"Startlingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. What the man said was to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pale, beautiful face, out of which the sun-colours had faded. Her hair of raven hue was gathered in massy coils over her head and fastened there by a spiral torque of gleaming gold. Her mantle, entirely black, which fell to her feet, made her features seem more strangely young, more startlingly in contrast with the monastic severity of the room. It was draped round with some dark unfigured hangings. A couch with a coverlet of furs, single chair of carved oak, the little table, and a bronze censer from which ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... yourself in music and languages, and that you seek for the attainment of all the subtle graces, which are, in the long run, more lasting as sources of happiness for a woman than mere beauty. It is a peculiarly significant fact that the great passions of history have not been inspired by very young or startlingly beautiful women, but by those of maturity and ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... forget the hand I took in mine, Pale as pale violets; that eye, where mind And matter met alike divine?—ah, no! May God that moment judge me when I do! O! she was fair; her nature once all spring And deadly beauty, like a maiden sword, Startlingly beautiful. I see her now! Wherever thou art thy soul is in my mind; Thy shadow hourly lengthens o'er my brain And peoples all its pictures with thyself; Gone, not forgotten; passed, not lost; thou wilt shine In heaven like a bright spot in the sun! She said she wished to die, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... wonderful specimen of what might be called the new realism—of that realism which is paying more attention to spiritual than to material actualities. Yet it is by no means lacking in the more superficial verisimilitude either. Its character-drawing and its whole atmosphere are startlingly faithful to life, even though the life portrayed may represent a clearly defined and limited ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... allowance must of course be made for the inevitable disillusionment of such a return. After the palaces of the bishops by whom he had been entertained in England, the mission stations must have appeared even startlingly humble. But the real grievance was the cessation of the trade in firearms. The King had approved of this trade: why should the missionaries object? Kendall in his new clerical attire seemed quite willing to play the part of court-chaplain to the would-be ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... the hospital. Andover had left word that he be allowed to see Pete. And again The Spider stood beside Pete's cot, gazing down upon a face startlingly white in contrast to his dark hair and black eyebrows—a face drawn, the cheeks pinched, and the lips bloodless. "You taking care of him?"—and The Spider turned to Doris. She nodded, wondering if this queer, almost deformed creature were "The Spider" that Pete had so often talked ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... palpitating heart, she descended the stairs, and with a trembling hand knocked at the door. On entering, she was about to rush into her newly-found relative's arms, but, on casting her eyes around, she perceived her father and him standing side by side, so startlingly alike in feature, expression, and personal figure, that her heart, until then bounding with rapture, sank at once, and almost became still. The quick but delicate instincts of her nature took the alarm, and a sudden weakness seized her whole ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... gasp. Then he turned slowly back to the spot where Forrester had fallen, and threw himself on the ground in a paroxysm of rage and misery. It was late and growing dark as he re-entered the school. There was a strange, weird silence about the place that contrasted startlingly with the usual evening clamour. The boys were mostly in their studies or collected in whispering groups ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... hollow, a constant procession of wounded moved slowly. It was easy to distinguish them, and even to pick out in most cases where they were wounded, because in the dusk the bandages of the first field dressing showed up startlingly white and clear on the shadowy forms against the shadowy background. Some, with the white patches on heads, arms, hands, and upper bodies, were walking; others, with the white on feet and legs, limped and hobbled painfully, leaning on the parapet ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... the combatants withdrew to the quiet of the library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have an idea that her conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly free from conventional restraint. And worse, she fancied upon Knight's face a slightly ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... missionary station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader, essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... war which sprang so suddenly and startlingly into the field of events in 1914 very little of this sentiment of race animosity appeared. While the German element remained intact in the union of Germany and Austria, there was a strange mingling of races in the other side of the struggle, that of the Slavic ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... statement. Christianity would be poorer by the loss of them, but they are not indigenous to Christianity. They have their parallels in other religions, some of them much older than the advent of Jesus. The beautiful legends surrounding the infancy of Gautama, for example, are startlingly similar to those contained in the first and third gospels. Like Jesus, the Buddhist messiah is stated to have been of royal descent and was born of a virgin mother. At his birth a supernatural radiance illuminated the whole district, and a troop of ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... eagerly side by side, and Ditman Olansen, crank-eyed, as if drawn by some affinity of bitterness, stood behind them, his head appearing between their heads. Farthest advanced of all was Charles Davis, the man who by all rights should long since be dead, his face with its wax-like pallor startlingly in contrast to the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... call for the ambulance; Anson slumped in his chair; little old Sillsbee sat twisted away so that his face was in shadow, but the knuckles showed bone white where his hand gripped the table top. None of them seemed able to speak; the young voice that broke startlingly on the stillness had the effect of scaring the others, with its tone of nonchalance, rather than reassuring them. Worth Gilbert leaned forward and looked round ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... their curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Italian boy would like Italian history best." "But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?" I blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the Italians of the present day,—whatever that meant. But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... to save, but the flames were so hot we had to desist, and some cried out "Save the Eyry!" Turning on my heel I went to the greenhouse for water buckets, and entering saw the flowers lighted up with a heavenly glow of color, and so startlingly beautiful that in spite of my haste I lingered a moment to look at them. Roses and camellias, heaths and azaleas—whatever flowers there were in bloom looked superbly glorified in the transcendent light, and I uttered an exclamation of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... They had found the shore, the very spot where we had put her back into the sea. Then there was a momentary flash of the picture she had called up, of Mercer and I putting the shark-faced hordes to rout, and then, startlingly, I was conscious of that high, pleading sound—the sound that I had heard once before, when she had begged us to return ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Startlingly upon their ears rang shriek on shriek. Mrs. Schofield, recognizing Margaret's voice, likewise shrieked, and Mr. Schofield uttered various sounds; but Penrod and Sam were incapable of doing anything vocally. All ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... complete gravity and entire contempt that in a sense this is perfectly true. His thirst was for things as humble, as human, as laughable as that daily bread for which we cry to God. He had no particular plan of reform; or, when he had, it was startlingly petty and parochial compared with the deep, confused clamour of comradeship and insurrection that fills all his narrative. It would not be gravely unjust to him to compare him to his own heroine, Arabella Allen, who "didn't know what she did like," but who (when ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... enough on the high seas of life; more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it had ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... book in its nest, and gone quickly back to her chair. The entrance of the servant at that moment, to announce Edwin Clayhanger, seemed to her startlingly dramatic. "What," she thought, "I am just reading that and he comes!... He hasn't been here for ages, and, on the very night that I ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... impression either." "I assure you," replied Theodore, "that I lost nothing of the brightness and grace of that animated composition; yet it is very singular,—it is a faithful representation of a scene out of my own life, reproducing the portraits of the parties concerned in it in a manner startlingly lifelike. You will, however, agree with me that diverting memories also have the power of strangely moving the mind when they suddenly spring up in this extraordinary and unexpected way, as if awakened by the wave ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in front showed a sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... time has passed for concealment. Every message through the ether must now reach the public. We must send messages back. The case is out of private hands; it has become important to the people. Will you agree on your honor faithfully to transmit?" He leaned forward, his indolent frame startlingly tense. ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... listen to me!" she cried, forgetful of her surroundings, as she flung herself on her knees at his feet. "This is not the paper I signed, although the signature is so startlingly like my own that I am bewildered. I signed a paper which said that I would never cross your path again; but not this one—oh, not this one! I— I never saw this paper before. Oh, Hubert— Mr. Varrick— I plead with you not to believe that I could ever have signed a paper acknowledging that ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... twilight we thoughtfully left the last resting-place of the mighty dead, a platoon of thirty Chinese soldiers approached, drew their swords, dropped upon one knee and shouted. The movement was so unexpected and the shout so startlingly strident that my horse shied in terror and I had visions of immediate massacre. But having learned that politeness is current coin the world over, as soon as I could control my prancing horse, I raised my hat and bowed. Whereupon the soldiers rose, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... immediately—Guy Oscard and Joseph. They had arrived during the night, and, not wishing to disturb the sleeping household, had lain them down in the front garden to sleep with a quiet conscience beneath the stars. The action was so startlingly characteristic, so suggestive of the primeval, simple man whom Oscard represented as one born out of time, that ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Should Confide More in Their Sons," appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: "Sam Stone Must Leave Town." Beneath was the additional information: "Further issues of the Bulletin will tell why." Above and below this was nothing but startlingly white blank paper, two solid columns of it up ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... At that moment she struck her father as startlingly grown-up-so composed, swaying above that young man at her feet, whose sunny face was all adoration. 'No longer a child!' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his going on the morrow. And the change of subject had come something startlingly ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... hand was raised, the foot advanced, the chest expanded. Life, energy, command, flashed from the dark eye, breathed from the dilated nostril, broke from the inspired lip. That noble brow—those modelled features—that air, so full of the royalty of genius—how startlingly did they resemble the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... startlingly. He stooped with rapidity, looked at and touched the dark stain upon the coat, straightened himself, and turned violently upon the Major and the little group which had now approached. "Who?" he demanded in a voice that rose to ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startlingly exact ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... faces in a fold of blanket, slunk silently away like dogs that have been whipped and told to go. Even Hagar drew back a pace, hardy as was her untamed spirit. She looked at Evadna clinging to his arm, her eyes wide and startlingly blue and horrified at all she had heard. She laughed then—did Hagar—and waddled after the others, her whole body seeming to radiate contentment with ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man, Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more adventurous colonist than man, With whom he came across the eastern deep, Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... of detached chalk in front. At one time this was one of a family, but "Old Harry" and his "wife" have sunk beneath the waves and the sole remaining member of the family may disappear during the next great storm. Beyond, indistinct and remote during fine weather but startlingly near when the glass is falling, are the cliffs of Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, and ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... big man would rise to his feet as soon as the door was closed. The picture became startlingly real to John Gaspar. Sinclair would slip out that window, no doubt, and circle around toward the horse shed. There he would wait until his prisoner came out on Meg, and then without warning would come a shot, and there would be an end of ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... for the Angel of Death is present, and waits while the message of heaven is delivered: bend thy pride before it is bent for thee by a yoke of iron," said a strong rich voice, startlingly in contrast with ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... adopts in his reasonings, it is well to examine with some care certain broad differences in this respect which characterize different philosophers, and which help to explain how it is that the results of their reflections are so startlingly different. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... Ford's room had not been entirely fruitless, although they had also added a startlingly new element to the mystery of the case. Who was the person who had attacked him from the closet? Was it the woman who had just left the house? He did not think so. Nor was it Miss Ford herself. There had been something uncanny about the whole experience; he was ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... something hardly human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long yellow moustaches; on each side of them a fold or furrow from nostril to jaw, so that a sneer seemed cut into ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... would have been affected if Avery had been, say, a dentist, or of any other calling than the one that so obviously loaded the dice in his favour. I repeat, however, a distinctly well-written and human story, almost startlingly topical too in one place, where Dr. Avery observes, "There's a lot of grippe in town, and it's a thing that isn't reported to the Health Department." The obvious inference being that it ought to be. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... the wall for a moment, looking over into the ravine and at the mountain flank opposite. Etna was startlingly clear to-day. She fancied that if a fly were to settle upon the snow on its summit she would be able to see it. The sea was like a mirror in which lay the reflection of the unclouded sky. It was not far to Africa. She watched a bird ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... our good fortune to inspect the superb line of folding library-bedsteads which Professor Thorpe offers to the public at startlingly low figures, and we are surprised at the ingenuity and the learning apparent in these contrivances. The Essay bedstead is a particularly handsome piece of furniture, being made of polished mahogany, elaborately ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... big room, that seemed filled with all sorts of scenery, parts of buildings, rustic bridges—in short, all sorts of "props." She had been behind the scenes often in some of the plays in which her father took part, so this was not startlingly new to her. Yet it was different from ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... that went on, in the noiseless movements of the nurses, in the arrival of a new case, in the visit of the doctors and the chaplain, and the friends of the other patients. Let the pessimists say what they may, there is a lot of good in human nature; and it comes out quite startlingly in the ward of a hospital. Ida was amazed at the care and attention, the patience and the devotion which were lavished on herself and her fellow-sufferers; a devotion which no money can buy, and which could not have been exceeded ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... a community of scientists would educate for technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group picked for high I. Q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress. You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a wonder world in ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... riches, till the crash only became the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo, in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling, nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a few feet from him. Her glossy black curls were a bit dishevelled, and the excitement of the night had added to the vivid colouring of her rouged lips and cheeks. Her body was sleek and sinuous in its silken vesture; arms and shoulders were startlingly white; and when she turned, facing Aldous, her black eyes flashed ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... interruption was the report of a gun, sounding startlingly distinct on the quiet air. That, so far as could be judged, came from near the spot whither was sent the ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a startlingly sudden repose. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... between him and his hostess had been enlightening to both of them. It showed Lydia Sessions not only where she stood with Gray, but it brought home to her startlingly, and as nothing had yet done, the strength of Johnnie's hold upon him; while it forced Gray himself to realize that ever since that morning when he met the girl on the bridge going to put her little brothers and sisters ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... him at his own door. Lorelei's summons had evidently found the dancer dressed for anything except such a crisis, for Miss Demorest was arrayed in the very newest importation. The lower half of her figure was startlingly suggestive of the harem, while above the waist she was adorned like a Chinese princess. A tango cap of gold crowned her swirls of hair, and from it depended a string of tremendous beads, looped beneath her ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... the new West, at once startlingly and attractively true. * * * The heroine is a strange, sweet mixture of pride, wilfulness and lovable courage. The characters are superbly drawn; the atmosphere is convincing. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... mistake about Francis Sales, but her imagination, finding occupation where it could, began to endow him with romance, and that scene among the primroses, the startlingly green grass, the pervading blue of the air, the horse so indifferent to the human drama, the dog trying to understand it, became the salient event of her life because it had awakened her capacity ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... stupidly staring at the fragment of granite, his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... nothing very good comes from this impulse, for the purpose to "tell the world" that my vision of America is startlingly different from what I have read about America is identical with that break with the past which has again and again been prelude to a new era. I do not wish to discuss the alleged new era. Like the younger generation, it has been discussed too much ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," plays like the diffusive sheen of an aurora borealis over the whole surface of the composition. It does not often deliver itself startlingly in sudden discharges as of lightning. You need to school your sense somewhat, not to miss a fine effect now and then. Consider the broadness and coarseness in pleasantry, that, before Pascal, had been common, almost universal, in controversy, and you will better understand what a creative ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... noticed that I was driving along a broken-down fence between the brush and myself. The brush became a grove of boles which next seemed to shoot up to the full height of the bluff. Then, unexpectedly, startlingly, a vista opened. Between the silent grove to the south and the large; whispering, wailing bluff to the north there stood in a little clearing a snow white log house, uncannily white in the paling moonlight. I could still distinctly see that its upper windows ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... "You really are the most startlingly abrupt person I ever knew. Are you in earnest? What under the sun possessed you ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... expressions to translate very old conditions of soul. The fact is, that these young men, Augustin's friends and Augustin himself, were startlingly like those of a generation already left behind, alas! who will probably keep in history the presumptuous name they gave ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of the world of action to which the man must return. The two poems are fully discussed in Poet-Lore, Volume VII, April, May, June-July. The poems are noteworthy for the fusion of human emotion and natural scenery and for the startlingly specific ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... and lay fantastically heaped up on every side. We rose ever higher, though the train kept a moderate speed. At one station the bleating of a great truckload of kids, their legs tied, heaped one above the other, was startlingly like the crying of babies. We steamed upward through a narrow pass, the mountains crowding closer on either hand and seeming to grow lower as we rose higher among them. The landscape became less arid, half green, with little or no cactus, and ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... we may sometimes see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed. There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from behind a pine, and startlingly near her, came Quintana, moving with confident grace yet holding his ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... 'topped the neighboring hill.' Before me lay the little hill of Knockrue, on which he declares, in one of his letters, he had rather sit with a book in hand than mingle in the proudest assemblies. And, above all, startlingly true, beneath my ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the sacred home of the king!" His voice had again changed. A metallic hardness came into it, his words were vibrant with a strange excitement which he strove hard to conceal. It was still light enough for Captain Plum to see that the old man's black, beady eyes were startlingly alive with ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... thief in a mill," he whispered with a nod to his companion. And at that moment a harsh laugh overhead broke the silence startlingly, and set all the poultry in ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... book in her hand, but with a mind wholly distracted from the subject of its pages. After continuing some time thus, a prey to nervous anxiety, as much the result of Elmsley's long absence as of her former fears, the sound of the fifes and drums fell startlingly, she knew not wherefore, upon her ear and drew her to the door. The men were falling in, and in the course of a few minutes the little line was formed a few yards to her left, with its flanks resting on either range of building, so that the mess-room door, then open, was distinctly visible ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... startlingly fresh appearance, after the heavy rains. The gravel walk had the prim neatness of a Peter de Hoogh garden path. The white balustrades and flights of steps around the great circle, the statuary and the fountains in the middle lake, flashed pure. The enormous white caps of nurses, their gay silk streamers ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a blasphemous comment on the discomforts of such travel. After an apparently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so startlingly ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... illustration it is only the few intelligent and thinking individuals of the community who recognize that the departure from the standard type is in the direction of advancement and gain, rather than of retrogression and loss—a plus attribute, rather than a minus one. The illustration is startlingly true and in accordance with the facts of the case, as many thoughtful persons know only ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... chest, and the thin wrists. There was a weakness, too, at his knees which caused me to think that they had once worked on springs which now were broken. But the greatest abnormality was seen in his eyes. Startlingly large, startlingly bright, they were sometimes beautiful and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Stanley had asked him not to move until his own arrangements for a defensive fight were completed. That the outlaws had secret sources of information even in the railroad circles, came out startlingly. A special train—an express car pulled by an engine—entered the railroad yard at dusk that evening, when a party of men running out from the cover of the freight warehouse attempted to rush it for arms ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... flew back to her one meeting with Alice Crofton. It was during her brief engagement to Colonel Crofton, and the latter's sister, without being over cordial, had been quite pleasant to the startlingly pretty little woman, who had made such a fool ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... trail that led past the willows to the lode, slipping as silently as possible through the shadows, though now and then a stone clinked beneath their feet, or a stick or twig snapped as they passed, with a sound that seemed startlingly loud. Nobody, however, seemed to hear them, and at last they sank down amidst a brake of tall fern near a little, neatly-squared stake which had been driven into the soil. The brake was in black shadow, but a broad patch of moonlight fell on the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... "Adolf!" Mr Verloc had not changed his position; he had not apparently stirred a limb for an hour and a half. He got up heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc's taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Ideas chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... Then a few boys near him took up the music. Then a few more. Then it gradually swept back over that crowd of men until every single negro was swaying to that simple music, and then it was that I caught the almost startlingly ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... story dealing with the popular theme of the young writer from the provinces who comes to the metropolis to win fame and fortune with his pen in which the hero does not get his start that way. It does seem strange that some author, in casting about for startlingly original plots, has not hit upon the idea of having his hero write about the bluebirds in Union Square and sell it to the Herald. But a search through the files of metropolitan fiction counts up overwhelmingly ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Wilson's task was manifestly congenial to him, for it was deliberately chosen by himself, and it comprised the most tremendous problems ever tackled by man born of woman. The means by which he set to work to solve them were startlingly simple: the regeneration of the human race was to be compassed by means of magisterial edicts secretly drafted and sternly imposed on the interested peoples, together with a new ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... trying to remember—like a lunatic, who, having heard only the wrangle of fiends in his delirium, suddenly in a conscious moment, perceives the familiar voice of love. But who could this be, to whom mere human sympathy was so startlingly sweet? ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its construction, a ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... never thought it necessary to indulge in polite or political fictions about the superior virtue or wisdom of the working class. "Poverty," he once wrote in words that come at first sight rather startlingly from the mouth of so strictly Biblical a Christian as he, "is a great enemy to human happiness . . . it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult." {120} "Of riches," he said on another occasion, "it is not necessary to write the praise." No doubt the opposition ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... be informed. I have an announcement of my own to make. Listen!" He gave a command. Instantly, startlingly, in the fog-shrouded spaces of the valley rang out a salvo of gun fire. Many rifles spat. The sound rolled in long echoes along the gorge and was banged back by the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... a very versatile pen and in most of the twenty-one pieces of Jetsam (MILLS AND BOON) which he has recovered from the waves of monthly magazines and elsewhere there is a certain amount of material for mirth. I do not however find him a startlingly original humorist, whether on the river Thames, where he seems to follow in the wake of Mr. JEROME K. JEROME, or in a Chelsea "pub," where his manners are reminiscent of the characters of Messrs. W. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... Field, it was just 23 days, 6 hours and 15 minutes after the same crew had left that field in their Vickers-Vimy. This beats the former record of 36 days and some odd hours, made in 1913 by John Henry Mears, by the substantial margin of approximately 12 days. It is a big gain—a startlingly short time for encompassing the world as compared with the efforts ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... continuous; and finally, in the 17th century, a point was reached which is not likely to be surpassed. The Hung Lou Meng, the author of which took pains, for political reasons, to conceal his identity, is a creation of a very high order. Its plot is intricate and original, and the denouement startlingly tragic. In the course of the story, the chief clue of which is love, woven in with intrigue, ambition, wealth, poverty, and other threads of human life, there occur no fewer than over four hundred characters, each one possessed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... as she did not move or attempt to hide her face she had the appearance of some one disarmed of all defences, or Ralph likened her to a wild bird just settling with wings trembling to fold themselves within reach of his hand. The moment of exposure had been exquisitely painful—the light shed startlingly vivid. She had now to get used to the fact that some one shared her loneliness. The bewilderment was half shame and half the prelude to profound rejoicing. Nor was she unconscious that on the surface the whole thing must appear ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and desire. A hundred disillusioning revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been necessary to assist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with. Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... along natural lines and do no probing. And now,—this brother whom all had thought dead, come to life with menace in his acts and conversation! Also a sister,—but this sister he had no belief in. The coincidence was too startlingly out of nature for him to accept a brother and a sister too. A brother or a sister; but not both. Not even Mr. Harper's assurances should influence his credulity to this extent. "Money! money is at the bottom ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... in this old room, you are startlingly like her in some way, I can hardly tell what." She glanced up again at the portrait. "Your eyes look at me in the same understanding sort of way. They almost unseal the silence of twenty years. I have never said this to any one else. But I used to look at her sometimes and think that George ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... elsewhere, all over the land, those things were done which delight the heart of Englishmen at the merry season. Everybody shook hands with everybody else, everybody cried "Merry Christmas!" to his neighbour in the street, with an intonation as though he were saying something startlingly new and brilliant which had never been said before. Every labourer who had a new smock-frock put it on, and those who had none had at least a bit of new red worsted comforter about their throats and began the day ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... the ghastly expression of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... warrior was better than before, and though it was not fatal, it came startlingly near being so. The bullet nipped the ear of the pony, and cut through the coat of Warren Starr; grazing his shoulder in ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... Nikolayevna Alkina—a quiet, tranquil, cold creature with dark red hair and a thin face, the dull pallor of which emphasized the impressively vivid lips of her large mouth; it seemed as if all the sensuality and colour of the face had poured themselves into the lips and made them startlingly and painfully vivid and suggestive of sin. She had married and had parted from her husband. She had a son, who lived with her. She was an S.D.[14] and worked in the organization, but all this was merely incidental in her life. She met Trirodov in party work. Her ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... sight, followed for a quarter of a mile around the long face of the mountain. It was very still up here on the Pass, so still that when the Western Slope Limited, two hours and more late at Eagle Cliff, whistled for the tunnel four miles below the sound came echoing about them startlingly clear. ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena (as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... said Lavretsky in a low but startlingly impressive voice. "I dare say you are fond of affecting scenes" (Lavretsky was right, Marya Dmitrievna still retained her school-girl's passion for a little melodramatic effect), "they amuse you; but ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... grimy, their hair bristling with burs, their feet splashed with mud, their little straight night-gowns stained with strawberry juice from neck to hem,—looking startlingly like blood at first sight,—but in spite of all, the most beaming of smiles, for they ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... again. "I'm afraid I made a poor selection," she apologized. "You see I'm not as familiar with po'try as you are, Mr. Dale." She turned the leaves in a confusion that increased as her groping vision stumbled continually on lines startlingly sentimental. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... in at this time and the coffin was carried by the mourners on long stakes. The straggling procession of pedestrians behind wound its slow way in the waning light to the kirkyard, showing startlingly black against the dazzling snow; and it was not until the earth rattled on the coffin-lid that Little Rathie's nearest male relative seemed to remember his last mournful duty to the dead. Sidling up to the favoured mourners, he remarked casually and ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... whistling, upon that backbone of a broad hill-country—quite suddenly her heart leaped, and then stood fast. "Look, look!" she said softly. "There's Jack, close to us!" In a sheltered hollow some hundred feet below the level at which they were, a hooded figure in pure white was startlingly splashed upon the grey-brown of the dry hills. The peak of a cowl shot straight above his head, and the curtains of it covered his face. He sat, squatting upon the turf, with a lifted hand admonishing. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... warmed to his subject that he might have discoursed upon it indefinitely, had he not been startlingly interrupted. He and his wife were retracing their steps toward the house, and, as before, the Scotch maid, with her toddling charge, was some paces behind them. At a wild scream from the girl those in advance turned in time to see the flying form of a young Indian, who ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... heart long to serve her. Her eyes are gray and her hair a reddish brown, with kinks and curls in it like— But, pshaw! there comes that dream again! Was Honora Urquhart's hair so very unique that a head of wavy brown hair should bring her up so startlingly to my mind? ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... and the senorita," said he. It was so startlingly like an introduction that the cherubic brown man sprang up and bowed; and the girl, bending over the mazapan in her plate, let us see the very top coil on her crown of ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... separate county all by itself. It would be no credit to a bride to clamour for love in such a cottage, and turn up her nose at palaces. She might be married at the beautiful church of Lyndhurst (a most immediate jewel of a church, with an exquisite altar-piece by Lord Leighton, a Flaxman, and a startlingly fine piece of sculpture by an artist named Cockerell), then, safely wedded, plunge with her bridegroom into the Forest, and be perfectly happy without ever coming out again. I wish I had had the "Forest Lovers" to re-read while we were there. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... fitting the actual facts, sometimes unjust and cruel. Tender and sensitive as a child, his indignation is so uncompromising that it often involves injustice and wrong. But the beauty in him is often startlingly pure, and reveals itself in unexpected conditions and environment. I cannot do better in an attempt to present him and his history than to quote voluminously from his letters to me, adding only what is necessary ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... as her word. She didn't—that is, as long as Ernest could see her. She kissed him good-bye and gave him a playful box on the ear. She threw kisses, smiling as the group at the car window slid by, then the lump in her throat grew startlingly bigger. ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... of ownership is rather startlingly simple to a representative of the nineteenth century," I observed. "Would not the judges even ask me by what right or title of ownership ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... incident is supposed to have helped the Prince at this time. There had been among his Life Guards a handsome youth named Roderick Mackenzie, son of a jeweller in Edinburgh, who in face and figure was startlingly like the Prince. This lad was actually 'skulking' among the Braes of Glenmoriston at the time when the Prince was surrounded in Knoydart. A party of soldiers tracked him to a hut, which they surrounded. Flight was impossible, and the poor boy stood at bay. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly lifelike in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubtless there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Elizabeth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that dwelt in ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... with one accord we turned to on the foresail. With the peak of it hoisted we moved a trifle faster, though the schooner lay over at a perilous angle. A moment later the fogs parted to show us the cliffs looming startlingly near. There were the donkey engine and the works we had constructed for wrecking—and there beside them, watching ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the Parsee dead is startlingly original, and said to be in strict keeping with the teaching of Zoroaster. According to Parsee tenets fire is too highly venerated to be polluted by burning the dead, while water is equally respected, and Mother Earth as well. Hence the Parsees offer their dead to the elements and the birds ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... had. Fortunately most of the young people were honestly striving to earn their living; they were sweetly, proudly unafraid, but when they relaxed and played they made Joan's eyes widen, until she discovered that they often dressed their ideas, as they did themselves, rather startlingly while adhering, privately, to a respectability that ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... new green leaves on the little bush by the door-stone; they gleamed startlingly light in the dusk. A new moon hung beside the stalwart white chimney—all the house was a mouse-colored shadow against the darkening sky. The living-room windows showed as orange squares cut cheerfully from the night. Through the filmy whiteness of the cheese-cloth curtains, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... dressing-table upon which a tall candle stood in an equally tall candlestick. He was looking intently at his reflection in the looking-glass, as one who encounters and examines a stranger. In the glass his face looked red and ugly, and the tossed grey hair and heavy beard were made to appear startlingly unkempt. His mouth was open, and his eyes shaded by lowered lids. In a rather trembling voice he addressed ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... small-pox! Gee! You like nursing because you think it's pious to like it! But I like it—because I like it!" From brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. "The smell of ether!" she stammered. "It's like wine to me! The clang of the ambulance gong? I'd rather hear it than fire-engines! I'd crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... old when he first sprang into prominence in the newspapers through the publication of his book, Sex and Progress. The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers seized these three lines, "played ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... faced each other so, eyes burning into eyes with mute soul-probing and questioning. The sun had disappeared, leaving a stain of fiery red to mark his grave; the weird, radiant light was startlingly vivid and clear. Little crisp puffs and flakes of foam scurried over the point like elfin things. The fresh wind, blowing up the bay, tossed the lustrous rings of hair about Magdalen's pale face; all the routed shadows of the hour had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... impressive thing to hear the thrilling, earnest tones of the preacher as he offered up an eloquent extempore prayer—to the petitions in which many of the people in the congregation gave utterance at times to startlingly fervent and loud responses—not in set phraseology, but in words that were called forth by the nature of each petition, such as "Glory to God," "Amen," "Thanks be to Him"—showing that the worshippers followed and sympathised with their spokesman, thus making his prayer their own. But the newest ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne |
