"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thankfulness for my deliverance from the stark death that had been so near me all day, I looked up to heaven and remembered the blessed birth eighteen centuries ago when Jesus Christ came to the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... drawn; but though the light was softened, the apartment was by no means obscure. Ferdinand was sitting in an easy-chair, supported by pillows. A black handkerchief was just twined round his forehead, for his head had been shaved, except a few curls on the side and front, which looked stark and lustreless. He was so thin and pale, and his eyes and cheeks were so wan and hollow, that it was scarcely credible that in so short a space of time a man could have become such a wreck. When he saw Katherine he involuntarily ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... perhaps, although I did not think it curious then, that these men should have accepted so unquestioningly Lancelot's command over them. But they were old soldiers, who had promised to obey Captain Amber, and he had himself devolved his command upon Lancelot. And so, until Lancelot went stark staring mad, which he was not in the least likely to do, they were perfectly prepared to ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... can't take it easy like other folks. He has some writing on hand just now—a paper of sorts which he has undertaken to have ready by a certain time, and it appears to his benighted intellect that a holiday is an excellent opportunity of getting it through. Mad, you see; stark, staring mad, but an excellent fellow all the same. One of the very best. I have a large experience of men, but I've never met one to compare with him for all-round goodness and simplicity of heart. We all have our failings, and there are worse ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ses, "it isn't Bill; it's Joseph and Emily, stark and stiff, and they've on'y been married a week. 'Ow awful they look! Pore things. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... stretched himself, with a smile that ended in a yawn. The black windows had faded through every shade of indigo; they now framed their opposite neighbors, stark and livid in the dawn; and the gas seemed turned ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... was my uninvited visitor, with scant ceremony I drew myself away from him. By the light which was streaming through the laboratory door I saw that Woodville was lying close beside me,—stark and still. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man, past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... one's boon companion. When the day is sunny and the ground bare, you meet him at all points and hear him at all hours. At sunset, on the tops of the tall Maples, with look heavenward, and in a spirit of utter abandonment, he carols his simple strain. And sitting thus amid the stark, silent trees, above the wet, cold earth, with the chill of winter still in the air, there is no fitter or sweeter songster in the whole round year. It is in keeping with the scene and the occasion. How round and genuine the notes are, and how eagerly our ears drink ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... confronted with a monstrous and insupportable truth—the craven cowardice of the man who had been eligible to service in army or navy, and who had evaded it. In camp and trench and dug-out he had heard of the army of slackers. And of all the vile and stark profanity which the war gave birth to on the lips of miserable and maimed soldiers, that flung on ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... some chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... But only nods above the world to mock Its restless occupant, then rudely rock It as the cradle of a babe that weeps!" I seemed to see the seconds piled in heaps Like sand about me; and at every shock O' the bell, the piled sands were swirled away As by a desert-storm that swept the earth Stark as a granary floor, whereon the gray And mist-bedrizzled moon amidst the dearth Came crawling, like a sickly child, to lay Its pale face next mine ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... when last I heard. Jim came down here to see me once. That was before he broke the pledge; but afterwards he would always take drink when he was ashore, and a little drink would send him stark, staring mad. Ah! it was a bad day that ever he took a glass in his hand again. First he dropped me, and then he quarrelled with Sarah, and now that Mary has stopped writing we don't know how things are ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the simple act drove home with great force the stark fact that he was face to face with his business at last. Peter, holding out his hand to say good-bye, was struck to speculation by the look of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this old, silent place, among the stark figures on the tombs—they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her fancy—and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm delight, felt that now she was happy, and at rest. She took ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... went on,—misty Springs, golden Summers, flaming Autumns, Winters stark and chill, leaving each its tale on the unrolling scroll of time. For in those years the consul departed from Britain with his forces, and the cities ruled themselves, each in a state of feudal independence, now warring amongst themselves, now making ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... who hath transported us hither will sustain us; and that is true, Paul. He sustained us at Bunker Hill, and we should have held it if our powder had not given out. Our regiment was by a rail-fence on the northeast side of the hill. Stark, with his New Hampshire boys, was by the river. Prescott was in the redoubt on the top of the hill. Old Put kept walking up and down the lines. This is the way ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor to speak—wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who was left lying stark and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss. They ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... [to [4]] my Mistresss Toilet this Morning, for I am admitted when her Face is stark naked: She frowned, and cryed Pish when I said a thing that I stole; and I will be judged by you whether it was not very pretty. Madam, said I, you [shall [5]] forbear that Part of your Dress; it may be well in others, but you cannot place a Patch where ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... towns, he finds himself in the midst of utter confusion. The eye is bewildered by 'a city become an heap.' He wanders over masses of dislocated stone and mortar, with timbers half buried, prostrate, or standing stark up against the light, and is appalled by spectacles of desolation.... Houses seem to have been precipitated to the ground in every direction of azimuth. There seems no governing law, nor any indication of a prevailing direction of overturning force. It is only by first gaining some commanding ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease And, finding comfortable chests and knees Carelessly slept. But many there stood still To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, Knowing their feet had come to the end ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... Just queer perhaps. It doesn't seem as though a sane man would live all stark alone over on ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... up 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, ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... firm, unbending, inelastic, stark, impliable, rigorous, unyielding, inductile; strong, violent, forcible, inopposable; pertinacious, obstinate, tenacious, uncompromising, incompliant; constrained, formal, starched, affected, unnatural, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... life might be found in him, and with this he was content.—So the physicians are let to work, who pinched him with pincers in the fleshy parts of his body, and twisted a bow-string about his head with great force, but no sign of life appearing in him, the physicians pronounced him stark dead, and then there was no more delay to be made; yet Mr. Welch begged of them once more, that they would but step into the next room for an hour or two, and leave him with the dead youth; and this they granted. Then Mr. Welch fell down before the pallet, and cried to the Lord with all ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... up at the officer, his yellow canines showing like tusks. His matted face was an unlovely sight. In it stark, naked fear struggled with craftiness ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... day and burying his dead, drew off from the field, and we, remaining there, were able to claim the victory, which, however, my son, was one of a kind which was scarce worth winning. It was a sad sight to see so many men stretched stark and dead, and these killed, not in fighting with a foreign foe, but with other Englishmen. It made us all mightily sad, and if at that moment Lord Essex had had full power from the Parliament to treat, methinks that the quarrel ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... in his book when Kate entered with excited greeting. "Morton, do you know that those women have been locked in their rooms all day for fear of Clarke and Pratt? Well, they were! Clarke has gone stark mad with jealousy, and even that besotted mother was afraid of him, and admits it. They would be there in that house prisoners this minute only ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... regretted, in 1837, she proved her gratitude and loyalty to her banker-husband by leaving all she possessed, a fortune now swollen to L1,800,000, to Miss Angela Coutts (grand-daughter of Thomas Coutts and his first wife, Eliza Stark, a domestic servant) who, as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of later years, proved by her large munificence a worthy trustee and dispenser ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... war's shocks for four years, he had striven titanically for nearly a score, his efforts, beginning with the terrible five-year service in the Lgion des Etrangers, culminating in ever-mounting strain to his last achievement and then—sudden, stark failure! He was, as he had said, burned out, although he was barely thirty-nine years old. He was a man still young in body but with mind and nerves like overstrained rubber from which all ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... 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
... palm With walking in the fashion of their sires, Grope as they might to find a cruel god To work their will on such as human wrath Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left With rage unsated, white and stark and cold, Could hate have shaped a demon more malign Than him the dead men mummied in their creed And taught their trembling children to adore! Made in his image! Sweet and gracious souls Dear to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his own vindication, horridly wished 'that the devil might put out his eyes if he had done as was suspected concerning him.' That very night a rheum fell into his eyes so that within a few days he became stark blind. His company being astonished at the Divine hand which thus conspicuously and signally appeared, put him ashore at Providence, and left him there. A physician being desired to undertake his cure, hearing ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Toward that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects—one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... F.C. Lewis and Mr. W.E. Stark, of the Ethical Culture School, New York, for permitting us to make the test upon the pupils of ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... were conferring many people had entered the room, although none had purchased the wares. Now there was stark silence and a concentrated fire of attention as Mrs. Black entered with a strange young woman. Mrs. Black looked doubtfully important. She, as a matter of fact, was far from sure of her wisdom in the course she was taking. She was even a little pale, and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... Jerry's growls changed. The unforgotten and ineffaceable past strummed the fibres of his throat. His teeth flashed with fierce intent, in the desire of sinking as deep in the man's hand as passion could drive. For Jerry by this time was all passion. He had leaped back into the dark stark rawness of the early world almost as swiftly as had Borckman. And this time his teeth scored, ripping the tender and sensitive and flesh of all the inside of the first and second joints of Borckman's right hand. Jerry's teeth were needles that stung, and Borckman, gaining the grasp on Jerry's ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... that wi' willin heart, he does some gooid below. An when th' time comes, as come it will, when th' race is at an end, He'll dee noa poorer for what gooid he's ivver done a friend. An when they gently put him by,—unconscious, stiff an stark, His epetaph shall be, 'Here's one 'at didn't miss ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... was an earnest consultation, and so hazardous seemed the trail and the work to be done that for a time all except Eddy and Foster refused to go farther. Finally, John Stark ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... admire philosophers because they discover a small part of the wisdom that made all things, they must be stark blind not ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... regularity of things and their obscene necessity." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed for a frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a great painter—and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontes on this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly seen in that sister of Charlotte Bronte's who has achieved the real feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Bronte: ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the river pearl-colored, and the fireflies beginning to sparkle, when he rode through the home gates. In the dusk of the world, out of the deeper shadow of the surrounding trees, his house looked grimly upon him. The light had been at the side; all the front was stark and black with shuttered windows. He rode to the back of the house and hallooed to the slaves in the home quarter, where were lights and noisy laughter, and one deep voice ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... rough that we left its purpose dark; Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... and did the bidding of the star." And while Morven was yet speaking, a servant of the king's house ran up to the crowd, crying loudly, "The king is dead!" So they went into 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 Foe of all living flesh! Then fear came on the gazers, and they looked on Morven with a deeper awe than the boldest warrior would have called forth; and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... along the highroad, a tramcar went rocking by, doubtless bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about with the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car windows, in a place of prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic, flickering ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... to her stark naked baby, which broke from a tremendous stare into a benignant laugh, that had the effect of shutting up its eyes at the same time that it ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... its full force to the central idea of the passage, as well as to the obscure individual expressions. Most strikingly, then, he goes on to say, carrying out the allusion, 'and that he shall stand at the last upon the dust.' Little did it boot the murdered man, lying there stark, with the knife in his bosom, that the murderer should be slain by the swift justice of his kinsman-avenger, but Job felt that, in some mysterious way, God would appear for him, after he had been laid in the dust, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... obliged to walk without them. Swimming we had been taught by an old sailor, who gave lessons to the school, and at last I could pick up an egg from the bottom of the overfall, a depth of about ten feet. I have also been upset from my boat, and had to lie stark naked on the grass in the sun till my clothes were dry. Twice I have been nearly drowned, once when I wandered away from the swimming class, and once when I could swim well. This later peril is worth a word or two, and I may as ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... not that gaunt Professor Noting his man; that stark Assessor Of faulty play in the bat's possessor Clapped for his foeman, We who had seen that figure splendid Guarding the stumps so well defended Wept and cheered when by craft ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... 'they were quite sorry, but it wasn't like as if They had killed a decent Whiteman by mistake or in a tiff, It was only some old Injun dog that lay there stark ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... farthingales of our great-grandmothers; or, to speak more soberly, with the powdered wigs and hoops of their daughters. There is music to excite, much to irritate one, and much more to drive a really musical soul stark mad; but none to soothe, save that which is drawn from the hiding-places ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... my own misery. I did not even heed the approach of morning, till suddenly, with a shrillness no ear could ignore, there rose, tearing through the silence of the house, that great scream from my wife's room which announced the discovery of her body lying stark and ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Linlithgow is only mentioned as being a peel (a pile, that is, an embattled tower surrounded by an outwork). In 1300 it was rebuilt or repaired by Edward I., and used as one of the citadels by which he hoped to maintain his usurped dominion in Scotland. It is described by Barbour as "meihle and stark and stuffed weel." Piers Luband, a Gascoigne knight, was appointed the keeper, and appears to have remained there until the autumn of 1313, when the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... by a nondescript dog, which had the lack of decency—and also of discretion—to attack my dog Partial with no parley or preliminary. I wot not of what stock Partial came, but somewhere in his ancestry must have been stark fighting strain. Mutely and sternly, as became a gentleman, he joined issue; and so well had he learned the art of war that in the space of a few moments, in spite of the loud outcry of the owner of the invading cur, he had ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... founders of the Ursulines as a character could well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversiere had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum. Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... elders, who shortly before 'saw the God of Israel,' doing to be passive at such a crisis? Was there no one to bid the fickle multitude look up to the summit overhead, where the red flames glowed, or to remind them of the hosts of Egypt lying stark and dead on the shore? Was Miriam cowed too, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Pope stark mad; he stamped, foamed, and raved like one in a phrenzy: he swore the painter should suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another full as good as the former, for if but the least grace was missing, he would not ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... fro. One was Henry and the other a mighty Shawnee warrior, naked to the waist, and striving to use a tomahawk that he held in a hand whose wrist was clenched in the iron grasp of his foe. Lying almost at their feet was the body of another warrior, stark and dead. ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I, as he turned his terrible eye to me, 'I bear you no malice, but we must try to get on in the world, you know.' The captain grinned and gave up the ghost. I went upon deck,—what a sight! Twenty bold fellows stark and cold, and the moon sparkling on the puddles of blood as calmly as if it were water. Well, signor, the victory was ours, and the ship mine; I ruled merrily enough for six months. We then attacked a French ship twice our size; what sport it was! And we had not had a good fight so long, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Rodingham! "You are both stark and stoor; "Would you defile the king's own bed, "And make his queen ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... readily. No mechanical contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... saith he shall have none (Deut 29:18-20). And this must needs be, for did but men believe this, that it is the Word of God, then they must believe that he that speak it is true, therefore shall every word and tittle be fulfilled. And if they come once to this, unless they be stark mad, they will have a care how they do throw themselves under the lash of eternal vengeance. For the reason why the Thessalonians received the Word, was, because they believed it was the Word of God, and not the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... these our Recreations! thou needst not to be told—yet in love let us tell thee—that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch—by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it in as with ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... afire with mad desire, They chased him through the dark, And each soul carried his dead bodie, Grim, and stiff, and stark. ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word. He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth, just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing sunshine, very harsh and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... differences are innate or inherent in the things themselves, we must naturally endeavor to find out why and how they are different; and no matter how far we go along this road we are always headed in the direction of stark materialism. On the other hand, to say that the "properties" of the atoms are not inherent in themselves, but are imposed on them by an external ceaselessly acting power, the will of the Creator, would be in full accord with Biblical theism; and then we might naturally ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... heresies which afflicted either Church or State. He had an uncompromising hostility to what are termed New- England ideas, though the tenderest ties of his life were of New- England origin. "The New-Englander individually I greatly affect," he often said, "but, in the mass, I judge them to be stark mad." "I think, too," he would add, "that if you are going to make much of a New-Englander, he should, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, be ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the rattle and roar of the train died away, BROTHER'S hacking cough sounded from behind the closed door, and stark reality laid hold on her again. Her thin hands went together on her breast and then fell slackly to her sides. She seemed visibly to shrink and shrivel. Racked and spent with her one crowded hour, she stood looking into the bleak and empty vista ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... mean not cuckold-mad; but, sure, he's stark mad. When I desir'd him to come home to dinner, He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold: "Tis dinner time' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Your meat doth burn' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Will you come home?' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Where is the thousand marks I gave ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the weary spent-up glad, And cheer the orphan lass and lad; Make frailty's heart, so long, long sad, Your kindness feel; And make old crazy-bones stark mad ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... reverberate in the words of this service were, on his lips and in his sympathetic and superb reading, like the overtones and rich harmonies of an organ. There was no formalism nor coldness, no hesitancy to plumb the stark reality of the occasion, but only the vibrant convictions of his own great faith in the goodness of God. Few can fail to recall the clarity and feeling with which he read St. Paul's immortal passage in 1st Corinthians, nor ever forget the prayer ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... a motion of his arm through the wind and rain, summoned a kind of little, white, wooden sarcophagus which was skipping near us on the waves, sculled by two yellow boys stark naked in the rain. The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the world. Traueling from thence by the Ocean sea 50. daies iourney southward, I came vnto a certain land named Lammori, [Marginal note: Perhaps he meaneth Comori.] where, in regard of extreeme heat, the people both men and women go stark-naked from top to toe: who seeing me apparelled scoffed at me, saying that God made Adam et Eue naked. In this countrey al women are common, so that no man can say, this is my wife. Also when any of the said women beareth a son ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... against excess; made himself for the most part a reasonable 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 ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... scandal. All the principal inhabitants were assembled in the cell, with his stark black corpse in their midst, when one of them made the following sensible suggestion: "We never could understand him when he was alive; it was easier to trace the flight of the swallow than to guess at his thoughts. Now that he is dead, let him still follow his own fancy. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... columns of the American army, but with a lieutenant's commission, was sent south and took no further part in the struggles about Lake Champlain. But Bryce, two years after the capture of Ticonderoga, well sustained the family name and honor while fighting with Stark at Bennington. ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... "So there 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 ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... the bottom, sir, tied neck and heels. He went stark mad last night, and bit and fought till we had to tie him ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... outlet of the valley a strip of blue sea bounds the horizon; westward are the distant mountains. In the foreground, in front of a farmhouse, snug-looking, with its roof of velvety-brown thatch, a troop of sturdy urchins, suntanned and stark naked, are frisking in the wildest gambols, all heedless of the scolding voice of the withered old grandam who sits spinning and minding the house, while her son and his wife are away toiling at some outdoor labour. Close at our feet runs a stream of pure water, in ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... an' I thought the captain was stark, staring mad to fire his fallow on such a windy day, and that blowing right from the lake to the house. When Old Wittals came in and towld us that the masther was not to the fore, but only one lad, an' the wife an' the chilther at home,—thinks I, there's no time to be lost, or the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... amazement. "Are you goin' stark loony? Payin' that Simmie Crocker fourteen dollars a WEEK for drivin' team and swappin' our good sugar and flour for sewin'-circle lies over folks' back fences! I never heard such a thing in my life. Why, Baker's Bazaar don't pay the man ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Science! Ile lamps and old Charlies—bless 'em!— Wos good for trade, our trade. Ah! if my dad Could see 'ow Larnin', Law, and Light oppress 'em, Our good old cracksmen-gangs, he'd go stark mad. As for the Hartful Dodger and old Fagin, Ah! they're well hout of it. Wot could they do With Science and her bloomin' fireworks plaguin' Their hartfullest little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... perhaps, if they may come to the same fate; one or two are idle sightseers, not always French, for the Morgue is a favourite haunt with the irrepressible tourist doing Paris. Strangest of all, the murderer himself, the doer of the fell deed, comes here, to the very spot where his victim lies stark and reproachful, and stares at it spellbound, fascinated, filled more with remorse, perchance, than fear at the risk he runs. So common is this trait, that in mysterious murder cases the police of Paris keep a disguised officer among ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... sake, Alix, what on earth are you saying? Are you stark, staring crazy? You come right upstairs and get into bed this minute. My land, I—I believe you're going to be sick. You've got the queerest look in your eyes. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... they made their way onward across the Esplanade des Invalides, through the serried lines of trees, stark and formal against the January sky, to the rue Fabert. Here, in the rue Fabert, lay that note of contrast that is bound into the very atmosphere of Paris—the note that touches the imagination to so acute an interest. Here shabby, broken-down shops rubbed shoulders with ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... eighteen brothers Diderik stark Dwells in the hills of Bern; And each I wot twelve sons has got, For ...
— King Diderik - and the fight between the Lion and Dragon and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... then he remembered. The whole incident came back to him, etched upon his memory. How he had started from the car, eager to get to Amanda, then Lyman had come with his news of her engagement and the hope in his heart became stark. Where was her blue bunting with its eternal song? Ah, he had killed it with his indifference and caution and foolish blindness! He knew he stumbled along the road, grief and misery playing upon his heart strings. Then came the frantic ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... people 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
... toward that unknown husband was one of stark terror, a sick dislike that had grown stronger with the years. In her mind he remained unchanged. She saw him as the gawky, shrinking boy, his lips apart, his eyes looking at her with uncontrollable aversion. Oh, no! Life with Peter Champneys was unthinkable! ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... difficulty by single combat, and the weapons to be used were war-clubs and short knives. A suitable place was selected. The whole village of the Tetons emptied itself to witness the combat. Men, women, and children swarmed about the arena. The two youthful combatants made their appearance, stark naked, and took their positions about thirty yards apart. Just when the signal was given, Do-ran-to's eye caught that of his betrothed Ni-ar-gua in the crowd. Then said his heart, "Be strong and my arm big!" There was ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... 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 ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... Munin the owl, staring at her from the low mantel. She caught her breath, and the deep silence was broken by the metallic tongue that dirged out "twelve." The last stroke of the bronze hammer echoed drearily; the old year lay stark and cold on its bier; Munin flapped his dusky wings with a long, sepulchral, blood-curdling hoot, and the dying man opened his dim, failing eyes, and fixed them for the last ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... blood-drops stigmatize The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold. A rigid fetich in her robe of gold The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes, Enthroned beneath her votive canopies, Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold. The rest is solitude; the church, grown old, Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies. Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn From hot humanity's impatient woes; The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn, And in the east one ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... I call 'em," he said. "They're stark naked, and they have nothing. What is there ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... Meriones, 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 and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... is seen in stark immediacy and directness every now and then in civilized life. Lynchings and mob violence in general are illustrations of what happens when groups throw to the winds the multiple inhibitions of custom and law. And the records of the criminal ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Not far off were two dead artillery horses in their harness. Another had been attended to by a burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a great pity that we had no intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of the two armies which fought over this ground. There was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, too ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stirred in the streets of the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St. Gothard Road. The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm. There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind along the stark and broken faces of the precipice: it was like the rattle of thunder. In the sombre defile of the Schoellenen the air rushed as through a funnel. We could see nothing save the thread-like road illuminated by our steadfast ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... is worse even than I thought—it's run the man stark crazy," said Miss Sally Ruth, viewing him ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... crutches, came in and asked so plaintively for a penny; but no sooner had he got it than he let it fall on the floor, and for all he raked and scraped with his crutch he was not able to get hold of it, so stiff and stark was he. ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... on the morning of December 3, '84, the rain fell persistently in the midst of a profound silence. The trees stood stark in the grey air as if petrified; there was not wind enough to waft the falling leaf; it fell straight ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... 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, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... Moscow and St. Petersburg present some of the most cadaverous specimens of the startling humor in which the Russians delight. Here you find frozen oxen, calves, sheep, rabbits, geese, ducks, and all manner of animals and birds, once animate with life, now stiff and stark in death. The oxen stand staring at you with their fixed eyes and gory carcasses; the calves are jumping or frisking in skinless innocence; the sheep ba-a at you with open mouths, or cast sheep's-eyes at the by-passers; the rabbits, having traveled ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... stark mad. There was no question of it. For a moment I stood irresolute. Then I lifted him to his feet and ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... women were celebrated for their beauty, but Mrs. Boreel was usually regarded as the handsomest of the trio. Mrs. Walter Langdon was Dorothea Astor, a daughter of John Jacob Astor, and her husband was a grandson of Judge John Langdon of New Hampshire, who equipped Stark's regiment for the battle of Bennington, and who for twelve years was a member of the United States Senate and was present as President pro tempore of that body at the first inauguration ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... 'Oh—did you want towels?' And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and took his former position, crouching seated before ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... earth of mine doth tremble, and I feel A stark affrighted motion in my blood; My soul grows weary of her house, and I All over am a trouble to my self; There is some hidden power in these dead things That calls my flesh into'em; I am cold; Be resolute, ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... snow 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 almost at ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... of the sweet-smelling stuff are tossed about our persons. Neglect the duty and you must walk alone. For to neglect conventionality is like going abroad without clothes; the naked man appears. Now, nothing can be more utterly horrid to our senses than a stark woman or stark man walking down the street. We should certainly pull aside the blind to have a peep, and the more we could see of the nakedness the further would we crane our heads (provided no one was by to watch); ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the north side of the railway there stretched a stark desert, but unlike the one which lay on the other side of the Suez Canal. That one looked as level as would the bottom of the sea, from which the water had disappeared and only wrinkled sand remained, while here the sand was more yellowish, heaped up as if in great knolls, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... it is easier to remove a dead cow after dissection than before. Madame therefore announced her intention of sending for the butcher, and was upon the point of doing so when Corporal Mucklewame, in whose heart, at the spectacle of the stark and lifeless corpse, ancient and romantic memories were stirring—it may be remembered that before answering to the call of "K(1)" Mucklewame had followed the calling of butcher's assistant at Wishaw—volunteered for the job. His ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... You—good Lord!—do you pretend to put yourself in comparison with me? You, with your other affairs, and your conscious falsity to her, with me! Why, but for me, she would be drifting down the river, and lying stark and dead on the beach of Anticosti. That is what I have done for her. And what have you done? I might laughed over the joke of it before I knew her; but now, since I know her, and her, when you force me to say ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... Perlen klar aus Orient Mir Zhr von Augen schiessen: Wie Rosenwsser wohlgebrennt Mir Thrnen berfliessen. 20 O keusche Lieb, Cupido rein, Allda dein Hitz erkhle, Da dunk dein heisse Flttig ein, Dass dich so stark nit fhle. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... For the wild grim dice of the iron game. The looks are bent on the shaking ground, And the heart beats loud with a knelling sound; Swift by the breasts that must bear the brunt, Gallops the major along the front— "Halt!" And fettered they stand at the stark command, And the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... account o' me Some wench will go unwed, And 'eaps o' lives will never be, Because 'e's stark and dead? Or if 'is missis damns the war, And by some candle light, Tow-headed kids are prayin' for The Fritz I copped ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service |
