"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tornado was running of falling on board the vessel was very great, and Jack was about reluctantly to give the order to sheer off from her, when he saw the remainder of those on deck prepare to make the desperate leap which would either terminate in their destruction or place them in comparative safety. Just at that moment, as his eye was fixed on the naval ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course—but try to ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... room said to have been occupied by Isabella with the old brewhouse, now a tavern, by means of which Mortimer was wont to communicate with his mistress. The castle stands upon a mount of 280 feet, sheer rock, and the brewhouse is at its base. A peculiarity of the tube, bored through the live rock, is an elbow-joint, which is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester Square. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got the chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... sheer waste o' time," I protested. "But 'twill suit me, zur, an it pleases you. My sister will tell ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... willing to endure the sentence passed upon them, and they were not misled by Boer promises in which they had never had any faith at all. There are good reasons to be assigned for the willingness of many of the men to make appeals to the Government: sheer hard necessity and the sufferings of those dependent upon them were among these reasons; and it is unfair to consider these appeals to have been due ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... front of the tomb, the procession of mourners ranged themselves about it in a semi-circle. They stood with their backs to the edge of a cliff that rose sheer for sixty feet or more from the plain beneath, across which, but at a little distance from the foot of the precipice ran the road followed by the caravans of merchants in their journeys to and from the coast. Then, a hymn having been sung invoking the blessing of the gods on the dead priestess, Elissa, ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... awe, when we first climbed a winding, white trail to the summit of the mountain and gazed into the abysmal depths. My eye followed an eagle which floated across the chasm to its perch on a projecting crag; thence, down the sheer face of the cliff a thousand feet to the stream which has carved this colossal canyon from the living rock. Like a shining silver tracing it twisted and turned, foaming over rocks and running in smooth, green sheets between vertical walls of granite. To the north ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... half-eagles, which fell about me in a golden shower, and made me cry out with amazement; but this was not all! The tears sprang to my eyes as I opened the morocco box and took out the chrysoprase necklace: tears partly of gratitude and pleasure, partly of sheer kindness and love and sorrow for the sweet, stately lady who had thought of me in her closing days, and had found (they told me afterward) one of her last pleasures in planning this ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... an almost startled reverence. He stepped into the carriage, signed feebly, but with determination, to the Arab coachman, and was driven away, followed by a parting "Oh, la la!" from the chasseur, uttered in a voice that sounded shrill with sheer amazement. ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... amazing; but he dismissed it with a passionate energy. "The dull figuriste!" he exclaimed. "Daguerre. Once I could have done that, yes, and been entertained by its adroitness and insolence—before you made me. Do you suppose I was able then to understand the sheer tragic fortitude to live of a scrubwoman! The head you thought unpleasant—haven't you seen her going home in the March slush of a city? Did you notice the gaps in her shoes, the ragged shawl about a body twisted with forty, fifty, sixty years of ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sorcerers, stoop in the final rites of fire and burial. Some days ago I taxed the band-master, Bond, with the possibility of playing in the dark; for a moment his face was as long as Taylor's bassoon, but since then by means of surreptitious practice and, I fancy, the sheer confiscation of his bandsmen's folios, the impossible has been achieved. Every band is the best in France, but only ours can play in darkness. Thus, as the column swings past the pond and waiting cookers, the Band strikes up one of ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... already decided on a man for the job of foreman, and I, for one, am glad we picked the man we did, but I want you boys to approve of our appointment. What you say goes. Stand up!" commanded Tom Gray sternly, fixing his gaze on the red-headed jack, who, from sheer force of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... laymen; it was the minister only who was required to take the oath. Later, the laws enacted by the General Assembly required every clergyman coming into the colony to subscribe to the Articles of the Christian Faith according to the Church of England and to be of Anglican ordination. By reason of sheer inability at times to provide sufficient Anglican clergymen for the parishes, clergymen of Presbyterian ordination were permitted to serve in Virginia parishes; and that was true throughout the whole seventeenth century. The last Presbyterian clergyman ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... too much. Good-for-working boy. Me and heem make 'em three-four beg oyster every day. He bin say: 'You carn be mate for me!' He go along two Mulai boy. Dorphy [Adolphus] carn mek too much now—one sheer belonga him, Mulai boy two sheers. Carn beat me—one sheer one man." Hamed has clean-cut notions on the disadvantages ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... was dashing against the kitchen door. Underneath, the little cellar, dug in the dry sand weeks before, and used as a storing place for tents, chairs, vegetables and coal sacks, was filled with water which now came within a foot of the floors. From sheer force of habit, Mary began building a fire in the range, and I to pack the spoons, knives and forks in a basket for removal. Ricka thought this a wise thing to do, but ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... absurdity of their conversation; of which, although they had spoken in earnest, they were both somewhat conscious. "But I say, old fellow, without any more humbug about love and such like bosh, just look at the dear old craft! how beautifully she sits on the water— what a graceful sheer she has—and how well her sixteen guns look run out, like dogs from their kennels, all ready to bite. You should see her under weigh though, and how beautiful she looks with her canvas spread! You'd ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... susceptibilities of its political and commercial rivals. The idea that the sentiment either of the world at large or of the over-sea British would be favourably impressed by the three months of futile negotiations was a sheer delusion. It was the people of England who had to ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... redoubtable of sentinels. Either the figures below were hidden from him or instinct warned him that they were friends. He hopped from bough to bough of the great windrow, and nearly always he sang. Now his song was clear and happy, saying that no enemy came in the forest. He sang from sheer delight, from the glory of the sunshine, and the splendor of the great green forest, drying in the golden glow. Now and then the gray squirrel came down from a tree and ran over the windrow. There was no method in ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... terrace. To the rear, clinging to the mountain, is an Alpine gasthaus—a bit overdone, perhaps, with its red-framed windows and elaborate fretwork, but still genuinely of the Alps. Along the front of the terrace, protecting sightseers from the sheer drop of a thousand feet, is ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... ordinary occasions, Mrs. Gallilee was up in time to receive the letters arriving by the first delivery; the correspondence of the other members of the household being sorted by her own hands, before it was distributed by the servant. On this particular morning (after sleeping a little through sheer exhaustion), she entered the empty breakfast-room two hours later than usual. The letters waiting for her were addressed only to herself. She rang ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... special clause from Potsdam, the German troops); even fish caught by the fishermen of Lebanon have to be handed over to the military authorities, and the shortage of supplies in Smyrna, for instance, is such that at the end of 1916 there were two hundred deaths daily from sheer starvation, while Germany was importing from Turkey hundreds of tons of corn and of meat. Thus this was no natural shortage, for though supplies were low all over the Turkish Empire, there was not dearth of that kind. It was an artificial shortage made ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... seats were taken, someone gave a signal and off went the little trains down such a steep grade that their rush carried them far up another incline. This was repeated over and over until they had reached a great height. Here there was a sheer drop as straight as it could be made without taking the cars off the rails, and down they went, turning and twisting. All at once they were plunged ...
— The Girl Scouts at Home - or Rosanna's Beautiful Day • Katherine Keene Galt
... her? Now her wrath turned upon Bennett. What audacity had been his to believe that she would so forget herself? She set her teeth in her impotent anger, rising to her feet, her hands clenching, tears of sheer passion starting ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... powers of industry for the satisfaction of his prodigal instincts; it was the drawing-room of a woman whose placidity no danger could disturb, and who cared for nothing if only her husband was amused. Spend and gain! And, for a change, gain and spend! That was the method. Work till sheer exhaustion beat you. Plan, scheme, devise! Satisfy your curiosity and your other instincts! Experiment! Accept risks! Buy first, order first, pledge yourself first; and then split your head in order to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... these exhibitions of his strength. He had grown to understand that he could always affect her when he pretended to dominate her by sheer brute force. She had explained it to him ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... knew, was to big Wilbur what Dick himself was to the great mass of law-abiding men. Accident had cut Wilbur adrift, but it was more than accident which started Pierre on the road to outlawry; it was the sheer love of dangerous chance, the glory in fighting ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... Alps composed of solid coherent limestone (such as that familiar to the English traveller in the cliffs of Matlock and Bristol), 3000 or 4000 feet thick, and broken short off throughout a great part of this thickness, forming nearly[50] sheer precipices not less than 1500 or 2000 feet in height, after all deduction has been made for slopes of debris at the bottom, and for rounded ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... reputation of having once been the rendezvous of a gang of pirates, as a house, that has stood untenanted for any length of time, is sure to be peopled with ghosts. People seem to think it a pity that a tenement should remain unoccupied, so, out of sheer compassion for the proprietor, they stock it with unearthly tenants from roof to cellar, or like—for, now I am in the humor for comparisons, I might as well go on—it was like a man who keeps his business ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... had to pass in September or be forever labeled a dunce by his fond family. Now you see why I can understand the psychology of saying 'no' to a proposal. This stripling, who was at least five years my junior, proposed to me out of sheer gratitude. I actually succeeded in drumming quadratic equations into his stupid head, and he offered me his hand by the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... of amazement, fright and pain, which struck on the ear like the shriek of a terrified woman, the nimble creature spun lithely 'round, and, like the bull, reckless of all save the unseen foe behind him, made a blind leap sheer over the brink of the precipice, and in a ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... them. And now this possibility of fruitful co-operation is, for the time being, and it may be for many years, suspended. I say nothing of the loss of markets in the older countries which will be occasioned by sheer loss of population and the lower standard of living. That is one of the more obvious but not perhaps the most important of the ways in which the war affects ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... pilot-house, now partly open, caused Worden, blind as he was, to believe that the pilot-house was seriously injured if not destroyed; he, therefore, gave orders to put the helm to starboard, and 'sheer off.' Thus the 'Monitor' retired temporarily from the action, in order to ascertain the extent of the injuries she had received. At the same time Worden sent for me, and I went forward at once, and found him standing at the foot of the ladder ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... miles an hour. There, before us, is Cumbrae: over Bute and over Cumbrae look the majestic mountains of Arran; that great granite peak is Goat-fell. And on a clear day, far out, guarding the entrance to the Frith, rising sheer up from the deep sea, at ten miles' distance from the nearest land, looms Ailsa, white with sea-birds, towering to the height of twelve or thirteen hundred feet. It is a rocky islet of about a mile in circumference, and must have been thrown up by volcanic agency; for the water around it is hundreds ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... grow discouraged now, were we to weaken and slack off, the whole structure we have built, these past eight years, would come apart and fall away. Never then, no matter by what stringent means, could our free world regain the ground, the time, the sheer momentum, lost by such a move. There can and should be changes and improvements in our programs, to meet new situations, serve new needs. But to desert the spirit of our basic policies, to step back from them now, would surely start the free world's slide toward the darkness that the communists ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... classical author, to study the topography of Epipolae. But his talent is his own, and very agreeable, though he once so forgot himself as to jest on the Deceased Wife's Sister. When we think of those writers to whom we all owe so much, it would be sheer ingratitude to omit the name of the master of them all, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is a wit who is a scholar, and almost a poet, and whose humour is none the less precious for being accompanied by good humour, learning, a wide experience of ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... scored his first great popular success. 'The Sorcerer' had appealed to the few; 'Pinafore' carried the masses by storm. In humour and in musicianship alike it is less subtle than its predecessor, but it triumphed by sheer dash and high spirits. There is a smack of the sea in music and libretto alike. 'Pinafore' was irresistible, and Sullivan became the most popular composer of the day. 'The Pirates of Penzance' (1880) followed the lines of 'Pinafore,' with humour perhaps less abundant but with an added ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... pair of eyes belonged to a boy of twelve, though he looked older—a street urchin—dirty, ragged, with a pinched face and a starved, ill-clad form. A look of sheer desperation came into these eyes when their owner saw the money, and he trembled with excitement as a certain bold and wicked thought came into his mind—a thought born, not of a bad heart, but ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... reply. "His Eastern servant 'phoned for me one night last week; and I found Ferrara lying unconscious in a room like a pasha's harem. He looked simply ghastly, but the man would give me no account of what had caused the attack. It looked to me like sheer nervous exhaustion. He gave me quite an anxious five minutes. Incidentally, the room was blazing hot, with a fire roaring right up the chimney, and it ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... willingness of readers from around the world to share their observations and specialized knowledge is very helpful as we try to produce the best possible publications. Please feel free to continue to write and e-mail us. At least two Factbook staffers review every item. The sheer volume of correspondence precludes detailed personal replies, but we sincerely appreciate your time and interest in the Factbook. If you include your e-mail address we will at least acknowledge your note. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... could make up their minds whether to resent or applaud the trick that King had played on them with Yasmini's obvious collaboration, King was well under way with a speech that held them spellbound. It would have held any audience spellbound by its sheer, stark manliness. It was straighter from the shoulder than Yasmini's eloquence, and left absolutely nothing to imagination. Blunt, honest downrightness, that was the key of it, and it took away the breath of all ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... somewhere. I'm afraid you will think me a bore for sticking to the point like this, but the fact is, the one thing I pride myself on is my memory for faces. It's a hobby of mine. If I think I remember a face, and can't place it, I worry myself into insomnia. It's partly sheer vanity, and partly because in my job a good memory for faces is a mighty fine asset. It has helped me ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... as a matter of course; they fulfilled them, and went beyond. They were not a melancholy company; they had something of the lightness of the element in which they moved. Indeed, it would be difficult to find, in the world's history, any body of fighters who, for sheer gaiety and zest, could hold a candle to them. They have opened up a new vista for their country and for mankind. Their story, if it could ever be fully and truly written, is ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... their wont is in the pressure of debate, endeavored to deny, to insinuate in their vile Newspapers, That Jenkins lost his Ear nearer home and not for nothing; as one still reads in the History Books. [Tindal (xx. 372). Coxe, &c.] Sheer calumnies, we now find. Jenkins's account was doubtless abundantly emphatic; but there is no ground to question the substantial truth of him and it. And so, after seven years of unnoticeable burning upon the thick skin of the English Public, the case of Jenkins accidentally burns through, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... to her house so much, unless she meant to inveigle Elnathan; but, for her part, she would rather see him dead than live to bring reproach upon his family and the Church by following after the blasphemers. I ventured to tell her that I did look upon it as sheer kindness and love on the young woman's part; at which Elnathan seemed pleased, and said he could not doubt it, and that he did believe Peggy Brewster to be a good Christian, although sadly led astray by the Quakers. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was growing eery, now, and precipitous. To their right rose a sheer cliff. To their left, the path fell off abruptly to a gigantic caldron where red flames ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... Tammaritu was "a devil" incarnate, whose whole thoughts were of murder and rapine; at least, this was the idea formed of him by his Assyrian contemporaries, who declared that he desired to put to death the sons of his two predecessors out of sheer cruelty. But we do not need a very vivid imagination to believe that these princes were anxious to dethrone him, and that in endeavouring to rid himself of them he was merely forestalling their secret plots. They escaped his murderous designs, however, and fled to Assyria,—Khumban-igash, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... surprise had he learnt the real reason of his Matilda's change of plan. That angel had, in short, so wildly spent Bob's and her own money in the adornment of her person before setting out, that she found herself without a sufficient margin for her fare by coach, and had scrimped from sheer necessity. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... stairway, from gallery to gallery, hard pressed by her furious mistress. Soon she heard them rise into the belvedere and the next instant they darted out upon the roof. Down into its valleys and up over its ridges the little fugitive slid and scrambled. She reached the sheer edge, the lady at the window hid her face in her hands, there came a dull, jarring thud in the paved court beneath, and the lady, looking down, saw the child lifted from the ground and borne out of ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... convinced Madeleine that M. de Bois would not have made this inquiry out of sheer, causeless curiosity; and she made known to him the count's request concerning the votes which she was to exert herself to obtain. Gaston caught eagerly at ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... is of an oblong form flanked by stupendous mountains; the enormous barrier of the Dundun Shikkun almost precludes the possibility of bringing cannon from the south, although one gun is known to have been dragged over by sheer manual labour; it was brought by Dost Mahommed from Cabul to quell some refractory chiefs, the carriage being taken to pieces, and the gun fastened by ropes in the hollowed trunk of ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... exposure—I rely on you, dearest friend of ours, to at least lend us your influence when the time shall come—a word may be invaluable. If there is any show made, or gratification of strangers' curiosity, far better that I had left the turf untouched. These things occur through sheer thoughtlessness, carelessness, not anything worse, but the effect is irreparable. I won't think any more of it—now—at least. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... The extraordinary devotion to a volume of natural history, which after generations of use has become more like a mop-head than a book, may be seen in the reproduction of a "monkey-book" here illustrated; this curious result being caused by sheer affectionate thumbing of its leaves, until the dog-ears and rumpled pages turned the cube to a globular mass, since flattened by being packed away. So children love picture-books, not as bibliophiles would consider ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... an interesting spectacle to see this woman, moved by sheer pride and obstinacy, conjoined with ignorance of the actual situation, seeking to set her single will against that of a city in revolt, and endangering the very existence of the monarchy by her sheer lack of reason. Her ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... sheer good spirits carried him with her, heart and mind, that morning. And when it was time for him to go she said good-bye to him with a smile as tenderly gay and as happy and confident as though he were to return on the morrow. And ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... possible to have access by prayer, by meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one's very brother; if it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one's way to such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such a being in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish I could. To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as an incomprehensibly ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... struggled up through the lightning's glare, I have walked where the cliffs fell sheer To a gorge below, but I breathed a prayer, And my soul ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... Morvyth on terms of distant iciness, Valentine and Katherine constantly sparring over trifles, Fauvette preserving an attitude of martyred dignity, and Aveline, out of sheer perversity, striking up a friendship with Maudie Heywood, matters were not very ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... correct idea of the great central table-land of Fezzan. It is an elevation, not quite clearly marked to the eye on some of its northern approaches, but dropping sheer to the plain at other parts. Mourzuk is situated in a sandy depression on its surface, which would probably be turned into a salt lake if there were sufficient rain. The limits of the hollow, as of that of many others—Wady Atbah for example—are ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... till he had got nearly across the bridge that Captain Devereux, as it were, waked up. It was no good waking. He broke forth into sheer fury. It is not my business to note down the horrors of this impious frenzy. It was near five o'clock when he came back to his lodgings; and then, not to rest. To sit down, to rise again, to walk round the room and round, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pick up a living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress—a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs to extort, by sheer beggary, a scanty morsel from some pair of "drowthy cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... the morning session at quarter to twelve, so that those who lived near enough could go home for a change of dress. Emma Jane and Rebecca ran nearly every step of the way, from sheer excitement, only stopping to ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... like that, Geert. What do you mean by 'justifying it before my own heart?' By saying that you force me, half tyrannically, to assume a role of affection, and I am compelled to say from sheer coquetry: 'Ah, Geert, then I shall never go.' Or ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... hoped to obtain through the Princess some opening for their foreign trade, which would better enable them to dispose of their wines and help them to live. Mazarin kept down the local Parliament, and carried everything through sheer terror. Bouillon and La Rochefoucauld, the Princess's advisers, recommended that a royal envoy should be cut to pieces. Lenet dreaded lest such an act, somewhat over-energetic, might render his mistress ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... book of directions, has also been published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined, and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer want of resource and idea, on the part of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... of character or sheer doggedness one Native has tried to break through the South African shackles of colour prejudice, the Colour Bar, inserted in the South African Constitution in 1909, instantly hurled him back to the lowest wrung of the ladder and held him ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the tree he girdled; Just beneath its lowest branches, Just above the roots, he cut it, Till the sap came oozing outward; Down the trunk, from top to bottom, Sheer he cleft the bark asunder, With a wooden wedge he raised it, Stripped it from ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... country for fowls, but when we went to look at the result this morning we found about a dozen miserable chickens, almost featherless, standing dejectedly in corners, and Mrs. Royle wailed, "We can't kill these: it would be a sheer slaughter of the innocents!" It isn't easy to get beef or mutton in this part of the world, and when a sheep is brought to Rika it has to be carefully concealed, or Kittiwake ties a ribbon round its neck and claims it as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... rock-rooted conviction in the heart of the nation, we shall tend to lukewarmness—to an awful indifference as to how this contest shall end; and begin to seek for present peace at any price. We say present peace, for a permanent peace, short of a thorough crushing of the rebellion, is simply a sheer impossibility—a wild hallucination. Nor is it a less mad fantasy to suppose that the rebellion can be effectually crushed without annihilating slavery, the sole and supreme cause of the rebellion. Such lukewarmness and untimely peace sentiments, widely diffused through the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... some manuscript of that period preserved in the British Museum. She, who had explored the ruins dozens of times, knew well that at the point where she was standing there could be no place of concealment. Beyond that wall, the hill, covered with bushes and brushwood, descended sheer for three hundred feet or so to the bottom of the glen. Had the voices sounded from one or other of the half-choked chambers which remained more or less intact she would not have been so puzzled; but, as it was, the weird whisperings seemed to come forth from space. Sometimes they ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... northern division of the continent. This arises from the peculiar geological structure of these mountains. Vast clefts traverse them, yawning far into the earth. In South America these are called quebradas. You may stand on the edge of one of them and look sheer down a precipice two thousand feet! You may fancy a whole mountain scooped out and carried away, and yet you may have to reach the bottom of this yawning gulf by a road which seems cut out of the face of the cliff, or rather has been formed by a freak of Nature—for ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... desired to live quietly without opening the front door again; but his good master begged him to marry to please him, assuring him that he need not trouble about his wife. So the good steward wandered out of sheer good nature into this marriage. The day of the wedding, bereft of all her reasons, and not able to find objections to her pursuer, she made him give her a fat settlement and dowry as the price of ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... noble captain," answered the officer; "but, prithee, reserve thy oaths for the court of justice; it is but sheer waste to throw them away, as you do in your ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the same tactics over and over, learns no more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think; hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us sheer ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... thought I felt him nibble at my shirt tails, and his eyes grew in my imagination as large as wagon wheels and Mr. Fox, himself, seemed to grow as big as an elephant. When at last I dropped from sheer exhaustion and could summon courage to look behind me, I could see nothing. It was then I realized I was not so game as I thought I was and the knowledge was not pleasant by any means. Not far from our house there was a horse ranch, owned by a Mr. Williams. He had two sons about my own age ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... which proceeds thus: "Then the Priest, wetting his right thumb with spittle from his mouth, and touching therewith in the form of a cross the right ear of the person to be baptized, &c." The Mexican missionaries, it seems, had to leave out this ceremony, from sheer inability to provide enough of the requisite material ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Belshazzar's nails on the floor of the bathing pool. Then his heart and breath stopped an instant. Beside the dog walked the Girl, one hand on his head the other holding the flowing white robe around her and grasping one of the Harvester's lilies. His first thought was sheer amazement that she was not afraid, for it was evident now that the backlog had awakened her, and she had taken the dog and gone to her mother. Then she had followed the path leading down the hill, around the cabin, and into the sheet of moonlight gilding the shore. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... pretended stupidity, and inquired, "what pantry?" and "what bread?" but Jane soon discovered that I knew very well; and while she looked at me so searchingly I could not possibly frame a plausible story—so, from sheer necessity, I told the whole truth, "and nothing but the truth." My curious attempt at getting thin excited great amusement; but Mammy told me that she knew of a better way than that, which was to run up and down stairs as much as possible. ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... in sheer bewilderment. The position in which she found herself was so alarmingly novel, it made such a whirlpool in her quiet life, that it was all she could do to struggle with the throbbing of her heart and attempt to gather her thoughts. She did not even ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... civilization, and that by the Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia,—with many fortunes, under many masters, for many hundred ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... sight of a huge cactus, trailing its heavy knotted length upon the face of a rock; and at times we brushed beneath overhanging branches of some tree that could not be distinguished. All the way up we seemed to skirt a sheer precipice, which at moments was alarming in its gloomy depth. Deeper and deeper below shone the lights of the railway station and of the few houses about it; it seemed as though a false step would drop us down into ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... answered Outzen calmly. "But to disturb the peace of the grave from sheer daring, with the fumes of the punch still in your head,—that is a different matter,—that will ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... Soames. The idea that his nephew's wife (why couldn't the fellow take better care of her—Oh! quaint injustice! as though Soames could possibly take more care!)—should be drawing to herself June's lover, was intolerably humiliating. And seeing the danger, he did not, like James, hide it away in sheer nervousness, but owned with the dispassion of his broader outlook, that it was not unlikely; there was something ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sheer cliffs, past little coves, on whose sand men's feet had surely never trodden, past the mouths of great caves, gloomy, mysterious, from the depths of which came a hollow murmuring of water. The caves had a strange fascination ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... Scarecrow; who crawled to the edge of the nest and looked over. Below them was a sheer precipice several hundred feet in depth. Above them was a smooth cliff unbroken save by the point of rock where the wrecked body of the Gump still hung suspended from the end of one of the sofas. There really seemed to be no means ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... tongue, with inconceivable rapidity, passed from subject to subject, but with an incoherence that was to me, at least, marvellous. For two hours he poured forth a verbal torrent, which was only suspended by sheer physical exhaustion. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Adventures of Peter Wilkins, by Robert Paltock, 1751, is still read; but The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, 1736, has had its day. It was a blend of unconvincing travel and some rather free narrative: a piece of sheer hackwork to meet a certain market. See Lamb's sonnet to Stothard, Vol. IV. The Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy I have not seen. Canon Ainger describes it as a rather foolish romance, showing how a Blue-coat boy marries a rich lady of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... were to the waiter, and referred to successive tankards of bitter, with the superfluous rider that the man who said we couldn't drink beer was a liar. But indeed I never could myself, and only achieved the impossible in this case out of sheer sympathy with Raffles. And eventually I had my reward, in such a recital of malignant privation as I cannot trust myself to set down in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... distinct Provinces of the Dominion stand as land marks of portentous meaning in the History of Canada. The settlement and development of these immense fertile prairies of the West were bound to react on the economic powers and political outlook of our Country. By the sheer weight of their economic value these new Provinces have leaped into prominence and forced themselves upon the attention of the Country at large. The Western issues are now so weighty that only the greatest prudence and wisest statesmanship will maintain the equilibrium ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... make himself withal a body? What reality can there be in his efforts and approaches? Would she be sinning in the flesh, if she allowed the intrusions of one who was always roaming about her? Would that be sheer adultery?" Such was the sly roundabout way in which sometimes he stayed and weakened her resistance. "If I am only a breath, a smoke, a thin air, as so many doctors call me, why are you afraid, poor fearful soul, and how ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... opening scenes of the New World drama. Skies of profoundest blue—the tropical sun flaming through massive clouds of vapor—a sea of exuberant color, foaming white over coral beaches—waving cocoa palms against a background of exotic verdure marking a tortuous shore line, which now rises sheer and precipitous from the water's edge to dizzy, snowcapped, cloud-hung heights, now stretches away into vast reaches of oozy mangrove bog and dank cinchona grove—here flecked with stagnant lagoons that teem with slimy, crawling life—there ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... we kept up the pursuit of the flying Moors, and only rested from sheer weariness. The next morning Meer Jaffier rode into our camp at Daudpore, ill at ease. But Colonel Clive received him with friendship, and caused him to be saluted as the Nabob of Bengal. From him we learned the particulars of what had taken ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... "God-forsaken," so often applied to regions like this, would, however, be inappropriate here, for in God's name the locality is famous. On a promontory whose sides fall down in sheer precipices all about, except where a narrow neck of rock connects it with the net-work of cliffs, is a vast monastery, the Mother Abbey of the Olivetani. In 1313 a noble of Siena, Bernardo Tolomei, in the midst of a life of literary distinctions and pleasures, received, it is said, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the Irish had borne down the defence amidships, where the run of the gunwales was lowest. The sheer weight of them as they clambered, one over the other, on board, listed the ship over, and made the boarding easier for those who followed. The wild Danish war shout rose once or twice, and then it was drowned by the Irish yell. After that there was ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... will grow her governance; never out of her dominance.—Those who think this sheer nonsense, are welcome to think so. But it is worth ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... books again that for a month I gave no thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... daughter. "It is a monumental thing at this crisis of affairs—a huge, unpopular claim on a resenting government carried through by persons impelled solely by the most purely primitive and disinterested of motives. An ingenuous county politician, fresh from his native wilds, works for it through sheer prehistoric affection and neighbourliness; an old black man—out of a story-book—forges a powerful link of evidence for mere faithful love's sake; a man who is a minister of the gospel, a gentleman and above reproach, gives to its service all his interest, solely because he cherishes an affectionate ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in this upper stillness sweet sounds of church bells reach us from hamlets close underneath the convent. Nothing can be more solid, fresher, or more brilliant than the rich beech- and pine-woods running sheer from our airy eminence to the level world below, nothing more visionary, slumberous, or dimmer than that wide expanse teeming, as we know, with busy human life, yet flat ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... nine hundred beds, which were always so full that the last surgeon admitting to his wards constantly found himself with extra beds poked in between the regulation number through sheer necessity. It afforded an unrivalled field for clinical experience and practical teaching. In my day, however, owing to its position in London, and the fact that its school was only just emerging from primeval chaos, it ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Germans in daylight, with a like result. The ground was piled high in places with bodies. Then, when night had fallen, yet another attack was made. One mighty mass of Germans came charging over the narrow space. By sheer weight of numbers they overwhelmed the French and took the trench for which they had paid such a ghastly price. They held it only for a few hours. By converging on it from three points at once the French retook it soon ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Debby's pins were making, and could Aunt Judith not read in a lower tone? Nellie was surprised at Miss Latimer's good-humoured patience, and thoroughly enjoyed Miss Deborah's occasional tart remarks, thrown out in sheer desperation. ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... him pinned on that narrow shelf of rock. Watching that holocaust below, Shann Lantee could not force himself to move. The sheer ruthlessness of the Throg move-in left him momentarily weak. To listen to a tale of Throgs in action, and to be an eye-witness to such action, were two vastly different things. He shivered in spite of the warmth ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Rubens or a Velasquez. Browne's 'brushwork' is certainly unequalled in English literature, except by the very greatest masters of sophisticated art, such as Pope and Shakespeare; it is the inspiration of sheer technique. Such expressions as: 'to subsist in bones and be but pyramidally extant'—'sad and sepulchral pitchers which have no joyful voices'—'predicament of chimaeras'—'the irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity'—are examples of this ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... mind," he coaxed, "you were really not responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,—whatever you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes for dinner at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... would take him longer than that to get to a safe range, get into position, and fire. He'd be dead anyway, as the ship plunged into the atmosphere and burned up. And to pull out without firing would be saving his own life at the cost of the lives he was under oath to defend. That would be sheer cowardice. ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... this was played with great spirit, the two most distinguished being Nancy and Dan Dennison, though Miss Fortune played admirably well. Ellen had seen Nancy play before; but she forgot her own part of the game in sheer amazement at the way Mr. Dennison managed his long body, which seemed to go where there was no room for it, and vanish into air just when the grasp of some grasping "blind man" was ready to fasten upon him. And when he was blinded, he seemed ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... divisible. Has any man ever looked upon a line and perceived directly that it has an infinite number of parts? Did any one ever succeed in dividing a space up infinitely? When we try to make clear to ourselves how a point moves along an infinitely divisible line, do we not seem to land in sheer absurdities? On what sort of evidence does a man base his statements regarding space? They are certainly very ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... the sky was dust-dimmed, the south wind feverish and strength-sapping. At dawn we had sighted a peak against the western horizon. We were approaching it now—a single low butte, its front a sheer stone bluff facing southward toward the river, it lifted its head high above the silent plains; and to the north it stretched in a long gentle slope back to a lateral rim along the landscape. The trail crept close about its base, as ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... want of food, Sir," continued Thompson, by sheer duress preventing my father from following his guests and attempting to pacify them, "I have taken to spirits. I do not like the taste of spirits and they go at once to my head. They depress me further, Sir, but they intoxicate me. Yes, I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... determine to reject it. But it may have been, and if it was, then the selection of "A" only, carried with it the rejection of "B." A father sees his two children perishing in the waters. He jumps into a boat, and reaches the scene of disaster. The children are sinking from sheer exhaustion. He takes one into the boat, and returns to shore. He could easily have saved the other, but did not, and he tells the people this on landing, and that he must be simply judged by his act of saving the rescued child, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... and tried, but presently I saw mother looking queer, and she said I was tired, and had gone on enough. I made her read it to me afterwards, and I had gone off into a muddle, and said something that would have been sheer murder. So I had better leave it alone. Old Vanbro mistrusts every word I say because of the Hermann connection, and indeed I may not always have talked sense to him. Those things work out in God's own time, and the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... That's no joke! The dragon—though a dragon of dragon race—let the bags fall in his fright. But, from sheer terror, he picked them up again. Yet his fear did not gain the mastery till they entered the court-yard. When the hungry children saw their father coming with the loaded dragon, they rushed toward him, each one with ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... of what he had made of himself through sheer will and persistent? How could he credit it—remembering what he already stood for in the world, where he stood, how he had arrived by the rigid road of self-denial; how he had mounted, steadily, undismayed, unperturbed, undeterred by the clamour ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... glairy creatures pick up this science? We are told that the Mollusc derives from the Worm. One day, the Worm, rendered frisky by the sun, emancipated itself, brandished its tail and twisted it into a corkscrew for sheer glee. There and then the plan of the ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... breathe for wonderment; and numb With truth that fell too suddenly, sat dumb With sheer amaze, and stared at Roy with eyes That looked no feeling but complete surprise. He swayed so near his breath was on my cheek. "Maurine, Maurine," he ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... nature in many phases—of breeze and sunshine, of the glory of the land, and the sheer ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Well, isn't that just what the big world does after us? As men, we fight for bigger playthings, for pounds, where before we fought for pence—for gold where before we fought for coppers—for command of a country instead of a schoolyard; for our wives instead of sweethearts, and through sheer deviltry and the love of the thing, when there's nothing else to fight about, just the same ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... fought and won in the eleventh century any national prejudices that belong wholly to the modern world are quite as much out of place with regard to it as they are with regard to Caesar or St Augustine. And if we must be indignant and remember old injuries that as often as not were sheer blessings, scarcely in disguise, let us reserve our hatred, scorn and contempt for those damned pagan and pirate hordes that first from Schleswig-Holstein and later from Denmark descended upon our Christian country, and for ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... as if he had fainted from sheer starvation," returned Clemantiny brusquely as she picked him up in her lean, muscular arms. "Why, he's skin and bone. He ain't hardly heavier than a baby. Well, this is a mysterious piece of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... evolution at the mercy of His caprice; did not Brahma, by means of meditation, which, as the Oriental scriptures tell us, preceded creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the Goal? Is it not sheer blasphemy to attribute such folly to the Soul of the world? Does not the study of Nature, at each step, belie this insensate waste, of which no human being would be guilty? Everywhere with the minimum of force, Nature produces the maximum of effect; everywhere ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... his interview with the captain, thought that he had never seen a family more radiantly happy than this company of boys and girls who were skipping and prancing up and down the long room, bumping against each other in sheer gleefulness ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us hell's own fight—out of sheer indignation—back there in Brisbane. He flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies. Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... sperm spurted out: and only the last drop remained just as I buried my prick in her. Then instead of meeting her humid tongue with mine, I sank on her breast kissing, yet damning and cursing like a dragoon, at my spoiled pleasure,—I had spent out of sheer copiousness of ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... day was still, the sun's bright glare Fell sheer upon the Temple's beauteous wall Withered by tropic heat, the air Let, like a bird, its listless pinions fall. Behold a group, young men and gray, And women, kneeling; silence holds ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... its pallor; beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. But she was no longer quite so straight, and her hair, which it was a sheer impossibility to care for, was losing its soft vitality. She was still pretty, but not the beauty she had been when she was ejected from the class in which she was bred. However, she gave the change in herself little thought; it was ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... This is sheer nonsense. Joy smiles in good earnest, and many an aching heart knows too well the deep ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various |
