"Living thing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to a divine act, the act was done when we began to be, and the life was given as a gift that could be separated from the Bestower. But that is not the state of the case at all. The real fact is that life is only continued because of the continued operation on every living thing, just as being is only continued by reason of the continued operation on every existing thing, of the Divine Power. 'In Him we live,' and the life is the result of the perpetual impartation from Himself 'in whom all things consist,' according to the profound word of the Apostle. Their being depends ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... growing louder each instant, and as the tail-end of the last wagon was trotting out of the square a shell, the largest ever employed by the German command and called the Ypres Express, landed full in the square, killing every living thing there and destroying ambulances and wagons of every kind, catching our rear wagon and blowing it up, wounding the driver and destroying the magnificent Cloth Hall, the last vestige of this most beautiful piece of architecture being destroyed ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... perfect was it! And these were the same creepers to which he had listened, these that tapped now disconsolately, and this was his empty chair—but where was he? he who was tender for the tiniest living thing—who had thought and cared for everyone but himself. What was the end of it all? How had he been rewarded? His hearth was cold, his little house deserted, and the wind and the rain swept over his ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... "Besides, they wash and dress the children; they mend their toys and dress their dolls; yet, they find time to bathe the head of the little girl who is so sick in the next house to theirs. 8. "They are full of good deeds to every living thing. I have seen them patting the tired horse and the lame dog in ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... rail touched the water, and lay so for a minute or more in a smother of foam. Her deck was at such an angle that it seemed as though she never could right herself. Gradually, however, she rose a little, staggered and trembled like a living thing, and then plunged away through the storm, as a piece of paper is ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... out, his head bent, sat a yellow dog with a lead to his collar. Far and wide there was to be seen no other living thing, and in the apple-scented heat the screeching of the violin was like the resentful cries of some invisible creature ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... of the Capitol, I was struck with the gloomy and unimproved condition of the surrounding country. Except our caravan, not a living thing moved within sight—all was desert, silent, and solitary as the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... upon him. When first the brave was discovered thus wantonly, and with no other purpose but the shedding of blood, intruding on the dominions of the spirits, no words can tell the rage which appeared to possess their bosoms. Secure in the knowledge of their power to repel the attacks of every living thing, the intrepid Maha was permitted to advance within a few steps of Karkapaha. He had just raised his spear to strike the unmanly lover, when, all at once, he found himself riveted to the ground. His feet refused ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... of the Yosemite streams are buried every winter beneath a heavy mantle of snow, and set free in the spring in magnificent floods. Then, all the fountains, full and overflowing, every living thing breaks forth into singing, and the glad exulting streams shining and falling in the warm sunny weather, shake everything into music making ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... meaning as might be fancied to glitter in the organs of a sorceress; while a smile so strangely meaning and malign played about the mouth, that the young sailor started, when it first met his view as if a living thing had returned his look. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... regret is, that any duty to the world, beyond the duty of existing inoffensively, should be committed to such hands; that men like Charles and Ried, endowed with so very small a fraction of the common faculties of manhood, should have the destiny of any living thing ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... energetically, but always reverently, aiming at expressing life and dramatising Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's first essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable: he was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mosaic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the portrait of the living thing ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... which even the gentler stamp of man is apt to conceive towards one who, herself the object of his strong affection, daily and hourly repels and repays it with scorn and infidelity. He did love her truly; she was the one living thing in all his bitter lonely life to whom his heart had gone out. True, he put pressure on her to marry him, or what comes to the same thing, allowed and encouraged her drunken old father to do so. But he ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... struggling for it, Dick. The German chemists have been working night and day for three years, just for one little formula, and I've got it! One of my shells, which fell in a wood at daylight this morning, killed every living thing within a mile of it. The bark fell off the trees, and the labourers in a field beyond threw down their implements and ran for their lives. It's the principle of intensification. The poison feeds on its own vapours. The formula—I've got ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... canoe did not look as attractive as they had appeared when swimming and diving so gracefully in the lake. Souwanas was quick to notice their depression of spirits, and he there and then resolved that he would never again shoot any living thing in their presence, and he faithfully kept ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... every way suitable for our necessities,—a thing of beauty, a white-winged Angel set a-floating by the pennies of the children to bear the Gospel to these sin-darkened but sun-lit Southern Isles. To me she became a sort of living thing, the impersonation of a living and throbbing love in the heart of thousands of "shareholders"; and I said, with a deep, indestructible faith,—"The Lord has provided—the ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... filled quite up to the top with the red-brown beech leaves. He scooped out a place just large enough for himself, lay down in it, and carefully replaced the leaves up to his very chin. He even put a few lightly over his face, and when that was done no one would have imagined that a boy or any other living thing was hidden there. ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... Bronte's eyes I take to have had at times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she regarded Charlotte's friend ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... down the foliage many times, I watched her coming. It was not for long. More hurriedly than was her custom she glided, a glorified young creature, in and out amongst the shrubbery, until the envious chapel door hid her from my sight. No living thing was in view. The sound of no discordant voice broke the holy peace of God. Temptation came never to our first erring mother in more ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... GOD had made him indeed of the lowest and coarsest Materials, but that he had breath'd into him the Breath of Life, and that he became a living thing call'd SOUL, being a kind of an extraordinary heavenly and divine Emanation; and consequently that Man, however mean and Terrestrial his Body might be, was yet, Heaven-born, in his spirituous Part compleatly Seraphic; ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... smiled at her and said, "Of course, no one else would think it applies. Richard was saying it in Wales where he'd just landed, and it's about civil war, not foreign; but where it comes to me is the loving of the soil itself, as if it were a living thing that knew it was being loved and loved back in return. Our England, Nona. You remember Gaunt's thing in the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Only one living thing upon the mountains saw him go without mourning, and he was the red weasel who took the world as ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... earth is buried beneath water so salt that we cannot use it. Other parts of the earth are so dry that if we venture into them we may die of thirst. The solid land on which we make our homes is not all of the same value. Thousands of square miles are so rocky or so cold or so dry that they support no living thing. Other thousands of miles of the earth have been so favored by Nature that they are fairly alive with every sort ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... a living thing," he used to say at rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said with ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... not attempt a conception of the minuteness of the ultimate atoms that compose the several simple elements that thus mysteriously combine to form the complex substance and properties of this least and lowliest living thing. But if we could even measure these, as a mental necessity, we are urged indefinitely on to a minuteness without conceivable limit, in effect, a minuteness that is beyond all finite measure or conception. So that, as modern physics ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... inwards on his soul, and with no feeling for perishable nature, fated to damnation, save contempt. For a long time in his hours of devout thought he had dreamt of some hermit's desert, of some mountain hole, where no living thing—neither being, plant, nor water—should distract him from the contemplation of God. It was an impulse springing from the purest love, from a loathing of all physical sensation. There, dying to self, and with his back turned to the light of day, he would have waited till he should ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... road, and one more purely artistic, the great seeker after a new sense of form approached the same problem. Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... Shantung and a short residence in its capital city, Tsinan, made the conclusions, which so far as I know every foreigner in China has arrived at, a living thing. It gave a vivid picture of the many and intimate ways in which economic and political rights are inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret treaties during the war, could be naive enough to believe ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... gaze upon a vast space, the limits of which extended far beyond my vision. An atmosphere of magical luminousness permeated the entire field of view. I was amazed to see no trace of animalculous life. Not a living thing, apparently, inhabited that dazzling expanse. I comprehended instantly that, by the wondrous power of my lens, I had penetrated beyond the grosser particles of aqueous matter, beyond the realms of ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... coming to me. Could not I as well as Aunt Janet have a little Second Sight! I went towards the window, and, standing behind the curtain, listened. Far away I thought I heard a cry, and ran out on the Terrace; but there was no sound to be heard, and no sign of any living thing anywhere; so I took it for granted that it was the cry of some night bird, and came back to my room, and wrote at my journal till I was calm. I think my nerves must be getting out of order, when every sound ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... our nature so vague, so complicated, so mysterious, as that with which we look upon the cold remains of our fellow-mortals. The dignity with which death invests even the meanest of his victims inspires us with an awe no living thing can create. The monarch on his throne is less awful than the beggar in his shroud. The marble features—the powerless hand—the stiffened limbs—oh! who can contemplate these with feelings that can be defined? These are the mockery of all our hopes and fears, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... not further observe that the first shoot of every living thing is by far the greatest and fullest? Many will even contend that a man at twenty-five does not reach twice the height which he ...
— Laws • Plato
... flags snapping in the glorious air, and all her lovely lines showing in sharp beauty against a violet-blue sky, came Jim Hawkins's superb ship, crewless, and unguided, but moving evenly, slowly, majestically, as if she were some living thing! ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... in the operation; rammed home the extraordinary charge, pointed the gun at the cage, and applied the match. Instantly the gun leaped backwards as if it had been a living thing, broke down the bulwarks of the ship, and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... incredible that any living thing larger than a microbe could emerge under its own power from such a hell of energy, many flying tigers did; apparently being blown aloft along with the hitherto undisturbed volume of soil in which the creatures ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... matter for reflection that, while the effect of British administration has been to weaken self-government in villages, half a century of effort has failed to make it a living thing in towns and districts. The machinery exists, but outside a few towns the result is poor. The attempt was made on too large a scale, municipal institutions being bestowed on places which were no more than villages with a bazar. This has been partially corrected of late years. A new official ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and in which now her mind and spirit had ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... Vs. 19-20. And every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... without seeing one living thing, and then we came to a little adobe ranch where we dismounted to rest a while. By this time our feet and hands were almost frozen, and Faye suggested that I should remain at the ranch until they returned; but that I ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... water in them and so he considered that his cattle had a perfect right to drink the water. When Birbanta heard this he fell into a rage and vowed that he would not let the cattle drink, but would kill every living thing that went down to the water. From that day he let no one drink from his tanks: when women went to draw water he used to smash their water pots and put the rims round their necks like necklaces: all wild birds and animals he shot: and the cattle and buffaloes he cut down ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... knelt for a moment in a sort of stunned fright. Then, with a mad, awkward movement, I snatched at the ring, intending to hurl it out of the Pentacle. Yet it eluded me, as though some invisible, living thing jerked it hither and thither. At last, I gripped it; yet, in the same instant, it was torn from my grasp with incredible and brutal force. A great, black shadow covered it, and rose into the air, and came at me. I saw that it was the Hand, ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... roof would tumble in with a crash. When that moment came, every living thing must perish ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... been the main features of Africa during countless ages; 'for the old rocks which form her outer fringe, unquestionably circled round an interior marshy or lacustrine country, in which the dicynodon flourished at a time when not a single animal was similar to any living thing which now inhabits the surface of our globe. The present central and meridian zone of waters, whether lakes, rivers, or marshes, extending from Lake Tchad to Lake Ngami, with hippopotami on their banks, are, therefore, but the great modern, residual, geographical phenomena of those ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... instant the entire body of oil was a seething mass of flames, while the very rain seemed to add to their fury. One of the largest tanks in the valley had been struck, and the destruction threatened every living thing that could not flee to the mountains from the river of fire that poured out over the shattered iron sides ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... yonder castle which riseth on that mountain is a fountain sentinelled by four lions fierce and ravening; and they watch and ward the path that leadeth thereto, a pair standing on guard whilst the other two take their turn to rest, and thus no living thing hath power to pass by them. Yet will I make known to thee the means whereby thou mayest win thy wish without any hurt or harm befalling thee from the furious beasts." Thus saying she drew from an ivory box a clew of thread and, by means of a needle one of those wherewith she had been plying ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... tide at the tail of the land ran very strong, and threw the brig about. Two hands were put to the helm, and Hoseason himself would sometimes lend a help; and it was strange to see three strong men throw their weight upon the tiller, and it (like a living thing) struggle against and drive them back. This would have been the greater danger had not the sea been for some while free of obstacles. Mr. Riach, besides, announced from the top that he saw clear ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in wonder over the fate of her late antagonist. In all the mass of floating wreckage that covered the sea, there appeared to be no living thing. The four smaller American vessels, dismayed by the fate of their consort, were making good their escape. Without more ado, the "Yarmouth" ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... the steading of Waster Lunny sunk deeper into the waste. The schoolhouse, I suppose, serves similarly as a snowmark for the people at the farm. Unless that is Waster Lunny's grieve foddering the cattle in the snow, not a living thing is visible. The ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased to echo to the sharp crack of the sportsman's gun (so clear in the frosty air as to be a warning to every rabbit and partridge in the valley); and only giant Catlaw shows here ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... which any good engineer would at once have pronounced untenable! He raved, he blasphemed, in a language of his own, made up of all the dialects spoken from the Baltic to the Atlantic. He would raze the city to the ground: he would spare no living thing; no, not the young girls; not the babies at the breast. As to the leaders, death was too light a punishment for them: he would rack them: he would roast them alive. In his rage he ordered a shell to be flung into the town with a letter containing a horrible menace. He ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... frantic fashion, would suppose him either demented, or fleeing from pursuers who seek nothing less than his life. But as the plain over which he rides is smooth, level, and treeless for long leagues to his rear as also to right and left, and no pursuer nor aught of living thing visible upon it, the latter, at least, cannot be the case. And for the former, a glance at the man's face tells that neither is insanity the cause of his cruel behaviour to his horse. Rufino Valdez—for he is the hastening horseman—if bad, is by ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... other living thing, has specific diseases and enemies, the most common of which are certain fungoid diseases where the mycelium of the fungus grows into the tissue and spots the leaves, eventually causing them to fall, thus robbing the plant of its only means of elaborating food. Its most deadly enemy ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... deep blue of the sky. On the willow stems that were sometimes under water the bark had peeled in scales; beneath the surface bunches of red fibrous roots stretched out their slender filaments tipped with white, as if feeling like a living thing for prey. ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... not even a roller broke the perfect stillness of the cove. The gulls were all asleep upon the ledges. Over all was a true autumn silence; a silence which may be heard. She stood awed, and listened in hope of a sound which might tell her that any living thing ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... his mind had been terror-struck. There was a sickly, beseeching smile about his mouth. His skin, between the freckles, was as white as a leper's, and his teeth long and yellow. He appeared like one who had witnessed the destruction about him, and was the only living thing spared, to make death seem ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... woman I could not tell—walking towards me along the path which ran at the bottom of the cleft. In those gigantic surroundings it looked extraordinarily small and lonely, although perhaps because of the intense red light in which it was bathed, or perhaps just because it was human, a living thing in the midst of all that still, inanimate grandeur, it caught and focused my attention. I grew greatly interested in it; I wondered if it were that of man or woman, and what it was doing ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... migratory birds had come to know me well, and sang me to sleep at night, and awakened me with their strains in the morning. They built their nests near the windows, for the house was embowered in trees, and half covered with ivy. Even my cats, for every living thing was a pet to some one of the family,—when I think of them now, wandering about unprotected, give rise to painful emotions. But even my youngest child was willing to make any sacrifice for the sake of her country. The South ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... the campaign did not correspond to this brilliant beginning. Bibulus subsequently made up in some measure for the negligence, of which he had allowed himself to be guilty, by redoubling his exertions. He not only captured nearly thirty of the transports returning home, and caused them with every living thing on board to be burnt, but he also established along the whole district of coast occupied by Caesar, from the island Sason (Saseno) as far as the ports of Corcyra, a most careful watch, however troublesome it was rendered by the inclement season of the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Over-Reaction. Every organism, if it is to live, must be normally sensitive to its environment. It must possess the power of response to stimuli. As the sea-anemone curls up at touch, and as the tiny baby blinks at the light, so must every living thing be able to sense and to react to the presence of a dangerous or a friendly force. Only by a certain degree of irritability can it survive in the struggle for existence. The five senses are simply different phases of the apparatus ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... well, for it was a living thing with him. "There," he would say, pointing to a bend of the river, "there, my boy, do you see those trees? That is where the Prince of Orange cut the dikes to drown the land and save Leyden." Or he would tell me the tale of the old Meuse, until ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Wilds of Destruction; and to my right, methought, the base of the ramparts of Glory. "This is the great abysm between Abraham and Dives," said he, "which is called Chaos: this is the land of the matter which God did first create, and here is the seed of every living thing; of these the Almighty Word created your world and all it doth contain—water, fire, air, earth, beasts, fishes, insects, birds and the human body; but your souls are of a higher and ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... thus, in the silence and heat of that uninhabited valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion which had burned in the hearts ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and I could feel that I was still sinking, slowly but surely, as though some subterranean monster were leisurely dragging me down! This very thought caused me a fresh thrill of horror, and I called aloud for help. To whom? There was no one within miles of me—no living thing. Yes! the neigh of my horse answered me from the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... famous daughters of Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's only son. Mrs. Norton, the innocent heroine of the Melbourne divorce suit, was one of his aunts, and the "Queen of Beauty" at the Eglinton Tournament—then Lady Seymour, afterward Duchess of Somerset—was the other. His mother's memory was a living thing to him all his life; he published her letters and poems; and at Clandeboye, his Ulster home,—in "Helen's Tower"—he had formed a collection of memorials of her which he liked to show to those of whom he made friends. "You must come ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of light, excepting where here and there a bright patch of blue sky peeped in through the thick trellis-work of branches overhead. Beautiful palms, kladiums, and tree ferns, grew in profusion around us, and rare orchids filled the air with their sweet perfumes. Strangely enough not a bird, or living thing, was to be seen in this lovely glen, and the solemn stillness which reigned, broken only by the plash of the water as it fell from rock to rock, was ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays. Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs. Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and is chased or stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests picked or kicked up out of the turf. In this way the creatures ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... them looking as if any unusual matter had befallen. What if each of those little lamps was growing into a big lamp, and after being a big lamp for a while, had to go out and grow a bigger lamp still—out there, beyond this out?—Ah! here was the living thing that would not be seen, come to her again—bigger to-night! with such loving kisses, and such liquid strokings of her cheeks and forehead, gently tossing her hair, and delicately toying with it! But it ceased, and all was still. Had it gone out? What would happen next? Perhaps the little lamps had ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... sea were mourning above an ancient grief. For once the restless Mother of all the weary lands Went down to him in beauty, with trouble in her hands, And gave to him forever all memory to keep, But to her wayward children oblivion and sleep, That no immortal burden might plague one living thing, But death should sweetly visit us vagabonds of spring. And so his heart forever goes inland with the tide, Searching with many voices among the marshes wide. Under the quiet starlight, up through the stirring reeds, With whispering and lamenting it rises and recedes. All night the ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... terrible! Oh, deadly tale to tell! When the sun shone through the window-hole all seemed still and well: The cats they sat and licked their paws all in a merry ring. But nothing else in all the house looked like a living thing. ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... and riverside the western mail has gone, Across the great Blue Mountain Range to take that letter on. A moment on the topmost grade while open fire doors glare, She pauses like a living thing to breathe the mountain air, Then launches down the other side across the plains away To bear that note to "Conroy's sheep along ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... if there was aught I wished changed: yes, this room; it is too still: I hear my own pulse beat so loudly in the silence, it is horrible! There is a room below, by the window of which there is a tree, and the winds rock its boughs to and fro, and it sighs and groans like a living thing; it will be pleasant to look at that tree, and see the birds come home to it,—yet that tree is wintry and blasted too! It will be pleasant to hear it fret and chafe in the stormy nights; it will be a friend ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by consultation with divers not very respectable spirits, she found means to transform the beautiful Sipelie into a raven. Thus it happened that when the prince went as usual to visit his beloved, he found the cottage empty, and no living thing in sight but a raven, which croaked dolorously from a neighboring tree. When the gamekeeper appeared, in answer to Prince Orca's eager questions, he could only say that his daughter was missing. Together, the two men searched the whole night for the lost maiden; but neither then, nor in any ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... The land low and barren, so low, indeed, as to be scarcely distinguished from the sea, as both lay covered with their mantle of snow. Neither tree nor sprout, and scarcely a hill visible—nothing whatever to relieve the crushing monotony of the scene—no living thing to be seen anywhere, though the eye had uninterrupted range over so vast a territory. Even a wolf prowling around would have been a relief in the utter loneliness that oppressed them. All this presented itself to our minds as we looked around but saw no ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... King Minos by Vulcan himself, the skilfullest of all workers in metal. But who ever saw a brazen image that had sense enough to walk round an island three times a day, as this giant walks round the island of Crete, challenging every vessel that comes nigh the shore? And, on the other hand, what living thing, unless his sinews were made of brass, would not be weary of marching eighteen hundred miles in the twenty-four hours, as Talus does, without ever sitting down to rest? He is a puzzler, ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and sparks, and to intercept any boats or rafts. The mate and four seamen pushed off in the jolly-boat, through a sea covered with floating spars, chests, and furniture, that threatened to crush or overwhelm the boat. When within a few yards of the stern, they caught sight of the first living thing—a wretched man clinging to a spar close under the ship's counter. Every time the stern-frame rose with the swell he was suspended above the water, and scorched by the long keen tongues of pure flame that now came darting through the gun-room ports. Each time this torture came the man shrieked ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... the Pack of two hundred fighting dholes, whose boast was that all jungles were their Jungle, and that no living thing could stand before them, not one returned to the ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... stretched in a pale, straight streak, narrowing to a mere thread at the limit of vision—the only living thing in the wild darkness. All was very still. It had been raining; the wet heather and the pines gave forth scent, and little gusty shivers shook the dripping birch trees. In the pools of sky, between broken clouds, a few stars shone, and half of a thin moon was seen from time to time, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... mind upon it, he made out what it was—a slow drip or trickle of water from the face of the wall. The contrast between his imagination and the reality supplied him with a kind of measure of the silence that enwrapped them—silence that seemed in itself a living thing, charged with the brooding vengeance of the earth upon the creatures that had been ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... number of a hive, or swarm, is from fifteen to twenty thousand bees. Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-nine are neuters or working bees, five hundred are drones, and the remaining one is the queen or mother! Every living thing, from man down to an ephemeral insect, pursues the bee to its destruction for the sake of the honey that is deposited in its cell, or secreted in its honey-bag. To obtain that which the bee is carrying to its hive, numerous birds and insects are on the watch, and an incredible number of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that his blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible and sinister and malignant monster of ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pass through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within—only a few dead men prone among ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... conveyed was that of a fluttering or waving movement, as though some one were endeavouring to attract the attention of those on board the brig. And the longer he gazed, the stronger grew the conviction that there really was some living thing upon that floating mass of wreckage. He stared at it until his eyes ached; ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... precious to the girl who stroked his head and talked to him, and that it was very helpless. He learned, too, that Joan was most delighted, and that her voice was softer and thrilled him more deeply, when he paid attention to that little, warm, living thing in the bearskin. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... and one house only, nobody has gone to rest. Every living thing there is wakeful, from the master of the house to the watch-dog. It is the squire's house. All its windows are lit up and all its ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... small back seat. The level sand formed a perfect roadway, and the car darted smoothly and swiftly between the twin barren spaces of land and sea. As they swept forward, the girls watched alertly for a glimpse of the ponies among the dunes, but there was nowhere any sign of a living thing, save the few hurrying gulls. They had gone perhaps twenty miles, and were beginning to fear disappointment, when, without warning, a drove of the horses came galloping over the crest of a little rise, a half-mile beyond. As the car ran forward, along the ribbon of sand below the higher ground, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... wandered for some time round the fences of the garden without finding any one to introduce them to the governor. They ended by making their own way into the garden. It was at the hottest time of the day. Each living thing sought its shelter under grass or stone. The heavens spread their fiery veils as if to stifle all noises, to envelop all existences; the rabbit under the broom, the fly under the leaf, slept as the wave did ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the window and began to undress. But Lady Kitty was leaning out, and her voice carried amazingly. Heard in this way also, apart from form and face, it became a separate living thing. Ashe stood arrested, his watch that he was winding up in his hand. He had known the voice till now as something sharp and light, the sign surely of a chatterer and a flirt. To-night, as Kitty ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were thus fighting for their {92} lives, Menendez executed a counter-stroke to that of the French captain. Through the raging gale, while every living thing cowered before driving sheets of rain, this man of blood and iron marched away with five hundred picked men. A French deserter from Fort Caroline and an Indian acted as guides, and twenty axemen cleared the way through ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart. Her sharp, steep prow cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the illustration of the horse which I have just now used. Every one likes ceteris paribus to use the horse to which he has been accustomed, rather than one that is untried and new. And it is not only in the case of a living thing that this rule holds good, but in inanimate things also; for we like places where we have lived the longest, even though they are mountainous and covered with forest. But here is another golden rule in friendship: put yourself on a level ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... shriek of warning he rushed forward,—stumbling against, leaping over obstacles,—gaining upon that menacing point of fire and fume, which now seemed to race him like a living thing. ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... all these things shall be added unto you," conveys a thought that may be found on almost any page of Wan Yang Ming. A Japanese disciple[7] of his says—"The lord of heaven and earth, of all living beings, dwelling in the heart of man, becomes his mind (Kokoro); hence a mind is a living thing, and is ever luminous:" and again, "The spiritual light of our essential being is pure, and is not affected by the will of man. Spontaneously springing up in our mind, it shows what is right and wrong: it is then called conscience; it is even the light that proceedeth from ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... a narrow glade opened beautifully into the woods, through which might be seen green lawns and pastures, with herds of dappled deer stealing silently to their covert. The low growl of the distant thunder seemed to come upon each living thing like the voice of some invisible spirit, subduing with its mysterious speech every power and faculty, with an authority superior to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... heart, and he was changed altogether. He served a false god, but served it faithfully. He was very gentle and patient with every one, almost like a saint, and he took infinite pains with the work of his farm. He would hurt no living thing—not even so much as lash a team of lazy oxen. You would have thought Kafirs would have done as they pleased with him, but they obeyed his least word, and hung on his eyes for orders as though they worshipped ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... variety that one sees on the canvasses of the Dutch painters. If you are not fortunate enough to see Paul Potter's great Dutch bull in the gallery at The Hague, you may see the same sort of thing hereabouts at any glance of the eye—the real living thing. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... when he climbed into a tree to sleep; but as he sat there, musing over the beauty of the site, behold, the sea became troubled and there rose up to the surface a great beast, which cried out with a cry so terrible that every living thing upon the isle trembled. As Bulukiya gazed upon him from the tree and marvelled at the bigness of his bulk, he was presently followed unexpectedly by a multitude of other sea beasts in kind manifolds, each holding in his fore-paw a jewel which shone like a lamp, so ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... exuberance of spirits to which a half holiday gives occasion. In most of them the animal nature was, for the time at least, far wider awake than the human, and their proclivity towards the sport of the persecutor was strong. To them any living thing that looked at once odd and helpless was an outlaw—a creature to be tormented, or at best hunted beyond the visible world. A meagre cat, an overfed pet spaniel, a ditchless frog, a horse whose days hung over the verge of the knacker's yard—each was theirs ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... tells of one which was felled which showed by its rings that it was 2200 years old. Another which had blown down was fully 4000 years old. Later investigation makes it seem not unlikely that some have existed for even 5000 years. It seems a sin to destroy a living thing of that age. ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... mass that loomed black against the star-flecked sky but saw not a living thing. This was trying for well he knew of the abundance so near, still out of reach. Furtive eyes, no doubt, were following his every movement, their owners eager to pursue their own affairs the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... creation would be incomplete without you. From the beginning God made you ruler over every living thing. Do you properly appreciate the kingdom over which you reign? We know that these thoughts do not take hold of you in boyhood, but there is a time when they are fully realized and yet neglected. God has called you because you are strong. Then exercise that strength, ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... animals, around which the barking dogs coursed; or, in silence, repaired so far their broken windows and rifled roofs. As the moon solemnly rose through the quietudes of the sky, deep silence as of sleep descended upon the village, where now not the shadow of a living thing stirred. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... weather is utterly inaccessible from the sea. Then the ponderous rollers of the deep Pacific thunder amid its caverns and cliffs with the foam and uproar of a thousand Yosemite waterfalls. The bones of many a noble ship lie there, and many a sailor. It would seem unlikely that any living thing should seek rest in such a place, or find it. Nevertheless, frail and delicate flowers bloom there, flowers of both the land and the sea; heavy, ungainly seals disport in the swelling waves, and find grateful retreats back in the inmost bores of its storm-lashed caverns; while in many a chink ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... already proved fatal to more than one living thing, for Robert, who had got a good bit ahead of the party, came rushing back ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... darkness often it was so dark that it was only by giving the horse his head that he was able to smell out the hoofs of his comrades in the partially covered grass of frozen swamp and moorland. No living thing stirred, save now and then a prairie owl flitting through the gloom added to the sombre desolation of the scene. At last the trail turned suddenly towards a deep ravine to the left. Riding to the edge of this ravine, the welcome glare of a fire glittering ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... like a sunbeam true enough," he said. "I don't know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps," he continued, smiling, "perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... of living thing, and I walked on for a time in and out among the great trunks in the deep shade towards where there was a broad patch of sunshine, and all therein looked to be of green and gold. It was the clearing where the trees had been cut down for building and fencing ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the moment, was glorifying his Creator and his race at the same time, by addressing Him as "Thou who hast given unto us, Thy servants, dominion over the beasts of the field and over every living thing, that they may serve us and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... like a child deprived of its candy. He ached with fatigue, his feet were blistered, his throat dry as a kiln. Throwing off his hat, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and cursed the marsh as if it were a living thing, cursed it with a slow, unctuous zest, spat out upon it the venom and wrath ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... sobbing, crawling over the others and trying to get down into the center, and causing a fight. This old house with the leaky weatherboards was a very different thing from their cabins at home, with great thick walls plastered inside and outside with mud; and the cold which came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room. They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside, or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness—and that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... gayly, and how it met after a time with storms, and cold, and fog, until at last it was all beset with ice. Then when to the sailors all hope seemed lost, an albatross came sailing through the fog. With joy they hailed it, the only living thing in that wilderness of ice. They ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... bare and lifeless on every side of them, the little birch-trees rustled mysteriously overhead, the leaden sky, with its chill curtain of unbroken gray cloud, spread monotonously above them; there was no living thing in all the winter landscape besides to listen or to ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... made every living thing to be happy," said his mother; "and in this we see His goodness. Are not you ...
— What the Animals Do and Say • Eliza Lee Follen
... prompted her, for she knew that if by any strange chance the bear did move about in the dark, and if he did happen to touch her bare figure—for Indian ladies never wear lingerie—the bear would have been so mystified on encountering a living thing in the dark that he would make never another move until light solved the mystery. However, Father came with a rush, and shot the bear, and the brute was a ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... drink made with sugar-water and photographic alcohol, but it did not appeal to my taste. It was after sunset when I started Nigger towards Eight Mile Spring and I enjoyed the ride in the edge of night with not a living thing, besides Nigger (and Nigger was a ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... graying fellows, then! and help them to affront the clean sane sunlight, by making guilds and laws and solemn phrases wherewith to rid the world of me. I, Anaitis, laugh, and my heart is a wave in the sunlight. For there is no power like my power, and no living thing which can withstand my power; and those who deride me, as I well know, are but the dead dry husks that a wind moves, with hissing noises, while I harvest in open sunlight. For I am the desire that uses all of a man: and it is I that am ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... imposing grandeur with a magnificent view beyond and through it, closed in turn by a sombre pine forest swept by the river, now grown larger and deeper, dancing and racing like a living thing in the brilliant sunshine and rare atmosphere ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... with a low whine. Jonathan looked up and down the creek valley and along the hillside, but he saw no living thing. Snow, snow everywhere, its white monotony relieved here and there by a black tree trunk. Tige sniffed again and then growled. Turning his ear to the breeze Jonathan heard faint yelps from far over the hilltop. He dropped his axe and the traps and ran the remaining short distance up the hill. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... bottom of the bank, the body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered moments brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could salute as the dead man's secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in Bohemian society and even famous in ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... come to unloose the bound boat, never more in it go forth to meet the joys that wander in from unknown shores. I saw the boat lying dark along the water's edge. 'I would run down a moment,' I thought, 'run down to speak a word of comfort, as if it were a living thing.' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various |
