"Shatter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it be my opponent, he has my full consent; then I will follow upon the very ground he shall have chosen and shall shatter him with a hail of new ideas and subtle fancies; if after that he dares to breathe another word, I shall sting him in the face and in the eyes with our maxims, which are as keen as the sting of a wasp, and he ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... as deeply as ever man was loved. Oh that he knew my heart! He would not then shatter his image there. He would not trifle with a spirit formed for intense, yielding, passionate love, but rigid as steel and cold as ice when its freedom is touched. He should have known me better before linking ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... feeling upon entering the room was one of mad indignation, a longing to fall upon the things before him, to tear and rend and shatter everything. Nothing, you see, resembles a woman so much as her bedroom. Even when she is absent, her image still smiles in the mirrors that have reflected it. A little something of her, of her favorite perfume, remains in everything she has touched. Her attitudes are reproduced in the cushions of ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... sound of Colonel Witham's shotgun startled the crows in all the nests around. But the pumpkin stayed. The shot had only buried itself within its soft shell. The colonel would not give up so easily, however. Again and again he fired, hoping to shatter the pumpkin, or to sever the ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... But, madam, I knew two things; I knew that you were born to command, that I was born to serve; I knew that by a rare conjuncture the hand had found the tool; and from the first I was confident, as I am confident to-day, that no hereditary trifler has the power to shatter that alliance." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my petard well and 'twas plain the shock of it had gone far to shatter the wall of confidence our enemies had builded on the field of Camden and elsewhere. Had a hand-grenade with the fuse alight been dropped upon the table, the consternation could scarce have been greater. To a man the tableful was up and thronging round me; but above all the hubbub I ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... experience. "Out of the three Reverences," says Wilhelm Meister, "springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself." Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the world as voices storm-shatter'd, Not borne down by the wind's weight; The rushing time rings with our splendid word ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... perhaps with a slight inclination to make my grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my grandmother, as he hummed ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the tide of battle followed. Like two giants the armies faced each other, getting their "second wind," and speculating on how to proceed next. Thomas held the ridge and the Confederates were bound to drive him from it and shatter his forces. It was two o'clock and assault after assault was made, lasting until sundown. At times the Confederates would gain a slope or a minor ridge, but a Union division or a brigade would rush upon them and ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... to bring all forces to bear in the right way—a man of consummate adroitness, to sail in torpedo-sown waters without exciting an explosion, though conducting wires of local prejudice, class sensitiveness, and personal foible on every hand led straight down to magazines of wrath which might shatter the cause in a moment—a man having resources of his own to such an extent that he could supplement from himself what was wanting in others—always awake, though others might want to sleep, always at work though others might be ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... measured by the standards of cool and polite debate. Phillips did not shrink from the sternest denunciation, or ridicule or scorn, of those who seemed to him recreant to freedom and humanity. The idols of a purely conventional virtue he delighted to shatter, because no public enemy seemed to him more deadly than the American who ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... dalliance with his new Calypso in the various capitals that they visited together during the months that followed was to shatter the relations that had existed for years between himself and Madame d'Agoult. The virtuoso emerged from the business badly, for the woman he had discarded in summary fashion for a younger and more attractive one had sacrificed her name and her reputation for his sake, and had also presented him ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... I have both enjoyed ourselves, Annetta ... We have drained the cup to the bottom and now, to use an expression of Pushkin's, must shatter the goblet!" said Dilectorsky. "You do not ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... a leaf from Havana; We'll cultivate yuccas and yams; The Curragh shall be our savannah, Swept clear of all soldiers and shams; And then to the cry of "Majuba" We'll shatter the enemy's yoke, When Ireland is governed like Cuba ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... head. "We could shatter her, but portions would still remain sticking up above water, and the explosion would be heard fifty miles round, and the cloud of smoke be seen from all the islands within that distance, and there would soon be canoes coming to see what had caused it. ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... perfect hilt and the long tapering needle-pointed spire of glass projecting from it was a perfect blade—rightly used, of course. Only a fool would attempt a heart-stab with such a dagger, as it would shatter on the ribs, leaving the fool to pay for his folly. But the neck-stab—for the big blood-vessels—oho! And Moussa Isa licked his chops just as he had seen the black-maned lion do in his own fatherland; just as did the lion from whom the fair ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... active genius comes To scourge a guilty race. The Punic fleet, Half lost, is swallow'd by the roaring sea. The shatter'd refuse seek the Lybian shore, To bear the news of their ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... expected to find her lying bow on. Now we rode the gentle swell without sound or motion. The slow paddles held us in the same place with regard to the ship, and minutes passed in which my nervousness rose to such a pitch that I felt as if I must scream or clap my hands simply to shatter that oppressive, tantalizing, almost unendurable silence. But when I started to turn and whisper to the cook, something sharp and cold pricked through the back of my shirt and touched my skin, and from that time on I sat as ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors... And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... once more, O ye Laurels, and once more Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sear, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... business to shatter your ideals," I answered, and the next minute, "O Sally, how is ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... she had come down to say good-by it would have been much less significant. But the rose, the red, red rose! It wouldn't be a bad idea to stick it in an envelope and mail it to the girl you were telling me about—the one who sent you forth to shatter kingdoms. I guess that would jostle her a little, particularly if you were to enclose a line telling her that it had fallen to your hand ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... in his own house; whereupon Sandro, in disdain, balanced on the top of his own wall, which was higher than his neighbour's and not very strong, an enormous stone, more than enough to fill a wagon, which threatened to fall at the slightest shaking of the wall and to shatter the roof, ceilings, webs, and looms of his neighbour, who, terrified by this danger, ran to Sandro, but was answered in his very own words—namely, that he both could and would do whatever he pleased in his own house. Nor could he get any other answer out of him, so that he was forced to ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... place it was, where the road made a sharper turn than any the drunken chauffeur had reckoned on, that catastrophe leaped out to shatter the rushing car. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the realms of Taste, Each Science trembled at the ruffian sound, Forsook her shades, and fled her classic ground; The lofty column prostrate in the dust, Defac'd the arch, o'erthrown the matchless bust; The shatter'd fresco animates no more, And ruthless winds thro' clefted temples roar! Florence beheld the scene with sad surprise, And bade the prostrate pile in grandeur rise. Then, oh! thou truly "Father of the Art[B]!" 'Twas thine superior vigour to impart; Illustrious Cimabue! it was thine To soar beyond ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... reduced to clay again and worked over into other forms, so our deeds in life, once done, are done forever. A vase may be broken, it is true, but the fragments are apt to reveal the form of the vessel from which they came. So the hand of jealousy, of envy, of persecution even, may shatter the results of our best efforts here; but God will gather up the pieces and be able to tell by their appearance and quality that they belonged to a vessel of honor in his sight. Seeds sometimes lie a ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... her feet and was standing stiffly before him. She put him in mind of an exquisite and fragile statue, and for a moment he had the feeling that if he were to reach out and touch her, she would shatter into a million pieces. She did not move for some time, nor did he; then she bent down, picked up three of the manila envelopes, straightened, and handed them to him. "Two of these contain the deeds, maps and other records you will need," she said in a dead voice. "The third contains ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... reason that men with eyes think that a blind man cannot see so well in the dark, perhaps," was the answer. "And see here," looking into the water, "away down here is a beautiful star. There, I can blot it out with my hand! and see, now, how I can shatter it into wavelets of stars, and now break it into a hundred, by merely disturbing the water where I see it, 'like sunshine broken in a rill.' Who knows but it may be the just-arrived light of an old, old star which has just come to us? How easy to climb back on one of these filmy rays, myriads ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... part of Europe, it does not appear at all probable. Almost the last words of Pitt before he resigned office were full of hope and confidence: "he was convinced," he said, "that the British fleet would, with one blow, shatter the coalition of the north." There is no reason, in truth, for doubting the word of Pitt that the question of Catholic emancipation was the real cause of his resignation. How far he was implicated in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy; Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care, And bring back the features that joy used to wear. Long, long be my heart with such memories filled! Like the vase, in which roses have once been distilled— You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will, But the scent of the roses ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... on, and Tom sunk deeper and deeper into the snare prepared for him, the thought of a week in the society of one so upright and pure as Charlie became positively odious. The effort to conceal his new condition would be almost impossible, and yet to admit it to him would be, he felt, to shatter for ever the only friendship he really prized. He racked his brain for expedients and excuses to avert the visit, but without avail. If he pleaded illness Charlie would be the first to rush to his bedside; if he pleaded hard work Charlie would insist on sharing it, or ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... lighted sea Which was my glory and the theme of the earth, Look! Must this go? The grave shall have these eyes Which were the bliss of burning Emperors. After what time, what labour the high gods Builded the body of this beauty up! Now at a whim they shatter it! More light! I'll catch the ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... could. I believe what I can. If I have my private doubts, why should I set them up to perplex the community withal? There's a friend of mine in this very city—not to mention names—but a greater heretic, I ween, than even thou. But doth he shatter the peace of the vulgar? Nay, not he: he hath a high place in the synagogue, is a blessing to the Jewry, and confideth his doubts to me in epistles writ in elegant Latin. Nay, nay, Senhor Da Costa, the world ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a swift ship Attis hasting over ocean a mariner When he gained the wood, the Phrygian, with a foot of agility, When he near'd the leafy forest, dark sanctuary divine; By unearthly fury frenzied, a bewildered agony, With a flint of edge he shatter'd to the ground his humanity. 5 Then aghast to see the lost limbs, the deform'd inutility, While still the gory dabble did anew the soil pollute, With a snowy palm the woman took affrayed a taborine. Taborine, the trump that hails thee, Cybele, thy initiant. Then a dainty ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... VICTOR owns! 'Twas fill'd with shrieks and dying groans, And mangled limbs and shatter'd bones— In heaps they lay! The vanquished Gaul as yet bemoans ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, save where Oblivion lone Has dimly traced his name upon the mouldering stone. Medina's sceptre is despoiled of might— Once stretched o'er realms that bowed in pale affright; The Moon that rose, as waved the scimetar ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Papal bondage—passed from the darkness of superstitious bondage into the light of religious freedom, shall we sink back to what she was, by casting ourselves into the whirlpool of civil war? Shall we not only put out, but shatter, the lamp of liberty, a lamp whose effulgence was beginning to scatter the shades of despotism from off the earth? Shall we extinguish the brightest star in the constellation of human freedom? The united voices of Humanity, Justice, ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... employed in subduing the wild tribes of Kurdistan. The storm was seen to be gathering, and the representatives of foreign Powers urged the Sultan, but in vain, to refrain from an enterprise which might shatter his empire. Mahmud was now a dying man. Exhausted by physical excess and by the stress and passion of his long reign, he bore in his heart the same unquenchable hatreds as of old; and while assuring the ambassadors of his intention to maintain the peace, he despatched ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... such perusal of my face, As he would draw it: long staid he so; At last, a little shaking of my arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, As it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And with his head over his shoulder turn'd, He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; For out of doors he went without their help, And to the last ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... it seemed probable that the opposing forces which were contending with one another in the depths of European life, would burst forth and shatter the peaceful state of affairs. For the advancing revival of Catholicism roused the hostile feelings of Protestants, while the union of the German and the independent feeling of the Italian princes resisted the extension of the alliances of Spain. In the year 1615, on the Netherland ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... dear," I said gently, anxious not to shatter illusions; "the Ibsen plays deal with Christiania, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... fall from such a height, that I shall shatter myself in falling." Then giving himself a shake, as though to escape from himself, "Whence came you," ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with any stolen merchandise. She went out and has returned with a clear bill. But with what terrible power Ker Karraje will be armed for both offensive and defensive operations at sea! If Thomas Roch is to be credited, this fulgurator could shatter the terrestrial spheroid at one blow. And who knows but what one day, he will try ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... as these were well calculated to shatter the dreams of the most infatuated of brides, and less was sufficient to rouse Natalie's proud spirit to rebellion. When affectionate pleadings proved useless, reproaches took their place. Heated words were exchanged, and the records tell of many violent ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... a great meeting at Belfast says, "You are sometimes asked whether you propose to resist the English army? I reply that even if this Government had the wickedness (which, on the whole, I believe), it is wholly lacking in the nerve required to give an order which in my deliberate judgment would shatter for years the civilization of these islands." If the Government does not have the nerve to employ its troops, "It will be for the moon-lighters and the cattle-maimers to conquer Ulster themselves, and it will be for you to show ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... fell into the road just ahead of me, and went on peaceably.—When passing a public-house, the landlord ran out with a large cudgel, and applied it to the head and shoulders of the man with such force as to shatter it in pieces. When the reason of his conduct was asked, he replied, that he owned slaves, and he would not permit free blacks to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... or ever that evening ended a great gale blew And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew, Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain. And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags To be lost ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... The lonely turret, shatter'd, and outworn, Stands venerably proud; too proud to mourn Its long lost grandeur: fir trees grow around, Aye dropping their hard fruit ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... but has (most disastrously, as I think) infected Europe with German ideas, especially with the idea that you make a nation strong by making its people behave like cattle. God send that I may live to see the day when victorious armies from Gaul shall shatter this illusion, burn up Prussianism with all its Police Regulations, Insurance Acts, Poll Taxes, and insults to the poor, and reassert the Republic. It will never be done in ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... come to an end! He even went so far as to describe the scene of destruction, when all the elements would be put in motion to destroy mankind, when volcanoes would deluge the land with liquid fire, and earthquakes shake and shatter the world to ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... in the course of a few days created a veritable whirlwind of false reports, hoping by that means to shatter or stifle all manifestations of patriotic feeling, and prepare Russia for a ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... nulla with, most likely, a couple of fathoms of water over his head, unconscious of danger, and little dreaming that the two-legged creatures on the bank had got a nerve communicating with his stomach, through which they were going to send a flash of lightning that would shatter ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... during the night, he awoke, slid cautiously and with infinite stealth from beneath the covers and closed the wide-flung window to within a bare two inches of the sill. Almost invariably she heard him; but she was a wise old woman; a philosopher of parts. She knew better than to allow a window to shatter the peace of their marital felicity. As she lay there, smiling a little grimly in the dark and giving no sign of being awake, she thought, "Oh, well, I guess a closed window ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... have me share the prey? By all that I have done, The Varian bones that day by day Lie whitening in the sun, The legion's trampled panoply, The eagle's shatter'd wing— I would not be for earth or sky So ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... stronghold he had prepared, Hooker did what most ordinary generals would have done, especially one who had served on the losing side at Fredericksburg. He had there learned the value of intrenchments. He had seen division after division shatter itself in vain against a stone wall and a few gun-pits, and it is little wonder that he had imbibed a profound respect for defensive tactics. He omitted, however, to take into consideration two simple facts. First, that few districts ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... to shatter the aerostat, and to this end either shrapnel, high explosive, or incendiary shells will be used. The former must explode quite close to the balloon in order to achieve the desired end, while the incendiary shell must actually strike it, so as to fire the gas. The high explosive ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... character. At the same time it is full of inconsistencies and contradictions upon immaterial matters. For example, the four accounts of the resurrection differ in detail, and there is no orthodox learned lawyer who dutifully accepts all four versions who could not shatter the evidence if he dealt with it in the course of his profession. These details are immaterial to the spirit of the message. It is not common sense to suppose that every item is inspired, or that we have ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Welcome, ye gods, be wickedness and crime; Thronged with our dead be dire Pharsalia's fields, Be Punic ghosts avenged by Roman blood; Add to these ills the toils of Mutina; Perusia's dearth; on Munda's final field The shock of battle joined; let Leucas' Cape Shatter the routed navies; servile hands Unsheath the sword on fiery Etna's slopes: Still Rome is gainer by the civil war. Thou, Caesar, art her prize. When thou shalt choose, Thy watch relieved, to seek divine abodes, All heaven rejoicing; and shalt hold a ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... not only sensitive, but it's unreliable. You might actually drop a jar of the stuff and do nothing but shatter the jar. Another jar, apparently exactly similar, might go off because it got jiggled by a seismic wave from a passing truck half a mile away. But the latter was a great deal more ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... don't want to shatter your ideal, but the beautiful Finola wants to work a revolution, and you can't do that sort of thing without soiling your hands. However, whether he imposed on her or not, there's no doubt about ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... to keep clear of the Cape that formed the key to her eastern and southern possessions, and her King's representative subjected to a studied slight from a Portuguese official in Brazil, she hardly appeared, just then, to be the nation that would soon shatter the naval power of France, demolish the greatest soldier of modern times, and, before her sword was sheathed, float her victorious flag in every continent, in every sea, and over people of every race ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Five Towns, and one of the earliest in England—dizzy thought! But the glimpses had been vain and tantalizing. She had been in the male world, but not of it, as though encircled in a glass ball which neither she nor the males could shatter. She had had money, freedom, and ambition, and somehow, through ignorance or through lack of imagination or opportunity, had been unable to employ them. She had never known what she wanted. The vision had never been clear. And she ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... again! And the havoc did not slack, Till a feeble cheer the Dane To our cheering sent us back; Their shots along the deep slowly boom; Then ceased, and all is wail, As they strike the shatter'd sail, Or in conflagration pale ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the same Nature with one another, and with their Totum, as their Reduction by Condensation Evinces. And even when the Fire seems most so Congregare Homogenea, & Segregare Heterogenea, it Produces that Effect but by Accident; For the Fire does but Dissolve the Cement, or rather Shatter the Frame, or [tructure [Errata: structure] that kept the Heterogeneous Parts of Bodies together, under one Common Form; upon which Dissolution the Component Particles of the Mixt, being Freed and set at Liberty, do Naturally, and oftentimes without any Operation ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... blast upon his whistle, and Smith, running to the rail of the platform, began to shatter the panes of the skylight ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the crack of doom. There was a brightness greater than the brilliance of the sun. And then there was a wrenching, heaving shock. Then there was blackness. Baird was flung across the radar room, and Diane cried out, and he careened against a wall and heard glass shatter. He called: ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... you will stand here alone, face to face with a hundred nameless temptations to perversity. The fumes of unrighteous pride may rise into your brain and tempt you, in the interest of a vulgar theory which it will call your independence, to shatter the edifice I have so laboriously constructed. So I must ask you for a promise—the solemn promise you owe my condition.' And he grasped my hand. 'You will follow the path I have marked; you will be faithful ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... father lived in, taught me, died in, and now is mine. They believed—and I believe—in what I have heard called the Sunday School God! the God who lives, who listens, and to whom I pray. I have read books attempting to shatter this belief—yes, and I think succeeding because written with a cunning appeal only to the intelligence of man. Can such a Being as God exist? they ask. And since man's intelligence can only grasp ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... called a fairly successful man. I dare say the majority of people never knew that he was created for grander things. But something was sapping his energy at the fountain-head. Was he realizing that he had helped to shatter his ideals ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... of the Estates of Scotland, richer than any of the others, and possessing almost all the political ability of the time: on the side of England a new, scarcely recognised, but powerful influence, which was soon to attain almost complete mastery in Scotland and shatter that Church to pieces. In the beginning of James's reign this new power was but beginning to swell in the silent bosom of the country, showing here and there in a trial for heresy and in the startling fires of execution which cut off the first martyrs for ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... fellows, so you'd better be getting out on the field. Benz, remember to hit that line lower. Neil, call your signals fast and snappy. Keep the team up and at 'em. You linemen, the fate of to-day's game is largely up to you. You must shoulder the brunt of the work and shatter the Pennington attack. The men who will start ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... the white madness before; had seen men die from the deadly monotony of it all. It was conceivable that a book of bright pictures, anything with warm colors might penetrate the pall of white fog that clouded his brain and shatter the obsession, reinstating reason on its tottering throne. But there was only the howling of white wolves out across the white snow fields. Then a wolf howl ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... she is compelling it to choose between secularised life and arrested growth. Were a growing tree encircled with an iron band, the day would surely come when the tree, by the force of its own natural expansion, would either shatter the band or allow it to cut deep into its own stem. The growing consciousness of Humanity has long been encircled by a rigid and inadequate conception of God. The gradual secularisation of the West means that the soul of man is straining that particular conception of God ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the source More selfish far, of other nations' deed, And mark their tortuous craft, their jealous greed, Their serpent-wisdom or mere soulless force, Homeward returns my vagrant fealty, Crying, "O England, shouldst thou one day fall, Shatter'd in ruins by some Titan foe, Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all The world, and Truth less passionately free, And God ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... "You can't shatter the conceit of a happy husband so easily, Madame von Marwitz. You ask too much of me if you ask me to believe that Karen makes confidences to you that she doesn't to me. I can't take it on, you ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... happiness was so immense that this confession did not shatter it, it only added another shade to it. She forgave him; but from that time more than ever he considered himself unworthy of her, morally bowed down lower than ever before her, and prized more highly than ever ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... in human nature to shatter such illusions. Thereafter, the subject of the evening was more guardedly treated, pending her departure. Grandma Plympton, valiant as she was in the social cause, could seldom stay up for more than the first few numbers of a ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... "You? Here?" The homely piece of news seemed to shatter all her plans. She had spent a long half-hour in elaborate approaches, in high moral attacks; she had neither frightened her enemy nor made him angry, nor interfered with the least detail of ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... the apple-tree. The hired man skins the tree with the harrow; fire runs through the dry grass; hard winters shatter the vitality, and parts of the tree die; borers enter; rabbits and mice gnaw the bark in winter; loads of fruit and burdens of ice crush the tree; wind storms play mischief; bad pruning leaves long stubs, and rot develops; cankers produce dead ragged wounds; ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... life a burden to her. Then it comes to her knowledge—she obtains absolute proof—that Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and probable, and eminently illustrative ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... a tank, the sense of confinement is, at times, terrible. One does not know what is happening outside his little steel prison. One often cannot see where the machine is going. The noise inside is deafening; the heat terrific. Bombs shatter on the roof and on all sides. Bullets spatter savagely against the walls. There is an awful lack of knowledge; a feeling of blind helplessness at being cooped up. One is entirely at the mercy of the big shells. If a shell hits a tank near the petrol ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... the ghastly remains fearful each instant that I should find the dainty skull that would shatter my happiness for life; but though I searched diligently, picking up every one of the twenty-odd skulls, I found none that was the skull of a creature but slightly removed from the ape. Hope, then, still lived. For another three days I searched north and south, east and west for the hatchetmen ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the gate of the underworld Ishtar came, To the keeper of the gate her command she addressed:— Keeper of the waters, open thy gate, Open thy gate that I may enter. If thou open not the gate and let me in, I will strike the door, the posts I will shatter, I will strike the hinges, burst open the doors, I will raise up the dead devourers of the living, Over the living the dead shall triumph. The keeper opened his mouth and spake, To the Princess Ishtar he cried:— Stay, lady, do not thus, Let me go ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to tell foolish men that they are foolish, mean men that they are mean, wicked men that they are wicked, traitorous men that they are traitors; for smooth lies cement what impolite veracities would shatter. The system, it is contended, on the whole, civilizes the individuals whose natures it may repress, and is better than a sincerity which would set them by the ears, and put a veto on all social intercourse whatever. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... adventuring. Extremes must meet, it is their urgent necessity; the reason for their distance, and the greater the distance between them, the swifter will be their return and the warmer their impact: they may shatter each other to fragments or they may fuse and become indissoluble and new and wonderful, but there is no other fertility. Between the sexes there is a really extraordinary freedom of intercourse. They meet each other something more than half way. A man ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... fact of the Resurrection; or, to put the conclusion in the most moderate fashion, for the belief in the Resurrection. For, as we have shown, the natural effect of our Lord's death would have been to shatter the whole fabric: and if that effect were not produced, the only reasonable account of the force that hindered it is, that His followers believed that He rose again. Since that was their faith, one can understand ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... distrust, and to test out, every rung in my rocky ladders. I found that even the most secure-appearing "stepping stones" were often rotten and treacherous, weathered by the continual freezing and thawing of the moisture in its seams. Often a mere touch was sufficient to shatter them, but sometimes it was not until I put my weight upon them, holding to a shrub or an earth-buried bowlder the while, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... its wheels sounded nearer. The trees on the hills behind the Castle were bending and bowing; and not merely around the boat, but far as could be seen the surface of the ancient channel was a-shirr and a-shatter under ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... proclaim aloud for themselves. And so we may be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations, not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from another and a more prosaic, because a ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... horror, my boundless despair, when the good woman slowly and sadly shook her head, saying, in a voice full of sympathy and commiseration, 'How loath I am to shatter your hopes and add more trouble to your already much overheavy sorrows, you cannot know, Monsieur, but I fear I can ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... I've got it adjusted right now. Come on, see if you can shatter this steel target," and Tom set up a small one at the end ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... shatter you in fragments, for the face That brimmed you up with beauty is no more: And die, dull heart, for she whose mournful words Made you a living spirit has passed away And left you but a ball of passionate dust. And you, proud earth and plumy sea, fade out! For you ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... ran on trucks and were kept in their places by rope tackles. In action, the recoil had to be taken up by men who held the ends of these ropes, rove through pulleys in the vessel's side. Despite their efforts the gun would sometimes leap back against the bulkhead hard enough to shatter it. As the charge for each reloading had to be carried sometimes half the length of the ship by hand, it is easy to see that the men who served the guns needed some strength and agility in ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... Inachus— A peremptory charge to fling me forth Beyond my home and fatherland, a thing Sent loose in banishment o'er all the world; And—should he falter—Zeus should launch on him A fire-eyed bolt, to shatter and consume Himself and all his race to nothingness. Bowing before such utterance from the shrine Of Loxias, he drave me from our halls, Barring the gates against me: loth he was To do, as I to suffer, this ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... self-reliant devotion passed away before a flippant servant-girl's tongue, stood before the rulers of Israel, and said: 'Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye!' The sense of sin, the assurance of pardon, shatter a man's unwholesome self-confidence, and develop his self-reliance based upon his trust in Jesus Christ. The consciousness of sin, and the experience of pardon, deepen and make more operative in life the power ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... may light on him, Crush him with thunder! Thou, too, great Neptune of the lower deeps, Heave thy wet head up from the monstrous sea; Advance thy trident high as to the clouds, And with a not to be repeated blow, Dash the sin-freighted ship of that rash man! And thou, old iron-sceptred Eolus, Shatter the bars of thine enclosed winds; Unhinge the doors of thy great kennel house, And 'twixt the azure and the roaring deep Cry out thy whole inflated Strongyle— Cry ruin on that man! But wherefore, thus, Do I invoke the speedy desolation Of any mighty magisterial soul, Whose will ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... entirely the strength and resisting power of the mass in which they are embedded, and of which they form scarcely a third. Destroy the vitality of its cells, and the rock-like bone will waste away before the attack of the body-fluids like soft sandstone under the elements. Shatter it, or twist it out of place, and it will promptly repair itself, and to a remarkable degree resume its original directions ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... change completely his mental and physical habits and his surroundings. Occupation, changed habits, taking in of confidence, faith and courage thoughts—these changes are necessary to the victim of melancholia, or he will shatter on the danger ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... "how this blade has life. Here is none of your soft bronze or rough iron from the northern hills. Here is a living metal that will sever a hair, yet not shatter on the hardest helm." ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... blessing! Now that I have grown so weak that the cough would shatter me—tear my frame to pieces—it is gone! It is nearly a week, sir, since I coughed at all. My death-bed has been made quite pleasant for me. Except for weakness, I am free from pain, and I have all things comfortable. I am rich in ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... They can learn, but you have to hit them pretty hard to make them do it. On the other hand, some people have minds like glass balls: They can't learn at all. If you hit them hard enough to make a real impression, they simply shatter." ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... a great invalid. The shock to his nervous system, the dragging out of those interminable hours in the lonely chamber, and the strain upon his physical powers by the absence of nutriment for seven long days and nights, had all combined to shatter a constitution once robust. He is now greatly improved in health, and has been recommended by his doctors to try a winter in the south of France ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... sabers bare, Flash'd as they turn'd in air Sab'ring the gunners there, Charging an army, while All the world wonder'd: Plunged in the battery-smoke Right thro' the line they broke; Cossack and Russian Reel'd from the saber-stroke Shatter'd and sunder'd. Then they rode back, but not ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... of the Provencal nobility; a whimsical creature, with an imagination amazingly rapid, but extravagant. Your brother calls him Count Shatter-brain; and I tell him that he forgets he has some claim to the title himself. The Count has read the old Provencal poets, and romance writers, till he has made himself a kind of Don Quixote; except that he has none of the Don's delightful systematic gravity. The Count on the contrary amuses ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... and long-winged hawk, of desert-life for thee; No more across the sultry sands shalt thou go swooping free: Blunt idle talons, idle beak, with spurning of thy chain, Shatter against thy cage the wing thou ne'er ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the first course of dinner—Gaspard's wonderful Puree Mongol—an artist's dream of all the most delicate vegetables in the world mingled together as the clouds are mingled, the tensity in the air seemed to break and shatter about them in showers of brilliant, artificial mirth, which presently, because they were all young and fond of one another and their group had the habit of intimacy, became less and less ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... precarious shelter. There she became the mother of two children—the poor creature! Just the seventh part of my mother joy! Who can deny that I am fortunate? Who will doubt that I shall remain happy? Fortune would have a hard time if she undertook to shatter my happiness. Take this or that one from my treasured children; but when would the number of them dwindle to the sickly two of Latona? Away with your sacrifices! Take the laurel out of your hair. Go back to your homes and let me never see such ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... skirted the edges of the fire, seen the hotel district burning, heard of fallen buildings. Chrystie could have been there keeping a tryst with Mayer. He let his thoughts go no further, stopped them in their race toward a tragedy that would shatter the girl beside him as ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... effect of any real contact with Christ and His Gospel is to reveal a man to himself, to shatter his delusive estimates of what he is, and to pull down about his ears the lofty fortress in which he has ensconced himself. It seems strange work for what calls itself a Gospel to begin by forcing a man to cry out with sobs and tears, Oh, wretched man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mask is down, and forth you stand Known for a King whose word is no great matter, A traitor proved, for every honest hand To strike and shatter. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... do pitchy, 'tis my pride Vor Jenny Hine to reaeke my zide, An' zee her fling her reaeke, an' reach So vur, an' teaeke in sich a streech; An' I don't shatter hay, an' meaeke Mwore work than needs vor Jenny's reaeke. I'd sooner zee the weaeles' high rows Lik' hedges up above my nose, Than have light work myzelf, an' vind Poor Jeaene a-beaet an' left behind; Vor ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... stone rising above the snow. With desperate tension of every nerve and muscle, I knew as I approached it, with the foaming water yonder, that it was my only hope. I consciously straightened my legs for the contact. The bump was tremendous, and seemed to shatter every bone in my body. But it stopped me, and I was saved only a few feet from the water's edge—miraculously, although fearfully bruised, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... too, were tapestries of many colours, beautiful as seaweed; no modern flotsam ever drifted hither, no early Victorian furniture, no electric light. The great trade routes that littered the years with empty meat tins and cheap novels were far from here. Well, well, the centuries will shatter it and drive its fragments on to distant shores. Meanwhile, while it yet stood, I went on a visit there to my brother, and we argued about ghosts. My brother's intelligence on this subject seemed to me to be in need of correction. He mistook ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... over now, and that for the future Buller will trust no one but himself in great matters; and it is because they believe this that the soldiers are looking forward with confidence and eagerness to the third and last attempt—for the sands at Ladysmith have run down very low—to shatter ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... lodged between the Timbers, which had stopped the Water from forcing its way in in great Quantities. Part of the Sheathing was gone from under the Larboard bow, part of the False Kiel was gone, and the remainder in such a Shatter'd Condition that we should be much better off if it was gone also; her Forefoot and some part of her Main Kiel was also damaged, but not Materially. What damage she may have received abaft we could not see, but believe not much, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... long shaft through which they had risen they saw the glaring flame of the Gorm. As they looked, its regular pulsations turned irregular: it leaped and splashed as though it was a stormy, choppy sea. Then it gave one final mighty heave, and the universe seemed to shatter beneath them. The "walls" of the shaft collapsed about them and they were enswathed in a raging ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... system adopted, the spirit in which it is carried out counts for even more than the system itself. Once place a firm, self-confident man with the centralising spirit strong within him at the head of affairs, and he will often, without any apparent change, go far to shatter any system, however carefully it may have been devised, to encourage decentralisation. Such a man was Napoleon. Every conceivable subject bearing on the government of his fellow-men was, as M. Taine says, "classified and docketed" in his ultra-methodical brain. It is useless to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... looking on with blank amazement, "MAKINS evidently thinks that JONAH swallowed the whale." Bill seemed to shatter friendships and dissever old alliances. SQUIRE of MALWOOD naturally at home in the fray, but rather startling to find HOME SECRETARY running amuck at CHAMBERLAIN. MATTHEWS in his most hoity-toity mood; quivered with indignation; thumped ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... the slender tip might slip through the steel bars across the windows in the helmets and shatter the glass. And that would be as great a danger as if the ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... assisted in the erection of that barrier of trenches which held the enemy in check; while, beyond the fighting-line, Britain called for her volunteers to form new armies, and France completed the mobilization of her men and made ready to shatter the invader. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... and they meet at the foot of the hill, where they attack and defy each other. Both smite each other with their iron-tipped lances with all their strength. The shields that hang about their necks are not worth two coats of bark: the leather tears, and they split the wood, and they shatter the meshes of the hauberks. Both are pierced to the vitals by the lances, and the horses fall to earth. Now, both the warriors were doughty. Grievously, but not mortally, wounded, they quickly got upon their feet and grasped afresh their lances, which were not broken ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE? To REVERSE all estimates of value—THAT is what they had to do! And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious—all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"—into ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of Free Nations and a famished race of men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the smouldering ruins of civilization. In the end I believe that the common sense of mankind will ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... she was a great deal too fond of being taken care of for that. And who wouldn't take care of her,—that delicate little thing,—like some choice small masterpiece of cunning workmanship? Why, she almost looked as if she were made of Venetian glass, and a fall on deck would shatter ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... position; most people spoke well of him, and liked him. It only rested with PETER himself to maintain what he had gained, and to enter on life with troops of friends. A few moments of purposeless folly were sufficient to shatter him. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... never known a mother's love, and his father's death was the first blow that helped to shatter his early notions of felicity. The cloud that overshadowed him at that time was very dark, and he received no sympathy worth mentioning from ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... shoulders. "It's all a question of motives," he said indifferently. "I don't want to shatter your idol; I only want to save you from counting too ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... To shatter at a single blow the most venerable of the routine precedents, the sensational thing chose for its colliding point with orderly system one of the oldest and most conservative of the city's banks: the Bayou State Security. At ten o'clock, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the election. The Monitor and other papers, the chosen or self-appointed champions of vested interests, were almost openly in revolt; in Harley's mind their course amounted to the same thing; they printed in their news columns many things derogatory to Grayson, and likely to shatter public faith in his judgment, and in nearly all of them appeared signed contributions from members of the wealthy faction led by the Honorable Mr. Goodnight, attacking every speech made by the candidate, and intimating that he was a ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... nature of contents, and radically elevated standard of editorship, mark an era in the progress of the Association; since the UNITED AMATEUR is really the nucleus of our activity and a reflection of the best in our current thought and ideals. We have this year helped to shatter the foolish fetichism which restricts the average official organ to a boresome and needless display of facts and figures, relating to the political mechanism of amateurdom. The organ has been a literary ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt. Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.) And dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... are determined to defend a strong position. They allow the enemy to approach without any warning of the resistance they are about to meet, and it is only when the main body of their opponents comes within range that they open a ferocious fire with musketry and cannon, which can shatter the columns of their adversaries. It is a method which has often produced good results for the Russians; so General Wittgenstein had ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... my breviary, felt even at night, in my dreams, your form in contact with my own, I desired to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see whether I should really find you like the ideal image which I had retained of you, to shatter my dream, perchance, with reality. At all events, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first had become insupportable. I sought you. I saw you once more. Calamity! When I had seen you twice, I wanted ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Re-mould it nearer to the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... some unmeasured valley driven, Swept down, and with a voice so loud It seemed as it would shatter heaven! The bravest quailed; it swept so near, It made the ruddiest cheek to blanch, While look replied to look in fear, "The avalanche! The avalanche!" It forced the foremost to recoil, Before its sideward billows thrown,— Who ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... bishop. One might almost hazard the conjecture that he remains in the Congregationalist Communion, as so many Anglo-Catholics remain in the Establishment, solely to supply the fermentation of an idea which will shatter its present constitution. One thinks of him as a repentant Cromwell restoring "that bauble" to its accustomed place on the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... surpassed in ecstasy that first touch of the water on my limbs. To prolong the joy I let myself slip in slowly, resting my hands on the edge of the tank, and smiling to see my body, as I lowered it, break up the shining black surface and shatter the starbeams into splinters. And the water, my Father, seemed to crave me as I craved it. Its ripples rose about me, first in furtive touches, then in a long embrace that clung and drew me down; till at length they lay like kisses on my lips. It was ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... competitions, over-reachings, envies and hatreds of to-day into two great class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance the reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not advance the reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order we have. Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I have presented it in my book, "New Worlds for Old," seeks to change economic arrangements only by the way, as an aspect and outcome of a great change, a change in the spirit and method ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... be attempted to be described, nor even remembered. It was one of those tragedies of life which enfeeble the most faithful memories at a blow shatter nerves beyond the faculty of revival, cloud the mind for ever, or turn the hair grey in an instant. They carried Venetia delirious to her bed. The very despair, and almost madness, of her daughter forced Lady Annabel ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... the matter struck me. It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress. No matter what the work is, one must spiritualize it in some way, shatter the old idea of it into bits and rebuild it nearer to the heart's desire. How was I ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... the welcome he received, for the importer gave him a veritable embrace; he patted him on the back and inquired three times as to his health. O'Reilly was anything but cold now; he was perspiring profusely, and he felt his collar growing limp. To shatter this old man's eager hopes would be like kicking a child in the face. Carter had never been so enthusiastic, so demonstrative; there was something almost theatrical in his greeting. It dismayed O'Reilly immensely to realize what a hold he must have upon his employer's affections. Although the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... many weeks of looking for employment had taught her nothing else, they now told her how worse than foolish it would be to shatter at one blow Mrs Hamilton's good opinion of her. In compliance with her employer's request, she returned to the drawing-room, her nerves all ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... your two assistants, whom I have had released, have been hanging about the place all the morning. If the violet rays have no other effect, they will at least prevent you from sleeping, and my experience shows that loss of sleep, if persisted in, will shatter the best set of nerves on earth. You know what the effect is, for six hours. The next time, as I said some little while ago, we shall try ten—and after that, longer periods, until the process becomes continuous. I am giving you these brief respites, at first, ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... Love, could we successfully conspire Against this sorry World for our desire, Would we not shatter it to bits without So much of damage as ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various |
