"Stupefying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us so long together snapped for ever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... view the body, and take a drop of the cratur to drink repose to the shoul of their countryman; and to complete the group, they were at-tended by the journeyman Jack Ketch. The noise and confusion were almost stupefying—there ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... events, forming a series of catastrophes unparalleled in the annals of war, are still fresh in the minds of our readers, for they have followed one upon the other with almost stupefying rapidity, and it is yet hardly six weeks since the Cossacks and Uhlans were engaged in their first skirmish ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... free al-Islam," he continues, "from its degrading customs, its stupefying traditions, its ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... silence. Effect of announcement, unexpected, momentous, was stupefying. Then a cheer, strident, almost savage in its passion, burst from serried ranks of Ministerialists. One leaped up and waved a copy of Orders of the Day. In an instant all were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... beheld the imposing pile which had been erected by the Count von Eltz. It is startling enough to come suddenly upon a castle where no castle should be; but to find across one's path an erection that could hardly have been the product of other agency than the lamp of Aladdin was stupefying, and Heinrich drew the sunburned back of his hand across his eyes, fearing that they were playing him a trick; then seeing the wondrous vision still before him, he hastily crossed himself, an action performed somewhat clumsily through ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... that there was a "power of life"[10] in his rude and singular language; that "things, commonplace, in his hand became of electric power;"[11] and that, standing "like a giant among pigmies,"[12] his style, albeit "savage,"[13] dominated the assembly, stupefying, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... harsh, wild, stupefying change. He can no longer go where he pleases, but he is led where others please. He can no longer choose the place he likes, but he is placed in a stone cage, and locked up like a thing. He can no longer choose freely, like all people, between life and death, ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... I had noticed in her began to disappear, when she set about her preparations for bed. I noticed the old easy indolent movements again, and that regular and deliberate method of brushing her hair, which I can never contemplate without feeling a stupefying influence that has helped me to many a delicious night's sleep. She said her prayers in her favorite corner of the room, and laid her head on the pillow with the luxurious little sigh which announces that she is falling ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... the heat and exertion were telling upon the poor lads now to a terrible extent. Their eyes grew wild and bloodshot, the faintness came on with increased force and refused to be exorcised, with each brain swimming at first a little, then more and more, till a heavy stupefying state of torpor supervened, and it was no longer the riders that directed their four-footed friends, but the latter leading them on ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... protest in their native tongue, that he smilingly handed his hatchet to Coffee; while Chicory collected some tolerably dry peaty growth, struck a light and set it on fire, causing a dense cloud of smoke to rise up round the tree that contained the wild honey, and stupefying and suffocating the bees that flew ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... sadly softening to the heart. Successful ambition, gratified vanity, what are these with none to share the triumph? But put the sufferer through a steady course of daily duties, engrossing in their nature, stupefying in the monotony of their routine, and insensibly, while his attention is distracted from self and selfish feelings, he gathers strength, day by day, till at last he is able to look his sorrow in the face, and fight it fairly, as he would any other honourable foe. The worst ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... child,—a very horrible picture indeed, yet the conspiracy entered into by civilization against the growth and making of character seems to me far more terrible and disastrous, because of the slow and gradual destruction of its latent qualities and traits and the stupefying and crippling effect thereof upon ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... half turning to the man at the wheel; he changed the indicator from "Full speed" to "Slow ahead"; in a few seconds the anchor chain would have rattled through the hawse-hole—when something happened that was incomprehensible, stupefying—something utterly remote and strange from the ways ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... a knock at the door and the anxious family jumped to open it. Two negro men entered, each carrying a trunk, and proceeded upstairs toward the guest-room. Then followed a stupefying apparition —a double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs! It—or they, as you please—bowed with elaborate foreign formality, but the Coopers could not respond immediately; they were paralyzed. At this moment there came from the rear of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... smoke—caught the eye as it closed at the explosion; with some of us it might have been for ever! Twas the affair of but a second. Death came to our sides, as it were, and departed ere the report of the gun had ceased to roll over the waters of the reach. Something whizzed past my ear, deafening and stupefying me for a moment—the next I saw my much-valued friend Gore stretched at his length in the bottom of the boat, and I perceived at a glance the danger we ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... queer jumble of mental impulses which seemed to lead her always back to the harrowing realization that she had lost her father. That was the gigantic axis around which her whole mental structure revolved. It was staggering, stupefying, and ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... mourned for her father, and she occasionally shuddered as she recalled the sudden death of Jennie, and all the horrible scenes she had witnessed; but on the whole she had aroused herself, and was no longer in the deep depression which usually accompanies grief. Perhaps the overwhelming, almost stupefying sorrow that crushed poor June, and left her for nearly twenty-four hours in a state of stupor, assisted Mabel in conquering her own feelings, for she had felt called on to administer consolation to the young Indian woman. This she had done in the quiet, soothing, insinuating way in which ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... represents the soldiers as cruelly giving Him a nauseating draught instead of a draught to dull His pain. The argument will hardly hold good, for the Greek word translated "gall" can also signify a stupefying drug, and thus Matt. and Mark agree. (3) That in xxi. 2-7, where our Lord is represented as making use of both an ass and a colt for His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The other Synoptists mention a colt only, and it is supposed that the evangelist altered his ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... observation, confirmed by many others, I have deduced the following theorem:—"Champagne, though at first exhilarating, ultimately produces stupefying effects;" a result, moreover, which is a well-known characteristic of the carbonic acid ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the woman was about, but heard the dish-clash of her jewellery for many minutes. A match lit up the darkness; he caught the well-known purr and fizzle of grains of incense. Then the room filled with smoke—heavy aromatic, and stupefying. Through growing drowse he heard the names of devils—of Zulbazan, Son of Eblis, who lives in bazars and paraos, making all the sudden lewd wickedness of wayside halts; of Dulhan, invisible about mosques, the dweller among ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... scornful condemnation in Scripture was not given to the evil but to the indifferent: "Because thou art neither hot nor cold I will spew thee out of my mouth." Let us not be the Laodiceans of Europe, listless and indifferent to human needs, swallowing our whisky and our porter, stupefying our souls, while our poor are sweated; letting the children of our cities die with more carelessness about life than the people of any other European country, with sectarian organization's crawling in secrecy like poisonous serpents through the undergrowth of swamps and forests. ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... showed her astonishment. Jim the underling. Jim the off ox. Jim the thorn in the county superintendent's side. Jim the country teacher! It was stupefying. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... controlled. On Hazlitt, bound up heart and soul in what he regarded as the cause of French and European liberty and enlightenment, Waterloo, the fall of the Emperor, the restoration of the Bourbons, fell as blows almost stupefying, and his indignant temper charged Heaven with them as wrongs not only public but ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... action his professional monopoly, the lay member responds by exhibiting increasing ignorance and incompetence. Sometimes it seems as if lay people show less intelligence in the church than in their world. It is as though the practice of religion had a stupefying effect on them, whereas in other areas of living they are intelligent, informed, and perceptive. This clericalizing of the church's ministry produces in lay members the sense that religion is separate from life. They are heard ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... Offensive Trades must have a nose as delicately trained as a Sousa's ear, so that when a blast from the full olfactory orchestra rolls up from Newtown Creek and its stupefying vibrations are wafted on the fog billows driven by a gusty east wind toward the Department of Health, he can detect strains of the glue hoofs quite independently of the abattoir's offal bass, and tell at a sniff if discord breathes from the settling tanks of the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are trying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternal mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them aside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace and patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... furtive glances at him from time to time as he sat back, obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of his intervention was wearing away—it seemed like a mad scene in a theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal—her primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... which title are included all kinds of porters and ales, produce the worst species of drunkenness. The effects of malt liquors are more stupefying than those of ardent spirits, and less easily removed. In a short time they render dull and sluggish the ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... he breathed seemed crisping his lungs. Vaguely, for the stupefying, brain-numbing heat, he wondered at the figure he saw dimly in its grotesque posturing close to the flames. And the hundreds of others—how could they live? How could he himself go on living ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... an ease as Cinquevalli catches half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying. Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that there's plenty of room they ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... then we will no more be racked With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah! yes, and they benumb us at our call; Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne, As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity—the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery—but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... silence in the mine. At our feet the water was quite still, not a ripple, not a gurgle. The mine was full. This heavy silence, impenetrable and deathly, was more stupefying than the frightful uproar that we had heard when the water first rushed in. We were in a tomb, buried alive, more than a hundred feet under ground. We all seemed to feel the awfulness of our situation. Even the ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... right man. Moreover, she is his only heir. 'Pon my soul, Mrs. King, he quite took my breath away when he announced that he knew all about our predicament in relation to the Russian loan. It really sounded quite—you might say significant. Does—does he imagine that— good heaven, it's almost stupefying!" ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... whole patrimony by gambling, and came hither to quaff forgetfulness from these Lethean cups; hoping, he said, to find death as well as oblivion. By far the larger proportion of the smokers were so entirely under the influence of the stupefying poison as to preclude any attempt at conversation, and we passed out from this moral pest-house sick at heart as we thought of these infatuated victims of self-indulgence and their starving families at home. This baneful habit, once formed, is seldom given up, and from three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother's mind with false statements as to the character of the baby's cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours. Such nurses as have not the hardihood to dose their infant charges, are often full of other schemes to still that constant and reproachful cry. The ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... One felt as though Hell had opened her mouth, and the Powers of Darkness had been let loose. Next day London was like a city of the dead, and by Monday all England was in mourning. Sir Wilfrid Lawson thus described that awful Sunday: "The effect was horrifying—almost stupefying. No one who walked in the streets of London that day can ever forget the sort of ghastly depression which seemed to affect everyone. Perfect strangers seemed disposed to speak in sympathizing, horror-stricken words with those whom they met. In short, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... absolute silence. The suggestion which the Professor's disclosure had brought to them was stupefying, even Quest's fingers, as a moment or two later he rubbed two knobs of sugar together so that the particles should fall into the tubes of bouillon, shook. The result was magical. The bouillon turned to a strange shade of grey ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nose to nose with a revolver, and that one of able bodied and respect-compelling proportions. For the first time in his life, again, he was under necessity of dealing with a housebreaker. But most stupefying of all he found the fact that this housebreaker, this armed midnight marauder, was a woman! And so it was not altogether fearlessness that made him to all intents and purposes ignore the weapon; it is nothing to his credit for ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... shells on the Bosche. The first of the 15-inch came over and exploded with a deafening roar. The sight was stupefying. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter's house. The great fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go home again. Could n't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked, and could n't I go to town and buy things for ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... But did any one ever know a respectable citizen go out to meeting with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and without his hat? Or would he go out leaving the key of the safe on the open desk table? Then the stupefying effects of chloroform would not certainly last more than an hour, although the sickly smell of the drug would linger about the ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... of the sea though he was, was forced to acknowledge that under some circumstances his capricious mistress had her unpleasant moods. "The sea," he writes to Sidney Colvin, "is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper—the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the passengers." Again he remarks concerning the food: "Our diet had been from the pickle tub or out ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of the silent night had gone by, minute following minute in a slow sequence, wherein as there was no change there was no time; wherein there was no past and no future, but a stupefying, endless present which is almost the annihilation of consciousness. A change came then, for the clouds had also been moving and the moon at last was sensed behind them—not as a radiance, but as a percolation of light, a gleam that was strained ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... no excuse on account of the cost, for the money now thrown away, and worse than thrown away, upon useless spelling books and mind-stupefying grammars, would purchase a rich supply of the best reading matter the English language affords for every school in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... sun had barely disappeared, ten times stronger than it had been in the sunlight. No faint sweetness now, but an overpowering scent similar to that of the well-known "moon-lilies" but infinitely stronger, and stupefying to a degree. Before fifty yards were traversed my head was spinning, and I was staggering like a drunken man. I remember Inyati half dragging me on to the horse again and feeling him lashing me to girth and ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... I forget the last night of painful and protracted suffering. The miserable woman who pretended to assist me in watching, had taken some stupefying potion, and I watched alone, as David expressed it, longing for the first ray of the morning. At length, the day dawned, and I was relieved by good old Mr. Moore. As he entered, I said to him, "Poor Juda is ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... French word signifying a person who puts another to sleep, the sleep makers," explained Kennedy. "They are the latest scientific school of criminals who use the most potent, quickest-acting stupefying drugs. Some of their exploits surpass anything hitherto even imagined by the European police. The American police have been officially warned of the existence of the endormeurs and full descriptions of their methods and photographs ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... familiar object to another; he moved restlessly, and began to roam through the richly furnished rooms. But to Berkley nothing in the world seemed familiar any longer; and the strangeness of it, and the solitude were stupefying him. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romances and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good, thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of female England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of mankind. Johnson revered him—Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... be, and this is merely a guess, that they indicate the presence of poison in the rock-hole; for by means of a certain plant which is bruised and thrown into the hole, the water is given a not actually poisonous but stupefying property. Thus birds or beasts coming to drink fall senseless and an easy prey to the ambushed native. This is a common plan in many parts of Australia, and was described to me by a tame boy from the Murchison. Here, too, were more little pyramids, similar to those at Empress Spring. ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Blindy Buff, Blind Eyes, Headwarke, and Headache, from the stupefying effects of smelling it. Apothecaries make a syrup of a splendid deep colour from its vividly red petals; but this does not exercise any soporific action like that concocted from the white Poppy, which is a sort of modified opiate, suitable for infants under certain conditions, when sanctioned ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... was lost; a yelling mass of soldiery burst into view; spiked helmets and bayonets glittering through the smoke, the Turcos were whirled about like brilliant butterflies in a tornado; the fusillade swelled to a stupefying din, exploding in one terrible crash; and, wrapped in ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... it is possible, Bathurst. If this revolt spreads though the three Presidencies the work of conquering India will have to be begun again, and worse than that, for we should have opposed to us a vast army drilled and armed by ourselves, and led by the native officers we have trained. It seems stupefying that an empire won piecemeal, and after as hard fighting as the world has ever seen, should be lost in ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... company; yet there are times when the visit is not pleasant; and when the parents in that fine house are getting ready their daughter for sale, and frightening away her tears with threats, and stupefying her grief with narcotics, praying her and imploring her, and dramming her and coaxing her, and blessing her, and cursing her perhaps, till they have brought her into such a state as shall fit the poor young thing for that deadly couch upon which they are about to thrust her. When my lord ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... corridors, he clutched wildly at the bars, and with a paroxysm of frenzy seemed as though he would rend them from their fastenings; then, realizing how fruitless were his efforts, he sank upon the narrow bed in a state of stupefying despair. ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... cooerdination would be brought about between old economic and social institutions and the union organizations which would then be tolerated, those who thought they could incorporate these industrial groups in the mechanism of production and political society, were guilty of the most stupefying of errors. They were ignorant both of the nature of the State and of the essence of unionism; they were attempting the squaring of the circle or perpetual motion; they had not analyzed the process of disintegration which ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... ridicule whatever they hear, and with much wit and humour provide a stock of laughter, by furnishing themselves from the pulpit. But, of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who come here to sleep; opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about, that the words, of whatever preacher, become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... visible creatures passed me like a burst of pink flames, and in the midst, borne swiftly away on the crest of the outrush, the professor passed like a bolt shot from a catapult; and his last cry came wafted back to me from the forest as I swayed there, drunk with the stupefying perfume: ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... were over, the young men gave what news they could—stupefying news of the advance of the enemy in overwhelming numbers, and of the flight and confusion of what ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... to hold myself tight to prevent a start. Not done! She talked of the man in the present case, as though he were alive, as though— stupefying thought!—Charmion was not a widow after all! The thought was stupefying, but even as it passed through my brain, I realised that no word of her own had been responsible for my conviction that her husband was dead. It was rather ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers—count them—six, ten bridesmaids—ten—a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... after dinner requires consideration. If your meal is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... deceased was dedicated to a particular divinity by the aid of holy oils, charms, and sentences; a specially prepared cloth was wrapped round each muscle, every drug and every bandage owed its origin to some divinity, and the confusion of sounds, of disguised figures, and of various perfumes, had a stupefying effect on those who visited this chamber. It need not be said that the whole embalming establishment and its neighborhood was enveloped in a cloud of powerful resinous fumes, of sweet attar, of lasting musk, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lovely Ellen— had degraded herself; though from what motive, or by whose agency, he could not conjecture. When Dr. Melmoth had taken her in charge, Edward returned to the apartment where he had spent the evening. The wine was still upon the table; and, in the desperate hope of stupefying his faculties, he unwisely swallowed huge successive draughts. The effect of his imprudence was not long in manifesting itself; though insensibility, which at another time would have been the result, did not now follow. Acting upon his previous agitation, the wine seemed ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... little spot which he could call home, its quiet, its order, his former talent came back to him, and he found strength, in pure air and pure water and those purer thoughts of which they are the emblems, to abandon burning and stupefying stimulants. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Somerville, or Caroline Herschel, or Maria Mitchell at every dinner-table or afternoon tea. But give your elect lady a pile of books to look over for you, and she will tell you what they have for her and for you in less time than you would have wasted in stupefying ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Bhaina is as deadly as the powdered mainhar fruit,' this fruit having the property of stupefying fish when thrown into the water, so that they can easily be caught. This reputation simply arises from the fact that in his capacity of village priest the Bhaina performs the various magical devices which lay the ghosts of the dead, protect the village against ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... if anybody who has not experienced it can realise the stupefying, helpless sensation of being roused up from a sound sleep, in the middle of the night, on board ship, by the cry of 'Fire!' and finding oneself enveloped in a smoke so dense ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... and rapid salutation Tom and Charlie, I need hardly say, were speechless. One in utter despair, the other in utter rage and astonishment. In both the revulsion of feeling caused by the interruption was almost stupefying, and they stood for a moment staring at the ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... and her own eyes were livid, for by this time she had fairly given up all hope of rescue; and, besides, the air in the tunnel was so foul and stupefying, she could hardly speak; indeed, her tongue clung to her palate. But she poured out the last few drops into the cup for Cyril and held them up imploringly, with a gesture of supplication. These two were no strangers to ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... thus hunched together, the voices outside were suddenly drowned in a deafening noise—in a hideous, stupefying din, that nearly split one's eardrums: it sounded as though all the tins and cans in the town were being beaten and banged before the door. Polly forgot the tarantula, forgot her bitter disappointment ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. The music comes to the listener of western birth and mind, as the Malay who knocked among English mountains at De Quincey's door. You learn of Sinbad, the explorer, who is nearer to us than Nansen; of the Kalandar Prince who ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through centuries, 80 And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, 85 Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... if paralyzed, on the edge of the gulch, and looked down. The catastrophe, coming on top of all that had gone before, was a death blow, stupefying, stupendous, and ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... borrow them from your sleep. Six, or at most seven hours sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody can want; more is only laziness and dozing; and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying. If, by chance, your business, or your pleasures, should keep you up till four or five o'clock in the morning, I would advise you, however, to rise exactly at your usual time, that you may not lose the precious morning hours; and that the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek polytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes in a happier region clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational, chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposed to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and spring of which Greek religion ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... creeping men. There was a terrific explosion. Alan reeled in the saddle, recovered by a great effort, and managed to control his frightened horse. He was struck on the forehead but fortunately the peak of his cap saved him. Still the effect was stunning, stupefying. A whistling in the air and another shell burst, throwing up a cloud of mud and dirt round him, thus lessening the danger of ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... manner which was strangely sudden. I remained alone before that glass globe, hesitating to unlock it, afraid lest some stupefying exhalation should escape from it. I thought that perhaps M. d'Asterac had put in it, as an artifice, some of those vapours which benumb those who inhale them and make them dream of Salamanders. I ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... thousand dollars. She held there in her hand seven years of her father's life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now. And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it. There was something stupefying about the thought to her. She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth. She looked up at him and thought, "What an immensely rich man he is!" She said to him wonderingly, "You can't imagine how strange it is—like magic—not to be ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... turned to their front it was to find the German trenches rendered invisible by a wall of greenish-yellow vapor, similar to that observed on the Thursday afternoon, which was bearing down on them on the breeze. Through this the Germans started shooting. During Saturday they employed stupefying gas on several occasions in this quarter, but did not press on very quickly. One reason for this, given by a German prisoner, is that many of the enemy's infantry were so affected by the fumes that they could ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a doctrinaire, her observations on "Romanism" (which she dubbed "an abyss of superstition and moral pollution") might have fallen from the lips of a hot-gospeller of to-day. "Who," she asked her hearers, "shall compute the stupefying and brutalizing effects of such religion? Who will dare tell me that this terrible Church does not lie upon the bosom of the present time like a vast, unwieldy, and offensive corpse? America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of defence. The crashing of the trees as they fell, the blows of crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... the conditions described. Changes in the temperature and movement of the air are, no doubt, important in securing a healthful physiological reaction, but air contaminated and befouled by bodies and lungs has stupefying effects which cannot be ignored. Frequent ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... his hand stretched out in the shadows. After a moment her fingers touched his, moved a little, and were clasped close. Then it was that, in her silence, he read a despair too deep, too sudden, too stupefying for expression—a despair scarcely yet understood. A sensitive young mind, stunned by realities never dreamed of, recovers slowly; and the first outward evidence of returning comprehension is an out-stretched hand, a groping in the shadows for the hand of the best ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... pretty well winded and in a bath of perspiration, trudged along more slowly while his thoughts streamed precipitately ahead under the pressure of the stupefying developments. He now knew who the little German was. He was that rigid, whiskered, military person in the train from Eisenach! The same flat, wide-lobed nose. He had not guessed it before because the face, clear of a beard, had really suggested in ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... believe you," I said, suddenly. I didn't want to believe her. The thing was too abominable—too abominable for words, and incredible. I struggled against it as one struggles against inevitable madness, against the thought of it. It hung over me, stupefying, deadening. One could only fight it with violence, crudely, in jerks, as one struggles against the numbness of frost. It was like a pall, like descending clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... had no more occasion to go out for their dalliance; and even the sober-minded girls among them became involved. They did not dare to say anything, for fear of the scandal; and also I had a drug which I applied during the night to their faces, stupefying them so that they allowed me to do as I liked. When they recovered their senses it was too late, and they dared not protest. On the contrary, they used to bribe me with gold and silken stuffs to keep silence and to leave their house. Ever since then—and I am now forty-seven years ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... in a lake, and now even the instinct of self-preservation must have been flickering, for he waded on, rejoicing merely in getting rid of the dog. Something in the water rose and struck him. Instead of stupefying him, the blow brought him to his senses, and he struggled for his life. The ground slipped beneath his feet many times, but at last he was out of the water. That he was out in a flood he did not realize; yet he now acted like one in full possession of his faculties. When his feet sank in ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... a low credulity. Here Augustin triumphs. He sends marching under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying us with the prodigious number of those he discovers. Dragged into open day by him, a whole divine population is brought out of the darkness and forgetfulness where it had been sleeping perhaps for centuries: ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... truly the ladies they pretended to be; declaring, that they could not take leave of me, when they left town, because of the state of senselessness and phrensy I was in. For their intoxicating, or rather stupefying, potions had almost deleterious effects upon my intellects, as I have hinted; insomuch that, for several days together, I was under a strange delirium; now moping, now dozing, now weeping, now raving, now scribbling, tearing ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson |
