"Stank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dimness, I started, for at my feet was a great floor of water, clear and green in its obscurity, going down between the walls, a reservoir in the gloom. The Signore laughed at my surprise. It was for irrigating the land, he said. It stank, slightly, with a raw smell; otherwise, I said, what a wonderful bath it would make. The old Signore gave his little neighing ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... atmospheric disturbance had been telegraphed from Manilla, within the previous forty-eight hours. Other usual and confirmatory indications were also observed; the presence of an unusual number of jelly-fish in the harbour till the sea stank with them; the lurid appearance of the sunset sky, as if the heavens were bathed in blood; the arrival of hundreds of junks from seaward seeking shelter: all these signs summed up were considered satisfactory ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... gathered that, in the opinion of the servants' hall, Theresa's offence was rank, it stank to heaven. She therefore, being covetous of continued contentment, turned the conversation to less controversial subjects; and, after passing notice of the fair weather, the brightness of the geraniums and kindred trivialities, successfully incited ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... "Well, if he'd been at some pains to point out that it leaked, stank, became white-hot, and was generally about the finest labour-wasting device ever invented, he'd 've been nearer the mark. If he'd added that it wasn't a geyser at all, but a cross between a magic lantern and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... well dazzle the clerk, the Governor, the warders, and the gendarmes, stank of musk. She had on, besides a thousand crowns of lace, a black India cashmere shawl, worth six thousand francs. And her chasseur was marching up and down outside with the insolence of a lackey who knows that he is essential to an exacting princess. He spoke never a word to the footman, who stood ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet proposes in his English Grammar, that they should all be abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming obsolescent. How seldom do we hear 'drank', 'shrank', 'sprang', 'stank'.] ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... was na wise-like. But after a' ye're ony a bairn. Here, Tam, ye'd better gang up by the Stank burn an' keep a look-oot ower the hills, an' ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... must do it by my fancies. And yet I have seen a gentleman who only communicated his life by the workings of his belly: you might see on his premises a show of a row of basins of seven or eight days' standing; it was his study, his discourse; all other talk stank in his nostrils. Here, but not so nauseous, are the excrements of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, and always indigested. And when shall I have done representing the continual agitation and mutation of my thoughts, as they come into my head, seeing that Diomedes wrote six ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... again, Jeames! Shy at a stane, and fa' into the stank (ditch). That's the pairt o' a colt and no o' ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exception, and notably the freshest ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the common room, which argued a fire, and this was too alluring to admit of my remaining longer in discussion with him. I strode forward, therefore. The Auberge de l'Etoile was not an imposing hostelry, nor one at which from choice I had made a halt. This common room stank most vilely of oil, of burning tallow—from the smoky tapers—and of I know not ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... the limbo of forgotten things. The boiled-up bones, hoofs, shanks, skull, etc., of each horse, though they failed to produce a sufficient quantity of oil to please us, yet in the cool of the night resolved themselves into a consistent jelly that stank like rotten glue, and at breakfast at least, when this disgusting stuff was in a measure coagulated, we would request one another with the greatest politeness to pass the glue-pot. Had it not been that I was an inventor ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the air but a few feet from their bloodless, sweating visages. Becoming irritated at the sturdiness of the barrier, the mountainous reptile tugged harder and hissed, filling the cell with a foul exhalation that stank like the reeks of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... iced water and figs and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience and felicity which really are edifying. We tried to make the monks of Vallombrosa let us stay with them for two months, but their new abbot said or implied that Wilson and I stank in his nostrils, being women, and San Gualberto, the establishes of their order, had enjoined on them only the mortification of cleaning out pigsties without fork or shovel. So here a couple of women besides was (as Dickens's American said) 'a piling it up rayther too mountainious.' So we were ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... jewelled alien men Worked then but as a little leaven; From some more modest palace then The Soul of Dives stank to Heaven. But when they planned with lisp and leer Their careful war upon the weak, They smote your body on its bier, For surety that ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... darnels rank, And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank, 55 Stretched out its long and hollow shank, And stifled the air till the dead wind stank. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Delachaux was to Gardane in Diderot's noble and true tale. But while sacrificing herself, she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress. She had her gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black. She stank of black, as Malaga said, making fun mercilessly ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... nearly severed his leg. The Highlander expired, and Lindsay was with difficulty borne out of the field by his followers—Wyntown. Lindsay is also noted for a retort, made to the famous Hotspur. At a march-meeting, at Haldane-Stank, he happened to observe, that Percy was sheathed in complete armour. "It is for fear of the English horsemen," said Percy, in explanation; for he was already meditating the insurrection, immortalised by Shakespeare. "Ah! Sir Harry," answered Lindsay, "I have seen you more sorely bestad by ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... irrelevant, or to give in because I could not reply. And a greater trouble still than these logical mazes, was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as it was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that "the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic." One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of the Movement, in which I have ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... never drank the Muses' stank, [pond] Castalia's burn, an' a' that; But there it streams, an' richly reams! [foams] My Helicon ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... ashes rose ceiling high and spread itself, together with the noisome smoke, throughout the squalid chamber. A brass lamp swung from the ceiling, and shone freely through that smoke, as shines the moon through an evening mist. So foully stank the place that at first Gonzaga was moved to get him thence. Only the reflection that nowhere in Urbino was he as likely as here to find the thing he sought, impelled him to stifle his natural squeamishness and remain. He slipped upon some grease, and barely saved himself from measuring his length ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... others, St. Jerome lived his whole life among women and never lost his purity. He answered his enemies who reproached him with his very great intimacy with the Saintly Sisters, that the irrefutable proof of his chastity was that he stank. That stinking of St. Jerome, which is not a veritable article of faith in the Church, is, however, an object of pious belief; and my readers will very gladly ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... and Pepys had dared to do an honest act! Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognized by society, he might have gone far as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the devil; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for office or ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... knew all this well enough, and how Charles' private life stank in the nostrils of God and man, I cannot describe how he affected me with loyalty and compassion and even a kind of love, in this little while that I had with him in private, nor how these emotions grew upon me the more that ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... remember noticing any of this at the moment, but it all comes back to me as soon as I begin to think of it—and the room stank of scent!" ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... men, and the Russian sisters sat with them all day and all night with a never-tiring devotion. The Commander and every one were strongly Russophile—won to them by personal contact with the Russians, and that although the ship "stank like a pole-cat" before it could bring ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed like lead ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... anti-Calvinistic dogma of the divine right of the episcopate. Abbot had no mercy for Erastians. Laud had none for anti-Erastians. It is no wonder that the Ecclesiastical Commission, which these men represented, soon stank in the nostrils of the English clergy. Its establishment however marked the adoption of a more resolute policy on the part of the Crown, and its efforts were backed by stern measures of repression. All preaching or reading in private houses ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... matter of record that the American continents were discovered because ice-boxes were unknown in the fifteenth century. There being no refrigeration, meat did not keep. But meat was not too easy to come by, so it had to be eaten, even when it stank. Therefore it was a noble enterprise, and to the glory of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, to put up the financial backing for even a crackpot who might get spices cheaper and thereby make the consumption of slightly spoiled meat less unpleasant. Which was why Columbus got three ships ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... rather bigger than usual, tarred all over except for the top plank, which was painted light blue. In the boat were the various bits of equipment needed for shark-fishing, including a thick wooden beam to which were attached four hooks of wrought iron, a keg of shark-bait which stank vilely, and barrels for the shark's liver. There were shark knives under the thwarts and huge gaffs hooked under the rib-boards. The crew had put the boxes containing their food and ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... leaf stirred; and the boat, when we came up to it, offered convincing proof of long desertion. She was an eighteen-foot whaleboat of the ordinary type, equipped with oars and thole-pins. Two or three quarter-casks lay on the bilge amidships, one of which must have been broached, and now stank horribly; and these, upon examination, proved to bear the same New Zealand brand as the beef ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... and he had let her have her way in everything else; but he had said quite plainly that he wouldn't on any account have hyacinths. The expression he used about them was excessively coarse, and it certainly should have remained in Estelle's memory. He had said, that the bally things stank. Nevertheless, Estelle had told the gardener that the master wanted hyacinths, and the gardener had told Winn. Winn gazed at the gardener in a way which made him wish that he had never been a gardener, but had taken up any ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... water-hole he guided me to. In this I lay and drank. I suppose it soaked into my system as rain in the earth after a drought. That stagnant pool was our salvation. The horses were brought up, and we drank, and drank again. Not until our thirst was slaked did we fully realize how the water stank! When the men were sufficiently refreshed they returned for the abandoned horses, which were found still alive. Had they scented water somewhere and drank? At the foot of the mountains, on the other side, we later discovered much better water, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... i' the foremost rank, A filly, buirdly, steeve, an' swank, An set weel down a shapely shank, As e'er tread yird; An' could hae flown out-owre a stank, Like ony bird. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... when kept, some characteristics which remind us of the terms in which our old English Bible describes the effect of keeping the manna of the ancient Israelites, which we are informed, in words more explicit than agreeable, "stank, and bred worms." If salt-rising bread does not fulfill the whole of this unpleasant description, it certainly does emphatically a part of it. The smell which it has in baking, and when more than a day old, suggests the inquiry whether it is the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... detachment should not keep so far ahead of the other troops, but I was anxious to keep well ahead for an important reason. The Bolsheviks had ravaged and tortured both young and old, rich and poor, male and female throughout the country till their very name stank in the nostrils of the common people. Their blood lust had been so great that when they had no Russian peasant to torture they fell back on the poor unfortunate Czech soldiers who had fallen into their hands as prisoners of war. Many authentic cases ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... sportsmen, while hunting close to our village the other day, got into a small but deep pond. They were said to have fallen into the "stank," and got "zogged" through: for a small pond is a "stank," and to be "zogged" is equivalent ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... men gassed. Then Captain Andrews sent for me and questioned me about gas last night. I told him frankly that I had not smelt any. He said that it was very strange, because when he got back early this morning 'the place simply stank of it.' He said that there would be a devil of a row about it; there were about ten casualties already! But, as time went on, the numbers began to grow rapidly. Yet I had not smelt it; the sentry had not smelt it; and the Sergeant-Major ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... rational, but it was prompt. Maulbow's tone and phrasing implied he was armed. Gefty wasn't, but he kept a gun in the instrument room for emergencies. He'd been through a whole series of unnerving experiences, winding up with being shagged out of his storage vault by something that stank of ammonia and looked like a giant snake. To have one of the Queen's passengers order him to stand where he was topped it off. Every other consideration was swept aside by a great urge to get his hands on ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... which we caught black and red ones, like those in France, but with heavier fur. This carrion consisted of a sow and a dog, which had sustained all the rigors of the weather, hot and cold. When the weather was mild, it stank so badly that one could not go near it. Yet they seized it and carried it off to their cabin, where they forthwith devoured it half cooked. No meat ever seemed to them to taste better. I sent two or three men to warn them not to eat it, unless they ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... ball That looked with rage upon a world askew. Poictiers' disgrace was now but two years old, Yet so outrageous rank and full was grown That France was wholly overspread with shade, And bitter fruits lay on the untilled ground That stank and bred so foul contagious smells That not a nose in France but stood awry, Nor boor that cried not ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier |
