"Tensely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and none of them made a bet, for any stakes they could offer would be trifles now; but they glanced at the lad, who stood tensely still, while Winston watched the face of the man at the table in front of him. For a moment he saw a flicker of triumph in his eyes, and that decided him. Again, one by one, the cards went down, and then while everybody ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... moved before a light wind drifting past them; and the blurred shapes of conical tepees showed dimly through the vapor. The night was dark but still, and Harding knew that a sound would carry some distance. He felt his heart beat tensely, but there was nothing to be heard. He had seen dogs about the Indian encampments farther south and he was afraid now of hearing a warning bark; but nothing broke the silence, and he concluded that Clarke's friends were unable to find food enough for sled-teams. ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... listening tensely. He could hear nothing. He went in, 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, ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... tensely to Jarviston, with more time to sweat out. Everybody looked at Gimp Hines—and then looked away. Even Jig Hollins didn't make any comments. Gimp, himself, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... vibrated in the word. "Go! We can't go, now or ever. It's death to Steve if we leave. I've got to stay here, month after month, year after year, dragging my life out until I grow gray-haired—until I die!" She halted, her arms tensely folded, her breath coming quick. Only the intensity of her emotion saved the attitude from being histrionic. In a sudden outburst, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... mother I ever had," she said tensely. "I have given you all I would have given my mother, had she lived—my love, my trust. And now, when I need you most, you fail me. I tell you, John Bailey is a good man, an honest man. If you ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he raised his head. His voice, like his face, was tensely drawn. "Ernestine, don't bother to stay. Probably you want to be seeing about dinner, and I—I don't feel ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... here," objected the younger pilot tensely. "What's this rot about your going into Jarmuth alone? How d'you know they won't skin you alive once you're ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... do I'll never speak to you again! Never, as long as I live; and I'll never rest till I have you in the penitentiary for his murder!" she cried tensely. ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... Peg, breathlessly. She rushed at once to her point. "I went home this morning. I saw my stepfather and Ben Travers. You don't know him, but he works at Heeler's." She stopped, breathless. "Is there any trouble round there?" she asked tensely. ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... deep woods that shows the power of love at work among its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling situations ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... hastily erected and still more hastily designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... and more indignant. "It's that I've got against you. It's my first kiss I've got against you. It's that Nina Micheltorena that I can't forgive. So now you can git—git!" And with these words she unbolted the door and concluded tensely: ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection. With nerves twittering and muscles tensely set, I was ready to become a homicidal maniac at the snapping of a twig or the rolling of a ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... was Nansal grew to a disc, and then it was swiftly leaping toward them, welling up to meet them, expanding its bulk with awesome speed. Torlos watched it tensely. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... Tensely the men watched the planet ahead, white, yet barely visible in the weak sunlight so far out. It was swimming slowly nearer as the tiny ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... California in 1876, was forced to find his West in Alaska—and in alcohol. He was what he and his followers liked to call the virile or red-blooded type, responsive to the "Call of the Wild," "living life naked and tensely." In his talk Jack London was simple and boyish, with plenty of humor over his own literary and social foibles. His books are very uneven, but he wrote many a hard-muscled, clean-cut page. If the Bret Harte theory of the West was that each man is at bottom, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... were distorted with pain and hunger, the sallow, dirt-grimed skin drawn tensely over the facial bones, and the whole framed with the long, lank, matted hair and beard. Millions of lice swarmed over the wasted limbs and ridged ribs. These verminous pests had become so numerous—owing to our lack of changes of clothing, and of facilities for boiling what ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... "Look out!" she gasped tensely. But she had spoken late. That cold blood which had kept me in a tremor and a wonderment, awaiting his pistol muzzle, exploded into a seethe of heat almost blinding me. I forgot instructions, I disregarded ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... out into the other room and stood listening tensely. He was not a naturally querulous man, but he did feel at this point that Fate was picking on him with ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Tensely he watched the red hand crawl up the face of the chronometer and he gripped the intercom microphone tightly. "Blast off," he began, "minus five, ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... tensely, "those girls are all around at the other side of the house, watching. They laughed at me like anything when they saw me, and I'm sure they think we'll have to get the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that, in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the cargo is taken out and portaged to the next 'steady' in the river. Rapids are so common in some journeys that canoemen think less of them than foxhunters think of five-barred gates. In most cases a mistake means death; so every nerve and muscle is kept tensely ready the whole run through. The current should be 'humoured'; for it does a surprising amount of the work itself. If rightly headed with the main throw of it the canoe will {36} naturally tend to seek the ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... the window wheeled suddenly and his face was white, his brows were drawn down. "By God!" he cried, tensely. "He won't get it. Where's ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... guest was gone Warren telephoned to the hospital, Rachael, a little tired and pale in the Indian costume, watching and listening tensely. She was sick at heart. Even into the library, where they stood, the Mardi-Gras disorder had penetrated: a blue silk mask was lying across Warren's blotter, a spatter of confetti lay on the polished floor, and on the reading table was a tray ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... continued Peter, tensely thoughtful, "that the old rascal has sneaked to her since the luncheon, to try to pump something out of her about our movements—even within the bounds of possibility that he is with her ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and caused her manner towards her husband to assume an air of tenderness and concern to which it had too long been a stranger. How quickly was this felt by Ellis! How gratefully did his heart respond to his wife's gentler touches on its tensely strung chords! ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... heard strange sounds all around him, in the room itself! His nerves were tensely strung: he was overwrought. Someone was certainly walking in the corridor!... He had felt a movement along the wall against which ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... of snow-water on the stove and began making his simple preparations for breakfast. For the first time in many days he felt actually hungry. And then all at once he stopped, and a low cry that was half joy and half wonder broke from his lips. With tensely gripped hands and eyes that shone with a strange light he stared straight at the blank surface of the log wall—through it—and a thousand miles away. He remembered THAT day—years ago—the scenes of which came to him now as though they ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... never before so tensely faced an audience, but there was more at stake than she cared to confess, and she was not equal to it. She shone, but did not blind those thousand eyes; she sang but did not cast enchantment. And David Cannon would not help her. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... "Oh, M'sieu!" she cried tensely; "know you of that country which lies far to the west and which the Indians call the Land of ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... siren whose raucous wail gave warning to the people of Hambleton when fire threatened their homes. Tensely, Simon counted the long blasts. One—two—three! A ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... tensely. "I'll fulfill my promise. It'll amuse me, sure, getting back at that Sufferin' Creek lay-out. I owe them something for keepin' back the gold-stages. You shall have ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... sign. Whether he were dead or alive, the victim or the captor of his old familiars, careless, or nursing an open wound, Magdalena was miserably ignorant. The time had come when she waited tensely as mails were due, feeling that an empty envelope covered with his handwriting would give her solace. She cherished no hope that he would ever return to her, but he had promised her his lasting friendship. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... quietly down the river road where John's crowd is gathered, John the witness points his finger tensely out, and eagerly cries out: There He is! This is the man I've been telling you about! He that cometh after me in point of time is become first in relation to me in point of preeminence: for He was before me both in time ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... mashie-niblicks and broke one of the drawing-room windows, she screamed sharply. In short her manner was strange, and, if Edgar Allen Poe had put her into "The Fall Of the House of Usher", she would have fitted it like the paper on the wall. She had the air of one waiting tensely for the approach of some imminent doom. Mortimer, humming gaily to himself as he sand-papered the blade of his twenty-second putter, observed none of this. He was thinking of the ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... know you can! 'Tis lithe in every limb, To your blood 'tis a busy fan, How can the flame burn dim? It tensely draws your sturdy nerves,— No bow's without a string, And when nor bow nor bow-string swerves, An ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... cross-bow breaks, when 'tis discharged Too tensely drawn the bowstring and the bow, And with less force the arrow hits ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... into the church. He took his place among the men, and then Ruth dropped quietly into a pew near the door. When the people rose to sing the Tantum Ergo, she saw Gadbeau slip unnoticed out of the church. She waited tensely until the singing was finished, then she ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... said, tensely. "I understand so perfectly that, were you dying, and were this request your last, I would refuse it! I hope ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bird. Tensely he waited. Unconsciously the hand of the Angel clasped his. He scarcely knew it was there. Suddenly Little Chicken sprang straight in the air and landed with a thud. The Angel started slightly, but Freckles was immovable. Then, as if in approval of his last performance, the big, ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the street door, hung there tensely for a moment to make sure they were not observed by any chance passer-by, then stepped out on the sidewalk. ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... distance they would travel. If I yielded too much of this, they might attain the sloop before I could sound an alarm; while if I moved too quickly the noise would bring them back to the rescue. The moments were agony, as I bent tensely forward, poised for a leap. God! I ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... when we wanted them before dinner, no such complaint could be entered now. There seemed to be a bowling party going on upstairs. We could also hear plainly the rattle of dishes and a lively interchange of informalities from the kitchen end of the establishment. We lay awake tensely. Shortly after one o'clock these particular sounds died away, but there was a steady tramp of feet over our heads until three. About this hour, also, the bridge party broke up and the guests ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... way strange to Pope's experience, for her tears appeared, grew, and spilled themselves slowly down her cheeks, and she made no attempt to hide them. The sight depressed him dreadfully, for at heart he was intensely sentimental. "I didn't know what it means to be notorious," she stated, tensely. "I didn't know what I was doing when I agreed to ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Mr. Canning's mysterious flying visit? That it had to do with her she did not question; and, tensely meditating, she presently found a hypothesis not unsatisfying after its kind. He had come with the hope that she would at last make some generous overture toward a reconciliation. More direct advances, after her three galling rebuffs of him, he naturally could not bring himself to make. Yet he had ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a strike. I was gripping my chair now, and for the next pitch I prophesied the Rube's wonderful jump ball, which he had not yet used. He swung long, and at the end of his swing seemed to jerk tensely. I scarcely saw the ball. It had marvelous speed. Lane did not offer to hit it, and it was a strike. He looked at the Rube, then at Cogswell. That veteran appeared amused. The bleachers, happy and surprised to be able to yell at ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... this sultry August afternoon, was tensely occupied tracking the family cat across the dining-room carpet by its foot-prints. Glancing up for a moment, he caught sight of the other members ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... Tensely she watched, in a suspense that racked her whole body. Guy reached the bend first. There was room for only one upon that narrow ledge. He went round the curve with the confidence of one who fully expected a clear path ahead. ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... the wilds, your highness," he said tensely; "I am trusting you now." Before she could reply the officer in charge of the Ganlook gates appeared at the coach window. There were lights on all sides. Her heart sank like lead. It would be a miracle if she passed ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... more," she said tensely, "and I should have struck those unspeakable young men with my umbrella. One of the things I have never been able to understand, Derek, is why you should have selected that imbecile Rooke as ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... forced itself upon them all then. Women began to shriek and men to pray, but, strange to say, the man whose life was at stake lay silent, with ashen lips, about which the muscles were tensely drawn. ...
— One Day At Arle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... opened the tea-room door. She was hot and tired and hurried. The little clock on the mantelshelf said a quarter to twelve as she closed the door behind her and then she saw that there was a customer at a far table in the corner and realized how late she was. A short, fat little woman was sitting tensely on the edge of a chair, looking about her with quick, restless, stabbing glances. She had on an atrocity of a hat that looked as though someone had plumped down on her head a flimsy crate of refuse blossoms and vegetables. It was a riot of colour ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... There was a strange Oriental odor in the car—suggestive of an incense. The car was gliding up Central Park West, toward one of the road entrances into the Park proper. Shirley's hand clutched the ring, tensely. The driver, tactfully looking straight to the front, gave no heed to the occupants of the Death Car. He was, by this time speeding too rapidly for either of his passengers to have leaped out without injury. Shirley understood the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Hal, tensely. "For you know, old fellow, it can't come true. Why, we haven't even a residence anywhere, from which a Congressman could appoint ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... in a castle which our ancestors built ages ago on a protected plateau," Naida answered tensely. "It is a good distance still, but we ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... loss of blood, lay watching the wolf as it crouched tensely. Again the great gray shadow lunged and a bright streak sprung up on the dog's side. "Gee Gosh!" whined Sundown; "he can't stand much more of that!" Undoubtedly Chance knew it, for he straight-way gathered ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... a moment remained tensely, watchfully still. She felt his eyes on her; she could not see them in the shadow of his hat, but had an unpleasant sensation of a pair of sinister eyes narrowing in their keen regard of her. She shivered as ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... and manners, a boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that went dark and deep with excitement. Several times White had seen him excited, and when he was excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things. On one occasion he had insisted upon walking across a field in which was an aggressive bull. It had been put there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to the swimming place. It had bellowed tremendously and finally charged him. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the same instant a girl on horseback tore past him. The speed of the animal would have been enough to have told him that it was beyond the control of its frail rider, even without the added testimony of the broken bit that dangled beneath the tensely outstretched chin. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tensely, and he suddenly leaned back and endeavoured to invoke into his soul the peace that pervaded the house of worship. The good clergyman was droning, fans and silken skirts were rustling, eyes challenging. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... turned very white. She pulled one of Grace's hands from her shoulder, holding it in hers. "Tell me," she whispered tensely. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... forward. There was no break in it now, but one could see a kind of uneasy ripple, almost as though it held its mob breath tensely and waited to see what was ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... 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, "Are you afraid?" Suddenly a stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadly pale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Ridgway's face. He saw red as he stood there with eyes burning into that door which had been shut in his face. The nails of his clenched fingers bit into his palms, and his muscles gathered themselves tensely. He had been cast aside, barred from the woman he loved by this septuagenarian, as carelessly as if he ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... reflection, at the slender yet full perfection of southern beauty, and she saw also the returning ardor in the face of her lover as he, too, looked at her image. Her black eyes grew soft, her lips parted slightly—with a sudden exuberance he caught her to him, and this time he held her so tensely that, although her plaint was the same, her tone was altogether different. "But I don't want you to marry—even without love, I don't want ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... she said tensely, to the small cat on the cushions, "if I should ever wake up and find that ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... her grandfather's arm, cast an upward glance at his face. It was tensely drawn; the eyelids were half closed and through their slits the Colonel's ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... strange sound in the room. He had dozed in a chair. Some strange sound, or had he imagined it? He sat up tensely and listened. It was her breathing, a harsh and laboured sound. He stepped quickly to the bed and looked and then ran into the passage and ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... in her chair, felt the blood creep into her face. There was no doubt that the sketch was striking. It showed a man standing tensely poised, with a big, glinting ax in his hand. He was lean and lithely muscular, and his face was brown and very grim; but the artist had succeeded in fixing in its expression the elusive but recognizable something which is born of restraint, clean living, and arduous physical toil. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... 'that which thou sowest,' the vivification, the change in vivification, and the rest. All this, almost purely argumentative, should be read quietly, with none of the bravura which your prize reader lavishes on it. The argument works up quietly—at once tensely and sinuously, but very quietly—to conviction. Then comes the hush; and then the authoritative voice speaking out of it, awful and slow, 'Behold, I shew you a mystery' ... and then, all the latent ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... There opposed to him stood I, a little soiled, perhaps, but still a rather elaborately civilised human being, born, bred and trained in a vague tradition. In my hand was an unaccustomed gun. And each of us was essentially a teeming, vivid brain, tensely excited by the encounter, quite unaware of the other's mental content or what to ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... window, Dorothy lifted through it by her admiring Captain Lem, whose heart she had wholly won by her music the night before, and by the deference she paid to his talk. She was eager to find out the cause of all this excitement and placed herself alongside him, as he led off with a military tread and tensely squared shoulders. It wasn't for him to admit that rheumatism commonly bowed those same shoulders, when he was "off duty" and secure in the shelter of ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... first time that night, I was sensible of an absolute stillness. Not even a board creaked. Not a breath stirred the leafless boughs outside, nor rattled the withered vines on the walls. Then of a sudden I grew rigid, tensely alert, and watchful. From somewhere a breath of icy outdoor air struck upon my ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... in the broad and careless spoor of Jake Kloon, his narrow, pointed head alert, and every fear-sharpened instinct tensely observant, the trap-thief continued ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... five or six minutes before he moved again from that attitude of clenched hands and tensely strung muscles into which his sudden passion ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... motionless as a soldier saluting, and held high his bluish shaven chin. There was a very great air of dignity in his stand-up collar, in his blue chin, in his small bald patch and his cane. His neck was so strained from excess of dignity, and his chin was drawn up so tensely, that it looked as though his head were ready to fly off and soar upwards any minute. The lady, who was stout and elderly and wore a white silk shawl, held her head on one side and looked as though she had done someone a favour, and wanted to say: "Oh, don't trouble yourself to thank ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
