"Nerve" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... order to avoid any risk to her, or whether I would lift against the wind and soar right over her. This latter I did. She had already got her horse in hand when I came up to her. Her woman's body lay along his neck, and she glanced up as I, with wings aspread, and every nerve in a state of tension, swept ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... scratched. The rest are giving me a stone. Unless the field hides something quite unknown I stand a chance. The going favours me. The ploughland will be bogland certainly, After this rain. If Royal keeps his nerve, If no one cannons me at jump or swerve, I stand a chance. And though I dread to fail, This passionate dream that drives me like a sail Runs in my blood, and cries, that ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... great mosaic, from the Fillmore-street hill, at once creates a nerve-soothing impression most uncommon in international expositions, and for that matter, in any architectural aggregate. One is at once struck with the fitness of the location and of the scheme of architecture. Personally, I am greatly impressed with the architectural scheme and the consistency ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... It's a maddening, nerve racking pace they go. To keep up the gait there is an incessant battle for wealth, and the struggle wears and ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... If every nerve is not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, I think the game is pretty near up, owing, in great measure, to the insidious acts of the Enemy, and disaffection of the Colonies before mentioned, but principally to the accursed policy of short enlistments, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... the first time tonight, Mr. Dennis, realized how hard a nerve shock Jim had had in seeing his father killed. He had kept from his mother the horror of the nights that followed the tragedy. She did not know that periodically, even now, he dreamed the August fields and the dying ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... "It requires some nerve for a man to tell a circumstantial story like that to a tableful of gentlemen, about one of ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... became aware of a pursuer, and, indeed, Suttung, having also assumed the form of an eagle, was coming rapidly after him with intent to compel him to surrender the stolen mead. Odin therefore flew faster and faster, straining every nerve to reach Asgard before the foe should overtake him, and as he drew near the gods ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... sacred being. All passion is still in her presence: I cannot express my sensations when I am near her. I feel as if my soul beat in every nerve of my body. There is a melody which she plays on the piano with angelic skill,—so simple is it, and yet so spiritual! It is her favourite air; and, when she plays the first note, all pain, care, and sorrow disappear from me ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... or exposed chest of the "case." When the fit was genuine, as of course it sometimes was, the test had no particular reviving effect; but if the man were shamming, as he probably was in spite of the great consistency of his symptoms, the chances were that, with all his nerve and foreknowledge of what was in store for him, the sudden biting of the fiery liquid into his naked flesh would bring him to his feet dancing with pain and cursing and banning to the utmost extent ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... feeling for design, in the broadest sense of the word, entirely lacking in the former. For we find that although folk song is composed of the same material as savage music, the material is arranged coherently into sentences instead of remaining the mere exclamation of passion or a nerve exciting reiteration of unchanging rhythms and vibrations, as is the case in the music of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the mound, he peered in. Below, and immediately under him, was a black hole, about three feet square. Burke was so startled that he almost dropped the lantern. But he was a man of tough nerve, and maintained his clutch upon it. But he drew back. It required some seconds to catch his breath. Presently he ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... may not only have existed, but may have existed in strength sufficient for any test whatever; not the principles of the Seceders, but their Jacobinical mode of asserting them, may have proved the true nerve of the repulsion to many. What is it that we wish the English reader to collect from these distinctions? Simply that the danger is not yet gone past. The earthquake, says a great poet, when speaking of the general tendency ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... should be treated properly and judiciously. Whenever disease shows itself we should apply a suitable remedy—one that is suggested by the pharmacy of mutual brotherhood, and yet powerful enough to reach every nerve in our ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... had the nerve to come back here while we were up at the house? And that his man calmly walked into the radio plant and operated it for him? ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... report that in the Lady Day quarter only ten per cent, of the residents had removed without paying their rates. The inhabitants of the New Cut now accuse Islington residents of losing their nerve. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... under its roof, and it afforded quarters for most of the officers' families, who must otherwise have remained in open tents. The enclosure had also one or two stone houses, which furnished accommodations to the quartermaster's and subsistence and medical departments. Every nerve was now directed to fit up the place, complete the enclosure, and furnish it with gates; to build a temporary guard-house, and complete other military fixtures of the new cantonment. The edifice also underwent such repairs ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... impossible. All through the long hours of the night Philippa lay wide awake, every nerve, every faculty of her mind tuned to the highest point of tension, going over and over ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... are now passing through a nerve-wearing time because of our difficulty with Serbia, but by the time this letter reaches you everything will be all right again. The Serbians have been intriguing against us these many years, and this time ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... or how I don't feel hain't got nothing to do with it, Mawruss," Abe retorted. "And furthermore, Mawruss, any motor-cycle policeman which has got the nerve to swear that he could tell inside of two miles an hour how fast somebody is driving, understand me, is guilty of perjury on the face of it, which I told the judge. 'Judge, your Honor,' I says, 'I admit I was going fast,' ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... brothers Themistocles, Napoleon Zambelli, and Sir Peter Braila, afterwards Greek minister in London. This small band of royal adherents gave Mr. Gladstone all the help they could in preparing his scheme of reform, and after the scheme was launched, they strained every nerve to induce the assembly to assent to it in spite of the pressure from the people. Their efforts were necessarily unavailing. The great majority, composed as usual of the friends of England who trembled for their own jobs, joining hands with the demagogues, was hostile to the changes proposed, and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... is all right, and don't you worry about that," said Sandlot. "I've got plenty of nerve so I don't have to brace it up with booze, and you ain't. That's what's the matter with you. You saw that feller as well as I did. Didn't you see him ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... either side started playing nasty, cheap European phonographs the noise of which was most disagreeable. Most of the records were of Chinese music, the harsh quality of which was magnified tenfold by the imperfections of the instruments. When the nerve-wracking concert became intolerable, they were always good enough to stop ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... Every nerve was tugging for haste, yet the first sign of impatience would ruin everything. He wished inexpressibly that the young woman should appear and that they could start at once without waiting for the pony. But that, from the nature of the circumstances, could ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... exception. There were a great many pretty faces among them, and not one that betrayed "boss-fright" or time-terror. As a class they looked more like normal college students than factory hands. Compared with overworked, nerve-strained, anxious-faced girls in the sweat-shops, and indeed in most shops and factories, these trim, tidy-looking, cheerful and contented women seemed to me the very noblesse ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... heath that is lonely and bare, For each nerve was unquiet, each pulse in alarm; And I hurl'd the mock-lance thro' the objectless air, And in open-eyed dream proved the strength ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the law for once at fault? A swift incision with the scalpel, a glance with a lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have eyes, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... got the other ready for completing the circuit. The Mugger all the while lying still at the bottom of the nulla with, most likely, a couple of fathoms of water over his head, unconscious of danger, and little dreaming that the two-legged creatures on the bank had got a nerve communicating with his stomach, through which they were going to send a flash of lightning that would shatter ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... his aching body. Though he had seen these fearful monsters on many occasions, yet it was never from such a position as that in which he now found himself. To his ears came a sibilant hissing like that of a thousand serpents; and, quivering in every nerve, he forced his eyes open once again, to discover that the cell which he and his companion occupied was but one of a series of cells surrounding a huge square in which were imprisoned perhaps twenty or thirty of those horrible, gargoylesque creatures which were the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... forbade, Pelissier was stubbornly determined to accomplish; the siege should be pressed at once, the city taken at any cost, the expedition to Kertch resumed. Once only, under torment of the Emperor's reproaches and the Minister at War's remonstrances, his resolution and his nerve gave way; eight days of failing judgment issued in the Karabelnaya defeat, the severest repulse which the two armies had sustained; but the paralysis passed away, he showed himself once more eager to act in concert with the English general;—when the long-borne ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... roping of the huge wild steers there was much opportunity for the display of skill and nerve. When these big steers had been run out and had passed the line the cowboy on his trained pony followed at racing speed. His pony seemed dowered with full knowledge of the methods, and so watched the lasso thrown over the ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... of town, a young infantryman held us up and asked for a lift. He turned out to be the son of the President of the Court of Appeals at Charleroi. He was a delicate looking chap with lots of nerve, but little strength. His heavy infantry boots looked doubly heavy on him, and he was evidently in a bad way from fatigue. He had to rejoin his regiment which was twelve miles along the road from Diest, so we ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... with shining eyes, "to think that all the time we were worrying about you and feeling sure you were lost, you were having the time of your life! Oh, if I'd only had the nerve to follow you!" ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... "I spent last evening with Alice and I felt like phony money all the time. She's going right ahead with the wedding preparations and I simply hadn't the nerve to tell her that I lost nearly every penny I had. Uncle William Grey tiptoed into the parlor for a few moments and began to congratulate me on the good reports he had had from Alice with regard to my ability to save a bit of money. ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... twenty-five mile gait, and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street. The din was nerve racking—but highly Parisian. One fancied that Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... after. On this occasion there was commonly a feast, at the conclusion of which the man gave to the woman, as a pledge, a ring, which she put on the fourth finger of her left hand, because it was believed that a nerve reached thence to the heart, and a day was then named for ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... hemolytic doses produce a sudden drop in pressure owing to liberation of potassium from the erythrocytes. The saponin increases the activity of the isolated frog heart, then stops it in systole. In frog nerve muscle preparations of this saponin reversibly interrupt stimulus transmission; recovery ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... falls; his ample shield Drops from his arm; his baldric strews the field; The corslet his astonished breast forsakes; Loose is each joint; each nerve with horror shakes; Stupid he stares, and all assistless stands: Such is the force of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... of India tea; for all physical as well as medical experience proves that vegetable produce afford some that are astringent, and others that are relaxant, of the dead as well as the living fibre. Oak bark is equally astringent, and hardens the fibres of the hide, as well as it braces the living nerve of our bodies; therefore the effect produced by the India tea upon the dead skin only proves, what we have before related, that an infusion of it has a peculiar effect, which, being too frequently applied to the nerves, destroys ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... land-marks. The young man might have been an hour in the open sea, gradually hauling off the land, in order to keep clear of the coast, when he bethought him of returning. It required a good deal of nerve to run in towards those rocks, under all the circumstances of the case. The wind blew fresh, so much indeed as to induce Mark to reef, but there must always be a heavy swell rolling in upon that iron-bound shore. The shock of such waves expending their whole force on perpendicular ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... Arizona. The scenes go on all day and all night in different forms. A number of dogs are being broken in by being tied up to stakes. These keep up a heart-rending and peculiar crying, beginning with a short bark which melts into a yowl and dies away in a nerve-racking wail. This ceases not day or night, and half a dozen of these prisoners are within a stone's throw ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the cruel nerve to tell that to a man dying of starvation?" demanded Sergeant Noll with heat. "Kelly, it takes me four seconds to get my overcoat off, and only two seconds to get off the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the bonde cheerfully, "thou must have found me no light weight, Valdemar! See what a good thing it is to be a man—with iron muscles, and strong limbs, and hardy nerve! By the Hammer of Thor! the glorious gift of strong manhood is never half appreciated! As for me—I am ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... silly, little tangle; and my wife is wretched. Otherwise she is better, steadily and slowly moving up through all her relapses. My knee never gets the least better; it hurts to-night, which it has not done for long. I do not suppose my doctor knows any least thing about it. He says it is a nerve that I struck, but I assure ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the river runs to the sea, we conjure up the chase and recapture of Pip's convict, while poor Pip himself, assisted by his friend Herbert Pocket, is straining every nerve to get him away. As illustrative of the wonderfully careful way in which Dickens did all his work, we also ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... ordinary individual, yes. But then, you see, this was not an ordinary individual. He was—let us suppose—an acrobat, a man of great nerve and courage, accustomed to trapeze work and the use of ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... especially as it is sensibly felt high up in the leg near the tuberosity of the tibia, when pulled by the dangling end, my own impression is that the so-called "Guinea worm" is nothing more than the external saphenus or communis tibiae (nerve) exposed in a peculiar manner, probably by a disease, which, by a curious pathological process, absorbs away the muscular parts, leaving the bare nerve detached at its lower extremity, suspended loose ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... at the nerve centers and turned back without their reaching the brain results in ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... attack was carried through by the cool courage of Decatur and the admirable discipline of his men. The hazard was very great, the odds were very heavy, and everything depended on the nerve with which the attack was made and the completeness of the surprise. Nothing miscarried, and no success could have been more complete. Nelson, at that time in the Mediterranean, and the best judge of a naval exploit as well as the greatest naval commander who has ever lived, pronounced ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... about it, Mr. Brown. I'm trying to forget what hell was like. I was in hospital for four months. It took a lot more nerve to draw a breath then than it did to fly over the German lines with the Boches popping away from all sides. I didn't mind the wounds I sustained,—but the ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... large mastiff, with a dangerous temper, who was chained up at night in the rough lean-to that was built against the side of the cabin. He barked again furiously, dragging at his chain with all his might, and quivering in every nerve of his body. The woman lighted a torch at the dying embers on the hearth, and unfastening the dog, waited to see what would happen. He dashed forward furiously a few steps, then suddenly stopped, sniffed the air, made one or two uncertain darts ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... moat-house. The difference went far beyond externals; there was a wide psychological gulf between them—the difference between a woman of healthy mind and calm, equable temperament, who had probably never bothered her head about the opposite sex, and a woman who was the neurotic product of a modern, nerve-ridden city; sexual in type, a prey to morbid ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... the sincerity, and naturalness of the speaker acted upon Will Phelps with the effect of an electric shock. Never had he been so thoroughly aroused, and every nerve in his body was tingling when he left the chapel and started toward ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... say," Mr Sharp writes, "that at that time"—speaking of his earlier years—"his faculty of observation would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois." Such activity of the visual nerve differs widely from the wise passiveness or brooding power of the Wordsworthian mode of contemplation. Browning's life was never that of a recluse who finds in nature and communion with the anima mundi a counterpoise to the attractions of human society. Society fatigued him, yet he would not ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... a position to-day only to announce the decision to which the Government have come with respect to the Transvaal. The case of the Transvaal is urgent. It is the nerve-centre of South Africa. It is the arena in which all questions of South African politics—social, moral, racial, and economic—are fought out; and this new country, so lately reclaimed from the wilderness, with a white population of less than 300,000 souls, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the lady gasp, and knew my message was received and understood. I waited for no other response. I scuttled away from that perilous spot as fast as caution permitted my legs to travel. Jack Shreve was no Newman; I had not his cool nerve when it came to flouting hell-ship rules. In truth, I was in a blue funk all the time I was aft, for fear I would be discovered. And there was another reason for my haste in getting forward. There was a sudden uproar in front of the ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... closer examination of the prostrate form, while Barnaby, holding the torch as he had been directed, looked on in silence, fascinated by interest or curiosity, but repelled nevertheless by some strong and secret horror which convulsed him in every nerve. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... part of his task had been accomplished. Could he reach the floor in safety? Gradually he worked himself backward over the rail, in imminent danger of falling; but his nerve never wavered, and I could see a wonderful light in his eyes. With something of a lurch, his body fell against the outer side of the railing, to which he was hanging by his chin, the line still held firmly in his teeth. ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... hidden psychic and economic bonds. At any rate an Englishman who took part in the Conference of Paris and was during those months a member of the Supreme Economic Council of the Allied Powers, was bound to become, for him a new experience, a European in his cares and outlook. There, at the nerve center of the European system, his British preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other and more dreadful specters. Paris was a nightmare, and every one there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... been serious, these men would never have recoiled before the mere danger of a stick of hardwood. The American woodsman is afraid of nothing human. But this was a good-natured bit of foolery, a test of nerve, and there was no object in getting a broken head for that. The reptilian gentleman alone grumbled at the abandonment of the attack, mumbling ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... was not a powerful man, and with Joan Perry near him he seemed to have lost his nerve. Her courage had shaken him badly, and he made no resistance. I was not long in having him ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... making proved an elegant success, since not one of the mess was left. But if the truth were told it would be found that the cook himself accounted for something like three-fourths of the number. And then he had the nerve to declare that he had made only one mistake, which was in limiting the amount of ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... me!" Flixman interrupted. "Actually the feller is got the nerve to ask me a hundred dollars for drawing a will, and this here feller on Center Street wants only fifty. I bet yer if I would go round there to-morrow or the next day he ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... the moment quite overcome, and unable to comply with the proposal of taking an immediate flight from the enemy's country. She soon, however, regains her sober senses, and is able to grasp the reality of the situation, and fully prepared with mental nerve and courage to face the scenes of hardship and fatigue which lay before them. The thought of flight was, indeed, a hazardous one. The journey to the sea board was far and dangerous; roads were miserably constructed, and these, for the most part, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... sufferings, and that through them they are giving great glory to God. But I compassionate greatly those who are not Saints, and who do not know how to profit by suffering. They indeed awake my pity. I would strain every nerve to help ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Woman reached over, and, taking the smaller revolver from his belt, handed it to the Angel. "Keep your nerve steady, dear; watch where you step, and shoot high," she said. "Go straight at them from where you are. Wait until you hear Freckles' first shot, then follow me as closely as you can, to let them know that we outnumber them. If you want to save McLean's ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... were by such. But the same are needed to-day to keep us from learning the ways of the world and getting a snare to our souls. Now, as ever, walking with God means walking in the opposite direction from the crowd, and that requires some firm nerve. The home-made idolatry is gibbeted as being according to 'the statutes of the kings.' What right had they to prescribe their subjects' religion? The influence of influential people, especially if exerted against the service of God, is hard to resist; but it is no excuse for sin that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dancing in her eyes, she turned away, and Mrs. Spruce, in full possession of restored nerve and vivacity, bustled off on her round of household duty, the temporary awe she had felt concerning the new written code of domestic 'Rules and Regulations' having somewhat subsided under the influence of her mistress's gay good-humour. And Maryllia herself, putting on her hat, called ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... informed that he must either speak to the point or leave. Of course the point was Belgium; if France would abandon her claim to Antwerp she could have compensation in Germany. There was some further futile talk about what both parties then as before, and thereafter to the end, considered the very nerve of their contention. Malmesbury went home toward the close of December, and soon after, Hoche's fleet was wrecked in the Channel. The result of the British mission was to clarify the issues, to consolidate British ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... sorrel went straight up in the air with all four feet, coming down with the legs stiff, giving Wilbur a jar which set every nerve twitching as though he had got an electric shock. But he kept his seat. Then the sorrel began pacing forward softly with an occasional sudden buck, each of which nearly threw him off and at most of which he had to "hunt leather," or in other words, catch hold of ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... and, to tear herself away, ran down the square and round the corner. She was quivering in every nerve from the strain of so much conflict, and she was angry with herself for having taken so high a hand with him. He was more to be respected than any man she had ever met, and yet she had—or so she thought—treated him as though he were another Charles. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... than a wife. Rose, you know Jack Rupert, who's sheer nerve when we're racing and ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... no harm, to girl or man, in being abroad in this peaceful country at night, if one has the nerve to undertake it. You and I, dear, prefer our beds. Josie is wrapped up in the science of criminal investigation and has the enthusiasm of youth to egg her on. Moreover, she is sensible enough to ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... was severed, the bear made a louder noise than ever, but not knowing the cause, I thought he was nearer me and I strained every nerve and fibre of my body to widen the distance between us, as I almost imagined his teeth clashing down on me, while Johnnie West was yelling: "Run, Willie; run for ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... receive no other pay than what they can squeeze from the prisoners or the prisoners' friends. Poor and friendless, the prisoners fare badly. But I question if the cruelties practised in the Chinese gaols, allowing for the blunted nerve sensibility of the Chinaman, are less endurable than the condition of things existing in English prisons so recently as when Charles Reade wrote "It is Never Too Late to Mend." The cruelties of Hawes, the "punishment jacket," ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... When he had finished his cigar it would be time to join the party in the smoking-room. Cartwright was something of a gambler and liked the American games. They gave one scope for bluffing, and although his antagonists declared his luck was good, he knew his nerve was better. In fact, since he lost his money by a reckless plunge, he had to some extent lived by bluff. Yet some ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... jack-knife bridge began to descend over their very heads. Over where the new bridge was being constructed men stood on slender girders high in the air, catching red-hot rivets that were being tossed them, while an automatic riveting hammer filled the air with its nerve-destroying clamor. Everywhere was bustle and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... entomologist; I quite agree with the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table*", that "the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp." If my life depended upon it I could not give the scientific name of every least organ and nerve of a moth, and as for wrestling with the thousands of tiny species of day and night or even attempting all the ramifications of—say the alluringly beautiful Catocalae family— life is too short, unless devoted to this purpose alone. ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... till Scotland's freedom is achieved, or Robert Bruce lies with the slain. Repentance for the past, hope, ambition for the future; a firm heart and iron frame, a steady arm and sober mood, to meet the present—I have these, sweet lady, to fit and nerve me for the task, but not such hast thou. I doubt not thy patriot soul; perchance 'twas thy lip that first awoke the slumbering fire within my own breast, and though a while forgotten, recalled, when again I looked ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... of the Imperial German Navy he was a failure. Only sheer luck had hitherto saved him from the fate that had overtaken scores of his brother officers in that branch of the service. Skilled as he was in the handling of a huge liner, he lacked the iron nerve that is essential to the man who has to risk his life in a steel box that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, offers no means of escape in the event of ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... study of perception by means of the sense of sight. We see things in the external world through the medium of light which they direct upon our eyes. The light strikes the retina, and causes a sensation. The sensation brought to the brain by means of the optic nerve becomes the condition of the representation in consciousness of certain objects distributed in space.... We make use of the sensation which the light stimulates in the mechanism of the optic nerve to construct representations ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Love of adventure has much to do with it also. Men feel a fearful joy in pitting themselves against stern natural obstacles and being compelled to exert all their physical energy and endurance, and all their wit and nerve and courage, in order to overcome them. The stiffer the obstacle, the more insistent do they feel the call to measure themselves against it. They thrill to the expectation of having their full capacities and faculties drawn out. By some curious natural instinct they ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... They were heartily clapped, and the Fifth began to look rather blue. Each side now played with extreme caution. They had taken one another's measure, and knew what they had to expect. Hilda Browne kept her nerve well, and her serves were acknowledged to be what the girls called "clinchers". As for Gwen, her arms seemed elastic. This time the Sixth were beaten, and ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... the moon, I'd no thought, love, that mischief would be at her Tricks with my tongue quite so soon; That I should forget fate and fortune Make a difference 'twixt Sevres and delf— That I'd have the calm nerve to importune You, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... as a nerve specialist, and fully qualified to do so, had lived a double life. As a doctor he was respected and was fairly successful; as the head and organizer of a small army of miscreants he had ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... should always be shunned and condemned. When his loss amounts to only 100 or 200, or when, not detecting his purpose, the adversaries fail to double, and the loss is, therefore, smaller, the odds favor his exhibition of nerve. Flag-flying, however, is like dynamite: in the hands of a child or of one unfamiliar with its characteristics, it is a danger, the extent of which none can foretell; but used with skill, it becomes a ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... face of bold unconsciousness. She was brought to bay, now; Aunt Roderick could exasperate her, but she could not touch the nerve, as dear Miss ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... scientific instrument, in his experiments. This instrument is so finely adjusted that the faintest current will cause a deflection of the registering needle, which is delicately swung on a tiny pivot. If the galvanometer be attached to a human nerve, and the end of the nerve be irritated, the needle ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... present has passed into other hands. But our spirit and temper is the same as of old. It has found a new world in the air. War in the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the old gallantry and initiative. The airman depends on his own brain and nerve; he cannot fall back on orders from his superiors. Our airmen of to-day are the true inheritors of Drake; they have the same inspired recklessness, the same coolness, and the same chivalry to ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... so transparent—this inflicted a wound that his pride found it hard to sustain. Through his lack of caution he had forfeited his own freedom, if not his life, and exposed Dot to a risk from the thought of which even his iron nerve shrank. He told himself repeatedly, with almost fierce emphasis, that Dot would be safe, that Warden could not be such a hound as to fail her; but deep within him there lurked a doubt which he would have given all he had to be able to silence. The ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... back against the wall and his eyes closed. It was plain that the words, together with his previous exertions and pain, had taken the nerve ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... steersman lost his nerve, and shrank from the coming shock. The galley's helm went up to port, and her beak slid all but harmless along Amyas' bow; a long dull grind, and then loud crack on crack, as the Rose sawed slowly through the bank of oars from stem to stern, hurling the wretched slaves ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... many another man who succeeds halfway up, failed at the top. He ordered an immediate general retreat which would have changed the hard-won Confederate victory into a Federal rout. But Thomas, with admirable judgment and iron nerve, stood fast till he had shielded all the others clear. From this time on both armies knew him as the "Rock ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... status quo, he voted in 1856, as he told me, for Fremont. In speaking of the candidates then in the field, he said of Fremont, that his comparative youth and inexperience in party-politics were points in his favor; for he thought the condition of the country called for a man of nerve and energy, one in his prime, and unfettered by party-traditions and bargains for "the spoils." His characterization of a more experienced functionary, who had once served in the State Department, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... that she would be a great success. That was all. Had I had the instinct that was given to those Emperors in stone, and even to the dog Corker, I should have begged Clio to send in my stead some man of stronger nerve. She had charged me to be calmly vigilant, scrupulously fair. I could have been neither, had I from the outset foreseen all. Only because the immediate future was broken to me by degrees, first as ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... secretions, fathered by Claude Bernard, the idea of a correlation, a mutual influencing of them and of the different organs of the body through them. The nervous system had hitherto been regarded as the sole means of communication between cells, by its telegraphic arrangements of nerve filaments reaching out everywhere, interweaving with each other and the cells. The Brown-Sequard conception inferred the existence of a postal system between cells, the blood supplying the highway for travel and transmission of the post, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... shock of the strong line of A. P. Hill, which Alexander seconded by opening with his artillery in full action. The Confederates forged ahead with the watchword, "Charge, and remember Jackson!" And this appeal was one to nerve all hearts to ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... in England he found that no man, not even Raleigh, had a thought to spare for Virginia. For Spain was making ready all her mighty sea power to crush England. And the English were straining every nerve to meet and break that power. So John White had to wait with what patience he could. Often his heart was sick when he thought of his daughter and his little granddaughter, Virginia Dare, far away in that great unknown land across the sea. Often he longed to be back beside ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... two hours before dark. Rachael was conscious of every nerve in her body, and paced up and down the long line of rooms which terminated in the library, until Alexander's legs were worn out trotting after her, and he fell asleep on the floor. Twice she went to the roof to look for Hamilton's sloop, but saw not a sail on the sea; and the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... swing through the wide country in the freshness and fullness of a blossoming, sun-steeped morning in May, breathing the breath of the fields and the taller by inches for the sweep of the hills and the reaches of sky above my head, every nerve in my body is alive with sensation and delight. My joy is in the fragrance of earth, the ingratiating warmth of the fresh morning, the spacious, inclosing air. My pleasure in this direct contact with the landscape is a physical reaction, to be enjoyed ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... circumstance, but when my little hand clutched the great knob of the library door and turned it, and when the placid countenance of my step-mother looked up at me from a comfortable easy-chair at the opposite side of the room, I felt that some awful moment had dawned on my existence. With as much nerve and self-control as a child usually displays on such an occasion, I closed the door behind me and walked towards the window where ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... emotion was visible on the prisoner's face, except at the harsh mention of her mother's name; when a shudder was perceptible, as in one where dentist's steel pierces a sensitive nerve. In order to avoid the hundreds of eyes that stabbed her like merciless probes, her own had been raised and fixed upon a portion of the cornice in the room where a family of spiders held busy camp; but a fascination ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... commanded our admiration. Never once did he use his whip for any other purpose than to crack it occasionally, and it did one good to hear his cheery call to the fourteen labouring beasts as they toiled up the steep side of a creek or gully with a heavy load of timber, straining every nerve in their great bodies, while the sweat poured off their coats in streams. He was like one of his own bullocks, patient, cheerful, and strong, and an exclamation of anger seldom passed his lips—an oath never. He took a great pride ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... rest,—for refreshment of mind and body: I will not have it turned into a time of toil. I know you, Phillis; you would work till your poor fingers got thin, and your spirits were all flattened out, and every nerve was jarring and set on edge; and you would call that duty! No, darling,—never! Dulce shall keep her roses, and we will have battledore and shuttlecock every evening; but, if I have to keep the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey |
