"Shattering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the solitudes. Tonight he was not alone. And yet more perfect than those other hours in other lands was this hour slipping by now as the tiny voice out yonder slipped through the silence without shattering it. Certain words of his own little ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... to the billet where two of the girls had slept. Opposite their bed on the other side of the room was a window and over the bed was a large picture. A shell had passed through the window and smashed the picture, shattering the glass in fragments all over the bed. Another shell had entered the window, passed over the pillows of the bed and gone out through the wall by the bed. It would have gone through the temples of any sleeper in that bed. After this they kept men ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... British Army, and their achievements in one form or another are thick on every page of the book. The author has reduced the description of a modern battle to a fine art. No one can describe more vividly the noise, the squalor, the terror, the high courage, the self-sacrifice and again the nerve-shattering noise, that go to make up the fierce confusion of trench-fighting. How anyone succeeds in surviving when so many instruments are used for his destruction is a mystery. The book is very certainly one to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... and he has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities, but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering sincerity and cries the praise ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Bethlehem. After that sad day at Gilgal, he and Saul met no more, though their homes were but a few miles apart, and it must have been difficult to avoid each other. Samuel yearned over the man whom he had learned to love, and it must have been pain to him to see the shattering of the vessel which he had formed. However natural his mourning, and however indicative of his sweet nature, it was wrong, because it showed that he had not yet reconciled himself to God's purpose, though his conduct obeyed. The mourning which submits while it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure, My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure. The shattering trumpet shrilleth high, The hard brands shiver on the steel, The splintered spear shafts crack and fly, The horse and rider reel; They reel, they roll in clanging lists, And when the tide of combat stands, Perfume and flowers fall ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... only needed woman in her capacity as a wife and potential mother—that for long ages woman had no place in society except as wife or mother. Why it was so long before the spirit of God moved women to shatter that conception, I do not understand. But with its shattering there appeared for a time a tendency to imagine that men and women are in most things practically the same, and that the difference of sex is a very little thing. Many people seemed inclined to believe that a woman is just the same sort of being as a man, except for ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... in gentle great content of itself (while all the boarders gallantly refrained from eating), was checked by an interruption which united into one shattering impact the effects of lese-majeste and ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... be prosecuted with the utmost vigour, it is not inopportune to reflect on those common and ineradicable elements in the civilization of the West which tend to form a real commonwealth of nations and will survive even the most shattering of conflicts. That we on the Allied side stand fundamentally for this ideal is one of our most ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... wave shocks, and confounds The bounding bulk whereon it bounds And breaks and shattering seaward sounds As crying of the old sea's wolves and hounds That moan and ravin and rage and wail, So steed on steed encountering sheer Shocked, and the strength of Launceor's spear Shivered on Balen's shield, and fear ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... general oversight of the field, attainable under the circumstances; and that it was within easy range of the enemy's missiles was demonstrated by one of the very first shot, which struck a tree immediately behind the General, shattering it to pieces and severely wounding one of the aid-de-camps ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... once she has pronounced that the great unknown has become known to her votaries and supporters. She is skilful to use the results of science up to the point where they serve her purpose, and to use the terms of science in order to build up her shattering position. But she does not advance. She does not accept the first chapter of Genesis as a wonderful revelation of the early stages of human investigation into the realms of the unknown, but still keeps to her old formula of a revelation of ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the crowd yelled and cheered, and great names were tossed to and fro, as the owners passed on, each talking to his fellow as if unconscious of the tumult and even of the presence of these shouting thousands. The cry of the trumpets rang out again high and shattering, as the trumpeters and heralds in rich coat-armour came next; and Anthony looked a moment, fascinated by the lions and lilies, and the brightness of the eloquent horns, before he turned his head to see the Lord Mayor himself, mounted on a great stately white horse, that needed no management, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... into fierce personal conflict with Him. Nor would she, ever again; from this time forward, she would rival the rest in lukewarmness.—But, before she could put this resolve into force, she had to let her first indignation subside: only then was it possible for her to recover the shattering of her faith, and settle down to practise religion after the glib and shallow mode of her friends. She did not, however, say her prayers that night, or for many a right to come; and when, at church, Christ's name occurred in the Service, she held her head erect, and shut ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... well, it is our careless custom to talk about dress, and to write about dress, as if it had no meaning at all; as if the breaking waves of fashion which carry with them the record of pride and gentleness, of distinction and folly, of the rising and shattering of ideals,—"the cut which betokens intellect and talent, the colour which betokens temper and heart,"—were guided by no other law than chance, were a mere purposeless tyranny. Historians dwell upon the mad excesses of ruff and farthingale, of pointed shoe and swelling skirt, as if these ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Sweep the golden reed-beds; Crisp the lazy dyke; Hunger into madness Every plunging pike. Fill the lake with wild-fowl; Fill the marsh with snipe; While on dreary moorlands Lonely curlew pipe. Through the black fir-forest Thunder harsh and dry, Shattering down the snow-flakes Off the curdled sky. Hark! The brave North-easter! Breast-high lies the scent, On by holt and headland, Over heath and bent. Chime, ye dappled darlings, Through the sleet and snow. Who can over-ride you? ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... almost reeling under the nerve-shattering crash of the guns, she toiled on through the dry grass, pausing at the edge of charred spaces to beat out the low flames that ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... shattering shell, Where the dull earth is stained with red, Fearless she fronts the gates of Hell And shields the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... he raised his tankard to thirsty lips, suddenly from the square below, shattering all the languid stillness of the tropic dawn, brayed a trumpet, arose a noise of hurrying steps and hasty voices. Baldry, at the window, wheeled, color in his cheeks, light in his ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... accomplished all he set out to do and the result is peace and happiness. I was sentimentalizing, no doubt, for I have never been able to live in the country. But as I stood there, looking back, the spell was broken. I heard a roar of a horn, one of those ear-shattering inventions that paralyze one's faculties, a grinding of gears and a slither of rubber tyres, and then the yell of a human voice. As I turned to jump I was nearly blinded by two enormous headlights. And the voice that had yelled, a half-familiar voice, shouted, 'What the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... way to the beach, and looked back upon the brig riding in the moon-light just outside the shadow of the palm trees. They waited and waited watching that dim light which shone through the stem port. And then at last there came the dull thud of a gun, and an instant later the shattering crash of an explosion. The long, sleek, black barque, the sweep of white sand, and the fringe of nodding feathery palm trees sprang into dazzling light and back into darkness again. Voices screamed and ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... unsatisfying, as his letters had been, at least they had never failed to arrive. And she counted upon them so. Without them, she felt bereft of her mainstay. Without them, the almost daily, nerve-shattering scenes which her step-mother somehow managed to enact, however discreet her attitude, became an infliction hardly to be borne. She might have left her home for a visit among friends, but something held her back from this. Something warned her that if she went ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... our good. Royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. They seemed to give a raison d'etre for mankind. It is the Emperor William and the Czar Ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. The wisdom of Kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. It needed the shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old Scotchman of Koenigsberg to the mind of the ordinary ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... the pilot-house door fell shattering on the inside, and what sounded like a volley of musketry, rattled against the harder woodwork of the pilot ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... rely thereon, Therefore this guilty act shall be to you Like a bulging breach in a high wall about to fall, Suddenly, in an instant, will come its destruction; Yea, its destruction shall be as when one dashes an earthen vessel in pieces, shattering it ruthlessly, So that not a potsherd is found among the pieces With which to take up fire from the hearth or to ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... The shattering concussion of a shot fired within an inch or two of her ear almost stunned her. She felt the powder burning her cheek. Almost against her will her eyes flew open to see the figure in the door jerk and sag a little. Triumphant ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... greed of money, hatred, want, and damnable persecution? A voice within cried aloud: "Why suffer it all? Why bear the brunt of other men's adventure?" Five thousand pounds. Was it a fair price for breaking one's body against rocks, for shattering one's soul ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Both broadsides were very destructive, each of the commanders falling at the very beginning of the action. Captain Blyth was struck by an eighteen-pound shot while he was standing on the quarter-deck; it passed completely through his body, shattering his left arm and killing him on the spot. The command, thereupon, devolved on Lieutenant David McCreery. At almost the same time his equally gallant antagonist fell. Lieutenant Burrows, while encouraging his men, laid hold of a gun-tackle fall to help the crew of a carronade ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... scorched fragments she had set forth, George lingered downstairs, waiting for a better opportunity to introduce his own subject, but when he heard dismaying sounds from the kitchen he gave up. There was a crash, then a shower of crashes; falling tin clamoured to be heard above the shattering of porcelain; and over all rose Fanny's wail of lamentation for the treasures saved from the sale, but now lost forever to the "kitchenette." Fanny was nervous indeed; so nervous that she could not ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... de Sautron she would have laughed less confidently at her father's gloomy forebodings. But she was destined never to know, which indeed was the cruellest punishment of all. She was to attribute all the evil that of a sudden overwhelmed her, the shattering of all the future hopes she had founded upon the Marquis and the sudden disintegration of the Binet Troupe, to the wicked ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... leaned the powder bag against it, ripped a hole in it with his knife, and attached the fuse. When it was well alight he and his two companions took to their heels, and were some distance off, safe and snug in a sheltering ditch, before the shattering roar of the explosion, with the low, deep rumble of the collapsing building, told them that their work was done. No cleaner job had ever been carried out in the bloodstained ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... step the room is silent. At the second step a shattering caterwaul goes up. He has stepped on the adventurous ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... with one of the love themes; other themes are worked in; the parts weave and interweave with each other, swelling and mounting until a shattering climax is reached; then all subsides, and an effect of terrible suspense is produced by the last subdued phrase in the bass as the curtain rises, and we feel that something tragic is to come. Here we have Wagner the full and ripe musician. As a technical achievement this prelude is marvellous; the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... was what happened, though not precisely as Mr. Skale had intended, nor with the margin for preparation he had hoped. It was all so swift and brief and shattering, that to hear Spinrobin tell it makes one think of a mass of fireworks that some stray spark has sent with blazing explosion into the air, to the complete loss of the calculated effect had they gone ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... stem with all his strength he struck the cup upon the table. Then what seemed to be to me a marvel happened, for instead of shattering as I thought it surely would, it split in two from rim to foot. Whether this was by chance, or whether the artist who fashioned it in some bygone generation had worked the two halves separately and cunningly cemented them ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... that she did not reign alone in his heart. As time passed this trouble went from bad to worse, but no more need be said of it at this point except to make it clear that years before her meeting with the true love of her heart, Robert Louis Stevenson, the disagreements which finally resulted in the shattering of her first ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... even in the light of my then limited judgment, as an unregenerate wish; and thus early my faith in the possibility of man's reformation received the first of those many blows that have resulted in shattering it. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... known France in all the glitter of its showy Empire, and had seen its imperial glories dispersed as mist. Russia she had watched with curiosity and dread. On the day when the ruler, who had bestowed freedom on millions of his people, met his reward in the shattering bomb which tore him to fragments, she had been in St. Petersburg. A king, who had been assassinated, she had known well and had well liked; an empress, whom a frenzied madman had stabbed to the heart, had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Felicity Brown served her as a fearsome revelation of life stripped to its rawest essentials,—a demonstration of shattering truths which she would never have believed had she not stood by, looking on. It held her as a snake's eye holds a ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... describes the arrival at the Front. "Battle," in eleven sections, reproduces the mental and physical phenomena of the attack. "The Dead," in four instalments, tells the tale of grief. "The Aftermath," with extraordinary skill, records in eight stages the gradual recovery of nerve-power after the shattering emotions of the right. The first section of "Battle," as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted in full as an example of Lieut. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... enemy State must not be spared the want and wretchedness of war; these are particularly useful in shattering its energy and subduing its will.—GENERAL v. HARTMANN, D.R., Vol. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... of the colours of its body being assimilated to those of the fallen leaves. Its hideous, flat triangular head, connected with the body by a thin neck, was reared and turned towards us: Frazao killed it with a charge of shot, shattering it completely, and destroying, to my regret, its value as a specimen. In conversing on the subject of Jararacas as we walked onwards, every one of the party was ready to swear that this snake attacks man without provocation, leaping towards him from a considerable distance when he approaches. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... these primitive "inferiors" had delivered the first shock, and the mind-probes of the dolphins had sent the "supermen" close to the edge of sanity. To accept an animal form as an equal had been shattering. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... oars out of unison; like carpet-beaters stricken in the eyes and throat with dust, they beat foolishly against the sides and bottom of the bucket, shattering and letting fall their goblets in each unruly attempt. And because Noodle wound leniently at the rope, willing that they should have their fill, at the last gasp they were able to send the bucket empty to the top. ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... never dreamt of breaking puny laws Formed for a puny race of grovellers; But in the blood-stained track of flaming swords, Wielded by knotty arms in Man's despite, Or on the wings of crashing battle-balls, Bone-shattering dealers of a thousand wounds, The roaring heralds of indignant God, There rapture dwells, and there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... And back its echoes shake; And, shouting peals of laughter, The trumpet rushes after, And cries: Wild spirit awake! Amid them flute-tones fly, Like arrows, keen and numberless; And with bloodhound yell Pipes the onset swell; And violins and violoncellos, Creaking, clattering, Shrieking, shattering; And horns whence thunder bellows; To leave the victim slumberless, And drag forth prisoned madness, And cruelly murder ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... increasing the pressure, slowly as he felt the tendons stretching, the bones cracking in this helpless right arm. A few seconds more and the end would come, a few seconds more and—then a crashing, shattering pain drove through Coquenil's lower heart region, his arms relaxed, his hands relaxed, his senses dimmed, and he sank weakly to the ground. His enemy had done an extraordinary thing, had delivered a blow not provided ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... though; There he was shining like a morning star. Now hark. You know how cold his manners are, Never a whinny for his dearest friend. To-day he heard me at the courtyard end, He left his breakfast with a shattering call, A View Halloo, and, swinging in his stall, Ran up to nuzzle me with signs of joy. It staggered Harding and the stable-boy. And Harding said, 'What's come to him to-day? He must have had a dream ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don't imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... panel is dashed in. Through the opening they have caught sight of their object, Garrison, serenely writing at his desk. "There he is! That's Garrison! Out with the scoundrel!" and other such words of recognition and execration, burst from one and another of the mob. The shattering of the partition, the noise of splitting and ripping boards, the sharp crash caused by the shivering of the office door, the loud and angry outcries of the rioters warn the serene occupant of the office that his position has become one of extreme peril. But he does not become excited. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... setting Arnold and his men had routed a party of Germans, and a wounded German, lying on the ground, shot at Arnold, killing his horse and shattering his leg - the same leg which had been ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... British, the dark overcoats of the Germans struggling and hacking in the barb-wires. The eye was confused with the medley of leaping lights and shadows; the ear was dazed with the clamour and uproar of cracking rifles, screaming bullets, and shattering bombs, the oaths and yells, the shouted orders, the groans and outcries of the wounded. Then from overhead came a savage rush and shriek, a flash of light that showed vivid even amidst the confusion of light, a harder, more vicious crash than all the other crashing reports, and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... was decisive in its effect—shattering the plans of Cornwallis, which till then appeared certain of success. The victory put a full stop to the invasion of North Carolina, which was then well under way. Cornwallis abandoned his carefully prepared campaign and immediately ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... swarthy-skinned strangers, who, with bared daggers and sword-blades, were making their way down to the cabin. That they were enemies was so instantly apparent that George unhesitatingly levelled his pistol at the foremost man and fired. The bullet struck the man in the shoulder, shattering the bone, and he staggered to one side,—only to make way for others, however, who, pressing upon George, disarmed and overpowered him before he had opportunity to do further harm. Mr Bowen, who had dashed out of his cabin just behind George, was similarly ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... before the birth of Schiller; but a progress of forty years had not carried it so far towards its meridian altitude, as that the sympathetic shock from the French Revolution was by one fraction more rude and shattering than the public torpor still demanded. There is a memorable correspondency throughout all members of Protestant Christendom in whatsoever relates to literature and intellectual advance. However imperfect the organization ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the third floor, and he succeeded by clever work in getting a foothold on the sill; and, still clinging to the rope, he stood erect. Inside, Chester saw the figure of a man. Inadvertently, the lad's foot crashed against the window pane, shattering the glass. There was a crash, followed by a guttural exclamation from ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... captain lay dying the cannonade seemed, if that were possible, to have increased in violence; another shell had landed in the garden, shattering one of the old elms. Terror-stricken men came running in to say that all Sedan was in danger of destruction; a great fire had broken out in the Faubourg de la Cassine. If the bombardment should continue with such fury for any length of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... other quarters of the World; by sending the few troops of the United States to remote points; by robbing the arsenals in the Northern States of arms and munitions of war, so as to abundantly supply the Southern States at the critical moment; by bankrupting the Treasury and shattering the public credit of the Nation; and by other means no less nefarious. Thus swindled, betrayed, and ruined, by its degenerate and perfidious sons, the imbecile Administration stood with dejected mien and folded hands helplessly ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... and there, other men, stout and middle-aged, lifted out of their chairs by this intense and beautiful burst of feeling, joined in that old heart-cry, and for two or three shattering minutes the air was rent with hoarse shouts of "Vive Joffre," "Vive la France," "Vive la patrie," to the louder and louder undercurrent of music. Indifference, complacency, neutrality, gave way. There ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... money—and he does not in the least like getting hurt. He has received just sufficient education to make him understand half the purport of the orders he receives, and to speculate on the nature of clean, incised, and shattering wounds. Thus, if he is told to deploy under fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes' time. He may either deploy ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... thousand troops into the conflict. Fully aware of the superiority of the Swedish troops, he awaited the attack of his formidable foe behind his redoubts. In one of the skirmishes, two days before the great battle, a bullet struck Charles XII., shattering the bone of his heel. It was an exceedingly painful wound, which was followed by an equally painful operation. Though the indomitable warrior was suffering severely, he caused himself to be borne in a litter to the head of his troops, and led the charge. The attack upon the intrenchments ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... was astonished to find how little both money anxieties and the shattering of literary hopes distressed him. For the first, it was clear that his mother and sister could live with an adequate degree of comfort and dignity. And as for his literary hopes, he realised that the failure had been a real revelation of his own weakness; ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... He had slid from the shadows and was gazing gravely at the picture. Upon my word, I can't give you a better idea of the shattering effect of Corky's uncle Alexander when in action than by saying that he had absolutely made me forget for the ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Division into Germany as a unit of the Army of Occupation. The artillerymen were enthused with the prospects of joining their division and getting in the midst of the big scenery. The movement, however, never materialized. The outfit was forced to bear a disappointment like unto the shattering of expectations of getting in on the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... perceived that our dastard captains had no such intent, but were beyond doubt running away, they bore down upon the Breda and ran between us and the disabled ship, firing all their guns, shooting away our main-topsail yard, and shattering our rigging. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... moment the door swung violently open, with Merevale holding on to the handle, and following it in its course. Merevale very rarely knocked at a study door, a peculiarity of his which went far towards shattering the nervous systems of the various inmates, who never knew when it was safe to stop work and read fiction. 'Ah, Thomson,' he said, 'I was looking for you. The Headmaster wants to see you over at his House, if you are feeling well enough after your exertions. Very ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... those profound mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart, sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open light the everlasting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tossed their heads, and lifted proudly their prancing feet. Allan had a keen sense of the easy, swift motion through the balmy atmosphere. As he leaned back against the comfortably cushioned vehicle, he could not help contrasting the circumstances with the hoary sea-shattering rocks of Fife, the tossing ocean, the tugging oars, and the fisherman's open boat. He did not try to decide upon the merits of the different situations; he simply realized the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... urged me, sought to persuade, to convince me, finally sent me ladies known as being in relations with him, if only we would not abandon him and would not insist on our resignations. I always gave him the same answer, shattering all his arguments, so that he was often embarrassed what to answer me. At last with tears I told him that we had deserved some consideration, fighting for our country, for the state, for Your Royal Majesty, and that we will never act against our convictions and honour. No one ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... eyes, and their sedate mothers; we did not speculate upon whose dog that was, and whether that was a crow or a man in the dim moor,—we thought of other things. That voice, that face; those great, simple, living thoughts; those floods of resistless eloquence; that piercing, shattering voice,—"that tremendous necessity." ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... demonstrating this, he attempts to make it part of a theory that all men of genius are more or less given over to this same "veiled epilepsy." And here he goes beyond the necessities of the case, and takes up an untenable position. There is a morbid and shattering susceptibility connected with some genius; but that tremulous, constantly readjusted sensitiveness which indicates the perfect equilibrium of health in other minds must not be confounded with it. Such is the condition of the highest genius alone; ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... smoke a pipe of peace at a time like the present. Nor was any such thought in the mind of Red Cloud. Instead, he suddenly struck the stem of the pipe across the trunk of a sapling, breaking it in two, and as the bowl fell upon the ground he put his foot upon it, shattering it. Then, raising his hand in a salute to Captain Kenyon, he turned upon his heel and walked away, all the other Indians following him without a word. At the edge of the thin forest they mounted their ponies and rode out of ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... studio-skylight overhead a pane of glass had fallen in with a shattering crash as ominous as the Trump ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... sitting there, with her eyes on the strip of sky which was visible through the window, that time would never go on. A pitiless fact was breaking into her understanding, shattering wall after wall of incredulity, of conviction that such a thing was too terrible to be true. She longed to get Patty away; but when she urged her in a whisper to go downstairs, the girl only shook her head, without moving her eyes from ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... toward the elevated table. The girl looked harmless enough. She was slender, attractive, even delicate looking. But he remembered a horror-distorted face, a mind-shattering scream, and a blinding flash of light. He shuddered a little and turned his attention ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... affirmative—waits threateningly to be discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our physicists) Perhaps not only Indian wars and complications in Asia would be necessary to free Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal subversion, the shattering of the empire into small states, and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together with the obligation of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast I do not say this as one who ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... entered he beheld a mighty beam of light which sprang from the ground, shattering itself against the roof in countless sparks, falling and flowing all together into a great pool in the rock. Brighter was the light-beam than molten gold, but silent in its rise, and silent in its fall. The sacred stillness ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... the young man, laying his right hand approvingly on Tom's head. "First, Tom," he pursues, "be to yourself a friend; second, forget the error of your mother, and forgive her sending you here; and third, cut the house of Madame Flamingo, in which our chivalry are sure to get a shattering. To be honest in temptation, Tom, is one of the noblest attributes of our nature; and to be capable of forming and maintaining a resolution to shake off the thraldom of vice, and to place oneself in the serener ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... from the professions, from the amenities of social intercourse, and even, as we have recently learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. The general and a priori doctrine of equality is shattering itself against the actual facts; and the old Greek conception, "the slave by nature", may be detected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern view is approximating to that of the Greeks, on the other hand the Greek view by its own evolution ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... repeated, with a bitter sort of smile. "And all about Kruger's guns. So it is coming, is it, Johnny Bull; and you do know all about his guns, do you? If it is, and you do know, then a shattering big thing is coming, and you know quite a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... complement to the crooked tree, color balances color, form corrects form, and the entire effect of every scene is completeness. The artist restores this harmony broken by our microscopic view. Music is a shattering and suspension of chords till we ache for their resolution; and the music of life is desire, a diminished seventh that melts the past and ruins the present to prepare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... what you will think of us, but we are escaping from this place. The truth is that I am not well, and my daughter can bear it no longer. She says that if she stops here, she will die, and that hunting for treasure in that ghastly grave-yard is shattering her nerves. I should have liked to tell you, but she begged me not, being convinced that if I did, you would over-persuade us or stop us in some way. As for the gold, if you can find it, take it all. I renounce my share. We are leaving you the waggon and the oxen, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... rendered no greater service to Christian civilization than that of establishing the religious value of the civil occupation, of shattering the monastic and medieval idea of the religious calling, an idea involved in the mist of human passions and imaginations and the cause of terrible life tragedies. If we could but enter into the cloister and examine the religious vocation ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... way? It was a night of perplexed thoughts, confused emotions. One thing only was clear. For the first time in his life certain dreams, which had been as dear to him as life itself, had received a shattering blow. Always he had spoken and acted from conviction. It was that which had given his words their splendid force. It was that which had made the words which he had spoken live as though they had been winged with fire. Perhaps it was his own fault. Perhaps he ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Babington then went to his seat. He felt that his reputation as an artistic player of the game had received a shattering blow. Then there was the imposition. This in itself would have troubled him little. To be kept in on a half-holiday is annoying, but it is one of those ills which the flesh is heir to, and your true philosopher can always take ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Suchet, Massena, Oudinot, and Soult were, with fluctuating fortunes but always with stubborn valour, clinging desperately to their positions or yielding ground to superior strength, awaiting with confidence the hour when the supreme master would strike the shattering blow that, while relieving the pressure on them, would completely change the aspect of the war. It was while pondering his masterstroke, and deliberating on the choice of the path across the Alps that was to lead to ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... eccentricities lead to the distortion of truth and the confusion of relations, but Mr. Reade has freaks of wisdom and eccentricities of practical sagacity. Occasionally he has a stroke of observation that comes like a flash of lightning, blasting and shattering in an instant a prejudice or hypocrisy which was strong enough to resist all the arguments of reason and all the appeals of humanity. "White Lies" is full of examples of his power, and of the peculiarities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... upon the clay, while high-powered bullets plunked on either side of them or soughed overhead. The two automatics blazed in shattering chorus. The guards parted, backed up, some ran away, others fell, and Peter felt the sudden burn of screaming lead across his shoulder. He slipped another clip of cartridges into the steel butt; they ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... now come into its own. The new power was the Germanic peoples, those wandering tribes who, after shattering the Roman Empire, were destined to form the modern nations of Europe and to find in Christianity the religion most admirably adapted to fill their spiritual needs and shape their ideals. In the year 476 the barbarian Odoacer ascended the throne of the Caesars. ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... and for an instant experienced that ecstatic thrill which only comes to elderly gentlemen of solitary habit who in a house full of their juniors find themselves alone at last. Then a voice spoke, shattering his ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... an ear-splitting fusillade of hammering commenced outside. The steel bulkheads reverberated with blows that settled down to a persistent rain of sound, deafening, nerve-shattering. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the passion of the collector was strong in them: so strong that Edmond half forgot his grief for his brother and his terror of the Commune in the pursuit of first editions: so strong that the chances of a Prussian bomb shattering his storehouse of treasures—the Maison d'un artiste—at Auteuil saddened him more than the dismemberment of France. But, even so, the idea that the Goncourts could in any circumstances subordinate literature to ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... disconcerting effect upon Alvaros, whose return gaze at once became shifty and uncertain; the result being that the Spaniard's bullet flew wide, while Jack's, aimed by a hand as steady as a rock, struck Alvaros' right elbow, completely shattering the bone and inflicting an injury that the surgeon, at a first glance, thought would probably stiffen the arm for the remainder of its owner's life, to the extent of very seriously disabling him. Under these circumstances ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... heart Brown saw Douglas leave. It was the shattering of his most dramatic dream of the execution of the Great Deed. When the black bees should swarm he had seen himself at the head of the dark, roaring tide of avengers, their pikes and rifles flashing in the Southern sun. Around his waist was the sword of George Washington and the pistols of Lafayette. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... general consolidation of capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark. In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the repeal of tradition, the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... thought of imprisonment in a steel tube beneath the surface of the sea, and being suddenly deprived of all means of bringing it up to air and light is a terrifying and nerve shattering thing. It is probably the first consideration which suggests itself to one asked to make a submarine trip. Always the newspaper headlines dealing with a submarine disaster speak of those lost as "drowned like ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... strength. Jackson's men, led by able officers, were pushing forward with all their might. The woods, the thickets and the mud nullified to some extent the superior power of the Northern artillery, but the rifles were pouring forth shattering ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... None knows the secret, cherished, perilous, The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet, Heart-shattering secret of ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... of Wilbur Cowan's right crosses—started from not too far back—landing upon the jaw of Spike Brennon with what seemed to be a shattering impact. Sharon Whipple yelled and Pegleg McCarron pounded the floor in applause. Spike ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... people who pass through life in ecstatic pursuit of some idea which those who do not share it call a fad. Well might poor Robert remember the devastation of his home when Daisy, after the perusal of a little pamphlet which she picked up on a book-stall called "The Uric Acid Monthly," came to the shattering conclusion that her buxom frame consisted almost entirely of waste-products which must be eliminated. For a greedy man the situation was frankly intolerable, for when he continued his ordinary diet (this was before the cursed advent of the ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... few centuries has been such as to make any other result improbable. I already have tried to show what seem to me the destructive factors, secularly and sociologically. As for the factors in religious development that have worked towards the same end, they are, first, the shattering of the unity of Christendom, with the denial by those of the reformed religions of the existence of a Church, one, visible and Catholic and infallible in matters of faith and morals; second, the denial of sacramental philosophy and abandonment of the sacraments ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... his way, shattering the peaceful air at half-minute intervals with his bilingual disharmonies. He was pallid, meagerly built, stoop-shouldered, bristly-haired, pock-marked, and stiff-gaited, with a face which would have been totally insignificant but for an obstinate chin ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind of picnic paraphernalia, and so started again, as it happened, by the way we had come. Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharp hill again before the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawl to the top of it; and seeing them under a different light, I saw them very differently. Black against the sun, they had seemed comic; but bright against greenwood and grey cloud, they were not ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... knights and bloody shields... The ship slowed, jarred and stopped. There, straight ahead, Were dock and fellows. Stumbling, he was whirled Out and away to meet them — and his back Slumped to the old half-cringe, his hands fell slack; A big boy's arm went round him — and a twist Sent shattering pain along his tortured wrist, As a voice cried, a bloated voice and fat, "Why it's Miss Nancy! Come along, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... was the reason, unseen and unrecognized at first, manifesting itself merely in the spontaneous and unconscious shattering of her maidenly reserve, but distinctly visible now. It was not that Bob McGraw had come to her out of the desert at a time when she needed him most; it was not that he came in all the bravery and generous sacrifice of youth, shedding his blood that she ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... the shrill CHEEP-CHEEP-CHEEP of the patrolman's whistle, and a shattering crash as the officer flung his body against the partition—then the bark of a revolver shot, the tinkle of breaking glass, as the man fired through the office window—and past Jimmie Dale, speeding now for the front ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... against him did the bear's rage turn. The maddened beast seemed to conclude that his master had betrayed him. With a roar he struck at Tomaso with the full force of his terrible forearm. Tomaso was in the very act of leaping forward from his seat, when the blow caught him full on the shoulder, shattering the bones, ripping the whole side out of his coat, and hurling him ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... Ypres is memorable, the silence is terrible. It is the silence of imminent and breathless things, full of strange secrets, thrilling with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering voices that speak and then are still—voices that seem to come out of the bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant, the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the roar of "Mother," that sounds like an invisible express train thundering ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... to one side. Her right forward plane crashed against the wall of ice, shattering some of the hard crystal. But on the rebound the fluttering flying machine sank lower. Jack tried to make her rise. She refused ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... same event in "Sevastopol," and his version of it would have pleased Owen Wister's Virginian more than Browning's. In Andreev there is no graceful gesture, no French pose, no "smiling joy"; but there is the nerve-shattering red laugh. The officer who tells the story in the first half of the book narrates how a young volunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face was so tensely white that the officer enquires, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... shot struck the end of Desmond's telescope, shattering it to pieces, and carrying the instrument out of his hands, a fragment striking Billy on the cheek and drawing blood, but not inflicting any serious wound. The same shot took off the head of a man who was at the moment coming aft, at the ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... our billet and had wrecked the beautiful mansion of the French mayor of the town. It also wounded some American soldiers in a nearby barracks. Another bomb landed between two buildings at Hexo Barracks, killing three of our boys and one French poilu, besides wounding many and shattering the buildings. Four horses were killed by pieces of shrapnel, and when looking over the scene of destruction the next morning I noticed a hole, clean cut, through a half-inch steel tire on a nearby cart. It had been cut by a piece of shrapnel about an inch long which had also gone through ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... I had long since recognised; but now, as I looked out into the night and dimly saw the breakers thundering in upon the outer end of the reef, shattering themselves into a wall of madly-leaping water thirty feet high, and then continuing their course across the reef in the form of foam-flecked waves, the power of which was rapidly dissipated as they swept inward toward the wreck, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... her, and as philosophical and cynical as once it was his pride to think he was, she would still have remained an absorbing study. Her sudden and awful bereavement had struck her strong and exceptional spiritual nature with the shattering force of the ball that crashes through muscle, bone, and nerves. In the latter case the wound may be mortal, or it may cause weakness and deformity. The wounded spirit must survive, although the effects of the wound may ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... disappeared. This blow fell upon the head of Mark Noble; it did not kill him, but left him an insane man till the day of his death, forty years afterward. A furious mob at once collected, and made an attack on the tavern, bursting in the doors and shattering every pane of glass in the windows. It was only through the intervention of Captain John Langdon, a warm and popular patriot, that the hotel was ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich |
