"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kneeled beside the body, saw a few drops of blood ooze from the wound, held his hand in front of Lorenzi's mouth—but the breath was stilled. A cold shiver passed through Casanova's frame. He rose and put on his cloak. Then, returning to the body, he glanced at the fallen youth, lying stark on the turf in incomparable beauty. The silence was broken by a soft rustling, as the morning breeze ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... innumerable spites and prides and pettinesses? Lord! marry Rodney! She must be as great a fool as he was. His bitterness took possession of him, and as he sat in the corner of the underground carriage, he looked as stark an image of unapproachable severity as could be imagined. Directly he reached home he sat down at his table, and began to write Katharine a long, wild, mad letter, begging her for both their sakes to break with Rodney, imploring her not to do what would destroy for ever the one beauty, the one ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... right in with it. Something to do with money? You're horribly sensitive about money, dear. I like that in you, of course. Not many women would have been as square, would have taken as little—and worked hard—and thought and cared about nothing but making good— By Jove, it's no wonder I'm stark crazy about YOU!" ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... chairs; the light now fell full on her face. Had she deliberately challenged me to look into her secret mind if I could? Anything like the stark insensibility of that young girl to every refinement of feeling, to every becoming doubt of herself, to every customary timidity of her age and sex in the presence of a man who had not disguised his unfavorable opinion of her, I never ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... one," he said, pressing me closer to his bosom. "Death and I killed it. Come with me to the other side, and you will see it lying there, stiff and stark." ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... uncle stark mad? What did the man mean? and what was the use of saying facetious things at a time ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... lightnings of the foam-flowered sea Here on this rock, whose height brow-bound with dawn Is head and heart of Athens, one sheer blow 450 Struck, and beneath the triple wound that shook The stony sinews and stark roots of the earth Sprang toward the sun a sharp salt fount, and sank Where lying it lights the heart up of the hill, A well of bright strange brine; but she that reared Thy father with her same chaste fostering hand ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... duty always to bring in the Christmas tree. By some strange mix-up of what is and what isn't my brother Carol was dumb—stark dumb, I mean, and from birth. But tho he had never found his voice he had at least never lost his shining face. Even now at eleven in the twilightly end of a rainy Sunday, or most any day when he ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... thou lose thy soul, it is thou also that must bear the blame. It made Cain stark mad to consider that he had not looked to his brother Abel's soul. How much more will it perplex thee to think that thou hadst not a care of thine own? And if this will not provoke thee to bestir ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... was nothing like the Polar regions of Earth. Stark desolation. A naked land seemingly upheaved by some gigantic cataclysm of nature, lying tumbled and broken where it had fallen in convulsive agony; and then congealed forever in ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Mr. Stratman rose to his feet and edged ever so little toward the door. Plainly these two very young women were stark mad! ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... must never bawl again over anything. I'll take care of you. You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer, we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at Austerlitz,—that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see Frederick Lemaitre. I have tickets, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a handsome woman with regular features, a large and almost stately presence and a direct, undraped manner not shadowed as yet by any ray of sex instinct. Nature, with her many endowments, chose to withhold the feminine challenge. She was as stark and pure as the moon. Young men, drawn by her smile, fled from her self. Her father's friends regarded her much as he did: with a sort of uneasy admiration. The people were fond of her, and older women declared that ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and he turned to its gilding and gewgaws, forsaking the engagements which his father had imposed upon him and casting off his obedience to him, neglecting the affairs of his reign and treading a road wherein was his own destruction. The love of women waxed stark in him and came to such a pass that, whenever he heard tell of a beauty, he would send for her and take her to wife; and after this wise, he collected women more in number than ever had Solomon, David-son, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... joy to see the rose Fade from her cheek for ever; To know the lips he kissed so close Could answer never, never. To see his arm grow stark and cold, And know it could not hold her; To know that while the world grew old His eyes ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... erupting at his least signal—a squadron of trawlers for the protection of the Dogger Bank Fleet. At present prices—let alone the chance of the paying submarine—men would fish in much warmer places. His flagship was once a multi-millionaire's private yacht. In her mixture of stark, carpetless, curtainless, carbolised present, with voluptuously curved, broad-decked, easy-stairwayed past, she might be Queen Guinevere in the convent at Amesbury. And her Lieutenant-Commander, most careful to pay all due compliments to Admirals who were midshipmen when he was a Commander, ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... when the man of God was lamenting the deplorable state of the church of Vervignole in the cloister of the cathedral, his meditations were disturbed by strange shrieks, and he saw a woman, stark naked, walking on all fours, with a peacock's feather for a tail. As she came nearer, she barked, sniffed, and licked the ground. Her fair head was covered with mud, and her whole body was a mass of filth. In this unhappy creature ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... "This is stark folly, my lord—confounded nonsense—if you will pardon me. Out of your power! Made silly and weak in mind by illness, your opinion is not now worth much upon any subject. It is not your fault, I admit; but, upon my soul, I really have serious ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Down moonless lanes from doubt to doubt; With hasting, hungry tread Up slopes of frost unpitying Where the last star went out; There fell I in unlifting dark, And lying while an aeon's wing Dragged o'er me bare, wind-stript and stark, As leafless planets dream of Spring, Dreamed ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... Bansemer stood stark and dumb at the foot of the steps. The whole situation had rushed upon him like an avalanche. Harbert had filed his charges and the hasty visit of the reporter proved that David Cable was an instrument in them. The blood surged to his head; he ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... against the moonlight. When over the fishing village they would sit down, each one on the loftiest rock he could find, raise their muzzles to the stars, and join in the long howl, Ooooooo-wow-ow-ow! a terrible, wailing cry that seemed to drive every dog within hearing stark crazy. Out of the village lanes far below they rushed headlong, and sitting on the beach in a wide circle, heads all in and tails out, they raised their noses to the distant, wolf-topped pinnacles and joined in the wailing answer. Then the wolves would sit very still, ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... see aught of life in all that great and desolate Gorge; for there did be only the gas-burnings, and the boulders and the stark rocks, and oft the rank smellings of the gases. And alway an utter and everlasting quiet; save when some lonesome gas-fire did oddly to moan or to whistle, and the whistling to sound very dree across the great waste of the Gorge, and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith's fire, and then squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's the microscope and the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... he does some gooid below. An when th' time comes, as come it will, when th' race is at an end, He'll dee noa poorer for what gooid he's ivver done a friend. An when they gently put him by,—unconscious, stiff an stark, His epetaph shall be, 'Here's one ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... assumption of the limitations of an incarnate life; if we consider the manifest potencies of the power that He has brought into operation in the present Christian life; and if we consider, side by side with these, the stark, staring contradictions and as manifest inevitable limitations of the effects of that power, His calling carries in its depths the assurance that what He means shall be done, that Jesus Christ has not died in vain, that He has not ascended ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... bridge across the strait, between Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, the Americans waited for the enemy to come and attack them, for with such leaders as Gates and Stark they felt confident ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... brain to find the gentlest, most reassuring phrases that would alarm her least and keep up her courage. But there was the stark, hideous fact that could not be blinked or dodged, and when at last his lagging steps returned, he was no nearer a solution ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... remembered what her father had said. As her mother lay there, stretched out stiff and stark, almost as if she were dead, Maria glanced around the room as if for help. She caught sight of a bottle of cologne on the dresser, one which she had given her mother herself the Christmas before; she had bought it out of her little savings of pocket-money. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sandbags and throwing up parapets on the far edge of the reeking explosion pit, had found many bodies caught in the descending avalanche of earth or buried in the collapsed trenches and dug-outs; and here and there, amid the confusion, a foot or a hand protruding stark from some earth-heap marked the death-place of other victims. The whole scene was one of death and desolation, of ruin and destruction, and the Subaltern turned from it sick at stomach. It was the first ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... wit: Some seem, as they were starched stiff and fine, Like to the bristles of some angry swine; And some to set their love's desire on edge, Are cut and prun'd like a quickset hedge; Some like a spade, some like a fork, some square, Some round, some mow'd like stubble, some stark bare; Some sharp, stiletto fashion, dagger-like, That may with whisp'ring, a man's eyes outpike; Some with the hammer cut, or roman T, Their Beards extravagant, reform'd must be; Some with the quadrate, some ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... was "hipped with an old mothy saddle, the stirrups of no kindred; besides, possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected with the fashions, full of wind-galls, sped with spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten, near-legged before, and with a half-checked bit, and a headstall of sheep's leather; which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... bushes stir, part, and, as I rose, an Indian leaped lightly into the road and strode straight toward me. He was curiously painted with green and orange, and he was stark naked, except that he wore ankle-moccasins, clout, and a fringed pouch, like a quiver, covered with scarlet beads in ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Cossack, displaying the letter he had brought from the Count's rooms. "Nothing more. Your wife has succeeded very well. He is quite mad now. I found him last night, helpless, in a sort of fit, stiff and stark on the floor of his room. And this was in his pocket. Read it, Herr Fischelowitz. Read it, by all means. I suppose your wife does not mind your reading the ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... bred to kintra-wark, And counted was baith wight and stark, Yet that was never Robin's mark To mak a man; But tell him, he was learn'd and clark, Ye roos'd ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... go to sleep nor fall off his wheel, and in due time he arrived in Economy and satisfied the Chief's curiosity with vague answers, a vivid description of Link and Shorty, and the suggestion that they might be found somewhere near the Haunted House on Stark's mountain. He had heard them talking about going there, he said. He got away without a mention of the real happening at Pleasant View or a hint that he had had anything to do with the stealing of the car. Billy somehow was gifted that way. He could shut ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... with a spoon in it, a collection of bottles near-by—all the poor, human, useless tools of defense were there, eloquent of a long and losing struggle. Every one who recalls the familiar picture knows what a dreary, hopeless scene it is—the room stamped with poverty, the window stark and curtainless, the woman meagerly clad, the man ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... progress, and in a house open to such mixed society had been admitted without arousing suspicion. There was little that was obscure or inexplicable in the coup; it was an amazing display of force majeure, an act of stark audacity. It pointed to the existence in London of a hitherto unsuspected genius. Such was ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... glow of his mind. At home now he was to be confronted with a monstrous and insupportable truth—the craven cowardice of the man who had been eligible to service in army or navy, and who had evaded it. In camp and trench and dug-out he had heard of the army of slackers. And of all the vile and stark profanity which the war gave birth to on the lips of miserable and maimed soldiers, that flung on ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... companion of the darkest hour of her life, as the one who saved her from death. You—good Lord!—do you pretend to put yourself in comparison with me? You, with your other affairs, and your conscious falsity to her, with me! Why, but for me, she would be drifting down the river, and lying stark and dead on the beach of Anticosti. That is what I have done for her. And what have you done? I might laughed over the joke of it before I knew her; but now, since I know her, and her, when you force me to say what you have done, I declare to you that you have wronged her, and cheated her, ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... one in the loft will be long enough,' whispered the rustic; 'but fetch the longest of the two ropes, and make haste. Oh, he's stark!' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... viel Leute schon gegeben, die waren stark in dem Bestreben, Durch Bcherschreiben zu bereiten sich gut Gercht fr alle Zeiten; Und darauf auch gerichtet war ihr starkes Sehnen immerdar, Dass man in Bchern es erzhlte, wie ihnen Tatenlust nicht fehlte. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the depth of sixty feet, on the hill opposite where I was working. The talk was soon Vulcanish through the land. Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other gold-fields are in dust. Diggers, whom the gold fever had rendered stark blind, so as to desert Ballaarat for Mount Alexander and Bendigo, now returned as ravens to the old spot; and towards the end of February, '53, Canadian Gully was ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... even six feet tall might easily have frightened Mr. Wordsley into a nervous breakdown by staring at him with that gaunt, hollow-eyed stare, but this creature, though manlike, was fully fifty feet tall, incredibly elongated, and stark naked. Its hair was long and matted; its cheeks sunken, its lips pulled back in an expression which might have been anything from a smile to ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about. There were just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and him—stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... its legs two in each hand before his head, and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much ease as he did the bellowing calf. His mother met him at the woodshed door. Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks. From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day—for how could the adoring mother help ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... the fur robe they burrowed, shivering more from sheer excitement than from cold, and the car flew across to Fifth Avenue and then northward along deserted sidewalks and a wintry park, where naked trees and shrubs stood stark as iron in the lustre of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... and shouting and waving his sword in the air, and I after him as hard as I could pelt through the mud, beating the charge on my drum until the war-cries of the regiment drowned the sound of it. For we were upon a pleasure trip—lest any man forget,—a pleasure trip amidst stark woods and brown plains flecked with ponds. So we followed him until we came to a place where, in summer, two quiet rivers flowed through green forests—the little Wabashes. And now! Now hickory and maple, oak ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... days she had always been a sincere person; she had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself. Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei. Beneath that surface I could not discover anything ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... never set in motion than the army I command, sir. They are our stark fighters—men who individually or in the mass can be depended on for any feat of arms in the power of mortals to accomplish. I know them from experience. They will blanch at nothing—yet they must ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... heart. I'm sore night and day thinkin' of my son, and him lying out there at night without a rag of dry clothing, and water that the bullocks won't drink, and maggots in the meat; and every day one of his friends laid out stark and cold, and one day—'imself perhaps. If anything were to 'appen to him. I'd never forgive meself—here. Ah! Miss Katherine, I wonder how you bear it—bad news comin' every day—And Sir John's face so sad—And all the time the master speaking against ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self-expression,' individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... waiting-maid to solve a knotty point for him. "What," said he, "should be done to a certain person who has deceived everyone?" and he proceeded to relate the whole story, ending up with, "Now what sentence should be passed?" Then the false bride answered: "She deserves to be put stark naked into a barrel lined with sharp nails, which should be dragged by two white horses up and down the street ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... Fancy the man stripped stark naked of every thing in the world, except an old pair of trousers and a shirt, for decency's sake, without even a name to him, and dropped down in the middle of Holborn or Piccadilly, Would you go up ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... help. She hated terribly to leave him alone in the dark, yet a lighted candle with a man so ill was a risk that she dared not run—he might move about and set the house on fire. When she closed the darkened room with its stark figure lying under the white covers, her heart sank and sank. She must turn the key upon him. There was no good in hesitating. Only her strong will, her high courage, sustained her as she locked the door, and turning ran, with feet that love and terror ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... to the breaking dawn, Lily so white, that through all the dark, Hast kept lone watch on the dewy lawn, Deeming thy comrades grown cold and stark; Soon shall the sunbeam, joyous and strong, Dry the tears in thy stamens of gold— Glinteth the day up merry and long, And the ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... but the Significant Room stood open and stark to the glittering winter sunlight! Reverent hands had removed the furniture, books, and pictures; the stark and staring walls, with their stained and torn paper, were bared to the gaze of every chance passerby. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... by the author of Swings and Roundabouts is something of an event; and in Bottles and Jugs Mr. Ughtred Biggs makes another fascinating raid on the garbage-bins of London's underworld. Mr. Biggs is a stark realist, and his unminced meat may prove too strong for some stomachs; but those who can digest the fare he offers will find it wonderfully sustaining. Here is no condiment of verbiage, no dressing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... this land that lies between Asia, where the occult is almost the obvious, and Europe, where it is always returning with a fresher and younger vigour. The truth becomes strangely luminous in this wilderness between two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... accompanied Colonel Monckton to the River St. John included several New England companies of Rangers under captains McCurdy, Brewer, Goreham and Stark, a detachment of artillery, the 2nd battalion of the Royal American Regiment[38] and the 35th regiment of light infantry. The troops embarked on board the transport ships "Isabella," "Wade," "Alexander the Second," "Viscount Falmouth," "Lord ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... enveloped her from head to foot. There, too, standing near to her were the Khania Atene and her uncle the old Shaman, who looked but ill at ease, and lastly, stretched upon his funeral couch, the fiery light beating upon his stark form and face, lay ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... the slightest chance of it," was the answer. "The wind has fallen, it will be stark calm in a few minutes; for what I can see it will be a calm all the ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... is a most extraordinary thing that men should be 'judges,' being convinced in their deepest consciousness that God is the only Foundation and Refuge, and yet that the conviction should have absolutely no influence on their conduct. The same stark, staring inconsequence is visible in many other departments of life, but in this region it works its most tragic results. The message which many of my hearers need most is—follow out your deepest convictions, and be true to the inward voice which condenses all your experience into ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was lying stark dead on the floor, and her babe, which was yet muttering its low moan of hunger, was clasped close in the arms of its dead mother, and was dabbling in the blood which had flowed from the wounds in ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge—his favourite flower that had the night's own colour on its curving crumpled petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why should a man feel lonely? The answer—as to some idiot's riddle—was: Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty was harmony, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... any knowledge of that which the crying might portend; but I shook my head, telling him that I had no knowing beyond his own; though, for his comfort, I said that it might be the wind. Yet, at that, he shook his head; for indeed, it was plain that it could not be by such agency, for there was a stark calm. ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... lest some one should say, 'See, where goes that fool!' The syndics and others forming the assembly remained confounded, first, by the difficult methods proposed by the other masters, and next by that of Filippo, which appeared to them stark nonsense. He appeared to them to render the enterprise impossible by his two propositions—first, by that of making the cupola double, whereby the great weight to be sustained would be rendered altogether unmanageable, and next by the proposal ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... answered, "These be all of the Guard who are left living in the Palace. The rest are stark, ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... of Silas Blackburn no longer lay peacefully on its back. It had been turned on its side, and remained in a stark and awkward attitude. For the first time the back of the ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... swinging open and the rain driving straight in. 'He cannot be in bed,' I thought, 'those showers would drench him through.' And so it was, for when I entered the chamber his face and throat were washed with rain, the bed-clothes dripped, and he was perfectly still—dead and stark. I called up Joseph. 'Eh, what a wicked 'un he looks, girning at death,' exclaimed the old man, and then he fell on his knees and returned thanks that the ancient Earnshaw stock were restored to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... have heard; but my niece was as healthy as she was lovely and good. Everything promised long life. I hoped she would have closed my eyes. In the bloom of health one day, and the next lying cold, stark, and drenched!! Oh, how terrible! Oh, my poor ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... befall her, so much worse was the fate of others that already she was passing into the solemnity of spirit inspired by the presence of mortal pain and death. She drew the curtains of her window and then shrank back, shuddering and sobbing, for, scattered over the lawn, men and horses lay stark and motionless. More pitiful still, here and there a wounded horse was struggling feebly. The spring morning, dewy, bright, fragrant, made these evidences of strife tenfold more ghastly. There could not be a more terrible indictment of war ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... coast-fog signals, May 24, 1872, speaks of these bells as unusually large, saying that they and the one at Ballycottin are the largest on their coasts, the only others which compare with them being those at Stark Point and South Stack, which weigh 313/4 cwt. and 411/2 cwt. respectively. Cunningham, speaking of the fog-bells at Bell Rock and Skerryvore lighthouses, says he doubts if either bell has been the means of saving a single vessel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... of their praise, waited with the others until the two guides were ready. Then, in the same order as before, they moved forward, descended the slope, and came into a strange wilderness of stark gray alders that stretched away in every direction. And threading, circling, crossing each other everywhere among the alders ran the trails of deer and wild boar, deep and fresh in ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... is without parallel; and yet it seems like a mysterious dream when I repeat—this is my last day! The last! Charlotte, no word can adequately express this thought. The last! To-day I stand erect in all my strength to-morrow, cold and stark, I shall lie extended upon the ground. To die! what is death? We do but dream in our discourse upon it. I have seen many human beings die; but, so straitened is our feeble nature, we have no clear conception of the beginning or the end of our existence. ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... Veronica found herself wondering whether these exclusions represented, after all, anything more than suppressions. Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's gnawing? The image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of Teddy's recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... was very much troubled, for he felt that he had been the unwilling cause of the young wife's unhappiness, although entirely innocent of any wrong intention. So when Mrs. Robards had fully determined to undertake the journey to Natchez, accompanied only by Colonel Stark and his family, he offered to go with them as an additional protection against the Indians who were then especially active, and his escort was very gladly accepted. The trip was made in safety, and after seeing the lady settled with ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... became senseless, vacant-eyed, unreasoning, incurable melancholy, when the victim would lie for hours, without speaking a word, except to babble of home, or would wander aimlessly about the camp—frequently stark naked—until he died or was shot for coming too near the Dead Line. Soldiers must not suppose that this was the same class of weaklings who usually pine themselves into the Hospital within three months after their regiment enters the field. They were as a rule, made up ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... a mother's joys caress'd, Haply some wretch has ey'd, and call'd thee bless'd; Who faint, and beat by summer's breathless ray, Hath dragg'd her babes along this weary way; While arrowy fire extorting feverish groans Shot stinging through her stark o'er labour'd bones. —With backward gaze, lock'd joints, and step of pain, Her seat scarce left, she strives, alas! in vain, To teach their limbs along the burning road A few short steps to totter with their load, Shakes her numb arm that slumbers with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... with the holiday spirit of a lad let out of a cheerless school Paul Burton walked along the principal street of a small New England town where old-fashioned houses sprawled between stark elms. When he reached the Palace Theater, the performance had begun, so he hurriedly bought a ticket and found himself sitting near the front with many empty seats about him. It was a cheap "follow up" company ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... at all events, that he had had enough of it, as he looked along the deck and saw numbers of the men who had been slightly hurt binding up each other's wounds. Several lay stiff and stark, whose bodies were dragged on one side, while not a few, severely hurt, had been carried below to the cockpit, where the surgeon and his mates ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... rifles crashed out together, and shot, shell, canister, and bullet cut gaping wounds deep into the dense gray ranks. Still, the wave broke; and, from its storm-blown top, one furious tongue surged over the breastwork and through the hedge of bayonets. It came from Armistead's brigade of stark Virginians. He led it on; and, with a few score men, reached the highwater mark ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... Days of stark blue ocean. Then out of the sea to the south rose a point of land, becoming presently three points, as it were three peaks. The Admiral stared. I saw the enthusiasm rise in his face. "Did I not write and say to the Sovereigns and to ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... was delighted to do. Ferdinand of Austria wrote to the king of Spain that Van Dyck had returned in great haste to London to arrange for his change of home, in order to do the work. "Possibly he may still change his mind," he added, "for he is stark mad." This shows how Van Dyck's erratic ways appeared ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... of the strangers started from his seat, And stood, and upward, downward, with a beat His head went, and he groaned, and all his arm Trembled. Then, as a hunter gives alarm, He shrieked, stark mad and raving: "Pylades, Dost see her there?—And there—Oh, no one sees!— A she-dragon of Hell, and all her head Agape with fanged asps, to bite me dead. She hath no face, but somewhere from her cloak Bloweth a wind of fire and bloody smoke: The wings' beat fans it: in her arms, Ah see! My mother, ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... back with ranks fearfully diminished. Many old familiar faces were gone—the faces of those now lying stiff and stark in death. More were groaning with anguish in the crowded hospital. My own wound was too trifling to require much attention. I shall have to wear a sling for a few ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the shadow foemen Hang about us grim and stark, Broken spars and shredded canvas, We are racing for ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, I ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... we were sailing along, we saw people stand on the shore looking at us: we could also perceive they were black and stark naked. I was inclined to go on shore, but Xury cried, "No, no:" however, I approached nearer, and I found they run along the shore by me a good way. They had no weapons in their hands, except one, who held a long stick, which ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... Fred did not feel happy, for he knew that not far away men were lying in fever and weariness, cut, stabbed, trampled by horse hoof, and shattered by bullet, many of them waiting anxiously for death, the same death that had come upon so many of their fellows, who were lying stark on the field, or being hastily laid in rows ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... scene. He saw again the Spear Point Rock standing out, scimitar-like, in the sea. The water was dashing all around it. It stood up, grim and unapproachable, the great waves flinging their mighty clouds of spray over its stark summit. But—possibly because he viewed it from above instead of from below—he saw naught beside that grand and futile struggle ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... rapid and enthusiastic. Gentlemen came with lance and cuirass, burghers with musket and bandoleer, artisans with axe, mallet, and other implements of their trade. A bold baker, standing by his oven-stark naked, according to the custom of bakers at that day—rushed to the street as the sound of the tumult reached his ear. With his heavy bread shovel, which he still held in his hand, he dealt a French cavalry, officer, just riding and screaming by, such a hearty blow that he fell dead ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... seen courage with mirth in De Aquila and Hugh, but stark mad courage of Rahere's sort I had never even ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott stared, and all the questions he asked me about you, and about our acquaintance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... some mud hovels where poverty was stalking about with a stick in rags and nakedness. Full dress of many of these beggars would disgrace a Polynesian. Even the better dressed were hung with garments in rags, tattered, and dirty as a Paisley ragpicker's. The children were mostly stark-naked. In the middle of the day we reached a Mohammedan village named Taouen, twenty miles from Chaotong, and my man prepared me an al fresco lunch. The entire village gathered into the square to see me eat; they struggled for the orange peel ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... his sword, ran upon the captain: for which I was about to strike him through the body; but the captain, not caring to waste steel on such a ribald, with his fist caught him such a buffet behind the ear, that he fell down stark dead, and all the rest stood amazed. Then Mr. Oxenham called out, 'All honest men who know me, and can trust me, stand by your lawful captain against these ruffians.' Whereon, sirs, I, and Penberthy my good comrade, and four Plymouth men, who had sailed with Mr. O. in Mr. Drake's ship, and knew ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... than the flight of projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes. Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy and heartless literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of great abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the mob stark naked from a window. A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man who has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence combine to push their fortunes at Court by circulating stories intended to ruin an ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was just the man needed to do that job at Bennington. I went as messenger to Portsmouth and heard John Langdon, the speaker of the New Hampshire assembly, pledge his property to fit out Stark. That's the kind ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... Man's Canon—a deep gorge that is lateral to the once populated valley of the Rio de Chelly, Arizona—stands a stark spire of weathered sandstone, its top rising eight hundred feet above its base in a sheer uplift. Centuries ago an inhabitant of one of the cave villages was surprised by hostiles while hunting in this region, and was chased by them into this canon. As he ran he looked vainly from side to side ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... was no longer a nation to be called the Union of Communist Republics. There were only frightened, starving people trudging blindly away from cities that were charnel-houses and machines that would not run and trees and crops and grasses that were stark dead where they stood. It would be a long time before anybody would want to cross those lifeless plains and enter the places which once had been swarming hives ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... deliverance from the stark death that had been so near me all day, I looked up to heaven and remembered the blessed birth eighteen centuries ago when Jesus Christ came to the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... guy in the story!" Boogies glowed at the adept who before his very eyes was turning a beautiful dream into stark reality. He was praying that his own courage to face ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... would often, even in mid-winter, have one or two pailsful of cold water poured upon him, as he rose from his bed, and then, in his shirt, leap upon an unsaddled horse and scour the camp with the speed of the wind. Sometimes he would appear, in the early morning, at the door of his tent, stark naked, and crow like a cock. This was a signal for the tented host to spring to arms. Occasionally he would visit the hospital, pretending that he was a physician, and would prescribe medicine for those whom he thought sick, and scourgings for those whom he imagined to be feigning ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... public road that led directly to his father's house, he went through the gate that led into Deacon Stark's pasture, and followed the cart-path through the woods. It was a great deal farther that way. But he went through the woods so as to get clear of his playmates. One of the deacon's hired men saw ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... stark silence for a moment when he sat down, and then as many cheers for Jim as for the principal speaker of the evening, cheers mingled with titters and catcalls. Jim felt a good deal as he had done when he knocked down Mr. Billy's chauffeur—rather ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Joseffy, all of whom have produced remarkable works on technic. Liszt's contribution to the technic of the instrument was made through his pieces, not through exercises; his contributions to the Lebert and Stark Stuttgart Conservatory method consist of two well-known concert studies. Personally, I am opposed to set methods, that is, those that pretend to teach the pupil factory-wise. Of what value is the teacher if he is not to apply his knowledge ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... go like that—KESKWAO (stark mad)—in the dead of winter," he shuddered. "Three days ago there were twenty of them, m'sieu, for I saw them with my own eyes, and counted their tracks in the snow. Since then they been murdered and torn into strings by the others of the pack. Listen to them ravin'! Can you tell me why, m'sieu? ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... crowded narrows, he went by lanes parallel with it as far as the Rue St. Denis, which he crossed. Everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible. Near the Rue des Lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. A little farther on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair. To obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards—but God knows how ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Odo had hoped, they were putting off from the shore in a blunt-nosed fishing-boat which was the lightest craft the village could provide. The lake was stark calm, and the two boatmen, silhouetted against the moonlight, drove the boat forward with even vigorous strokes. Fulvia, shivering in the autumnal chill, had drawn her hood close about her and sat silent, her face in shade. Measured by their secret ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten. It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill. Far around there spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long desolate cottage—unthatched and stark. The whole land is bare and unpeopled, the very earth scarcely covering the rock that lies beneath it, and with which the country abounds, in places rising out of the ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... of hunger was in the air. The armed men were emaciated. Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay black upon the ground. Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the uniforms hung loosely upon them. Where the lights struck upon their faces, their cheeks were hollow. They were cadaverous. And there ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... one, beneath derisive skies, The victims bare, bewildered heads arise: Tales of the passing of the spirit, graced With humour blinding as the doom it faced: Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried: Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue, But only (Allah be exalted!) true, And only, as the Seraph showed that night, Delighting to the limits ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes, and off he goes!) within a rood— Bog, clay, and rubble, sand, and stark black ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... stark, unreasoning terror that was like a physical thing. Run—but you can't run! They've ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... one thing about the surf that I do not understand, and that is why witches always walk stark naked along the beach by it at night, and eat sea crabs the while. That such is a confirmed habit of theirs is certain; and they tell me that while doing this the witches emit a bright light, and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of a simple thought, Whether for England or her enemies, Went in the night, and in the morning died; Each bleeding piece of human earth that lies Stark to the carrion wind, and groaning cries For burial—each Jesu crucified— Hath surely won the thing he dearly bought, For wrong is right, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... of town, growing at a distracting pace because of its railway connection and its smelting plants, had the same sort of ceremony. From here we passed through a land of almost sinister bleakness. There were tracts livid and stark, entirely without vegetation, and with the livid white and naked surface cut into wild channels and gullies by rains that must have been as pitiless as the land. It was as though we had steamed out of a human land into the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... being alone in a Boat (without a Water-man) having newly thrust off from shore, at Medley, to come homewards, standing near the Head of the Boat, were presently with a stroke of Thunder or Lightning, both struck off out of the Boat into the Water, the one of them stark dead, in whom, though presently taken out of the Water (having been by relation, scarce a minute in it) there was not discerned any appearance of life, sense, or motion: the other was stuck fast in the Mud (with his Feet downwards, and his upper parts above water) ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... me 'twixt the booming wind-gusts, a sound that came and went, now loud and clear, anon faint and remote, and I wondered what it might be. Then the rushing dark was split asunder by a jagged lightning-flash, and I saw. Stark against the glare rose black shaft and crossbeam, wherefrom swung a creaking shape of rusty chains and iron bands that held together something shrivelled and black and wet with rain, a grisly thing that leapt on the buffeting ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of a fierce and monstrous gladness Spread through the multitudinous streets, fast flying Upon the wings of fear:—From his dull madness The starveling waked, and died in joy: the dying, Among the corpses in stark agony lying, Just heard the happy tidings, and in hope Closed their faint eyes: from house to house replying With loud acclaim the living shook heaven's cope, And fill'd the startled earth ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... disgusting, ash-smeared, stark naked brutes, armed with clubs of hard wood brought to a point, were lying idly about the station. The mission having given up the White Nile as a total failure, Herr Morlang sold the whole village and mission-station to Koorshid Aga this ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... of French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book, the Text-book of Psychology of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for 'The Text Book of Psychology,' read 'The Principles of Psychology'.] in ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... deeper, But lay there warmly, like a sleeper Who shifts his arm once, and moans low, And then sinks back to night. Slow, slow, And still as Death, came Sleep and Death And looked at me with quiet breath. Unbending figures, black and stark Against the intense deeps of the dark. Tall and like trees. Like sweet and fire Rest crept and crept along my veins, Gently. And there were ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... churning pool below closing in triumphantly as it might have done upon some reclaimed pagan creature that had tasted the bitter wine of exile and returned in leaping joy to its chosen element! It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... followed by the dignified old gentleman. Grenfall tingled with a strange delight as she moved quite close to his side in her desire to see. Once he glanced at her face; there was a pretty look of fear in her eyes as she surveyed the massive bears and the stark, stiff antelopes. But she laughed as she turned ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... face to gather his meaning; and when I did, I laughed out loud. The horror of that new thought—our bright, darling Peter, cold, and stark, and dead! I remember the ring ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... shone over her winding-sheet, There stark she lay on her carven bed: Seven burning tapers about her feet, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... his memory was at fault, but because he was perpetually dumbfounded by her genius. Originally, this living-room had been a dolorous cave with varnished yellow-pine woodwork, gas-logs, yellow wall-paper to induce toothache, and a stark chandelier with two anemic legs kicking out at vacancy. She had caused the Orpheum electrician to remove the chandelier; with her own hands, she had painted the woodwork a deep, rich cream-colour; she ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... mad!' he retorted, appealing to those behind him. 'Stark, staring mad to show your face here! 'VENTRE SAINT GRIS! Are we to have all the ravishers and plunderers in the country ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. "Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight. Apparently it is used only to supply ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... couch, and stark, Like the sea-rejected thing Sea-sucked white, behold their King. Attila, my Attila! Beams that panted black and bright, Scornful lightnings danced their sight: Him they see an oak in bud, Him an oaklog stripped of bark: Him, their lord of day and night, White, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he had not only been delirious, but stark staring mad, and expressed a very earnest hope that, now he had got his senses hauled taut again, he'd belay them an' make all fast for, if he didn't, it was his, Disco's opinion, that another breeze o' the same kind would blow 'em ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... science of a sort! Spiritually he was a little bit aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful exercise of ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of Schisms and Sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims.... Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... false aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy. Fact, valiantly faced, is of more value than any reputation. The false aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes stark as Apollo. The false is ridiculous with undignified insistence upon his dignity; the true says like God, "I am ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... he shouted, tugging at his goggles with nervous hands from which he had forgotten to remove his gloves. "You've got to put a stop to this sort of thing. It can't go on. She must be crazy,—stark, raving crazy. You must ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... sightseers, not always French, for the Morgue is a favourite haunt with the irrepressible tourist doing Paris. Strangest of all, the murderer himself, the doer of the fell deed, comes here, to the very spot where his victim lies stark and reproachful, and stares at it spellbound, fascinated, filled more with remorse, perchance, than fear at the risk he runs. So common is this trait, that in mysterious murder cases the police of Paris keep a disguised ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... diction, not all the ingenious theories in the world, can for a moment be set in the balance against rigid exactness, even if some of the concomitants of rigid exactness are such as to spoil the subject for popular treatment. The truth, the stark naked truth, the truth without so much as a loin-cloth on, should surely be the investigator's sole aim when, having discovered a new set of facts, he undertakes to present them to the consideration of ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... Frenchified, but inwardly German enough. At the time of the commencement of the armistice and the German retirement "Simplicimus" published a picture of a "Farewell to Strasbourg." It was a stormy sunset and late evening, and the black silhouette of the very memorable cathedral, the stark and ragged grandeur of that cathedral and its spire which looks as if nothing exists in Strasbourg but it, stood for the significance of the city. Some German horse-soldier symbolized the last to go, and lifting his hat, took one last look ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Since those that can are glad to pay; There's nothing now too rich or good For poor men, not the King's own food. Now like a singing bird my feet Touch earth, and I must drink and eat. Welcome to all men: I'll not care What any of my fellows wear; We'll not let cloth divide our souls, They'll swim stark naked in the bowls. Welcome, poor beggar: I'll not see That hand of yours dislodge a flea,— While you sit at my side and beg, Or right foot scratching your left leg. Farewell restraint: we will not now Measure the ale our brains allow, But drink as much as we can hold. We'll count ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... dalliance with his adored wife. She told me he was very amorous upon her, could not do much fucking, indeed, she thought his efforts that way were even more than he ought to do at his age, but he was never tired of gamahuching her and posing her in every attitude when stark naked; of course she lent herself to every wish of the old man, and had, even after great persuasion, which only her love and attachment to him could have even made her consent, allowed him the honours of her beautiful arse-hole. This requiring, as he said, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... his master's heart The Douglas, stark and grim; And woe is me I should be here, Not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... which I hope will be in a week. He has had an ill surgeon, by the caprice of that puppy Dr. Radcliffe, which has kept him back so long; and yesterday he got a cold, but is better to-day.—What! I think I am stark mad, to write so much in one day to little saucy MD; here is a deal of stuff, indeed! can't you bid those little dear rogues good-night, and let them go sleep, Mr. Presto? When your tongue runs there's no ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Alix, what on earth are you saying? Are you stark, staring crazy? You come right upstairs and get into bed this minute. My land, I—I believe you're going to be sick. You've got the queerest look in your eyes. Come ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... the fireflies beginning to sparkle, when he rode through the home gates. In the dusk of the world, out of the deeper shadow of the surrounding trees, his house looked grimly upon him. The light had been at the side; all the front was stark and black with shuttered windows. He rode to the back of the house and hallooed to the slaves in the home quarter, where were lights and noisy laughter, and one deep voice singing in ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... rumoured abroad that I had lived two days and nights without meat or drink, some began to believe that I was a holy madman, while others supposed me to be stark mad; wherefore they consulted to send for certain men who dwell in the mountain, who lead a contemplative life, and are esteemed holy as we do hermits. When they came to give their judgment concerning me, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... eloquence of yours, when you harangued the people stark naked! What could be more foul than this? more shameful than this? more deserving of every sort of punishment? Are you waiting for me to prick you more? This that I am saying must tear you and bring blood ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero |
