"Murk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk and gloom of the ill-lit street, and was straining his eyes as if in search for some ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... wood to the coal. All three flared and blazed with a sound of cheerful crackling. The blaze threw out its glow as finely as if it had been set alight to warm a better place. The wonder of a fire is like the wonder of a soul. This one changed the murk and gloom to brightness, and the deadly damp and cold to warmth. It drew the girl Polly from the table despite her fears. She turned involuntarily, made two steps toward it, and stood gazing while its light played on her face. Glad whirled ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... called his men to the dinghy, and they rowed him away through the fog. It was a touchy job, picking his way through that murk. He stood up, leaning forward holding to his taut tiller-ropes, and more by ears than his eyes directed his course. A few of the anchored craft, knowing that they were in the harbor roadway, clanged their bells lazily once in a while. Yacht tenders were making their rounds, carrying parties who ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... hurrying onward to their doom. Here, a stately barque, with disordered topsails almost bursting from the yards as she hurries her hapless crew—all ignorant, perchance, of its proximity—towards the dread lee-shore. Elsewhere, looming through the murk, a ponderous merchantman, her mainmast and mizzen gone, and just enough of the foremast left to support the bellying foresail that bears her ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... oblivious to her surroundings, without sense of her incongruous attire or of the water that squeezed up through the soggy moss at her tread and soaked her frail slippers. On she stumbled blindly through the murk like some fair creature of light cast ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... visit the Prince's chamber, near the House of Peers, where his Majesty's body lay in state. This was on the very afternoon of the funeral, that would start for the Abbey after nightfall, and at Westminster I found a throng already gathered in the mud and murk. In the chambre ardente, which was hung with purple, a score of silver lamps depended from the roof around a tall purple canopy, under which the corpse reposed in its open coffin, flanked with six immense silver candelabra. Between the candelabra and at the head and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... sudden fury. While the other men have turned full around and stopped dumfounded by the spectacle of Mildred standing there in her white dress, Yank does not turn far enough to see her. Besides, his head is thrown back, he blinks upward through the murk trying to find the owner of the whistle, he brandishes his shovel murderously over his head in one hand, pounding on his chest, gorilla-like, with the other, shouting:] Toin off dat whistle! Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... absolutely dejected, and looked it. His mare, too, appeared neither happy nor spirited. Except for some nebulous figures, indistinct in the yellow murk, little else was visible. Mac crouched scowling in the lee of the mare, who stood with drooping head and closed eyes, swaying occasionally to the violent buffetings of the desert storm, and patiently waiting for some move on the part of her master. The three squadrons and the transport had ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... I suppose you know it? And there was a strong man dying a helpless invalid, and his sister breaking her heart, and a woman from the opposite flat, who said she stood for nothing in the world but a letter of the alphabet. And all round was gloom, and murk, and shabbiness, and hard, pitiless facts. I came home in the tube, and all the passengers seemed to look like lifeless, starved, white-faced mummies. They made me feel frightened. I wondered where ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... sufficiently, as it seemed, to put her into perfect sailing trim, her black hull with its painted ports showing up in strong contrast to the peasoup-coloured flood upon which she rode, her lofty masts stayed to a hair, and all accurately parallel, gleaming like ruddy gold against the dingy murk of the wild-looking sky. Her yards were all squared with the nicest precision, and the new cream-white canvas snugly furled upon them and the booms; the red ensign streamed from the gaff-end; and the burgee, or house flag—a red star in a white diamond ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... fog-signals. For outside the fog still held. The air was cold and raw and tasted coppery. In the street traffic moved at a funeral pace, to the accompaniment of hoarse cries and occasional crashes. Once the sun had worked its way through the murk and had hung in the sky like a great red orange, but now all was darkness and discomfort again, blended with that odd suggestion of mystery and romance which is a ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of a ferryboat bellowed through the murk. Bud started the engine, throttled it down to his liking, and left it to warm up for the flight. He ate another banana, thinking lazily that he wished he owned this car. For the first time in many a day his mind was not filled and boiling over with his trouble. Marie ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... out at the wagons, the carts, the nondescript vehicles of every description; but a moment before she had been there,—so near; he had caught beneath filmy white the glitter of gold,—her hair, the only bright thing in that murk and gloom. He recalled how he had once sat beside her at the opera. How different was this babel, this grinding and ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Darkness. — N. darkness &c. adj., absence of light; blackness &c. (dark color) 431; obscurity, gloom, murk; dusk &c. (dimness) 422. Cimmerian darkness[obs3], Stygian darkness, Egyptian darkness; night; midnight; dead of night, witching hour of night, witching time of night; blind man's holiday; darkness visible, darkness that can be felt; palpable obscure; Erebus[Lat]; "the jaws of darkness " [Midsummer ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... she has composed herself with a book in the library, and before the fire sits half lost in reading, half in wondering. Without, the early gloom of the short day is gathering, and the bare trees cast murk shadows all across the frostbitten lawns, and late birds twitter their good-night notes, and a few sleepy rooks caw coldly to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... full moon O' murk or sun of undurn sheeny bright, * Which is she hight who all the three hath might to place in pauper plight, ah! Where on the bending branch alight with grace of stature like to hers * Tho' be the branch by Zephyr deckt and in its ornaments bedight, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... essence of this world, The wine of life, and he who treads the press Is lofty with imperious disregard Of the burst grapes, the red tears and the murk. But nay! that is a thought of the old poets, Who sullied life with the passional bitterness Of their world-weary hearts. We of the sunrise, Joined in the breast of God, feel deep the power That ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... puffs of smoke, blended with steam, and foul with the scent of roasting human flesh, poured into the cabin, turning the dimming light into yellow murk. Gasping for breath the while, Ben-Hur knew they were passing through the cloud of a ship on fire, and burning up with the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... have been nearly at the full, but I could not guess its position behind the even murk of cloud that muffled the whole face of the sky. Yet, it was not very dark. The broad masses of the garden through which Jervaise led me, were visible as a greater blackness superimposed on a fainter background. I believed that we were passing through ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... in the west, Wrapping the forest in funereal gloom; Onward they roll'd and rear'd each livid crest, Like death's murk shadows frowning o'er earth's tomb: From out the inky womb of that deep night Burst livid flashes of electric flame: Whirling and circling with terrific might, In wild confusion on the tempest came. Nature, awakening from her ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... gravel path, hedged about with thick masses of shrubbery; but the park was as black as a pocket; and the heavy effluvia of wet mould, decaying weeds and rotting leaves that choked the air, seemed only to render the murk still more opaque. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... mist and the murk of the morn, From the beaches of Hampton our barges were borne; And we heard not a sound, save the sweep of the oar, Till the word of our Colonel came up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... writing the verses she continued, "These words are from her who saith that melancholy destroyeth her and that watching wasteth her; in the murk of whose night is found no light and darkness and day are the same in her sight. She tosseth on the couch of separation and her eyes are blackened with the pencils of sleeplessness; she watcheth the stars arise and into the gloom she ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... though the chilly wide-mouth'd quacking chorus From the rank swamps of murk Review-land croak: So was it, neighbour, in the times before us, When Momus, throwing on his Attic cloak, Romp'd with the Graces; and each tickled Muse 5 (That Turk, Dan Phoebus, whom bards call divine, Was married to—at least, he kept—all nine) Fled, but still with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sentimentalist than the sky. Standing near the folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of the foam, and saw the whole further sky deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, abhorrent murk of smoke from the nearest town. Much rather would I see that water put to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only by picking one's way between cities can one walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and no one cares; ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... their torches His Reverence, a happier man, stepped boldly out of doors and was swallowed up in the murk. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... sunless, dusky, rayless, Cimmerian, pitchy, tenebrific, murk, murky, dingy, shadowy, shady, mirky, lowering, overcast, gloomy, sullen, Stygian, sombre; obscure, mysterious, incomprehensible, recondite abstruse, cabalistic, cryptic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... continued to hurl other people's vegetables into the murk forward for at least two minutes after Mr. McGuffey had shaken the coal dust of the Maggie from his feet, and was only recalled to more practical affairs by the ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... of the incomprehensible phantasma which hovered about Lord Byron has been more or less felt by all who ever approached him. That he sometimes came out of the cloud, and was familiar and earthly, is true; but his dwelling was amid the murk and the mist, and the home of his spirit in the abysm of the storm, and the hiding- places of guilt. He was, at the time of which I am speaking, scarcely two-and-twenty, and could claim no higher praise than having written a clever worldly-minded satire; ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... silently out of the little office. Through the opened door the trio with their eyes followed him while he crossed the concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... on the invisible shore was sending out its unearthly blasts. Then a whistle seemed to cut the gloom right ahead, and a big black shape loomed through the murk. The Merry Seas sounded her warning, and the helm was jammed hard a-starboard. Another shriek came from the phantom that had seemed to rise right out of the sea. With that shriek, she ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... into the mist and murk of a spring thaw. Wittemore never forgot that night's experience—the prayer, and the walk home again through the fog. The old woman died ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... low voice was heard Threading the ominous silence of that fear, 570 Gentle and terrorless as if a bird, Wakened by some volcano's glare, should cheer The murk air with his song; yet every word In the cathedral's farthest arch seemed near, As if it spoke to every one apart, Like the clear voice of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... him Plutina. His arm was about her waist, and their hands were clasped, as they crept with cautious, feeling steps amid the perils of the path. For over the lofty, barren summit, the mist had shut down in impenetrable veils. Yet, through that murk of vapor, the two, though they moved so carefully, went in pulsing gladness, their hearts singing the old, old, new, new mating song. A mist not born of the sea nor of the mountain, but of the heart, was in the lad's eyes while he remembered and lived again those golden ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... was settling over Boston, a thick foggy murk that soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. The streets were oozy with a wet snow which had fallen through the afternoon and had been trodden into mud; and draughty with an east wind, that would ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... trap was found, and raised. The smoke rushed up in a volume, and the boys looked with dismay at the dense murk below. ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... unawares have sunk awry. Some care, poor eagerness, ambition of work, Some old offence that unforgiving did lurk, Or some self-gratulation, soft and sly— Something not thy sweet will, not the good part, While the home-guard looked out, stirred up the old murk, And so I gloomed away ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... hot and heavy, pungent, gray with the smoke. Farther along, St. Allwoods bulked mistily amid its grounds. The crescent of shore line half a mile distant was wholly obscured. Up over the eastern mountain range the sun, high above the murk, hung like a bloody orange, rayless and round. No hotel guests strolled by pairs and groups along the bank. She could understand that no one would come for pleasure into that suffocating atmosphere. Caught in that great bowl of which the lake formed ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gentleman that knows his own mind, while so many do not. Unspeakable imbroglio of negotiations, mostly insane, welters over all the Earth; the Belleisles, the Aulic Councils, the British Georges, heaping coil upon coil: and here, notably, in that now so extremely sordid murk of wiggeries, inane diplomacies and solemn deliriums, dark now and obsolete to all creatures, steps forth one little Human Figure, with something of sanity in it: like a star, like a gleam of steel,—shearing asunder your big balloons, and letting out their ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... nought could darken or destroy it, Locked in me, Though as delicate as lamp-worm's lucency; Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it In the seventies!—could not darken or ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... the silver clean, Unwonted plain the superscription's seen Round the cleared head; the metal, virgin-bright, Shines a mild Moon to the Sun candle-light. And in these floating stains, this evil murk, All your change-crowded, moment-histories lurk, Voluble Silverling! Dost yield me now Your chance-illumined record, and allow Prying of idle eyes?... you came a boon To men as weary as any the weak moon Shines on but cheers not; you were life ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... clang and chime, Flashed on each murk and murderous meeting-time, And kings invoked, for rape and raid, His fearsome aid in ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... of stags has more of wind, And speedier through their inwards rouses up The icy currents which make their members quake. But more the oxen live by tranquil air, Nor e'er doth smoky torch of wrath applied, O'erspreading with shadows of a darkling murk, Rouse them too far; nor will they stiffen stark, Pierced through by icy javelins of fear; But have their place half-way between the two— Stags and fierce lions. Thus the race of men: Though training make them equally ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... the divided channel of the St. Lawrence, between Orleans and the mainland. Montmorency Falls in a moment showed dimly white through the murk to our left, a great hanging veil of ice higher than Niagara. Further ahead, the lights of the little village of St. Anne de Beaupre were visible with the gray-black towering ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... heavy ones for Natalie and Garth. A haggard misunderstanding rode between them on the trail. Denied the all-explaining, all-healing touch of hands—or lips, the unreasonable despair of lovers seized on each; and the sunny way was plunged in murk. They rode, and camped, and ate their supper in silence; and in silence they turned in for the night. But there was little sleep for either; they lay apart, each nursing a burden of unhappiness; unable to say now what ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... mountain top, he would have found, perhaps, the answer to his question. He had wondered in a puzzled fashion why the great ship had shown its mysterious presence over the flying field. He had questioned whether it was indeed the field that had been the object of their attention or whether in the cloudy murk they had merely wandered past. Could he have seen with the eyes of Lieutenant McGuire the descent of the great shape over Mount Lawson, he would have known beyond doubt that here was the magnet that drew the eyes of whatever crew was manning the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... curved and ended in two obelisked pillars from which, like a tremendous curtain, stretched a barrier of that tenebrous gloom which, though weightless as shadow itself, I now knew to be as impenetrable as the veil between life and death. In this murk, unlike all others I had seen, I sensed movement, a quivering, a tremor constant and rhythmic; not to be seen, yet caught by some subtle sense; as though through it beat a swift ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt |
