"Devastating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... joints, their fierce short spear thrusts did no damage. Presently four more corpses lay still and Stevens, with his, to them incredible, earthly strength, was once more upon his feet in spite of their utmost efforts to pinion his mighty limbs, and was again swinging his devastating weapon. Half their force lying upon the field, wiped out by a small, but invincible and apparently invulnerable being, the remainder broke and ran, pursued by Stevens to the point where the red monsters had first ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... wild-ox revelled in dense herbage that often concealed his whole body; gray, black, and yellow elephants of the most gigantic size burst headlong, like a living hurricane, through the forests, breaking, rending, tearing down, devastating every thing in their path; upon the woody slopes of the hills trickled cascades and springs flowing northward; there, too, the hippopotami bathed their huge forms, splashing and snorting as they frolicked in the water, and ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... the Randall drawing-room were failures, chilled by brief but devastating invasions of Mrs. Randall with a too polite manner and disapproving eyes. But wherever the crowd drifted after school hours, Judith drifted, too, or was summoned by telephone, by imperative messages, vague, and of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... war had been increased by the deadly bubonic plague which appeared in Europe early in 1348. In April it had reached Florence; by August it was devastating France and Germany; it then spread over England from the southwest northward, attacking every part of the country during the year 1349. This disease, like other terrible epidemics, such as smallpox and cholera, came ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... for some hesitation," said he. "St. Riok was only two years old when he overcame the dragon. Who says that nine or ten years later he could have done as much? Remember, father, that the dragon who is devastating our island has devoured little Elo and four or five other young boys. Brother Samuel is not go presumptuous as to believe that at nineteen years of age he is more innocent than they were ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Mac would say, in his rich brogue. "My wife was at the ball last night," the other would reply in a brogue of deeper richness, "but it wasn't a masked ball." The first Mac would then express an overwhelming surprise, as he countered with the devastating question, "Was ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... along the galley's deck sufficed to reveal to the Englishmen the devastating effect which that single broadside of langrage had wrought upon the unfortunate craft's crew. It had been fired at such close range that the missiles had only spread just sufficiently to include the entire range of the deck in its destructive ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... wanderings, they reached the coast. Add to all this the fact that most African sculpture is in wood (except, of course, those famous products of early European influence, the bronze castings from Benin), that this wood is exposed to a devastating climate—hot and damp—to say nothing of the still more deadly white ants, and you will probably agree that the dealer or amateur who betickets his prizes with such little tags as "Gaboon, 10th century" evinces a perhaps ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... and he replied that, by what he gathered of folks' talk as they went up together from the beach, he supposed it must be one of the Paumotus. This was in itself probable enough, for the Dangerous Archipelago had been swept that year from east to west by devastating smallpox; but Herrick thought it a strange course to lie from Sydney. Then ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... stood on the north-west corner of North and Richmond streets. It was built in 1654, and kept by Nicholas Upsall, a Quaker, who was persecuted, imprisoned, and banished for his faith. Near this spot the devastating fire of November 27, 1676, broke ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... annals of Indian history testify more scantily but not less eloquently to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then under Akbar won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for a time succeeded in bringing almost the whole of ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... Madam lying dead in it, and servants who would resent her appearance, and Gaga; and Sally was such a little girl in the face of a definite trial. She was a little girl, and she would never be able to deal with what lay ahead. It was a long, devastating spasm of doubt, like a trembling of the earth. The house towered above her, huge and gloomy; and other houses, equally oppressive, continued from the Merricks' house, with basements and railings and great black fronts and lace ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... do as he liked with it!" said a mild, piping falsetto; "And so far, he has made it beau-ti-ful!—beau-ti-ful!" carved with traceries of natural fruit and foliage, which were scarcely injured by the devastating mark of time. But rough and sacrilegious hands had been at work to spoil and deface the classic remains of the time-worn edifice, and some of the lancet windows had been actually hewn out and widened to admit of the insertion ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Constabulary, labored on in the glory of service: eradicated cholera, built roads and bridges, brought six hundred thousand children into school that two score tribes might find a common tongue, fought the devastating cattle plagues, wiped out brigandage and piracy, brought order and first semblance of prosperity to eight ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... So devastating had been the character of the late wars in Tahiti, that we found it impossible to obtain supplies, and we therefore sailed for Ulitea, the largest of the Georgian group, where we were informed that we should probably be more successful. No sooner had we dropped anchor within the coral bed ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... tempest waves no keel Hath ever sailed. A grim smile held your lips when strong men quailed. You strove alone with chaos and prevailed; You felt the grinding shock and did not reel, And, ah, your hand that cut the battle's path Wide with the devastating plague of wrath, Your bleeding hand, gentle with pity yet, Did not forget To bless, to ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... imposes few restraints upon its user. If you shoot somebody who doesn't need to be shot, he may not like it but he isn't permanently harmed. So the twelve who'd followed Hoddan poured in what would have been a murderous fire if they'd been shooting bullets, but was no worse than devastating ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... 1875).] Thanks to the goats, Maltese fever has lately been introduced into Calabria. Man, with his charcoal-burning, has completed the disaster. What happens? The friable rock, no longer sustained by plant-life, crashes down with each thunderstorm, blocks up the valleys, devastating large tracts of fertile land; it creates swamps in the lowlands, and impedes the outflow of water to the sea. These ravenous fiumare have become a feature in Calabrian scenery; underneath one of the most terrible of them lies the birthplace of Praxiteles. Dry or half-dry during the warm months, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elemental raison d'etre of their lives. Baree hung to the trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted McTaggart. He continued to strip his traps of their bait and the humor grew ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton, the two vocations are "non-compossible." Bridge himself was undertaking a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods; and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a class of men who were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Hotel, and the adjoining Luna Park. These men related their own experiences and impressions. Their auditors were able to appreciate the stupendous task of the landing parties and the heroism with which they had held on to the ground gained under devastating enemy fire and the ravages of disease. Of the relative positions of the opposing forces little of a definite nature was known, nor could anything be ascertained as to the plans for the future. The fact that so ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... and security of America and American citizens might have been the subject of international adjudication but for the arrogance of the ruling forces of the Teutons. In a broad sense, Prussianism is credited with responsibility for the devastating war and for the policy which drew America into ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... winds. It is unnecessary for me to prove that the motion of winds can be transmitted to other matter, as we have numerous examples from our observation and experience, in the case of windmills driven by the motive power of the winds, and also balloons urged along by the same cause; apart from the devastating effect produced in towns and country by a hurricane ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began indolently to study diseases generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... disinherited, Must steal in secret through his own domain; While his first peer and nearest relative Contends against him in the hostile ranks; Ay, his unnatural mother leads them on. Around us towns and peaceful hamlets burn. Near and more near the devastating fire Rolls toward these vales, which yet repose in peace. Therefore, good neighbors, I have now resolved, While God still grants us safety, to provide For my three daughters; for 'midst war's alarms Women require protection, and true love Hath power to render lighter every ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... animated by that ferocious wrath which is the mother of heroism! . . . Their despairing expressions mutely sought the nearest officers, the leaders, even the colonel. They simply could go no further! Such a long, devastating march in such a few days, and what for? . . . The superior officers, who knew no more than their men, seemed to be replying with their eyes, as though they possessed a secret—"Courage! One more effort! . . . This is going to come to an end ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and ill-fortune had exposed it to plunder and conflagration. The insurgents, irreparably injured by the disaster of Savenay, by the loss of their principal leader, and their best soldiers, by the devastating system of the infernal columns, now desired nothing more than to live on good terms with the republic. The war now depended only on a few chiefs, upon Charette, Stofflet, etc. Hoche saw that it was necessary to wean ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... cimeter in the other, urged on their resistless course, till they were arrested by the Atlantic on the one side, and the Indian ocean on the other—of the stern crusaders, who, nursed amid the cloistered shades and castellated realms of Europe, struggled with that devastating horde "when 'twas strongest, and ruled it when 'twas wildest"—of the long agony, silent decay, and ultimate resurrection of the Eternal City—are so many immortal pictures, which, to the end of the world, will fascinate every ardent and imaginative ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards to the ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... in the late afternoon to advance against our positions in a line of small sections, which was met with the usual devastating fire, the enemy gave it up and occupied the remaining hours of daylight with fierce shelling. Our heavy artillery had at last returned and got to work and their shelling began to have effect, for it was noticeable that the Boche shells were now arriving from a greater ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... a rational point of view some of her feelings and emotions were very devastating for her own existence and her own serenity. And her deep attachment to the family was also a source of pain and suffering because of its acuteness. There was not much family left but for those who remained, Nelka gave ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... he cried, and begged for mercy; but they raised a devastating shindy, and gave the stone a trundle. Down the turf it rolled and rolled, and then whoo! leaped over the edge of the fall into space and down—down—till it smote the waters far below, and knocked a mighty hole in them, and ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lived and died with large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and I do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that the landscape is not peopled by a ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... quite plentiful in that part of the Sierra Nevada in the early 90's, when, as State Forester, I co-operated with the first superintendent of the National Park, Capt. Wood, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, in driving out the sheep-men with their devastating flocks of "hoofed locusts," and protecting ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... dogs; eradicate &c 301. Adj. destroyed &c v.; perishing &c v.; trembling to its fall, nodding to its fall, tottering to its fall; in course of destruction &c n.; extinct. all-destroying, all-devouring, all-engulfing. destructive, subversive, ruinous, devastating; incendiary, deletory^; destroying &c n.. suicidal; deadly &c (killing) 361. Adv. with crushing effect, with a sledge hammer. Phr. delenda est Carthago [Lat.]; dum Roma deliberat Saguntum perit [Lat.]; ecrasez ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... more devastating criticism was published in Le Journal des Debats by Jules Janin. He went out of his way, indeed, to be positively offensive. Nor did Theophile Gautier, who in his famous waistcoat of crimson velvet was present on ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... searching for gold. In ancient times gold and other metals had been found there in abundance, and remains of the old furnaces still dotted the country. Forty cities had lived by the mines, and would, Burton averred, still be living by them but for the devastating wars that had for centuries spread ruin and destruction. He, reasoned, indeed, much as Balzac had done about the mines of Sardinia as worked by the Romans, and from no better premises; but several of his schemes had a distinctly Balzacian aroma, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... France, and Spain, proved Mary's complicity, produced an actual threat of war from France, and made the Pope and Philip gnash their teeth with rage. The Roman Catholic allied powers had no sufficient navy, and Philip's credit was at its lowest ebb after Drake's devastating raid. The English were exultant, east and west; for the True Report of a Worthie Fight performed in the voiage from Turkie by Five Shippes of London against 11 gallies and two frigats of the King of Spain ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... and immediately after this engagement the Indians divided themselves into small parties for the purpose of devastating the country. They made their appearance simultaneously in the southern part of the peninsula as far north as Picolata and from the extreme east below St. Augustine to the west, carrying off everything that was useful to them and destroying the remainder. At New River, on the ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... Koords and Tartars from the east, Roumanians and Slavs from beyond the Balkans. The roads from the northwest are lined with trains bringing supplies and siege-machinery. The cities along the shores of the Black Sea have yielded to Mahommed; those which defied him are in ruins. An army is devastating Morea. The brother whom His Majesty the Emperor installed ruler there is dead or a wanderer, no man can say in what parts. Assistance cannot be expected from him. Above us, far as the sea, the bays are crowded with ships of all classes; four hundred hostile sail have been counted from ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... me much joy. But now how different! though absent, I deeply lament the more your tribulations and calamities; the manner in which the Pagans contaminate the sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of saints around the altar, devastating the joy of our house, and trampling on the bodies of holy men in the temple of God, as though they were treading on a dunghill in the street. But of what effect is our wailing unless we come before the altars of Christ and cry, 'Spare me, O Lord! spare thy people, and take not ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... an exhibition of the savage mind in a new guise. We have only to add, with regard to Pomaree, that it appears by other authorities, as well as by the notice we find in Rutherford, that he was in the habit of making very devastating excursions occasionally to the southern part of the island. When Cruise left New Zealand in 1820, he had been away on one of these expeditions nearly a year, nor was it known exactly where he had gone to. The people about the mouth ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... did the flames advance to the devoted scene of their ministry; nothing could impede their progress. They removed every obstacle by the desolation they occasioned, and several hundred miles of prostrate forests and smitten woods marked their devastating way. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... window and witnessed the spectacle for which the unhappy captain had prayed long and devoutly. The Philadelphia was in flames—red, devouring flames, pouring out of her hold, climbing the rigging, licking her topmasts, forming fantastic columns—devastating, unconquerable flames—the frigate was doomed, doomed! And every now and then one of her guns would explode as though booming out her ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... been upright and conscientious; he had given good, wholesome counsel, worthy of his knowledge and experience. Miss Maggimore had actually asked him if the papers were good for anything; and he had actually informed her that they were very valuable, thus saving them from a devastating conflagration in the cooking-stove. Miss Maggimore had actually been paid five hundred dollars for opening that chest, and taking therefrom the package of papers; while he, who had furnished the intelligence, ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... unexpectedly the first visit of these unwelcome strangers. Thirteen years afterwards they returned, and were not so easily got rid of. An enormous horde crossed the River Ural and advanced into the heart of the country, pillaging, burning, devastating, and murdering. Nowhere did they meet with serious resistance. The Princes made no attempt to combine against the common enemy. Nearly all the principal towns were laid in ashes, and the inhabitants were killed or carried off as ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... THE GAULS (390 B.C.).—We have already mentioned how, in very remote times, the tribes of Gaul crossed the Alps and established themselves in Northern Italy (see p. 223). While the Romans were conquering the towns of Etruria, these barbarian hordes were moving southward, and overrunning and devastating ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... maxims of the republic, for the most part, rejected the ancient system of devastating a vanquished state by an instant, unsparing, and crushing plunder, which may answer very well where the tenure is expected to be brief, but does not accord with the formula subdue, retain, advance. Yet depopulation was the necessary incident. Italy, Sicily, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... all the naive enthusiasm of youth. His manner throughout was that engaging mixture of modesty afraid of being thought conceited and eager pride in showing his skill so attractive to everybody. At first he shot deliberately, splitting cards, hitting marbles, and devastating whole rows of clay pipes. Then he took to secreting the weapons in various pockets from which he produced and discharged them in lightning time. His hand darted with the speed and precision of ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... she would. But the boots seem to have a devastating effect. The minute she gets them on—even in imagination, for we haven't had a dress rehearsal yet—her voice grows softer and her manner more lady-like. It's the funniest thing I ever knew, to hear her say ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... few hours given every day to foraging, they spend their lives in playing in numerous parties. And when they multiply too rapidly in a region, they assemble in bands, almost as numerous as those of locusts, and move southwards, devastating the forests, the fields, and the gardens; while foxes, polecats, falcons, and nocturnal birds of prey follow their thick columns and live upon the individuals remaining behind. The ground-squirrel— a closely-akin ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... few extraordinary cases, in which man, as an instrument in the hands of Providence, sometimes punishes great crimes, eradicates great evils, and accomplishes great national reforms by acts as sudden as the devastating career of the tempest in sweeping away pestilential vapors. Such may be the case with the revolted States, if they should persist in this wicked rebellion beyond the close of the period ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, but his thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down. Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... comfort among people who work with their hands; I take the standpoint of the wholly unpractical man, and say that such efforts do not concern me. From my point of view no movement can be tolerated which begins with devastating the earth's surface. You will clothe your workpeople better, you will give them better food and more leisure; in doing so you injure the class that has finer sensibilities, and give power to the class which not only postpones everything to material well-being, but more and more regards intellectual ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... drive were relieved. It was, indeed, a great relief. It permitted us to relax our bodies and minds after four days of steady strain, with no more food than was sufficient to sustain us and without rest during the entire time. We were grateful to be away for a short time from the devastating fire that the Huns were pouring into our front line trenches in an endeavor to check a further penetration into their lines, but we were ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... rigor and destructive power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left no ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... based upon the maintenance of the status quo; no cession of territory was to take place. The rights of commerce and of navigation were to be as provided by the treaty of 1662. Never was a costly and devastating war entered upon more recklessly, conducted, on our side at least, with more helpless inefficiency, and closed with a smaller result in any change which it effected. The people of England accepted peace as a relief; they ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... A devastating curiosity seized upon us boys concerning that Latin grammar, for we had discovered the nature of the book. Strong wanted to steal it one night, but concluded not to. "In the first place," reflected Strong, "I haven't the ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... although there is so great a fuss about the Borgoo robbers, and so manifest a dread of them, that a minder on the high-way is of very rare occurrence. When this crime was perpetrated, the whole nation seemed to be terror-struck, and the people rose up in arms, as if a public enemy were devastating their country, and slaughtering its inhabitants without mercy. This is the only instance they ever heard of a young man entertaining a strong attachment for a female. Marriage is celebrated by the natives as unconcernedly as possible. A man thinks ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... a black box, with numerous wires, wheels, levers and projecting tubes. These latter contained lenses and shutters, but the Germans must have imagined devastating fire could spout from them. And ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... when I entered the building at nine, it was as though a devastating tornado had swept down every club boy, sparing only Sidney Price, who was preparing miserably to meet ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of ever marrying him. She will fool the mature man who is desperately in earnest, while she is angling after some one wealthier or more amusing. If she does elect to wed one of her victims, it is, in all probability, only to carry out her devastating tactics on a ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... hatred to the Pope and Bourbon monarchy, rallied likewise to the royal cause. "The French spirit triumphed over the masonic spirit in the greater number of the Brothers. Opinions as well as hearts were still for the King." It needed the devastating doctrines of Weishaupt to undermine this spirit and to turn the "degrees of vengeance" from vain ceremonial ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... could see, there was no sign of life. Even the birds seemed to have flown away. There were no chickens, no dogs, no cattle nor horses—in fact none of the usual farm scenes. Here and there were farmhouses, some in ruins, others scarcely touched by the devastating wave of war. But in these latter, which were still habitable, there were no men or women, and no laughing children. In fact, throughout France it is probable that there were no laughing children at this stage of the war. Or if they laughed, it was because ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... of Joel admirably illustrates the intimate connection which subsisted for the prophetic mind between the sorrows and disasters of the present and the coming day of Jehovah: the one is the immediate harbinger of the other. In an unusually devastating plague of locusts, which, like an army of the Lord,[1] has stripped the land bare and brought misery alike upon city and country, man and beast—"for the beasts of the field look up sighing unto Thee," i. 20—the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... executed a flank movement that would have done credit to the 42nd Highlanders, and even drew forth an approving nod and smile from the reviewing officer, who with his cocked-hatted staff witnessed the movement from an eminence which was swept by a devastating cross-fire from every part ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... had gone, and he left her without breaking his silence more than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time, reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But probably these extreme passions are very rare, and the state of mind thus depicted belongs to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the primary export. Transfers from the US Government add substantially to American Samoa's economic well-being. Attempts by the government to develop a larger and broader economy are restrained by Samoa's remote location, its limited transportation, and its devastating hurricanes. Tourism, a developing sector, has been held back by the recurring ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... violence. Scarcely did one become eminent before it was torn to pieces by its comrades, or perished of its own rage. They were like barbarous hordes, exterminating one another or falling into dissolution, while devastating everything in ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... age. To be sure, it was many years since anybody had asked him to take part in any service whatsoever, even a funeral service—for which, as is well understood, a man retains efficiency long after he has ceased to be of use in the pulpit, no matter how devastating may be the weather. But that fact did not seem to bear upon the ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... saved the mission. It did more than that—it saved the Mantatees themselves from terrible destruction. As a devastating host they would in all probability have advanced to the borders of the Colony, and being driven back, would have perished miserably, men, women, and children, either of starvation, or at the hands of those tribes whom they would have overcome in their advance, ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... French had been distracting the enemy by a demonstration to the south-east of Colesburg. Consequently the shells from nowhere began to pour into their laager during breakfast (January 12) with devastating results. The laager was instantly abandoned, and a second, two thousand yards farther off, suffered the same fate. When Butcher had finally been able to get a second 15-pounder up the hill, the Boers were compelled to shift every camp they possessed ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... else, is easier to tear down than to build up, and one of the most devastating instruments of destruction is discourtesy. A contact which has taken years to build can be broken off by one snippy letter, one pert answer, or one discourteous response over the telephone. Even collection letters, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... army that issued forth from the gates of Antiquera on one of the most extensive "talas," or devastating inroads, that ever laid waste the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Nabonassar of classical writers, the so-called Canon of Ptolemy begins. When he ascended the throne of Babylon in 747 B.C. Assyria was in the throes of a revolution. Civil war and pestilence were devastating the country, and its northern provinces had been wrested from it by Ararat. In 746 B.C. Calah joined the rebels, and on the 13th of Iyyar in the following year, Pulu or Pul, who took the name of Tiglath-pileser III., seized the crown and inaugurated a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... worn into the national character that they almost form the character itself, with its fertile plains, its sandy deserts, its lofty mountains, its mighty rivers, its torrid heat and arctic cold, its devastating floods, its cruel famines and loathsome epidemics, represents a mass, the contemplation of which staggers the mind and makes one ask, "What is Europe trying to do here? Does she hope to conquer, to change ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... was in a fever; not a physical fever, but a mental fever that burned with devastating insistence. He could not lie still upon his bed, so he rose and stumbled about the city's streets. But nothing diverted him. Before his eyes a sheet of fire burned, and a blinding light seemed to shut out everything else from his vision. Even his thoughts crackled ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... through the streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us in ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... calamities from the distress and pressure of the war. They have much more to dread in that way from the confiscations, the rapines, the burnings, and the massacres that may follow in the train of a peace which shall establish the devastating and depopulating principles and example of the French Regicides in security and triumph and dominion. In the ordinary course of human affairs, any check to population among men in ease and opulence is less to be apprehended from what they may suffer than from what ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... suppressed in France, but not in Holland or Germany. In England, the struggle was to continue, not between the Catholics and Protestants, but between different parties among the Protestants themselves. In Germany, a long and devastating war of thirty years was to be carried on before even religious ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... father, though I can tell no one else. Harold has ordered us to bring out our housecarls, and with them he means to deal a blow against the Welsh, who have been devastating our western counties. The expedition is to be secret and sudden, although against what point and in what manner the blow is to be struck Harold ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... poised to spring, his fangs bared and his fierce eyes hot with fire, but he was not hunting. Whatever moved in the darkness without, the wolf had no desire to go forth and attack. Perhaps he would fight to the death to protect the occupants of the cave; but surely an ancient and devastating fear had hold of him. Evidently he recognized the intruder as an ancestral enemy that held sovereignty ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... the extremes of heat and cold, removed alike from the sultry, protracted summers of the more southern states, and the longer winters and devastating storm and cyclones of the North and Northwest. Its limits north and south correspond to California and ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... lowlands along coast Natural resources: fish, arable land Land use: arable land 20%; permanent crops 2%; meadows and pastures 4%; forest and woodland 35%; other 39%; includes irrigated 2% Environment: periodic devastating cyclones Note: located 750 km east of Madagascar in the ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... liberty, forced to labor in the silver mines with inadequate food, and barbarously treated, finally rose, joined with tribes who had never been subdued, and gradually drove out or massacred their oppressors. A superior civilization disappeared before their devastating career, and to day there is scarcely a trace of it left, except scarcely visible ruins, evidence everywhere, of extensive and hastily-deserted mining operations, and the tradition of the country. ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable,—then we saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps devastating torrent. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... His one hope of support in his own plans lay in the Dominicans, without whose aid his efforts were foredoomed to failure. He spoke to the Bishop and the members of the Council, reading them the letter and addressing earnest appeals to them to stop the iniquities which were devastating the entire coast. He urged, with all the arguments of which he was master, that the one hundred leagues asked for should be conceded. The Bishop of Burgos was unmoved, both by the Prior's harrowing description of the outrages committed on the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... fall of 1900, without expressly assuming the right of interfering in the affairs of a friendly nation further than to "emphatically affirm the unchangeable principles of international justice," adopted a resolution declaring that the responsibility for the war devastating South Africa fell upon that one of the two parties who repeatedly refused arbitration, that is, it was explained, upon the British Government; that the British Government, in ignoring the principles of right ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... England, not an English wherry would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... some ways extremely tender about his wife. This struck her as an outrageous disloyalty. Instead of appreciating a paradox she resented an infidelity. She smouldered with perplexed resentment for some days, and then astonished her lover by a series of dissertations of a hostile and devastating nature upon the lady of the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... nearly a fortnight. Finally, on September sixteenth, Massena crossed the Portuguese frontier, and Wellington, who lay near by but had not ventured to assume the offensive, began a slow and cautious retreat down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country as he went. At last he made a stand on the heights near Busaco, over against a gorge where the river breaks through the hills into the plains below. Massena attacked on September twenty-seventh ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Are we absolutely spick and span?" Marjorie turned slowly about, then made a laughing dive at her mother and enveloped her in a devastating embrace. ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... not help looking at her with curiosity. I tried to see what there was in her to have excited in Lawson such a devastating passion. But who can explain these things? It was true that she was lovely; she reminded one of the red hibiscus, the common flower of the hedgerow in Samoa, with its grace and its languor and its passion; but ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... feet in height at their source—this could only be estimated—they were devastating when they struck. The ocean raged over the frail bulwark of England in wave upon wave, and, retreating, the waters left smooth, shining rock where cities had been. The stone and steel of their buildings was scattered far over the desolate land ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... piece of stiff ground about two miles in extent, which appeared to have been the scene of a devastating hurricane. It was covered with fallen timber, which rendered it very difficult to cross. The wind must have swept from the south-west to the north-east, and from the appearance of the saplings which were growing ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... maker of day and generator of all beauty, should be destined to hurl from its shining centre death and destruction upon the planet it had from creation vivified and warmed! The Vision had shown the devastating ring of fire rising from that very quarter of the heavens where the sun should have been radiantly beaming,—and as Felix Bonpre dwelt upon the picture in his mind, and remembered his own wild prayer to the Eternal, a great ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Most of the ruins were blackened by a devastating fire. And silence brooded over the place—a silence undisturbed by a human voice, the bark of a dog, or any other ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... midnight," replied the Nome King, "we shall arrive at the Emerald City by daybreak. Then, while all the Oz people are sleeping, we will capture them and make them our slaves. After that we will destroy the city itself and march through the Land of Oz, burning and devastating as ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship. The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem cold and beautiful ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Jack, with their companions, had flown aloft, and, taking the stations assigned to them, did their part in the battle. As the light grew with the break of day, they could see the effect of the American big guns. It was devastating. And yet some German batteries lived through it. Several times Tom and Jack, by means of their wireless, sent back corrections so that the American pieces might be aimed more effectively. Below them was a maelstrom—an indescribable ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... there was no care for the agricultural labourer on the part of a Government which has undertaken the largest scheme of agricultural reform ever presented to a House of Commons. This had the effect of rousing the Old Man to one of those devastating bits of scornful and quiet invective by which he sometimes delights the House of Commons. Jesse had spoken of the proposals of the Queen's Speech as a ridiculous mouse, and thereupon came the dread retort that ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... into tears and forgave her father all. In the midst of his devastating fury he had stopped short, restrained by paternal feeling and the gratitude he owed to his daughter! This proof of tenderness, coming to her at a moment when despair had reached its climax, brought about in ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... overcrowded dressing station as quickly as the bearers could get the stretchers away; the unhurt—scarcely half the company—were, for the most part, still gazing up into the sky in the expectation of that twisting, all too familiar, black bomb that has such a terrific devastating power. Gradually quiet came again, and the men set about their interrupted business—their sleep to be snatched, their work to be finished before the long night with its monotonous watching and ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... it was split into so many petty rival states, occupied in serious wars against the Germanic tribes, its fertility remained hidden in the earth, and the ability of its inhabitants dissipated itself in devastating wars, instead of spending itself in fruitful effort. All that changed, and without any one's foresight or intent, when the Roman policy, urged by the internal forces that stirred the Republic, had destroyed ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... he has got all the choice bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts. 'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together, withdrawing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I feel, with ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... see it for himself, if he doubts it. This is not an indictment of the whole German people; it is an indictment of the militaristic-bureaucratic ruling class, which, persuaded of its divine inspiration and intolerant of criticism,[432] has plunged the country into a devastating war. It is not unlikely that the end of the conflict will mark also the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty. The spirit of the Germans of 1848, who labored unsuccessfully to make their country a republic, may awake again and realise its dreams. In concluding ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... his strong view of danger ; not alone that measures might be taken to secure my safety, but to spare me any sudden agitation. Alas! none was spared to himself! More clearly than any one he anticipated the impending tempest, and foreboded its devastating effects. He spoke aloud and strenuously, with prophetic energy, to all with whom he was then officially associated but the greater part either despaired of resisting the torrent, or disbelieved its approach. What deeply interesting scenes crowd upon my remembrance, of his noble, his daring, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... During the first year these soil animals are present but cause no problem. But after the first mild winter with no population setback, they become a plague. Slugs (and in California, snails) will be found everywhere, devastating seedlings. Earwigs and sow bugs, that previously only were seen eating only decaying mulch, begin to attack plants. It soon becomes impossible to get a stand of seedlings established. The situation can be rapidly cured by raking up ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were out-works which might also be usefully attacked:—there were alcohol and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces unnatural celibacy and prostitution. These threads, and many others, were all taken up in his first serious poem, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... together, had been made, had been twisted into grotesque, nightmarish shapes, and the whole fused into a burned and gleaming mass—which covered half of what had once been a mighty ocean—as though a bomb larger and more devastating than ever imagined of man, a bomb large enough to rock the Earth, had landed in the midst of the area once occupied by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and lower Mississippi being now under the assured predominance of Union forces, Grant, with equal wisdom and decision, entirely approved of Sherman's plan to cut loose from his western base, make a devastating march through the heart of fertile Georgia, and join the eastern forces of the North at Savannah, where Fort Pulaski was in Union hands and the Union navy ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... successive eruptions extending over many years. The most ancient eruption of Mount Aetna on record is that mentioned by Pindar and Schylus, as occurring under Hiero, in the second year of the 75th Olympiad. It is probable that Hesiod was aware of the devastating eruptions of Aetna before the period of Greek immigration. There is, however, some doubt regarding the work [Greek word] in the text of Hesiod, a subject into whci I have entered at some length in another place. (Humboldt, 'Examen Crit. de le ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... or origin of the fire no one knew. It had come as a devastating scourge. It had left the beautiful little city a mass of blackened, ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... This ends the main thread of the first incident. In the second incident, after an interval of fifty years, we find Beowulf an old man. He has been for many years king of the Geats. A fire-breathing dragon, the guardian of a great treasure, is devastating the land. The heroic old king, accompanied by a party of thanes, attacks the dragon. All the thanes save one are cowardly; but the old hero, with the aid of the faithful one, slays the dragon, not, however, till he is fatally injured. Then ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the summit of the hill, where the black flag waved over a scene of utter desolation. The vegetation was withered to pallid rags: even the tiniest weedling in the rock crevices had been poisoned by the devastating blast. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... alternating despotism and license. Ambitious soldiers strove with each other for the place of highest honour and profit. Texas, resenting the instability of Creole government, separated from the Mexican States after a devastating war. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... Your real, devastating row has many points of resemblance with a prairie fire. A man on a prairie lights his pipe, and throws away the match. The flame catches a bunch of dry grass, and, before any one can realise what is happening, sheets of fire are ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse |
