"Ravening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bodies were covered with gashes, and the mouths of some frothed blood. They did not run as wolves run for meat. They were a sinister and suspicious lot, with a sneaking droop to their haunches, and their cry was not the deep-throated cry of the hunt-pack but a ravening clamour that seemed to have no leadership or cause. Scarcely was the sound of their tongues gone beyond the hearing of Pierrot's ears than one of the thin gray beasts rubbed against the shoulder of another, and the second turned with the swiftness of a snake, like the "bad" dog of ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... brow. frontire, f., frontier. fugiti-f, -ve, fleeing, fleeting. fuir, to fly from, shun. fuite, f., flight. funbre, funereal, black, dark. funeste, baneful. fureur, f., fury; en —, furious, raging. furieu-x, -se, furious, ravening. ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... display of attendants, inasmuch as he had a whole retinue of myrmidons at his beck and call; and these, as before observed, were well paid. They were the crows that followed the vultures, and picked the bones of the spoil when their ravening masters ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... of all this, as of course he ought to have thought. He was not the ravening lion of fiction—so rarely, if ever, to be met with in real life—going about seeking whom he might devour. He had absolutely no designs on Beatrice's affections, any more than she had on his, and ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... for all that did they often gaze over the broad sea, in grievous fear against the Thracians' coming. So when they saw Argo being rowed near the island, straightway crowding in multitude from the gates of Myrine and clad in their harness of war, they poured forth to the beach like ravening Thyiades: for they deemed that the Thracians were come; and with them Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas, donned her father's harness. And they streamed down speechless with dismay; such fear was wafted ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... treachery with treachery, and for blood Blood shall be shed. Therefore let loose the flood Of our pent passion; break her gates in, raze The walls of her, cumber her pleasant ways With dead men; set on havoc, sate with spoil Men ravening; get corn and wine and oil, Women to clasp in love, gold, silken things, Harness of flashing bronze, swords, meed of kings, Chariots and horses swifter than the wind Which, coursing Ida, leaves ruin behind Of snapt tall trees: not faster shall they ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... ravening eagle rose, In anger, wheel'd on Europe-shadowing wings, And barking for the ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... any more healing? Would he turn a little more to the light—just one second, thank you. Would he mind making a group with Miss Magna and Mr. T-S and the "wealthy young scion"? Would he consent to step outside for some moving pictures, before the light got too dim? It was a new kind of mob—a ravening one, making all dignity and thought impossible. In the end I had to mount guard and fight the publicity-hounds away. Was it likely this man would go out and pose for cameras, when he had just refused fifteen hundred dollars a week from Mr. T-S to do that very thing? And then ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... truth. By a conversion like that of Paul, he turned from the bondage of tradition to the liberty of the sons of God. "Instead of the murderous heart of a ravening wolf, he came back," he says, "quietly, like a meek and harmless lamb, having his heart entirely withdrawn from the pope, and ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... for the young ranchers lay in the speed of their horses, since there was no other possible chance against the bucks who were as fierce after their lives as so many ravening wolves. The boys shouted to their animals, who flew across the plain as though the snow did not discommode them in the least. They did not separate, for the instinctive resolve thrilled them that they would fall or ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... at St. Helena would dull the memory of the wrongs which he had done to the cause of liberty, and that from that lonely peak would go forth the legend of the new Prometheus chained to the rock by the kings and torn every day by the ravening vulture. The world had rejected his gospel of force; but would it not thrill responsive to the gospel of pity now to be enlisted in his behalf? His surmise was amazingly true. The world was thrilled. The story worked wonders, not ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... for thee, Unchanging as the belt Orion wears, Bright as the jewels of the seven-starred Crown, The spangled stream of Berenice's hair!" And so she twines the fetters with the flowers Around my yielding limbs, and the fierce bird Stoops to his quarry,—then to feed his rage Of ravening hunger I must drain my blood And let the dew-drenched, poison-breeding night Steal all the freshness from my fading cheek, And leave its shadows round my caverned eyes. All for a line in some unheeded ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Edmund Spenser a modest 3,000 acres in Cork, on the beautiful Blackwater. The other notable Undertakers were the Hides, Butchers, Wirths, Berklys, Trenchards, Thorntons, Bourchers, Billingsleys, &c., &c. Some of these grants, especially Raleigh's, fell in the next reign into the ravening maw of Richard Boyle, the so-called "great Earl of Cork"—probably the most pious hypocrite to be found in the long ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... in Hester, "you know dass not a pullite question!" But she was ravening for its answer, and I said I had bought it for twenty-five cents. They laughed with delight. Yet, when I told Sidney she might have it, her thanks were but two words, which her lips seemed to drop unconsciously while ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... and narrow way by which man may walk in Godliness was compared with the broad highway leading to destruction. False prophets were to be shunned, such as were then among the people, comparable in their pretense to sheep, and in their reality to ravening wolves. These were to be recognized by their works and the results thereof, even as a tree to be judged as good or bad according to its fruit. A thorn bush does not produce grapes, nor can thistles bear figs. Conversely, it is as truly impossible for a good tree to produce evil fruit as for ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... was to begin at two o'clock, and after cleaning out all the restaurants in town, put to their utmost to feed the ravening horde of locusts that had swarmed down upon them, the throngs set out for the stadium. That gigantic structure could hold forty thousand people and, long before the time for the game to begin, it was crowded to repletion. ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... them), he would show concern in behalf of these poor waifs and have them conveyed to some place of safety; or he would entrust them to the care of fellow-prisoners also left behind on account of old age; in no case must they be left to ravening dogs and wolves. In this way he won the goodwill not only of those who heard tell of these doings but of the prisoners themselves. And whenever he brought over a city to his side, he set the citizens free from the harsher service of a ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... me dominion! Within your spirit's arms I stay me fast Against the fell Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell; And claim my right in you, most hardly won, Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste: Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall (O in high escalade high companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. Like to a wind-sown ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... Curtius did his life, in the bosom of father-land, they passed with fearful rapidity to a state of corruption, by avarice and luxury, equally without example. Never in their character did they belie the legend that their first founder was suckled, not at the breast of woman, but of a ravening she-wolf. They were the tragedians of the world's history, who exhibited many a deep tragedy of kings led in chains and pining in dungeons; they were the iron necessity of all other nations; universal destroyers for the sake of raising at last, out of the ruins, the mausoleum of their own ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... wage war on wrong, And the clash of their swords is sweet as song; Fair are the maids, and so pure from taint The flash of their eyes turns sinner to saint; There reptile is none, nor the ravening beast; There light has no shadow, no ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... lord," answered they, "if we show thee our tribes, we fear for thee and these who are with thee, for their name is legion and they are various in form and fashion, figure and favour. Some of us are heads sans bodies and others bodies sans heads, and others again are in the likeness of wild beasts and ravening lions. However, if this be thy will, there is no help but we first show thee those of us who are like unto wild beasts. But, O our lord, what wouldst thou of us at this present?" Quoth Hasan, "I would have you carry me forthwith to the city of Baghdad, me and my wife and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball, that esuriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn't seem possible that anything could get any worse than that without exploding. And such an explosion, he ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... and sisters had been taken, and she was made sole guardian of their orphan children,—a flock of tender little lambs,—to be nourished and protected from the cold and the rain, the snare and the pitfalls, the tempter and the ravening wolf ever prowling around the fold. Hugh and Sibyl, Tom and Grace, and, last of all, wild little Bessie from the southern hill-country,—this was her charge. Hugh and Sibyl Warrington were the children ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... so absolutely black in its hideous agony as jealousy. The other mental pains of this life may last longer, but there is none that cuts down deeper, that possesses such a ravening tooth, while it ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... Titan power, while yet the world was young, Within the woodland's shady heart had flung The green earth open, and a dark ravine, Through which a streamlet purled o'er mossy-green, Gigantic boulders, formed the chosen lair For ravening beasts that through the forest fare. At night or morn the deer were wont to seek The freshening nectar of the crystal creek; At night or morn the pard, with stealthy tread, Crept softly out upon the boughs o'erhead; A wanderer from rocky realms remote, Here laved the mountain bear his shaggy coat; ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... slopes to destroy him! With the pack at his doors, he did as he had told them he would do. Though they hurried swiftly into the great valleys to colonize them—where oceans had been—they were like ravening beasts, and gave my grandfather no thanks. Our people have always fought against progress, have always been disparaging of its advocates! When the first Sarka discovered the Secret they would have destroyed him, though he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... especial one Ralpho—that was my assistant in the dungeons once. Thrice did they beset me close, and once did I escape by running, once by standing up to my neck in a pool, and once lay I hid in a tree whiles they, below, ate and drank like ravening swine—and I a-famishing. A murrain on 'em, one and all, say I—in especial Ralpho that was my comrade once—may ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... great gilded tomb. His sensation was almost that of a drowning person or of one awaking from a trance to find himself shut in the narrow confines of a buried coffin. The air seemed heavy and impure; he fancied it still fetid with all the blood of sacrificial offerings which the ravening ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... yourselves to free, Or such at least as would not hold your lives unworthily, No better counsel can I urge, than that which erst inspired The stout Phocaeans when from their doomed city they retired, Their fields, their household gods, their shrines surrendering as a prey To the wild boar and the ravening wolf; [1] so we, in our dismay, Where'er our wandering steps may chance to carry us should go, Or wheresoe'er across the seas the fitful winds may blow. How think ye then? If better course none offer, why should we Not seize the happy auspices, and boldly ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of all, one's sympathies went out to a person who was not to be met in either of these sets; to the girl who had not sold herself, but was struggling for a living in the midst of this ravening corruption. There were thousands of self-respecting women, even on the stage; Toodles herself had been among them, she told Montague. "I kept straight for a long time," she said, laughing cheerfully—"and on ten dollars ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... instant he was on his back and the ravening pack were about him in a ring. In that lurid firelight their fangs gleamed like ivory as they flashed, here and there, over his body and throat, and their fierce eyes blazed with pale-blue fire,—the mark and sign of the blood madness ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... are you talking about, and what a resolution you are going to take. Just cast a glance on the ins and outs of justice, look at the number of appeals, of stages of jurisdiction; how many embarrassing procedures; how many ravening wolves through whose claws you will have to pass; serjeants, solicitors, counsel, registrars, substitutes, recorders, judges and their clerks. There is not one of these who, for the merest trifle, couldn't knock over the best case in the ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere (Poquelin)
... that morning, have told how he felt about Lydia, or whether he had any feeling at all, save a proper gratitude for her tenderness to his father. But he had found her in his path, when his hurt soul was crying out to all fostering womanhood to save him from the ravening claw of woman's cruelty. She had felt his need, and they had looked at each other with eyes that pierced defences. And then, incarnate sympathy, tender youth, she had rested in his arms, and in ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... to the cave, having heard no more of the lion, or lions, they unsaddled there, purposing to put the horses into it, where they would be safe from the attack of any such ravening beast. But when they tried to do this, Smoke and Flame spread out their nostrils, and setting their feet firm before them, refused to enter the place, about which there ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... free hand on the rock, but the water tore at him like a ravening beast and he lost his hold. Jim swam furiously after him. The white head showed for a moment, then disappeared around a turn ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... dreaming wistful dreams of conical Ciriimian cities spearing up to a soft and plum-colored sky. The Zid raged into their communal rest cell, smashed them down from their gimbaled sleeping perches and, with the ravening blood-hunger of its kind, devoured them before they could wake enough to ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... badly jarred by his fall. Time dragged by wearily, and his bruises pained him. He knew at length that all the world slept,—all but himself and some distant ravening wolf, whose fierce howl ever and anon set the mists to shivering in Poor Valley where he prowled. This blood-curdling sound and his bitter thoughts were ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... change of heart and affection; unless he has been made meek and gentle by the Spirit of the Lord coming into his heart, he is only a wolf, after all, and not of the Savior's fold. Jesus speaks of some who put on "sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." By "wolves" he means men and women with wicked hearts. They profess to be Christians; but in their hearts are envy, pride, hatred, jealousy, love of self, and love of the world. They may appear quite lamb-like in public ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... monster tore the paddle from out the hands of the steersman of the canoe wherein were the terrified Palu and the four children, and then, before the man for'ard could bring her head to the wind, she broached to and filled. Like ravening wolves the sharks dashed upon their prey, and ere the people had time to give more than a despairing cry, those hideous jaws and gleaming cruel teeth had sealed their fate. Maddened with fear, the rest of the people threw everything ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... did the Hunger come. It began as a little gnawing doubt and disappointment. It grew to a devastating, ravening starvation of the heart, for sign or sight or word of Io Welland. It drove him out of his withered seclusion, to seek Miss Van Arsdale, in the hope of hearing Io's name spoken. But Miss Van Arsdale scarcely referred to Io. She watched ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... asked Sylvia despairingly, seeing wherever she looked nothing but that ravening, fiery leap of the flames, feeling that terrible hot breath on ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... surveillance of village life. In a hundred ways there are increased opportunities for doing evil with impunity. [Footnote: Cf. E. A. Ross, Sin and Society, pp. 32: "The popular symbol for the criminal is a ravening wolf; but alas, few latter day crimes can be dramatized with a wolf and a lamb as the cast! Your up-to-date criminal presses the button of a social mechanism, and at the other end of the land or the year innocent lives are snuffed out. As society grows complex, it can be harmed in more ways. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... tops; close at hand it rustled with a flurry of dead leaves that was uncannily like the bustle of inimical businesses pursued insolently in the dark, at my very elbow; and suddenly, through and over all other sounds, there rose in the harsh gloom the long, ravening cry ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... the beginning, for it is no disgrace to a general to refuse to fight an army of superior numbers, but he, once we had gone in, was bound to see the thing through to the end. And see it through he did! why, I tell you that the men down in Froeschwiller were no longer human beings; they were ravening wolves devouring one another. For near two hours the gutters ran red with blood. All the same, however, we had to knuckle under in the end. And to think that after it was all over they should come and tell us that we had whipped the Bavarians over on our left! By the piper that played before ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... all very well for Grindhusen. He had gone ravening after the girls when he was young, and he still spanked about with his hat on one side, out of habit. But he was quiet and tame enough now, as well he might be—'tis nature's way. But some there are who would not follow nature's way, and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb, Longs ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... and hear," said Ridley. "Featherstone cannot go till he has spoken with you, and he ought to depart betimes, lest the Gilsland folk and all the rest of them be ravening on their ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... steps. It was Maggie in descent from the bedrooms. Now, the Baines family passed its life in doing its best to keep its affairs to itself, the assumption being that Maggie and all the shop-staff (Mr. Povey possibly excepted) were obsessed by a ravening appetite for that which did not concern them. Therefore the voices of the Baineses always died away, or fell to a hushed, mysterious whisper, whenever the foot of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... conference between these execrable and ravening birds of night and prey, Helen and her boy-lover were thus conversing in the garden; while the autumn sun—for it was in the second week of October—broke pleasantly through the yellowing leaves of the tranquil shrubs, and the flowers, which should have died with the gone summer, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... His only trouble or anxiety was about himself. He felt as though he was in a position of tremendous danger, and was being tossed about by pitiless waves, which were hemming him in on every side, like ravening beasts of prey. In reality the pitiless waves were scarcely waves at all, the breeze was only moderate, and there was no possible danger; but David did not know this, and so he suffered as much as though ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... awakened in the night by the ravening of a pack of wolves at the carcass of the slain moose, which lay within twenty rods of the snow camp. They were growling and snapping as they tore the meat from the bones. Solomon rose and drew on ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... She had cut a hole, and jumped out of the bag, to be sure; but here she was, "all alone by herself" once more, and the foxes—Want and Cruelty—ravening after her all through the ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... there comes a ravening kite, That both at quick, at dead, at all will smite. He shall, he must; ay, and by'r Lady, may Command me to give over holiday, And set wide open ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... away, and lukewarmness has taken its place. Unlimited enthusiasm has given place to limited stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights have gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful glare. But unto this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world. When ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... hatches the young aphis lion drops down to the leaf and runs about like a ravening lion seeking some living thing ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... by his ravening hunger, the wretched Otter fell upon the turnips and munched them sullenly, Leonard rating him all the while for his ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Pork-pies, saveloys, sausages, cold potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, cold bacon, veal, ham, crabs and shrimps, cheese, butter, cold suet-puddings and treacle, gooseberry-tarts, cherry-tarts, butter, bread, more sausages, and yet again pork-pies! They devoured the provisions like ravening beasts, stolidly, silently, earnestly, in large mouthfuls which they shoved down their throats unmasticated. The intelligent foreigner seeing them thus dispose of their food would have understood why England is a great nation. He would have understood why Britons never, never will be slaves. ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... say, "I hate to call your friends names, but really he's a perfect scamp, and underneath all his fine manners he is no better than a wolf ravening ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... the dog moved her—his restlessness, his whining, the channels that tears had worn under his faithful eyes. She would have liked to take him up in her arms and comfort him; but once when her pity moved her to attempt it, the dog ran at her ravening. The husband cried out: 'Has he hurt you, my Love?' and was for stringing him up. But some compunction stirred in her, and she saved him from the rope, though she made no more ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... those just dying as they pass by their houses. [73] Sometimes the whole complex conception is wrapped up in the notion of a single dog, the messenger of the god of shades, who comes to summon the departing soul. Sometimes, instead of a dog, we have a great ravening wolf who comes to devour its victim and extinguish the sunlight of life, as that old wolf of the tribe of Fenrir devoured little Red Riding-Hood with her robe of scarlet twilight. [74] Thus we arrive at a true werewolf myth. The storm-wind, or howling Rakshasa ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... rude, ungentle, bluff, boisterous, wild; brusque, abrupt, waspish; impetuous; rampant. turbulent; disorderly; blustering, raging &c v.; troublous^, riotous; tumultuary^, tumultuous; obstreperous, uproarious; extravagant; unmitigated; ravening, inextinguishable, tameless; frenzied &c (insane) 503. desperate &c (rash) 863; infuriate, furious, outrageous, frantic, hysteric, in hysterics. fiery, flaming, scorching, hot, red-hot, ebullient. savage, fierce, ferocious, fierce as a tiger. excited &c v.; unquelled^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... only heroic sufferers who smile and make no moan, clasping close the hidden fangs ravening on ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the south of France, Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies, pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself. The ravening lions, the clawing, tearing griffins, the nightmare brood carved on the capitals, porches, and pulpits of pre-Franciscan churches, are surely not, as orthodox antiquarians assure us, mere fanciful symbols of the Church's vigilance and virtues: they express too well the far-spread ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... always. Once lost sight of, and trade competition substituted for competition in serving the interests of the sick, medical and pharmacal practice will become an ignoble scrabble for wealth, in which the sick become victims of avarice and greed. Better set free a pack of ravening wolves in a community than to change the end of medical practice to a commercial one, for physicians and pharmacists would soon degenerate into quacks and charlatans, and take shameful advantage of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... day it happened he felt the same old surge of anger and despair twenty years old now, felt the ray-gun bucking hard against his unaccustomed fist, heard the hiss of its deadly charge ravening into a face he hated. He could not be sorry, even now, for that first man he had killed. But in the smoke of that killing had gone up the columned house and the future he might have had, the boy himself—lost ...
— Song in a Minor Key • Catherine Lucille Moore
... Sweep it to sea, wash it on wreck, and leave A costless thing contemned; and in our stead, Where these walls were and sounding streets of men, Make wide a waste for tongueless water-herds And spoil of ravening fishes; that no more Should men say, Here was Athens. This shalt thou 40 Sustain not, nor thy son endure to see, Nor thou to live and look on; for the womb Bare me not base that bare me miserable, To hear this loud brood of the ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... But with less terror, and disorder less, The Gascoigns kept array, and kept their ground, Though most the loss and peril them oppress, Unwares assailed they were, unready found. No ravening tooth or talon hard I guess Of beast or eager hawk, doth slay and wound So many sheep or fowls, weak, feeble, small, As his sharp sword ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... long, and was topped by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to wink at us like an impish gnome. The most grotesque shadow of Peg flickered over the wall behind her. The one-eyed cat remitted his grim watch and went to sleep. Outside the wind screamed like a ravening beast at the window. Suddenly Peg removed her pipe from her mouth, bent forward, gripped my wrist with her sinewy fingers until I almost cried out with pain, and gazed straight into my face. I felt horribly frightened of her. She seemed an ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... you laugh, I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sites are still so pestilential, after the lapse of centuries, that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the less malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the commonwealth in the form of its prosperity, and is ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Frenchman, in his own tongue. "It is none other!" With a hand of great rejoicing, he stirred the unconscious Sheik—over whom the sand was already sifting as the now ravening simoom lashed it along. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... answered, rubbing his chin, "for in such matters even a Matabele generally keeps faith, and you may remember he promised you life for life. However, they are here ravening like lions round the walls, and that is why we carried you up to the top of the hill, that you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... disguise his excitement. The fact was, he could not have disguised it, even if he had tried. The fever of artistic creation was upon him—all the old desires and the old exhausting joys. His genius had been lying idle, like a lion in a thicket, and now it had sprung forth ravening. For months he had not handled a brush; for months his mind had deliberately avoided the question of painting, being content with the observation only of beauty. A week ago, if he had deliberately asked himself whether he would ever paint again, he might have answered, "Perhaps not." Such is man's ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... tempest, blinding electric flash, rushing wave, descending spray, creaking timbers, with instinctive ravening of ocean's hungry hordes, are luring, friendly greetings compared to merciless clamor of ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... huge space armadas were but skirmishes in the galactic war, as the invincible aliens savagely advanced and the Earth team hurled bolt after bolt of pure ravening energy—until it appeared that the universe itself might end in one final flare of ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the ravening Leaf As our savage fathers of old. No longer our wounds made us weak, No longer our pulses were cold. Though half of my troops were afoot, (For the great who had borne them were slain) We dreamed ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... all the powers of heaven destroy you, Ergasilus, and that belly of yours and all parasites and anyone that gives a parasite a meal hereafter! Disaster, devastation, a tornado, has just fallen on our house. I was afraid he'd jump at my throat like a ravening wolf! ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... delight at the marvellous fidelity with which the sculptor has rendered these links in the great chain of animal life. Their (as we call it) savage eagerness, their almost blind rage for their appointed food, the tenacity with which they clutch and the ravening anxiety (caused by the dread of losing their prey) with which they tear the flesh of their victims, is portrayed to the life. We speak of a death-grip, but here is a death and life grip—death to the victim whose palpitating body furnishes life to its destroyer. It ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... too late. Even if he had yielded in his ravening frenzy—for his beard was like a mad dog's jowl—even if he would have owned that, for the first time in his life, he had found his master; it was all ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... hid with a flowering face! Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st, A damned saint, an honourable villain!— O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... it happened that all the Ulster heroes were in the great hall one night, except Cuchulain and his cousin Conall. As they sat in order of rank, a terrible stranger, gigantic in stature, hideous of aspect, with ravening yellow eyes, entered. In his hand he bore an enormous axe, with keen and shining edge. Upon King Conor's inquiring his business there, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... of mine! You must settle it with Madame of Hainault; but you had best take care. You are more like to make your tame lambkin into a ravening wolf, than to get that Deborah ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... speak, but he was saved from any further need of self-defence or explanation, for at this moment the door of the office was broken rudely open and there entered like a hurricane a veritable fury in female form—a whirlwind, a tornado, a ravening wolf into a fold of lambs. This formidable apparition, which proved to be none other than the wife of the suspected Myers, amid a volley of abuse and oaths delivered in the choicest Billingsgate, pounced down on her ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... pretty? And somehow this discovery of his—that passion springs from worship of beauty and warmth, of form and colour—disturbed him horribly, for he had no habit of philosophy. The thought seemed to him strangely crude, even immoral. That she should be thus between two ravening desires—a bird between two hawks, a fruit between two mouths! It was a way of looking at things that had never before occurred to him. The idea of a husband clutching at his wife, the idea of that young man who looked so gentle, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it be but the old master of Walladmor? He knows by this time what it is to have the heart-ache. Oh kite! he tore my lamb from me. But, hark in your ear—Sir Lawyer! I visited his nest, old ravening kite! High as it was in the air, I crept up to his nest: I did—I did!" And here she clapped her hands, and expressed a frantic exultation: but, in a moment after, she groaned and sate down; and, covering ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... days' journey from Cufa city and called a halt on the eleventh day till midnight, when he ordered a march and rode on devancing them till he descended into the valley aforesaid and heard Jawamard reciting his verses. So he crave at him as the driving of a ravening lion, and smiting him with his sword, clove him in twain and waited till his captains came up, when he told them what had passed and said to them. "Take each of you five thousand men and disperse ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... thoughts had wandered a little, while he was remembering the Jews and the heathen and the missionaries, in the customary phrases, felt their hearts dimly moved when he asked that his house might be kept from the power of darkness and the ravening wolves of sin, kept in unbroken purity and peace, holy and undefiled. The potent sincerity of his love came upon them. They believed with his faith; they consented with ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... and sink again into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the ages, it hath been decreed, Shall perish and vanish each weak god of men, And the world shall be purged with ravening fire." ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... ravening beast trot by your side?' asked Constance. She was looking more than ever ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Manchegan lion and the white Tobosan dove shall be linked together, having first humbled their haughty necks to the gentle yoke of matrimony. And from this marvellous union shall come forth to the light of the world brave whelps that shall rival the ravening claws of their valiant father; and this shall come to pass ere the pursuer of the flying nymph shall in his swift natural course have twice visited the starry signs. And thou, O most noble and obedient squire that ever bore sword ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of the Catholics was drawn for the assault—the sword of the reformers for defense. Civil war was just bursting forth in all its horrors, when the Turks, with an army three hundred thousand strong, like ravening wolves rushed into Hungary. This danger was appalling. The Turks in their bloody march had, as yet, encountered no effectual resistance; though they had experienced temporary checks, their progress had ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... later, from the gnarled branches of the willow—up into which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered with the beasts ravening at his legs—the two sole survivors of the human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... their rations, plain but plentiful at first, at the last only a mouldy crust and a bit of rusty bacon. I have been upon an ambulance-train freighted with human agony delayed for hours by rumors of an enemy in ambush. I have fed men hungry with the ravening hunger of the wounded with scanty rations of musty corn-bread; have seen them drink eagerly of foetid water, dipped from the road-side ditches. Yet they bore it all with supreme patience; fretted and chafed, it is true, but only on account ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... must go to them. They gave me the book of Holy Writ, and they said: 'Read, man of God, our beloved brother, read the word of truth!' And I read, and my soul was renewed by the word of God. I shall go away. I shall leave all you ravening wolves. You are rending each ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... senceless false lewd spirit, maister of devils, miserable creature, tempter of men, deceaver of bad angels, captaine of heretiques, father of lyes, fatuous bestial ninnie, drunkard, infernal theefe, wicked serpent, ravening woolfe, leane hunger-bitten impure sow, seely beast, truculent beast, cruel beast, bloody beast, beast of all blasts, the most bestiall acherontall spirit, smoakie spirit, Tartareus spirit!"[4] Whether this objurgation terminates from loss of breath on the part of the conjurer, or the precipitate ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... Approach to desecrate The sacred hearthstone and the Temple-gate— Who would defile our fathers' graves, and cast Their ashes to the blast— Yea! who declare, "we will annihilate The very bound-lines of your sovereign State"— Against this ravening flood Of foul invaders, drunk with lust and blood, Oh! we, Strong in the strength of God-supported might, Go forth to give our foe no paltry fight, Nor basely yield To venal legions a scarce blood-dewed field— But witness, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Depravity is contra-natural. It is against the whole law of man's being. It is never wrong for any creature God has made to act out the nature which God endowed him with. It is not wicked for a tiger to be ravening. It is not wicked for a snake to be sinuous. It is wicked for man to be ravening or sinuous, because it is against the divine nature that God has put in man. He made man ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... hear beneath the cloud of secrecy How the whole city for this maiden mourns. She, who the least deserves it, dies, they say, A cruel death for a most noble deed, The rescue of her brother's mangled corpse From being left unburied on the field, A prey to ravening dogs and carrion birds. Has she not merited a crown of gold? Such murmurs darkling spread among the crowd. Father, I hold no treasure half so dear As thy well-being; greater joy or pride Is none than sons have in an honoured sire, Or than a sire has ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... the pastoral poem which is misliked? {46} For, perchance, where the hedge is lowest, they will soonest leap over. Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometimes, out of Melibaeus's mouth, can show the misery of people under hard lords and ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest? Sometimes under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrong doing and patience; sometimes ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... hear you say so, good Master Nowell," replied the rector. "I have done my best, I assure you, to keep my small and widely-scattered flock together, and to save them from the ravening wolves and cunning foxes that infest the country; and if now and then some sheep have gone astray, or a poor lamb, as in the instance of Mary Baldwyn, hath fallen a victim, I am scarcely to blame for the mischance. ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... wily Dakotas; But DuLuth and his voyageurs heap their fire that shall blaze till the morning, Ere they lay themselves snugly to rest, with their guns by their side on the blankets, As if there were none to molest but the ravening beasts of ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... will be seen the prototype of the wolf-mania of mediaeval Europe. In Brittany, men betook themselves to the forests in the shape of wolves, out of a morbid passion for the amusement of howling and ravening; but if they left in some secure place the clothes they had thrown off to prepare for the metamorphosis, they had only to reassume them in order to regain their natural forms. But sometimes a catastrophe like the above occurred: the wife discovered the hidden clothes, and carrying them home ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... "'Full fifty warriors bold and true Fell as becomes the brave; And whom the arrow spared, the spear Reaped for the ravening grave. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... thing—we had been for hours in a motor-car, exceedingly engaged on the task of looking at houses to let. At last, utterly worn out, in the way that motoring can wear out body, soul and nerves, and filled with a ravening desire to tear meat limb from limb, we came to an inn of which our host had the highest opinion—so high, indeed, that, empty though we were, he had forced the car at full-speed past at least half-a-dozen admirable but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... forward!—tantivy!—and hey for the marriage-lines of Charlotte Meynell, great-granddaughter of Matthew Haygarth, and, if still in the flesh, rightful heiress to the one hundred thousand pounds at present likely to be absorbed by the ravening jaws of the Crown! One more day, one more delightful idle day, in the land where it is always afternoon, and then away to Hidling in the hybrid vehicle, and thence to Hull, from Hull to York, from York to Leeds, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... so ravenous as that of these slender and spiritlike beings. With appetites insatiable, ferocity implacable, strength and courage prodigious for their stature, to call them the little wolves of the air is perhaps to wrong the ravening gray pack whose howlings strike terror down the corridors of the winter forest. Mosquitoes and gnats they hunted every moment, devouring them in such countless numbers as to merit the gratitude of every creature that calls the mosquito its foe. But every ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the tail hover the jackals of La Manche: the Paternosters, the Dirouilles, and the Ecrehos, themselves destroying where they may, or filching the remains of the tiger's feast of shipwreck and ruin. In truth, the sleek beast, with its feet planted in fearsome rocks and tides, and its ravening head set to defy the onslaught of the main, might, but for its ensnaring beauty, seem some ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of your enemies' garrison, Who is the worst for your witty comparison?" Said Cormac: "Not hard to tell! A man with a satirist's nameless audacity; A man with a slave-woman's shameless pugnacity; One with a dirty dog's careless up-bound, The conscience thereto of a ravening hound. Like a stately noble he answers all speakers From a memory full as a Chronicle-maker's, With the suave behaviour of Abbot or Prior, Yet the blasphemous tongue of a horse-thief liar And he wise as false in every grey hair, Violent, garrulous, devil-may-care. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves |
