from that of Othello, writhing under the arts of Iago: or that of Posthumus, whose understanding has been cheated by the most damning evidence of his wife's infidelity. The jealousy which in Othello and Posthumus is an error of judgment, in Leontes is a vice of the blood; ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... doctor came again the outline of the Countess's writhing form had shrunk to the lines of a skeleton under the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... re-enter the gay circle of society:—Were it not for the dread of its waves, much would be the profits of a voyage at sea; were it not for the vexation of the thorn, charming might be the society of the rose. Yesterday I was walking stately as a peacock in the garden of enjoyment; to-day I am writhing like a snake from the absence ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... pull trigger—bang! A shower of sand rattled on the dry leaves, and a roar of rage and pain satisfied me, even before the white smoke, which hung in the still air, had cleared away, to show the huge monster writhing and plunging where he had fallen. Either directed by the fire, or by some slight noise made in the agitation of the moment, he saw me, and, with a hideous yell, scrambled up: the roaring thunder of his voice filled the valley, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... If Bibliography were to apply itself to the investigation of the popular English Literature of the latter half of the year 1644 and the first half of the year 1645, it would come upon these, and other controversialists whose names have been long forgotten, writhing together like a twisted knot of serpents, not to be uncoiled except by a distinct enumeration of several scores or hundreds of the most quaintly-entitled pamphlets, in the exact order of their publication, and with an account of the nature of each. London ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... defiance, and hit his opponent between the eyes with such force as to lay him a second time flat on the floor. A fierce struggle now ensued, during which the light was extinguished. The alarmed neighbours found them there, a few minutes later, writhing in each other's arms, and punching each other's heads ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... his unit-mate, Astro. The big Venusian had his head turned to one side; he seemed to be staring out over the vast writhing jungle. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... death-bed repentance. Have not prayers against sudden death a tendency to interfere with or obstruct that daily walk with God, which alone can fit us to meet the king of terrors? When heart and strength fail; when the body is writhing in agony, or lying an insensible lump of mortality; is that the time to make peace with God? Such persons must he infatuated with strange notions of the Divine Being. No, my reader, life is the time to serve the Lord, the time to insure the great reward. Sudden death is a release from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Vargrave," said Caroline, with a compressed and writhing lip, and turning very pale, "I tremble to tell you that I fear Doltimore suspects. He looked at me sternly this morning, and said, 'You seem unhappy, madam; this marriage of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sigh, then the noise of a fall, and one of the sentries at the mouth of the cave came rolling to our feet. A random shot had struck him, and as he just fell in, a ray of light which entered the grotto, we were able to see him writhing in the agonies of death. Mademoiselle Zephyrine seized my hands, and I felt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... to the hearts of his accusers, and, writhing under the lash thus boldly applied, Judge Blackburne hastened, to intervene. Unable to stay, on legal grounds, the torrent of scathing invective by which O'Brien was driving the blood from the cheeks of his British listeners, the judge resorted to a device which Mr. ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... saw a sight that struck terror into our guilty souls—a Danse Macabre of three writhing black and yellow, long-tailed "goanners," twisting, turning and lashing their sinuous and scaly tails in agony as they sought to free their widely-opened jaws from the cruel hooks. One had two hooks in his mouth. He was the quietest of the lot, as he had less purchase than ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... on briskly for upward of an hour. Again and again the whites rose in the grass, blundered forward and took cover, each rush stemmed by the Oas, who, darting up from their wall, gave volley for volley at point-blank range. Standing in a slop of blood, their great naked feet trampling the dead and writhing bodies of their comrades, they rivaled the rocky wall itself in the unflinching obstinacy of their resistance. It was then the battle reached its deadliest stage, more falling in those terrible minutes than during the ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... dropped down the precipitous ladder into the well, he made out two figures struggling against the rail. From the junk, imploringly, a giant Chinese with pigtail flapping held out his long arms. Silent, his face was writhing with ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one or another caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope, but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose. I saw what was coming, sprang on top the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... fair, Or if you liste to flee as high in th' aire As doth an eagle when him liste to soare, This same steed shall bear you evermore, Withouten harm, till ye be there you leste, Though that ye sleepen on his back or reste; And turn againe with writhing of a pinne, He that it wroughte he coulde many a gin, He waited many a constellation, Ere he ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... And how they called her childless among mothers, Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers Might a shamed sister's,—"Had she been less fair She were less wretched;"—how, evoking so From congregated wrong and heaped despair Of men and women writhing under blow, Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair, Some personating Image wherein woe Was wrapt in beauty from offending much, They called it Cybele, or Niobe, Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such, Where all the ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... had lain writhing in the agony of rheumatic fever. For days she had lain at the gates of death, and when at last she came back to life again, it was such a wreck of her old self that she was scarcely able to do anything. And this in Granny Barnes' eyes ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... diameter was cut in two by the bullets which struck it. Ten thousand men fell on each side. Men in hundreds, killed and wounded together, were piled in hideous heaps, some bodies, which had lain for hours under the concentric fire of the battle, being perforated with wounds. The writhing of the wounded beneath the dead moved these masses at times; while often a lifted arm or a quivering limb told of an agony not quenched by the Lethe of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... were fired. When the great mouth of the monster opened something shot out from the boat and landed squarely between the extended jaws of the crocodile. There was a snap, a crunching sound, then the water was whipped into commotion by the writhing body of the monster. ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... heard the shrieks of a female issuing from an outhouse; and so piercing, that he determined to see what was going on. On looking in he perceived a young female tied up to a beam by her wrists; entirely naked; and in the act of involuntary writhing and swinging; while the author of her torture was standing below her with a lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all the parts of her body as it approached him. What crime this miserable woman had perpetrated he knew not; but the human mind could not conceive a ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... who will be incredulous and even resentful in view of this picture, but it will not be the first time that facts have been quarrelled with. It is true that many are writhing and groaning in this cruel bondage, mastered and held captive by some debasing appetite or passion, perhaps by many. Sometimes, with a bitter, despairing sorrow, of which superficial observers of life can have no idea, they speak of these horrid chains; sometimes ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... seeking the Gulf of Mexico, turns from east to south before it sweeps northward and southeast again to give to the Creole capital its graceful surname of the "Crescent City." Mile-wide, brimful, head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could easily have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen feet high and broad in proportion. So swollen was the flood that from any deck of a steamboat touching ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... that class that enjoyed seeing the Negroes writhing under their wounded sensibilities, this young man had craved the honor of being the first to make Eunice taste the bitterness of her new lot ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing themselves into spectral shapes rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of myriad eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... unique and telling satire of these papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the field and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal to the might of whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. An athlete in logic may lay an error writhing at his feet, and after all it may recover to do great mischief. But the sharp wit of the humorist drives it before the world's derision into shame and everlasting contempt. These letters were read and shouted over gleefully at every camp-fire in the Union ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... lines rolled over the captured trenches. They ringed the edge of the crater with a circle of flaming muskets. The writhing mass of dead, dying, wounded and living, scrambling blacks and whites, was a thing for devil's joy. At the bottom of the pit the heap was ten feet deep in moving flesh. In vain the terror-stricken blacks scrambled up the slippery sides through clouds of smoke. They fell ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... The writhing mass became still, flattening itself against the bed of rock. Hazelton was not to ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... and she dropped at his feet, grasping at the ground, and writhing in agony. Her soul seemed striving to recover the shock, and recollect its faculties. She half arose upon her elbow, supported her head upon her hand, and with her other hand drew the steel out from her bosom, and laid it down. The blood followed, and with the life-stream her strength flowed away. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... hell!", and turned his back on the fishman. Garf looked astonished, then angry, and raised a hand. Ray jumped, not very far because of the heavy diving suit, stumbled on oddly twisted legs, and collapsed on the deck, writhing, moaning, and turning red in the face. The diving helmet ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... professor began the full arm chords with sudden fury, writhing upon the stool as he struck the angry notes from the ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... suits of armour, and hold in their right hands something between a monarch's sceptre and a priest's staff. They have goggle eyes and open mouths, and their faces are in distorted and exaggerated action. One, painted bright red, tramples on a writhing devil painted bright pink; another, painted emerald green, tramples on a sea- green devil, an indigo blue monster tramples on a sky-blue fiend, and a bright pink monster treads under his clawed feet a flesh- coloured demon. I cannot give you any idea of the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... she stood poised, one foot on the ground, the other on the stool, both hands gripping the high shelf, she felt the reptile whipping, writhing, jerking, lashing, flogging at her ankle and instep, coiling round her leg.... And in the fraction of a second the thought flashed through her mind: "If its head is under my foot, or too close to my foot for its fangs to reach me, I am safe while I remain as I am. If its head ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... any of the brackets used in the ordinary architecture of London, he will find them of some such character as Fig. XLI.; not a bad form in itself, but exquisitely absurd in its curling lines, which give the idea of some writhing suspended tendril, instead of a stiff support, and by their careful avoidance of the wall make the bracket look pinned on, and in constant danger of sliding down. This is, also, a Classical ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece—he was whipped, and never could bring himself to touch the book again. One reading had burned out his entire interest. It was not Life nor Death nor Ocean, as he had seen them in ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... the rush of thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the feelings under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her husband slowly crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women know that agony of inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was writhing. Even one whose heart has been tried by nothing worse than the declaration to a husband of some extravagance, or a debt to a dress-maker, will understand how its pulses swell and quicken when the matter ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... may see how it is with her; for I hope in Allah to heal her by my healing hand through means of the horse." Then he bade them take care of the horse and the King carried him to the Princess's apartment where her lover found her wringing her hands and writhing and beating herself against the ground, and tearing her garments to tatters as was her wont; but there was no madness of Jinn in her, and she did this but that none might approach her. When the Prince saw her thus, he said to her, "No harm shall ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... moon was dark, the weather somewhat thick, the stars pale over the trucks, and hidden in the obscurity a little way down the dusky slope of firmament. Windsails were wriggling fore and aft like huge white snakes, gaping for the tops and writhing out of the hatches. The flush of sunset was dying when I came on deck. I saw the captain slowly pacing the weather side of the poop with Miss Le Grand. He seemed earnest in his talk and gestures. Enough western light still lived to enable me to see faces, and I observed that Mrs. ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... break just a few seconds before engulfing her and to divide, passing on either side, but the "Sister Sue" wallowed in a smother of foam, creaking and groaning, giving in every joint, and threatening to fall to pieces with each new twist and turn forced upon her by the writhing seas. ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... grave-clothes flaunting behind them. These were the dead of many years ago. Then the dead of more recent times, with yellow bones showing only here and there, the long and insecure hair of their hideous heads writhing in the beating air. Then green and gray horrors, bloated and shapeless, stained with earth or dripping with spattering water; and here and there white, beautiful things, like chiselled ivory, the dead of yesterday, locked it ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... space in front of a temporary church; in the midst is a gaudy statue of the Virgin set upon a pillar, around whose base seven or eight persons of both sexes, whom one might suppose from their attitudes to be drunk, are seen writhing, while a procession headed by huge cierges and a cardinal's hat on a pole encircles the whole building; those in the procession carrying offerings or else candles, two men being naked save for scanty hair shirts. On the margin of the copy now at Coburg Duerer ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... as a mob of hopping figures, he throws douches of cold water on the imagination of the listeners. Later he spoils enjoyment of the music utterly by making it the accompaniment of some utterly irrelevant pantomime by Marguerite, who goes into the street and is seen writhing between the conflicting emotions of love and duty, symbolized by a vision of Faust and the glowing of a cross on the facade of a church. To learn the meaning of this, one must go to the libretto, where he may read that it is all a dream dreamed by Marguerite ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... continuous nightmare: I was half asleep, wholly delirious and every impression was as the half-delusion of a half-waking dream. I was barely half-conscious, yet I had sense enough to lie still, except for writhing and turning over, and to restrain myself from singing ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... to him in the court, when he mentioned casually that he had caught a snake in the Riesengebirge. 'I have it here,' he said; 'would you like to see it?' I said yes; and putting his hand into his breast-pocket, he drew forth not a dried serpent skin, but the head and neck of the reptile writhing and shooting out its horrible tongue in my face. You may conceive what a fright I got. I send off this single sheet just now in order to let you know I am safe across; but you must not ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the balustrade, she gazed at the deep, rapid river which flowed at her feet. Her husband's voice calling her aroused her from this gloomy contemplation. When she returned to Christian, his eyes were flaming, a flush like that of fever had overspread his cheeks, and a writhing, furious indignation was depicted upon his face. "Were you looking at that smoke?" said he, angrily; "it is your lover's signal; he is there—he is waiting to take you away—and I, your husband, forbid you to go—you must not leave me—your place is ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression—done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow—was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape, and yet each change made it more threatening and loathsome ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle |
