"Torso" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... waist and flung him to the ground. Upon the inert body the victor dropped, his knees clinching the torso of ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... the fashion of late years to cry down the Vatican collection of statues, and to say that, with the exception of the 'Torso' it does not contain a single one of the few great masterpieces known to exist, such as the 'Hermes of Olympia,' the 'Venus of Medici,' the 'Borghese Gladiator,' the 'Dying Gaul.' We are told that the 'Apollo' of the Belvedere is a bad copy, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... slit his nose, by which his speech was made thick and very nasal, like that attributed to Capuchins. His hands, which were short and broad, were of the kind that make women say: "You have the hands of a rascal." His legs seemed slender for his torso. In that fat and active body an absolutely lawless spirit disported itself, and a thorough experience of the things of life, together with a profound contempt for social convention, lay hidden beneath the apparent indifference ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 1869, he visited all the picture galleries and evidently enjoyed doing so; but it was easy to see that his brother, Rev. Samuel Longfellow, felt a much livelier interest in the subject than he did; and injured frescos or mutilated statues, like the Torso of the Belvidere, were objects of aversion to him. Poets and musical composers see more with their ears than they ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... basalt, lay a hideous reptile, which in form faintly resembled an enormous and fantastic kangaroo. Its scabby belly was of the unhealthy yellow of a grub, a hue which gave way to a leaden gray as the wart-covered skin reached the back. Two enormous hind legs, each thick as a man's torso and each equipped with three dagger-like talons, struck out in helpless fury at the air, while a long, lizard-like tail threshed powerfully back and forth, scattering ponderous boulders right and left as though they had been marbles. The flashlight being trained as it was, the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... of the third day, the captain of the junk, whose name was Hoang, presented himself upon the quarter-deck. He was naked to the waist, and his bare brown torso was gleaming with oil and sweat. His queue was coiled like a snake around his neck, his hatchet thrust into ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... swinging back in an arc, at the same time bending at the hips, until he has completed the circle and reached a hip-bending position, with the fingers of one hand touching the floor, the other extended vertically. This gives a stretching movement to all of the muscles of the torso, side, back, and abdomen, as well as considerable play to the muscles of the legs ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... in the Toulouse of 1894, as in the London of sixty years before, its mendicants "were so many of its sights, its Lions." The city literally swarmed with beggars. At every turn we came upon some living torso, distorted limb and hideous sore. Begging seemed to be the accepted livelihood of cripples, blind folk and the infirm. Let us hope that by this time something better has been devised for them all. Was it here that Richepin partly studied the mendicant fraternity, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animated ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... mate. The nose was but a gaping orifice above a deformed and twisted mouth. The thing was chinless, and its small, foreheadless head surrounded its colossal body like a cannon ball on a hill top. One arm was at least twelve inches longer than its mate, which was itself long in proportion to the torso, while the legs, similarly mismated and terminating in huge, flat feet that protruded laterally, caused the thing to lurch fearfully from side to side as ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... planted in her mind that daringly fearless thought of a human perfection as to the Intention of the Creative Cause. They used to look at the child as he lay asleep and note the beauty of him—his hands, his feet, his torso, the tint and ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... immobility that approached stupor, while the surgeon worked with intent haste to stop the flow of blood. The wound was most barbarous, and Williams' eyes filled with tears as he looked upon that magnificent torso mangled by buckshot. He loved his big partner—Haney was indeed his highest enthusiasm, his chief object of adoration, and to see him riddled in this way was devil's work. He lost hope. "It's all over with Mart Haney," he said, chokingly, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... a very marvellous copy, surely; one that might stand in the Vatican, with the Torso, or in the Louvre, beside the Venus of Milo, or in the British Museum, opposite the Pericles, or in Olympia itself, facing the Hermes, the greatest of all, and yet never be taken for anything but the work of a supreme master's own hands. But Constantine Logotheti shrugged his ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... jolting some tobacco ash off the ledge made by his abdomen, which he did by pounding the side of his torso with a bulky volume of the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini," "what is the theme of the most conspicuous portion of our fiction by feminine hands? In large measure it is a peevish criticism of husbands. We have the popular creator of a type of ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... were enabled to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... no clamor. The labor is heavy, and the laborers in earnest. Some of them wear round steel caps, but the majority are civilians with here and there a monk, the latter by the Latin cross at his girdle an azymite. Now and then the light flashes back from a naked torso streaming with perspiration. One man in armor rides up and down the lines on horseback. He too is in earnest. He speaks low when he has occasion to stop and give a direction, but his face seen in flashes of the light is serious, and knit with purpose. The movement of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... America, with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sometime before dawn he woke up feeling fairly normal and clear-headed and interested. This was where fifteen years of clean living counted for something. When Marcellin and his assistant had first stripped Monte to the waist the day before, they had paused for a moment to admire what they called his torso. It was not often, in their city practice, that they ran across a man of thirty with muscles as clearly outlined as ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... leg encased in a tight-fitting boot, was juggling deftly with the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; Prussia, a formidable hatchet imbedded in the heart of Germany, its edge just grazing the frontiers of France; whilst France itself suggested a vigorous torso ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... tight belt maketh the waistline small, the body bulgeth above and below eventually. So Eve began making a still wider plait—chasing, as it were, the "bulge" all over her body. In this manner she at last became encased in a belt wide enough to imprison her torso quite uncomfortably, but "she kept her figure"—or thought she did—and thus easily passed for one hundred and fifty years old when, in reality, she was ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... feet high and had curiously broad, square shoulders; but his imposing torso was ill supported. His legs were very thin and long, and they turned out a trifle. With his prominent nose, small head, and bright little slate-grey eyes, he looked rather like a stork. He was rheumatic, too, and ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... piece. The crossing-sweeper now has shaggy legs which end in hoofs. His way of looking at young people is very unpleasant;—and one had always thought him such a kindly old man. The butcher's boy—what a torso!—is walking with his arm round the waist of the young lady in Number seven. These are lovers, you see; but it's mostly on her side. He tilts up her chin and gives her a kiss before he goes; and she stands looking after him ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the muscular torso, and his face expressed pity, regret, embarrassment, and, perhaps, a ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... left arm above the elbow was welded a broad band of copper inscribed with a mark to identify Lua as her owner, for she was a slave. Her torso was bare, except for a cloak like Lua's which hung from her shoulders in the back to cover her wings. By this I knew she could ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... a slam, and, groping beneath the seat of the summer-house, found and handed to Clem the torso of an old rag doll, which, because it might be thrown against a window without breaking the glass, served as their wonted ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... feet. It was an impressively effortless motion. There was a thick wide torso on short thick legs under the golden fur. The structure was gorilla-like. Pilli might weigh around four ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... unfeminine pyjama; ruby lips, uncarmined, ajar; whilst to port like rocks from the ocean, unshaven chins rise unrebuked from blanket billows, and pyjama button and buttonhole play touch across the unseemly, unrestrained and unconfined masculine torso. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the accuracy of the lines of the Torso of the Vatican, (the Maestro of M. Angelo,) from those in one of M. Angelo's finest works, could perhaps scarcely be appreciated by any eye or feeling undisciplined by the most perfect and practical ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Priest of the old dispensation welcoming the childish representative of the new. Below is a great crowd, but it is this little figure which first attracts the eye. The contrast between the mass of architecture and the free and glowing country beyond is not without meaning, and a broken Roman torso, lying neglected on the ground, symbolises the downfall of the Pagan Empire. The flight of steps, with the figure sitting below them, is an idea borrowed from Carpaccio, and perhaps taken by him from the sketch-book of Jacopo Bellini. The men on the left are portraits of members ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... objects undergo a transformation. On the edge of the cliff, the old palm-tree, with its cluster of yellow leaves, becomes the torso of a woman leaning over the abyss, and poised by ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... passes like the shadow of a cloud, leaving no trace behind. Admirable as it may be in other respects, to the eye of the statesman, the physician, the lover of his species, it remains but a fragment, a torso. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... 243. Sala delle Iscrizione.—The walls are covered with Greek and Roman inscriptions, arranged in 12 divisions according to the subject. In this room are also some very interesting ancient sculptures. Among others (315) the Torso of a Faun. Cabinet of the Hermaphrodite.—The most important piece of sculpture here is 306 Hermaphrodite reclining on a lion's skin, avaluable Greek work; 318 Bust of Alexander the Great in suffering. Cabinet of Cameos.—A very ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Samson proudly stripped off his thin calico jacket and exposed a torso of terrifying power, but beautiful in its play of muscles ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... suffered great losses of territory in the storms and struggles of the past. The Germany of to-day, considered geographically, is a mutilated torso of the old dominions of the Emperors; it comprises only a fraction of the German peoples. A large number of German fellow-countrymen have been incorporated into other States, or live in political independence, like the Dutch, who have developed into a separate ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... tones, shadows hazy and undefined, misty and without form,—an enchanting foot, a living foot. They stood lost in admiration before this glorious fragment breaking forth from the incredible, slow, progressive destruction around it. The foot seemed to them like the torso of some Grecian Venus, brought to light amid the ruins of ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... singer and sorceress of great beauty, a veritable queen of the genus adventuress, who was setting the town by the ears not only by her loveliness but her voice. Her beauty was so remarkable that the Sunday papers were giving full pages to her face and torso alone. There were to be several light opera and stage beauties there also, a basso profundo to sing, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... feeling of too much strength! A glance at his body reinsured the first thought. It was not normal. His shirt bulged tightly at the shoulders with muscles. He was not tall—inches shorter than his brother Jerry, for instance—but the bulk of his body was incredible. His torso was a veritable barrel that bulged out both in the chest and the back. And even the tremendous thighs of Mac Strann were perceptibly bowed out by the weight which they had to carry. And there was about his management of his arms a peculiar awkwardness which only the very strongest ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... shall have you again. Torso, where we are exiled for the present, is only a night's ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... ceased to manipulate the unresponding controls. Stretching his trunklike torso to its full twenty feet, four heads gazed through observation ports at the four points of the compass while the remaining head desultorily ...
— Solar Stiff • Chas. A. Stopher
... Plimsoll number was showing. But the skipper was far from average. Brad Marbek, as Rick saw him on the deck overhead, was a bull of a man. He was about six feet tall, but his width made him look shorter. His shoulder span would have done credit to a Percheron horse, and from his shoulders his torso dropped in almost a straight line. His waist lacked only an inch or two of being as wide as his shoulders. His legs were short and thick and planted wide on the deck. His head was massive and set squarely on his shoulders with hardly any neck. He was hatless and his coarse black hair, ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... men, but very athletic, and of commanding air and stature, the body of one was painted with pipe-clay, that of the other with yellow ochre; and through these tints their well-defined muscles, firm as those of some antique torso, stood out in bold relief in the beams of the setting sun. The two made a fine group on which dress would have been quite superfluous, and absolutely a blot on ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... attempting to snare Peter in the brazen web of her comeliness. For to the old gentleman's eyes there was an abiding impudicity about Cissie's very charms. The passionate repose of her face was immodest; the possession of a torso such as a sculptor might have carved was brazen. The girl was shamefully ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... dismissed his model—an Italian, with a wonderfully fine torso and admirable capabilities for picturesque pose, whom he had easily persuaded to abandon his ice-cream barrow to sit for him two or three times a week, acting the part of studio servant in ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... in what conceivable sense the death of Jesus Christ can be the culmination and crown of His work, without which it would be a torso, an incomplete fragment, a partial fulfilment of the Father's design, and of His own mission, unless it be that that death was, as I take it the New Testament with one voice in all its parts declares it to be, a sacrifice for the sins of the world. I know of no construing of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more so, he expanded his fine torso. His Standard—bold he swore so—flying proudly, Still supreme should flow and flaunt, its defenders none should daunt. 'Twas a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... hours. He could not get out of his mind the girl he had met and taken to punishment. A dozen pictures of her rose before him, all of them mental snapshots snatched from his experience of the night. Now he was struggling to hold her down, his knees clamped to her writhing, muscular torso. Again he held her by the strong, velvet-smooth arms while her eyes blazed fury and defiance at him. Or her stinging words pelted him as she breasted the hill slopes with supple ease. Most vivid of all were the ones at her father's camp, ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Torch torcxo. Toreador toreadoro. Torment turmenti. Torment turmento—ado. Torpedo torpedo. Torpedo boat torpedboato. Torpid sensenta. Torpidity sensenteco. Torpor sensento. Torrent torento. Torrid varmega. Torsion tordo. Torso torso. Tortoise testudo. Tortuous torda. Torture turmentego. Torture turmentegi. Tory konservativulo. Toss skui. Toss (throw) jxeti. Total tuto, a. Totality tuteco. Totter sxanceli. Touch tusxi. Touch (feel) palpi. Touch lightly tusxeti. Touch up (improve) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... one of them, a young man with a torso noble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal hills, ran here and there calling ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... o'clock, I find him seated on the floor, in the middle of my rooms, with naked torso (this is a sufficiently proper costume for private life here, I admit). Around him are grouped Chrysantheme, Oyouki, and Mademoiselle Dede the maid, all eagerly rubbing his back with little blue towels decorated with storks and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... eminently successful, seemed at the time well-nigh hopeless. All the conventual buildings, and everything outside the actual walls of the church had been alienated, and, to a great extent, destroyed, and of the church itself but a battered torso remained. The nave had been destroyed at the Dissolution, and its site had become the parish churchyard; the south transept had perished in the fire of 1830, and its unroofed area had also become a burying-ground; ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... dressing-room, the dividing-curtain was drawn. Max, in deerskin trousers but with unpainted torso looked very white and strange as he put the last touches of war-paint on Louis' face. He glanced round at Alvina, then went on with his work. There was a sort of nobility about his erect white form and stiffly-carried head, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... work, rose from bed unrested and retired with all her bones aching. But she was of a natural grace that hard work could not make awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though no more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest thrown forward, her back like the torso of a Venus de Milo, her head placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child molded in the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes—very long, excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so imperfectly that once Reybold had seen it ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... slung in the waist under the midship awning—for he had given up all the accommodation below to his guests. He got out with a sudden swift movement, flung off his sleeping jacket, rolled his pyjamas up his thighs, and stole forward, unseen by the one Kanaka of the anchor-watch. His white torso, naked like a stripped athlete's, glimmered, ghostly, in the deep shadows of the deck. Unnoticed he got out of the ship over the knight-heads, ran along the back rope, and seizing the dolphin-striker firmly with both hands, lowered himself into the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... at the precise instant when he has brought the greatest possible bodily strength into play in order to give to the disc its highest force. The body is bent forward, the toes of one foot cling to the ground, the muscles of the torso are strained, the whole body is in an attitude of violent tension which can endure only for an instant. Yet the face is free from contortion, free from any trace of effort, calm and beautiful. This shows that Myron, intent as he was ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the sidewalk, with the stumps bound with leather, carrying a little tray of lead-pencils which nobody seemed to buy. He felt like that cripple. A man living to-day in the heart of civilization, where money is in reality legs and wings and hands, is nothing more than a torso without it, he thought. He felt mutilated, unspeakably humiliated. It seemed more out of his ability to get any honest employment than it had ever done before. A number of laborers with their dinner-satchels, and their pickaxes over their shoulders, passed him. They looked at him, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... end—he stood still at the gates of the court, which were opened as the rest of the party came up; and, as they crossed and entered the hall, they beheld, through the open door of the drawing-room, two figures in the window—one, a dark torso, perched outside on the sill; the other, in blue skirt and boy-like bodice, negligently reposing on one side of the window-seat, her dainty little boots on the other; her coarse straw bonnet, crossed with white, upon the floor; the wind playing tricks with the silky glory of her flaxen ringlets; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Theseus, which is from the sculptures of the eastern pediment. The sculptures upon this pediment represented the story of the birth of Athena, and it was proper that Theseus should be present, as he was king over Athens, of which city Athena, or Minerva, was the protecting goddess. Torso is a term used in sculpture to denote a mutilated figure, and many such remains of ancient sculpture exist which are so beautiful, even in their ruin, that they are the pride of the museums where they are, and serve as studies for the artists of all time. This figure of Theseus ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... shot into the helio window. It showed me Snap lying there on the floor. He was bound with wire. His torso had been stripped. His livid face was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... over, apron and all? I'd go on with my profession at once, as you call it, if the governor would set me up with a studio in London; but as to sculpture at Barchester—I suppose half the people here don't know what a torso means." ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and leaned forward, thus bringing her torso into a ravishing position. She had the air of one who has done many things besides work in the Treasury Department. No least detail, as she observed, was lost on Mr. Sluss. He noted her shoes, which were button patent leather with cloth tops; her gloves, which were glace black ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... half-pathetic cadence of that well-known Chorus, "The world's great age begins anew." Of dramatic interest it has but little; nor is the play, as finished, equal to the promise held forth by the superb fragment of its so-called Prologue. (Forman, 4 page 95.) This truly magnificent torso must, I think, have been the commencement of the drama as conceived upon a different and more colossal plan, which Shelley rejected for some unknown reason. It shows the influence not only of the Book of Job, but also of the Prologue ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... green. In the second place, the larger mouth, complete with jaws and impressive musculature, opened not into a digestive system, but into a large closed pouch which comprised most of the animal's torso. There was no proper digestive system at all, only a rudimentary gut, heavily laced with blood vessels, terminating at one end in the small second mouth, at the other in an even smaller anus. Otherwise, the thing had no insides except ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... own resources to fall back upon. Our experience is like that of the monkish builders, according to many an old legend, who found every morning that yesterday's work had been pulled down in the darkness by demon hands. There is no man whose character is anything more than a torso, an incomplete attempt to build up the structure that was in his mind—like the ruins of half-finished palaces and temples which travellers came across sometimes in lands now desolate, reared by a forgotten race who were swept away by some unknown calamity, and have left the stones half-lifted ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... if remembering scraps of conversation he had segregated from the murmur inside, and rolled his long body over until he rested on his belly with the upper part of his torso raised ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... palms, and supple and tall, these colored women and men impress one powerfully by their dignified carriage and easy elegance of movement. They walk without swinging of the shoulders;—the perfectly set torso seems to remain rigid; yet the step is a long full stride, and the whole weight is springily poised on the very tip of the bare foot. All, or nearly all, are without shoes: the treading of many naked feet over the heated pavement makes ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... bird; and my soul is in that bird." When the bird is seized by the hero of the story, the Rakshas feels that something terrible has occurred. When the bird's legs and wings are pulled off, the Rakshas becomes a mere head and torso; and when the bird's neck is wrung, down falls the Rakshas dead. In like manner, in the tale of "The Demon and the King's Son" (No. 24), the demon dies when the prince has killed a certain bird, the lives of the bird and of the demon being ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... and bestowed it safely with the spoil of the young patrician. "Of course I must show up," he said as he betook himself to his tub whence he emerged shapely as an Adonis with the corded torso of an athlete. The appetizing breakfast put the Major in excellent humor, and he drew forth his "sailing orders" as he lit his first cheroot. Seated in a window recess, he watched the hotel frontage, while he read the imperative lines again. They were explicit enough and had been dictated en reine. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... upon his back. Steel fingers circled his throat, choking the cry which sprang to the lips of the terrified man. Strong teeth fastened themselves in his shoulder, and powerful legs wound themselves about his torso. ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... road, the bathtub contraption bounced on its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders, thus draped, were surmounted by a huge head, which by reason ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... strange wistfulness as they watched Harrigan strip off his shirt, but when they saw the wasted arms, lean, with the muscles defined and corded as if by famine, their faces went blank again. For they glanced in turn at the vast torso of McTee. When he moved his arms, his smooth shoulders rippled in significant spots—the spots where the driving muscles lay. But Harrigan saw nothing save the throat of ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... ruthless, then. He wrenched away the other arm. He battered at the unseen torso. The feet of the desperate mech smashed at his knees and thighs, staggering him. Then he bore the armless torso of the mech backward and ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... ghost had gained ground. Roland saw him at the end of the passage, this time distinctly outlined against the gray background of the night. He redoubled his pace, and as he crossed the threshold of the passage, he fancied that the ghost was plunging into the bowels of the earth. But the torso still remained visible. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Calais it was as a maundering young wretch in a clammy perspiration and dripping saline particles, who was conscious of no extremities but the one great extremity, sea-sickness—who was a mere bilious torso, with a mislaid headache somewhere in its stomach—who had been put into a horrible swing in Dover Harbour, and had tumbled giddily out of it on the French coast, or the Isle of Man, or anywhere. Times have changed, and now I enter Calais self-reliant and rational. I know where ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... scenes at pleasure or as the exigencies of space demanded. Here, Samson-like, he tore the Numean lion jaw from jaw, his knee sunk in the shaggy chest, his shoulders ripped to the bone as the hooked claws gripped the muscles, his mighty torso a dripping crimson in the scheme of colour. There he cleansed the Augean stable in a faithfulness of detail more admirable in its approach to nature than its appeal to the sensibilities, the artist having left nothing to the imagination; beyond was the more human note, and Omphale ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... in his appraisement, with a touch of scorn, the clean-shaven face and general neatness of the other, but as against this effeminacy he offset the steady-eyed fearlessness of gaze and the smooth power of shoulders and torso that ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... fifteenth century it is the revelation of a whole world, a world in itself. We can scarcely realize all this; but let us look and reflect, and even we may feel as must have felt the man of the Renaissance in the presence of that mutilated, stained, battered torso. He sees in that broken stump a grandeur of outline, a magnificence of osseous structure, a breadth of muscle and sinew, a smooth, firm covering of flesh, such as he would vainly seek in any of his living models; he sees a delicate and infinite variety of indentures, of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... drove him mad. "The women—oh, the women!" he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated Mugneeficent to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules torso. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... by Huldricksson himself, who must have risen just as I left the cabin. The Norseman had slipped on a pair of pajamas and, giant torso naked under the sun, he strode out upon us. We all of us looked at him a trifle anxiously. But Olaf's madness had left him. In his eyes was much sorrow, but the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... were against the chest of his upholder. He flung his arms backwards round Doughty's fore-arms, thus keeping himself pressed upon the other, his stomach arched outwards, his legs curled back each side round the other's knees, his arms, also backwards, pressing the other's torso in a curve that followed and supported his own with the disadvantage of having his full weight ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... his torso like a vise but his legs were unsupported and weighed what seemed a thousand tons. He could feel them stretching. Somewhere a coil slipped a fraction. His arms were jerked suddenly upwards and Johnny knew a sensation he'd never believed possible. At the same time his ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... in vain!... Then with strange, uncanny persistence, one face rose again and again before his mental vision, clear, vital—the face of the enigmatic Thomery, with his silver white hair, his red face, his light blue eyes, that Yankee head of his, well set on his robust torso.... ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... it. The Martian's legs and arms joined his torso at a slightly different angle, giving him an angular look. That was what made him look like a caricature of a human, although he was human, of course—as human as ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... tripo. triumph : triumf'i, -o. troop : trupo, bando. tropic : tropiko. trot : troti. trough : trogo. trousers : pantalono. trout : truto. trowel : trulo. tramp : (cards), atuto. trumpet : trumpeto. trunk : (animal) rostro; (tree) trunko; (box) kofro; (body) torso. trust : fidi. try : provi, peni. Tsar : Caro. tuber : tubero. tuft : tufo. tumbler : glaso. tumult : tumulto. tune : ario, melodio; agordi. turbot : rombfisxo. turkey : meleagro. turn : turn'i, -igxi; torni; pivoti; vico. turnip : napo. turpentine : terebinto. turquoise ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... was no longer sought after for subject pieces. He was in clamorous demand at Life Schools, where he drew a higher rate of pay, but where he was as impersonal to the intently working students as the cast of the Greek torso which other students were copying in the next room. The intimacy of the studio, the warmth and the colour and the meretricious luxury were gone from his life. On the other hand he was making money. He had fifty pounds in the Savings Bank, the maximum of petty thrift which an incomprehensive British ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... who opened the door. Because the night was hot he had shed coat and shirt, and his fine torso, bare to the shoulders and at the neck, gleamed in the electric light. Willy Cameron had not seen him since those spring days when he had made his casual, bold-eyed visits to Edith at the pharmacy, and he had a swift ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... surgeon's nimble fingers proceeded with the utmost unconcern to open wide the patient's torso. Other pairs of hands, belonging to nurses, aided in this; and Billie found the intricate process decidedly interesting rather than otherwise. Of course she was spared the odor ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... handed it to an attendant. To another he gave the rose. Shane handed his coat and hat to a saturnine French corporal. Ahmet Ali took his shirt off. Kicked away his sandals. There was the dramatic appearance of an immense bronze torso. The Syrians smiled. The French soldiers looked judicially grave. Ahmet Ali stood talking for an instant with one of his men, a lean bilious-seeming Turk. The Turk was urging something with eagerness. The wrestler's soft girl's face ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Bentley, with the air and the preformed bias of a professional skeptic, went all over the boy's torso, starting with a prolonged examination of the heart action ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... approximates too closely to the manner of Erasmus Darwin to suit a modern ear. Another fragment called L'Invention sums Chenier's Ars Poetica in the verse "Sur des pensers nouveaux, faisons des vers antiques." Suzanne represents the torso of a Biblical poem on a very large scale, in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... much like Estra, but shorter, and with a little more flesh about the torso. His forehead bulged directly over his eyes, instead of above his ears, as did Estra's; also his eyes were smaller and not as far apart. His whole expression was equally kind and affable, despite a curiously shriveled appearance of his lips; they made the front ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... the waist-line, thick-shouldered, with large head and bull throat, his muscular torso tapered down to clean-lined hips, his legs of no greater girth than those of the lean-bodied man confronting him, his feet small in glove-fitting boots. His eyes, prominent and full and a clear brown, were a shade too innocent. Chin, jaw, and mouth, the latter full-lipped, ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... is used as a museum for the antiquities discovered at Nismes, and contains some admirable specimens. Among these are a torso in marble of a Roman knight, in a cuirass, and another colossal torso, with a charming little draped statue seated in a curule chair, and holding a cornucopia in the left hand; a cinerary monument, enriched with bassi-relievi, representing a human sacrifice; a bronze head of Apollo, much ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... three months in summer; that is why I try for it. If I get it, which I shall not, I should be independent at once. Sweet thought. I liked your Byron well; your Berlioz better. No one would remark these cuts; even I, who was looking for it, knew it not at all to be a torso. The paper strengthens me in my recommendation to you to follow Colvin's hint. Give us an 1830; you will do it well, and the subject ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only to lose the 'prize of his high calling'. Sir Walter Scott, one of his kindlier censors, rebukes him for 'the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as if in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which like the Torso of antiquity defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them'. But whatever may be said for or against Coleridge as an 'inventor of harmonies', neither the fineness of his self-criticism nor the laborious diligence which he expended on perfecting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... corrupt: and then, in their artists, what a sense of beauty! I remarked that much less in the old days. You taught me to see. My eyes were opened in the light of Rome. Your Renaissance men have helped me to understand these. A page of Debussy, a torso of Rodin, a phrase of Suares, these are all in the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. It was a mental impression. The man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous. It was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a false report that melted under direct vision. O'Malley took him in with attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of herself always astonished her, and she would look as surprised and ecstatic as a young girl who has discovered her puberty. Slowly, slowly, she spread out her arms in order to give full value to her figure, which suggested the torso of a plump Venus. She bent herself this way and that and examined herself before and behind, stooping to look at the side view of her bosom and at the sweeping contours of her thighs. And she ended with a strange amusement which consisted of swinging ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... twenty paces long; that in which the bathers disrobed is eighty feet in height; the whole is covered with marble, and with such beautiful marble that mantel ornaments are now made of its fragments. In the sixteenth century the Farnese Hercules was discovered here, and the Torso and Venus Callipygis, and I know not how many other masterpieces; and in the seventeenth century hundreds of statues. No people, probably, will ever again display the same luxurious conveniences, the same diversions, and especially the same ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... but through the inner door came the strident tones of the lieutenant's modulating contralto. He had expected to see the general towering over the girl's shrinking figure, but as he entered she was bent earnestly in the middle, and the top of her torso inclined toward General Morrison, who had tilted as far back as his swivel ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... interrupted by a raucous voice overhead, and both boys looked up to see the mate's thick torso hanging over the rail. He was shaking his fist ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... Skippy, glancing down at the bulging front that gave him the torso of a wrestler. Then he began to wonder which was the owner of the still slightly moist tie. But soon all discomforts, even the intricate maze of forks and knives, were forgotten before the alarming problem of the shirt front. When he sat upright, stiff as ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... the hours glided away two thousand years ago, when the artists who executed these masterpieces were yet alive. But the most melancholy impression which we experience at the Vatican, is in contemplating the remains of statues which are collected there: the torso of Hercules, heads separated from the trunks, and a foot of Jupiter, which indicates a greater and more perfect statue than any that we know. We fancy a field of battle before us, where time has fought with genius; and these ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... and kissing them gallantly). George is perfectly right, dear soul. Our Peregrine requires a naked mauley (clenches Aunt Julia's white hand into a fist)—something like this, only bigger and harder—applied to his torso— ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... is, the mural decorations of the ancients, were discovered, and the Apollo of the Belvedere was found at Porto d'Anzio. Under Julius II followed the memorable discoveries of the Laocoon, of the Venus of the Vatican, of the Torso of the Cleopatra. The palaces of the nobles and the cardinals began to be filled with ancient statues and fragments. Raphael undertook for Leo X that ideal restoration of the whole ancient city which his (or Castiglione's) celebrated letter (1518 or 1519) speaks of. After a bitter complaint over ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... like white apparitions issuing from their embrasure of columns and advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. The sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their heads and strange headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating their athletic muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross, the three giants rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smiling, in a radiant ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his "terrible manner." Already were invented in his brain that race of superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned utterance. Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master to symbolise force. We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Yet while the "Pieta" is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those contorted lines that are commonly ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... a passion in Ingres' line for the like of which we have to go back to the Greeks. Apelles could not have realised more exquisite simplifications, could not have dreamed into any of his lost works a purer soul of beauty than Ingres did into the head, arms, and torso of "La Source". The line that floats about the muscles of an arm is illusive, evanescent, as an evening-tinted sky; and none except the Greeks and Ingres have attained such mystery of line: not Raphael, not even Michael Angelo in the romantic anatomies ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... stream and moves As though in dread to wake some sleeping god, Yet still she nears and nears the further bank Where there is shade under a shumac's eaves. The brilliant surface cut her right in two, And the reflection of her bronzed torso Hid all beneath the polished gliding mirror; How her face listened to that sleep divine Whose audible breath was ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Bradley lay slightly raised upon his left elbow, his right arm free, and as the thing came close, he cut at the hideous face with all the strength that lay within him. The blade struck at the junction of the neck and torso and with such force as to completely decapitate the Wieroo, the hideous head dropping to the floor and the body falling forward upon the Englishman. Pushing it from him he rose to his feet and ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... don't know." Professor Pettibone looked down his torso with an impersonal eye. "I think the greenish skin pigmentation is a result of mineral-heavy vapors that occur during certain seasons. The growth. As to my body—I ...
— Say "Hello" for Me • Frank W. Coggins
... poor devil, but anyhow I'm not in a position to be going around with ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,—very good things. Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras's mind is as sick as his torso. By the way, he calls himself 'Charles Boyd,' so I suppose we needn't recall to him his former experiences by ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tree, muffled in green, leans out over the stream as the lightning bowed it long ago, propped by wooden stays, mutilated to the merest torso of a tree. A sacred thing, the elm tree is inclosed and guarded by a wooden railing as in ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... not only sits at the windows of the eyes, and hangs upon the gateway of the lips; she speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror and supplication cries out from that headless and limbless trunk! Decapitate Laocooen, and his knotted muscles will still express the ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... open, grassy level before the cave mouth, the two great fires burned steadily in the sun. The giant Ook-ootsk, hideous with his ape-like forehead, his upturned, flaring nostrils, his protruding jaw, his shaggy, clay-colored torso, and his short, massive, grotesquely bowed legs—of which one was twisted so that the toes pointed almost backwards—lay sprawling and chuckling benevolently near the entrance, while a swarm of little ones, A-ya's two among them, clambered over him. The old men and the old women most of them ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... men meet for a struggle which for either may end alone in death. The Indian was magnificent in mien, superb in confidence. Fear was not in him. His vast figure, nourished on sweet meat of the plains, fed by pure air and developed by continual exercise, showed like the torso of a minor Hercules, powerful but not sluggish in its power. His broad and deep chest, here and there spotted with white scars, arched widely for the vital organs, but showed no clogging fat. His legs were corded and thin. His arms were also slender, but showing full of easy-playing muscles with ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the plane, the hammer, the chisel, each requires its special muscular energy. The carpenter, unlike the blacksmith, does not put all his brawn into his shoulders, nor develop his torso at the expense of his other muscles, like the mason. It may also be said that, unlike most other occupations, the carpenter has both out-of-door and indoor exercise, so that he is at all times able to follow his occupation, summer or winter, rain or shine; and ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... blank out his mind while the meditechs adjusted the neurocontacts to his head and torso. They finished at last and withdrew. He was alone in the booth now, looking at the dead-white walls, completely bare except for the viewscreen before his eyes. The screen finally began to glow slightly, then brightened into a series of shifting colors. The colors merged ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... Who my trumpet thus is blowing," Said young Werner, in his anger Starting from his seat so quickly That the storks thereby much frightened, Fluttering upward sought the tower; And so quickly that they even Had no time to take the eel off. Like a poor old torso lay he On the sand so pitifully; And the chronicles are silent Whether the old father stork came Ever back to ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... He stood happily trading blows with Slashaway Tommy, his lean-fleshed torso gleaming with sweat. He preferred to work the pugnacity out of himself slowly, to ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... whatever the thing was, it had leaped upon our deer and was devouring it in great mouthfuls which it swallowed without mastication. The creature appeared to be a great lizard at least ten feet high, with a huge, powerful tail as long as its torso, mighty hind legs and short forelegs. When it had advanced from the wood, it hopped much after the fashion of a kangaroo, using its hind feet and tail to propel it, and when it stood erect, it sat upon its tail. Its head was long and thick, with a blunt muzzle, and the opening ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... back his head with a grunt that slid swiftly into a gurgle, and the shadow of a man's torso, monstrous beneath a huge inverted bottle, wavered and danced on the frown of the cliff at our backs. Palitlum released his lips from the glass with a caressing suck and glanced regretfully up into the ghostly vault of the sky where played ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... bishop. 'Look at that, Lotte; isn't it the little man all over, apron and all? I'd go on with my profession at once, as you call it, if the governor would set me up with a studio in London; but as to sculpture at Barchester—I suppose half the people here don't know what a torso means.' ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... his boat to me at least he seemed incomplete. The tug herself without his head and torso on the bridge looked mutilated as it were. But he left her very seldom. All the time I remained in harbour I saw him only twice on shore. On the first occasion it was at my charterers, where he came in misanthropically to get paid for towing out a French ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... thump it and listen to it. For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,—displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance to overhaul such an interesting malformation. And so I managed to do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time. The torso was slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,—the left full, round, and of perfect symmetry. It had run away with the life of the other limbs,—a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you before. If you see a man with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... barrel-chested, with or without the hump. Some were as thin as skeletons, with huge heads; some were hulking miniatures of Brute. One steatopygean girl was so bulky in legs and hindquarters that she could waddle only a few inches with each step, yet her head and upper torso ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... interest to this neighborhood. It was the Parliament Oak, so called in memory of an assemblage of the kind held by King John beneath its shade. The lapse of upward of six centuries had reduced this once mighty tree to a mere crumbling fragment, yet, like a gigantic torso in ancient statuary, the grandeur of the mutilated trunk gave evidence of what it had been in the days of its glory. In contemplating its mouldering remains, the fancy busied itself in calling up the scene that must have been presented beneath ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... bracelet in the form of a serpent in several coils, held a long gold scepter with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his body was wrapt in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited, bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold plates. Between the band and the belt his torso appeared, shining and polished like pink granite shaped by a cunning workman. Sandals with returned toes, like skates, shod his long narrow feet, placed together like those of the gods on the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... in the blackness he saw it—the lifted arms, the bare torso of the man, writhing under the agony of realisation—the tools, symbols of a life's toil, lying as they had dropped for ever from the hands that should work no more. It had sent a shudder through him, even amid the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
