"Puny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one will take the trouble to watch the action of the sageer or water-wheel, it must strike him as a most puny effort to obtain a great result, that would at once suggest an extension of the principle. The sageer is merely a wheel of about twenty feet diameter, which is furnished with numerous earthenware jars upon its exterior circumference, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... flashlight must be lying. Hoping against hope that its fall had not shattered the bulb, he ran his fingers over the cold, damp stones, every instant expecting to feel the clutch of the unseen monster. How tiny, how puny he was! All at once his fingers encountered the smooth familiar shape of the flash and he raised it cautiously through the darkness. Patiently he shifted the Winchester to his left hand in order to set the flashlight on the top of a flat rock, pointing it as nearly as ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... the farmer with whom I lived. I was the child by a former marriage of his wife, who had brought me with her into this wilderness, a puny, ailing creature of four years, and into the three years that followed was compressed all the happiness I could remember. The free life in the open air, the nourishing influence of the rich natural scenery by which I was surrounded, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... of these shall puny sages shake Their heads, and haste to mock the failing one, Who in his strength could ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... disgrace me! Oh, these four terrible weeks—ecstasy, despair—ecstasy, despair—and to the world as unblinking as a marble in a museum! Do you wonder that I welcome the hurricane, in which no man dare think of any but his puny self? For the moment I am free, and as alive, as triumphant as that great wind outside—as eager to devastate, to fight, to conquer, to live—to live—to live. What do I care for civilization? If James Hamilton were out there among the flying trees and called to me, ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... looking like a giant in comparison with this dwarfish antagonist. As she approached, the little craft glided swiftly in front of her grounded consort, like a new David offering battle to a modern Goliath. As if in disdain of this puny antagonist, the Merrimac began an attack on the Minnesota. But when the two eleven-inch guns of the Monitor opened fire, hurling solid balls of one hundred and sixty-eight pounds' weight against the iron sides of her great opponent, it became at once evident that a new move had opened ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... consolation to me if I should be caught by a bilious fever in some rice swamp. The situation of Theodosia, so far from being an objection, ought, in my mind, to be an additional and strong motive. With her Northern constitution she will bring you some puny brat that will never last the summer out; but, in your mountains, one might expect to see it climb a precipice at three weeks old. Truly, I mean to be serious, and beg to know whether you have, in fact, resolved, and whether the resolution has, in good faith, been the result of reflection ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... was in favor of the plan, and a firm ally to the lovers. He had grown extremely Western in his ideas, and was persuaded in his mind that "this old East," as he termed it, with its puny possibilities, did not amount to much, and that as soon as he was old enough to shape his own destinies, he should return to the only section of the country worthy the attention of a young man of parts. Meanwhile, he was perfectly well ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... puny child!" he cried. "Wear that mask on your face when I return. I'll have no barber-surgeon boast that he ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... some years ago, partly on account of his kind-heartedness, partly since he could never resist a bargain and he got her for almost nothing, partly, perhaps because of his canny foresight, bought a wretched, puny, sickly, little runt of a four-year-old slave-girl, a mere rack of bones covered with yellow skin. She continued sickly for some years, then, when she was more than half grown, the fresh air of Trebula, its good water, the kindness with which ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... trail had to be broken. The Northland giants thronged about them, glistening in their impenetrable armour and crested by the silvery burnish of their glacial headpieces. They frowned vastly, yet with a sublime contempt, at the puny intrusion of their solitude. But the fiery spirit impelling the brothers was a power which defied the overwhelming grandeur of the mountain world, and rendered insignificant the trials they encountered. The cry was "On!" and the dogs laboured as only these ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... about it," he cried bitterly. "I'm not worth it. Besides, I can't stand it from—you. Only—from Kate. I know what you're thinking. You're bound to think that way. You were born with a man's body—a big, strong man's body. I was born weak and puny. I was born all wrong. I don't say it in excuse. I merely state a fact. Look at me beside you, both children of the same parents. I'm like a woman, I can't even grow the hair of a man on my face. My mother reveled in what she regarded as the artistic beauty of ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a purty good world this is; For all its follies and shows and lies, Its rainy weather, and cheeks likewise, And age, hard hearing, and rheumatiz; We're not a faultin' the Lord's own plan; All things jest At their best, It's a puny ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... Pope and Swift, and the author of "Letters" bearing upon politics and literature. "Bolingbroke," says Prof. Saintsbury, "is a rhetorician pure and simple, but the subjects of his rhetoric were not the great and perennial subjects, but puny ephemeral forms of them—the partisan and personal politics of his day, the singularly shallow form of infidelity called Deism and the like; and his time deprived him of many, if not most, of the rhetorician's most telling ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior. At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... glided the puny form of a little old Turk, poorly dressed like a marabout or santon of the desert—a sort of enthusiasts, who sometimes ventured into the camp of the Crusaders, though treated always with contumely, and often with ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... he meant it, too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something in touch with Life's great scheme of compensations, which she manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny humans. ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... had adored him in time past, and had built temples in his honor. They also were puny mortals, scarcely longer of life than the birds themselves. The Phoenix had seen many generations of men grow up, do good or evil deeds, and die, sometimes leaving grand monuments upon the ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... girls, and from them received his first impression that women were small of soul and narrow of mind. As they stood by the gate now, this last hour grudged to them, neither dreamed that this was the final canto in the poem of boyhood. They had been fast friends since the first day pale, puny Fred made his appearance in school, and was both laughed at and bullied by some boys larger in size, but ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... "By the puny god, Harpocrates!" the prince cried, scoffing. "That is the weakest avowal I have heard in ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... After supper was over, dishes all washed and kitchen in order, she would then go to the little ones for the night. One can see that she had very little time with the children. My heart was sore and heavy, for my wife was almost run to death with work. The children grew puny and sickly for want of proper care. The doctor said it was because the milk the mother nursed to them was so heated by her constant and excessive labors as to be unwholesome, and she never had time to cool before ministering ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... which seemed a splendid and spacious one to him. It was filled with ladies in beautiful costumes, and with men in clawhammer coats. He had seen pictures of evening suits in the newspapers but never before had he been privileged to behold live men in them. The men seemed pale and puny for the most part. He had never before seen ladies in low-necked dresses and one just before him seemed shamelessly naked, and he gazed at her in astonishment. He was glad ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... of will, his eloquent, passionate speech, and, above all, his burning patriotism, soon brought him to the front as the leader of the national party; and he now strove with all his might to prevent his land falling to the position of a mere satrapy of the liberators. Better the puny autocracy of Prince Alexander than the very real despotism of the nominees of the Emperor ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... these puny mortals! (furious). I will launch from fairy portals All the most terrific thunders In my ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... me; exhausted, spent, my life shrunken up within me, my energy burned out, a puny, spiritless remnant of the strong woman who lay down upon that couch, I lay despondent, vacant of all interest in the world hitherto so exciting to me. I had not seen Monsieur since this apparent commencement of recovery. A great, good-natured nurse kept watch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... solace and relaxation in sitting at the windows of our respectable inn to watch every passer-by on the dusty boulevard below, in spending half the day indoors, let it be ever so comfortably, or in merely turning out in the evening to shop in the puny town, whilst we bemoaned the want of a circulating library and a brass band. It was even more intolerable, as the Post had been built perversely with its back to the fine view of the glaciers. Moreover, the whole establishment was in the hands of bricklayers, painters and glaziers, who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... to it, my dear. Do you think that that woman, who sits there at Barchester in high places, disgracing herself and that puny ecclesiastical lord who is her husband,—do you think that she would not immure me if she could? She is a she-wolf,—only less reasonable than the dumb brute as she sharpens her teeth in malice coming from anger, and not in malice coming from hunger as do the outer wolves of the forest. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... were dead it would forget you in a few days," repeated themselves over and over again. His vindictive feeling against society died out in the consciousness of his weakness and insignificance. What is the use of one's smiting a mountain with his fist? Only the puny hand feels the blow. The world became, under Mrs. Arnot's words, too large and vague a generality ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... seeds of disease, he has less about entailing them upon others. And a consumptive young man or woman—the son or daughter of consumptive parents—hesitates not to spread the evil in society, and entail puny faces, weakness, pain, and early death upon several individuals, and punish their children for ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... impossible contrasts, the magic illusions of color made it a land of remote enchantment, even to the most unimaginative. And to Hanson the world outside became as unreal as a dream that is past. Here was beauty, and the wide, free spaces of nature, where every law of man seemed puny, ineffectual and void. In this unbounded, uncharted freedom the shackles of conventionality fell from him. Here was life and here was love. He was a primitive man, and here, before him in visible form, stood the world's desire. Barriers there were none. A man and woman, both as vital as the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... had fought in Monmouth's Rebellion. Pitied by the planters, despised even by the negro slaves, this small colony held itself aloof, starved, and married none but members of their own colony. They are now mere shadows of men, with puny bodies and witless minds, living in brush or wooden hovels and eating nothing but a ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... baby is better, and I dare say it is my imagination that says she looks pale and puny. She is now asleep in your study, where too I am sitting in your chair. I came down as soon as I could this morning, and have stayed here all day. It is so quiet and pleasant among your books and papers, and it was so dull up-stairs! I thought before your letter came, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... on board, but this saccharine essence of rat was too much even for the unscrupulous stomachs of South-Sea whalers. A queer set they were on board that Sydney barque. Paper Jack, the captain, was a feeble Cockney, of meek spirit and puny frame, who glided about the vessel in a nankeen jacket and canvass pumps, a laughing-stock to his crew. The real command devolved upon the chief mate, John Jermin—a good sailor and brave fellow, but violent, and given to drink. The junior mate had deserted; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... ascending, as the river is left, to the summit of the streams falling into it. Long slopes or terraces are thus formed, furrowed here and there by the ravines, which serve to drain off the water from above into the river below. Puny rivulets where they begin, these watercourses cut deeper as they run on, until, at the river, they become impassable gulches. The old military road skirts the foot of the heights, which sometimes abut closely upon the river, and sometimes draw back far enough to leave a strip of ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... scornfully, not at all pleased with the idea of having his powerful enemy in the boat with him, "such a puny young fellow can be of no use to me, and if I go as far out to sea as I generally do, and stay as long, you will catch a cold that will be the death ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... London Streets. Everything is gesticulation, and the gesticulations are ambiguous. When we think he is going to weep, he laughs; when we think he is going to laugh, he cries. A remarkable genius who does everything he can to make himself appear puny, yet who is, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... calculated to promote my health was a habit that I could not easily relinquish. So now I began to read up and practice physical culture—which I had always spoken of as physical torture. I had read that any puny, warped little body could, by proper and persistent training, be made sturdy and strong. I had no desire to grow big, ugly muscles that look like knots, but I was effeminate enough to think that a touch of physical culture might enhance ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... hand, the Hopi came into the country with a comparatively elaborate system of house structures, previously developed elsewhere. They are an undersized, puny race, content with what they have and asking only to be left alone. They are in no sense warriors, although there is no doubt that they have fought bitterly among themselves within historic times. Following the ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... was a clerk with a small salary in the Navy Pay Office, and his son Charles was born in 1812 at Portsea. When Charles was about four his father was moved to Chatham, and here the little boy Charles lived until he was nine. He was a very puny little boy, and not able to join in the games of the other boys of his own age. So he spent most of his time in a small room where there was some books and where no one else besides himself cared to go. He not only read the books, but lived them, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... voices. The body was diseased, so that no spiritual influence could work upon it. Had every man in the empire been a Christian, yet, when, the army had lost its discipline and efficiency, when patriotism had fled, when centuries of vices had enfeebled the physical forces, when puny races had lost all martial ardor, and could present nothing but weakness and cowardice—all from physical causes, how could they have successfully contended with the new and powerful barbaric armies? Christianity saves the soul; it does not restore exhausted physical functions. The ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Quixote, with a scornful smile, "lion-whelps against me! Against me, your puny monsters! and at this time of day! By yon blessed sun! those who sent them hither shall see whether I am a man to be scared by lions. Alight, honest friend! and, since you are their keeper, open the cages and turn out your savages of the desert: ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... me and the mist Is damp and cold upon my hands and face. Why should I fear?—the loved have gone before: I seem to hear the plash of coming oars; The mists are lifting and the boat is near. 'Tis well. To die as I am dying now— A soldier's death amid the gladsome shouts Of victory for which my puny hands Did their full share, albeit it was small, Was all my late ambition. Bring the Flag, And hold it over my head. Let me die thus Under the stars I've ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... a hunter—a hunter always. He may be a poor thing and hunt only a few puny aims, or he may be a strong man and choose big game. But he is ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... fairy window, she pointed down the steep to a small garden patch near by—mere pot of rifled loam, half rounded in by sheltering rocks—where, side by side, some feet apart, nipped and puny, two hop-vines climbed two poles, and, gaining their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an upward clasp, but the baffled shoots, groping awhile in empty air, trailed back ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... love for women, because I've got a mother, and if ever there was a woman on the face of this earth that deserves the love of a son, that woman is my mother. Sister," he added, turning to one of those who sat on a bench near him with a thin, puny, curly-haired boy wrapped up in her ragged shawl, "the best prayer that I could offer up for you—and I do offer it—is, that the little chap in your arms may grow up to bless his mother as heartily as I bless mine, but that can never be, so long as you love the strong ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... pursuers. High up on the left side, and rounding the rim of the cup, were little black figures. They had not followed my trail, but, certain of my purpose, had gone forward to intercept me. I remember feeling a puny weakling compared with those lusty natives who could make such good going on steep mountains. They were certainly no men of the plains, but hillmen, probably some remnants of old Machudi's tribe who still squatted in the glen. Machudi was a blackguard chief whom the Boers long ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... their puny knives with which to give battle to the serpent, the boys stood petrified with terror. Even Ben, to whom his rescue and Frank's peril had been unfolded so swiftly that he was half-dazed, seemed unable to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... read about Kings in your history-book you will find that size has nothing to do with Kingliness. I have heard, indeed, that some of them were very puny little fellows, in mind as ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various
... There is no puny planet, sun or moon, Or zodiacal sign which can control The God in us! If we bring that to bear Upon events, we mold them to our wish, 'Tis when the infinite 'neath the finite gropes That men are ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... now on the other, would show us a glimpse of the land looming darkly ahead. The powers of darkness seemed at play; while the sea, the ice, the craggy cliffs, and the flashing heavens were advertising man's puny power. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Thereafter I studied him with some attention during our drive of four or five miles. I called to mind the theory that an innate physical deficiency is seldom without its moral counterpart, and I wondered how far this would apply to the deaf-mute at my side, who was ill-grown, wizened, and puny into the bargain. The brow-beaten face of him was certainly forbidding, and he thrashed his horse up the hills in a dogged, vindictive, thorough-going way which at length made me jump out and climb one of them on foot. It was the only form of ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... Laura Bridgman. 'She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829. She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance: and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... main street opened on the sea-front, a lady and gentleman were advancing with hesitating steps, as though unfamiliar with the place. The brother was a puny little man, with a sallow complexion. He was wearing a motoring-cap. The sister too was short, but rather stout, and was wrapped in a large cloak. She struck them as a woman of a certain age, but still good-looking under the thin veil that covered ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... she recognized the distant figure of a man, dwarfed to puny proportions by the bulk of the structure in the mazes of which he stood. The man was O'Neil; he was perched upon one of the girders near the center of the longest span, where he could watch the attack upon the pyramidal ice-breakers ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... this puny game amuses me? Do I not know that you could buy a principality like this for a souvenir of Europe if it happened to please you? The one time I have been allowed to feel a man was in your country, where we met as equal rivals.... No, not equal even then, because you were ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... years ago were only known to travellers and a few shepherds. But although this great change has been brought about by railway enterprise, the gorge is still uninhabited, and has lost little of its grandeur; for when the puny train, with its accompanying white cloud, has disappeared round one of the great bluffs, there is nothing left but the two pairs of shining rails, laid for long distances almost on the floor of the ravine. But though there are steep ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... who helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... face will go to ashes, when he feels his empty purse! How he'll wish his vogue were greater; plume himself it is no worse; Then go bother the dear public with his puny little verse! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... that great day of God Almighty," it would seem, must commence by a conflict of opinions. Mind will war with mind, and puny man will stoutly contend against the truths of the Almighty. In this revival of demon-worship, the old gods of the heathen are to be set up against the claims of Jehovah. His declarations are to be made to give place to "doctrines ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... had emerged from the depths of the primeval forests of Manyuema! The reflection of the dazzling light of civilisation was cast on him while Livingstone was thus listening in wonder to one of the most exciting pages of history ever repeated. How the puny deeds of barbarism paled before these! Who could tell under what new phases of uneasy life Europe was labouring even then, while we, two of her lonely children, rehearsed the tale of her late woes and glories? More worthily, perhaps, had ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... earthly life would seem but as the space of time from yesterday until today. Centuries upon centuries have rolled away behind us; before us stretches out an eternity of years to come; and on the narrow boundary between the past and the present flickers the puny taper we term our life. When we came into the world, we knew naught of what had been before us; but, as we grew up to manhood, we learned of the past; we saw the flowers bloom as they had bloomed for centuries; we beheld the orbs of day and night pursuing their ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... bears, the limitless deep green of the unmeasured seas, the great arch of the zenith, the clear view of the sun's march, the purity and the stillness and the mastery of it all, the consciousness of the puny power of man, the mind message recalling the sublimity and the awe of the unseen Power beyond—all these things impress you, move in you the deepest thoughts, turn you from the little estimates of self as Nature only ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... under the pinpricks which came from the United States. "A few short months of war," declared the Morning Post truculently, "would convince these desperate [American] politicians of the folly of measuring the strength of a rising, but still infant and puny, nation with the colossal power of the British Empire." "Right," said the Times, another organ of the Tory Government, "is power sanctioned by usage." Concession to Americans at this crisis was not to be entertained for a moment, for after ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... will represent him? This puny generation does not produce such figures as Pylades and Bathyllus—except among those Goths. Besides, Apollo must have golden hair; and our Greek race has intermixed itself so shamefully with these ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... good drinker will empty that horn at a draught. Some men make two draughts of it, but the most puny drinker of all ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... but beautiful with a smiling delight in his deed. And then suddenly the spell that held the child was broken, and he leaped out upon the murderer and beat and beat and beat upon him with helpless, puny child-fists, and all a child's splendid and ineffectual rage. And at that the man turned and thrust the child from him in utter astonishment, and the boy fell heavily back upon the road, the second quiet figure lying there. And again the man's face ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as this Yeobright descended into the Blooms-End valley from beside that very pool, where he had been standing with another person quite silently and quite long enough to hear all this puny stir of resurrection in nature; yet he had not heard it. His walk was rapid as he came down, and he went with a springy tread. Before entering upon his mother's premises he stopped and breathed. The light which shone ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... to sue for her hand, the assembled gods did not refuse their consent. They had scarcely signified their approbation, however, when Thor, who had been absent, suddenly appeared, and casting a glance of contempt upon the puny lover, declared he would have to prove that his knowledge atoned for his small stature, before ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... escape after all, you say?" asked Phil, who had some difficulty in keeping a grin of satisfaction from showing on his face; for the idea of these seven stalwart men chasing one puny little chap was pretty close to ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... supposed that good could come out of evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly fallacy, to be combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... for she did not feel like sleep. It would be fine to sit out in the open, watch the moon and the stars, the mysterious banks gliding swiftly by, and new vistas always widening out ahead. But not with this puny, sandy little "river character," not with anybody that night. "No," replied she. "I think ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... discourse picked out of the effusions of the year as the one most adapted to excite admiration; and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their fans, you know that they are not so much impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced and the farce ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... don't, neither, considering her provocations. She were the smartest, most managing woman in these parts, and I never did have no faculty, and don't run her house like I ought; and John is a puny man and not able to do all her bidding; and the young uns they gits terrible noisy and feisty at ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... has done neither the one nor the other, his only chance of not being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated, by his contemporaries, is to continue his work of mischief, and merely change the object of his puny attacks as one becomes more prominent than another, and as he can manage to maintain his own quasi-importance by attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike for this country; so far from that, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... revenge!"—As this he said, He lifted up his stature vast, and stood, Still without intermission speaking thus: "Now ye are flames, I'll tell you how to burn, And purge the ether of our enemies; How to feed fierce the crooked stings of fire, And singe away the swollen clouds of Jove, 330 Stifling that puny essence in its tent. O let him feel the evil he hath done; For though I scorn Oceanus's lore, Much pain have I for more than loss of realms: The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled; Those days, all innocent of scathing war, When all the fair Existences of heaven Came ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... figure is lion-like in attitude, but how human of face in spite of its broken nose. It was carven of the solid rock and fashioned with its face to the sunrise and its back to the desert. No one knows the thought in the mind of the puny artist who brought it into being and then shrivelled beside it like a blade of grass. Was it intended to be a god? It has been silted up by sand and unburied again; it has been worshipped and hated. It has been reverenced and shot at, so that its face is chipped ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... lived to boast of the fact,—[This honor has been claimed also for Mrs. Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell. Probably all were present and assisted.]—but she had no particular pride in that matter then. It was only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life. Still, John Clemens must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land, for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and added the name of an old and dear ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... spent, Her cruel heart disdains what they do motion. Yet though persisting in eternal hate, To aggravate the cause of my complaining, Her fury ne'er confineth with a date, I will not cease to love, for her disdaining. Such puny thoughts of unresolved ground, Whose inaudacity dares but base conceit, In me and my love never shall be found. Those coward thoughts unworthy minds await. But those that love well have not yet begun; Persever ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... Norwegian mountain folks are big and strong," said Granbury Lapham. "I fancy the puny ones die ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... world in the points in which he is superior. He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error. Common cyclometers sink into puny orthodoxy by his side. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... near the caribou meat after the big fight. Thor was in no condition to eat, and Muskwa was so filled with excitement and trembling that he could not swallow a mouthful. He continued to worry a strip of black hide, snarling and growling in his puny way, as though finishing ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... intellect; these are the master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here—if we would not wilfully be blind or blindfold—a poet, yes, a true poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet with small ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Coward, slave! Art thou so faint? Does Malatesta's blood Run in thy puny veins? Take ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... and with my window raised, I sat and mourned, and wrung my hopeless hands. No light was in the house. I half reclined— My back toward the window. Something shut The puny sheen of starlight from the room. The Thing, a monstrous shape, was with me there, And two hard arms were thrown about my waist. For very terror I was hushed, nor moved To cast my foe off. I was in the arms Of ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... Always, his consciousness was filled with a morbid counting of the matches, the measure of his life. So, when there was only the one, he felt that the end was, indeed, come upon him. He strove his mightiest, but his might was shrunken to a puny sham. He struggled forward valiantly, but his advance was like the progress of a snail. Then, suddenly, another step became an infinite labor—something of which he could not even think. He lurched forward, and fell against a tree-trunk. The concussion aroused him to ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... was unpromising. At birth he was puny and diminutive in a remarkable degree. Weems, in his peculiar fashion, writes, "I have it from good authority, that this great soldier, at his birth, was not larger than a New England lobster, and might easily enough have ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... the prison; but the prisoners! There were forty-eight—grey-haired men and puny boys—all ragged, and stalking with slippered feet from end to end with listless eyes. Some, all eagerness; some, crushed and motionless; some, scared and stupid; now singing, now swearing, now rushing about playing at ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds? The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... this child was weakly and puny to boot; its parents often thought it looked sickly and would soon become a little angel in Heaven. But it was not so; Matthew thrived, became a priest subsequently, and weighed in his prime two hundred and fifty, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... that puny schoolma'm, with her baby face and weak voice, 'll never help you to get a livin', Ben. What are ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... Lucien, making ready their pieces, looked along the trail. There, sure enough, was a bear coming up as fast as he could gallop. It was at him Francois had fired. The small shot had only served to irritate him; and, seeing such a puny antagonist as ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... blood-hound for murder; or, if a wolf could have written a journal, the gaunt and famished wretch could not have ravened more eagerly for slaughter. It was blood which was Marat's constant demand, not in drops from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter of families, but blood in the profusion of an ocean. His usual calculation of the heads which he demanded amounted to two hundred and sixty thousand; and though he sometimes raised it as high as three hundred ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... side of a Lamennais, this Pierre Leroux was a very puny personage. He had been a compositor in a printing works, before founding the Globe. This paper, in his hands, was to become an organ of Saint-Simonism. He belonged neither to the bourgeois nor to ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... it may seem strange if I say that the artillery fire in the Mamund Valley did very little execution. It is nevertheless a fact. The Mamunds are a puny tribe, but they build their houses in the rocks; and against sharpshooters in broken ground, guns can do little. Through field-glasses it was possible to see the enemy dodging behind their rocks, whenever the puffs of smoke from the guns ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... of life runs ever away To the bosom of God's great ocean. Don't set your force 'gainst the river's course And think to alter its motion. Don't waste a curse on the universe— Remember it lived before you. Don't butt at the storm with your puny form, But bend and let ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... funny little cuss; like you, a trifle puny. Has coughin' fits. Coughs six times each fit. Spits up a chunk o' lead ev'y time he coughs. Want ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... is too egregious: But how should these young colts prove amblers, When the old, heavy, galled jades do trot? There shall you see a puny boy start up, And make a theme against common lawyers; Then the old, unwieldy camels 'gin to dance, This fiddling boy playing a fit of mirth; The greybeards scrub, and laugh, and cry, Good, good! To them again, boy; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the same tree were sown, the one in a deep clay soil and a favourable situation, the other in a light sandy soil and an unfavourable situation, the former would in time develop into a large and shapely, the latter into a puny and misshapen oak-tree. It would be the same, mutatis mutandis, with two human beings who were exposed from their earliest days to ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... announcement, but she knew not the greatness of the old woman's soul. It was long ere her voice was heard again. Presently, raising herself, she said, "I would it had been otherwise; but I have erred, I have misjudged. I thought that your Gods were false; puny creations of a nerveless brain; but they are strong, I own their power! It may be that the great ones of old have wearied of our spiritless race, and abandoned us. So perchance you may be wise to turn to the new-comers!" Her voice failed her, but as they knelt ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... for His assisting grace, And, straining every muscle, I brought round The vessel's stern close to the rocky wall; Then snatching up my weapons, with a bound I swung myself upon the flattened shelf, And with my feet thrust off, with all my might, The puny bark into the watery hell. There left it drift about, as Heaven ordains! Thus am I here, deliver'd from the might Of the dread storm, and ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... to speculate too curiously concerning God's plan in governing the world, much less to strive to thwart his purposes with our puny arms; he will work out his purposes of good to the human race, in his own good time and way, whether it meets our views or not. But from the revelation of his purpose concerning the descendants of the three progenitors of the human race after the flood, it is manifest that the children ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... it no longer requires, or it produces a positive injury on its constitution. After the period when Nature has ordained the child shall live by other means, the secretion of milk becomes thin and deteriorated, showing in the flabby flesh and puny features of the child both its loss of nutritious properties and the want of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the despatch of Marshal de Retz in his place, on the plea of her son's illness. The excuse may have contained some truth,[1332] for, albeit Francis of Alencon had received the baptismal name of Hercules, he was a puny weakling, from whom no labors could ever be expected, but rather a dull existence of sloth and imbecility. It was, however, a stretch even of diplomatic assurance, for La Mothe Fenelon to suggest to the virgin queen of England, as he deliberately reports that ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... reappears. In a moment he is standing out amidst the tree-trunks, slim, erect, a puny figure in a world of giants. He is not so cowardly after all. He stands there calmly, with eyes alert, watchful, measuring, ready to gamble his wit and skill against whatever odds ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Skirmishing took place in the wooded, undulating country between the shore and the slopes of Bembridge Down; the English retreated and broke the bridge over the Yar. This checked the French advance, though a force which was stopped by that puny stream could not have been very determined. A day or two later the French sent round a party to fill their water-casks at the brook which trickles down Shanklin Chine; it was attacked and cut to pieces.[1139] They then proposed forcing their way into Portsmouth Harbour, ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the door to receive them. Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in a certain degree to the dominant ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... shillings and six pence, and, You are welcome: with this shril addition, Anon, Anon sir, Score a Pint of Bastard in the Halfe Moone, or so. But Ned, to driue away time till Falstaffe come, I prythee doe thou stand in some by-roome, while I question my puny Drawer, to what end hee gaue me the Sugar, and do neuer leaue calling Francis, that his Tale to me may be nothing but, Anon: step aside, and Ile shew ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... experience of many observers that the first whelps born in a litter are the strongest, largest, and healthiest. If the litter is a large one, the last born may be noticeably puny, and this disparity in size may continue to maturity. The wise breeder will decide for himself how many whelps should be left to the care of their dam. The number should be relative to her health and constitution, and in any case it is well not to give her so many that they will be a drain upon ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... understand how the peasant, winning a scanty subsistence from his poor fields near the forest, and seeing his harvest destroyed in a night by the trampling of a herd of these great brutes against whom his puny weapons were powerless, looked on them as terrible and malignant deities. The sacrifice of a buffalo would be beyond the means of a single man, and the animal is now more or less sacred as one of the cow tribe. But the annual joint sacrifice of one or more buffaloes is a regular feature of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... spiritual infants are doing well—that is, they are beginning to think, and when man begins to think and question, he begins to progress. It is not the fact of these people's immature ideas that has caused these remarks on our part, but rather their tendency to set up their puny conceptions as the absolute truth, and then insisting upon forcing these views upon the outer world of men, whom they consider "poor ignorant heathen." Permit each man to think according to his light—and help him by offering to share with him the best ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... two boys, healthy and beautiful, took scarlatina and died; the poor, sickly girl wailed on. His wife, who had always been more devoted to her children than her husband, pined, and died also. Her money went, if not with her, yet away from him. His spirits began to fail him, and his small, puny, peaking daughter did not comfort him much. He was capable of true, but not yet of pure love; at present his love was capricious. Little Dora—a small Dorothy indeed in his estimation—had always been a better child than either of her brothers, but he loved them the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... profound and more harmonious than the transformation wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity, miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is possible that our race will persist in melancholy, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... picking my way I paused to gaze at the distant purple peaks and watch the sun set in that lonely land as if I was witnessing it for the first time. As my eyes roamed over the stupendous distance and unnamed mountains I felt my own puny insignificance, as who has not when confronted with ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... and their seven children incommoded them greatly, because not one of them was able to earn his bread. That which gave them yet more uneasiness was that the youngest was of a very puny constitution, and scarce ever spoke a word, which made them take that for stupidity which was a sign of good sense. He was very little, and when born no bigger than one's thumb, which made him be ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... With puny fists I pounded the panel. A small pane in it was transparent. Within the lock I could see the blurred figures of Anita and her captor—and it seemed, another figure there. The lock was some ten feet square, with a low ceiling. It glowed with a ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... worked up to a pitch of wild excitement, naked to the waist, with their faces and bodies streaked with the powder, one could understand that the superstitious Spaniards, already depressed by their vain efforts to overpower so puny an assailant, thought that they were attacked by foes straight from the infernal regions. As they stood hesitating and aghast, we went at them, while Cochrane, with the force that had boarded at the waist, fell ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... from the body, it is obvious that any cause profoundly affecting the latter might in that way exercise an influence on the germ-cells; that if the parent was starved, the germ-cells might be ill-nourished and the resulting offspring might be weak and puny. There is experimental evidence that this is the case; but that is not the inheritance of an acquired character. If, however, a white man tanned by long exposure to the tropical sun should have children who were brunettes, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... refuse, Bentley," said the scientist at last. "For then I should find it necessary to remove you. You might stand in my way, and though you would be but a puny obstacle, you still would be an obstacle. For example, consider Ellen Estabrook, your fiancee. I can find no use for her ... and she knows as much about me as you do. Therefore, at my convenience, ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... remove the glasses and place the seed-pans in the fullest light, where air can be given without danger to them. A dry east wind blowing fiercely over them will prove a blast of death. If they have no air at all, they will be puny, rickety things, scarcely worth planting out. Choice varieties should be carefully pricked out into pans and pots as soon as large enough; this will promote a fine, stocky growth and a splendid development of flowers. ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... peculiar worshipper. I may compare her to what I please, great or small—to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in the desert—a woman in wretchedness and rags. She carried her puny baby rolled hard in the corner of her scrap of black shawl. To the youths a sea of trouble looked out of those wild eyes. As she drew near them, she hesitated, half-stopped, and put out a hand from under ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... tall, broad-shouldered son, who was as fine a specimen of an American sailor as could be found anywhere outside of New England. Although he was but three years older than Marcy, who was by no means a puny fellow, he stood head and shoulders above him, and was built like a young Hercules. It was little wonder that Mrs. Gray and Marcy had awaited his coming with the greatest anxiety and impatience, or ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... broken-hearted woman crying to heaven for her murdered husband and her stolen children, of the scouts and couriers shot down from ambush in their efforts to reach them in their isolation or to creep through with messages to the columns afield, of the wounded lying with but scant attention and puny guard, weary marches away, of the comrades killed or died of wounds in fierce grapple with the warriors of the desert and the mountains—even of this young soldier within their gates, sore stricken in daring rescue of ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... axe does fell the oak; He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree; He darts upon thee as a hawk doth dart Upon small birds, so that from this hour forth Until the end of time, thou hast no claim Or title to be called a valorous man: Thou little puny phantom form," said Laegh. Then with the rapid motion of the wind, The fleetness of a swallow on the wing, The fierceness of a dragon, and the strength Of a roused lion, once again up sprang Cuchullin, high into the troubled air, And lighted for ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... were planning nothing. What was there to plan? We were under observation. A Martian paralyzing ray—or an electronic beam, far more deadly than our own puny weapons—would have struck us the instant we tried to leave ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... admiration. The wind, blowing furiously, whistled wildly among the rigging; the waves of alarming size and threatening appearance, came rushing in swift succession towards us, as if eager to overwhelm our puny bark, which nevertheless floated unharmed, now riding on the crest of a wave, and anon plunging into a deep and angry-looking gulf, taking no water on deck, excepting from an ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... gardens as if the black ships of the Greeks were come to take me. But such is long ago. Tell me, now, is the world yet harsh with men and sad with women? Burns yet that madness mirth calls Life? or truly does the puny, busy-tongued race sleep at last, nodding no more ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers holding possession of the centre of the landscape—majestically beautiful—imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have stretched upwards from two stories ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of ancestral force ...
— Burke • John Morley
... disliked its little wooden cottage, on the unfinished spire; or was inspired, or in a towering passion to live in a tower, or saw no fun in waiting for funds; and so, continually pealed an appeal to the public:—however, it was a puny, little, curious bell, with a tongue of its own, now clacking for a charity sermon; and, curiously, Mr. Brown thinks a charity sermon always edifies him with the headache, and is doubtful about going, as ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... alphabet, than, in a short period, it was succeeded by the wonders of Greece and Rome. And now, that its circulation is facilitated in so incalculable a degree, who shall be daring enough to assert his puny standard is the measure of all possible futurity? I am amazed, sir, that a man of your acuteness, your readiness of wit, and your strength of imagination, can ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... du San Miguel; no von see, no von hear. I know in my heart you loaf me; tell me so vonce! Blanca!" The music and entreaty in the deep voice thrill me strangely. "Oh, Blanca darling, keess me!" My puny resistance is nothing to those athlete's arms; he holds me close one instant and I, breathless, struggle to free my hands, and push his hot cheek ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins |
