"Writhed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles, Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... He writhed in convulsions, beat his breast, and in heart-rending accents called upon God for help. But nothing relieved ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... paragraph, condensing oceans of gall into a drop of ink. Under these mortal stabs, delivered coolly and deliberately, the authors of public abuses shrank, recoiled, and sought safety in silence. They writhed, but knew the power of their adversary too well to reply to him. When once or twice they did so, his rejoinder was more mortal than his first attack. The whole country read the Examiner, from the chief officers of the administration to the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... and even as the Name passed his teeth, the gobbets of foam floated forth from the gate, and the water-weed writhed away with the stream, and the river flowed fair and softly, with a ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... hooked his left arm about the side-post of the open window-shield. It was a strong arm, a firm grip. He seized her left wrist with his free hand. Though all the while his eyes grotesquely kept their amused sparkle, and beside them writhed laughter-wrinkles, he shouted hoarsely, "You'll stop hell!" His hand slid from her wrist to the steering wheel. "I can drive this boat's well as you can. You make one move to stop, and I steer her over—— Blooie! ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the air as swift and deadly as a steel dart and was buried in the heart of the stag, which, leaping upward, fell, writhed convulsively a moment or two, and died. The young Onondaga regarded his work a moment with satisfaction, and then walked forward, ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... was in the war for the House gavel. Under the supervision of Senator Hanway, it brought its whole smothering weight to bear upon the Hawke twenty of those twenty-three whose districts it dominated. The Hawke twenty wriggled and writhed, but in the end gave way—all save a rock-ribbed quartette. They must stay by ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gargantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal-lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the car. And again the big motor roared and churned up the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... young Helmer Kamp, As he writhed him round with pain; This Angelfyr, my brother, has done Since the maid ...
— The Fountain of Maribo - and other ballads • Anonymous
... Chartreuse oblige the prior and procurator to flagellate all the frati, or lay brothers of the convent. They were, therefore, armed for their wonted pious discipline, when the miserable Salvatoriello fell in their way; whether he was honored by the consecrated hand of the prior, or writhed under the scourge of the procurator, does not appear; but that he was chastised with great severity more than proportioned to his crime, is attested by one of the most scrupulous of his biographers, Pascoli, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... ahead was important—very important. That accounted for the tedium of the day. But it would be dark soon. There would be a to-morrow. There had been other important evenings. It was not necessary to get too nervous. He had writhed before in the embrace of interminable hours, hours that seemed never to arrive. Then suddenly they came, looming, swelling into existence like oncoming locomotives that opened with a sudden rush from little discs into great roaring shapes. And once arrived they had seemed to be present forever. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... With bunching muscles he writhed inch by inch to one side, out of the path of the flow of the acid. He was just in time, for, at his last mighty effort, the consuming fluid flowed past, not ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... above his head, and made a vehement gesture as if flinging something from him—something that writhed ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... wand, into thin air. Congratulate yourselves upon your freedom. The Egyptians had gods, and you know what they were. The Greeks had gods, and you know what they were. Those nations grovelled and writhed under their partly childish, partly terrific, and partly disgusting superstitions. Happy that the reality of divine natures can, so easily as I have now done it, be disproved! The superincumbent gloom is dispersed. Light has broken through. And so too, touching ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... fell. There through the ages on ages she stood, relieving Loki's pain, and trying to cheer him, for whom there was no cheer. When the cup was filled and she had to go to the cavern's mouth to empty it, then the venom fell on Loki's face, and in his terrible pain he struggled and writhed until the earth shook. And all the people, startled at their work or from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that all the tortures of his laboratory had been chemically concentrated and were being poured out upon his head. "Our name means 'right,'" said the boy, proudly, and the man writhed in his chair. ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... she put it on, then posed before the mirror. Next down came her hair amid a shower of pins. She arranged it loosely about her face, and, ripping an artificial flower from her "party" hat, placed it over her ear, then swayed grandly to and fro while the golden dragons writhed and curved as if in joyous admiration. A dozen times she slipped out of the garment and, gathering it to her face, kissed it; a dozen times she donned it, strutting about her little room like a peacock. Her tip-tilted nose was red and her eyes were wet when at last she laid it out upon ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... lookers-on to see the amused Chiswell, one of his mates, roll over and over on the greensward in repeated convulsions of side-splitting laughter, whilst the others, standing up, had hard work to keep their perpendicular and writhed in awful shapes as they joined in chorus with him, as Tirrell was slowly wading out of the water ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Pickett writhed. But it seemed to Ruth, as her gaze shifted from Randerson to him, that Pickett's manner was not what it should be. He was not embarrassed enough, did not seem to feel his disgrace keenly enough. For though he twisted ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... officers stole knives from the galley and held the boy as hostage for their freedom. When their demands were refused they cut his heart out. Lake cornered them a few minutes later and, without touching his blaster, disemboweled them with their own knives. He smiled down upon them as they writhed and moaned on the floor and their moans were heard for a long time by the other Gerns in the ship before they died. ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... writhed while he slept. His tongue was busy in audible speech. He had no secrets, in that mysterious hour, from night, and silence, and his dreary rocks. His dreams told him of no ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Zoe had not opened her heart to Fanny. She clung to her, and writhed in her arms; but she spoke little, and one broken sentence contradicted the other. But mental agony, like bodily, finds its vent, not in speech, the brain's great interpreter, but in inarticulate cries, and moans, and sighs, that prove ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... he could get farther, and his spectacles came tinkling down to McMurdo's feet. There was a thud and a groan. He was on his face, and half a dozen sticks were clattering together as they fell upon him. He writhed, and his long, thin limbs quivered under the blows. The others ceased at last; but Baldwin, his cruel face set in an infernal smile, was hacking at the man's head, which he vainly endeavoured to defend with his arms. His white hair was ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... why God made the world so fair, and then left so much that was amiss, like a foul stream that makes a clear pool turbid. And there came into his head a horror of taking the lives of creatures for his own use—the shell-worm that writhed as he pulled it from the shell; the bright fish that came up struggling and gasping from the water, and that fought under his hand—and at last he made up his mind that he would take no more life, though how he would live he knew not; and as for the world of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... strained and writhed to free himself from the encircling arms. But the arms were bands of steel, clamping tighter and tighter about him. Slowly MacNair worked his hand downward to the other's wrist. There was a lightning-like jerk, and the automatic new into the air and dropped harmless into the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... head and neck immovable except as he wished, and the cobra had no power save over its coils. These were in constant and furious motion. They were now wrapped tightly round U Saw's arm, now flung loose, and then tightened anew as the angry snake twisted and writhed and sought to free itself from the clutch ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... red rod of flame, stony and steeled The Gorgon's head its leaden eyeballs rolled, And writhed its snaky horrors through the shield, And gaped aghast with bloodless lips and cold In passion impotent, while with blind gaze The blinking owl between the feet hooted in ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... The words came out in broken, strenuous speech, while the lady's fair face was writhed and drawn like that of one who looks upon a horror which strikes, the words from her lips. Du Guesclin gazed round the tapestried room, at the screens, the tables, the abace, the credence, the buffet with its silver salver, and the half-circle of friendly, wondering faces. There was an utter ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all hungry, and the boys were still very fagged. As they approached the blazing mass, the figure seemed to leap more wildly still among the flames, the cries to grow hoarser and more grotesque. All about was heavy blackness. The slender branches of the burning pine writhed and hissed; they might have been a pyramid of rattlesnakes caught in spouting flame. Overhead the stars had disappeared beyond a heavy cloud of smoke. It was a sight to strike terror to the heart of civilised man; small ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... she was gone the doctor also yielded to the force of the suffering that he had been able to endure silently in her presence, and writhed and groaned with agony—that wrung the ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... others in quick time. Jack and Mark felt that if the cabin was going to fall, the open air was the safer place. Here, however, it seemed that they could not keep their feet. They reeled about like drunken men, and the forest trees bent and writhed as though an invisible wind tore at them, whereas the fact was that the wind had fallen and it was ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... King, and all of them," said John with a shudder; "it looked black and deadly, and I crossed myself, and said the Blessed Name, and no doubt it writhed itself and went off in brimstone and smoke, for I shut my eyes, and when I looked up again it ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disapproving friend had to divide his sympathy, and to feel for each of the pieces. And what appeared to us worthy of remark was, that whereas, when a snake was decollated, it was only the tail that continued to wriggle—when a worm was divided, all the segments writhed in the same way, and manifested an equal irritability; showing the difference between creatures of annulated structure, according as they have or have not a brain. A new argument against the brain as the organ of sensation, was afforded to us by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... the glistening skin of the fish, as it suddenly untwisted itself, and writhed into another form. Then the heron changed its direction, and nothing but the great, grey beating pinions of the bird were visible, the long legs outstretched like a tail, the bent back neck, and projecting beak being merged in the body ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... fagged out and at my wits' end to know what style of entertainment to provide for the club meeting to be held on the evening of the 15th of that month. I had provided already an unusually taking variety of evenings, of which one in particular, called the "Martyrs' Night," in which living authors writhed through selections from their own works, while an inhuman audience, every man of whom had suffered even as the victims then suffered, sat on tenscore of camp-stools puffing the smoke of twenty-five score of free cigars into their faces, and gloating ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... tune, and sang in a low tone. The boy seemed to have a fit, and writhed as though he were in convulsions, finally dropping down into the basket very slowly. Mrs. Blossom was sure the basket was not big enough to contain him, and wondered what had become of him. Then the performers threw themselves on the basket, closed the lid, and began to punch it in every direction ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... at her ease; Pons was too angry to say a word. He writhed on his bed, painfully uttering inarticulate sounds; the blow was killing him. And at this point, as usual, the scolding turned suddenly to tenderness. The nurse dashed at her patient, grasped him by the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the car comes on. The mangled steeds grim Terror guides. His forehead writhed to a relentless frown, Aloft the angry Power of Battles rides: Grasp'd in his mighty hand A mace tremendous desolates the land; Thunders the turret down the steep, The mountain shrinks before its wasteful sweep; Chill horror the dissolving limbs invades, Smit ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... occasional interruption. It hardly need be stated that he kept a sharp eye on Jefferson, but for the sake of the country he supported him when he could do so consistently with his principles. More than once the President found in him an invaluable ally; and as often, perhaps, he writhed as on a hot gridiron. Hamilton came forth in the pamphlet upon extreme occasions only, but he was still the first political philosopher and writer of his time, and the Federalists would have demanded his pen upon these occasions had he been disposed to retire it. Although out ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... that had attended the discovery and gift—warming and exalting Judge Harvey's very human pride—had been followed by an anti-climax of gibes and jeers at his gullibility. Whenever the hoax was spoken of, Judge Harvey writhed with personal humiliation, and with anger against the person who had recalled his discomfiture, and with a desire for vengeance against the ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a series of theological and economical questions which surprised her father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a courteous attention when the minister came to call, and she engaged him in spiritual converse until he writhed again. For a space her investigations led her no whither, and then, without warning, the man of peace solved her dilemma and shed ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... order to preserve its peace; and we were such as still is apparent round about the Gardingo." I began, "O Friars, your evil"—but more I said not, for there struck mine eyes one crucified with three stakes on the ground. When me he saw he writhed all over, blowing into his beard with sighs: and the Friar Catalano, who observed it, said to me, "That transfixed one, whom thou lookest at, counseled the Pharisees that it was expedient to put one man to torture for the people. Crosswise and naked is he on the path, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... Dick received a blow across the chest that not only knocked the breath out of him, but sent him to the ground with a crash, while the threshing of the creature's body upon the earth, as it writhed and twisted convulsively in its death agony, might have been heard from one end of the glade to the other. Earle dashed forward and quickly dragged Dick out of the way before assisting the lad to regain his feet, and it was well that he did so, for ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... men, in a like attitude, were seen also behind the group of prostrate figures. These first two men made most hideous faces for a few minutes, and then the lads were led over the bodies lying on the ground, which moved and writhed, as though in great agony; after which the same strange grimaces were repeated by the two men who were placed on the further side of the apparently dead bodies. All the information that could be gained of the ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... times as much. Did any man that ever got the Pearl of great price feel that he had given too much for it, even if he had given all that he had? Never! Martyrs and confessors have gloried in the possession of it while they have writhed on the rack and in the flames, and you never heard one solitary testimony that any man or woman of God ever thought that they had paid too highly for it. Never! Do you want to have your prayers answered? That is the way. Walk so that your own heart ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... my grip and spoke no word. He writhed and turned, striving to free himself. I had knocked his revolver from his hand, and he tried in vain to reach it. My grip was strong with the strength of madness, and the white face before me grew whiter except where a smear of blood closed the left eye ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Medicine writhed in the restraining grasp of those who held him. "Look at that there! As good hearted a boy as ever turned a cow! Never harmed a soul in 'is life. Is all your dirty, stinkin' sheep, an' all your lousy herders, worth ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... that awful lust for slaughter which will creep into the hearts of the most civilised of us when blows are flying, and life and death tremble on the turn. My arms were round the two swarthy demons, and I hugged them till I heard their ribs crack and crunch up beneath my grip. They twisted and writhed like snakes, and clawed and battered at me with their fists, but I held on. Lying on my back there, so that their bodies might protect me from spear thrusts from above, I slowly crushed the life out of them, and as I did so, strange as it may seem, I thought of what the ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... while stamping upon a rock, with my bristling head swung high, breathing through wide nostrils all the savour of the world. For I had come marvellously from decrepitude to strength. I had writhed from the bonds of age and was young again. I smelled the turf and knew for the first time how sweet that smelled. And like lightning my moving nose sniffed all things to my heart and ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... at his grandson and writhed. So many openings, so many things to be done; yet what future aid had he to count on for carrying along his line and for reaping the opportunities in his field? A child of four, in rompers, pushing a little wheelbarrow of pebbles along ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... madam," he said, with a curious writhed smile. "Did you not know that they thought they were rid of me when I took the disease at seven years old, and lay in the loft over the hen-house with Molly Owens to tend me? and I believe it was thought ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... same manner the gallant fellow himself had done. He struck his bayonet into his head; the tiger rose at him, he fired, and this time the ball took effect, and in the head. The animal staggered backwards, and we all poured in our fire; he still kicked and writhed, when the gentlemen with the hogspears advanced and fixed him, while some natives finished him by beating him on the head with hedge stakes. The brave artillery-man was after all but slightly hurt; he ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... long festoons, rested a huge black snake; a bird two thirds grown was slowly disappearing between his expanded jaws. As he seemed unconscious of my presence, I quietly observed the proceedings. By slow degrees he compassed the bird about with his elastic mouth; his head flattened, his neck writhed and swelled, and two or three undulatory movements of his glistening body finished the work. Then he cautiously raised himself up, his tongue flaming from his mouth the while, curved over the nest, and with wavy subtle ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Cemetery, with its lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested in such a Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through Hell-fire. No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No wonder the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights. And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she was alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she stood face to face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose loving hand had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... figure he made in the patriotic imagination must diminish rapidly with the establishment of the very conditions he labored to bring about. The wit of much that he said must grow dim with the fading remembrance of what provoked it; the sting lie pointless and painless in the dust of those who writhed under it,—so much of the poet's virtue perishing in their death. We can only judge of all this vaguely and for a great part from the outside, for we cannot pretend to taste the finest flavor of the poetry ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... catches in one over was straining the bonds of human affection too far. There would have been serious trouble between David and Jonathan if either had persisted in dropping catches off the other's bowling. He writhed in bed as he remembered the second of the two chances which the wretched Bob had refused. The scene was indelibly printed on his mind. Chap had got a late cut which he fancied rather. With great guile he had fed this late cut. Sent down a couple which he put to the boundary. Then fired ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... completion to all passion, this minute and individual drama of the perfected history of separate spirits, and of their finally accomplished affections!—think you, I say, all this was well told by mere heaps of dark bodies curled and convulsed in space, and fall as of a crowd from a scaffolding, in writhed concretions ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... any hand but her own mother's had dashed her cup of happiness out of her hand, she would have had there a refuge to go to. Most girls have their mothers. If Evan had not been sent to so distant a post—but when her thoughts dared turn to Evan, Diana writhed upon her bed in tearless agony. Evan, writing in all the freshness and strength of his love and his trust in her, those letters;—waiting and looking for her answer;—writing again and again; disappointed all the while; and at last obliged ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... had a space cleared and seized the spiny one by its soft, unspiny nose. Grunting and squealing it pulled back and lashed its terrible tail. To what effect? Merely to fill the log around with quills. With all its strength the quill-pig pulled and writhed, but the fisher was stronger. His claws enlarged the hole and when the victim ceased from exhaustion, the fisher made a forward dash and changed his hold from the tender nose to the still more tender ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the rising pleasure of his hopes of entering upon a new species of existence-that of an approved man of letters ; for it was on the bed of sickness, exchanging the light wines of France, Italy and Germany, for the black and loathsome potions of the Apothecaries' hall, writhed by darting stitches and burning with fiery fever, that he felt the full force of that sublunary equipoise that seems evermore to hang suspended over the attainment of long-sought and uncommon felicity, just as it is ripening to burst ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... day, by night, on constant guard." The merchant, having thus his doubts and fears removed, resumed his meal with freshened appetite, but gave nought to the poor nomad, and, having finished, closed his wallet. The Bedouin, seeing his stinginess, writhed with the pangs of hunger. Presently a gazelle passed rapidly by them, at which he sighed heavily, and the merchant inquiring the cause of his sorrow, he said: "The cause is this—had not thy dog died he would not have allowed that ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... David appeared, there happened a certain thing to all but her, and yet to her it was, for the time being, utterly overwhelming. It absorbed all her thoughts into one maddened channel, where they writhed and raved and dashed themselves blindly against inevitable fate. For the first time in her life this patient woman felt as if endurance were not the right thing; as if wild shrieks of pain, bitter outcries against Providence, would be somehow easier, better: might reach His throne, ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... into the air, though near blind with the anguish of that iron grip, the little victim writhed upward and bit furiously at his enemy's leg. His jaws got nothing but a bunch of fluffy feathers, which came away and floated down the moonlight air. Then the life sank out of his brain, and he hung limply; and the broad wings bore him inland over the dyke-top—straight over ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... He shrieked and roared, writhed and turned, until the forest re-echoed with his cries, and the cruel ropes cut into his ankles, making deep, red wounds which stained the ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... miracles which the saint had performed, unfortunate persons afflicted with that disease which the Greeks call "the divine malady," came from all parts of Egypt in incalculable legions. As soon as they saw the pillar, they were seized with convulsions, rolled on the ground, writhed, and twisted themselves into a ball. And—though it is hardly to be believed—the persons present were in their turn seized with a violent delirium, and imitated the contortions of the epileptics. Monks and ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... who know anything of such experiences, it will not be surprising that such feelings as these should be alternated with fierce bursts of passion. The old self then started up with feverish energy, and writhed for life. Never any one tried to be better, without, for a time, seeming to himself, perhaps to others, to be worse. For the suffering of the spirit weakens the brain itself, and the whole physical nature groans under it; while the energy spent in the effort to awake, and arise ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... some creeping thing forcing its way through wet and tangled grass, or over dead leaves, . . one instant more, and a huge Serpent—a species of python some ten feet in length—glided through the round aperture made by the lifted bars, and writhed itself slowly along the marble pavement straight ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... prey; and, when gorged and helpless, behold, it was immediately fallen upon by two other snakes. To his disturbed fancy, there was a dim resemblance between their heads and those of Quirk and Snap—they all three became intertwisted together—and writhed and struggled till they fell over the edge of a dark and frightful precipice—he woke—thank God! it ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Before a motion-picture theatre he paused to study the billing of Muriel Mercer in Hearts Aflame. The beauteous girl, in an alarming gown, was at the mercy of a fiend in evening dress whose hellish purpose was all too plainly read in his fevered eyes. The girl writhed in his grasp. Doubtless he was demanding her hand in marriage. It was a tense bit. And to-morrow he would act with this petted idol of the screen. And under the direction of that Mr. Henshaw who seemed to take screen art with proper seriousness. He wondered if by any chance Mr. Henshaw ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... stumbling, but coming on. It swept like a long serpent parallel to the works, writhing, smitten but surviving. It came on through the wood, writhing, tearing at the cruel abattis laid to entrap it. It writhed, roared, but it broke through. It swept over the rail fences that lay between the lines and the abattis, and still came on! This ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... The man writhed in silence with his hand to his breast, and the crowd stood aghast. He held up his hand and gazed at it with a queer stupefaction. The blood dripped from his fingers. Then his chin went up as if some one was gripping the back of his neck. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground, and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw. He would then call for a bucket of salt, and fling upon the raw flesh till the man writhed on the ground like a worm, and screamed aloud with agony. This poor man's wounds were never healed, and I have often seen them full of maggots, which increased his torments to an intolerable degree. He was ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... to whimper; Cuddie writhed himself this way and that way, the very picture of indecision. At length he broke out, "Weel, woman, canna ye tell us what we suld do, without a' this din ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... or else to compel the other to relinquish his hold for an instant—either of these successes giving the victory. Often as Arthur had tried the art, he never had been so matched before. The competitors swayed this way and that, writhed, struggled, half lost their footing and regained it, yet neither yielded. All the boatmen gathered breathlessly around, King Arthur's men refusing to believe their eyes, even when they knew their king was in danger. A stranger group was that of the sullen farm-laborers, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... from the back of her victim, held high in the air so her feet did not touch the ground, and shaken to and fro as a terrier shakes a rat. She twisted and turned and writhed and squirmed to free herself, thinking this must be the big brother punishing her for the drubbing she had given hapless Joe, and expecting any instant to feel the lash of his heavy herder's whip. But no whip struck her, and with one great tug she broke loose from the ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... thin, straight stream, that, striking upon the face of the Bee, clung about her head enveloping it as though with a strange blue veil. Then of a sudden she stretched out her hands, and let fall the two locks of hair upon the burning herbs, where they writhed themselves to ashes like things alive. Next she opened her mouth, and began to draw the fumes of the hair and herbs into her lungs in great gulps; while the snake, feeling the influence of the medicine, hissed and, uncoiling itself from about her neck, ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... words and manner, she could not delude herself with the belief that he came only in his own behalf, or that he was prompted by jealousy. She remembered the grim frankness with which he said virtually that he had nothing to hope from her, not even tolerance. She almost writhed under the fact that he had again compelled her to believe that, however mistaken, he was sincere and straightforward, that he truly thought that Bodine was lover ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... awful sight his distorted features presented as, drawing back his head as far as he could from the fierce heat, he glared round the circle seeking perchance for a hand merciful enough to put him out of his misery—but after the first minute of suffering his stoicism abandoned him, and he writhed so violently that the fetish-man and his assistants had to steady the shears in order to prevent them from capsizing altogether. And with every writhe of the victim the slender poles bent and gave, letting the miserable sufferer ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... could; if I should be too late, it would not be my fault. The agent, whoever he might be, was a striking-looking fellow in a dirty brown cloth caftan and an enormous sash wound round his middle. A pointed cap with some tawdry gold lace on it covered his head, and greasy black love-locks writhed filthily over his high cheek bones and into his scanty tangled beard; a suspicious hilt bound with brass wire reared its snake-like head from the folds of his belt, and his legs, terminating in thick-soled native shoes, reminded one of a tarantula in boots. He salaamed awkwardly with a ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the solution of this mystery. What was it that afflicted the sylph? She seemed to suffer intense pain. Her features contracted, and she even writhed, as if with some internal agony. The wondrous forests appeared also to have lost half their beauty. Their hues were dim and in some places faded away altogether. I watched Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to wither away under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... missed the prize he so coveted and had made such strenuous efforts to win. He had learned nothing new in regard to his own character, yet somehow it had never looked so black as now, when seen through the spectacles of an upright, honest, vice-detesting Christian gentleman. He writhed at the very recollection of the disgust, loathing, and contempt expressed in Mr. Dinsmore's voice and countenance as well ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... frog's leg, stretch up through the water, and a hand that dripped with slime grope for his cap. With three strides he was in the pond, and he caught the cap and the hand together in his fist. The hand writhed in his, but Hobb was too strong for it; and with a mighty tug he dragged first the shoulder and then the head belonging to the hand into view. They were the shoulder and head of the muddy man whom you, dear maidens, have seen once before in this ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... known by courtesy as Rear Ninth Street. "Rear Ninth Street" has a sound of exclusive aristocracy, and the name was a matter of some pride to the dwellers in the narrow, unpaved alley that writhed its watery way between two rows of tumble-down cottages, Joe's family consisted of his father, whose vocation was plumbing, and whose avocation was driving either in the ambulance or the patrol wagon; his mother, ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... bring his talons out, His forfeit life to save; And planted thus, he writhed about ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... presented themselves: linnets and finches fluttered here and there upon the rare bushes, whilst swallows joined the caravan, and skimmed round and round for hours among the camels, almost brushing the faces of the drivers. Lizards glanced and snakes writhed across the path. We started three wadan or mouflon, churlish animals, fond of such solitudes. As to the birds, our people say they do not drink in winter, and in summer leave the Hamadah altogether. Four-fifths of the surface were utterly barren. Little ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... great booby held Jan to receive his thwacks from the strap which the Dame had of late years substituted for the birch rod. And as Jan writhed, he chuckled as heartily as before, it being an amiable feature in the character of such clowns that, so long as they can enjoy a guffaw at somebody's expense, the subject of their ridicule is not a matter of much ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and now and then would crowd her forearm between her teeth to shut in her pent-up anguish. She would have thrown herself from the seat but for the unobtrusive little man who knelt in front to keep her from falling, and gently held her on as she spasmodically writhed. His plain, unromantic face showed deep anxiety, not unmixed with fear. He was eagerly assisted by the dear old lady who sat in front. Hers was mother-heart clear through; her satchel had been disturbed to the depths ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the mutterings ceased, while his breathing grew more labored and uneven. Then, while Willow Spring was still miles away, he suddenly gasped, choked, and writhed beneath the blanket. The blood welled up to his lips, and he fell ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... this conscientiousness in his own work did not make the little authors one whit less sore under his lash. Privately they writhed and they squirmed—publicly they denounced. All save one—an ex-preacher, Dr. Rufus Griswold—himself a critic of ability, who would like to have been, like The Dreamer, a poet ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... he was the same man who, an hour ago, in the theater, had raged and writhed under what he felt to be an invasion of his ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Solomon's seal upon them, sold by the miracle-worker of the city. Visanteta thought that all these remedies that were being thrust down her throat would be the death of her. She shuddered with the chills of nausea, she writhed in horrible contortions as if she were about to expel her very entrails, but the odious toad did not deign to show even one of his legs, and la Soberana cried to heaven. Ah, her daughter!... Those remedies would ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... neither of his class, his understanding, or his education. She was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel at present, can ever be. And though through her inspiration he had not to come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes writhed with the thought that he was so far above her. Nevertheless, her position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... then, he respects them. Turn which way you will, either your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are; but no eel in the well-sanded fist of a cook-maid, upon the eve of being skinned, ever twisted and writhed as an orthodox parson does when he is compelled by the gripe of reason to admit anything in ...
— English Satires • Various
... without a second's warning, the engine bucked like a balky broncho, and after one or two mad plunges along the roadbed, toppled over the bank and rolled into the gulley below. At the first impact of the locomotive with the long train behind it, the freight arched its back and writhed and twisted like a mighty serpent. Three of the cars went over the bank still attached to the engine and the rest piled up on one another or rolled down into the gulley, as fate willed. There was crash upon crash and thunder upon thunder as the heavy cars piled ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... question—which would be by the same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie wouldn't open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he were not fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it was not till then that he had chosen between what he could do and ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... that it was bound. With great heavings and throes, with snortings and bellowings, with scratchings and tearings of its great claws and lashings of its terrible tail, it writhed and fought to be free, and the light of thousands of ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... happened at all until a second figure rolled and toppled itself out on the ground from the seat beside the ambulance driver's. That figure kicked and writhed on the ground. A policeman went to find out what was ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... martial tread Over a heap of bodies, felt his heel Seized fast, as if 't were by the serpent's head Whose fangs Eve taught her human seed to feel; In vain he kicked, and swore, and writhed, and bled, And howled for help as wolves do for a meal— The teeth still kept their gratifying hold, As do the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his cot and writhed in blind despair. Might not even his mother have deceived him! Might not she too have been acting! What did he care now for name or liberty, or life itself! The girl had mocked him with what he thought was love, ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... Bouillon, Comte de Bechamel, Grandee of Spain and Prince of Volovento, in our Assembly what was the oath you swore?' The old man writhed as he ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... As it writhed past him he reached out a hand and touched the side of its gigantic tail. It was of stone. It had not "come alive" as he had fancied, but was alive in its stone. It turned, however, at the touch; but Gerald also had turned, and was running ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... hands of Henry Martyn. Twenty years earlier it had opened the eyes of William Wilberforce and led him to repentance. Doddridge's powerful sentences fell upon the proud soul of Henry Martyn like the lashes of a scourge. He resented them; he writhed under their condemnation; but they revealed to him the desperate need of his heart, and he could not shake from him the alarm ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... intoxicated me like wine. I approached him quite softly, persuaded that he was going to run away. And suddenly I seized him by the throat. He held my wrists in his little hands, and his body writhed like a feather on the fire. Then he moved no more. I threw the body in the ditch, then some weeds on top of it. I returned home and dined well. What a little thing it was! In the evening I was very gay, light, rejuvenated, and passed the evening at ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Benson writhed as John finished his story. He went on with the tale of his own black loneliness and grey home-sickness. The glory of Kent and the charm of High Wood seemed to be gone like the shadows of a dream already. What good had ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... shaken by a giant's hands, the tree-tops above us swayed to and fro; then the shrubbery along the paths seemed full of wild terror and writhed in ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... purely instinctive revulsion. The things in the plastic container were gray and small. Had they been still, they might have been no worse to look at than raw oysters in a cocktail. But they squirmed. They writhed. ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... into the circle of the fire came the group of Monumwezis. Again they were gathered together in a compact little mass; but now they were bent nearly double, and were stripped to the red blankets about their waists. Before them writhed Sulimani, close to earth, darting irregularly now to right, now to left, wriggling, spreading his arms abroad. He was repeating over and over two phrases; or rather the same phrase in two such different intonations that they seemed ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... upon picture and speculations, returning to them by another door. The lady had not Aminta's freshness: she might be taken for an elder sister of Aminta. But Weyburn wanted to have her position defined before he set her beside Aminta. He writhed under Lady Charlotte's tolerating scorn of "the young woman." It roused an uneasy sentiment of semi-hostility in the direction of my lord; and he had no personal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... short observations in return. But when Anton proceeded, with the utmost delicacy indeed, but still with the precision of a man of business, to state the obligations under which the baron at present lay, and his inadequate means of fulfilling them, the nobleman writhed in his chair like a victim on the rack. And Anton keenly felt how painful it must needs be to him to have a stranger thus introduced into his most secret affairs—a stranger anxious to spare his feelings, it is true, but at every ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... the field or on the hill except a deformed tree, which writhed and shivered a few paces ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to ease his cold-stiffened limbs. Toward dusk the party left the river and turned into a tote-road that writhed away under snow-laden spruces and hemlocks, coiled its way about rocky hummocks, and curved in "whip-lashes" up precipitous hillsides. There was not a break in the forest that stretched away ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... stepped close to her and jerked her blouse down from her shoulder. She writhed away from him, silent in her rage and fear and fighting dumbly. She made no appeal. At that moment her heart was so full of hatred that it was hardened to pride. He lifted his brand and set it against the ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... young man, Roger, just 32 years of age, but an irresistible man who can win anything from anybody. He writhed into the presidency first, and then deliberately set about rearranging the government to suit himself. And the people let him get away with it, followed him like sheep. And then he was Dictator, and he began turning the social and economic balance of the planet into a ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... silence. It speaks well for our sense of honour, and respect for the implied conditions of the treaty, when it is remembered that this abhorred Tom, the living instrument of our tortures, and on whose back we had most of us so often writhed, was permitted to go into the darkest corners of the room unmolested, and even uninsulted. When the tables were cleared, then rung out exultingly the shout of "Bar him ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... writhed upon the grass and sobbed again, his bent chest almost bursting with his efforts to make no sound. He had always been alone—always, always; but this loneliness was such as no young human thing could bear. He was no longer alive; he was no longer a ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... feel Medusa's dream, and to be made more restless by it. They twined themselves into tumultuous knots, writhed fiercely, and uplifted a hundred hissing heads, without ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... of snakes writhed backward and forward, and then two of them rose in the air and hung over the ship. I could see the under side and I saw what Green had called the scars where the sharks had attacked. They were great cup-shaped depressions with vile white edges, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... the brilliantly lighted theatre was crowded to overflowing. Of course there were English who scowled at the Americans, and Americans who smiled on every one and ate candy while Othello writhed in jealous rage, and a scattering of Germans with spectacles and a row of double-barrelled field glasses glued over them, and Frenchmen with impudent eyes and elegant gloves, and a general filling in of Italians, ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... Nothing could be said against an unspoken accusation, especially in the presence of a stranger; but the sisters exchanged meaning glances across the table, and Nan stamped so violently upon Elsie's foot that that melancholy young person writhed on her seat. The best safeguard to the feelings of the family was to change the subject, which Chrissie at ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... large raw-hide. Very soon his bottled wrath burst forth, and the blows, aimed with all his strength, descended upon the unprotected head, shoulders and back of the helpless woman, until she was literally cut to pieces. She writhed in his powerful grasp, while shriek after shriek died away in heart-rending moanings; and yet the inhuman demon continued to beat her, though her pleading cries had ceased, until obliged to desist from the ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... "Oh Radzywin— Thraxa! Behold, my witchcraft doth begin!" Back shrank their foes, back reeled they one and all, They choked, they gasped, they let their weapons fall; And some did groan, and some did fiercely sneeze, And some fell prone, some writhed upon their knees; Some strove to wipe the tears from blinded eyes, But one and all ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... thunder. In consequence of twanging bows and flashing sabres and the glaring armour of the combatants, all became so confused there, that nothing could be distinctly marked. Invulnerable arms, lopped off from human bodies, and looking like the tusks of elephants, jumped up and writhed and moved furiously about. The sound made, O monarch, by heads falling on the field of battle, resembled that made by the falling fruits of palmyra trees. Strewn with those fallen heads that were crimson with blood, the Earth looked resplendent as if adorned ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and seventeen," replied Sydney, who writhed under his companion's supercilious ways, but was determined to ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... blood, bright glaring yellow of gold new-minted—were the predominant notes in a colour scheme at once sombre and violent. The walls were hung with scarlet tapestries whereon gold dragons crawled and fought or strove to swallow dead black planets, while on every hand black imps of Eblis writhed and struggled over golden screens, golden devils mocked and mowed from panels of cinnabar, and horrific masks of crimson lacquer, picked out with gold and black, leered and snarled dumb ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... for the dreams to come when he found himself lying side-ways across the bed with wide open eyes staring into the darkness. Someone had touched him, and he had writhed away in his sleep as from something unholy. The movement ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... muscular development had always amazed him. The short man stood an inch less than five feet. His chest and shoulders must have measured more than that, his muscles writhed like iron snakes as he moved. His biceps and forearms were those of a smith—which indeed Gunnar had been, for Gunnar had been many things. The huge torso slanted down to narrow waist and hips. Then his short legs propped him up like carved things of oak. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... Henrietta writhed and struggled, and went off on frivolous pretexts, but she could not escape the pamphlet, which was extremely able; so was the author extremely able, but for a complete ignorance of human nature. Henrietta heard ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... the bride ye are seeking,' snarled he that waited, and gave the sailor the dagger where the throat dimples above the collar-bone. And they say the swarthy lad writhed him up against the old tree ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... and wit are so ingrained that age only increases his subtile spirit, and greatly enhances the power of his cheerful temperament, always had the talismanic faculty of breaking up that thoughtfully sad face into mirthful waves; and I remember how Hawthorne writhed with hilarious delight over Professor L——'s account of a butcher who remarked that "Idees had got afloat in the public mind with respect to sassingers." I once told him of a young woman who brought in a manuscript, and said, as she placed it in my hands, "I don't know what to do ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... writhed. Though his colleague's success would plant laurels upon his own brow—little would he ever say at the Yard of that journey to Burnham and the preposterous funeral—he was jealous, bitterly jealous. I am by special appointment the Boswell of Dawson, yet I do not spare ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... writhed, and he slavered in fury, but the clashing of his teeth subsided instantly at a soothing ...
— Upstarts • L. J. Stecher
... The foliage actually was hidden beneath their coils, so that the beholder might have fancied that he saw before him a new kind of tree that bore reptiles for its leaves and fruit. And all this horrible living mass writhed and twisted in the first rays of the morning sun! Joe experienced a keen sensation or terror mingled with disgust, as he looked at it, and he leaped precipitately from the tree amid the hissings of ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... speak at first, he literally staggered under these words; his proud spirit writhed in his countenance, and with a groan, he turned his back abruptly upon them all and hid his face against the corner of his own ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... fall of the cone she moaned and writhed, but not till the hush of death came over her did the horn move. So intense was the silence each time that we could hear the slightest breath, the minutest movement of the tin as it scraped along ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... with him and he went down in a corner with Slade. Slade struck him twice in the face, writhed away and gained his feet, back-slashing at Harris's head with his spurs. Harris caught a hand-hold in the long fur of the other's chaps, wrapped both arms round Slade above the knees and dragged him back. His hand found Slade's throat and he squeezed down on it as the man raised both ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child; who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother's system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... would be suspected as an accomplice. The mere fact that one man could disarm, bind and gag him, would be used as a suspicious circumstance against him. Although he did not know the exact sum of money in the safe he was aware that it was of a very considerable amount, and he fairly writhed in his agony of mind. In an instant Cummings (or, as he had been called by the messenger, Bronson) was on his feet, revolver in hand, and again the cruel, murderous expression dwelt on his face, ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... Carne wrenched at his dagger, but failed to draw it, and the two strong men rolled on the grass, fighting like two bull-dogs. Reason, and thought, and even sense of pain were lost in brutal fury, as they writhed, and clutched, and dug at one another, gashing their knuckles, and gnashing their teeth, frothing with one another's blood, for Carne bit like a tiger. At length tough condition and power of endurance got the mastery, and Twemlow planted his knee upon the gasping breast ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... sight was a bloody shape, with face to the ground, fingers clutching the grass with aimless eagerness, and shivering silently with an invisible wound. Twisting convulsively, it rolled down into the road under our horses' feet,—and there this human form, which some call godlike, writhed and floundered like a severed worm, and disguised itself in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... do anything for my sake, hein? I knew you were that kind of man directly I see you. No," she added, as Roland writhed uneasily in his chair, "do not embrace me. Later, yes, but now, no. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... darkened brow, writhed uneasily in his chair. "I have heard of these things before now, but this is a new view of a medium's development. I don't understand the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... ticked on; Susannah felt herself aware that the person of Smith's vision was withdrawing, repulsed. She almost cried aloud to the invisible, but checked the prayer, holding on, as it were, to her own sanity with both hands. Smith writhed continually, moaning. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall |
