"Deathlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the amazing facilities of intercourse daily developing between distant countries (and with so great good, how should there not be some evil?), think of those whose lots are cast far from their early homes and friends; think of the deathlike separation that going to America has been to thousands who left England, and friends there, but a few years ago; the uncertainty of intercourse by letter, the interminable intervals of suspense, the impossibility of making known or understood ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... they met Mrs. Montrose and the Stanton girls at dinner and told them about the boy, who still remained invisible. Uncle John had listened at his door again, but the snores had ceased and a deathlike silence seemed to pervade the apartment. This rendered them all a trifle uneasy and when they left the dining room Arthur went to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... occupants of the dug-out, whence the voices proceeded, were white men. Thinking that they might be a party of trappers, I boldly walked up to the door and knocked for admission. The voices instantly ceased, and for a moment a deathlike silence reigned inside. Then there seemed to follow a kind of hurried whispering—a sort of consultation—and then some one called out: ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... of that night Old Jase lay on a pallet spread before the fire, rising at intervals out of a deathlike slumber to slip his single suspender strap over his bent shoulder, turn up the lantern, ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Beyond the circle of Willamettes, who were still indifferent and unconcerned, the discontented bands had thrown aside all concealment, and stood with bared weapons in their hands; all murmurs had ceased; there was a deathlike silence in the dense mob, which seemed gathering itself together for a forward rush,—the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... cloud shut out completely the struggling moon, and closing over the valley covered it like a pall, leaving him in perfect darkness. At the same moment the moaning wind died away, and with it died away all sound. The darkness and the deathlike silence sent an icy chill to the heart of Cuglas. He held his hand close to his eyes, but he saw it not. He shouted that he might hear the sound of his own voice, but he heard it not. He stamped his foot on the rocky ground, but no sound was returned to him. ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... communicated itself to Mr. Scarrick; abruptly deserting a lady who was making insincere inquiries about the home life of the Bombay duck, he intercepted the newcomer on his way to the accustomed counter and informed him, amid a deathlike hush, that he had ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... entered. On the bed lay the mother, white as death, but with her black eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling: and on her arm lay little Gerard, as white, except where the blood had flowed from the bandage that could not confine it, down his sweet deathlike face. His eyes were fast closed, and he had no sign of life about him. I shut the door behind me, and approached the bed. When Catherine caught sight of me, she showed no surprise or emotion of any kind. Her lips, with automaton-like movement, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... glance over her shoulder and Miss Gallifer look up. A little gray figure in a battered black hat stood just within the door. She stood just within the door, but with no consciousness of anything or anyone in the room. She saw only the upturned face and its deathlike fixity. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... yet to awaken. Little by little the mind began asserting itself, vaguely feeling here and there, putting scrap with scrap, until returning memory poured in upon me like a flood, and I grasped the terrible truth that I was buried alive. The knowledge was a deathlike blow, with which I struggled desperately, seeking to regain control over my shattered nerves. I recall yet the frenzied laugh bursting from my lips—seemingly the lips of a stranger—ringing wild and hollow, not unlike ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... was pressed tightly over her heart, her lips quivered, and her whole person trembled. It was dreadful to see her thus agitated; and Alice, throwing her arms around her mother exclaimed, "What is it, dearest mother? Be not look so deathlike. I cannot bear ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... and heavy log. Dick heard him, but could not answer for fear of getting his mouth full of water. The youth turned over and over, clutched at one log and missed it, missed a second and a third, and then touched a fourth, and clung with a deathlike grip ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... and encamped on a branch of the upper Saco. Here they killed a moose—a timely piece of luck, for they were in danger of starvation, and Lovewell had been compelled by want of food to send back a good number of his men. The rest held their way, filing on snowshoes through the deathlike solitude that gave no sign of life except the light track of some squirrel on the snow, and the brisk note of the hardy little chickadee, or black-capped titmouse, so familiar in ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... impression of his remarkable physiognomy. None of the paintings of him that I have seen do him justice, and the etchings are not much of an improvement on the paintings. The best photographs only fail because they cannot retain the peculiar deathlike pallor of the skin and the clear, innocent china blue of the large eyes. These eyes were deep set under two arching brows, and yet were so large that their deep setting was not at first apparent. Field's ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... minutes the mine was silent as a grave. Only the faint drip, drip, drip of water from the warm spring and the almost inaudible tremble-mumble of the throbbing earth disturbed the deathlike stillness. ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... hundred horse had met on Clifton down; The sentinel on Whitehall gate looked forth into the night, And saw o'erhanging Richmond Hill the streak of blood-red light. Then bugle's note and cannon's roar the deathlike silence broke, And with one start, and with one cry, the royal city woke. At once on all her stately gates arose the answering fires; At once the wild alarum clashed from all her reeling spires; From all the batteries of the Tower pealed loud the voice of fear; And all the thousand ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... as the native women developed into maturity very early. His tired glance rested upon her face. That, too, bore promise of great beauty. The features were fine and regular, singularly well formed, and the eyes those of a gentle cow, unspeculative, unintelligent. She was very white, with the deathlike whiteness of the Tropics, and under the childish eyes were deep, black rings, coming early. He noticed her hands—slender, long, with beautiful fingernails—such hands in Paris! And again his roving glance fell lower, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... scattered in various parts. The electric fluid ran over our anchors, top-sail sheets and ties; yet no harm was done to us. We went below at four o'clock, leaving things in the same state. It is not easy to sleep, when the very next flash may tear the ship in two, or set her on fire; or where the deathlike calm may be broken by the blast of a hurricane, taking the masts out of the ship. But a man is no sailor if he cannot sleep when he turns-in, and turn out when he's called. And when, at seven bells, the customary "All the larboard watch, ahoy?" brought us on deck, it was a fine, clear, sunny ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... one nearer to the war by its look of deathlike desolation. The paralysis of the bombarded towns is one of the most tragic results of the invasion. One's soul revolts at this senseless disorganizing of innumerable useful activities. Compared with the towns of the north, Rheims is relatively unharmed; but for that very ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... cold sensibly affected the already exhausted lascars, at once disinclining them from exertion, and incapacitating them from making any; some of them even sat down like inanimate statues, with a fixed stare, and a deathlike hue upon their countenances: the most afflicting circumstance was, their being destitute of warm clothing, which they had neglected to provide themselves with, as they ought to have done, out of the four months' advance they received in Calcutta. All that I could spare was given to Thomson; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... example of thorough seamanship and discipline; the shrill boatswain's whistle, the captain shouting a few orders, passed on by the mates, a crowd of sailors appearing like magic in the rigging, and in another instant the ship riding under bare masts; a deathlike stillness for a few seconds, and then a snow white wall of foam, stretching as far as the eye could reach, came down upon us with a sweeping wind, striking the ship broadsides, and over she went on her beam ends. Half a minute's hesitation or bungling would in all probability have sent ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... a laugh, cut through the deathlike stillness. Allan was nearly to the top. Down the corridor into which he crept, snakelike on his belly, red light flickered from an ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... me. They have turned me into a liar and a hypocrite. They have stifled me with their middle-class gentleness, and I can hardly understand how it is that there is still blood in my veins. I have lowered my eyes, and given myself a mournful, idiotic face like theirs. I have led their deathlike life. When you saw me I looked like a blockhead, did I not? I was grave, overwhelmed, brutalised. I no longer had any hope. I thought of flinging ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... then she has told us that when half an hour or so had elapsed she fell into a reverie. What she was thinking of she cannot remember, save that she had forgotten altogether about her husband. Then she awoke with a curious sort of sensation at her heart. The first thing that struck her was the deathlike stillness of the room. Glancing at the bed, she perceived her husband to be lying in the same position as before. Thereupon she approached him, turned the coverlet back, and saw that he was stiff and ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... up and showed by fits and starts the inside of the hut. There lay the dying woman, her deathlike face drawn and haggard from her long agony, breathing very shortly, the beginning of the death rattle being audible. There lay the child, half covered by the skin, its lips parted in the ghastly semblance of a smile ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... It was, indeed, alarming, for no one seemed to know what to do, and the blood flowed rapidly. Presently he turned a dreadful color, and stopped laughing. I brought a chair, while the others thrust him into it. His face grew more deathlike, his mouth trembled, his eyes rolled, his head dropped. I comprehended that these must be symptoms of fainting, a phenomenon I had never beheld. I rushed after water, and Lydia after cologne. Between us, it passed away; but for those few moments I thought it was all over with ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... stood, between them, motionless as a statue, impalpable as air, but real as life itself. The vision, if it was a vision, lasted fully a minute. Never, to the day of her death, was Unorna to forget that face, with its deathlike purity of outline, with its unspeakable nobility ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... mighty pyramid that towered over us! The heaviness of her swoon had smoothed away the falseness of her face, and nothing was left but the divine stamp of Woman's richest loveliness, softened by shadows of the night and dignified by the cast of deathlike sleep. I gazed upon her and all my heart went out to her; it seemed that I did but love her more because of the depth of the treasons to which I had sunk to reach her, and because of the terrors ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... sooner left alone then she recollected the cordial Pisanio had given her, and drank it off, and presently fell into a sound and deathlike sleep. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... emperor fell into a deathlike slumber and would have been unable to resist or to defend himself had he been bound and gagged and quietly carried away. Yet what did the generals and colonels who had assembled in the large reception-hall close beside the sleeping emperor's private office? What did the gentlemen ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... vain hope of catching some clue to the result of the fearful struggle that had just taken place, if it were not still going on in the water. Nothing was audible beyond the steady roar of the rushing river; it being a part of the policy of their enemies on the opposite shore to observe the most deathlike stillness. ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... spread all over the thin and wasted features, like sunlight gleaming on the grey surface of a church-yard stone. He lifted his attenuated hand, and when Harold clasped it, the fingers were so cold and deathlike that their pressure seemed to close about his heart, compressing it, and chilling the life current in ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... approach to the study of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead" is through the well-known facts of the deathlike trance ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... opened and closed, a glare of light showed her a crowded room; a monotonous hum like the swell of the sea fell on her ear; then stifled ejaculations, to which succeeded a sudden, deathlike hush. The officer placed a chair for her in front of the platform where the magistrate sat, and retired to the rear of the room. With some difficulty Judge Dent made his way through the throng of spectators, and seated himself beside ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and again she shrank away from him, dragging herself along against the wall, and with her eyes still fixed in the same deathlike stare. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to walk along the moraines with rapid and uneasy steps. The day was declining, the snow was assuming a rosy tint, and a dry, frozen wind blew in rough gusts over its crystal surface. Ulrich uttered a long, shrill, vibrating call. His voice sped through the deathlike silence in which the mountains were sleeping; it reached the distance, across profound and motionless waves of glacial foam, like the cry of a bird across the waves of the sea. Then it died away and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... an arrangement with Mrs. Prince, by all means!" Warren said evenly. But a deathlike terror convulsed his heart. Rachael had burned ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... in the midst of their solemn chant—a deathlike silence and complete immovability prevailed among the mourners and the spectators—and the wind was moaning beneath the vaulted roofs, awaking those strange and tomb-like sounds which are only heard in large churches,—when ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... self-restrained, and less demonstrative in the presence of others, held back her heart till we were fairly gone from the door; and then, as my dear brother afterward informed me, she fell back into his arms with a great cry, as if all the heart-strings had broken, and lay for long in a deathlike swoon. Oh, all ye that read this page, think most tenderly of the cries of Nature, even where Grace and Faith are in perfect triumph. Read, through scenes like these, a fuller meaning into the words addressed to that blessed Mother, whose Son was given for ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... Everything had grown dim and blended together, though it was clearer near the ground. Around us flat, dreary country; fields, nothing but fields—here and there bushes and ravines—and again fields, mostly fallow, with scanty, dusty grass. A wilderness... deathlike! If only a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... darling child. They found they could not remove everything, and there were chairs and tables, and bundles of linen too heavy to carry, lying abandoned in the gutter, Some before leaving had carefully locked their dwellings, and the houses had a deathlike appearance, with their barred doors and windows, but the greater number, in their haste to get away and with the sorrowful conviction that nothing would escape destruction, had left their poor abodes open, and the yawning apertures displayed the nakedness of the dismantled rooms; and those were ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... deathlike still, and a sound which was exactly like the roaring of a furnace came out of the north, with an occasional louder boom when the pent-up fury of the storm burst through the brown cloud. In reality, the sound was made by millions of particles of sand being hurtled through ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... ready for use on his knee; and to give an idea that he was bringing up a strong reinforcement, he ordered the bugler he had with him to strike up "Rory O'More." This was immediately responded to by three British cheers, followed, however, by a deathlike silence, which made him suppose that the enemy were between ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... forward stiffly like the broken points of a javelin; its dilated eye blazing with steady green fire—as still as death. And then with his blood become as ice in his veins from horror and all the strength gone out of him in a deathlike faintness, the school- master realized that he was face to face unarmed with a cougar, gaunt with famine and ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... to be no waking life on the pirates' island. Even old Tabus had probably put out the fire and gone to sleep, for deathlike silence and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... crowds of happy souls, and rapturous songs, and shouts of praise, and joyous meetings of loving and long parted friends in realms of endless life and boundless blessedness; but all were gone. A sullen gloom, a deathlike stupor, a horrible and unnatural paralysis of hope had come in place of those sweet visions of celestial glories. My only comfort was, that though I had ceased to believe in the divinity of Christianity myself, she had retained her faith, and had lived ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... face of a deathlike whiteness, his lips apart, and the perspiration standing thickly about them, Uncle Nat sat leaning forward, his eyes fixed upon the door through which she would enter. In a moment she stood before them—Dora Deane—but far more lovely than ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... with her pallor and her wasted, thin face she looked deathlike. At a turn of the path where a great crag of purple porphyry closes the view of the lowlands, I saw her open her eyes. I rode just behind her holding the little girl with my right arm. 'The child is all right,' ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... de Marny entered the final awesome stage of his gilded career, that deathlike life which he dragged on for ten years wearily to the grave, Juliette became his only joy, his one gleam of happiness in the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... nose absolutely refused to adhere to a face for more than two minutes together? The recumbent figures lay meekly on their beds and allowed themselves to be rolled, and patted, and pinched into shape, until at a distance, they presented quite a life, or rather deathlike, effect. The girls declared that the sight gave them the "creeps," whatever that mysterious malady might be, and snowballed the effigies vigorously before returning to the house, so that no straggler through the grounds might be scared ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... up into the eastern sky, touching the face of the waters with a soft, pearly light. A few straight streaks of cloud became faintly outlined. The moon looked yellow and deathlike. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... no noise on the soft carpeting; nor did mine. The whole house, indeed, seemed stuffy with motionless air, as if not even sound vibrations had disturbed the deathlike fixity of that interior. As we turned at the top toward the paneled white door, which I knew as by instinct was the one we sought, for the first time I became conscious of the faint ticking of a clock somewhere on the floor ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Robert, too, he has a most pleasant voice, and a slow deliberate way of speaking, and a warm kindly smile which fades at the first movement of serious thought, leaving the whole pale face, even the dark eyes under their heavy brows, almost deathlike in immobility. One seems to see in such moments the spirit withdraw from the surface of things to take up its duty at the citadel of ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... massive truck. It had developed express train speed now and it rocked from side to side like a ship in a gale as it tore down the rough country road! Bruce clutched the big steering wheel with deathlike grip and tried his mightiest to keep the cumbersome vehicle straight! He realized that a loose stone or a deep rut meant death to him and destruction to the motor car! His teeth were clenched and his face was white! The wind had whisked away ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... the gravity of the situation, far more serious, indeed, than we then realized, and as they approached us, in the deathlike silence that prevailed, we could distinctly hear the throbbings of our hearts. We were impatient to learn our fate, and yet we dreaded the disclosure. Our anxiety was of short duration, and one of our elders spoke as follows. ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... at the window, and when he saw the doctor coming, he swallowed a large pill of plug tobacco. The effect was more serious than he expected. In a few minutes he became sick in earnest, and was frightened. A deathlike pallor supervened. When the doctor reached him, there was a genuine fit of vomiting. The story runs that Captain Tiemann made a pathetic appeal in behalf of the imaginary twin babies, that the doctor diagnosed it ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... turn'd.—His guide was gone; A broad chaotic cloud appear'd alone. His limbs no more their chilly weight sustained, A deathlike torpor o'er his bosom reign'd, His stony eyeballs fix'd in silent trance Met the terrific Spectre's withering glance. And lo! the Phantom waves, with sudden glare, His burning sceptre thro' the starless air! High o'er the bark the booming billows spread, The deafening waves were closing ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... it. I sprang to my feet and screamed. Peggy, who was already on the threshold, caught her as she fell forward, and laid her on the bed as if she were a little child. She was in a fainting fit. I had seen her before in these deathlike swoons, but never had I watched with such shuddering dread to see the dawn of awakening life break upon her face. I stood at her pillow scarcely less pale and ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... have said, was awaiting the arrival of Savonarola with an impatience mixed with uneasiness; so that, when he heard the sound of his steps, his pale face took a yet more deathlike tinge, while at the same time he raised himself on his elbow and ordered his three friends to go away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... around faded and grown confused and all beneath him slipping and giving way. Suddenly a sound rouses him back to life: a voice has smote his ear and cleaved his inmost soul; and lifting his head his eyes are met by sight of Joan, who with a piercing shriek has fallen back, deathlike and pale, in Reuben's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Lawler remained unconscious. And during that interval there were no disturbing sounds to agitate the deathlike quiet of the sickroom. Riders glided into town from various points of the compass and stepped softly as they moved in the street—whispering or talking in low tones. The universal topic was the fight, and Lawler's condition. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to the frightened man as if the accompanying noise must wake the dead. He lay for a moment where he had fallen, listening for sounds from within. He clutched his rifle nervously, but the deathlike silence was unbroken save for his own heavy breathing and the tiny snapping of the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... gone to do anything but splutter. She clutched him with a deathlike grip—a thing every person in danger of drowning will do—and he had his hands full to keep both himself and his burden afloat. Shallow water was not far off and he struck out for this and ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... the sea. All their meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... say anything about them. He did what Sewell bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if he had been an Indian he could not have regarded them with a greater reticence. Sewell made him sit down from time to time, but in a sitting posture Barker's silence became so deathlike that Sewell hastened to get him on his legs again, and to walk him about from one point to another, as if to keep life in him. At the end of one of these otherwise aimless excursions Mrs. Sewell appeared, and infused a gleam of hope into her husband's breast. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... announced his unconditional refusal of the terms proposed to him. He would not give a constitution or promise allegiance to the French. The minister withdrew, and Odo was left alone. He had dismissed his gentlemen, and as he sat in his closet a sense of deathlike isolation came over him. Never had the palace seemed so silent or so vast. He had not a friend to turn to. De Crucis was in Germany, and Trescorre, it was reported, had privately attended the Duchess in her flight. The waves of destiny seemed closing over Odo, and the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... there was something cold and deathlike in my soul; it was then I bade farewell to Sally Langdon. For I knew, whatever happened, of one thing I was sure—I would have to kill either Sampson or Wright. Snecker could be managed; Sampson might be trapped into arrest; but Wright had no sense, no control, no fear. He would snarl ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... under the open sky, with the gear of the recado for my bed. There is high enjoyment in the independence of the Gaucho's life, to be able at any moment to pull up your horse, and say, 'Here we will pass the night.' The deathlike stillness of the plain, the dogs keeping watch, the gipsy group of Gauchos making their beds round the fire, have left in my mind a strongly-marked picture of this first night, which will not soon be forgotten." After an interesting rencontre with General ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... deathlike sinking of her heart. She was afraid of her father, who no longer seemed her father, created to protect and cherish her, but some maniac stranger. She felt an impulse like that of a terrified child to run away, far away to some one who should stand ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... their hands. He listened with the utmost anxiety, expecting every instant that his door would be forced and his relentless foes come thronging into the chamber. No such movement, however, was made. A deathlike silence prevailed. What was the meaning of all this? What was taking place or about to occur? If the men in the corridor were not Luigi Vampa's bandits, who were they? The Viscount lost himself in a bewildering maze of conjectures. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... and a bigot's eye was gyrating like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified. As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... same figure that he had seen on the railway platform, the same gloomy drapery, the same quiet, almost deathlike demeanor, nay, almost the same veil over her features; but the Lady Ongar whom he now saw was as unlike that Lady Ongar as she was unlike that Julia Brabazon whom he had known in old days at Clavering ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... crew of Newfoundland sealers who found her, as they wandered over the floating ice-fields in search of seals, did not fail to appreciate the weird and romantic suggestions of a derelict Mission steamer, keeping her lonely watch on that awful, deathlike waste. She had been left at Assizes Harbour, usually an absolutely safe haven of rest. But she was not destined to end her chequered career so peacefully, for the Arctic ice came surging in and froze fast to ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the window and threw it open. Water was thrown upon the Count's face, but without reviving him; and his swoon was so deathlike, that for a moment his anxious friends almost feared that life had ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... warbled forth his notes, free and simple, but singularly sweet, with something of a plaintive tone, that heightened their effect. The first morning that he was heard, was a joyous one among the young folks of my household. The long, deathlike sleep of winter was at an end; nature was once more awakening; they now promised themselves the immediate appearance of buds and blossoms. I was reminded of the tempest-tossed crew of Columbus, when, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... of, and the time when a queen of France was disguised as a flower merchant. I found there flower merchants disguised as camp-followers. I expected to find libertinism there, but in fact I found none at all. It is only the scum of libertinism, some blows and drunken women lying in deathlike stupor on broken bottles. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by the reading of this letter was profound. The stillness that followed was deathlike. Then one of the oldest men in the room rose, and in a prayer of great power prayed for the absent man and thanked God for His guiding strength. The prayer was followed by others, and then one and another of the members, who had ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... him at once. The deathlike repose had wiped away much that recent years had engraven on his face. He looked as Priscilla remembered him, standing in his father's ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... the rigorous measures of the British officers in South Carolina seemed successful and a deathlike stillness prevailed in the province. The clangor of arms ceased and no enemy to British authority appeared. The people of the lower parts of South Carolina were generally attached to the revolution, but many of their most active ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... impact the club fell from the brute's hand and Tarzan's hold was wrenched from its throat. Instantly the two were locked in a deathlike embrace. Though the creature bit at Tarzan the latter was quickly aware that this was not a particularly formidable method of offense or defense, since its canines were scarcely more developed than his own. The thing that he had principally to guard against was the sinuous ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... traveling possible even after the twilight had deepened. By and by it grew lighter and the north horizon took on a rosy flush that spread into a tremendous flare. The night was still, clear, crackly; it was surcharged with some static force, and so calm was the air, so deathlike the hush, that the empty valley rang like a bell. That mysterious illumination in the north grew more and more impressive; great ribbons, long pathways of quivering light, unrolled themselves and streamed across the sky; they flamed and flickered, they writhed and ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... equally familiar with his unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains at the first late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, "Look what I am bringing you who watch there! ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... narrow stone-lined passage. She steadfastly ignored the hand he held back for support. It was not a pleasant place, this underground way to the outside world. The walls were damp and mouldy; the odor of the rank earth assailed the nostrils; the air was chill and deathlike. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... longed for something to come and relieve the monotony of this deathlike stillness. If only someone would speak to him! If only someone would sing to him. Music would carry his thoughts away, and would break the spell lying on him. The moon was streaming in at the open window; but that, too, was ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... that memorable meeting on my understanding is indelible. The deathlike weakness and decay of Mr. Falkland, his misery and rage, his haggard, emaciated, and fleshless visage, are ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... began a magic song to chant, towards the north looked, potent runes applied, a spell pronounced, an answer demanded, until compelled she rose, and with deathlike ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... (the conclave agreed) had such an absurd question been asked before! Every human creature, with the slightest claim to a place in society, knew the Countess Narona. An adventuress with a European reputation of the blackest possible colour—such was the general description of the woman with the deathlike complexion ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... pains and of strange misgivings that load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animal nature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bring upon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public and personal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, to induce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, to pervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorse and shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... already fallen upon her lips and cooled them with bitter water, and hiding her head under the broad, fresh leaves of a calla that bent its marble cups above her knitted brow and loosened hair, she lay in deathlike trance, till the Fairy Anima swept her feet with fringed garments, and cast the serpent wand writhing and glittering upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... everything seems still and silent during the long wintry season, as if death had spread a white pall over the earth and hushed every living thing into silence. Few sounds are heard through the winter days to break the deathlike silence that reigns around, excepting the sudden rending and cracking of the trees in the frosty air, the fall of a decayed branch, the tapping of a solitary woodpecker—two or three small species of which still remain after all the summer-birds are flown— and the gentle, weak chirp ...
— In The Forest • Catharine Parr Traill
... and likewise so did Blake, And the former was a puddin', and the latter was a fake; So on that stricken multitude a deathlike silence sat. For there seemed but little chance of Casey's getting to ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought its gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... you pray for, Dick?" asked Hugh, glancing at his companion's fierce face, which in that half light looked deathlike ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... departed helpmate, is all but incurable. The sister of Mr B——, who saw the necessity of administering relief, tried to awaken him to a sense of religious consolation; but he was as yet unfit even for that sacred ministration; and all her efforts having failed to rouse him, even from the deathlike stupor in which he lay, she had recourse, by my advice, to probing the wound, to take off the stricture by which the natural humours were pent up. She discoursed pathetically on the qualities of the departed, which, she said, would be the passport of her ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard, or a man like Turgenev's Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies—all that disposes one to indolence, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild where God broods amid His silence; the Wild, His ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... entering the Bayou of Plaquemine, Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken save by the herons Home to their roosts in the cedar trees returning at sunset, Or by the owl, as he greeted the moon with ...
— Reminiscences of two years with the colored troops • Joshua M. Addeman
... minutes, though less in volleys than at first, gradually ceased, and all was quiet, as if nothing had happened to disturb the deathlike stillness of the night. Yet, in that brief hall hour, the fate of a continent was decided—the almost desperate cause of the colonies had been retrieved. The victory of ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... Vera, Nina, Lawrence, and I started for the theatre. I can't say that I was expecting a very pleasant evening, but the deathlike stillness, both of ourselves and the town did, I confess, startle me. Scarcely a word was exchanged by us between the English Prospect and Saint Isaac's Square. The square looked lovely in the bright moonlight, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... in the mornings. Then there fell on Gao the deathlike lull of the red siesta. When that was finished, we came back to the edge of the river to see the enormous crocodiles with bronze goggle-eyes creep along little by little, among the clouds of mosquitoes and day-flies ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... out to the embankment bordering our side of the great dynamite ditch. I crept to the top of it and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch. But it was too dark to see anything. As for sounds, there were none. The stillness was deathlike. True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country—the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine —but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... looked as deathlike as ever. It seemed incredible that human existence could be possible within its sunless walls. Indeed, my persistent efforts at the rusty bell-handle produced only a feeble echo, and the round-eyed interest of a group of urchins, who volunteered, after a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... her hands, and endeavored to shut out the grotesque and phantom-like forms that seemed to dance before her. A deathlike stillness reigned through the house, the silence alone broken by the ticking of the great dial at the head of the staircase. There is something inexpressibly awful in the ticking of a clock, when heard at midnight by the lonely and anxious watcher beside the bed of death. It ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... outset of this revival of Bohemian literature, there appeared so great a multitude of writers; such habits of diligence and productiveness were immediately manifested throughout the whole nation; and such a mass of respectable talent was brought to light; that the long interval of a dull and deathlike silence, which preceded this period, presents indeed an enigma difficult to be solved. No small influence may be ascribed to Germany. The principles of the government were changed; the country, physically as well as morally exhausted, could recover but gradually; but ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... move. Her great, startled eyes, dark, intense, and passion-filled, stared helplessly at the two, who, transfixed, returned the stare in frozen silence. So rigid and deathlike the model lay in the meshes of the net, so beautiful and graceful in her motionless pose, that for an instant the intruders could not trust their senses. Then the woman found voice ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... a relation," she insisted, in bad French. "This young man is a Russian, and I am his relation." On this plea they let her have her way. She sat down calmly, and took his head on her lap; her scared faded eyes avoided looking at his deathlike face. At the corner of a street, on the other side of the town, a stretcher met the car. She followed it to the door of the hospital, where they let her come in and see him laid on a bed. Razumov's new-found relation never shed a tear, but the officials ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... little storm-beaten cabin that represented Law at this loneliest outpost on the American continent, he looked like a carven thing of dun-gray rock, with a dun-gray world over his head and on all sides of him, broken only in its terrific monotony of deathlike sameness by the darker gloom of the sky and the whiter and ghostlier gloom that hung over the ice-fields. The wind was still bitter, and his vision was shut in by a near horizon which Billy had often thought of as the rim of hell. On this afternoon his heart was as leaden as the day. Under his ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead Him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on. The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient palace of the Holy ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... huge Christ; while, along the walls, the fourteen scenes of the Passion displayed their awful story in red and yellow daubs, reeking with horror. It was life that was suffering the last agonies there, amidst that deathlike quiver of the atmosphere, upon those altars which resembled tombs, in that bare vault which looked like a sepulchre. The surroundings all spoke of slaughter and gloom, terror and anguish and nothingness. A faint scent of incense still lingered ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the church listened intently as each report reached his ear, and kept his fingers firmly on the bell-rope. An hour passed on, and the sun rode high in heaven; gradually the thundering died away. Quicker grew the breathing, and tighter the cold fingers clasped each other. The last sound ceased: a deathlike silence reigned throughout the town, and many a cheek grew colorless as marble. There came a confused sound of shouts—the mingling of many voices—the distant tramp of cavalry; and then there fell on the aching ears the deep, thrilling tones of the ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... for a father of his own church, and demanded if any further penance were necessary to atone for his sin. But as soon as Edie declared his message, at the very first mention of the name of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, the Earl's cheek became even more deathlike than it had ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and deathlike silence that reigned around him, Jacky returned to the road, where he actually gasped with horror on finding himself the solitary tenant of an apparently uninhabited wilderness. Sitting down on a stone, he shut his eyes, opened wide ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... easily be imagined that the whole scene by which we are here surrounded has over it an air of profound and deathlike stillness. The sea, where we behold nothing but water around us, presents more of life to divert the mind. The very rushing and splash of the wheels, the bounding waves, the bustle of bending or reefing sails, and the crowding of people on the steamer, ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the very frightfulness and shadow of the deathlike army. Umbra may be taken of the literal shadows of the men in the night, with Rit., or with Doed. and Or., of the general image or aspect of the army. Feralis, as an adj., is found only in poetry and post-Augustan prose. ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... a tremendous racket, but now, as Fred gripped his ashen stick and Tommy Flanders prepared to deliver the ball, a deathlike silence came over the field. Every one of the men on the bases was prepared to leg it at the slightest chance of being able ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer
... intensely. Unconsciously she had drawn her lower lip altogether between her teeth, and I well remember what a deathlike and idiotic look the contortion gave her. My terror lest she should discover me amounted to positive agony. She rolled her eyes stealthily from corner to corner of the room, and listened with her neck ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... silent there, Yes, deathlike! Dead? I dare not look: if dead, Were it best to steal away, to spare myself, And her too, pain, pain, pain? My curse on all This world of mud, on all its idiot gleams Of pleasure, all the foul fatalities That blast ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... to understand, inasmuch as Kunti, abandoning sovereignty, became desirous of taking up her abode in the forest. How is it that she who was the mother of Yudhishthira, of Bhima, of Vijaya, was burnt to deathlike a helpless creature. Thinking of this I become stupefied. In vain was the deity of fire gratified at Khandava by Arjuna. Ingrate that he is, forgetting that service he has burnt to death the mother of his benefactor! ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... power when he reaches the month represented in the Zodiac by the sign of the Lion, then the decay of his strength as he pales and sickens in the autumn, and at last his restoration to youth and vigor after he has passed the Waters of Death—Winter, the death of the year, the season of nature's deathlike torpor, out of which the sun has not strength sufficient to rouse her, until spring comes back and the circle begins again. An examination of the Accadian calendar, adopted by the more scientifically inclined ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... to dissuade her. But she would go. Her aspect, however, was deathlike, and as he softly undid the doors, and half-helped, half-carried her across the passage, he said to her that he must go and waken Fraeulein Anna and ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... days' silent space Balen and Pellam face to face Lay dead or deathlike, and the place Was death's blind kingdom, till the grace That God had given the sacred seer For counsel or for comfort led His Merlin thither, and he said, Standing between the quick and dead, "Rise up, ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in the upper reaches of the seats, but the silence of the body of the house was deathlike as he lay without stirring. Old Jerry gulped and waited—choked back a sobbing breath as he saw him start to lift himself once more. Upon his hands and knees first, then upon his knees alone. And then, with eyes shut, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans |
