"Tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... straining ears, dilated pupils, every sense tense with this effort to hear, the need to breathe, the impossibility of seeing, he advanced slowly, a pistol in one hand, touching the wall with the other to guide himself. He walked thus for fifteen minutes. A few drops of ice-cold water fell through the roof on his hands and shoulders, and told ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... in the supporting sling; and, afterward, went over and talked with Aunt Ruth before passing out and going round to his side of the divided house. But so long as he remained in sight, Cleek's narrowed eyes followed him and the tense creases seamed Cleek's indrawn, silent lips. But when he broke that silence it was to speak to the captain and to say some silly, pointless thing about that refuge ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... this as he knelt in the stern of his little craft and plied the paddle slowly and with infinite caution, his every nerve tense, and sight and hearing strained to catch any sound of movement on the rapidly nearing point. Were it white men only that they were seeking to elude, he would have felt far less apprehension, but he recognized that in the person of Indian Charley ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... words, I could tell from the people's faces what it was about. When he spoke of the horrors of war, the losses and the deaths and the suffering that had come to so many of them, one woman put her apron to her face and sobbed aloud in the tense silence. And in a moment the whole congregation began sobbing and moaning and swaying themselves to and fro. The young priest stopped and left them alone a moment or two, and then began to speak in a low persuasive voice. I do not know what he said, but ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver interspaces, and all that tense silence of evening ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... and German, was still of such persistent social aggressiveness that in a week's time he knew every Hungarian of proletarian rank within a wide neighborhood of where they lived or worked. Within a month he had managed to acquire present tense, almost verbless, jargon with which he was able to conduct all necessary transactions pertaining to his household duties, and to get into surprisingly complicated arguments as well. Joe had to give up attempting to ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... pleasant lookes, you are not in any serious and earnest discourse amongst your selves;" to whom one of them, named Heracleon the Megarian, answered, "That belongeth to them, who busie themselves in seeking whether the future tense of the verbe , hath a double, or that labour to find the derivation of the comparatives, [omitted] and of the superlatives [omitted], it is they that must chafe in intertaining themselves with their science: as for discourses of Philosophie they are wont to glad, rejoyce, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the detective leaned forward and spoke in a low, tense voice. "Just now, as I say, I'm not in this case. Not being a public official, I'm not bound to use what knowledge or suspicions I have regarding this matter, and I'm not particularly interested—as yet. So I'm going to give you a chance, just as you gave me mine ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... do like it! There is no future tense on that score. I have always longed for a visit 'way down east.' And how strange people talk! Just as soon as we passed Connecticut it was like going into a new country, the accent is so different. Tavia declared it was nothing but a left-over brogue of the Mayflower vintage. Of course, that's ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... her foot restlessly upon the floor. The atmosphere was surcharged with expectancy, then grew tense with waiting. Alden's eyes never swerved ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... their destination. On the way they encounter various characters, some good and honourable, and others very much the reverse. Finally they arrive and set to work seeking for gold. Of course there are more adventures and tense situations, as you would expect from ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... He walked away. He was quite warm and tense now—almost nervous. It was quite clear to him that he had done or was contemplating perhaps a very treacherous thing. Under the current code of society he had no right to do it. It was against the rules, as they were understood by everybody. Her ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... his half-drowsy ears, was amused by the colloquy that ensued, in the course of which Andy completely floored the Canadian by a glowing description of Dunore, delivered in the present tense, but referring, alas! to a period of sixteen or twenty years previously. But the smart black-eyed backwoodsman wound up with the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Mr. Barker and of the red cab-driver, in the past tense. Alas! Mr. Barker has again become an absentee; and the class of men to which they both belonged is fast disappearing. Improvement has peered beneath the aprons of our cabs, and penetrated to the very innermost recesses of our omnibuses. Dirt and fustian will vanish before cleanliness and livery. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the jury returned their verdict, was intensified as the Judge, with a quick glance over his pince-nez at the tall prisoner, marshalled his papers with the precision and method which old men display in tense moments such as these. He gathered them together, white paper and blue and buff and stacked them in a neat heap on a tiny ledge to the left of his desk. Then he took his pen and wrote a few words on a printed paper ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... God; And canst oppose to each malignant hour Ethereal presence:—I am but a voice; 340 My life is but the life of winds and tides, No more than winds and tides can I avail:— But thou canst.—Be thou therefore in the van Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb Before the tense string murmur.—To the earth! For there thou wilt find Saturn, and his woes. Meantime I will keep watch on thy bright sun, And of thy seasons be a careful nurse."— Ere half this region-whisper had come down, Hyperion arose, and on the stars 350 Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide Until ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... the house was curious in the extreme. If there were quiet and darkness outside, a brilliant light and a tense, contagious excitement reigned within. The large hall, lighted by tall lamps, was covered with a thick black carpet into which the feet sank noiselessly, and the walls and ceiling were draped in the same sombre tint; but at intervals of a few feet, columns ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... reach him, and he wavered a moment. "Perhaps," he began haltingly; then he backed several paces. "No!" he cried, all his small wiry figure suddenly tense. "No! You are a dangerous man. You carry brandy, and no one knows your errand. If I let you go, I may save one man from torture,—which, after all, is but an open door to the blessed after life,—but I shall be letting you carry brandy and perdition on to scores of souls. No." And he ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... had listened in tense silence. Now he started forward, his hand on his sword, but his arms were caught by two of Lord Grimsby's men. "You will admit, my Lord Farquhart, that the matter demands explanation," said the councillor, dryly. "How came you by the jewels and rose? Can you tell us? ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... was not so ardent a lover of the Nude for its own sake as the Florentine, and the problems of movement have little interest for him, whereas in the most characteristic work of Pollaiuolo it is evident that the scenes are chosen to display the muscles in tense prominence, and the limbs in violent action or unusual posture.[32] With precisely the same interests in the human structure and its movements, it is no wonder that Signorelli caught so much of his style and mannerisms. The influence ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... the methods, the instruments, the form?" Lenyard's voice was tense with excitement. The phlegmatic Scheff noticed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... move when Patsy came toward him and delivered his oration. At its conclusion he turned his livid face toward where, above him, Patsy was swaggering and heaving his shoulders in a consummate display of bravery and readiness. The Cuban, in his clear, tense tones, spoke one word. It was the bitter insult. It seemed fairly to spin from his lips and crackle in the ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... about her. Every muscle in her lithe young body was strained to catch a glimpse of one familiar figure. She had little difficulty in singling him out from the rest. He had stripped off his sweater and stood with head well down, his great limbs tense, straining for the word to spring. Anna's breath came quickly, as if she had been running, the roses that he had sent her heaved with the tumult in her breast. It seemed to her as if she must cry out with the delight of ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... would fall to wreck, Because of vengeance stayed at Amalek. Yet strove the sun-like king, nor rested hand Till yellow evening filled the level land. Then Judah reeled before a biting hail Of sudden arrows shot from Achor's vale, Where Libnah, lapped in blood from thigh to heel, Drew the tense string, and pierced the quivering steel. There fell the sons of Saul, and, man by man, The chiefs of Israel, up to Jonathan; And while swift Achish stooped and caught the spoil, Ten chosen archers, red with sanguine toil, Sped after Saul, who, faint and sick, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... snow-storm. After a day of this severe sunshine there comes commonly a darker day of cloud, still hard and forbidding, though milder in promise, with a sky of lead, deepening near the horizon into darker films of iron. Then, while all the nerves of the universe seem rigid and tense, the first reluctant flake steals slowly down, like a tear. In a few hours the whole atmosphere begins to relax once more, and in our astonishing climate very possibly the snow changes to rain in twenty-four hours, and a thaw sets in. It is not strange, therefore, that snow, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... you're tired and so am I. I've had the devil of a hard day." He stretched himself, raising his wrists to the level of his shoulders, luxuriously tense under the closefitting coat. "I shall hope to see your ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... coldest days I have seen beggars collected in groups and gambling for the few cash they possessed, the total sum probably not exceeding a halfpenny. Naked, hungry and frozen, they watched with tense features and straining eyes the fatal issue of their throw for either a meal or death that night ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... the Latin recitation, which came just before closing time at noon, that Cordelia's perturbation culminated in a blunder that sent most of the class into convulsive giggles, and even brought a twitching smile to Genevieve's tense lips. ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... was strange, her name unknown, she came we knew not whence, But on the flag at her peak we read 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft.' And—I speak for one—my breath came thick and my pulse beat hard and tense, And we cheered with tears of splendid joy at sight of the ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... a tense whisper, so low that I could hardly understand him with his mouth against my ear, so full of terror that the tone of it startled ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... crisis, when every nerve was drawn tense and the question of life and death hung on the passing of a breath, Colonel Briggs leaned backward and elevating his chin in the way that had become familiar, emitted one of his resounding laughs. Then ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she shrank from contemplating it. Yet it was better for Yeobright himself when he spoke openly of his sharp regret, for in silence he endured infinitely more, and would sometimes remain so long in a tense, brooding mood, consuming himself by the gnawing of his thought, that it was imperatively necessary to make him talk aloud, that his grief might in some degree ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... room, her head thrown back, every nerve tense. Let the ignorant and stupid blame her if they chose. She stood absolved. Memory reminded her, moreover, of a great number of kind and generous things—private things—that she had done with her money. If men like Herbert French, or Alfred Boyson, denounced her, there were many persons ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the lamp, my white brother," he whispered in the same tense tones, "to do so would be to reveal to those who are now approaching that we are awake and expect them. Rather let us pretend that we are unaware that they come and spring upon them like the leopard ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... problems. To bring the Queen down on the circumscribed field of an E-Stat—without a guide beam to ride in—since if they contacted the Stat they must reveal their own com was working and they would have to answer questions—was the sort of test even a seasoned pilot would tense over. Yet Rip was sitting now in the Captain's place, his broad hands spread out on the edge of the control board waiting. And below in the engine room Ali was in Stotz's place ready to fire and cut rockets at order. Of course they were both several ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... verbs of the first conjugation, and proceed to the second. Belle, I will now select for you to conjugate the prettiest verb in Armenian; not only of the second, but also of all the four conjugations; that is siriel. Here is the present tense:—siriem, siries, sire, siriemk, sirek, sirien. You observe that it runs on just in the same manner as hntal, save and except that e is substituted for a; and it will be as well to tell you that almost the only difference between ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... his face, Puffed and purple, tense and tired; Pasha-like he holds his place, Hated, envied and admired. How you gobble life, my friend; Wine, and woman soft and pink! Well, each tether has its end: Sir, it's later ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... or unusual usage of language are as in the original text, for example, the author's use of annihilate in the past tense without ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... day of queer experiences. He had never before realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house—a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very normal. Which should it be, that, or—his face lifted itself once more to the ice-like gloom ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Armitage?" demanded Durand sharply; but Chauvenet stared at him in stupefaction for a tense moment, then ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... from loudness. In mere loudness the vocal organs are comparatively relaxed—the intensity of sound being produced by the violent discharge of a great volume of air from the lungs. In forceful utterance the vocal organs are compressed and tense, and though the volume of air effused be small, the resulting sound-vibrations are strong, and distinct, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... for the idle words spoken in haste all those years ago. There is no knowing what might have happened had not Fate intervened. But just as things had reached breaking-strain the door-bell rang. The prosaic sound brought us back instantly to earth, and a dramatic situation, tense with possibilities, became ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... pace she exacted. She knew by her instincts where the herds of ponies ran. It was easy to catch and halter any one she chose; no forest beast went in fear of her who had the wild-wood savour in her hair—but it meant more contriving and another stretch for her tense brain. For herself, she hardly dared stay at all. Prosper's breast under a dagger! If she had stayed she would not have slept. The fever and the fever only kept her up; for a slim and tender girl she went through incredible ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... like the wild phantasmagoria of some visionary hell. Their silent, mechanical movements, their red eyelids, their broad white faces, utterly devoid of intellect or expression, terrified him. He could not avoid the tense, shocked accent with which ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... concentration darkened Saidee's eyes. She appeared to question herself, to ask her intelligence what was best to do. Then the tense lines of her face softened. She forced herself to smile, and leaning towards Victoria, clasped the slim white figure in her arms, holding it tightly, in silence. But over the girl's shoulder, her eyes still seemed to search an answer ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... such a thing. But think for a moment! Is it not a fair guess that a man like our neighbour, who has had such a varied career, who can divine my interest in him as an author, and Mac's as an artist, will be able to fathom the reason why you watch him with a tense and silent stare?" ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the trial, the situation became tense. As the wrongs inflicted on the Indians were described by the attorneys, indignation was often at white heat, and the judge made no attempt to suppress the applause which broke out from time to time. For the department, Mr. Lambertson made a short address, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... flickered and went out I grasped the shotgun which I had laid at my side and actually turned the muzzle in the direction of the now invisible entrance, my thumb on one of the hammers, ready to cock the piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid and tense. But later I laid down the weapon with a sense of shame and mortification. What did I fear, and why?—I, to whom the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... I eat, I love, I work. Passive verbs, denote suffering, they are only the participle passive of an active verb with a tense of the neuter verb to be before it; as, I am loved, ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... happened which the gunner never in this life explained. Poised expectant in the lull of the fray, he was trembling under the tense silence, when he saw the impetuous Don Rodrigo dart up the slope, full against the muzzle. At the same instant he heard shouts of warning behind him, and he heard the tiradores there above firing ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... eccentric people to behave and profess exactly as other people do. The second is by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... and, full of apprehension and expecting reconciliation, Frank went to Maggie and talked to her of the tennis parties he was going to, of the people he had seen—of indifferent things. The time was tense with the fate of their lives. Once she turned her head and sighed. Time slipped by, and still they talked of their friends—of things they knew perfectly. Maggie said: "I hope you are not angry; I hope we shall ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... laughing and warm with a sweet friendliness, but they crashed through the room like the breath of a swarm of furies. Andrew Sevier's face went white and drawn on the instant, and every muscle in his body stiffened to a tense rigidity. His dark eyes narrowed themselves to slits and glowed ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to turn the people from internal reform to external policy, will not be certain until the chancelleries of Europe have given up their secrets, if certain then; but, whatever the motive, all the world outside Germany has agreed that had she willed she could have averted the fatal ending of those tense days of July 1914. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... consider Felix Brand, his ideas and principles and his mode of life, to be so thoroughly detestable that even the mention of his name rouses my contempt and disgust. I consider him," Gordon went on, his tones lower and more tense, "a plague spot, a source of evil that would be ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... aussitt que, ds que, peine, quand, lorsque, the Past Anterior, not the Pluperfect, must be used when the principal verb is in the preterite. In other words, the auxiliary of the compound verb must be in the same tense as the verb in the ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... discourse on eternal torment while gazing at earthly paradise. Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become things of ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... erect, her two hands tense upon the useless wheel. He noted the poise of her head and found in it something almost queenly. For a moment they were both very still, he watching and feeling his sense pervaded by the glowing sensation that all was right ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... raised his eyes and looked ahead. Step by step he traced the marks on up the hill in the direction of the dugout, and, at last, silent speculation gave place to tense, low-spoken words. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... She was still tense, still watching Bat. The cat dashed madly around the cabin twice, running crazily with white-ringed eyes and flecks of foam on his muzzle. Then he stopped abruptly in the doorway, stopped and looked back over his shoulder for a long silent ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... of a new volume of Lafcadio Hearn's exquisite studies of Japan happens, by a delicate irony, to fall in the very month when the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latest exploits of Japanese battleships. Whatever the outcome of the present struggle between Russia and Japan, its significance lies in the fact that a nation of the East, equipped ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... the third week of August, 1914, the atmosphere of every European capital became tense with the realization that a momentous crisis was impending. It was known that the French-British armies confronted German armies of equal, if not of superior strength. In Paris and London the military ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... walked in the jangling city Together . . . . forgetful. One by one we crossed the avenues, Rivers of light, roaring in tumult, And came to the narrow, knotted streets. Thru the tense crowd We went aloof, ecstatic, walking in wonder, Unconscious of our motion. Forever the foreign people with dark, deep-seeing eyes Passed us and passed. Lights and foreign words and foreign faces, I forgot them all; I only felt alive, defiant of all death and sorrow, ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... somehow state the fact, Did, with no matter what imperfect words, One way or other give to understand That woman, soul and body were her slave Would she but take, but try them—any test Of will, and some poor test of power beside: So did the strings within my brain grow tense And capable of ... hang similitudes! She answered kindly but beyond appeal. 'No sort of hope for me, who came too late. She was another's. Love went—mine to her, Hers just as loyally to some one else.' Of course! I might expect it! Nature's law— Given the peerless woman, certainly ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious—dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon. But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... into instant silence, sitting tense and mute, scarcely even breathing, while the pale blue eyes opposite remained steadily and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... situation was becoming more tense, momentarily. Many towns in the heart of the lumber district had passed absurd criminal syndicalism ordinances. These prohibited membership in the I.W.W.; made it unlawful to rent premises to the organization or to circulate its ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... good folks who dated from the time when they "buried aour little Anny Mari'," and others of that homespun stripe, were founded in reason, after all. And so it was natural enough that they should be shared by various ladies, who, having conjugated the verb to live as far as the preterpluperfect tense, were ready to change one of its vowels and begin with it in the present indicative. Unfortunately, there was very little chance of showing sympathy in its active form for a gentleman who kept himself so much out of the way as the master ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... not every one bolted, for here sat two of the colony among the broken rocks. These two had not been frightened off. That both of them were greatly alarmed, any one could see from their open beaks, their rolling eyes, their tense bodies on tiptoe for flight. Yet here they sat, their wings out like props, or more like gripping hands, as if they were trying to hold themselves down to the rocks against their ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... hitherto unheard of in that land! In the other box was an object almost as unfamiliar as an oyster can,—an oblong, smooth, and now partially frost-covered object with tinfoil about its upper end. A certain tense excitement obtained. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... "I used the past tense, not because he has fallen, my young friend, but Elihu was unfortunate enough to receive a severe wound in the leg some months after Ticonderoga, and he is now recuperating at his own home here near the Common. 'Tis not dangerous. ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... darkness her tense features relaxed and her body felt greater ease. Finally her eyes closed and ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... never once left Harris as he came down the street. When almost abreast of the stage Slade stepped from a doorway twenty feet in before him and stopped in his tracks. Harris turned on one heel and stood with his left side quartering toward Slade,—the old pose she remembered so well. There was a tense quiet the ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... that one time in the trenches is any more tense than another. One cannot take any one particular hour and call it, in modern nonsensical talk, "typical hour in the trenches.'' The routine of the trenches has gone on too long for that. The tensest hour ought to be ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... up and shouted. And then a tense silence followed, as the first kick-off sent the ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... with the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting the stars ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... a typical one. Finished and elegant, his polished sentences reached his congregation gently; not like swift arrows from a tense bow, but rather like harmless darts taken from the preacher's quiver and laid without violence against the hearts of his listeners. Very good arrows they often were from the philosophic standpoint, but seldom fashioned from the rugged essential truths ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... on the increase. Still, it is true, she wrote to disciples near and far long, tender letters of spiritual counsel—analyses of the religious life tranquilly penetrating as those of an earlier time. But her political correspondence grew in bulk. It is tense, nervous, virile. It breathes a vibrating passion, a solemn force, that are the index of a breaking heart. Not for one moment did Catherine relax her energies. From 1376, when she went to Avignon, she led, with one or two brief intermissions only, the life of a busy woman of ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... out-manoeuvred and helpless. The British fighting men, with Maori allies, marched off to break in upon the rear of the Wereroa. They filed past the Governor, shaking hands with him; the moment was tense. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... his pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said he ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... asleep in that room above—" I looked up at the closed shutters, scarcely seeing them for the blinding rush of tears; yet stared steadily till my eyes were dry and hot again, and my choked and tense throat relaxed. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... forward first, then raise them, then move them backward as far as possible in the raised position, muscles tense, and then lower to ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... in the papers that a large shipment of heavy cannon had left America for Russia," he said with dry humor, "in transit for us—for if they're consigned to the Russians, we'll have them sooner or later, I hope;" adding, with his habitual tense earnestness, "the Americans are something more than shrewd, hard-headed business men. Have they ever vividly pictured to themselves a German soldier smashed by an American shell, or bored through the heart by an American bullet? The grim realism of the battlefield—that ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 36. The exact connective 37. Repetition of connective with gain in clearness 38. Repetition of connective with loss in clearness 39. EXERCISE A. Parallel structure B. Shift in subject or voice C. Shift in number, person, or tense D. The exact ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... men watched the two ships, waiting for any hostile movement. There was a long, tense moment, then something happened for which three of ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... the gallery. What had roused him at this time of night? She leaned over the railing and peered down into the roadway which in daytime was given over to the rickshaw coolies. She heard the crunch of wheels, a low murmur of voices; beyond this, nothing more. But as the silence of the night became tense once more, she walked as far as Warrington's door, ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... look and your reputation," she said calmly, "was worth a woman's looking up. When that woman had need for a man." Her eyes were glittering now; she leaned forward, suddenly rigid and tense and breathing hard. "When I have found a man who stakes ten thousand, twenty thousand on one throw and is not moved; who returns ten thousand in rage because a word of pity goes with it, am I ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... confusion and furious activity. The face of each individual was calm and his motions by themselves were not excited. But taking all together and adding the tense, strained expression underneath the calm—the expression of the professional gambler—there was a total of ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... her, tense and ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... present tense, and the term "executive" can describe only the then actual President. Consequently, it designates General Washington as expressly as if ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... is no mean test of a translator's ability—this quick, tense scene, one of the finest in dramatic literature. Foersom did it with conspicuous success. Blom has reduced it to ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... splendours! I did not follow the counsels of friends of Jamadagni's son, of the celestial rishi Narada, and of island-born Krishna, while they offered me counsel. In the midst of the assembly, Krishna told me what was for my good, saying, "A truce (tense) to hostilities, O king! Let thy son take the whole kingdom! Give but five villages to the Pandavas!" Fool that I was, for not following that advice, I am now obliged to repent so poignantly! I did not listen to the righteous counsels of Bhishma. Alas, having heard of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... was crammed. Opening the door was like turning a corner of cliff by the seashore. Almost all, at the tables, were men: officers, tradesmen, clerks, talking in eager tense words. We found three seats. Nobody had anything to eat or drink. Three men came to the table next to us. They exhibited two loaves of bread to the others, and had the air of some one who had done something ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... The tense strain of the moment was broken suddenly by the advent on the scene of an actor who had, in the rush of events, been neglected and forgotten. The little Crown Prince had stood clinging to his nurse's skirts, ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... up a good deal of shyness, over the littleness and grace that made him want to pick her up and pet her and protect her, he said . . . Marjorie could remember, even yet, with pleasure, the lovely things he had said to her in that tense way he had on the rare occasions when he wasn't laughing. She had fought off marrying him till the very last minute. And then the very day before the regiment sailed she had given in, and the other ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... "It shows the same deep insight into the complications of the human soul [as did the author's earlier novel].... This story from the opening page is tense with sustained power and is surely destined to be one of the most important ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... tracks penetrated the broad upper intercostal spaces, an interesting feature, due to the tense and rigid nature of the muscles closing the intervals, and their large admixture of fibrous tissue, was sometimes noticed. The bullet, especially if passing obliquely, was apt to cut a slit in the muscles far exceeding in size the opening in the overlying ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... was tense, with a note of nervousness in it, which Nat recognised at once. He turned with a sudden desire to see the speaker's face. Here was one who felt as he did, one who could understand him, but his eyes sought in vain among the lines of glimmering ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus' resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them. Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... in a low, tense voice, "I must go. You have been more to me than you will ever know. May ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... tense. She was afraid to look at Baldos, who rode up as Quinnox started into the narrow defile, calling to the escort to follow. The keen eyes of the guard caught the situation at once. Miss Calhoun ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... composing my features to a deeper solemnity and sadness than usual—no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise, I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant. I knew very well the thing called a tense; I knew even then by name the Aoristus Primus, as a respectable tense in the Greek language. It (or shall we say he?) was known to the whole Christian world by this distinction of Primus; clearly, therefore, there must be some low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending also ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Hunched up, her nerves tense, Josephine kept her mind fixed on one point. She was waiting anxiously for the first chance to protest. At a certain juncture the ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... prosperous, well-fed obscurity, but an obscurity all the same—and now she was tired of it and was rebelling against it and was meaning to emerge from it. Every inch of her tall, meagre figure was straining with the wish to attract attention; every feature of her thin, eager, big-eyed face showed forth the tense desire to shine. She realized that Preciosa was the only one of them who could raise the family to a higher level and bring it within range of the glamouring illumination of "society." The child's grandfather doted on her, true, but had ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... has been mentioned that there is no inflection of signs to express tense, yet the conception of present, past, and future is gestured without difficulty. A common mode of indicating the present time is by the use of signs for to-day, one of which is, "(1) both hands extended, palms outward; (2) swept slowly forward and to each side, to convey ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... go. Yet he went not. Under the dusty front windows of the counting-room the street was roaring below. Just beyond a glass partition at his back a great windlass far up under the roof was rumbling with the descent of goods from a hatchway at the end of its tense rope. Salesmen were calling, trucks were trundling, shipping clerks and porters were replying. One brawny fellow he saw, through the glass, take a herring from a broken box, and stop to feed it to a sleek, brindled mouser. Even the cat was valued; but he—he stood there absolutely ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the father who had bequeathed him such an inheritance, but as he did so he stopped suddenly for a soft clear voice sounded close to his ear. "No man need be fettered for life by an inherited weakness. Every man who is worthy of the name can rise above hereditary deficiencies." He lay tense and his heart gave a great throb and then he remembered. The voice was inward—it was only another memory, an echo of the young mother who had died, ten years before. Overwhelming shame filled him. "Mother, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... is released. Jesus is led away to be scourged by the soldiers. His clothing is removed, and He is bent over, with thongs on the wrists drawn down, leaving the bare back uppermost and tense. The scourging was with bunches of leather strips with jagged pieces of bone and lead fastened in the ends. The blows meant for the back, even if laid on by a reluctant hand, would strike elsewhere, including the face. But reluctance seems absent here. Then occurs another, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... inquired whether there were any messages or visitors for Mr. Kay McKay; and the quiet, penetrating glances of the clerks on duty immediately discovered his state of intoxication but nothing else, except his extreme politeness and the tense whiteness of his face. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Soon it gained the head. The physician made two successive bleedings, which dislodged it for the time, but left the patient very weak, and without power of action in anything but his brain. And yet this redoubtable fever had ceased. It besieged with its last palpitations the tense extremities; it ended by yielding as ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to Hood. The latter drew Ellis down and transmitted his master's instructions. The atmosphere grew tense, and the hush of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fought for room for their games under the spreading branches of a plane tree. All around were cells that looked like horse boxes, without light or air; those were the classrooms. I speak in the past tense, for doubtless the present day has seen the last of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... arms out wildly, then, as if realizing the futility of gesture, dropped them helplessly to her sides. There was something in the action which suggested a bird trying to stretch its wings in a cramped cage. Her quivering lips, tense facial muscles, and strained yet restless bearing plainly revealed an unbalanced temperament, bending beneath the weight of a burden too heavy and sustained. As an experienced police official, Merrington was well versed in the little signs which indicate the breaking point of imprisonment in ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... his companions with boundless astonishment. Their faces under their fur-caps had a tense, cruel look, their brows ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... dislike of these parts. You will readily imagine why we are here. The excitements and distractions of city life for the last few months were too much for us, and there are some things that can only be enjoyed apart from the world. Here, we subside gradually and gracefully from that high and tense delirium from which I at least made my aerials, always coming back, however, to young JULIAN; who, by the way, is another occasion for country life, as I have great faith in first impressions, and I wish his to be bright and beautiful. Heaven preserve him from all darker colors; from the doubts, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... There is a touch of the hearthstone priestess about the woman. The force of sex has turned to the austere comforting passion of motherhood. From the children, under the wings of this spirit, come special delicate powers of life. There is nothing tense or restless about them, yet they embody action, the beating of the inner fire, without which all outer action is mockery. Hearthstone tales keyed to the mood and using the brush stroke that delineates this especial circle would ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... that followed was the face of another man. It stood out in the nebulous gathering of his returning self-consciousness like the face of an angel; there was the flame of enthusiasm in the eyes, a force of will had chiselled handsome features into tense lines; but in spite of that, or rather perhaps because of it, it was a gentle, ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... Cornwallis. Here captured represents the act as having taken place in past time. Tense means time, and hence this verb is in the past tense. Cornwallis captured, the war speedily closed. Here captured is, as you have learned, a participle; and, representing the act as past at the time indicated by closed, it is a past participle. Notice that ed is added to capture (final ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Celt and Saxon, and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton," the old European midland with its "racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under tense conditions"—not with that purpose, to be sure, but with that certain result. The conscious purposes have been expressed in the tangible ingots, the wages they have offered them in their hot hands, and the profits. The ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... staying just behind Zircon's flippers, feeling the wash of water from his wake. The light was nearly overhead now, and Rick saw dark figures moving. It was unreal, like a Hollywood motion picture, except that the tense music of a movie production was replaced only by the soft ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... end his sentences became broken, became short and uncertain, and his body seemed tense, seemed strained to catch the slightest pressure or whisper of life in the spaces around him. His hair had turned gradually white as he talked, and now he lifted his head high to the heavens like a prophet ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts. In such recreations the chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of Mignon when ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... a word which signifies action or the doing of something. A verb is inflected by tense and mood and by number and person, though the latter two belong strictly to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... behind the hazel bushes on the other side of the enclosure came an answer, a second neighing, deeper and fuller. The swampy ground of the enclosure shook, powerful hoofs scattered the stones, to right and left and a black stallion appeared at full gallop. The tense neck carried a magnificent head, the muscles lay like ropes under the glossy skin. As he caught sight of the mare, his eyes began to flash. He stopped and stretched out his neck as if he were going to yawn, raised his upper lip and showed his teeth. Then he galloped across the ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... August, 1834, the evils of West India emancipation on the lips of the advocates of slavery, or, as the most of them nicely prefer to be termed, the opponents of abolition, have remained in the future tense. The bad reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with the predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the cover of its legal ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... rose for the last time from the bench, these were fixed. His appearance was one of great calmness tense above a suppressed ebullition. Before him his programme stretched like a broad, clear ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... glitter of the mighty clouds of foliage. For a man with pure palate and healthy eye the sights and sounds would have made a heaven; but my mouth was like a furnace, and my eye was fevered. Nevertheless, I managed to enjoy the sweet panorama more and more as my muscles grew tense, and I pulled on doggedly for full three hours, until I had not a dry stitch on me; then a funny little waterside inn drew my eye, and I went ashore. Bob Darbishire met me with a shout of welcome, and I wondered what brought him there. Bob did not often visit ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... from the preterperfect tense of bend. The space lying between two promontories or headlands, being wider and smaller than a gulf, but larger than a bay. It is also used generally for any coast-bend or indentation, and is mostly held as a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... however, quite possible that she was led astray by a will-o'-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the very first class—the chance of an easy contrast. The light-hearted, light-minded Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious Nelvil—a type again, as he was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat new type of Englishman. She was a devotee of Rousseau, and she undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston before her. But, though her sojourn in England had not taught her very much about ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... "lads" of Ludlow are so human to him, the hawthorn and broom on the Severn shores are so fragrant with associations, he cannot help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, perhaps sardonically, but smiles nevertheless. In the real countenance there are ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... se reciprocal. She had sacrificed herself to him; therefore he had sacrificed himself to her. A halo of mysterious sanctity hung about her obligations to him, and seemed to forbid too close an analysis of their nature. An old conjugation of the indicative mood, present tense, backed by the third person singular's capital, floated justifications from Holy Writ of the worst stereotyped ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... still silent and the horse stopped. One tense moment pulsed through all the swamp. Then the girl, still motionless—still looking Miss Taylor through and through—said with ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... him in like circumstances, and would that at length the gods opened their eyes; then he would surely have to pay a heavy penalty for his impiety, for the death of my brother and for my sufferings.' The present subjunctive in the apodosis corresponds with the same tense in the protasis, and differs very little from the future indicative. See Zumpt, S 524, note. [107] 'Although life has been taken from thee before the age of maturity, and by a person who should have done it least of all.' Unde, the more general relative, is here used for a quo homine. In like ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... demurely by her father the Earl of Huntingdon. If Rob had been grimly resolved to win the arrow before, the sight of her sweet face multiplied his determination an hundredfold. He felt his muscles tightening into bands of steel, tense and true. Yet withal his heart would throb, making him quake in ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... be placed next to the words they are intended to affect.* When unemphatic, adverbs come between the subject and the verb, or, if the tense is compound, between the parts of the compound tense: "He quickly left the room;" "He has quickly left the room;" but, when emphatic, after the verb: "He left, or has left, the room quickly."[10] When such a sentence as the latter is followed by a present ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... left off asking questions of Mrs. Sherwood, who answered none. The feeling of tense expectation filled her also. What was forward? Was this a mob? Why were these people gathered? Somehow they gave her the impression that they, too, like Mrs. Sherwood and ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... The tense feline growl of the tiger grew more distinct. The Prince's hand sought the jewelled handle of his kris. There was a swift rush in the darkness, a crashing among the rubber-vines, a short, quick snarl, and then ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... in one instant shifted his gait from the easy swing of the march to the prowl of a hunting animal. Behind him the line grew tense. The click of rifle hammers and of safeties being thrown off breech bolts blended with the faint slither of arrows being swiftly drawn from quivers. Eyes searched the bush, spying ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... phrases in his mind needs help. He needs a Socrates who will separate the words, cross-examine him until he has defined them, and made words the names of ideas. Made them mean a particular object and nothing else. For these tense syllables have got themselves connected in his mind by primitive association, and are bundled together by his memories of Christmas, his indignation as a conservative, and his thrills as the heir to a revolutionary ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... connoisseurs had never touched her more than did the praise of that simple audience. Rickman was the only one who did not thank her. For when her playing was over he had turned suddenly very cold, seized with a fierce shivering, the reaction from the tense fever of his nerves; and it was with difficulty that he controlled the chattering of his teeth. But before they parted for the night he asked if he might "call" some afternoon; his tone pointing the allusion to the arrangement that permitted this approach, "We can't talk very well ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... a tense whisper, to her sleeping nephew—"Chris, what on airth is this here hitched ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... clock ticked, the wind went around the house with a faint, banshee crying. The figure by the fire rested there, silent, still, and brooding. Strickland observed with some wonder its power of long, concentrated thinking. It sat there, not visibly tense, seemingly relaxed, yet as evidently looking into some place of inner motion, wider and swifter than that of the night world about it. Strickland tried to read. The clock ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... the past year again showed the value of the United Nations in bringing about the peaceful adjustment of tense international controversies. In Indonesia and in Palestine the efforts of the United Nations have put a stop to bloodshed and paved ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... drew out a little silver figure, whether of man or woman La Mothe was uncertain, so fully the tense fingers clenched it. This he held up, palsied, before his face, bowed to it thrice, his lips moving soundlessly, then the hand slipped weakly to his knees, the grasp relaxed, and the image clattered on the floor. It had served its purpose, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... their places before the prisoners arrived. Every face in the room was tense and expectant; even the calloused attendants felt the hush and lowered their voices in deference. Every eye was strained toward the door behind which the jury was concealed. There came the rumble of the prison van below, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a translation ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... was sincere; he was determined to become worthy of Lily. And now the best hours of his life—hours strangely tense and strangely personal—were passed in that Kensington drawing-room. She was to him like the light of a shrine; he might kneel and adore from afar, but he might not approach. The goddess had come to him like the moon to Endymion. He knew nothing, not even if he ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... (The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith), bastards (Antony; Le Fils Naturel), ex-convicts (John Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton |
