"Terse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... AMATEUR for April is made brilliant by the presence of Henry Clapham McGavack's terse and lucid exposure of hyphenated hypocrisy, entitled "Dr. Burgess, Propagandist". Mr. McGavack's phenomenally virile and convincing style is supported by a remarkable fund of historical and diplomatic knowledge, and the feeble ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... deliberately rewritten. Now, there is hardly anything in it that is not beautiful and perfect in form. The whole range of noble emotions finds expression there, and all the guiding ideas of our Modern State. We have recently admitted some terse criticism of its contents by a man ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Nature. I do not think these have been sufficiently admired. As an epigrammatist Mr. Watson has no rival in Victorian or in contemporary verse. The epigram is a quite definite form of art, especially cultivated by the poets in the first half of the seventeenth century. Their formula the terse expression of obscene thoughts. Mr. Watson excels the best of them in wit, concision, and grace; it is needless to say he makes no attempt to rival them as a garbage-collector. Of the large number of epigrams that he has contributed to English ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... others.' (Memoirs of Jefferson, i. 15.) The striking out of the passage declaring the slave trade 'piratical warfare against human nature itself,' was deeply regretted by many of that generation. Other alterations were for the better, making the paper more dispassionate and terse, and—what was no small improvement—more brief and exact. On the evening of the 4th the Committee rose, when Harrison reported the Declaration as having been agreed upon. It was then adopted by twelve States, unanimously." [That is, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... participles and infinitives. Metaphors abound in the speeches, some of them slightly far-fetched, but others of uncommon beauty, appropriateness, and pith. There is no brilliant employment of words, but not seldom one comes across such terse and happy phrases as the famous "We stand under the star of commerce," "Our future lies on the water," "We demand a place in ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... passages from known authors. No special course of reading has been pursued, the thoughts being culled from foreign and native tongues—from the moss-grown tomes of ancient literature and the verdant fields of to-day. The terse periods of others, appropriately quoted, become in a degree our own; and a just estimation is very nearly allied to originality, or, as the author of Vanity Fair tells us, "Next to excellence is the appreciation ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... to his spoken utterances is indicative of his divided life. There are moments at which his writing takes the terse, vigorous tone of his talk. In his letters, such as those to Chesterfield and Macpherson and in occasional passages of his pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his Latinized abstractions ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... "Elia," [1] written originally for the London Magazine, I feel it difficult to speak. They are the best amongst the good—his best. I see that they are genial, delicate, terse, full of thought and full of humor; that they are delightfully personal; and when he speaks of himself you cannot hear too much; that they are not imitations, but adoptions. We encounter his likings and fears, his fancies (his nature) in all. The words have an import never known before: ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... no doubt very boldly take this capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a courtesy, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... whitened and her eyes grew dark with indignation. The sight renewed Allan's emotion. His voice broke, his black hands shook, he began to sob once more, and great tears stole down his ebony cheeks. But he managed to answer her terse, shocked questions with some degree of intelligence, calling upon his vivid imagination for such details as ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... them day and night! "Well! but our fathers Plautus lov'd to praise, Admir'd his humour, and approv'd his lays." Yes; they saw both with a too partial eye, Fond e'en to folly sure, if you and I Know ribaldry from humour, chaste and terse, Or can but scan, and have ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... the boy had seen that name, and he blinked and smiled and got very red. "Terse and literary," he said, dying to put his arms round her and kiss her before all mankind. "They'll have something to talk about at dinner to-night. A nice whack in the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... glowed with delight in these tales, reading beneath the terse lines of Haney's slang something epic, detecting a perfect willingness to take any chance. The fact that his bravery led to nothing conventionally noble or moral did not detract from the inherent interest of the ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... mid-day—(what didst thou in an office?)—without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days—thy topics are staled by the "new-born gauds" of the time:—but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... was the pride of lineage, of womanhood, of an assured station in life, combined with that other pride which is rather difficult of definition without verbosity and is perhaps better expressed in the terse and illuminating phrase "a dead-game sport." Unlike her precious relative, unlike the majority of her sex, Shirley had a wonderfully balanced sense of the eternal fitness of things; her code of honour resembled that of a very gallant gentleman. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the infallible word." Was ever a poem more frequently quoted or so universally plagiarised? In writing or speaking about the country and its inhabitants, if we would express ourselves as concisely as we possibly can, we are bound to quote the "Elegy"; it is invariably the shortest road to a terse expression of our meaning. Who can improve on "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife," or "The short and simple annals of the poor"? If Gray's "Elegy" is but "a mosaic of the felicities" of those ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... sweeps over Pluton and Furor and breaks into spray on the shapeless and fire-distorted steel of Vizcaya and Oquendo, tell how the navy has paid our debt to Spain. Nor is the renown which crowns the standards of our army one whit less glorious. Nothing in the lucid page of Thucydides nor in the terse commentaries of Caesar, nothing in the vivid narrative of Napier or the glowing battle scenes of Allison, can surpass the story how, spurning the chapparal and the barbed wire, pressing their rifles to their throbbing hearts, toiling up the heights, and all ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... consulting the indexes to the foreign affairs of the past eventful four months, and in making himself master of the situation. His first act is to transmit to all the (Buchanan) subordinates abroad copies of the President's Message, accompanying it with a score of terse and sparkling paragraphs regarding the rebellion; yet, in those few paragraphs, demonstrating the illusory and ephemeral advantages which foreign nations would derive from any connection they might ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the ancient world none is more suitable for modern use than Demosthenes. It is true that he is guilty of gross bad taste in some of his speeches—but rarely in a parliamentary oration. Cicero is too verbose and often insincere. Demosthenes is as a rule short, terse and forcible. It is the undoubted justice of his cause which gives him his lofty and noble style. He lacks the gentler touch of humour—but a man cannot jest when he sees servitude before the country he loves. With a few necessary alterations ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... himself half covered with dirt and debris of all kinds, and when he crawled out and brushed himself off, he saw that of all his comrades he alone survived, and that they were mangled and mutilated in a most gruesome way. "Pieces of my friends everywhere," is his terse account. He lay in the trench, not daring to move for hours, the bitterest thoughts assailing him,—anger, hatred and disgust for war, the Germans, his own countrymen; and he even cursed God. When he did this he shuddered at his blasphemy, became remorseful and prayed for forgiveness. A little ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... silence and vacancy, noting, as he went, the signs on the shop windows. There was the Busy Bee Restaurant, Jim's Place, the Hotel Renown, the Last Dollar Dance Hall, Hank's Pool Room. Upon one window was painted the terse announcement, "Joe—Buy or Sell." The Happy Days Bar adjoined the ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology—of what our own age can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... far as I am able to understand the subject, the tendency of all Japanese poetry is to terse expression. Were it not well therefore to consider at least the possible result of a totally opposite tendency,—expansion of fancy, luxuriance of expression? Terseness of expression, pithiness, condensation, are of vast importance in prose, but poetry has other methods, and the "Kalevala" is ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... a strange way, as if he liked her terse creed, and would fain have heard it a second time. Then suddenly he leant back with his head against a corner of the piano. The fronds of a maidenhair fern hanging in delicate profusion almost hid his face. He was essentially muscular in his thoughts, and did not make the most of his dramatic effects. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... terse; it is evidently intended to be wholly comprehensive. Its decisive, almost abrupt tone would seem to forbid either question or argument. The old-world narrator of the sublime event thus briefly chronicled was a poet of no mean quality, though moved by the natural conceit of man to give undue importance ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... philosopher, and pulpit orator, whose teachings, as I was to learn later, had exerted the most powerful influence upon my principal instructors at Keilhau. She also knew his best enigmas; and the following one, whose terse brevity is unsurpassed: ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been too often conceded that because the new testament contains, in many passages, a lofty and terse expression of love as the highest duty of man, Christianity must have a tendency to ennoble his nature. But Christianity is like sweetened whisky and water—it perverts and destroys that which ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... that is true," assented the girl, "but I have a most important piece of information for you that wouldn't wait, and in half an hour from now you will be writing your to-morrow's leader, showing forth in terse and forcible language the many iniquities of the ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... take a closer observation of Willy Hammond, in whom an interest, not unmingled with concern, had already been awakened in my mind. I found him engaged in a pleasant conversation with a plain-looking farmer, whose homely, terse, common sense was quite as conspicuous as his fine play of words and lively fancy. The farmer was a substantial conservative, and young Hammond a warm admirer of new ideas and the quicker adaptation of means to ends. I soon saw ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... get looking at that for?" she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the Vaterland, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,—that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... later epistle, still more graphic and terse in statement, which has the unusual merit of painting both confessor and penitent ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... called various officers and gave terse orders. Double crews on duty in the generator compartment, the ray projectors, the atomic bomb magazines, and release tubes. Observers at all observation posts, operators at the two smaller television instruments ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... cans, general refuse, and discarded boots could not spoil the beauty of the scene. Prescott asked for a room; and sitting outside after dinner, he gathered from some men, who were not working, the story of Kermode's next exploit. Their accounts of it were terse and somewhat disconnected, but Prescott was afterward able to amplify them from the narrative of a ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers, F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest affirmative. "Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority on the ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... idea of Washington's activity as a planter can be had than from his brief and terse journals as an agriculturist. He sets down day by day what he did and what his slaves and the free employees did on all parts of his estate. We see him as a regular and punctual man. He had a moral repugnance to idleness. He himself worked steadily and he chided the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... has many merits and one great fault. He has fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler's ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... open resistance, the more difficult would the inevitable revolt become. He did not hesitate, therefore, to speak in ever plainer and bolder terms as the peril augmented. Reason was on his side, and his command of logic and of terse and telling language enabled him to set his cause in the most effective light. By drawing a distinction between the king and his ministers, he opened the way to arraign the latter for their "wickedness" in sending an "impudent mandate" to one ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... speedily opened his negociation by asking in very terse and unequivocal phrase, my intentions regarding his sister-in-law. After professing the most perfect astonishment at the question, and its possible import, I replied, that she was a most charming person, with whom I intended to have nothing whatever ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... These were two bay windows, with two glass doors. Between them stretched the conservatory. "Jolly convenient," said Lancelot. "What, for burglars?" the Judge asked. "Yes, for burglars, and policemen, and Father, you know ... I don't think," said the terse Lancelot. "Why don't you think, my friend?" says the Judge, and Lancelot became cautious. "Oh, Father won't come into the drawing-room if he can possibly help it. He says it's Mamma's province—but I expect he's afraid of meeting ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Hobbes of Malmesbury; and I have brought with me that famous work which is now so little known, greatly as it deserves to be studied, "The Leviathan," in order that I may put to you in the wonderfully terse and clear language of Thomas Hobbes, what was his view ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... cabbage and roast turkey go?" Dan called, finding himself confronted with the great slabs of cabbage; and the traveller, thinking it was supposed to be a joke, favoured us with another nervous grin and a terse "Thanks!" Then Dan reappeared, laden, and the man's eyes glistened as he forgot his first surprise in his second. "Real cabbage!" he cried. "Gosh! ain't tasted cabbage for five years"; and the Maluka telling him to "sit right down then and begin, just where you are"—beside our camp fire—with a ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... on in terse military German which eighty per cent. of all Russian officers know and the trend of which is never misunderstood. I pointed out that any further encroaching would be resented in a most drastic ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... not meant to deliver my information quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now, and I repeated the statement, giving him a terse account of my two encounters with the rattish youth, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... purposes. In his plays it modulates and adapts itself to the changing emotions of every speaker, "from merely colloquial dialogue to strains of impassioned soliloquy, from comic repartee to tragic eloquence, from terse epigrams to elaborate descriptions." It is customary to distinguish three 'periods' in Shakespeare's blank verse, corresponding closely to his whole artistic development: first, the more formal, 'single-moulded' line of the early plays; second, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the desks of certain brokers was not wholly apparent until late in the evening, and was not thoroughly understood until late on Tuesday morning, when to other and greater shoals of cables came the terse price-lists from the Board of Trade in Chicago, and on top of all the wirelessed Press accounts for the sensational ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... of affection were his tones. I wondered at his broken Indian tongue, for he had learned good English, and sometimes he surpassed us all in the terse excellence and readiness of his language. Why should he ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the form of permanent types. It is a literature peculiarly adapted to the flexibility and fine perception of the French mind, and one in which it has been preeminent, from the analytic but diffuse Mlle. de Scudery, and the clear, terse, spirited Cardinal de Retz, to the fine, penetrating, and exquisitely finished Sainte-Beuve, the prince of modern critics and literary artists. It was this skill in vivid delineation that gave such point and piquancy to the memoirs of the period, which are little more than a series of brilliant ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... properly enough, as owners of the ship. These gentlemen did not wish to retire at so early an hour, nor did they desire to spend the intervening time in darkness. They remonstrated with Thorn, and he told them, in the terse, blunt language of a seaman, to keep quiet or he would put them in irons. In case he attempted that, they threatened to resort to firearms for protection. Finally, however, the captain allowed them a little longer use of their lights. Thus was inaugurated a long, disgraceful wrangle that did ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... except for a few terse words among themselves and a barked order to march, delivered to the prisoners. Very shortly they were in the entrance hall facing the wreckage of the crawler and doors through which a ragged gap had been burned. Ali viewed the scene ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... the bank president who lived in town and put his terse question as to whether Alexander had withdrawn from the safe, her ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's forthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... rapid and terse—so rapid as to create the impression that he bit off the ends of the longer words. He turned his fierce blue eyes upon the uniformed officer who stood at the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... sake as well as ours, is necessary," was the terse reply. "To continue, people of unsound mind are remarkably tenacious of their ideas. There was certainly nothing of the murderess in her demeanour towards you last night. Cannot you see that a too friendly attitude on her part might become ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they decided upon their next move in the quiet, terse manner of men who cannot bring themselves to speak of the strange feelings which possess them; who are ashamed of their own weakness, and yet ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... were filled with a sense of their importance and power as people of some authority in the world. They bore an escutcheon and were proud of it, they had their portraits painted in gorgeous attire, they gave the things their terse and pretty names, and they spoke picturesquely and gallantly as befits people ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... matters of government his ideas were terse and decided. He was strongly attached to the present, heedless of the future, and the socialists troubled him little. Without caring whether the sun and capital should be extinguished some day, he enjoyed them. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... frighten him into a confession," was the terse reply. "I want your authority to threaten him with arrest. In fact, I should prefer that you or Superintendent Galloway undertook to do that. It ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... there quietly, savouring the scene. But Mrs. Yaverland said in her terse voice: "I've taken rooms at the Hapsburg for to-night. I thought you'd like it. I do myself, because it's near the river. You know, we're near the river at Roothing." Ellen could not longer turn her attention to the spectacle for wondering why Mrs. Yaverland should speak of the Thames ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... succinct or terse than this description of the catastrophe. This was a sudden volcanic eruption like that which destroyed in one night the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. At the time of the convulsion in Palestine while clouds of ashes were ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... called the philosopher of statesmen, and his style accords with this description. "His eloquence was part of his intellectual character. It was plain, strong, terse, condensed, concise; sometimes impassioned, still always severe. Rejecting ornament, not often seeking far for illustration, his power consisted in the plainness of his propositions, in the closeness of his logic, and in the earnestness and ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... playing Lady Bountiful among the tenants on her husband's estate. On the death of the wife of one of the cottagers, she called to condole with the bereaved widower. She uttered her formal expressions of sympathy with him in his grief over the loss of his wife, and she was then much disconcerted by his terse optimistic comment: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... cast a quick look at Dr. Marks. The scientist was sitting quietly, staring straight ahead. He wasn't talking, and Rick was glad. He didn't know how much of the gibberish he could take. It was weird and horrifying, particularly since Marks had been so crisp and terse—even though ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... spoke in these terse and pregnant sentences with astonishment. "This," said he, "is not the same language in which you addressed the people in the Battery. This is the language of a philosopher! Do all lumbermen in ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... available for the private reader and public teacher. Mr. Moody's idiom has been strictly preserved. He tells the story. "Gold" will be found scattered through the volume, which includes Mr. Moody's terse declarations of ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... were terse and brief enough, but I could not help talking about the poor young creature, and wondering if she had any relative or friend to come to ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that he does not always abuse Latinising, would hardly be what it is without the word "antipodes." So again in the Christian Morals, "Be not stoically mistaken in the quality of sins, nor commutatively iniquitous in the valuation of transgressions." No expression so terse and yet so striking could dispense with the classicism and the catachresis of "stoically." And so it is everywhere with Browne. His manner is exactly proportioned to his matter; his exotic and unfamiliar vocabulary to the strangeness and novelty of his thoughts. He can never be really ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... but the ordinary business had occurred, Jasper sat down and went carefully over every detail of the commission he had been sent on, heard Mr. Marlowe's terse, "That's good, Jasper; you've done it all well," and passed out for the last time, from the private office, and joined his father in silence, for the ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... condition his friends had returned it to him. What was his amazement, as he read chapter after chapter, to find his poverty transmuted into riches by the cunning of the pen, and the devotion of the unknown great men, his friends of the brotherhood. Dialogue, closely packed, nervous, pregnant, terse, and full of the spirit of the age, replaced his conversations, which seemed poor and pointless prattle in comparison. His characters, a little uncertain in the drawing, now stood out in vigorous contrast of color and relief; physiological observations, due no doubt ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... peculiarities are seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... book of honest, direct, sympathetic, humorous writing about Australia from within is worth a library of travellers' tales. Mr. Lawson shows us what living in the bush really means. The result is a real book—a book in a hundred. His language is terse, supple, ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... indeed the one sole organizing principle of it. Accordingly he has specimens of the most pithy, piercing, sententious brevity; specimens with all the ample and rich magnificence of ordered pomp; specimens of terse, restrained, yet rhythmical, and finely-modulated vigour; specimens of the most copious and varied choral harmony; specimens of the most quiet, simple, and pure-flowing melody; now a full burst of the many-voiced lordly organ, now the softest and mellowest notes ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget the great poet Edmund Spenser, who, a victim to barbarity, died there, in destitution and grief. Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity says: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Ben Jonson is closely ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... officers are about him, the customary rant and bombast is on his lips when those two steal in. 'While the trumpets are sounding, Death slays Herod and his two soldiers suddenly, and the Devil receives them'—so runs the terse Latin stage-direction. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... whistled a tune as he continued the perusal of Mr. Keene's political and social intelligence, on the whole as trustworthy as the style in which it was written was terse and elegant. Adela, finding she could feign indifference no longer, ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... whose features are always the same and always interesting. Prose writers are voluminous and unwieldy; their pages crowded with commonplaces, and their thoughts expanded into tediousness. But with the true poet every thing is terse, touching, or brilliant. He gives the choicest thoughts in the choicest language. He illustrates them by everything that he sees most striking in nature and art. He enriches them by pictures of human life, such as it is passing before him. His writings, therefore, contain the spirit, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... in these few terse lines, the long dissertations in the Sixth Book, tenth chapter, of the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius. (See Marcus ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... mistakes, strengthening weaknesses. It was the business and the delight of his life. He had his agents throughout the country. The churches might be many, but the cause was one. Ever watchful, ever active, he spoke of his measures and his plans in just such terse, homely phrase as any house-carpenter would use. Doubtless the fragile reverence of many a clerical cumberer of the ground was shocked by his familiar use of their sacred edge-tools. One can imagine the thrill ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... and trembling I presented myself, and confronted not Miss Steele but Miss Bousfield, who addressed me in terse and forcible language, and gave me to understand that I was a person of extremely second-rate character and attainments. I acknowledged it, but hoped for an opportunity of improving ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... than made good by the far higher value and stronger attraction of the book as the portraiture of a striking character and a remarkable career. In this view the Diaries are not inferior in interest to the expanded narrative that precedes them. Indeed, terse and concise as they generally are, they have the advantage of presenting freshly and vividly the impressions and reflections of the moment, and thus exhibiting the writer's mind both in its habitual and exceptional states ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... was terse but adequate: "Well—here's may God help us as we deserve!" I dipped my spoon, lifted it with shaking hand, my heart bursting to tell the little dear girl what I thought about her, my lips refusing to do anything of the sort; refusing, indeed, to do anything at all; for having ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... heard of (AUCTOR. The pictures! the remarkable pictures! All that is meant by culture! The brown photographs! Oh! Lector, indeed I have done you a wrong!), and I would certainly not have the bad taste to say anything upon religion. Above all, I would be terse. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Bill Hayes gave a terse account of his stewardship during Hollister's absence. So many cords of bolts cut and boomed and delivered to the mill. Hollister's profits were accelerating, the fruit of an insatiable market, of inflated prices. As he trudged down the hill, he reflected upon that. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... physician, Dr. Armand Mercier. He could not recall the matter until I recounted the story, and then only in the vaguest way. Yet when my friend the former chief-justice kindly took down from his shelves and beat free of dust the right volume of supreme court decisions, there was the terse, cold record, No. 5623. I went to the old newspaper files under the roof of the city hall, and had the pleasure speedily to find, under the dates of 1818 and 1844, such passing allusions to the strange facts of which I was in search as one might hope to find in ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... debate, maintaining intact the time-honored parliamentary methods and amenities which unfailingly secure action after deliberation, possesses in our scheme of government a value which can not be measured by words. The Senate is a perpetual body. In the terse words of an eminent Senator now present: 'The men who framed the Constitution had studied thoroughly all former attempts at Republican government. History was strewn with the wrecks of unsuccessful democracies. Sometimes the usurpation of the executive power, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... enormous capital required for the establishment and maintenance of new competing units tends to fortify the monopoly in its position and render the escape of the public from its grasp practically impossible. These terse statements contain exactly the kernel of potent truth for which we are seeking; MONOPOLIES OF EVERY SORT ARE AN INEVITABLE RESULT FROM CERTAIN CONDITIONS OF ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... apparent an air of probability about this terse statement of the case, that it has satisfied the insatiable curiosity of infantile minds for long ages. Little girls never doubt it, and little boys never contradict it. If Paterfamilias has any thoughts upon the subject, he probably thinks this expenditure ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... university, which they have exchanged for plays, poems, and pamphlets, in order to qualify them for tea-tables and coffee-houses. This they usually call "polite conversation; knowing the world; and reading men instead of books." These accomplishments, when applied to the pulpit, appear by a quaint; terse, florid style, rounded into periods and cadences, commonly without either propriety or meaning. I have listen'd with my utmost attention for half an hour to an orator of this species, without being able to understand, much less to carry away one single ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... had sat down, and was writing his report as fast as he could get his pencil over the paper. It was a short, terse, but quite comprehensive account of the happenings of the last three hours, and a clear statement of the strength and position of the torpedo and cruiser squadron under his command. When he had finished, ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... then went into a terse though rapid review of the origin of the Mexican War, and the connection of the administration and General Taylor with it, from which he deduced a strong appeal to the Whigs present to do their duty in the support of General Taylor, and closed with the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... her much to stand upon. She had expected him to go about it in an entirely different way. She had counted upon an impassioned plea for himself, not this terse, cold-blooded, almost unemotional summing up of the situation. For an instant she was at a loss. It was hard to look into his honest eyes. A queer, unformed doubt began to torment her, a doubt that grew into a question later on: was he still in ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... later on when, placed by Barras in command of the defenders of the Convention against the attacks of the Sectionists, Napoleon was asked the chairman of the Assembly to send them occasional reports as to how matters progressed. His reply was terse. ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... provoked him to hostilities; and, looking back at these difficulties when he laid down the Provostship a few years later, he said, "I thank my God that my magistracy has ended without reproach." His correspondence, published by the Maitland Club, contains some terse descriptions of the "prodigious slavery" he underwent, "going through the great folks" in London day after day for two months trying to recover from the Government some compensation for the Prince's exactions. And it may be added that it was his banking firm—Cochrane, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... exceeded the limits of "winking," to use his own term. Mr. Frederick Swanwick, who officiated as his secretary, after the appointment of Mr. Gooch as Resident Engineer to the Bolton and Leigh Railway, has informed us that he then remarked—what in after years he could better appreciate—the clear, terse, and vigorous style of Mr. Stephenson's dictation. There was nothing superfluous in it; but it was close, direct, and to the point,—in short, thoroughly businesslike. And if, in passing through the pen of the amanuensis, his meaning happened in any way to be distorted or modified, it did not ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... that the first sentence of a paragraph of exposition and of argument is usually a terse statement of the proposition; and that after the proposition has been established there follows a longer sentence gathering up all the points of the discussion into a full, rounded period which forms a suitable climax and conclusion of the paragraph. Of Macaulay's "Milton" ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... came, there was no message of congratulations, nor even any acknowledgment of the new contract. Instead, there was only a terse message: ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... difference between being in this world and out of it," was the terse reply. "He'd better have lost a minute rather than take a chance like that. But, alas, we have got into the habit of thinking we cannot stop for anything. From morning to night we race about as if the bogey man were at our heels. Sometimes I wish myself ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... Phono means a sound, Phonography so terse, Just pictures out or tells about The sounds of the ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... silence only!—silence to him to whom words of her dictation, however few and terse and filtered through no matter how many indifferent mediums of intelligence, would have been precious ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... into his utterance of the general thanksgiving, as he might have done had he been a more effusive man; but, on the contrary, read it with a more than ordinary calmness, and preached to the excited people one of those terse little unimpassioned sermons of his, from which it was utterly impossible to divine whether he was in the depths of despair or at the summit and crown of happiness. People who had been used to discover a great many of old Mr Bury's personal peculiarities ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... made the biggest discovery of the year in this point of the woods," was Hyman's terse comment. "I reckon, too, the captain ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... the company by the "teacher" and those joining in the game are each to define the subject in as terse a manner as possible, in epigram or verse, written on a slip of paper. The cards are then signed, turned in and the "teacher" reads the definitions. Then the company are to decide which one of the definitions has the ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain |
