"Shrinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of yours, I hope? I know it is dangerous, so late and alone," said Rose, shrinking behind the big chair as Charlie approached the fire, carefully avoiding ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... to haul the supplies for the North West Mounted Police this spring. I'll be in Fort Macleod 'most as soon as you, I reckon. What is it, Winnie?" he questioned, as the child drew shrinking closer ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... the line. When dry, let two persons stretch the goods as curtains are stretched, fold it with the wrong side of the material out and iron double with the seam running through the center of the goods on the length of the material. In shrinking colored prints add turpentine to the water, and it will set the color. A teaspoonful is used ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the road to Cecily's right. She did not see him yet, for she looked up to Merrion. He took a step forward, his tread sounding loud on the road. There was a sudden turn of Cecily's head. A moment's silence followed. He came up to her, holding out his hand. She drew back, shrinking from it. Laying her hands on the gate of the bridge, she seemed to set it as a fence between them. Her voice reached Mina's ears, low, yet as distinct as though she had been by her side, and full of a terrified alarm and ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... whole kid-glove gang have n't been able to do," he avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that Blake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk end the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It was as though he had put the shutters up ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... led to form their conjectures as to the cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... weeks ago, she had charged me to burn all that she had written to me, and as yet I had not done so, shrinking from the sharp unreasonable pain with which we bury the beloved dead. But the time of my mourning was accomplished. I tore the paper into fragments and ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... spending her time with elderly ladies who talked of moral obligations, and social demands, and civic consciences. The duties of her married life which had promised such interesting responsibilities, and wonderful opportunities for aiding the Doctor in his great work, seemed to be shrinking into the dull task of keeping herself and the children out of his way, preserving a tomb-like silence in the house, and entertaining ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... acute, receptive temperament—capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain. Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun. Both were shrinking yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for love that earth could not requite. At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... resemblance (which is as much as one can expect) to the scene which had been in my sleep before me. But sleeping I had seen roaring torrents; waking, I beheld a quiet stream. The little river, as blue as ever, and shrinking from all thoughts of wrath, showed nothing in its pure gaze now but a gladness to refresh and cool. In many nicely sheltered corners it was full of soft reflection as to the good it had to do; and then, in silver and golden runnels, on it went to do it. And the happy voice ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a great deal about Gerald; he was interested in many things, and not least in himself; he was not troubled by that shrinking sense of his own worthlessness—with the feeling of being not an individual, but a part of a community—which is so characteristic of mediaeval writers, and led them often to omit to mention ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... discouragement, it stared back.—What if the deepest thing, the thing which alone lasted, the thing which, therefore, you were bound in the end to accept, to submit to, was just darkness, sorrow, loneliness of worn body and shrinking spirit, by the shore of a cold, dumb, and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... likes not only to be mothered but he likes to play the father. Let his wife be a daughter to him; let her be capable of shrinking, so to say, into small space, becoming little and confident and appealing and calling forth every protective impulse of her ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Steel, including Forging, Hardening, Tempering, Annealing, Shrinking, and Expansion; also the Case-Hardening of Iron. By George Ede, employed in the Royal Gun Factories Department, Woolwich Arsenal. First American, from Second London Edition. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... out of the old road into the main-travelled one, and presently passed the old Thayer house. A woman's figure fled hurriedly up the yard into the house as they approached. There was a curious shrinking look about her as she fled, her very clothes, her muslin skirts, her light barege shawl, her green bonnet, seemed to slant away before the eyes of the two women ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not, of course, in Horikawa's confession. But the dread of it was there. The valet had come to fear Shibo. He was convinced in his shrinking heart that the man meant to get rid of him. It was under some impulse of self-protection that he had ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... not of caprice, and pardon my irresolution, when you find me shrinking with terror from the promise I have made, and no longer either able or willing to perform it. The reproaches of your family I should very ill endure; but the reproaches of my own heart for an action I can neither approve nor defend, would be still ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... whip, but it did not fall on poor, timid, shrinking Will. For Mr. Bobbsey snatched it away from the angry farmer's hand and flung ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on a Houseboat • Laura Lee Hope
... corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... three girls had now come close enough to see the blood also, and except for Betty, Pony would everlastingly have disgraced herself. There are many persons in the world whom the sight of blood fills with a strange shrinking and terror that is almost like faintness, and Polly was one of them. Now she wanted to run away, she even turned to fly, when her friend caught hold of her. "Don't be utterly stupid, Polly, you have done a foolish trick and you've got to face the music, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... laws, with which no volitions, natural or supernatural, interfere. These being the three stages, the discovery of which as a series necessarily passed through by human thought in its progress towards maturity, constitutes one of Comte's chief glories, I almost tremble at my own audacity, shrinking from the sound myself am making, when by inexorable sense of duty constrained to declare that the grand discovery is after all merely that of a distinction ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... because of systemic problems and disruptions in socialist-style economic relations and technological links with the former USSR and China. The leadership has insisted on maintaining its high level of military outlays from a shrinking economic pie. Moreover, a serious drawdown in inventories and critical shortages in the energy sector have led to increasing interruptions in industrial production. Abundant mineral resources and hydropower have formed the basis of industrial development since World ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the dock by our Consul General, John Goodnow, and his wife, with their elegantly liveried coachman, and was taken to the consulate, and, after a fine tiffin (lunch), we started for the walled city. A shrinking horror seized me as if I were at the threshold of the infernal regions as we crossed the draw bridge over the moat and entered the narrow gate of the vast city of more than a million souls. Immediately ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... over his face, surprise followed by a growing scorn. It came to him in a flash that Stephen Tolman, the boy he had looked up to as a sort of idol, was a coward, a coward! He was afraid! It seemed impossible. Why, Steve was always in the thick of the football skirmishes, never shrinking from the roughness of the game; he was a fearless hockey player, a dauntless fighter. Coward was the last name one would have thought of applying to him. And yet here he sat cowering before the just result of ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... woman's heart, even while from day to day she was meditating murder,—while she was telling herself that it would be a worthy deed to cut off from life one whose life was a bar to her own success,—even then revolted from the shrinking stealthy step, from the low cowardice of the hidden murderer. To look him in the face and then to slay him,—when no escape for herself would be possible, that would have in it something that was almost noble; something at any rate bold,—something that would not shame ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... princess, and shrinking behind her as if to escape the gaze of the courtiers, or rather warriors, who crowded the platform, came a girl of about nineteen summers, the companion of Hafrydda. Branwen was a complete contrast to her friend in complexion. She ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... appropriate heroic gestures, "white, secret, maiden flower, hear us! Discover thyself, O shrinking flower, and thou shalt be kissed by the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... some splendid cricket, but their deeds Were not colossal, and our own brave Tennant Proved himself all as good a man as they. * * * * * Through them we greet our Mother. In their coming, We shake our dear old England by the hand And watch space dwindling, while the shrinking world Collapses into nothing. Mark me well, Matter as swift as swiftest thought shall fly, And space itself be nowhere. Future Tinleys Shall bowl from London to our Christ Church Tennants, And all the runs for all the stumps be made In flying baskets ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the room a woman whom Monsieur Loches had noticed waiting there. She was verging on old age, small, frail, and ill-nourished in appearance, poorly dressed, and yet with a suggestion of refinement about her. She stood near the door, twisting her hands together nervously, and shrinking from the gaze of the strange gentleman. The doctor began in an angry voice. "Did I not tell you to come and see me once every eight days? ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... personal beauty—which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the College towards him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that dismal one—'The ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knew she had gone too far to recede, though she would willingly have delayed, in enjoyment of the present homage and shrinking from the future plunge away from all her protectors. Though the strong, manly will overpowered hers, and made her submit to the necessities of the case and fix a day early in July, she clung the more closely to her sisters, and insisted on being accompanied by Jane on going to London ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Maggie, in a tone of dread, shrinking away from him into the opposite corner; "I shall scream—I'm sure I shall! Oh, don't! I ...
— Tom and Maggie Tulliver • Anonymous
... these and many other difficulties, I firmly believe that Labrador is by far the best country in the world for the best kinds of sanctuary. The first time you're on a lee shore there, in a full gale, you may well be excused for shrinking back from the wild white line of devouring breakers. But when you actually make for them you find the coast opening into archipelagoes of islands, to let you safely through into the snug little "tickles," between island and mainland, where you can ride ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... his keys; he went to his box, unlocked it, and took out a small paper package. Of the fifty pounds he had received from Ford about twenty remained: he had been poorer before, but hardly quite so hopeless. He scanned every horizon—all were barred. The thought of suicide, and with it the instinctive shrinking from it, came into his mind again. Suppose he took, that very night, an overdose of chloral? He tried to put the thought from him, and returned, a little dazed and helpless, to his chair. Had the critic in The Modern Review told ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... judgments. Ellen could not attach dishonor to her father's motives or speeches. For long, however, something about him had troubled her, perplexed her. Fearfully she believed she was coming to some revelation, and, despite her keen determination to know, she found herself shrinking. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... any siren's; so broad and fine are the countries; so strong and true are the friendships; so brave and kind are the men I meet—so beautiful the whole world of the Singing Mouse, that when it is over, and in a chill I start up, I scarce can bear the shrinking in of the walls, and the grayness of the once red fire, and my gold turned to earthenware, and my pictures turned to splotches. In my hand everything I touch feels awkward. A pen—a pen—to talk of that? If one could use it ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... necessities, and take the world's trade from our harbors, so superior to theirs, and they are always busy, and intermeddling in everybody's affairs; and we hate them—ah, how we do hate them!' In short, a certain leading class at the South, that which moulds and leads the hollow, shrinking, scared thing they called public opinion, have come to hate and detest everything distinctively New English, and finally to make the wicked, traitorous attempt to overturn the Government, which they know received ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sleep in the grass, Feed upon apples red, and strawberries, And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees; Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places, To woo sweet kisses from averted faces,— Play with their fingers, touch their shoulders white Into a pretty shrinking with a bite As hard as lips can make it: till agreed, A lovely tale of human life we'll read. And one will teach a tame dove how it best May fan the cool air gently o'er my rest; Another, bending o'er her nimble tread, Will set a green robe floating round her head, And still will dance ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... as well that you know whom you are up against," he said as he held her with his hand heavy on her shrinking shoulder. ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... appealed to by the coarse sympathy with physical pain: the rags that covered the sores, the tainted corruption of the ulcers, are brought to bear, not so much on the mind as on the nerves; and when the hero is represented as shrinking with corporeal agony—the blood oozing from his foot, the livid sweat rolling down the brow—we sicken and turn away from the spectacle; we have no longer that pleasure in our own pain which ought to be the characteristic of true tragedy. It is idle to vindicate this error ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stepped from the boat and came up the beach toward them. It was very beautiful, and in its hand it carried a great bunch of shining bubbles, fastened to a stick by parti-colored ribbons, just as Teddy had seen Italians carrying balloons, only these bubble-balloons were growing and shrinking and changing every moment, just as though ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle
... fellow's eye was upon me. I could observe him prying, endeavouring to search and probe me. But I came too well prepared. Instead of shrinking from the encounter, my brow contracted increasing indignation; and my voice grew louder, as I stood forth the champion of chaste virginity and sanctimonious wedlock!—The scene, in the very critical sense of the phrase, was ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all kinds and of all ages—the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of his pitifully frail body, could never fight for old Bannister on gridiron, diamond, or track, and they tremendously admired him for working for his college and for the redemption of Thor. Timorous and shrinking by nature, whenever his Alma Mater, or a friend, needed him the Human Encyclopedia fought down his painful timidity and came ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the stories told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system. It seemed to me that the woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the Kodak," muttered the witness, shrinking into cover, and scarcely breathing lest his hiding-place should ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... fighting for his king and country. Death was a debt which every man owed, and must pay; and that now was as well as another time." I was much pleased and edified with the maxims of this sea-philosopher, who endured the amputation of his left hand without shrinking, the operation being performed (at his request) by me, after Mackshane, who was with difficulty prevailed to lift his head from the deck, had declared there was a necessity for his ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... corpse in burial clothes just lifted from its coffin and placed stiffly upright in a sitting position. Involuntarily Cardinal Bonpre, as he made the usual necessary genuflections, thought, with a shrinking interior sense of horror at the profanity of his own idea, that the Holy Father as he then appeared, might have posed to a painter of allegories, as the frail ghost of a dead Faith. For he looked so white and slender and fragile and transparent,—he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... There was, perhaps, something in the scene that invited them to silence and reverie. Clodius, shading his eyes from the burning sky, was calculating the gains of the last week; and the Greek, leaning upon his hand, and shrinking not from that sun—his nation's tutelary deity—with whose fluent light of poesy, and joy, and love, his own veins were filled, gazed upon the broad expanse, and envied, perhaps, every wind that bent its pinions towards ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... at it, Deerslayer," returned the girl with emphasis, still shrinking with a woman's sensitiveness from a direct offer of her hand, "and can say, from the bottom of my heart, that I would rather trust my happiness to a man whose truth and feelings may be depended on, than to a false-tongued and false-hearted wretch that had chests of gold, and houses ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... on him that Heritage had been right. He only played with life. That imbecile image was a mere spectator, content to applaud, but shrinking from the contact of reality. It had been all right as a provision merchant, but when it fancied itself capable of higher things it had deceived itself. Foolish little image with its brave dreams and its swelling words from Browning! All make-believe of the feeblest. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... at long intervals, and burned behind grimy glasses with the sickly light of oil, and by this wavering glimmer Salisbury could make out the shadowy and vast old houses of which the street was composed. As he passed along, hurrying, and shrinking from the full sweep of the rain, he noticed the innumerable bell-handles, with names that seemed about to vanish of old age graven on brass plates beneath them, and here and there a richly carved penthouse overhung ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... ragged in place of round, as though the soft metal had been rent open and bent backwards. Then the two men looked at each other, and the hot fury that for a moment flushed Seaforth to the temples, passed and left him with a curious vindictive coldness and a faint shrinking from the touch of the murderous lead. Okanagan's eyes were very steady, but there was a little glow down ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same—always the same," she answered in ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... vanishing oasis of happy literary celebrity. Ah! the Sahara of letters is full of bleaching bones that tell where many of your sex as well as of mine fell and perished miserably, even before the noon of life. Ambitious spirit, come, rest in peace in the cool, quiet, happy, palm-grove that I offer you. My shrinking violet, sweeter than all Paestum boasts! You cannot cope successfully with the world of selfish men and frivolous, heartless women, of whom you know absolutely nothing. To-day I found a passage which you had marked in one ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... filled the room, and Seaton turned towards the bar. That two-hundred-pound mass of copper was shrinking visibly, second by second, so vast were the forces being drawn from it, and the searing, blinding light would have been intolerable but for the protective color-filters of his helmet. Tremendous flashes of lightning ripped and ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the Fleering frumpe.] Or when we giue a mocke with a scornefull countenance as in some smiling sort looking aside or by drawing the lippe awry, or shrinking vp the nose; the Greeks called it Micterismus, we may terme it a fleering frumpe, as he that said to one whose wordes he beleued not, no doubt Sir of that. This fleering frumpe is one of the Courtly graces ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... Three Wise Men. They did not bring their gifts as a joke, but as an awful oblation. It never entered into the heads of the saints and scholars, the poets and painters, of the Middle Ages. Looking back across the years, they saw in that dark and ungarnished manger only a shrinking woman, a brooding man, and a child born to sorrow. The philomaths of the eighteenth century, looking back, saw nothing at all. It is not the least of the glories of the Victorian Era that it rediscovered Christmas. It is not the least of the mistakes of the Victorian Era that it supposed Christmas ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... should certainly admire the skill and humour with which he has patched together, or invented where seemly, the story of lanky ABE, with his axeman's skill, his immense physical strength, his poor head for shopkeeping, his passion for books, his lean purse and "shrinking pants," his wit, courage and resource. A romance of reasonable interest and plausibility is woven round young Lincoln's story. Perhaps Mr. BACHELLER makes his hero speak a little too sententiously at times, and certainly some of his other folk say queer things, such as, "What so vile as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... are thinking, our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would shrink; To the life we are clinging, they also would cling—But it speeds from us all like a bird ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... not know that I had done so terribly wrong," moaned the girl, shrinking back from those angry, fiery eyes that glowered down so fiercely ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... lay spread over the white valley, and the freshening gusts drove the powdery snow before them, and sent little stabs of pain through John's shrinking body. Yet how glad he was to find himself again between those familiar hedges, to see the church-tower in front of him, the long hill to his right! His heart swelled at once with longing and satisfaction. During his Frampton job, and in the infirmary, ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... means David Madoc. He was a descendant of Owen Tudor, Lord of Hereford and Whittington. This chief had three sons; the second married a daughter of the Prince of North Wales, half a century before the Conquest, and was ancestor of David ap Madoc; Dai-Madoc, in course of time, shrinking into Daimoc, or Dymoke. Burke says that the John Dymoke who married Margaret de Ludlow, granddaughter of Philip de Marmion, was a knight of ancient Gloucestershire ancestry, and there is a village of Dymock, near Gloucester. A Welsh origin ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother's roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his perdition by ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... neither thought nor heard. His eyes were close to a window of thick glass. Below him was a shrinking, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. "How—how do you ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... he said; and at that word "mate" I seemed to feel a curious shrinking from him; but it passed ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to take the situation lightly then—this curious situation of the "freed" American wife, with or without children, drifting through Europe, aimless, and generally better off when friendless. But she began to be sorry for the type. Instead of shrinking from Gertie in the presence of the discerning compatriots, as she was at first inclined to do, she made it a point to be seen with her, championing the sisterhood of loneliness. There were moments when this ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... thrown away his crutch. Some one plucked at his sleeve, but Madison gave no heed—again his arm was pulled, and he turned to look into Pale Face Harry's face. The other's countenance was gray, the eyes full of a shrinking, terrified light. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... be borne in perpetual recollection, that we are in no small danger of shrinking from a faithful maintenance of those testimonies which are unpopular with the world, as well as of not seeing our own neglect of duty, while censuring the zeal or supposed indiscretion of others. Besides, if this ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... may be not only the dreaded enemy who ends life, but also the friend who brings relief from all conflict, strife and effort. Death may, therefore, well express a shrinking from adaptation and reality, and as such may symbolize one of the most deep-seated yearnings of the human soul. But from time immemorial man has associated with this yearning another one, one which, without the adaptation ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... left us?" she murmured, shrinking nearer to the iron shield which Courtenay seemed to think ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... them together (or twist them) so as to have the gold on the outside, and then fill any cavity with it. Since adopting the above combination I have almost abandoned amalgam. This is recommended on account of its density, ease of insertion, capacity for fine finish, non-conducting and non-shrinking qualities, and compatibility with tooth-substance. Those who have not used it will be surprised at the rapidity with which it can be manipulated. It may be employed in any cavity not exposed to view, also in crown, buccal, and approximal fillings ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood, overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... same person who had passed him on the stairs. The new-comer took up the candle and approached the bed. The old man's face was turned to the pillow; but he lay so still, and his breathing was so inaudible, that his sleep might well, by that hasty, shrinking, guilty glance, be mistaken for the repose of death. The new-comer drew back, and a grim smile passed over his face: he replaced the candle on the table, opened the bureau with a key which he took from his pocket, and loaded himself with several rouleaus ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which it had best behoved[ec] To guard those relics ne'er to be restored:— Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, And once again thy hapless bosom gored, And snatched thy shrinking Gods to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... me enter the cloister, then?" he asked, a look of distaste and shrinking upon his face; for the quiet, colourless life (as it seemed to him) of those who entered the service of the Church was little to the taste of the ardent boy. But John's answer was a bright smile and a decided negative; whereupon Raymond breathed ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to herself! No woman whose judgment is well-balanced, and whose womanly-nature is finely strung, but will regard the path to the rostrum with shrinking and dismay. Either the desire to save and help her fellow-creatures, "plucking them out of the fire," if need be, is so strong upon her as to overmaster all fear of man; or else the necessities and claims of ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... of a Greek slave, by our countryman Powers, which was to be seen a few days since at a print-shop in Pall Mall. I went to look at it. The statue represents a Greek girl exposed naked for sale in the slave-market. Her hands are fettered, the drapery of her nation lies at her feet, and she is shrinking from the public gaze. I looked at it with surprise and delight; I was dazzled with the soft fullness of the outlines, the grace of the attitude, the noble, yet sad expression of the countenance, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... condition, and she was more frightened of him than she had been of Dennin in the thick of the struggle. She could not believe that this raging beast was her Hans, and with a shock she became suddenly aware of a shrinking, instinctive fear that he might snap her hand in his teeth like any wild animal. For some seconds, unwilling to hurt her, yet dogged in his desire to return to the attack, Hans dodged back and forth. But she resolutely ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... so much does the opposite part increase; that is: in proportion as the length of the part d a diminishes the normal size so does the opposite upper part increase beyond its [normal] size. The navel does not change its position to the male organ; and this shrinking arises because when a figure stands on one foot, that foot becomes the centre [of gravity] of the superimposed weight. This being so, the middle between the shoulders is thrust above it out of it perpendicular line, and this line, which forms the central line of the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... done that the fascinated throng could not at first understand what had happened to the executioner, who sprang into the air, screamed, and stood clawing and plucking at the arrow while his bow hung dripping with blood, yet nailed to his shrinking palm. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... very painful shrinking at his heart. If the old man went away to live with his daughter in the country, his home would be lost to him, and he would have to go out into the great city again alone, with nobody to love. He could get his living now in a respectable manner, and there was no fear of his being driven ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... of trivial ceremonies, with which he had been received. He had been friendly, though the Cranford ladies had been cool; he had answered small sarcastic compliments in good faith; and, with his manly frankness, had overpowered all the shrinking which met him as a man who was not ashamed to be poor. And, at last, his excellent masculine common sense and his facility in devising expedients to overcome domestic dilemmas had gained him an extraordinary place ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... then, without speaking, he continued up the stairs. The difficulties of his position were increasing; it was something new to be assailed from the bosom of his own family. He felt that he was being very unfairly used, but he had no intention of shrinking from his duty as a husband and father, even if its discharge should bring pain ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking—she gloried in the growing fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... it had been her resolution, her strength, not her weakness, that had gained the victory. Chafe as Theodora might, she could not rid herself of the consciousness that the sister of that underbred attorney—that timid, delicate, soft, shrinking being, so much her junior—had dared to grapple with her fixed determination, and had gained an absolute conquest. 'Tyrant!' thought Theodora, 'my own brother would have left me alone, but she has made him let her interfere. She means ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crying, 'Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!'; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over, some shrinking back—delicate arms and bosoms—graceful figures—glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!—when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... winter quarters. He would not give his enemies, he said, the least chance of outstaying him. All success, wrote the Marquis of Marignano, was due to the Emperor's resolution to keep the field. Charles vexed the fiery Buren by shrinking from a general engagement, because he knew that his combinations would break up the league without the risk of a battle. But when once danger really pressed, ill as he was, he marched across Germany, and followed fast upon the Elector's heels until ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... border outside blooming in a patch of sunshine close against the old grey house. At first there seemed to me to be no visible difference between them, but after a minute, I saw that the second one was gentler and smaller, with a softer smile and a more shrinking manner. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... an instant through the boiling foam, though the blue stripe of a sailor's jacket, or a red rag of a flag would do all our hearts good, we are not allowed to have it; it would make us too comfortable, and prevent us from shivering and shrinking as we look, and the artist, with admirable intention, and most meritorious self-denial, expresses his piece of wreck with a dark, cold brown. Now we think this aim and effort worthy of the highest praise, and we only ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... as to whether she had acted right. If the dress had required the money set apart for the poor she would have been perfectly clear about it, but she knew it need not have done so. Would her vanity have been gratified? Decidedly not—admiration of her face was so distasteful to her proud shrinking bashfulness, that she felt it like an insult when reported to her, and could almost have wished not to be so handsome, if it had not been more agreeable to an artist-like eye to see a tolerable physiognomy in the glass, when obliged to look ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... miserable, my dear," he says hastily, dreading a scene with all the shrinking of his cowardly nature. "I won't say anything to vex you again. I was ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... be the matter!" exclaimed by aunt, shrinking from me, and following with her frightened eyes the direction of mine. My breath was coming in short, quick gasps now, and my excitement was almost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this shrinking soul to a more universal acceptance. What! does it aspire to the All, and yet deny by its revolt and inner protest the justice of Law. From sorrow we shall take no less and no more than from our ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... stood there, wide eyes seeing nothing, and in her shrinking ears only the terrible reiteration of her ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Margot, she was too completely exhausted to realise relief; she knew only a shrinking from the light, from the strange watching face; a deathly sensation as of falling from a towering height, before darkness and oblivion overpowered her, and she lay stretched ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in terror, as Lomaque spoke his last words—looked round, and saw her husband recoil before the signature on the arrest order, as if the guillotine itself had suddenly arisen before him. Her brother felt her shrinking back in his arms, and trembled for the preservation of her self-control if the terror and suspense of the arrest lasted ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... little bunch of them in Colorado who have failed to command the same attention in politics that their money imposes upon the social world, so they rush into type and get themselves interviewed and asked to speak when they come East, all by way of proving their sensitive and shrinking nature. I don't agree with the suffragists, not a little bit, but I can fraternize with them; they are sincere, but none of the 'Antis' for me; never saw one yet who wasn't either a snob or so narrow-minded that a toothpick would look like ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... inadequate sanitation facilities; increasing levels of soil salinity; industrial pollution; excessive pesticides; part of the basin of the shrinking Aral Sea suffers from severe overutilization of available water ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... household in the parsonage next morning. Reuben rebelled in heart, in face, and in action against the tediously long prayer of the parson, though the old gentleman's spirit was writhing painfully in his pleadings. The aunt was more pious and austere than ever. Adele, timid and shrinking, yet with a beautiful and a trustful illumination in her eye, that for days, and weeks, and months, lingered in the memory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the momentary shrinking that she ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sake, quit!" exclaimed Vandover in great alarm, twisting off the window-seat and shrinking back out of sight into the room. "Quit, Charlie; you don't want to insult a girl that way." Geary looked at him over his shoulder in some surprise, and was about to answer when he turned to the window again and exclaimed, grinning and ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... visually it had not grown larger. Instead, there was only a steady dwindling. A dwindling of great Saturn, with its gorgeous, luminous rings came next. These approaching planets, seeming to shrink! Because, with Lee's expanding viewpoint, everything in the vast scene was shrinking! Great distances here, in relation to the giant globe, were dwindling! These millions of miles between Saturn and Jupiter had shrunk into thousands. And then were ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... of observations have related the pineal to muscle function, inviting comparison of it with the thymus. There is a singular muscle shrinking and deforming disease, known as progressive muscular dystrophy, hitherto a complete and unsolved mystery. Newer studies of the pineal in this disease during life by means of the X-ray have shown it calcified, that is, buried in lime salts, which signifies put out of business. Recently thus ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D. |
