"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in doing so. There came the sound of doors rasping open, of footsteps echoing on metal stairs and corridors. Once a giant Cossack passed within four feet of them. But at length, all was ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... revolutionary literature. They were vague and tumultuous ideas, which had very little relation to a definite theory of government, but he was very much in earnest with them, especially after his rasping experience with the Duke of Wuerttemberg. No one can mistake the autobiographic note in the speech of Bourgognino which closes the first act: 'I have long felt in my breast something that would not be satisfied. Now of a sudden I know what it was. (Springing ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... footsteps sounded again; there came a noise of clattering chains and the rattle of the key in the lock, and the rasping of the bolts dragged back. Then the gate swung slowly open, and Baron Conrad rode into the shelter of the White Cross, and as the hoofs of his war-horse clashed upon the stones of the courtyard within, the wooden gate ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... brought to Christ and joined his "Daniel Band." Moreover, Ned kept to his own district and class. He did not assume that all rich church-goers are hypocrites, and that it was his duty to stand in conspicuous places and howl to them the message of salvation, in tones of rasping discord. No, it was noted by his mates, as particularly curious, that the voice of the man who could, when he chose, roar like a bull of Bashan, had become soft and what we may style entreative in its tone. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Daniel ought to be more cautious," she said with her rasping voice. "This being together all alone for hours at a time ain't going to do no good; no good at all, I say. And the two are always running after each other; if it's not her, it's him. If you happen to take 'em by surprise, they jump like criminals. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... rasping voice of Dalis. "You hear? Look into your Beryl! See the clenched fists of the earth's myriads being shaken at you! Listen to the protests of the millions who hear your every word! See what Earthlings think of the prospect ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... He was not conscious of real pain, although he knew that his lips were cut and bleeding, that his cheeks were bruised and cut where Tommy Ashe's hard-knuckled fists landed with impressive force, that his heart pounded sickeningly against his ribs, and that every breath was a rasping gasp. Nor was he conscious of pity when he saw that Tommy Ashe was in no better case. It seemed fit and proper that they should struggle like that. There was a strange sort of pleasure in it. It seemed natural, as natural an ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... murmur became audible. It was an unholy blend of rasping shouts and shriller chanting, punctuated by notes of a brassy gong. As Charlie listened, ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... resentment had reached this height, he heard rasping in a large pine that grew close to him, and saw a squirrel come down from the tree, hotly pursued by a marten. Neither of them noticed Smirre; and he sat quietly and watched the chase, which went from tree to tree. He looked at the squirrel, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... forestall some perverse attempt at loquacity, Skipper Billy lifted his voice in song—a large, rasping voice, little enough acquainted with melody, but expressing the worst of the rage of those days: being thus quite sufficient to ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... name of every ship that Dad then pointed out to me. I can picture, too, the whole scene, with the tide at the flood and the sunshine shimmering on the water and the old Victory belching out a salute in sharp, rasping reports from the guns of her main deck battery, that darted out their fiery tongues, each in the midst of a round puff ball of smoke in quick succession, first on the port and then on the starboard side, until ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... lashings, which were then cut adrift. The Webb passed up following the Queen. The latter, having gained sufficient distance, turned and charged down, but as the Indianola was turning up at the same moment the blow on the starboard bow glanced, the vessels rasping by each other; and as the Queen cleared the stern of her enemy, the latter planted two IX-inch shot successfully, killing 2 and wounding 4 of her crew and disabling two guns. During all this time ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... little trumpery jewelry—I can't ever get back to India on that!" He seemed to hear again the rasping voice of the vulpine caller at Monte Carlo: "Messieurs! Faites vos jeux! Rien ne va plus! Le jeu est fait!" And, if a dismal failure in Lender had been his Leipsic, the black week at Monaco had been his long drawn-out ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... instinctive life. One might hope that this would not prove to be so in Russia, the first Socialist State, as yet unindustrial, able to draw on the industrial experience of the whole world, were it not that one discovers with a certain misgiving in the Bolshevik leaders the rasping arid temperament of those to whom the industrial machine is an end in itself, and, in addition, reflects that these industrially minded men have as yet no practical experience, nor do there exist men of goodwill to help them. It does not seem reasonable to hope that ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... none," returned Raikes with a rasping lack of emotion, "for the last ten years. It is too late to begin to cultivate ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... said Susan, in a hard rasping voice, "I'd box your ears for you. That's what I'd do to you, and you can go and tell the cap'n I said ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... of the Acme Film Company cleared his throat with a rasping noise that sounded very loud, coming as it did after fifteen minutes of complete silence. Luck, smoking a cigarette absent-mindedly by the window while he stared out across two vacant lots to a tawdry apartment house,—and saw a sage-covered plain ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... was a better speaker than Mr. Grimsby, but his voice had a hard, rasping quality that smote the ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... linnet, Its frail legs raw from rasping strings! A carriage comes,—he flings within it The tortured bird ... to sell ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... short and the shot sped true. Upon receiving the bullet, the beast emitted a rasping screech and leaped directly upward, as if impelled from a springboard, and falling on its side, rolled over the edge of the precipice, down which it sped, clawing, snarling and bringing the loose dirt streaming after it, until it vanished in the gloomy depths ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... across a dyke, and there isn't a spot on's body that I haven't hit, nor one on mine that he hasn't mauled. I've sat on his head, and he's had his knee in my stomach till I squealed, and we never could meet without back-talking and rasping 'gainst the grain. The night before he joined the coast-guardsmen, he was down at the Book-in-Hand, and 'twas little like that I'd let the good chance pass—I might never have another; for Gover'ment folk will not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stone boats and urged governmental remonstrance[538]. Hammond at once replied quoting the language of Russell's letter of December 20 and stating that further representations would be made[539]. On the sixteenth Russell again instructed Lyons to speak to Seward, but now was much less rasping in language, arguing, rather, the injury in the future to the United States itself in case the harbours were permanently destroyed since "... the object of war is peace, and the purposes of peace are mutual goodwill and advantageous commercial intercourse[540]." ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... ideal man an optimist. "Maud" is a study in pessimism. The lover's blood is tainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with all things and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broad sympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, rasping and self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wings beneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up their young; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity, then despise him, then pity him once more, and in ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... detained me, and meantime the kingfisher has taken wing and gone noisily up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once more. A killdeer's sharp, rasping note—a familiar sound in St. Augustine—comes from I know not where. A procession of more than twenty black vultures passes over my head. I can see their feet drawn up under them. My own I must ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... had cold feet and a sore heart. Something resembling rotten wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the servers were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher's ears. He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of sentences: "She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and intellect... her person more compelling ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the Archduchess and Nikky began in a storm and ended in a sort of hopeless quiet. Miss Braithwaite had withdrawn to her sitting-room, but even there she could hear the voice of Annunciata, rasping and angry. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... knew perfectly well there was not, but she reached for a small pile of letters in a pigeonhole on her right and glanced over them rapidly. Her sour visage and rasping voice softened perceptibly as she smiled on the little ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... There was a moment of silence aboard the Adventurer. Then: "Over with it, Han," directed Steve. There was a splash, followed by the rasping of the cable through the chock and then a cheerful whistle from the crew as he made fast. "About eighteen feet, Steve, ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... his rasping order, "go to your rooms! Remain there until you hear from Colonel North, Major Silsbee ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the extreme. The favourite dance was a fast, hopping waltz, in which the swain seized his partner firmly in both hands under the arms and put her through a vigorous test of wind and agility. The floor was rough and sanded, and the rasping of feet almost drowned the music. There were long Virginia reels, led with peremptory dash by a master of ceremonies, full of grace and importance. Swarthy faces were bedewed with sweat and dark eyes glowed with excitement, but there was never the ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... such as it was, brought the concrete and material even more forcibly upon him—the gross things that are called Facts. And it seemed to him that there were no facts beyond them. These were the bones of the Universe—a stuffy bedroom, a rasping flannel suit, a cold dawn, a snoring in the gloom, and three bodies, heavy with weariness.... There once had been other facts: Merefield and Cambridge and Eton had once existed; Jenny had once been a living person who loved him; once there had been a thing called Religion. ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... about him. He placed his hand to his ear and gazed intently out into the darkness. What was that? He shut his eyes that he might hear the better. He could not be mistaken, he had heard a dry twig snap—one, two, three little dry, rasping sounds. Perhaps it was just a rabbit or a squirrel. Again he raised himself cautiously on his shoulder and peered out into the shadows. There! another snap, this time nearer and more distinct. The night breeze gently fanned the dying embers. Suddenly there was a series of ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... coming late. He scolded them for leaving early. Once he scolded them for coughing. They continued the rasping noise. After the intermission, on Stoky's orders, the 100-odd men of the orchestra walked out on the stage barking as if in the last stages of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... your Excellency?" protested the Jew, in a rasping voice, "did I not repeat to him a dozen times, that my horse and cart would take him quicker, and more comfortably than Reuben's bag of bones. He would not listen. Reuben is such a liar, and has such ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... read your article ("Some disputed Points in Music."—'Fortnightly Review,' July, 1876.) with much interest, except the latter part, which soared above my ken. I am greatly pleased that you uphold my views to a certain extent. Your criticism of the rasping noise made by insects being necessarily rhythmical is very good; but though not made intentionally, it may be pleasing to the females from the nerve cells being nearly similar in function throughout the animal kingdom. With respect ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... you don't stop mopin' out thar an' come along in, I'll clear off the dishes!" called his mother again in her rasping voice which sounded as if she were choking in a perpetual spasm ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... some one ought to speak, and speak promptly. The news had not come to us directly from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of theirs, who was also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold back. So, in the cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished rasping my lawn with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath, which had brought me near the fence, ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... said the rasping voice of Gisele, "Niafer is my suitably disguised heathen waiting-woman, to whom my husband sent a dream some while ago, with instructions to join me here, so that I might have somebody to look after my things. So, Niafer, since you were fetched to wait on me, do you stop pawing at that ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... to the grey and rasping reality was so painful that tears ran down his cheeks, and he gasped as if struck in the pit of the stomach. How could beauty like that be all around him ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... I," croaked Professor Biggleswade. He was a little, untidy man with round spectacles, a fringe of greyish beard and a weak, rasping voice, and he knew more of Assyriology than any man, living or dead. A flippant pupil once remarked that the Professor's face was furnished with a Babylonic ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... gear, Nicholas—Your voice is rasping, your remarks are bitter, and you must be awfully unhappy, ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... flung the door wide open, he heard the rasping of the lynx's claws on the boards behind him. He dashed outside, threw both flat-irons wildly at his pursuer, and jumped as far as he could to one side. The lynx kept straight on, headed for the woods a few ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... second day her burro gave a rasping bray, and a hee-haw answered from the bush. It was Miguel's burro. He had come at last! Leaping to her feet, in her impatience, she ran to meet him, and found him lying on the earth, staring silently at the sky. All that day she sat beside him, caressing his ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had revived Millie Slade. She was in the common dressing-room—a littered, infamous, foul, place, situated below stage. Behind her the gas flared and screamed. Still in her panderous disguise, within hearing of the rasping music and the tramp of the dance, within hearing of the coarse applause, this tender mother sat alone, unconscious of evil—uncontaminated, herself kept holy by her motherhood, lifted by her love from the touch of sin. To her all ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... impotent envy—will possess their hearts: why cannot they be rich, and grown-up, and bowed to by every one? When the chariot is out of sight, envy will be superseded by the play-instinct. Silently, in their hearts, the children will play at being Lady Noble.... Mamma's voice will be heard on the stairs, rasping them back to the realities. Sullenly they will go down to the schoolroom, and resume their tasks. But they will not be able to concentrate their unsettled minds. The girls will make false stitches in the pillow-slips which they had been hemming so neatly when the yellow chariot ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... feet to find that his muscles still were reluctant to respond to orders; he helped the professor to arise. And from the group that drew back further into the far end of the room came a subdued and rasping tumult of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... rasping scorn was in the voice of the unhappy woman. "Nobody thinks of mine! He is my only son. He knows quite well that I can't live without him—that I could not ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... rasping noise you now hear in the undergrowth has nothing to do with busy civilization—'tis only the rattlesnake drawing his slimy length among the dead leaves or tangled reeds. No, all that is past, and this ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the bank, he let himself into his rooms and locked the door. He stooped to open the draft of the stove when a sound stopped him halfway. The cashier stood rigid, still crouched, waiting for a repetition of the noise. It came once more—the low, dull rasping of a file. ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... rent!" exclaimed a rasping voice. "This is about the tenth time, I guess. Have you got it?" and a burly man thrust himself into the room from ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... better than to show off all his pigs, and if I were a native I would pass them in review as we Europeans visit picture-galleries; but I refuse as politely as I can. We return to the cook-house, where the cocoa-nut rasping is finished; the man washes his hands in the water of a nut, splitting it open and squeezing the water in a little spray on to his hands. Mrs. Agelan knows a simpler way; she fills her mouth with water and squirts it on her hands. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... their heads under their wings, to shut out the horrid sound. And as for Miss Kitty Catbird, she actually left the meeting and flew straight home, because she felt that she must scream if she stayed there any longer. Having a sensitive ear, she could not endure Jasper's rasping voice. In her opinion, it sounded more like a ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... carriage and pairs," shouted a rasping voice at last. It was Black Tom. "Who says the fortune is belonging to the lad at all? It's mine, and if there's law in the land I'll ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... of the iron ships. It was the first of the kind in the world. Close against each other, iron rasping on iron, they exchanged their heaviest volleys. Five times the Merrimac tried to run down the Monitor, but her huge beak only grated over the iron deck, while the Monitor glided out unharmed. Despairing of doing anything with her doughty little antagonist, the Merrimac now steamed ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... ran suddenly into an oyster stake that went rasping aft along her side, and at the same moment the searchlight from Fort Schuyler beamed with dazzling playfulness in his face, and then having half blinded him wheeled heavenward, a narrow cornucopia of light that petered out just short of the stars. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... heinous thing he had done. He wanted to tell her that he had driven Bucky Nome into outlawry, that he had fought for her, and run away himself—because he loved her. It was Sergeant Moody's voice, vibrant with the rasping unpleasantness of a file, that jarred him back into his practical self. He thrust the letter and the flowers into his breast ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... that our landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks G. will not get well. Sometimes, in awful moments, I think so too; but then I cheer up and get quite elated. Last night as I lay awake, too weary to sleep, I heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw. I thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent. But after a time I found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than Miss ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Marville, who, moreover, had formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband. A temper naturally shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... speech the most astounding experience befell Mr. Lavender, so that his eyes nearly started from his head. It seemed to him, indeed, that he was seated at dinner with a Prussian, and the Major's voice had no sooner ceased its genial rasping than with a bound forward ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the day he will be the life and soul of the hunt, urging on the beaters with voice and example, climbing trees, peeping under bushes, carrying orders, giving advice, changing the line, until that supreme moment when shots are fired, when the rasping growl tells that the shots have taken effect, and when at length the huge cat lies stretched out dead. And all this on a handful ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Arnold Forster—with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—is intolerable and hateful. He never gets up without making one angry. There is no man whose genius would entitle him to half the arrogant self-conceit of this young member. Acrid, venomous, rasping, he injures his own cause by the very excess of his gall and by the exuberance of his pretension. He also saw that the riots would do no good, and he hinted darkly of what he called "ordered resistance," whatever that means. But, on the whole, the advocates ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... The low rasping went past close at hand, then to the right, then back, and seemed going away. Rag felt he knew what he was about; he wasn't a baby; it was his duty to learn what it was. He slowly raised his rolypoly body on his short fluffy legs, ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... I kneel before you." And, springing to her feet, La Marmotte went on: "But there is no time to waste; come—come at once. A—h!" For the loud report of the arquebus, and Pierrebon's angry shout, rang out; then followed the rasping of swords, and the two stood speechless, ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... another La Fontaine in simplicity, preparing for his grandest predications by sorrily rasping on an execrable fiddle. So, if the devil had lifted him up to a high mountain, showing him all he would give him, he would have simply invited him to his lonely cell, to have a jig to ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... on the United States Supreme bench), called Lincoln to him. The Judge never could whisper, but in this instance he probably did his best. At all events, in attempting to whisper to Lincoln he trumpeted his rebuke in about these words, and in rasping tones that could be heard all over the court-room: 'Lincoln, I have been watching you and Lamon. You are impoverishing this bar by your picayune charges of fees, and the lawyers have reason to complain of you. You are now almost ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, 'as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... royal robes, but she is liable to have her head snapped off at any moment. [Laughter.] On the other hand, there are hundreds of men who have their heads snapped off every day. [Laughter.] Mere man has his faults, no doubt, but sovran woman also can be a rasping sort of creature, especially if she does not cultivate sympathy with cigarettes as she gets older. [Laughter.] Let us be fair to mere man. Mere man has always treated me with exemplary fairness, and I certainly have never ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... while in Lemberg, to General Bom-Ermolli, and lunched at the headquarters mess. We also met Major-General Bardolf, his chief of staff, and chief of staff of the assassinated Crown Prince. The latter described to us the campaign about Lemberg, and it was interesting to hear the rasping accent he gave to a word like "Durchbrechung," for instance, as if he were a Prussian instead of an Austrian, and to observe the frankness with which he ascribed the difference that had come over the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... a wan light upon all things when he thrust his short, sharp muzzle inside that hole, to be met by a positively hair-raising volley of rasping, vicious growls. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... shock, the like of which he had never known before, McTeague turned from Trina, gazing bewilderedly about the room. The struggle was bitter; his teeth ground themselves together with a little rasping sound; the blood sang in his ears; his face flushed scarlet; his hands twisted themselves together like the knotting of cables. The fury in him was as the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer. But for all that he shook his huge head ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of the coach; a tiger's rasping yarr answered from behind it and almost instantly there were noises alongside the coach indicating that a lion and tiger were at grips; growls, snarls, more growls and more snarls, each choked off in the middle ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... got a lot more of those infernal skeletons hanging on the poles by the fire?" he concluded in a rasping whisper. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... let loose; all the pupils studying aloud together, making a deafening, rasping noise. Sessions from 7 to 10 A. M., ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... The rasping broadcast cut off in the middle of a syllable. Somebody had come to believe that he really heard what he thought he heard. Now there would be reaction. At the sunrise-line on Tralee only a handful of people were awake. They were dumbfounded. Where ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... hypocrite, will take the liberty to say so, and act accordingly. Are the superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—the duty of publicly ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... began talking his voice was mild and persuasive, and Shields and McNally listened expectantly. As the minutes went by and he did not get the information he wanted, it became evident that the cocksure young man at the other end of the line was rasping through what was left of Porter's patience as an emery wheel does through soft iron. As might be expected, the process was accompanied with a shower of sparks. Porter's voice rose and swelled in volume until at last he shouted, "You ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... chilled with dew and famished, awoke to a happier life. The loneliness at his heart was gone. The feeling of hopeless imprisonment that the miles and miles of streets had terrified him with gave place to one of freedom and exaltation. Above him he heard the rasping of pine boughs; his feet trod on a rebounding mat of decay; the sky was as coldly blue as the bosom of Huron. He walked as if on ether, singing a senseless jargon the woodmen had aroused the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... itself. It was something, at any rate, that she was out of the Chapel, away from Mr. Crashaw's piercing eyes, Mr. Thurston's rasping voice, Mr. Warlock's reproachful melancholy. She felt this evening as though by struggling with all her strength she could shut the gates upon new experiences that were fighting to enter into her soul, but must, at all costs to her own happiness, be defeated. No ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... the garden with a hollow, rasping sound and added to the din made by that noisy and drunken crowd. Brutal laughs broke out in sharp, penetrating scales, and those bravos emitted by the drunken threats of a Sunday public and interrupted by hiccoughs, beat against the stage with a hoarse and hollow roar together with ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... throw down its foe and bite him to death. The charge is made at a gallop, the animal sometimes coming on silently, with the mouth shut, and sometimes with the jaws open, the lips drawn back and teeth showing, uttering at the same time a succession of roars or of savage rasping snarls. Certain bears charge without any bluster and perfectly straight; while others first threaten and bully, and even when charging stop to growl, shake the head and bite at a bush or knock holes in the ground with their fore-paws. Again, some of them ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... dungeon. Only by their ears might they make any guess at what was going on. These admonished them that more of the burning brush was being heaved into the hole. Every now and then they could hear it as it went swishing past the door of their curtained chamber, the stalks and sticks rasping against the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... a scandal—and they'll get so stirred up that they'll put an independent ticket into the field. You'll have to fight 'em all over again at the polls. You're rasping ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... other was here at Maubeuge. I helped hold his right arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand. When the wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it—it had rotted off, if you care to know that detail—and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping, animal-like sounds. Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne. He had ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... laughter upon the stage were laborious on his part and mystifying to the thoughtful observer. He took noticeable means to change from his real self. It mattered not what was the nature of the part he filled, he invariably assumed an unnatural, rasping voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... to the stable with the milking pail. Her father had spread fodder for the cow and she could hear the rasping of the ears of corn against each other as he tumbled them into the trough for the old sorrel. She put her head against the cow's soft flank and under her sinewy fingers two streams of milk struck the bottom of the tin pail with such thumping loudness that she did ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... dollars!" echoed a rasping voice which from its smothered sound probably came from the bearded lips of the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... hobbling about getting the supper, which she said was all but ready. When it was all ready, without the but, they sat down, though the poor Prince, hungry as he was, found it hard work to swallow the dry red herring, the rasping oaten cakes, and the brackish water of which the meal consisted. When he had finished the meal,—which, as you may suppose, did not take long,—he set his box upon the table and ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... night. Diana had wandered up and down before the narrow cages, looking at the big brutes still restless from the show, rubbing her cheek on the soft little round head of the cub she was holding in her arms, smiling at its sleepy rasping purr. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... losing his friends as a result of his speech are at variance with the facts. Cautious Northerners naturally hesitated to support him and face both the popular convictions on fugitive slaves and the rasping vituperation that exhausted sacred and profane history in the epithets current in that "era of warm journalistic manners"; Abolitionists and Free Soilers congratulated one another that they had "killed Webster". In Congress ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... to the bunk-house," commanded Tom, "and tell Jimmy Doolan, with my regards, to take particler care of yer. I'll speak to him later." Then, as Dennis was moving off, he added, in a rasping voice: "You an' my wife is acquainted, eh? Wal, when you've dropped your blankets, come up to the house ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... loud clap, a rusty bolt was shot, and then, as the two prisoners stood in the darkness listening, there was a rasping noise, and then a crash, which Don interpreted to mean that the heavy step ladder had been dragged away and half laid, half thrown upon the floor below. ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... the rasping of his throat, and, though he shrieked into my ear to make sure that I understood him above the howling of the wind, I could only make out that it was an endless ballad telling the fortune of a young man who went to sea, and had many adventures. ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... and a strange, harsh, rasping sound was made as the adventurer lowered himself from stone to stone till he must have been half-way down, when all at once there was a violent tug at the rope, a crash as of something giving way, and directly after a deep, echoing ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... gave the necessary order to the waiter, a noisy hubbub of laughter from an adjoining cabinet particulier almost drowned his words. There was one woman's voice that was rasping and sustained with an abandon of vulgarity released ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... replied Doggie. "It's a fact," he continued after a pause. "The scheme of decoration is revolting to every aesthetic sense which I've spent my life in cultivating. Its futile pretentiousness is the rasping irritation of every hour. Yet here I am. Quite comfortable. And here ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... ask her to sell me some plants. I had great misgivings as to my success; and in addition, the fear of her sharp temper and language made me nervous. I could stand up and face and argue with a man without flinching; but somehow the rasping savagery of a termagant woman always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot explain, has always prevented me. I have been dead a month; not cancer, but Dolly. Poison. Good-bye, Hely. I shall ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... toward the saloon, holding close to the back walls of buildings so as not to be seen from either end of the alley. Murphy removed the padlock from the basement door and opened it with precautionary slowness to minimize the rasping of the rusty hinges. He closed it again when they had entered the ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... rough, with the deep rasping intonation of a savage. "Garn out o' this or I'll——" He took a step forward with uplifted hand, but in an instant down came cut number three upon his wrist, and cut number five across his thigh, and cut number one full in the center of his rabbit-skin cap. It was not a heavy stick, but it was ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshy ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... rubbing his big hands together until they made a rasping sound, and his one good ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... Daniel had been painfully exercising the minds of the editor and readers of the Church Times; and it was then that the curate's friend, without moving a muscle of his face, suddenly leaned forward and said, in a rasping voice: ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... dry; he could have caressed the man's slimy sleeve that touched his cheek, he was so glad to live. The boatman was in no humor for caresses; he drew his labored breath sharply, fighting the waves, rasping out a sullen oath when they baffled him. The little surgeon had tact enough to keep silent; he did not care to talk, either. Life rose before him a splendid possibility, as never before. From the silent figure at the helm came neither word nor motion. Presently a bleak morning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... fierce, passionate hatred, swept over her as he shouted in her ear. A hundred times she had informed him politely that she was not deaf when she wore her ear-'phone, and a hundred times he had listened impatiently and gone on in his sharp, rasping snarl. She drew away shuddering as he looked over some papers and cleared his throat for a fresh start; and then, without reason that he could ever divine, she burst into ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... sought! Now, careless, let us stray, or stop To see the partridge from the covey drop, Or, while the evening air's like yellow wine, From the pure stream take out The playful trout, That jerks with rasping check the struggled line; Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks, The labourers stir themselves amain To feed with hasty sheaves of grain The deaf'ning engine's boisterous maw, And snatch again, From ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... of a cyclone has struck us now?" growled the ticket agent, who was in the next room. Then he frowned, as the first noise was followed by the rasping sound of a bench being dragged out of a corner, to a place nearer the stove. It scraped the bare floor every inch of the way, with a jarring motion that made ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... vanished back into the control room of Reactor Two. De Hooch kept on running, his breath rasping loudly in the confines of the fishbowl helmet. Running four hundred yards isn't the easiest thing in the world, even if a man is in good physical condition. There was less weight to contend with, but the mass that had to be pushed along remained ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... by the gorgeous flame of the morning star retreating before the coming sun, we all collected buckets and rags and bottles and sponges. In Indian file we were led by Sam around the hill, up a steep path that was bordered by coral-strung buck-bushes and rasping blackberry brush, and to his little farm-house perched on a plateau almost up to the top of the hill. It was long and low, with a wide red roof that seemed to hover in the whitewashed walls and green shutters; while white smoke ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... evil spirit. Without uttering the words of any language — Poe's "Nevermore" was, of course, a poetic license — people of all nationalities appear to understand that some dire calamity, some wicked portent, is being announced every time the unbirdlike creature utters its rasping call. The superstitious folk crow with an "I told you so," as they solemnly wag their heads when they hear, of some death in the village after "the bird of ill-omen" has made an unwelcome visit to the neighborhood—it receives the blame ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Abbey, Old Pye Street, Peter's Street, and Duck Lane were aflare with the coarse lights of open naphtha lamps, and all but impassable with costers' barrows. There were the husky voices of the street hawkers, the hoarse laughter, the quarrelling, the oaths, the rasping shouts of the butcher selling chunks of dark joints by auction, the screeches of the roast-potato man, and the smell of stale vegetables and fried fish. "Jow, 'ow much a pound for yer turmaters?" "Three pence; I gave mor'n that for 'em myself." "Garn!" ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... least bear that of listening. Remember that knowing—knowing what you know, or at least what you have heard—you could come here and propose marriage to me!' This she said with a cold, cutting sarcasm which sounded like the rasping of a roughly-sharpened knife through raw flesh. Harold groaned in spirit; he felt a weakness which began at his heart to steal through him. It took all his manhood to bear himself erect. He dreaded what was coming, ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... the uplifting of the smoke had been prearranged, the discovered troops burst into a rasping yell, and a hundred flames jetted toward the retreating band. A rolling gray cloud again interposed as the regiment doggedly replied. The youth had to depend again upon his misused ears, which were trembling and buzzing from the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... did not relish Craig's bellicose manner, nor the glare in his one eye that showed, nor the imputation of vindictive rebuke in his rasping tones. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... hot parching winds bent the rank grass, which gave forth a dry, almost rasping sound, very different ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... talked of nothing but their 'shop' and their young ladies. I have been to a public-house, drunk beer, and shaken hands with the barmaid. I was even disappointed when one of them—a creature with false hair, a loud, rasping voice and painted lips—was not there. Just in time I took one of my beans and became myself again, but Edith, I have only two more. When they are gone there is an end of me. That is why I sit here by your side at this moment and feel myself a condemned man. I think that ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the ships ran foul; With a gnarring shudder and growl— He gave us a deadly gun; But as he passed in his pride, (Rasping right alongside!) The Old Flag, in thunder tones, Poured in her port broadside, Rattling his iron hide, And ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... tilting of the water-logged boat, a sound of rasping timbers, the swarming of men in shirtsleeves and blue trousers around her, seemed to rouse her momentarily, but she ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... from the panhandler's thoughts than flight. His rags fluttered freely in the evening air and his sole-less shoes flopped up and down upon his feet, rasping his bare toes, as he approached the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... such wide intervals, sounded through the house. Morel, in his room, slept on. Paul and Annie sat crouched, huddled, motionless. The great snoring sound began again—there was a painful pause while the breath was held—back came the rasping breath. Minute after minute passed. Paul looked at her again, bending low ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a hoarse, rasping voice, "I'm in a hurry. Guess natur' don't wait fer nuthin' when she gits busy on matters wot interest her; an' seein' Barnriff needs all the population that's comin' to it with so energetic a funeral maker as our friend, Angel Gay, around, I'll git ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... same time he was thunderstruck by the excellence of his drawing. It was indeed a thaumaturgic design, just such a one as the architect himself had dreamt of, but had been unable to execute; and while he gazed at it eagerly the stranger hailed him in an ugly, rasping voice. "A cunning device, this of mine," he said sharply; and the architect was bound to agree, despite the jealousy he felt. Surely, he thought, only the Evil One could draw in this wise. Scarcely had the ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... years, was frightfully aged by dissipation and disease. The gross, sensual mouth with its loose-hanging lips; the blotched and clammy skin; the pale, watery eyes with their inflamed rims and flabby pouches; the sunken chest, skinny neck and limbs; and the thin rasping voice—all cried aloud the shame of a misspent life. It was as clearly evident that he was a man of wealth and, in the eyes of the world, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... how you criticise your neighbors," spoke a rasping voice near by. "As a matter of fact you are rather ugly-looking creatures yourselves, and I'm sure mother has often told us we were the loveliest and prettiest ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed In the vole's empty house, still drove afield To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees And build their young ones their hutched nurseries; Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison Nor had the whisper through the tansies run Nor weather-wisest bird gone home. How then Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken Lightning coming? troubled up they stole To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole, Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... by the ribs. Forcing people to drink till they burst. Baking many in hot ovens. Fixing weights to the feet, and drawing up several with pulleys. Hanging, stifling, roasting, stabbing, frying, racking, ravishing, ripping open, breaking the bones, rasping off the flesh, tearing with wild horses, drowning, strangling, burning, broiling, crucifying, immuring, poisoning, cutting off tongues, nose, ears, &c. sawing off the limbs, hacking to pieces, and drawing by the heels through ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... lets technical skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his poems, the Hymn to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... puritanic quiet here reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The silence to ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... pleasure. Socially conspicuous before many years? The splendid prophecy, which went beyond the limit of Horace Elton's usual caution—for he combined the faculty of habitual discretion with his chatty proclivities—was dimmed for Selma by the rasping intimation that she was not conspicuous yet. Worse still, his statement shattered the hope, which Flossy's fluent assertions had already disturbed, that she was to find in Washington a company of ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... been removed and the walls hung with flags, those of Spain on three sides, the Russian, borrowed by Santiago from the ship, at the head of the room. Concha laughed gaily as Luis stormed about the sala rasping his spurs on the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... a strange rasping sound. Then, in a tone of weird intensity: 'See! See!' and he laid his hand on mine ... the curtain was no longer there, and some vague thing gathered—the statue was dim behind it—the form of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips |
