"Giant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... burning desert that surrounded its course, fringed by a belt of withered trees, like a monument sacred to the memory of a dead river. We had seen the sudden rush of waters when, in the still night, the mysterious stream had invaded the dry bed, and swept all before it like an awakened giant; we knew at that moment "the rains were falling in Abyssinia," although the sky above us was without a cloud. We had subsequently witnessed that tremendous rainfall, and seen the Atbara at its grandest flood. We had traced each river, and crossed each tiny stream, that fed the mighty Atbara ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... P. roseum have handsome, daisy-like flowers in white and various shades of pink, up to red, in single and semi-double forms, but they seldom live long. A raised bed suits them best. P. uliginosum, the giant white daisy, ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... Those giant mountains inwardly were moved, But never made an outward change of place; Not so the mountain-giants—(as behoved A more alert and locomotive race), Hearing a clatter which they disapproved, They ran straight forward ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear. And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame; Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came. It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge; Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge. Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled; Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled. There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... considered to be "way out" or "blue sky"—in short, farfetched. Yet they include the ideas of men with solid scientific training as well as vision. For example, Germany's great rocket pioneer, Prof. Hermann Oberth, "has proposed that a giant mirror in space (some 60 miles in diameter) could be used militarily to burn an enemy country on Earth. For peaceful purposes, however, such a space mirror could be used to melt icebergs and alter temperatures."[14] Another reputable ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... Unusual breadth and fulness of the spiritual life is the distinction of the epoch. This variety of mental traits combined in a marvelous union to form the great personality of Maimonides, the crown of a glorious period. With one "Strong Hand," this intellectual giant brought order out of the Talmudic chaos, which at his word was transformed into a symmetrical, legal system; with the other, he "guided the Perplexed" through the realm of faith and knowledge. For rationalistic clarity and breadth of view no counterpart to the religio-philosophic ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... a giant arm of land reached out into the water, high and stark and rocky; further on a group of white farallones lay in the tossing foam and over them great flocks of seabirds dipped and circled. Finally, along the coast to the northward, they descried those chalk cliffs ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... him the hero of the Old Empire. Myths gathered about his name, which, softened into Sesostris, became a favourite One in the mouths of Egyptian minstrels and minnesingers. Usurtasen grew to be a giant more than seven feet high, who conquered, not only all Ethiopia, but also Europe and Asia; his columns were said to be found in Palestine, Asia Minor, Scythia, and Thrace; he left a colony at Colchis, the city of ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... nostrils as the atmosphere of a laundry on ironing day. Beyond and above the trees a fiery blast blew from the north; but it was seldom a wandering puff stooped to flutter the edges of the tents in the little hollow among the trees. And into this empty basin poured a vertical sun, as if through some giant lens which had burnt a hole in the heart of the scrub. Lulled by the faint perpetual murmur of leaf and branch, without a sound from bird or beast to break its soothing monotone, the two men lay down within a few yards, though out of sight, of each other. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... wait, A few leagues out of Rome. Men go to Rome, Not always to return — but not that now. Meanwhile, I seem to think you look at me With eyes that are at last more credulous Of my identity. You remark in me No sort of leaping giant, though some words Of mine to you from Corinth may have leapt A little through your eyes into your soul. I trust they were alive, and are alive Today; for there be none that shall indite So much of nothing as the man of words Who writes in the Lord's ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... a greater souled or doughtier tailor than little Neal Malone. Though but four feet; four in height, he paced the earth with the courage and confidence of a giant; nay, one would have imagined that he walked as if he feared the world itself was about to give way under him. Lot none dare to say in future that a tailor is but the ninth part of a man. That reproach has been gloriously taken away from ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... performed in the short days of October in a carriage and four (I was with Mr. Marshall), supplied my memory with so few images that were new and with so little motive to write. The lines, however, in this poem, 'Thou too he heard, lone eagle!' &c., were suggested near the Giant's Causeway, or rather at the promontory of Fairhead, where a pair of eagles wheeled above our heads, and darted off as if to hide themselves in a blaze of sky made ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... unhallow'd crowd avaunt! Keep holy silence; strains unknown Till now, the Muses' hierophant, I sing to youths and maids alone. Kings o'er their flocks the sceptre wield; E'en kings beneath Jove's sceptre bow: Victor in giant battle-field, He moves all nature with his brow. This man his planted walks extends Beyond his peers; an older name One to the people's choice commends; One boasts a more unsullied fame; One plumes him on ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... made no reply, as a geologist, perhaps, would have done. At any rate the wonderful phenomenon existed before our eyes, explanation or no explanation. We learned afterwards that the river formed by the giant fountain passed through a gap in the hills to the seaward, and the more I reflected upon Edmund's idea the more acceptable I ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... movement as if she would have fled; but suddenly the person who sat beside her was no longer an infirm old man. He who a minute before had scarcely strength to mutter out a few sentences, and reclined against the arbour trembling like an aspen, sprang up with the force of a giant, and drew her ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... the mobility of the intelligence conforming exactly to the mobility of things. It is the moving continuity of our attention to life. But now, let us take Don Quixote setting out for the wars. The romances he has been reading all tell of knights encountering, on the way, giant adversaries. He therefore must needs encounter a giant. This idea of a giant is a privileged recollection which has taken its abode in his mind and lies there in wait, motionless, watching for ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... fairies or "good people," the remains attributed to the giants are of a different character and probably of a later date. In some places, however, a mound similar to those often connected with fairies is associated with a giant, as is the case at Sessay parish, near Thirsk,[A] and at Fyfield in Wiltshire. The chambered tumulus at Luckington is spoken of as the Giant's Caves, and that at Nempnet in Somersetshire as the Fairy's Toot. In Denmark, tumuli seem to be described indifferently as Zettestuer (Giants' Chambers) ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... than the Genius of the nation. And by and by, when the building shall be quite complete, and shrubbery shall have grown in the new grounds, when the almond and the tulip tree and that burning bush the scarlet Japan quince, shall have come to blossom there, and the giant magnolia shall lift its snowy urns of incense about the spot, imagination will be able to conjure up no image of majesty and beauty eclipsing the reality. For all this and much more is now under way: streets have been ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... miners in order to deceive their fair visitors. Erroneous ideas of the richness of auriferous dirt resulting therefrom. Rarity of lucky strikes. Claim yielding ten dollars a day considered valuable. Consternation and near-disaster in the author's cabin. Trunk of forest giant rolls down hill. Force broken by rock near cabin. Terror of careless woodman. Another narrow escape at Smith's Bar. Pursuit and escape of woodman. Two sudden deaths at Indian Bar. Inquest in the open. Cosmopolitan gathering thereat. Wife of one of the deceased an ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... from her breast, spread her wings, and, with a laugh of sheer delight, flew rapidly up into the air. I stood watching her, my heart beating fast. Up—up she went into the gray haze of the sky. Then I could see her spread her great wings, motionless, a giant bird soaring ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... first wife had been Miss Martin, a North Carolina lady, who was the mother of his two young sons, who inherited from her a plantation which had belonged to her father in Lawrence County, Mississippi, on which there were upward of a hundred slaves. The "Little Giant's" second wife was Miss Ada Cutts, a Washington belle, the daughter of Richard Cutts, who was for twelve years a Representative from Maine when it was a district of Massachusetts, and afterward Comptroller of the Treasury. Miss Cutts was tall, very beautiful, and well qualified ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Lady's lighted oriel shines A giant glowworm in the odorous gloom. Ah, stands she smiling there in loose white gown, Hearing the music of her future drown The stillness and hushed whispering of the vines, Whose lattice-clasping ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... thoughts and of his life. William Farel heard talk of another young man, his contemporary and neighbor, Peter du Terrail, even now almost famous under the name of Bayard. "Such sons," was said in his hearing, "are as arrows in the hand of a giant; blessed is he who has his quiver full of them!" Young Farel pressed his father to let him go too and make himself a man in the world. The old gentleman would willingly have permitted his son to take up such a life as Bayard's; but it was towards the University of Paris, "that mother ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... obeying the advice of his friends, in the hope of recovering his health under warmer skies than those of his native land, but the effort was futile. It was of no use his trying to shake off his malady of heart and body by a change of air. He carried his giant about with him, if we may apply to his condition the expressive and melancholy words which Emerson used with a different application. Scott was little over sixty years of age when he died—a time of life at which, according to our ideas of longevity at the present day, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... may think to the chief person in it. All high parliamentary people will doubtless so think, and the wives and daughters of such. The Titans warring against the gods had been for awhile successful. Typhoeus and Mimas, Porphyrion and Rhoecus, the giant brood of old, steeped in ignorance and wedded to corruption, had scaled the heights of Olympus, assisted by that audacious flinger of deadly ponderous missiles, who stands ever ready armed with his terrific sling—Supplehouse, the Enceladus of the press. And in this universal ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... day at Burnham Breaker. The sun of midsummer beat fiercely upon the long and sloping roofs and against the coal-black sides of the giant building. ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... the patriots, a huge fellow, almost a giant, with heavy, coarse fists and broad shoulders that obviously suggested coal-heaving, had, after a few satirical observations, dragged one of the empty wine barrels to Merlin's table, and ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... lianes which hung to the very earth, often without a knot or leaf. Once in the tree, you were within a new world, suspended between heaven and earth, and as Cary said, no wonder if, like Jack when he climbed the magic bean-stalk, you had found a castle, a giant, and a few acres of well-stocked park, packed away somewhere amid that labyrinth of timber. Flower-gardens at least were there in plenty; for every limb was covered with pendent cactuses, gorgeous orchises, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works. One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... always sided with the emigrants; he would be talking to me of past times; he was for Josephine! My wife, Duroc, is near her confinement; I shall have a son, I am sure!... Bourrienne is not a man of the day; I have made giant strides since he left France; in short, I do not want to see him. He is a grumbler by nature; and you know, my dear Duroc, I do not like men ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... fairy tales, all in dull blue and gold and scarlet and silver. From the door to the closet there was the story of "The Fair One with Golden Locks;" from closet to bookcase, ran "Puss in Boots;" from bookcase to fireplace, was "Jack the Giant-killer;" and on the other side of the room were "Hop o' my Thumb," "The ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on now in a kind of dream, quite apart from all usual feelings of this world. The earth itself seemed far away, and he was toiling among vastnesses, himself a giant with colossal frame and huge, sprawling limbs. It was like a gruesome vision of the night, when the body is an elusive, stupendous mass that falls into space after a confused struggle with immensities. It was all mechanical, vague, almost ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... imaginative genius of the phrase in which he speaks of friendship developed by common dangers and hardships as "a fine, hearty, roaring, mirthful sort of thing, like an open fire of whole pine trees in a giant's castle?" ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... for it by no means tended to soften his opposition. When parliament met, indeed, he took his place in the house of lords, vigorous and more eloquent than ever, and the administration was doomed to feel his power, like that of a giant refreshed with wine. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of a giant Hun, There stood a dwarf, misshapen and uncouth. His lifted eyes seemed asking: 'Why, in sooth, Was I not fashioned like this mighty one? Would God show favour to an older son Like earthly kings, and beggar without ruth Another, who sinned ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... torn and distracted by her promise. Now and then an awful shudder took her in a giant grasp, and she thought she would drop down and ask them to leave her. Savignon would stay behind, if she proposed that. What if he had not gone to the Hurons? Frightful stories of torture she had heard rushed ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... their voice again, where they ripple gaily over yon gravelly shallow. On the left, the hill slopes gently down to the margin of the stream. On the right is a green level, a smiling meadow; grass of the richest decks the side of the slope; mighty trees also adorn it, giant elms, the nearest of which, when the sun is nigh its meridian, fling a broad shadow on the face of the pool; through yon vista you catch a glimpse of the ancient brick of an old English hall." This old hall stood on the site of an older hearthstead called the Earl's ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... but only for a moment, turned and fled. There were a hundred things he had wanted to say to her, a hundred questions he had wanted to ask. But off she ran along the margin of the wood, and where a giant elm stood, a forest outpost at a salient, paused and waved ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... evening came we had gone forward only a short distance. We had come to a rather open space, and here the men proposed making camp. Great smooth-worn boulders lay strewn about as if flung at random from some giant hand. A dry, black, leaflike substance patched their surfaces, and this George told me is the wakwanapsk which the Indians in their extremity of hunger use for broth. Though black and leaflike when mature, it is, in its beginning, like a ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... Bible; learn Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Saxon law; learn Italian and Hebrew; and study economics, politics, history, logic, rhetoric, and poetry by reading selected ancient authors. What Rabelais suggested in jest for his giant, Milton adopted as a program for the school. In addition, in thoroughly characteristic modern English fashion, he makes careful provision for daily exercise and play. Aside, though, from its impossibility of accomplishment except by a superior ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... know its wondrous beauty, and as calm as if no wind strong enough to make a violet tremble could ever breathe upon its face; yet near, in vivid contrast, stands a craggy peak, towering up, up, toward the deep blue sky, so broken and so black that it seems like the very Giant Despair of mountains, frowning with unearthly fierceness upon his gentle neighbor, who returns his grim looks with meek and placid trust. Where whirlwinds and tempests await the signal for howling desolation, stands the beautiful colossal image of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... conscious only of a giant form lurching, red-eyed and yelling, out of the turmoil, of brown hands that clutched her arms, and of another form which shot past her. For the second time in a few moments one man had reached for her and another ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the breeze—Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is ingeniously made to revolve ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... definitely a Greek and Etruscan bearing; I do not know how to blazon it;) concentric bands, argent and sable. This is one of the remains of the Greek expressions of storm; hail, or the Trinacrian limbs, being put on the giant's shields also. It is connected besides with the Cretan labyrinth, and the circles of the Inferno. 3. Parted per fesse, gules and vai (I don't know if vai means grey—not ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... speak truth, men act, that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant, When you call DESDEMONA, enter GIANT. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... he attempted to scramble to his knees, and before Nick could prevent him had even done this, trying to strike back in return. The boy was furious because of having been dealt such a foul blow; he would have leaped at the giant just ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... epoch—these later years—took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance—what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a moment of those days at Cruta. Did I not refuse to confess you? Why? You know! Because of those long, dreamy days we spent together, not as priest and penitent, but as man and woman. Do you remember them—the cliffs, with their giant shadows standing out across the blue waters of the harbour; the hollows, where we sat amongst the perfumed wild flowers, gazing across the sea, and watching the white sails in the distance; the nights, with their white moonlight and silent grandeur! Ay, Adrea! ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... me was strange and novel. The dark forest towering above our heads, the flickering flames casting an uncertain light on the giant trunks, and the tracery of sepos or twisting vines, which interlaced the branches and hung down in festoons and ropelike lines to the ground, along which they ran, often assuming the appearance of huge serpents; indeed, more than once, as I paced up and ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... the tiger in his desert lair— Now half the world! Beholding with dismay That Human Freedom is the tiger's prey, A giant, down whose shoulders, broad and bare, The long, thick, crimson flow is Sampson's hair, Makes haste to clutch the beast. Oh, how the clay beneath their struggle, reddens, night and day, Till lies the beast, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... he call'd to a wrong-maddened people, and swore[B] Their name in the map should never be more: Dire came the laugh, and smote worse than before. Were earthquake a giant, up-thrusting his head And o'erlooking the nations, not worse ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... again we passed between acres and acres of taro-patches where the water mirrored the large bright stars and the arrow-shaped leaves cast sharp-pointed shadows. We rode through the quiet little village of Waialua, sleeping beneath the shade of giant pride-of-India and kukui trees, without meeting any one, and forded the Waialua River just where it flows over silver sands into the sea. As we paused to let our horses drink I looked up at the cluster of cocoanut palms that grew upon the bank, and noticed how distinctly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... stairway that opened immediately from the Porta della Carta the Venetians came and went—nobles old and young; the people, bringing wrongs to be adjusted, or favors to be granted, or some secret message for the terrible Bocca di Leone; the people, rich and poor, in continuous tread upon this Giant Stairway, guarded by the gods of war and of the sea; the winged Lion enthroned above, just over the landing where the elected noble dons the rank of Serenissimo—this kaleidoscopic epitome of the life of the Republic ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the plate-mill, where giant hammers resounded, and steel plates of several inches' thickness were chopped and sliced like pieces of cheese. Here the spectator stared about him in bewilderment and clung to his guide for safety; huge travelling cranes groaned overhead, and infernal engines made deafening ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... boys stood looking at the rolling Hudson below them, watching the ferry-boats come and go, like huge shuttles in a giant loom, following the movements of steamers, and tugs and tow-boats, and tracing the circling flight of the gulls, they forgot entirely the errand that had brought them. Presently their ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... a long way in those still parts, and as he hurried Gulo heard, far, far behind in the forest, the faint, distant whir of a cock-capercailzie—the feathered giant of the woods—rising. It was only a whisper, almost indistinguishable to our ears, but enough, quite enough, for him. Taken in conjunction with the mysterious shifting of the elk and the red deer and the reindeer and the wolf, it was more than ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Pickett, owner of the Excelsior Boarding-House. The policeman's name was Grogan. He was a genial giant, a terror to the riotous element of the waterfront, but obviously ill at ease in the presence of death. He drew in his breath, wiped his forehead, and whispered: "Look ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... Mother Adolf. "You and Bello may take them out to the path and wait there until the cattle have passed by. Then you must fall in behind them with Father and Fritz and go with them as far as the Giant Pine Tree that stands at the parting of the paths. Father and Fritz will leave you there, and you and Leneli must go on alone. You are sure you know the way?" She looked anxiously ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... one so deeply concerning the most vital prosperity of the United States, was never before submitted to the consideration of her citizens. If entertained by Government and the people on a great, enterprising, and vigorous scale, as such schemes were planned and executed by the giant minds of antiquity, it may be made productive of such vast benefits, that in a few years at most, the millions of Americans may look back to this war as one of the greatest blessings that ever befell humanity, and Jefferson ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... all know certainly that they are not what the old Northmen believed them to be, but are God's workmen, a part of Nature's family, employed to work in the great garden of the world; but, whenever we look at their work, we cannot fail to admit that to do it needed a giant's strength, and ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... pray, use such a monstrous sword, Captain Studdiford? It must have been made for a giant." "It was; it was my great-great- grand-father's over a century ago. See! It is serviceable, even in my weak hand." He pulled the gleaming blade, long and heavy, from its scabbard, and swept it downward through the air so fiercely that it ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... The last named is the highest part of the spur, and is located in the township of Alford. The view from Tom Ball is very fine. A perfect panorama of hills, with handsome towns and villages nestling in the valleys, is spread out before the eyes, while the southern horizon is filled by the giant piles in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... now came. A delightful place, this home for destitute Orientals; for it has a veranda and a compound, stone beds and caged cubicles, no baths and a billiard-table; and extraordinary precautions are taken against indulgence of the wicked tastes of its guests. Grouped about the giant stove are Asiatics of every country in wonderful toilet creations. A mild-eyed Hindoo, lacking a turban, has appropriated a bath-towel. A Malay appears in white cotton trousers, frock-coat, brown boots, and straw hat; ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... successfully on the eastern frontier. Haspinger wished to invade the country of their foes, but was restrained by his more prudent associate. Speckbacher is described as an open-hearted, fine-spirited fellow, with the strength of a giant, and the best marksman in the country. So keen was his vision that he could distinguish the bells on the necks of the cattle at the distance of half ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... ferries and bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave with its swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and bridged hereafter, again and again, but its mere size will keep it savage, just as a giant, though ever so amiable and good-natured, could not imaginably be civilized as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among rivers the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average, and is therefore perfectly proportioned to the little continent of which it is the Amazon or the Mississippi. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... men, still holding the bobbing torches. The mourners who rode behind did not escape so easily, for their long skirts and cloaks hindered them from moving, and Don Quixote struck and beat them just as he would, till they took him to be a giant or ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... damaged, the giant vessel was reported as still afloat, but whether she could reach port or shoal water was uncertain. The White Star officials declared that the Titanic was in no immediate danger of sinking, because of ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... much. It's because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I've learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It's simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Christ was as white of face as his robe. He visibly cowered and shrank before the coming of the giant figure of the World's Dictator, as the latter strode in three long strides ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fatten them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the intellect of that pismire. He shook the reefs out of his legs; he scratched the reverse of his ear; he grappled that cereal, and trotted away like a giant refreshed. It was observed that he submitted with a wealth of patience to manipulation by his friends and neighbours, and went some distance out of his way to shake hands with strangers on competing ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... the sky, and a few slant rays were shot through the gaps in the mountain ridge, gilding the evergreen foliage of the holm-oaks with bright lustre, and warming the cold grey stones which cumbered the sides and summits of the giant hills; but all the level country at their feet was ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... mewed like a furious cat; the detonations came closer, then retired methodically, like the footsteps of a giant on guard around us, above ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... foot through quiet country lanes. Through the trees, the glimmer of the searchlights' flashes comes and goes like giant fireflies. The clear notes of a nightingale ring out in the stillness of the night. Nestling in the valley lies a large town, which only a fortnight ago was filled with civilians, 'redeemed Italians,' who had enjoyed eight months of prosperity and liberty under Italian rule. Now these have ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the notion that all the nebulae we see, including our own, which we call the Milky Way, may be particles of snuff in the box of a giant of a proportionately {192} larger universe. Of course the minim of time—a million of years or whatever the geologists make it[335]—which our little affair has lasted, is but a very small fraction of a second to the great creature in ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... now giving way to the oil tradition. The Texas myth as imagined by non-Texans is coming to embody oil millionaires in airplanes instead of horsemen with six-shooters and rifles. See Edna Ferber's Giant (1952 novel). Nevertheless, many Texans who never rode a horse over three miles at a stretch wear cowboy boots, and a lot of Texans are under the delusion that bullets and atomic bombs can settle complexities that demand informed intelligence ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... strange din of harsh gutturals and singular sibilation. Instead of the decorous tread and stately mien of the cavaliers of the former vision, they came pushing, bustling, panting, and swaggering. And as they passed, the good Father noticed that giant trees were prostrated as with the breath of a tornado, and the bowels of the earth were torn and rent as with a convulsion. And Father Jose looked in vain for holy cross or Christian symbol; there ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... bearded giant in livery brought in a tray containing a very appetizing meal, set it on the table, and retired. Kasia realised suddenly that she was very hungry, for she had had nothing to eat since breakfast. There was certainly nothing to be gained by starving ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... forests of South-east Island, yet diligent search on the trunks of the trees and among the dead leaves about their roots produced only four species, all of which however are new. The finest of these is a Pupina, the giant of its race, of a glossy reddish ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... Mun Bun were making another snow-man, which was to be a regular "giant," so the girls had the coasting hill to themselves. They took two sleds, for Vi wanted to go by herself. But Margy was almost too ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... but this is a case of having to. Say! ever been in one of those big machine shops and seen a giant flywheel swizzling round at three hundred revs. a minute? Guess you wouldn't be gink enough to put out a hand and try to stop it. Never saw any machine yet that develops ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... of the lifeboats watched with fascinated eyes the first of the giant rockets that whizzed and roared its way up from the deck of the ship, an endless arrow of fire piercing the night. A loud report, the scattering of a hundred stars, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... later we came to Roncevaux. Where Abbey began or village ended, it was impossible to say, and there was no one to be seen. The place looked like a toy some baby giant had carried into the mountains, played ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the legend, a giant of the country, wishing to clear the fields of his friend, a Druid, from the rocks that encumbered them, rolled them ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... sounds of sylvan war Disturbed the heights of Uam-Var, And roused the cavern where, 't is told, A giant made his den of old; For ere that steep ascent was won, High in his pathway hung the sun, And many a gallant, stayed perforce, Was fain to breathe his faltering horse, And of the trackers of the deer Scarce half the lessening ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... duke met; Harold short and strong, with his good honest English face and steadfast blue eyes; William almost a giant in height, stern and proud, with steely eyes, and a face that had never yet shown pity to ...
— Stories from English History • Hilda T. Skae
... that had passed over it, but yet would be worth living through. And down on the church-yard, where were buried many generations whom it remembered in their time, looked the stately tower of Saint Botolph; and it was good to see and think of such an age-long giant, intermarrying the present epoch with a distant past, and getting quite imbued with human nature by being so immemorially connected with men's familiar knowledge and homely interests. It is a noble tower; and the jackdaws evidently have pleasant homes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of the giant Cossack stood them all in good stead. More than once Hal or Chester would have gone down, or been trampled under foot by the troops behind, had not the quick eye of Alexis signaled out their danger and his powerful arm come to their aid. Guarding himself perfectly from the sword ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... who told a pathetic story was John C. Peterson. He is a small man but he was wearing clothes large enough for a giant. He lost his own and secured those he had on ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... begins to fumble at his hip-pocket. But, save for that, he took no further notice, and beat on with his terrific, piston-like, regular wing-beats; and the gull, that speckless, dazzling, hardened, hard giant, laughed—laughed, I say, softly and to himself, hoarsely and insolently: "How-how-how-how!" It was as if he laughed ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... we behold our principles, our sense of justice trodden underfoot. We see the wild straining of the felon arms that would drag our land into the abyss of the giant Conspiracy and Crime. ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... "Surely"—they will think—"the man whose sympathy is active for a few of the 'meanest things that live' will gush with sensibility towards a countless multitude, fluttering into rags and gaunt with famine. He will go back to first principles; he will, with a giant's arm, knock down all the conventionalities built by the selfishness of man—(and what a labourer is selfishness! there was no such hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)—between him and his fellow! Hunger ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... upon us, and one of the shells clipped a large tree as easily as if it had been done with a giant razor, and it crashed down directly in front of our gun, putting it out of business for ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... all, however, in people's minds, was his appropriation of the tract of Jettenwald, or the Giant's Wood, Ytene, in South Hants. A tempting hunting-ground extended nearly all the way from his royal city of Winchester, broad, bare chalk down, passing into heathy common, and forest waste, covered with ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cowpunchers filled with alkali dust and their eyes grew red and sore from it. Magnificent mirages unfolded themselves: lakes cool and limpid, stretching to the horizon, with inviting forests in the distance; an oasis of lush green fields that covered miles; mesquite distorted to the size of giant trees and cattle transformed into dinosaurs. The great gray desert took on freakish shapes of erosion. Always, hour after hour beneath a copper sky, they rode in palpitating heat through sand drifts, among the salt bushes ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... accustomed only to such simple architecture as that of the Shinto miya, the new temples erected by the Buddhist priests must have been astonishments. The colossal Chinese gates, guarded by giant statues; the lions and lanterns of bronze and stone; the enormous suspended [200] bells, sounded by swinging-beams; the swarming of dragon-shapes under the caves of the vast roofs; the glimmering splendour ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... see that already several fellows had gathered; and other lanterns were meanwhile coming like giant fireflies through the gathering gloom of ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... roses from the rest, ran downstairs to collect box, paper and string, and handed rubbish and roses together to Lizzie at the top of the kitchen stairs. Lizzie received her share of the treasures with dignity, cut off the giant stems, which she considered straggly and out of place, and crammed the two heads into a brown cream-jug, the which she deposited on a sunny window-ledge. Claire saw them as she next left the house and shrugged resignedly, ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... strange stories it could tell if it could but speak! Had it been on the southern slope it might have been lost in the cool shadows of the forest, or have disappeared in the leafy molds and decaying twigs of many autumns. But it was on the north slope, from which the hungry flames of a giant forest fire had snatched every tree and bush, leaving ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... to his taste; you wish the panther to taste you," said the giant, stalking heavily ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... caught in the bushes before the door, he captured it, and put that in his pocket also. Soon after he set out boldly on his travels; and, as he was light and active, he felt no fatigue. His road led him up a hill, and when he arrived at the highest point of it he found a great Giant sitting there, who was ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... was certain to discuss with Senator Lodge and also with certain other members of Congress, such as Senator Turner of Washington and Representative Hitt of Illinois. Anything relating to labor legislation and to measures for controlling big business or efficiently regulating the giant railway systems, I was certain to discuss with Senator Dolliver or Congressman Hepburn or Congressman Cooper. With men like Senator Beveridge, Congressman (afterwards Senator) Dixon, and Congressman Murdock, I was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... blonde giant who had ridden on the train from New York, and the group of friends who had been waiting ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... towards the enemy in a smother of foam. Every quick-firing gun on the German ships spouted shells at the mysterious white streaks approaching them with the speed of lightning. So close did these plucky little ships go to their giant adversaries that the blast of the German guns was felt aboard, but no shells struck them. Then the line of C.M.B.'s swerved and their torpedoes were launched at close range. One of the enemy destroyers was hit and badly damaged, while two others had ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... ghosts of hungry bellies Point at yonder stand of jellies; While such dainties are beside ye. Snatch the goods the gods provide ye: Mighty rulers of this state, Snatch before it be too late, For, swift as thought, the puddings, jellies, pies, Contract their giant bulks, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... the Jarley Wax-works held the undivided attention of all save Happy Jack; to him there were other things more important. Even when he was informed that he must be the Chinese Giant and stand upon a coal-oil box for added height, arrayed in one of the big-flowered calico curtains which Annie Pilgreen said she could bring, he was apathetic. He would be required to swing his head slowly from side to side when wound up—very ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... grumbled and said scathing things of the Germans, he was half laughing, and it required a very great deal of annoyance indeed to rouse his passions. Yet the smallest hint of disloyalty to Great Britain, the smallest slur cast on his country's people, roused the giant in this fellow; then those muscles of his were braced for action. And if Henry and Jules had previously had any doubts as to his prowess, these were set at rest after they had witnessed his manner of tackling that under-officer at the mouth of ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Grundtvig buried himself in "the giant's mount," emerging only occasionally for the pursuit of various studies in connection with his work or to voice his views on certain issues that particularly interested him. He discovered a number of errors in the Icelandic version of Beowulf and made ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... of vulgar intellect: True, that intellect is rarely cultivated by the learning which consists of words. The view it takes of science is but a partial glance—that intellect is contracted, but it is strong. It is a dwarf; with the muscle and sinews of a giant; and its grasp, whenever it can lay hold of anything within its circumscribed reach, is tremendous. The general who has conquered armies and subjugated countries—the minister who has ruined them, and the jurist who has ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... to view the Giant's Causeway. It is certainly a very great curiosity as an object for speculation upon the manner of its formation; whether it owes its origin to fire, and is a species of lava, or to crystallisation, or to whatever cause, ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... thee a unicorn, Father Noah," he heard in a voice of thunder, and turning round he saw the giant, Og. "But thou must agree to save me, too, from ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... garden, which appears in much better order than when I saw it two years ago. The hedge-rows of the Bencoolen nut (Vernilzia Montana) are prodigiously grown: the Norfolk Island pine has shot up like a young giant, and I was glad to find many of the indigenous trees had been placed here; such as the Andraguoa, the nut of which is the strongest known purge; the Cambuca, whose fruit, as large as a russet apple, has the sub-acid taste of ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... birth. It was in the month of March, at the village of Ryseree, in Bhaugulpore. I had been encamped in the midst of twenty-four beautiful tanks, the history and construction of which were lost in the mists of tradition. The villagers had a story that these tanks were the work of a mighty giant, Bheema, with whose aid and that of his brethren they had been excavated ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... certain savage landscapes, you are tempted to exonerate man and blame creation; you feel a silent challenge and incitement from nature; the desert is constantly unwholesome for conscience, especially for a conscience without light. Conscience may be a giant; that makes a Socrates or a Jesus: it may be a dwarf; that makes an Atreus or a Judas. The puny conscience soon turns reptile; the twilight thickets, the brambles, the thorns, the marsh waters under branches, make for it a fatal haunting place; amid all this it undergoes the mysterious infiltration ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... a laundryman ironing away.... Mingled there with the streets and alleys, The railroad-yard and the clock-tower bright, Demon clouds crossed ancient valleys; Across wide lotus-ponds of light I marked a giant firefly's flight. ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... garden this sunny, enticing morning-just the day for a tramp among the purple hills—for our friend, the long Englishman, who promised, over night, to go with us. This excellent, good-natured giant, whose head rubs the ceiling of any room in the house, has a wife who is fond of him, and in great dread of the brigands. He comes down with a sheepish air, at length, and informs us that his wife ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... which I recognized as a great power, which my father, otherwise yielding to nothing or no one, dared only resist with faltering mockery; the sphere of suffering and tears in which she lived - all this drew my chivalrous heart to her. I considered my father a great man, a giant who dared anything and could get whatever he pleased - but for this very reason would I defend my mother against him. I went to church with her faithfully, and strictly followed her admonitions to piety, and the frivolous jokes ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... any living thing endure the impact of such weight? She looked to see the skin break away and fall apart at once. She expected to see an elephant's head split open. It was nerve-wrecking—an arena of giant violence. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... But the chances of war were unfavourable this time, and the little baker whopped Georgie, who came home with a rueful black eye and all his fine shirt frill dabbled with the claret drawn from his own little nose. He told his grandfather that he had been in combat with a giant; and frightened his poor mother at Brampton with long, and by no means authentic, ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... stood before him and began to grow. He shot up at last into a flame, and stretched out his arms. He was a giant. ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the perimeter gate and stopped. Krannon waved to the guards through the front window, then closed a metal shield over it. When the gates swung open the truck—really a giant armored tank—ground slowly forward. There was a second gate beyond the first, that did not open until the interior one was closed. Jason looked through the second-driver's periscope as the outer gate lifted. Automatic flame-throwers ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... The drum-bamming giant took his place opposite the Wildcat. The Wildcat turned to the Supreme Organizer of the Culled Militarriers of America. "Git abo'ad 'at steed, Honey ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... first time, and that only because the service had broken down, and to relieve an inexperienced servant. Nearly four months now I have rested my brains; and if it be true that rest is good for brains, I ought to be able to pitch in like a giant refreshed. Before the autumn, I hope to send you some Justice-Clerk, or Weir of Hermiston, as Colvin seems to prefer; I own to indecision. Received Syntax, Dance of Death, and Pitcairn, which last I have read from end to end since its arrival, with vast improvement. What a pity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
