"Stinging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped the arms of the chair so savagely that every finger-end was stinging. At the same moment he became aware that a woman was entering the room. He saw the girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the newcomer. They kissed each other, and, with arms around each ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... led a dissipated life, and to have mixed with very bad company. But he had kept out of reach of the law. A man may be a profligate vagabond; may insult a lady; may say threatening things to her, in the first stinging sensation of having his face slapped—but it doesn't follow from these blots on his character that he has murdered her husband in the ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... party enjoyed the ride, except poor Hector, who complained bitterly of the pain he suffered from the stinging-nettle. On their arrival at home, Mrs Hugh applied ammonia and oil. At length he acknowledged that the pain had considerably abated, but during the remainder of the evening he took every opportunity of abusing the country and ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... undressed!—Clare hurried off the infant's one garment, gently rubbed her little body till it was quite dry, if not very clean, and laid her tenderly in the heart of the blankets, among the remains and eggs and grubs of the mothy creatures—they were not wild beasts, or even stinging things—and covered her up, leaving a little opening for her to breathe through. She had not cried since Clare took her; she was too feeble to cry; but, alas, there was no question about feeding her, for he had no food to give her, were she crying ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... fear, it shall be stinging stuff'; and with that he began to brew without more fuss, but all ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... confides to me what he was dreaming, The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and content to the ground, The no-form'd stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with, The hubb'd sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any one, The sensitive, orbic, underlapp'd brothers, that only privileged feelers may be intimate where they are, The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful withdrawing of flesh where the fingers ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... was, generally speaking, a conservative young man and one slow to make friends; slower still to discard them. He was astonished to feel a choky sensation in his throat and a stinging of eyelids, and a leap in his blood. To be thus taken possession of by a blunt-speaking stranger not at all in his class; to be addressed as "Bud," and informed that he once devoured dried prunes; to be told "Doggone your measly hide" should have ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... not attempt to bear. His privacy, his habits, his freedom—all at the mercy of this white-faced boy, these two intolerable women, and the still more intolerable doctor, on whom he intended to inflect a stinging lesson! No doubt the whole thing had been done by the wretched pill-man with a view to his own fees. It was a plant!—an ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that they hooted the officer roundly, and called on him and shouted, "Give the old man back his dog," and greater honor yet to them that some of the boys pelted him with snowballs and junks of ice as he hurried on, and one brawny chap, sitting on the seat of his cart, struck him a stinging blow with his black whip as he scuttled past, with, "Damn you, take that, for killing my dog." The officer shook his club at the honest fellow and said, "I'll pay you for that, see if I don't," but he dared not stop to make the arrest, for the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... their own positive opinions on the point of that vote, with the Scripture proofs. Selden's hand is distinctly visible in this ingenious insult to the Assembly. [Footnote: Commons Journals, April 17 and April 22, 1646; Baillie, II. 344.] It was a more stinging punishment than adjournment or dissolution would have been, though that also had been thought of, and Viscount Saye and Sele had recommended ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... stinging blow on his fleshy ear with the pistol barrel, ad Sard gave a muffled shriek which was more like the squeak of ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... unparalelled outrage to sacrifice them from mere prejudice, or in the belief that their presence would injure the chances of Mr. Dunlap. Then arose Collector Elliott, his face fairly glowing with honest indignation, and his voice sharp and stinging in his tirade against the newspapers. What did he care what the newspapers said? What are the newspapers but sheets sold out to the highest bidder? The newspapers, he cried, are all in the market, to be bought and sold ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... he sprang up with an ear-splitting war-whoop and brought the whip down with a stinging blow over the ears of the indignant horses, who plunged forward with a frightened leap. The coach rose and rocked, narrowly missing overturning in its sudden headlong course. Jimmy clamped on the brakes, snatched the reins and brought the plunging team to a stop after narrowly missing ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... tangled thicket, Where the level meets the hill, Where the mealy alder-bushes Crowd around the ruined mill, Where the thrushes whistle early, Where the midges love to play, Where the nettles, tall and stinging, Guard the vine-obstructed way, Where the tired brooklet lingers; In a quiet little pool, Mistress Salmo Fontinalis[A] Keeps a ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... waiting was short. The popping of dry, scrubby timber warned us that our position would soon be untenable. The infernal vapors from the unholy mixture of green and dry grass, berry bushes, willow scrub, and the ubiquitous sage, made breathing a misery and brought unwilling tears to our stinging eyes. And presently, above the subdued but menacing noises of the fire, the beat of ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... stabbing pain in the calf of his leg. With a cry, he looked back, expecting to see a water-snake gliding off. He saw nothing. But in the next instant another stab came in the other leg. Then A-ya screamed: "They're biting me all over." A dozen stinging punctures distributed themselves all at once over Grom's body. Then he understood that their assailants ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... time I felt some sympathy with the poor fellow. He had probably come, thinking that the great philanthropist was quite ready to become a friend to a Union soldier without much inquiry into his personality and antecedents, and now he met with a stinging rebuff. But it must be confessed that subsequent experience has diminished my sympathy for him, and probably it would be better for the country if the innovation were introduced of having every senator of the United States dispose of such callers ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... But besides emotion, and stronger than emotion, was the anger that August roused in him; he hated and despised himself for the barter of the heirloom of his race, and every word of the child stung him with a stinging sense of shame. ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Mr. Cockerell in Jamaica has noted an interesting Coccid, Icerya rosae, which is protected by ants; "at the present moment some of these Iceryae are enjoying life, which would certainly have perished at my hands but for the inconvenience presented by the numbers of stinging ants."—Nature, 27th April 1893. Mr. Romanes (Nature, 18th May 1893) quotes as follows from a letter addressed to him by the Rev. W. G. Proudfoot:—"On looking up I noticed that hundreds of large black ants ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... behind the group of hungry boys, he suddenly hit one of them a stinging blow on the face, and as this one turned and struck back angrily at him, the big fellow flung him back with all his strength against Tode's stand. The stand was an old one and rickety—Tode had bought it secondhand—and it went down with ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... from his opponent's grasp, and, sidestepping, struck Duval a stinging blow just above the right ear. Duval staggered back, then came forward with a cry ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... What would she think of it? She had read him accurately: it was in him to write. And she could help him, if only by—well, if only by being at hand.... But Gardner's letter! That meant that the pursuit was on again, more formidably this time. Gardner, the gadfly, stinging this modern Io out of her refuge of peace ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... glasses slung across his shoulder in the leather case. He handed them to Priscilla. The squall increased in violence. The whole sea grew white with foam. A sudden drift of fine spray, blown off the face of the water, swept over Inishbawn, stinging and soaking the watchers ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... unhealthy excitement, is misery enough in itself. But to have left off with as much money in his pocket as he began with, would have been felicity, compared with the bitter consciousness of folly, the stinging vexation and regret, which came ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... me?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. "What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... She followed it up, this time, with a string of intricate, foreign-sounding words that even Farmer could tell were hot and stinging. ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... had never been Roland's forte. He sat and stared at the white paper and chewed the pencil which should have been marring its whiteness with stinging paragraphs. No sort of idea came ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... that to a yell which might have issued from the throats of a million fiends in torment; the white wall of foam and the yelling fury of wind struck us at the same instant; and the next thing I knew was that I was lying flat in the stern-sheets, hatless, and with my face stinging as though it had been cut with a whip; while the boat trembled and quivered from stem to stern with the scourging of wind and water, and the spray blew in a continuous sheet over the opening above me and into the sea astern, not a drop falling ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... uncertainly, tilted, hair-poised over a yawning gulf. Were we going to upset? Mental agony screamed in me. But, no! We righted. Dizzily we dipped over; steeply we plunged down. Oh! it was terrible! We were in a hornets' nest of angry waters and they were stinging us to death; we were in a hollow cavern roofed over with slabs of seething foam; the fiery horses were trampling us under their myriad hoofs. I gave up all hope. I felt the girl faint in my arms. How long it seemed! I wished for the end. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... over one's words as well as acts: for there are words that strike even harder than blows; and men may "speak daggers," though they use none. "UN COUP DE LANGUE," says the French proverb, "EST PIRE QU'UN COUP DE LANCE." The stinging repartee that rises to the lips, and which, if uttered, might cover an adversary with confusion, how difficult it sometimes is to resist saying it! "Heaven keep us," says Miss Bremer in her 'Home,' "from the destroying power of words! There are words which sever hearts more than sharp swords ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... mentioned bookbinders among the Enemies of Books, and I tremble to think what a stinging retort might be made if some irate bibliopegist were to turn the scales on the printer, and place HIM in the same category. On the sins of printers, and the unnatural neglect which has often shortened the lives of their typographical ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... as do those of one whose tongue's end holds a quick and stinging retort. Then they closed again. She walked over to the big window that faced the street. When she had stood there a moment, silent, she swung around and came back to where T. A. Buck ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... branches, breaking here and there a limb; But every now and then broad sunlit days Lovingly lingered, caught among the leaves. Yes, it had known all this, and yet to us It does not speak of mossy forest ways, Of whispering pine trees or the shimmering birch; But of quick winds, and the salt, stinging sea! An artist once, with patient, careful knife, Had fashioned it like to the untamed sea. Here waves uprear themselves, their tops blown back By the gay, sunny wind, which whips the blue And breaks it into gleams and sparks of light. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... perhaps it is thought that from their burrowing habits they may serve to hollow out a grave for the soul under the earth, the quarter to which the shaman consigns it. In other similar ceremonies the dirt-dauber wasp or the stinging ant is buried in the same manner in order that it may kill the soul, as these are said to kill other more powerful insects by their poisonous sting or bite. The wood of a tree struck by lightning is also a potent spell for both good and evil and is used in many ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... through the night— A stinging one. Our heedless boys Were nipped like blossoms. Some dozen Hapless wounded men were frozen. During day being struck down out of sight, And help-cries drowned in roaring noise, They were left just ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged in the end. By such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is stinging. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or meal or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax, and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,—these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies; if we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we must expect a wet coat. Then climate ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... nearer, fierce as vengeance, Sharp and shrill as swords at strife, Came the wild MacGregor's clan-call, Stinging all the air to life. But when the far-off dust cloud To plaided legions grew, Full tenderly and blithsomely ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... left five thousand French infantry, having ascended to the ridge and maintained a stinging musket-fire as sharply returned, are driven down by the bayonets of six English regiments. Thereafter a brigade of the French, the northernmost, finding that the others have pursued to the bottom and are resting ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... never sated, With thick, black veins, wherethrough the must is soaking, Nods his dull forehead with deep sleep belated; His eyes are wine-inflamed, and red, and smoking: Bold Maenads goad the ass so sorely weighted, With stinging thyrsi; he sways feebly poking The mane with bloated fingers; Fauns behind him, E'en as he falls, upon the crupper ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... very troublesome when the fruit ripens, stinging the berries and sucking the juice. A great many can be caught by hanging up bottles, with a little molasses, which they will enter, and get stuck in ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... there—take that stern fast out to the last ringbolt. Mr. Second Mate... get your fenders aboard." The wind increased in a violence tipped with stinging rain. "Give her the jib and stay-sail." She heeled slightly and gathered steerage way. Roger Brevard involuntarily waved a parting salutation. An extraordinary emotion swept over him: a ship bound to the East always stirred his imagination and sense ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... singular by what means this discovery was made. One of the seamen of the Samarang complained of a stinging sensation in his feet from having wetted them in the pool. Our assistant surgeon happening to be on shore at the time, caused the watering to be stopped, and the pool to be examined. Buried in the sand, at the bottom of the pool, and secured in wicker baskets, ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... difficult and trodden by men of sinful deeds. It was enveloped in thick darkness, and covered with hair and moss forming its grassy vesture. Polluted with the stench of sinners, and miry with flesh and blood, it abounded with gadflies and stinging bees and gnats and was endangered by the inroads of grisly bears. Rotting corpses lay here and there. Overspread with bones and hair, it was noisome with worms and insects. It was skirted all along with a blazing fire. It was infested by crows and other birds and vultures, all having ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... them to act in this cruel manner; for, as the same writer informs us, the man who suffers his daughter to remain unmarried till she is thirteen or fourteen years old is "subjected to endless annoyances, beset with stinging remarks, unpleasant whisperings and slanderous gossip. No orthodox Hindoo will allow his son to accept the hand of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... all its perils and possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... are a very good friend of mine! Please fly down there and sting that big cat for me! It will only take you a moment and it will be a great favor!" But Mrs. Bee was busy filling her bag with honey, and had no time to bother, stinging cats. ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field
... flashes, and spots that ate into the eyes with their fierce colour. In every direction shot the rays from it, blinding; for it was a mound of stones of all the shapes into which diamonds are fashioned. It makes my heart beat but to imagine the glorious show of deep-hued burning, flashing, stinging light! The heaviest of its hues was borne light as those of a foam-bubble on the strength of its triumphing radiance. There pulsed the mystic glowing red, heart and lord of colour; there the jubilant yellow, light-glorified to ethereal gold; there the loveliest ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... sitting a little longer his mind gradually grew clearer, and at last he felt for the first time that his hand held something. As his eye fell on it and he saw distinctly what it was, he leaped upright with a savage yell and dashed the knife from him as if it had been an asp stinging him. He stood with his bloodshot eyes fastened on it, his hands spread, and his body shrunk up with horror. "Forged in hell! and for me, for me!" he screamed, as he sprang forward and seized it with a convulsive grasp. "Damned pledge ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... make sure he is in. You commence by ringing up some half-dozen times before anybody takes any notice of you whatever. You are burning with indignation at this neglect, and have left the instrument to sit down and pen a stinging letter of complaint to the Company when the ring-back re-calls you. You seize ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... play no more. He was livid with rage. He had lost his wager (he had bet Abellino a thousand ducats that he would never seduce Fanny)—he had lost his money, and he had to bear, besides, the stinging sarcasms of his triumphant rival. His heart was full of gall and venom. More than once he was on the point of making a vigorous demonstration with a heavy candlestick; but he thought better of it, and at last got ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... United States Volunteers, assigned to command Porter's corps; afterwards, McDowell's; in pursuit of Lee; at South Mountain; Burnside's stinging reply to untrue report of, note; ordered to extreme right at Antietam; his march; at battle of Antietam; wounded and retires; sent with two corps to reinforce Rosecrans at Chattanooga; at Tunnel Hill; assault on Rocky Face, fails; at Snake Creek Gap; at Resaca; ordered to cross Oostanaula at ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... run, plunged through a hedge of raspberry bushes, chased right across a strawberry plantation, and came out on the terrace where the roses grow. There I caught sight of a pink dress and pair of white stockings—that was you! I crawled under a pile of weeds—right into it, you know—into stinging thistles and wet, ill-smelling dirt. And I saw you walking among the roses, and I thought: if it be possible for a robber to get into heaven and dwell with the angels, then it is strange that a cotter's ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... was in a pitiful mood, and now he grew hot and forgot himself wholly before her stinging contempt. She did not reply to his ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... back upon the Bishop, and walked over to the window. She was so angry that she felt the tears stinging beneath her eyelids; yet at the same time she experienced a most incongruous desire to kneel down beside that beautiful and dignified figure, rest her head against the Bishop's knees, and pour out the cruel tale of conflicts, uncertainties ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... pain depends on its seat, intensity, nature, and duration. An acute, intense pain usually indicates inflammation of a nerve as well as the adjacent parts. Sharp, shooting, lancinating pains occur in inflammation of the serous tissues, as in pleurisy. A smarting, stinging pain attends inflammation of the mucous membrane. Acute pain is generally remittent and not fixed to one spot. Dull, heavy pain is more persistent, and is present in congestions, or when the substance of an organ is ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... ill-tempered, ugly featured, and quarrelsome. Once when I visited an English line-of-battle ship, the gunner's gang were fore and aft, polishing up the batteries, which, according to the Admiral's fancy, had been painted white as snow. Fidgeting round the great thirty-two-pounders, and making stinging remarks at the sailors and each other, they reminded one of a swarm of black wasps, buzzing about rows of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... maintenance. The majority are printed at a positive loss, as regards dollars and cents. It is doubtful if any of the survivors are supported exclusively from revenues derived from subscriptions and advertising. It is a stinging indictment of our much-lauded "race pride" that the greater proportion of our Negro journalists are compelled to depend for a living upon teaching, preaching, law, medicine, office-holding, or upon some outside business investment. In character and make-up, these papers are ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Her thick crape veil was down; but she closed her eyes behind it, and pressed her hands upon them. She wanted to summon up the vision of the past; she wanted to lash the demon out of her soul with the stinging memories of the bygone misery; she wanted to renew the old horror and the old anguish, that she might throw herself with the more desperate clinging energy at the foot of the cross, where the Divine Sufferer would impart divine strength. She tried to recall those ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... him, Bill," said Reginald, half an hour later, as he sat rubbing his eyes on the fire step of their own trenches to get the stinging ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... cutting words, but she felt, intuitively, that he was not being true to himself in this—that he was forced, as it were, into a false position by something deep down in his life. This feeling robbed her of the power to reply in stinging words, and instead gave her answer ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... be—and it does not affect the general question before us—mark how distinctly Paul lays down here the principle that you will get no real love of God or man out of men whose hearts are foul, and whose consciences are either torpid or stinging them. I need not dwell upon that, for it is plain to anybody that will think for a moment that all sin separates between a man and God; and that from a heart all seething and bubbling, like the crater of a volcano, with foul liquids, and giving forth foul ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes her nestle more closely to her goslings. It was the calamity of my friend Pantoufle to be born with what the novelists call a "too ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... this sudden apparition and these stinging words, the boys dispersed with scarce an attempt to reply, and all the more hastily because they spied, coming up the Grand Canal, the gorgeous gondola of the Companions of the Stocking, an association of young men under whose charge ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... determination that Eleanor never should be bride of mine; nor would he receive, under his roof, her mother, the discountenanced daughter of his father. I endeavored to remonstrate with him. He was deaf to my entreaties. My mother added sharp and stinging words to my expostulations. 'I had her consent,' she said; 'what more was needed? The lands were entailed. I should at no distant period be their master, and might then please myself.' This I mention in order to give ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Konrad Nirlanger, and on his oogly face was the very oogliest look that I have ever seen on a man. He glanced at us as we stood transfixed in the doorway, and laughed a short, sneering laugh that was like a stinging ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... dry dust, the aromatic smell of mountain plants that had been baked all day in sunlight, and the expressive silence of the night. My negro blood had carried me unhurt across that reeking and pestiferous morass; by mere good fortune, I had escaped the crawling and stinging vermin with which it was alive; and I had now before me the easier portion of my enterprise, to cross the isle and to make good my arrival at the haven and my acceptance on the English yacht. It was impossible by night to ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... after the last scene faded out slowly. He slipped quietly into the aisle and went away, while the hands of the old-timers were stinging with applause. Halfway down the block he heard it still, and his steps quickened unconsciously. They were calling his name, back there in the hall. They were all talking at once and clapping their hands and, as an interlude, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... shirt-sleeves, ready to go down, all but his coat and waistcoat, his hair-brushes in the uplifted hands. Hands and brushes had been arrested midway in the shock. The calm clerical man; all the more terrible then because of his calmness; standing there with his cold stinging words, and his unhappy culprit facing him, conscious of his heinous sins—the worst sin of all: that of being ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... him, lest the sons of Greece Should make their onset ere his shaft could reach The warlike Menelaus, Atreus' son. His quiver then withdrawing from its case, With care a shaft he chose, ne'er shot before, Well-feather'd, messenger of pangs and death; The stinging arrow fitted to the string, And vow'd to Phoebus, Lycia's guardian God, The Archer-King, to pay of firstling lambs An ample hecatomb, when home return'd In safety to Zeleia's sacred town. At once the sinew and ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Broke showed himself as adroit with his pen—the adroitness of Canning—as he was to prove himself in battle. Not to speak of other points of irritation, the underlining of the words, "even combat," involved an imputation, none the less stinging because founded in truth, upon the previous frigate actions, and upon Lawrence's own capture of the "Peacock." In guns, the "Chesapeake" and "Shannon" were practically of equal force; but in the engagement the American ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of Havana, in an exhaustive paper read before the Royal Academy of Sciences, gave as his opinion that yellow fever was spread by the bites of mosquitoes "directly contaminated by stinging a yellow fever patient (or perhaps by contact with or feeding from his discharge)." This latter view he held as late as 1900, which, although correct in the main fact of the transmission of the germ from a patient to a susceptible person by the mosquito, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... for the street. The taxi sputtered at the curb, but just as he dashed down the steps a limousine drew up, and Denning sprang from its opened door. His hand fell heavily upon Gard's shoulder as he stooped to enter the cab. Gard turned, his overwrought nerves stinging with the shock of ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... being just sufficiently thick to spice the disaster. When he had succeeded in fishing him out, pulled down the shirts, and pushed up the cap, he began vigorously rubbing the bare young legs with the palm of his hand, spitting upon it, the better, as he said, to draw out the smarting and the stinging of the brier-scratches. Then setting his idol, still howling, upon his own panel of the fence, Burl began looking about him with wide-open eyes, as if in quest of something lost, wondering the while what could have become of his ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Before the year was up, Mrs. Bullard was making overtures to Susan to take the paper back. Susan wanted desperately "to keep the Old Ship Revolution's colors flying"[259] and to bring back Mrs. Stanton's stinging editorials. She also feared that Mrs. Bullard on Theodore Tilton's advice might turn the paper over to the Boston group to be consolidated with the Woman's Journal. As no funds were available, she had to turn her back on her beloved paper and hope for the best. "I suppose there is a wise ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... his eyelid and biting the corner of his eye. They also bite all round the nails of your fingers and toes, unless they are closely covered. It must be said that insects are a great discomfort at Sarawak. Mosquitoes, and sand-flies, and stinging flies which turn your hands into the likeness of boxing-gloves, infest the banks of the rivers, and the sea-shore. Flying bugs sometimes scent the air unpleasantly, and there are hornets in the woods whose sting is dangerous. When we look back upon the happy days we spent ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... since that last day. The path that led from the gate to the door and from there over to the cow house had vanished; grass covered it. The cow-house door had fallen off, and around the doorposts had grown up tall stinging nettles. No trace was to be seen of the foot of man ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... is not attractive to myself, and I very seldom have indulged in such wearisome shikar. There is no particular satisfaction in sitting for hours in a cramped position, with mosquitoes stinging you from all directions, while your eyes are straining through the darkness, transforming every shadow into the expected game. Even should it appear, unless the moon is bright you will scarcely define the animal. I have heard well-authenticated accounts of ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... is found, not in Legislature, but in the interests of the Women themselves. For, although they can inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging extremity from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail bodies are liable ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... Gavin Brice and out into the sandy open, filling his smoke-tortured lungs with the fresh sunset air and blinking away the smoke-damp from his stinging eyes. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the insect which leaves the poison bag at the base of the barb at the instant that the person is stung. The bee stings but once, as the sting being barbed is broken off, and is retained in the flesh of the victim. The sting of the wasp and hornet is merely pointed, and is not lost during the stinging process so that they can repeat the act. Bee keepers, after being stung a number of times, usually become immune, i. e., they are no longer poisoned by bites ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... thankful Thanksgiving, after all! Who knows what may happen? I'm 'strung up' this afternoon and in a fighting mood. I've felt like a new piece of snappy white elastic all day; it's the air, just like wine, so cool and stinging and full of courage! Oh, yes, we won't give up hope yet awhile, Waity, not ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... When they threatened, he cowered down. When they commanded him to go, he went away hurriedly. For behind any wish of theirs was power to enforce that wish, power that hurt, power that expressed itself in clouts and clubs, in flying stones and stinging lashes of whips. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Then the wind seemed to have changed, or else they had traveled in a circle—they knew not which, but the snow was in their faces now. But, worst of all, the snow had changed too; it no longer fell in huge blue flakes, but in millions of stinging gray granules. Julian's face grew hard and his eyes bright. He knew it was no longer a snow-squall, but a lasting storm. He stopped; the boys tumbled against him. He looked at them with ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... spring morning, and when I marked the sunlight dancing here and there, its beauty seemed to mock my sadness. For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like fire. O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be, if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up, and disencumber the world of ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... it announced the knight-errant of never-ending space, a wicked comet. To Arizona gave he playthings many: the rattlesnake, hairy tarantelas and stinging scorpions, horned toads and centipedes, a scented hydrophobia-cat, the Gila monster, a Mexican and the Apache; also ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There was something splendidly theatrical about it all; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the stinging blows of the hailstones, our friends felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated about going at all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... monopolizes most of the nest, and lifts its open mouth far above that of its companion, though obviously both are of the same age, not more than a day old. Ah! I see; the old trick of the cow bunting, with a stinging human significance. Taking the interloper by the nape of the neck, I deliberately drop it into the water, but not without a pang, as I see its naked form, convulsed with chills, float downstream. Cruel? So is ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... of rage possessed the girl. Beside herself with anger she sprang to her feet and delivered a stinging blow straight in the boy's face. Then, her mood changing, she fell back into ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... traveller, reduced to a sweltering prickliness by his exertions, wasn't "noticing much at present," as he rubbed his back in his misery against the saddle of the horse he was unpacking. Then his horse, shifting its position, trod on his foot; and as he hopped round, nursing his stinging toes, Dan found an illustration for his argument. "Some chaps," he said, "'ud be thankful to have toes to be trod on"; and ducking to avoid a coming missile, he added cheerfully, "But there's even an advantage about having wooden legs at times. Heard once of a chap that reckoned ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... once and started for the canyon. A storm blew up, a fierce and pelting hail. The company took refuge in a cottonwood grove. The stones were as large as good-sized plums, and in three minutes the ground was covered. Under the stinging ice bullets the horses grew very restless. More than one went plunging out into the open and had to be forced back to shelter by the rider. Fortunately the storm passed as quickly as it had come up. The sun broke through ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Joe, in his slipshod manner, gave it no thought. Later that very afternoon as the opening of the hall door rang a bell sharply and Joe came in, the men swiftly and guiltily flung their lighted cigarettes to the floor and stepped them out or crumpled them with stinging fingers in their pockets. But Joe did not even notice the clinging cigarette smell that infected the strange printery atmosphere, that mingled with its delightful odor of the freshly printed page, damp, bitter-sweet, new. Once Marty ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... a sharp buzz from the machine and a million stinging needles drove into his brain. There was a moment of fleeting visions; strange places he viewed, and strange creatures parading in a fantasmagoria of delirium before his aching eyes. Voices, harsh and guttural, spoke in his drumming ears; voices that were dimly understandable, though uttered in the ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... The plum curculio, sometimes called the plum weevil, is a little creature about one fifth of an inch long. In spite of its small size the curculio does, if neglected, great damage to our fruit crop. It injures peaches, plums, and cherries by stinging the fruit as soon as it is formed. The word "stinging" when applied to insects—- and this case is no exception—means piercing the object with the egg-layer (ovipositor) and depositing the egg. Some insects occasionally use the ovipositor merely for defense. The curculio has an especially interesting ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... had seen no copy except Lufa's? It was a puzzle he never got at the root of. Probably some one he had offended had contrived to see as much of it, at the printer's or binder's, as had enabled him to forestall its appearance with the most stinging, mocking, playfully insolent paper that had ever rejoiced the readers of the "Onlooker." But he had more to complain of than rudeness, a thing of which I doubt if any reviewer is ever aware. For he soon found that, by the blunder of reviewer ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... had, He who has this, has all. This comforts under pain; This, through the stinging rain, Keeps ragamuffin glad ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pray forgive me!" screamed the beautiful youth, as he felt the stinging strokes descend on his hitherto ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... desire to serve, and whose will I wish above all other things to do. My earthly career can never end better than in the work of my Divine Master; and should it be his will to terminate my life in the Arab tent, I shall have more consolation there than in an English home under the stinging sense of a dereliction of my ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... pleasure relaxed; his own thoughts returned, like stinging insects, in a cloud; and the talk of the night before, like a shower of buffets, fell upon his memory. He looked east and west for any comforter; and presently he was aware of a cross-road coming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a sudden to the boy as if his arms were asleep up to the shoulders; he had a stinging sensation in his flesh and a humming in his ears, which made him fear that his last hour had come. If the bear renewed the attack now, he was utterly defenceless. He was not exactly afraid, but he was numb all over. It seemed to matter little ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... causing the sobs to quaver and become broken off. Next he lost his hat, the poor old fellow, yet would not stop to pick it up, even though the rain was beating upon his head, and a wind was rising and the sleet kept stinging and lashing his face. It seemed as though he were impervious to the cruel elements as he ran from one side of the hearse to the other—the skirts of his old greatcoat flapping about him like a pair of wings. From every pocket of the garment protruded books, while in ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... made Lady Vere de Vere bow to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening—twice, in Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk, but—— All those hills to sail over and—— Come on! ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis |
