"Off guard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... equivalent to saying that it was usually elicited by a sobering sense of responsibility. In his letters and despatches may be found many wild guesses, inconsistent from week to week, colored by changing moods and humors,—the mere passing comments of a mind off guard,—the records of evanescent impressions as numerous, fickle, and unfounded as those of the most ordinary mortal. It is when urgency presses and danger threatens, when the need for action comes, that his mental energies are aroused, and he begins to speak, as it were, ex cathedra. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Bluelake with anything less than half a brigade. Gonzales has his hands full in his area. He had a nasty business while you were off on that world cruise—natives in one village caught the men stationed there off guard and wiped them out, and then started another frenzy. It spread to two other villages before he got it stopped. And we need the Third Brigade in the northeast; there are three quarters of a million natives up there, inhabiting ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... caught off guard when he opened the door to them. Beatrice was inside before he could quite make up his mind how best to ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... is imperative that your own main force be not surprised or caught off guard by any contingency, however exceptional. To secure this immunity, it is necessary to send men or groups of men in the direction of the probable advance of the enemy, anti to arrange these men or groups of men so that they can be of assistance to each other. ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... she ever thought that Ahmara might stab her some night when Max was off guard, she told herself that she did not care. She longed for death as the one way out of the cage into which she had foolishly flown, and would have prayed for it, if such a prayer were not to her mind sacrilegious. She was too young to realize that to wish ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... with a twist of the wrist tried to jerk it down and out of Faye's hand. But this he failed to do, so, with a sarcastic laugh, he settled himself back on his pony to await a more favorable time when he could catch Faye off guard. He wanted that glistening pistol, and he probably wanted the fat pony also. And thus they sat facing each other for several minutes, the Indian apparently quite indifferent to pistols and all things, and Faye on the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... swift, uncontrollable look that flashed suddenly across his face, like the lightning that leaps out of the dark by night, laying all earth bare in one brief, vivid glimpse? He was so taken by surprise as to be completely off guard. It was but an instant, and with a start ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... intervals one of them would make a feint to attack; or by feigning a retreat endeavour to get the other off guard; but, after several such passes and counter-passes had been delivered between them, still not a scratch had been given,—not ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... counting-house, his ledger, not the Bible, the last book he had read; of a miner killed in an instant by an explosion while he was picking coals in the bowels of the earth; of a soldier falling on a battle-field, while his right hand raised the sword to strike a foe; these were all slumbering and off guard when the bridegroom came. What of them? were they all shut out? Nay, verily. Some of them were shut out, and some were let in, according as they were carnal or spiritual when the decisive moment came. The new creature ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... was deceived at times. He went his customary round, sent out the monthly bills, opened and answered David's mail, bore the double burden of David's work and his own ungrudgingly, but off guard he was grave and abstracted. He began to look very thin, too, and Lucy often heard him pacing the floor at night. She thought that he seldom or never went to ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... uncle peering greedily into the cabin, all but licking his lips, his nostrils distended to the savor, his flooded eyes fixed upon the fresh beef and vegetables in manifest longing, every wrinkle and muscle of his broad face off guard. My tutor—somewhat affected, I fancy, by this display—turned to me with a little frown of curiosity, an intrusive regard, it seemed to me, which I might in all courtesy fend off for the future. 'Twas now time, thinks I, to enlighten him with the knowledge I had: a task ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan |
