"Desert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Her fair white loins with barking monsters girt Vexed the Dulichian ships, and, in the deep Swift-eddying whirlpool, with her sea-dogs tore The trembling mariners? or how he told Of the changed limbs of Tereus- what a feast, What gifts, to him by Philomel were given; How swift she sought the desert, with what wings Hovered in anguish o'er her ancient home? All that, of old, Eurotas, happy stream, Heard, as Apollo mused upon the lyre, And bade his laurels learn, Silenus sang; Till from Olympus, loth at his approach, Vesper, advancing, bade the shepherds ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... of time drift round me, and within There is the knell of passing and decay: The sun-smit vastness of the world doth weigh Upon my riddling soul like hidden sin, And bids it speak. Thou desert art my kin! I crumble to thee, waning day by day; But I am cursed with questions that betray The end of life before death's hours begin, My eyes are staring, yet their sight is blind. My ears are hollow, yet they hear no sound. My knees are buried and my body sinks. The stars weave fates that ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... continued St. Antony, who would listen to nothing. "They are called harpies, and they are the most obscene animals in creation. One day as I was having supper in the desert with the Abbot St. Paul, I placed the table outside my cabin under an old sycamore tree. The harpies came and sat in its branches; they deafened us with their shrill cries and cast their excrement over all our food. The clamour of the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... his followers take one method of purification from these pulveratrices? because I find from travellers of credit, that if a strict Mussulman is journeying in a sandy desert where no water is to be found, at stated hours he strips off his clothes, and most scrupulously rubs his body ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... hastily, "I'll tell you a story. Once upon a time, to a beautiful country called Oz, which is surrounded on all sides by a deadly desert, there came a little girl named Dorothy. A terrible gale—Well, what's the matter now?" The Scarecrow stopped short, for the oldest Prince had jerked a book out of his sleeve and was flipping ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the most beautiful is one in the church of the Badia in Florence. It tells the story of the blessed St. Bernard, and shows the saint in his desert home, as he sat among the rocks writing the history of the Madonna. He had not been able to write that day; perhaps he felt dull, and none of his books, scattered around, were of any help. Then, as he sat lost in ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... passed, with much running to and fro, in foul weather and fair; and still the sounds of war came no nearer to Raglan, which lay like a great lion in a desert that the hunter dared not arouse. The whole of Wales, except a castle or two, remained subject to the king; and this he owed in great measure to the influence and devotion of the Somersets, his obligation to whom he seemed more ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... This association has good buildings in nearly every large oriental city especially if it is near the coast. One can hardly realize the debt of gratitude civilization owes to this organization. These buildings are oases on the great oriental desert where the American traveler can find ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... shouldering one small trunk, whilst a porter followed, shouldering another. Out they trotted, leaving Alvina abandoned with the pile of hand luggage. She waited. The train drew out. Ciccio and the porter came bustling back. They took her out through the little gate, to where, in the flat desert space behind the railway, stood two great drab motor-omnibuses, and a rank of open carriages. Ciccio was handing up the handbags to the roof of one of the big post-omnibuses. When it was finished the man on the roof came down, and Ciccio gave him and the station porter each sixpence. The ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... people. Whoever heard of any one ever wanting to be carried back to New England, where the natural resources are mainly ice, granite, rock, codfish and beans. Still we are all proud of the hardy New Englander who makes the desert blossom as the rose wherever he pitches his tent. His hard environment has been a blessing to every other part of the country, forcing him to seek greener pastures in balmier climes, and to disseminate his energy and frugality in those ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... articles, and he felt very badly. People said—they made out that—well, he had heard severe things about them; he knew people were often unjust, but he had come—here he pressed Clerambault's hand in a timid friendly way—he had come to entreat him not to desert all those who loved him. He reminded him of the devotion that had inspired the poet who had celebrated the traditions of French soil and the glories of the race.... "In this hour of trial," he implored, "stand ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... gentleman, to whose industry and ability the Overland line owes much of its success, with sincere regret; and I hope he will soon get rich enough to transplant his charming wife from the desert to the "White settlements". ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... wheeze. The tractor swung about and began heading away from Southport toward the desert dunes. It shook and rattled, but it seemed to make ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... shown that a man may be absolutely honest and yet practical; a reformer by instinct and a wise politician; brave, bold and uncompromising, and yet not a wild ass of the desert. The exhibition made by the professional independents in voting against you for no reason on earth except that somebody else was voting for you, is a lesson that is worth its ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... courage he pursued his way through the valley, and after three or four windings it took him out upon a sandy desert. He had no sooner set foot upon the desert than he heard behind him a crashing sound louder than thunder. He looked around, and he saw that the walls of mountain through which he had just passed had fallen into the valley, and filled it up so that he could no longer ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... not seem fitting: because that people turned to idolatry, even after the Law had been made, which was more grievous, as is clear from Ex. 32 and from Amos 5:25, 26: "Did you offer victims and sacrifices to Me in the desert for forty years, O house of Israel? But you carried a tabernacle for your Moloch, and the image of your idols, the star of your god, which you made to yourselves." Moreover it is stated expressly (Deut. 9:6): "Know therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest —most unadulterated, and compromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like the tiller-ropes in a gale of wind. "Well," said I, after a pause, "how did you back out when you parted with your wife?" "You may well say 'back out,'" said he. "I was taken slap aback—it came over me like a clap of thunder. I was half inclined to play the shy cock and desert, and had it not been for the advice of the good old man, I should have been mad enough to have destroyed my prospects in the Service for ever. Now," said he, "how do you feel?" "A little qualmish," said I, "and I'll take a good stiff glass of grog to wash it down. But you have not finished. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... different experience. He had married, in the far-away years, so young as to have missed the time natural in Boston for taking girls to the Museum; and it was absolutely true of hint that—even after the close of the period of conscious detachment occupying the centre of his life, the grey middle desert of the two deaths, that of his wife and that, ten years later, of his boy—he had never taken any one anywhere. It came over him in especial—though the monition had, as happened, already sounded, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the enormous outer door of a house as large as the Hotel Carnavalet, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind, the sound rang as in a desert. While my uncle inquired of an old porter in livery if the Count were at home, I cast my eyes, seeing everything at once, over the courtyard where the cobblestones were hidden in the grass, the blackened walls where little gardens were flourishing above the decorations of the elegant ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... devotedly, as I do you, what a life ours would be; but you are a slave to fancy, a creature of impulse, and I am now a mere barrier in your path, to be kicked aside at will; yet knowing this, I love you as ever, with the same old mad passion; and should you desert me, Heaven help me;" and the ring of truth and despair in his tones would have touched ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... You make amends for enmitie to him, With tenne parts more love and desert of mee; And as you make your hate to him no let Of any love to mee, no more beares hee 110 (Since you to me supply it) hate to you. Which reason and which justice is perform'd In spirits tenne parts more then fleshy ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... 'Psammeads were rare, even in my time. I remember I used to be called the Psammead of the Desert. I was always having compliments paid me; I can't ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... going to spend several months roaming in some selected region. Many of the wives started off immediately in pursuit of their errant husbands, and it took the Government a considerable time and much trouble to reclaim them from their fruitless quests along the banks of the Oxus, the Gobi Desert, the Orenburg steppe, and other outlandish places. One of them, I believe, is still lost ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... heaven's best gifts best won by giving all for them? I would lay my manhood at her feet. I do not expect to earn her or buy her, giving a quid pro quo. A woman's love is like the grace of heaven—a royal gift; and the spirit of the suitor is more regarded than his desert. Moreover, I do not propose to soil her life with the evil world that I must daily brush against, but through her influence to do a little toward purifying that world. Since this is but a dream, I shall dream it out to ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... by wealth also affords a motive to accumulation. That propensity for purposeful activity and that repugnance to all futility of effort which belong to man by virtue of his character as an agent do not desert him when he emerges from the naive communal culture where the dominant note of life is the unanalysed and undifferentiated solidarity of the individual with the group with which his life is bound up. When he enters upon the predatory stage, where self-seeking in the narrower sense becomes ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and the friends who usually dine with me on Thursdays, Rochefort and Blum came. I invited them to come every Thursday if we have many more Thursdays to live. At desert I ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... to get there. Owing to the weak, fatigued, and starved condition of my two followers, I had to seek to get them food and horses, as it was impossible for them to get on without horses. I would not desert them, as I might have, as I was still prepared to push on despite the many difficulties I had to encounter hourly. Toxem consisted of one mud house and an encampment of about eighty tents. The shepherds received us kindly and consented to sell me horses and provisions. I encamped for ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... anxiety in its relation to the Red Sea trade. He was assisted by Capt. J.H. Speke and two other young officers, but accomplished the most difficult part of the enterprise alone. This was the journey to Harrar, the Somali capital, which no white man had entered. Burton vanished into the desert, and was not heard of for four months. When he reappeared he had not only been to Harrar, but had talked with the king, stayed ten days there in deadly peril, and ridden back across the desert, almost without food and water, running ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Janet. "Didn't mother read us a story about some sailors on a desert island whistling ...
— The Curlytops and Their Playmates - or Jolly Times Through the Holidays • Howard R. Garis
... would have failed had it not been for the continental troops. They knew also, by the bitter experience common to all officers who had been through the war, that, though the militia might on occasion do well, yet they could never be trusted; they were certain to desert or grow sulky and mutinous if exposed to the fatigue and hardship of a long campaign, while in a pitched battle in the open they never fought as stubbornly as the regulars, and often ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... perceiving the courage of his youthful visitor, proposed to him to go and fight the Chimera, which everybody else was afraid of, and which, unless it should be soon killed, was likely to convert Lycia into a desert. Bellerophon hesitated not a moment, but assured the king that he would either slay this dreaded Chimera or perish in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and calculated? It was necessary for that most arid country, Arabia, that we should have a sober animal, susceptible of existing a long time without water, and capable of treading the hot sands of the desert. God has accordingly ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as the star of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in those dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, for love of some Chaldean Elizabeth—both he and she blown about the desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records the star and the Tree are brought together as here side by side. And the story of the star leads backward to one of the first things that man ever worshipped as he looked beyond the ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... taken out of himself by the pity of the sight.] Rosie, get up! I won't desert you! Get up, I can't bear to see you lyin' there! We're all sinners together! An' anyone who repents so deep, is bound to be forgiven. Get up, Rose, Father, raise her up! We're not among them that condemns—not I, at least. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... that a man can learn what beauty is, and where to look for it. Out in the world beauty is held to be a sporadic thing. It is like a flower growing where no one expected a blossom. It is an unrelated and unexplained surprise. It is a green oasis in the desert of unlovely and unpromising things. But for the dweller in the house of the Lord beauty is not on this wise. Said one such dweller, 'The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.' He looked across the leagues of burning sand and saw the loveliness of Carmel by ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... friends had come to visit them. They were very wonderful people, these Americans, thought Peninah, and most wonderful of all were the little girls of her own age, with their full skirts and dainty bonnets. True, they had never seen the Sahara Desert or crossed the mysterious ocean, yet she envied them their pretty clothes, feeling outlandishly queer in her pointed cap and baggy trousers. Mr. Noah had been very kind to her; he had brought her several pretty trinkets and ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... rather let me try the gittern," she said. "See, now will I charm this snaily from its cell with the air that Rene taught me," and together the two heads bent over one of the vicious little "desert snails of Egypt," which young Isabelle of Tyre had found crawling along the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... story of the Mexican border. Two men, lost in the desert, discover gold when, overcome by weakness, they can go no farther. The rest of the story describes the recent uprising along the border, and ends with the finding of the gold which the two prospectors had willed to the girl who is the ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... come. It appears that the caravan bringing them down to Alexandretta, from whence they were to be shipped to Philadelphia, was attacked by robbers, and the sculptured stones were thrown upon the desert as useless, and there they remained for some years. Finally they were recovered, shipped to this country (about twenty-five years ago), and arriving at their destination during the absence of the consignee, were deposited temporarily in a subterranean ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... you have no plan that will interfere with coming with us," he said to the physician. "We have a big boat chartered down here at the beach, and we're going to loaf along out to one of the 'desert islands' and camp ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!" ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... man had arrived at his station who declared that two months' journey beyond Mt Lekakisera, which no white man has yet visited — at least, so far as I know — he found a lake called Laga, and that then he went off to the north-east, a month's journey, over desert and thorn veldt and great mountains, till he came to a country where the people are white and live in stone houses. Here he was hospitably entertained for a while, till at last the priests of the country set it about that he was a devil, and the people drove him away, and he journeyed ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... small, or thinking that he was safe in some one of the other boats, the rough sailors had gone off without him, and he was left alone. So for a whole week he had stayed with the ship, like a whisper of its vanished life amid the blues of a deep calm. And the birds came to the ship only to desert it again quickly, because it stood so still ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... Imlac, 'are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.' Writing to Mrs. Thrale from Skye, Johnson said: 'The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which education expands, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... it's disloyal of you to desert California," said Tiny. "I have a feeling that we should all keep together, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of slender palms, like forgotten scaffolding, stood out clear against the intense blue of the sky; the desert, that wonderful magnetic plain, stretched away in mile upon mile of yellow nothingness, until as minute as flies on a yellow floor, growing more distinct at every step, with solemn and exceeding great dignity stalked a string of camels, each animal fastened by a rope ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... had been fixed upon as the starting-point of future excursions, till at last reindeer traces and afterwards the sight of some of these friendly animals brought us to the right way, so that about 9 o'clock P.M. we got sight of the longed-for dwelling in the middle of a snow-desert. At the word yaranga (tent) the dogs pointed their ears, uttered a bark of joy, and ran at full speed towards the goal. We arrived at 10.30 P.M. In the tent we were hospitably received by its mistress, who immediately made the necessary preparations for our obtaining ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Rhine, to evangelise the country, and built himself a cell on the side of the mountain which overlooks the glassworks. Here he did his appointed work, and here, on June 2, 670, he was put to death. The mountain was then known as Mount Ereme or Mount Desert, and it is still heavily wooded throughout ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by this accident. But her steady wits—skilled in her profession—did not wholly desert her. She saw that the man was dead. There was peril in that—immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril, the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... gratefully toward his partner. He thirsted for more like a desert traveler for water, but he dared not speak for fear of ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... child was sent to Rome to be educated, but he preferred the desert. Hither his nurse accompanied him, and his first token of signal holiness was his answered prayer that a pitcher which she had broken might be made whole again. Leaving his nurse, he associated with a hermit who lived ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... actual sanction of Sir William Howe, these atrocities were at least committed with his guilty knowledge.[1] The calculated barbarities practised upon these poor prisoners, with no other purpose than to make them desert their cause, or if that failed, totally to unfit them for serving it more, are almost too shocking for belief. It was such acts as these that wrung from the indignant Napier the terrible admission that "the annals of civilized warfare furnish ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... found, she stepped back to the door. "Hurry, hurry," she said. The old iron resolve never to desert the shack was fusing in the heat of a panic. Her unfailing instinct was hardening a new one, that ruled for ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... enable you to fasten the relation of the unbranched leaves to streams more distinctly in your mind,—just as the toss of the palm leaves from their stem may, I think, in their likeness to the springing of a fountain, remind you of their relation to the desert, and their necessity, therein, to life of ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... years been subject to such droughts, as to disappoint the hopes of the husbandman and the breeder of cattle. In the early part of 1832, the drought had reached to such a height as to convert the whole province into one continued bleak and dreary desert. The clouds of dust raised by the winds were so dense as completely to obscure the sun at mid-day, and envelope the inhabitants in almost total darkness. When the rains at length commenced, in March, ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... the winds and rains. For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild," ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... just received permission from H.M. the Emperor of Morocco to go to Fez, and am in hopes to obtain his approbation to enter the desert along with the caravan to Soudan. The letter of introduction from Mr. Wilmot to Mr. Douglas has been of much importance to me; this gentleman fortunately finds pleasure in affording me all the assistance in his power to promote my wishes, a circumstance which I have not been accustomed to meet ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... his daughter was born with a tendency inherited from her father, or whether she was influenced by what she had heard of his life, and death, I do not know. But she was a dreary creature with never a smile or a hopeful look upon her dark face. Nothing to her was right or good; this world was a desert, her friends had all left her, strangers looked coldly upon her. As for the future, there was nothing to look forward to in this world or the next. As Dave Moony, the village cynic, said, "Mary Ann ...
— Story-Tell Lib • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... respected Trenchard very greatly. He wasn't, in any case, a man of authority and his broken stammering Russian wouldn't help him. Then there is nothing stranger than the fashion in which the Russian language will (if you are a timid foreigner), of a sudden wilfully desert you. Be bold with it and it may, somewhat haughtily, perhaps, consent to your use of it ... be frightened of it and it will despise you for ever. Upon that afternoon it deserted Trenchard; even his own language seemed to have left him. His brain was ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... engineer with his railway and irrigating dam and power plant in the desert has replaced the monk as the vanguard of the forces of civilization. The scientist in his laboratory in part replaces armies and navies as the protector of the nation's safety. The scientifically trained Red Cross nurse ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... comings were unseen, was not apt to lose courage when confronted with any other enemy. An experience in following in the trail of an enemy who might flee at one stretch through fifty miles of death-like desert was a good school out of which to come with profound indifference for ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... glories of his order, of the Jesuits, an order founded by Ignatius Loyola, whose members were intimately associated with intrigues of church and state. He told Harry of its martyrs and heroes, of its brethren converting the heathen by myriads, traversing the desert, facing the stake, ruling the courts and councils, or braving the tortures of kings; so that Henry Esmond thought that to belong to the Jesuits was the bravest end of ambition; the greatest career here, and in heaven the surest reward; ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... contemplative life, devoted to the consideration of divine subjects, had always been considered more meritorious than active exertion. This calling was gradually adopted by so many, that at the end of the third century, the Egyptian Antonius, who had cast away his vast possessions, and chosen the desert for his residence, collected together the hitherto dispersed anchorites (monachi) into fenced places (monasteria, caenobia, claustra, cloisters), that they might live together in fellowship; and his disciple, Pachomius, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... land. Certainly, if he had consulted his own ambition or been influenced by any but the most unselfish motives, he would have accepted the call as the highest honor in the gift of the nation. But to do so he would have been obliged to surrender his private principles and desert his native state, and it is impossible to imagine that a man of his character would, even for an instant, consider such a course. Gravely and sadly he declined the mighty office, and two days later he tendered his resignation from the service ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... I were to speak unto you in the mystic language of past ages, and say that this windfall has come to the robins' nest out of the tomb of Amenotaph, out of the desert of Ra, supposing," she had to stop and chuckle at the look of utter astonishment on Doris' round eager face, "supposing I was to tell you that Annui had smiled upon the revelation, and that the sacred circle had given up its secret at the punch of your ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... you what the people want,' said the President, 'they want, and must have, success. But whether that come or not, I shall stay right here and do my duty. Here I shall be; and they may come and hang me on that tree' (pointing out of the window to one), 'but, God helping me, I shall never desert my post.' This was said in a way that assured me that these were the sentiments ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing," she said, understanding all he had not uttered. "But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love, and there is none. So then ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... have thrown stones at them, that, in the course of nature, have returned to earth again, breaking more glass. I have blazed at them with a revolver; but they have come to regard this proceeding as a mere expression of light-heartedness on my part, possibly confusing me with the Arab of the Desert, who, I am given to understand, expresses himself thus in moments of deep emotion. They merely retire to a safe distance to watch me; no doubt regarding me as a poor performer, inasmuch as I do not also dance and shout between each shot. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... of the early part of the day soon dropped lower to afford us a wider view. In its broad, general features the country was, quite simply, the desert of Arizona over again. There were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... occasion, for he heard enough to learn that a large proportion of the crew intended, as soon as they saw a favourable opportunity, to seize the long-boat—which contained nearly all the provisions that had been got up from the hold— and desert the ship before morning. ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Egyptian land of woe, Teeming with idols and their monstrous train, O'er which the galling yoke that I sustain Like Nilus makes my tears to overflow, To thee, her land of rest, my soul would go: But who, ah! who will break my servile chain? Who through the deep, and o'er the desert plain Will aid and cheer me, and the path will show? Shall God, indeed, the fowls and manna strew,— My daily bread? and dare I to implore Thy pillar and thy cloud to guide me, Lord? Yes, he may hope for all who trusts ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... offence of quitting the ship without permission,' I said, trying to keep from laughing. 'You were not aware probably that you were to be left among the tops of the trees when we hauled off from them? I don't accuse you of intending to desert.' ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... behind the site of the old temples of Abydos, and within the great girdle-wall enclosure of the twelfth dynasty, which stands about half a mile north of the well-known later temples of Seti I. and Ramses II. This early town, being behind the temples, or more into the sandy edge of the desert, was higher up; the ground gently sloping from the cultivated land upward as a sandy plain, until it reaches the foot of the hills, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... that this case is finished, my engagement with Dr. Thorndyke terminates automatically, and I relapse into my old life—a dreary repetition of journeying amongst strangers—and the prospect is not inspiriting. This has been a time of bitter trial to you, but to me it has been a green oasis in the desert of a colourless, monotonous life. I have enjoyed the companionship of a most lovable man, whom I admire and respect above all other men, and with him have moved in scenes full of colour and interest. And I have made one other friend ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... wicked age must have appeared to many a standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which the sand storms can ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... from his bachelor dinner-table that evening, lit his "planter" cheroot, and strolled into the verandah that looked across a desert to ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... to the imaginary history of Pine, a merchant's clerk, who, being wrecked on a desert island in the South Seas, bestowed on it his own name, and peopled it by the assistance of his master's daughter and her two maid servants, who had escaped from the wreck by ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... forest was so disturbed by the king possessed of wonderful energy and by the warriors in his train delighting in warlike sports, the lions began to desert it in numbers. And herds of animals deprived of their leaders, from fear and anxiety began to utter loud cries as they fled in all directions. And fatigued with running, they began to fall down ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... only sign that we found anywhere about this grim and desert place was the dried, shrivelled remnant of a woman that we came upon in an upper room of one of the larger houses farther on. She was lying upon a bed of mats, partly turned upon her side, and one arm was stretched out towards an earthen cup ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... of broad passes and good roads, the almost entire lack of railway facilities and the whole nature of the country rendered offensive operations as difficult as on the northeast frontier of Italy or in the Carpathians. In Syria and on the road to the Suez Canal, the waterless desert, the entire absence of railways, the paucity and inadequacy of roads and the nature of the obstacles to be crossed before an invasion of Egypt was possible made the task one of terrible difficulty. In the Dardanelles the peninsula of Gallipoli, strong as it was in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... in which he dwelt, was a tract of suburban Sahara, where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by contractors. Skirting the border of this desert, by the way he took, when the light of its kiln-fires made lurid smears on the fog, R. Wilfer ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... came the wide, sandy desert separating the rest of the world from the Land of Oz, and before noon they saw the dome-shaped houses that proved they were once more within the ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... who foully murdered him, I adjudge guilty of his death and I hereby condemn him to be kept chained in the slaves' prison until the next day of beast-fighting in the Colosseum, then, in the arena, to be exposed to the ferocity of the famished wild beasts of the desert, wilderness and forest, by them to be lacerated and torn to pieces, as he ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... filled with deep regret, No leader; them Podarces led, a Chief Like Mars in battle, brother of the slain, But younger born, and from Iphiclus sprung 865 Who sprang from Phylacus the rich in flocks. But him Protesilaues, as in years, So also in desert of arms excell'd Heroic, whom his host, although they saw Podarces at their head, still justly mourn'd; 870 For he was fierce in battle, and at Troy With forty sable-sided ships arrived. Eleven galleys, Pherae on the lake, And Boebe, and Ioelchus, and the vale Of Glaphyrae supplied ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... single darkness do I find. What might this be? A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound 210 The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion, Conscience. O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemished form of Chastity! ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... to serve will suffer. To him, as to them, it seemed a monstrous thing to take away the water from its natural channel and force the men who lived on it and by it to alter all their ways of life and see their birthplace changed into a desert in order that aliens might make money. But he could not counsel them to resist; no resistance was possible. It was like any other tyranny of the State: like the fiscal brutality which sold up a poor man's hayrick or clothing because ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... of Boston, and also Miss Winthrop, her paternal aunt, and also Mr. Hutchinson Port, of Philadelphia, her maternal uncle—all of whom were but forty hours removed from the Alkali Desert west of the Continental Divide—felt in the very depths of their several beings how entirely good this air was; and, as their several natures moved them, they betrayed their lively appreciation ...
— A Border Ruffian - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... black upon that plain; And many say that devils there remain. Says Chemubles "My sword is in its place, At Rencesvals scarlat I will it stain; Find I Rollanz the proud upon my way, I'll fall on him, or trust me not again, And Durendal I'll conquer with this blade, Franks shall be slain, and France a desert made." The dozen peers are, at this word, away, Five score thousand of Sarrazins they take; Who keenly press, and on to battle haste; In a fir-wood ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... if they should find the means of subsistence, they must be condemned to languish out the remainder of life in a desolate wilderness, without the possession, or even hope, of any domestic comfort, and cut off from all commerce with mankind, except the naked savages who prowled the desert, and who perhaps were some of the most rude and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... lover is not in love with them "in a human sort of way." He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old chateau, or the farmer's cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him pause, and at ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... desired to forgive, as he hoped to be forgiven when the last hour came. The letter was to me, and, as I read it, I saw a way where-by I might be spared the hard task of telling Effie she was to be free. I feared my new-found strength would desert me, and my courage fail, when, looking on the woman who was dearer to me than my life, I tried to give her back the liberty whose worth she had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... course, this sublime suitor must die, or desert me, to show how I would behave under the trial.—Katy," continued my aunt, after a little pause, with a smile and slight blush, "I have half a mind to tell you a little romance of my early days, when I was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... winter they were nearly starved to death. They stayed at Fort Enterprise; but, long before the spring returned, they found their food was all but finished, and the nearest place to get more was five hundred miles away, over a trackless desert of snow. One of their number, however, tramped the whole weary way, and brought back food to his starving leader ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... That is, not to desert an honourable woman who loves you. Certainly that is what honour commands. Indeed, I ought to have read your letter. But what I have not read, I shall hear, ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... steal from the company, or game up to the value of a piece of eight, (piastre, translated cu by the French,—rated by the English of that day at not quite five shillings sterling,—about a dollar,) shall be landed on a desert place, with a bottle of water, gun, powder, and lead. Whoever shall maltreat or assault another, while the articles subsist, shall receive the Law of Moses: this was the infliction of forty consecutive strokes upon the back, a whimsical memento of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... winter cannot annihilate its charms, though it greatly diminishes them. The variety of the grounds, and the striking form of the hills, always afford something new to observe, and contain something lasting to admire. Were 1, however, in a desert, people such as these would make it gay ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... and carelessly in that general redistribution which was going on. As a house of call upon the way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself was looked upon as unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which they were buying for six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed one of good and of evil: nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond mines in the ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Yussuf, laughing as he smoked, and bowing down as if something droll had been said. "Yes, I have a pistol of many barrels given to me by a Frankish effendi when we returned from a journey through the land of Abraham, and then down to the stony city in the desert—Petra, where the Arab sheiks are fierce and ready to rob all who are ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... what they profess to be, a record of a few weeks snatched from a soldier's life in Affghanist[a]n, and spent in travels through a region which few Europeans have ever visited before. The notes from which it is compiled were written on the desert mountains of Central Asia, with very little opportunity, as will be easily supposed, for study or polish. Under these circumstances, it can hardly be necessary to deprecate the criticism of the reader. Composition is not one of the acquirements usually expected of a soldier. What ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... her eyebrows disclaimingly—even shrugged her shoulders: "What are you going to do?" he persisted. She was ready. She looked longingly out of the window. The sun blazed over the desert in a ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... or Trinidad de Cuba. Beyond this latter port, towards the mouth of the Rio Cauto and Cabo Cruz (behind the Cayos de doce Leguas), the coast, covered with lagoons, is not very accessible, and is almost entirely desert. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... watches near The Master's path to-day, That he may into wicked hands The Eternal Lord betray, Who in the desert lone and dread Supplied the multitudes ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie |
