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Brink   /brɪŋk/   Listen
Brink

noun
1.
A region marking a boundary.  Synonyms: threshold, verge.
2.
The edge of a steep place.
3.
The limit beyond which something happens or changes.  Synonym: verge.  "On the brink of bankruptcy"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Brink" Quotes from Famous Books



... Father, to pause and consider deeply before you eject me from the Church for so simple and plain a matter. Let me as one who is nearing the grave in company with yourself—as one who with yourself must soon stand on that dark brink of the Eternal from which we see the Light beyond—let me most humbly yet most earnestly point out to you the far more serious things than my offence, which are threatening Rome to-day. The people of all lands are ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... stewed with a wine sauce that was delicious, fish, boiled chicken, and baked pig. I had not tasted more appetizing food. It was all cooked in the native fashion on hot stones above or under ground. We saw the pig's disinterment. On the brink of the stream which flowed past the bower the oven had been made. The cooks, Moorea men, removed a layer of earth that had been laid on cocoa-palm leaves. This was the cover of the oven. Immediately below the leaves were yams and feis and under them a layer of banana leaves. The pig came next. It ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... apparently combined to humiliate Lucien by various aristocrats' sarcasms. Lili the religious thought it a charitable deed to use any means of enlightening Nais, and Nais was on the brink of a piece of folly. Francis the diplomatist undertook the direction of the silly conspiracy; every one was interested in the progress of the drama; it would be something to talk about to-morrow. The ex-consul, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... brink—who can guess what say the dashing waters beneath? Who can interpret the silence of the eternal stars? We rest in the walley—valley, who can understand the whispering of the leaves? Who can read the secrets of the ocean blue? O, ...
— The Sweet Girl Graduates • Rea Woodman

... the south, and bid them farewell. She got up, went out on the balcony, and then she saw, on the roof of an adjoining outhouse, stork upon stork, while all around the place, above the highest trees, flew crowds of them, wheeling in large circles; but below, on the brink of the well, where little Helga had but so lately often sat, and frightened her with her wild actions, sat now two swans, looking up at her with expressive eyes; and she remembered her dream, which seemed to her ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... done? how can we investigate the ideas of peoples who, ignorant of writing, had no means of permanently recording their beliefs? At first sight the thing seems impossible; the thread of enquiry is broken off short; it has landed us on the brink of a gulf which looks impassable. But the case is not so hopeless as it appears. True, we cannot investigate the beliefs of prehistoric ages directly, but the comparative method of research may furnish us with the means of studying them indirectly; it may hold up ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... was cleft by a broad and deep gorge. The design of the enciente was peculiar. There was a thick and high exterior wall of mud, with a banquette for infantry protected by a parapet. Inside this wall was a dry ditch forty feet wide, on the inner brink of which was the long range of barrack-rooms. Along the interior front of the barrack-rooms was a verandah faced with arches supported by pillars, its continuity broken occasionally by broad staircases conducting to the roof of the barracks, which afforded a second line of defence. The closing ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... other passages of the text. In one a king was praying in the Temple to an exploding bomb intended to represent the Shechinah or divine glory. In another, Sarah attired in a matronly cap and a fashionable jacket and skirt, was standing behind the door of the tent, a solid detached villa on the brink of a lake, whereon ships and gondolas floated, what time Abraham welcomed the three celestial messengers, unobtrusively disguised with heavy pinions. What delight as the quaking of each of the four cups of wine ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... kindness to me shown, Never from thy banks be blown Any tree, with windy force, Cross thy streams, to stop thy course: May no beast that comes to drink, With his horns cast down thy brink; May none that for thy fish do look, Cut thy banks to damm thy Brook; Bare-foot may no Neighbour wade In thy cool streams, wife nor maid, When the spawns on stones do lye, To wash their ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... still under the shadow of the dreadful thing that he had averted but a little while before. There was a feeling over him that he had seen this warm, breathing woman, with the best of her life before her, standing on the brink of a terrifying chasm into which one little movement would have precipitated her beyond the help ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden

... slowly on. Had not he been so absorbed in thought of the crisis of his life, on the brink of which he stood, the indications of something unusual and foreboding would have arrested his attention. A rustling among the leaves and brush of the undergrowth told of the presence of some animated thing, human or brute. Once a gleam, as of some highly burnished ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter

... in which ingenious critics have attempted to discover the poet in the plays and the poems. Collin then gives a brief survey of modern Shakespearean criticism—Furnivall, Dowden, Brandl, Boas, ten Brink, and, more recently, Sidney, Lee, Brandes, and Bierfreund. An important object of the study of these men has been to fix the chronology of the plays. They seldom fully agree. Sidney Lee and the Danish critic, Bierfreund, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud

... kept close to the house, but, considering that a bold effort was the only one likely to succeed, he walked out straight to the moat, hesitated a moment as to whether he should leap in and swim or wade across, and ended by walking sharply along its brink till it turned off at right angles, and he now saw a sandstone bridge facing the entry of a large, old-fashioned hall, that had evidently gone to ruin, and which, from the outside aspect, seemed to be uninhabited, for a more thorough aspect of desolation ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn

... a little knowledge of the fundamentals of health and growth know that useful men and women are going into degeneration and premature death constantly, because of violated health laws. If these people on the brink, who can yet be saved by natural means, are told how it can be done, they generally either refuse to believe it, or they have led such self-indulgent lives that it is beyond their power to change. The knowledge often comes ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker

... people on the brink of starvation! In Christian England hundreds of thousands of thieves, knaves, idlers, drunkards, cowards, and harlots; and fortunes spent on churches and the praise ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... striking feature in the geology of New South Wales. They are of grand dimensions, and are bordered by continuous links of lofty cliffs. It is not easy to conceive a more magnificent spectacle, than is presented to a person walking on the summit- plains, when without any notice he arrives at the brink of one of these cliffs, which are so perpendicular, that he can strike with a stone (as I have tried) the trees growing, at the depth of between one thousand and one thousand five hundred feet below him; on both ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin

... brink of the giant hollow and clapped their hands for the very joy of seeing it all; and there—a little man stepped up to them and doffed his cap. The queen wanted them—she was waiting for them by the throne that very minute; ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... have done, over, over the brink I have dropped at last headlong into nought, plunging upon sheer hard extinction; I have come, as it were, not to know, died, as it were; ceased from knowing; surpassed myself. What can I say more, except that I know what it ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence

... passed an hour that threatened to turn his hair gray, and then a blessed calm settled down upon him that filled his heart with gratitude. Weak and languid, he made shift to turn himself about and seek rest and sleep; and as his soul hovered upon the brink of unconciousness, he heaved a long, deep sigh, and said to himself that in his heart he had cursed the Colonel's preventive of rheumatism, before, and now let the plague come if it must—he was done with preventives; if ever any man beguiled ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... A few years later it was recognized as an accepted mode of propulsion and had gained a permanent and definite place in the practice of the day,—a place which has continued to grow in importance until its earlier rival, the paddle-wheel, is almost on the brink of relegation to museums of antiquities, except possibly for rare and special shallow-water uses. A careful and dispassionate study of the facts, so far as they can be known at the present time, seems to indicate clearly that of those who were concerned in successfully ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... to a decision, is that very combined scheme of activity which the despots of Europe too evidently display. They know full well that they are on the brink of an inevitable retribution; that their crimes have pushed them to the point, where either their power will cease for ever to exist, or they must risk all for all. In former times they relied at the hour of danger upon the generous credulity of nations. By seemingly submitting, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth

... mineral, so that it gave out crystal lights even to the darkness, and the arched grotto which held it was all aglow, as though with hidden fires. A silent pool it was, we said, and our path seemed to end upon its brink; but even as we stood asking for a road, all the still water began to heave and foam, and, a great creature rising up from the depths, the lantern showed us a monster devil-fish, and we fell back one upon the other with affrighted cries. Nor let any man ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... of a dark and rainy March evening. "Any statement you would like to make?" One stands upon the brink of the living world, facing the darkness and silence, and hears ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... a mournful throng On the brink of a gloomy grave, In a valley where grief had found relief On the breast of an angry wave! I heard a tearful song That told of an orphan's love— 'Twas a song of woe from the valley below, To the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... saw this," he said, "this—exquisitely smiling at me under a green tree in a sunny garden—the tomb opened under my feet, and I stood on the brink ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to overtake him. We thought it was not safe to follow long an unknown person who was so evidently afraid, and flying, as we supposed, to his home. Accordingly we hastened our speed, and I, being the nimblest reached him at a place where he was stopped by a cleft in the rocks on the river's woody brink. ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... Near the brink of the Falls, beneath an aged pine, reclined a well- guarded, sorrowful, but haughty band. Their fine symmetry, noble height, and free carriage, were especially attractive. They were all young warriors, ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah

... again by the meaner prejudice of color. We can have no permanent peace with the South but by Americanizing it, by compelling it, if need be, to accept the idea, and with it the safety of democracy. At present we seem on the brink of contracting to protect from insurrection States in which a majority of the population, many of them now trained to arms, and all of them conscious of a claim upon us to make their freedom strong enough to protect them, are to be left at ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... in indistinct and exaggerated shapes which they would not have worn by night, they gradually became less and less capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled headlong down, and threw ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... yours, and goodbye! I drop these few lines, as in a bottle from a ship water-logged and on the brink of foundering, being in the last stage of dropsical debility; but, though suffering in body, serene in mind. So, without reversing my union-jack, I await my last lurch. Till which, believe me, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... celebrated Captain, on the brink of a war with France, was an admission of the desperate strait to which the English interest had been reduced. And if the end could ever justify the means, Henry V., from his point of view, might have defended on that ground the appointment ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... elusive fluctuations, ever dimmer, ever recurrently flaring, and when the jury of view and their companions, alarmed by the long absence of Persimmon Sneed, followed the strange light through the woods to the brink of the burning spring, they found naught astir save the vagrant shadows of the great boles of the trees, no longer held to their accustomed orbit, but wandering through the woods with a ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... wrote in concealment and sent out by trusty hands, in cantos, that autobiography in which she appealed to posterity, and by which posterity has been convinced. She traced her career from earliest childhood down to the very brink of the grave into which she was looking. Her intellectual, affectional and mental history are all there written with a hand as steady and a mind as serene as though she were at home, with her baby sleeping ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... stage. This struggle was an excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled with debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with further responsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondary house, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink of bankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in the country that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to court starvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The only published volume of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... of all the world is changed, I think, Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul Move still, oh, still beside me, as they stole Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink Of obvious death, where I who thought to sink Was caught up into love and taught the whole Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole God gave for baptism, I am fain to drink, And praise its sweetness, sweet with thee anear. The name ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... itself, and in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of DELIRIUM TREMENS. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie came carrying a lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they went down the street of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand, the barred lustre ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with a dull thud against the rugged trunk of an ash which hung over the water, and he sank below the brown, turbid stream. Then Victor Carrington emerged from his hiding-place, and rushed to the brink of the water. No sign of the rector was to be seen; and midway across, the horse, snorting and terrified, was struggling towards the opposite bank. In a moment Carrington, drawing something from his breast as ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Right. That is to be observed, or we fail. Persons have existed, and do yet exist, who are law unto themselves, deliberate choosers of their fate, deliberate allies of Atropos with the shears, who go what seems to us, shivering on the brink of things, a bright and bloodstained way, and furrow deeply into life, because it must be so, because so they will have it. Great ones of time, a Caesar or so, a Catherine, a Buonaparte, come handily to mind, who, wreaking countless woes, wrought evenly ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... ceremonious pause. Then Multnomah arose. He looked over the council, upon the stern faces of the Willamettes and the loyal tributaries, upon the sullen faces of the malcontents, upon the fierce and lowering multitude beyond. Over the throng he looked, and felt as one feels who stands on the brink of a volcano; yet his strong voice never rang stronger, the grand old chief never looked more a chief ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch

... are quite right, John. Imprudent marriages are, in most cases, very wrong things—a mere tempting of Providence: and, that no blessing follows such tempting, we know from the best authority: but this is a most pious, benevolent, and very rational attempt to save a fellow-creature upon the brink of destruction, and I think it would be a want of faith, as well as a want of common humanity, in either of us to hesitate; I am very glad she seems such a sweet, innocent, pretty creature, for your sake, my darling John; I hope she ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... ha! I laugh at it now to think Of the way I contrived to work it. Shut in amongst them, before you'd wink, He found himself on the water's brink, With never a ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... happens to be vested in a distillery? Is it consistent with the great law of love by which you profess to be governed? Will it bear examination in a dying hour? Shall I bid you look back upon it from the brink of eternity, that you may from such recollections gather holy courage for your pending conflict with the king of terrors? Will you bequeath this magazine of wrath and perdition to your only son not already ruined, and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... He peered down into it and saw it had no bottom, but opened away off at the other side of the world. Here was an obstacle which might well dishearten the boldest traveler, and Timtom was so grieved that he sat down on the brink and wept tears ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum

... he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in upon your friends as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... damsel-flies That fluttered round the jasmine stems, 70 Like-winged flowers or flying gems: And, near the boy, who, tired with play, Now nestling 'mid the roses lay, She saw a wearied man dismount From his hot steed, and on the brink 75 Of a small imaret's rustic fount Impatient fling him down to drink. Then swift his haggard brow he turned To the fair child, who fearless sat, Though never yet hath daybeam burned 80 Upon a ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... brink!" — and ever she flies up the steep, And the clansmen pant, and they sweat, and they jostle and strain. But, mother, 'tis vain; but, father, 'tis vain; Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and dangles the child ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... something after they're married," retorted Eliza, "and the looking for it will give a spice to life. There's many a man—ay, and woman, too!—who have fallen deeper in love after they've taken the plunge than ever they did while they were hovering on the brink." ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... content; And let this truth be understood— Few can be great, all may be good. Power, pomp, ambition, envy, pride, Wrecked barks adown life's stream may glide, Ruined by some fierce passion throe, E'er, reckless, o'er Time's brink they go; But if fair virtue grasps the helm, Nor storm ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... won some notable victories. They are a recognized power in the land. There are those who hope, and those who fear, that they will in the end become socially and politically omnipotent. It is now generally recognized that society prior to the war was on the brink of a struggle between the classes of great bitterness, and that the social condition of the country after the war is likely to be fraught with formidable possibilities. There are many observers who regard a social revolution, in one form or ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... flung farther, to the parasites of the parasites, the ticks on ticks' backs. Round about the Castle of Verona, where Can Grande II. misused the justice which his forefathers had set up, lay the houses of his courtiers; beyond them the lodgings of the grooms; beyond them again, down to the river's brink, were the stews and cabins and unholy dens, whose office was to be lower than the lowest, that there might still be degrees for the gentlemen of gentlemen's gentlemen. And since even cockroaches must drink, in this fungus-bed of misery there flourished a rather infamous tavern by the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression; and acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... had been guilty towards her, were now forgotten, and her vivid fancy, excited by the extent of the danger, now saw nothing but his brilliant qualities, and his untimely fate. Doubly dear was Gomez Arias to Theodora, when she perceived him on the brink of destruction. Hope, however, did not entirely forsake her, though the boding voice of grief, which floated on the air, soon dissolved so enchanting an illusion. If expectation had been great, the disappointment was now doubly terrible; the sentence had been ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... road lay along the brink of a deep ravine, with the brook that made the waterfall tumbling along over the rocks ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott

... wonderful indeed," he said. "We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen

... generally conspicuous and efficient. At the present apparently hopeless financial crisis, Talleyrand uncovered a new source of revenue, claimed that the property of the Church belonged to the nation, and that as the nation was on the brink of financial ruin, this confiscation was a supreme necessity. The Church lands represented a value of two thousand millions of francs,—an immense sum, which, if sold, would relieve, it was supposed, the necessities of the State. Mirabeau, although he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... congregations—are but poor substitutes for what many of us have lost in racing after them. We have the departed prophets' mantle, the outward resemblance to the fathers who have gone, but their fiery zeal has passed to heaven with them; and softer, weaker men, we stand timidly on the river's brink, invoking the Lord God of Elijah, and too often the flood that obeyed them has no ear for our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... has seemed to me more significant than that dark civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it. The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life. He has advanced against all opposition by a certain elevation of his spirit. He has been made strong in tribulation. He has constrained oppression ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... us, but sat down by the side of the girl, and they fell at once into earnest conversation. She leaned forward in her deep armchair, and took her nicely rounded chin in her beautiful white hand. He looked attentively into her eyes. It was the attitude of love-making, serious, intense, as if on the brink of the grave. I suppose she felt it necessary to round and complete her assumption of advanced ideas, of revolutionary lawlessness, by making believe to be in love with an anarchist. And this one, I repeat, was extremely presentable, notwithstanding his ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... sir! don't you know better than to do that?" I looked up, and saw a man twice as big as myself sprawling over me, headlong down the bank, toward the river, whither I followed him, but alas! not on my feet, but rolling head over heels. On the very brink he stuck his heels into the turf, and stopped dead, amid a shout of, "Well saved, Lynedale!" I did not stop; but rolled into some two-feet water, amid the laughter ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... this flirtation, and saw that it could only end in one way, if her daughter should fall into the hands of an utterly unscrupulous intriguer. How could it be other than a terrible thought for her that her daughter listened willingly to this roue? Her darling stood on the brink of a precipice, she felt horribly sure of it, yet dared not hold her back. She was afraid of the Countess. She knew too that Moina would not listen to her wise warnings; she knew that she had no influence over that nature—iron for her, silken-soft for all others. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... Atlantic coast. But she might well have divided with them North America; and today the lands north of the Ohio and westward beyond the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean might have been French. The two nations on the brink of war in 1754 were playing for mighty stakes; and victory was to the power which had control of the sea. France had a great army, Britain a great fleet. In this contrast lay wrapped the secret of the future ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... forming part of a dinner-party of thirteen. Where am I going? To that 'Sea of Serenity' which astronomers tell us is located in the left eye of the face known in common parlance as the man in the moon. Where am I going? To Western Ross-shire, to pitch my tent and smoke my cigar in peace, on the brink of that blessed Loch Maree, whereof ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... for he knew that Miss Torrance was very like her father in some respects, and Hetty shook the reins. The next minute they had swept over the brink, and Flora Schuyler saw the trail dip steeply but slantwise to lessen the gradient to the frozen creek. The sinking sun was hidden by the high bank now and the snow had faded to a cold blue-whiteness, through which the trail ran, a faint line of dusky grey. It was difficult ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... be frightened on the very brink of hell by nursery-tales? But they shall not prevent me from piercing the darkness; I will know what the gloomy curtain conceals, which a tyrannical hand has drawn before our eyes. And who is to blame, I repeat? Was it I that formed myself so that trifling exertion exhausts ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... intend to act?" repeated the second trapper. "That is simple enough. We shall place ourselves in the cistern—the jaguars will come forward to its brink; and then, if we are only favoured by a blink of the moon, I'll answer for it that in the twinkling of an eye the brutes will neither feel ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... he alone of mortals is impervious to love, and so the discovery that he is in it suddenly alters his views of his own mechanism. It is thus not unlike a rap on the funny-bone. Did Gavin make this discovery when the Egyptian left him? Apparently he only came to the brink of it and stood blind. He had driven her from him for ever, and his sense of loss was so acute that his soul cried out for the cure rather than for ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... he informed my parents of the duel. After having paced up and down my little chamber, I stopped suddenly before the old man and said: "It seems that it is not enough that you caused my wound, and brought me almost to the brink of the grave, but that you want ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin

... before the brink of death In fitful sleep the army lay, For through the dream that stilled their breath Too ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... Henry, it went quite another way, which, widening diagonally, did not bring the creature at all near him. It was evidently directing its course toward some liliaceous plants with large succulent stems, which formed a patch or bed, standing in the water, but close to the brink of the lake. ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... ground their way through the Princeton defense, making a breach through which the mighty Butterworth, Bronc Armstrong and Brink Thorne ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... tragedy. My husband has all the sacredness to me of having come back to me from the brink of the grave. He has all the wonder of a man who has offered, and is willing to offer his life again for right. He has all the glory of a man who had not to ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat

... thrown the reins on to the neck of the old white horse, and was waving his arms and singing a wild Gaelic song. Suddenly they saw the thin gleam of a river, at an immense distance below, and knew that they were upon the brink of the abyss that is now called Lug-na-Gael, or in English the Stranger's Leap. The six horses sprang forward, and five screams went up into the air, a moment later five men and horses fell with a dull crash upon the green slopes at ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats

... go without food for a couple of days, even longer. Had not certain English women survived days and days of a voluntary hunger strike? But he could not do without water. In the black hours before dawn he would climb down from his eerie den and drink his fill at the river's brink. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... frequently referred with tears. While under Mr Ballantyne's scholastic superintendence, his love of nature first became apparent. After school hours it was his delight to wander by the banks of the Tweed, or reclining on its brink, to listen to the music of its waters. From circumstances into which we need not inquire, his family was induced to remove from Kelso to London. The position they occupied we have not learned; but young Hume is remembered as being a quick, intelligent, and most affectionate boy, eager, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may—to use a lofty expression—have no individual soul. Obviously a book of that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... opportunity as has never occurred before," she said, "and in a hundred years none so fit may occur again. Here are we—England—on the brink of civil war with Ireland and the Home Rulers; our hands are tied, or, rather, are occupied with our own troubles. Anyhow, Germany thinks so: that I know for a fact among so much that is only conjecture. And perhaps ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... dogs. The sled jerked forward, and commenced to move at tremendous speed. A slight wind created a funnel-like opening in the dense white cloud before her. She gave one long shriek of horror at the sight which met her eyes. The sled was on the very brink of a precipice! It hovered there for a moment—just long enough for her to fling herself sideways against the wall; then it, and the team, vanished over the side, taking a mass of snow down, ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... suffer myself to be seduced by the most ridiculous illusion imaginable, and to be hurried away rather by frivolous appearances than any real inclination: to you I owe the obligation of having preserved me from destruction at the very brink of a precipice. This is not the only kindness you have done me, your favours have been innumerable; and, as a proof of my gratitude for this last, I will follow your advice, and go into retirement at my cousin Wetenhall's, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... night; And then the hospitable Sire Bid goody Baucis mend the fire; While he from out the chimney took A flitch of bacon off the hook, And freely from the fattest side Cut out large slices to be fried; Then stepped aside to fetch 'em drink, Filled a large jug up to the brink, And saw it fairly twice go round; Yet (what is wonderful) they found 'Twas still replenished to the top, As if they ne'er had touched a drop The good old couple were amazed, And often on each other gazed; For both were frightened to the heart, And just ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... not stir a finger in the matter—but now, stung beyond endurance, I rose and addressed the jury in impassioned words. 'Their verdict,' I told them, 'was of little importance if I was to lose the respect of my fellow-citizens. I had made no effort to shape their decision, but now on the brink, it might be of a felon's grave, I would utter my dying words. I would confine myself to protesting before God, and on my honor, that I had long since forgiven George Conway the wrongs done me—that the scene on the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... was the first who arrived on the brink. For a moment he paused, as if uncertain what course to pursue, then, seeing Middlemore close behind him, he leaped in, and striking a blow of his sabre upon the stockade, called loudly upon the axemen to follow. While he was yet shouting, a ball from a loop-hole, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... of the fatal results and asked him to quit or it would be the ruin of both. Here were these two on the brink of ruin, so young, so attractive. I never shall forget the pathos of that woman's story. The yearning of that heart for love. Of course in her unhappiness she would turn to the benumbing ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... like the unwinding of the coils of a serpent, Ned Rector slipping slowly over the brink, the red man squirming after him, until both were clear of the edge, ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin

... gone out with a fishing party at about ten o'clock at night to spear trout. We supplied ourselves with an eel spear and a lantern, and visited Cannon's "beck." We drew the light gently over the water near the brink. Immediately the light appeared, both trouts and eels were splashing about the lantern in great quantities. We then took the spear, and as they approached, thrust it down upon them, sometimes bringing up with it three or four together. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various

... the water's brink, joined Uncle Lorne, who was talking, after his fashion, into the dark pool. And Stanley Lake—a general in difficulties—retraced his steps toward the park gate through which he had come, ruminating on his ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... old age and of a complication of diseases, in the spring of 1892. He lost his hair, he lost his teeth, he lost everything but his indomitable spirit; and when almost on the brink of the grave, he stood in the back-yard—literally, on the brink of his own grave—for eight hours in a March snow-storm, motionless, and watching a great black cat on the fence, whom he hypnotized, and who finally came ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton

... if my mortal feet Have almost gained the brink; If it be I am nearer home Even to-day than ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... strangely kind through the poor victim's swoons and weeping that the very menials who were called to aid her went back to their hall wondering in their talk of the noble grandness of so great a lady, who on the very brink of her own joy could stoop to protect and comfort a creature so far beneath her, that to most ladies her sorrow and desertion would have been things which were too trivial to count; for 'twas guessed, and talked over with great freedom ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... was hurled into the air. He sprawled forward like a frog diving and—without touching the ground—passed over the brink of the precipice and disappeared from Helen's ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... I linger on the brink of painful scenes to observe that a sweet and loving friendship, such as this was between the good doctor and three persons of another sex, is one of the best treasures of the human heart. Poverty had strengthened it; yet now ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... to plague his enemies, their mouth, Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried In fancy, puts them soberly aside For truth, projects a cool return with friends, The likelihood of winning mere amends Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently, Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he, Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon Off-striding for the Mountains ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... like some icy lake, On whose cold brink I stand; Oh, buckle on my spirit's skate, And lead, thou living saint, the way To where the ice is thin— That it may break beneath my feet And let a ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells

... of return had hitherto been just a little over three days. Sometimes, with favorable winds to the brink of the Abyss, and unusually strong rising currents of vapors from the sunken sea—from the Vortex, perhaps?—he had been able to make the round trip in ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... So he took the churn on his back, and went out with it; but then he thought he'd better first water the cow before he turned her out on the thatch; so he took up a bucket to draw water out of the well; but, as he stooped down at the well's brink, all the cream ran out of the churn over his shoulders, and so down into ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen

... precipice there lay a long hollow log, which had been probably dragged there with the intention of making a bridge across the chasm. Overton dismounted, led his horse to the very brink, and pricked him with his knife the noble animal leaped, but his strength was too far gone for him to clear it; his breast struck the other edge, and he fell from crag to crag into the abyss below. This over, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... emerged from the woods, and Frank found himself on the brink of a rocky chasm, which stretched away to the right as far as his eye could reach, and seemed to extend down into the very bowels of the earth. It was so deep that his head grew dizzy, as he looked into it. On his left, and directly in front of him, was a precipitous mountain, the top of ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon

... the sun-baked clay, The dripping jar, brimful, she rests a space On the well's dry white brink, and leans her face, Heavy with tears and many a heartsick day, Down to the water's lip, whence slips away A rivulet thro' the hot, bright square apace, And lo! her brow casts off each servile trace— The wave's cool breath hath won her ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts

... under the able leadership of Mr. Tooke. By these the rise of prices is, to a large degree, attributed to the excited spirit of speculation produced by the war, which, as they show, twice during this period brought the country to the brink of ruin. In favor of this explanation it may be further said that the fall of prices began immediately on the close of the war, and at no time was greater than in 1817, two years before the resumption of specie payment by the Bank. In 1819 the Bank of England resumed the payment of specie. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... painter, Plucked from his willow-tree Two big paper lanterns And ran to the brink of the sea; Over his head he held them, Crying, and only heard, Somewhere, out in the darkness, The cry ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... thing to birth is brought; Nor know I then what next will come From out the gulf of silence dumb. I am the door the thing did find To pass into the general mind; I cannot say I think— I only stand upon the thought-well's brink; From darkness to the sun the water bubbles up— I lift it in my cup. Thou only thinkest—I am thought; Me and my thought thou thinkest. Nought Am I but as a fountain spout From which thy water welleth out. Thou art the only One, the All in all. —Yet ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... single pace and gathered his muscles for the leap. He took one quick step and made a terrific bound upward and outward, straight for the rocky brink whereon Deerfoot the Shawanoe instantly stepped ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis

... I feel, I believe, as our brethren from America and many English friends do at this moment, that we are treading on the brink of a precipice; and that precipice is the awaking in our bosoms by this discussion, feelings that will not only be averse to the great object for which we have assembled, but inconsistent, perhaps, in some degree, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... old man, 'indeed! then she has done justice at last. I'm glad on it, Harry, glad on it, for it's a relief to my mind. I was bound to the secret, and have kept it; but when a man is on the brink of the grave, he does not like to have a secret like that upon his mind, and I've more than once talked ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... Kilian, "I have a compromise to offer. If we go home by the bridge we pass the little Brink hotel, where they give capital teas. We can stop there, rest, get tea, have a dance in the 'ball-room,' sixteen by twenty, and go home by moonlight, filling the souls of Miss Leighton and Henrietta ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris

... Still, it is not the whole meaning of things, for, as Eucken points out: "But we are now experiencing what mankind has so often experienced, viz. that at the very point where the negation reaches its climax and the danger reaches the very brink of a precipice, the conviction dawns with axiomatic certainty that there lives and stirs within us something which no obstacle or enmity can ever destroy, and which signifies against all opposition a kernel of our nature that can never ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... I know she does, and God knows I forgive you—I, who, above all others, have most reason to curse you for ever. Think not that she can hate upon the brink of the grave. Her mind wanders, and no wonder that the wrongs of earth press upon her memory, her reason being gone. She knows not herself of the mood which her features express. Look not upon her, Guy, I pray you, or let me ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... in the Coal-house, apart from Ralph Allerton, or any other; and we look every day when we shall be condemned; for he said that I should be burned within ten days before Easter; but I lie still at the pool's brink, and every man goeth in before me; but we abide patiently the Lord's leisure, with many bonds, in fetters and stocks, by which we have received great joy of God. And now fare you well, dear brethren and sisters, in this world, but I trust to see you in ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... with letters of confirmation; Sir Edward Karne and Dr. Revett following leisurely, with a more ample commission. The stone which had been laboriously rolled to the summit of the hill was trembling on the brink, and in a moment might rebound into ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... oaks, the linden, the locusts on the hill and the solitary old honey-locust down by the river's brink are as yet unresponsive to the smiles of spring. The plum, the crab apple, the hawthorn and the wild cherry are but just beginning to push green points between their bud scales. But the elms are a glory of dull gold; every twig is fringed with blossoms. The maples have lost their fleecy white ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... all that's sacred, I did my duty! Night and day I was with young Fane. A hundred times he was on the brink of ruin; a hundred times I saved him. One day, one never-to-be-forgotten day, one most dark and damnable day, I called on him, and found him on the point of joining a coterie of desperate character. I remonstrated with him, I entreated, I supplicated him ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... bird singing from a short distance: it was as though the storm of music broke from his singing heart—yes, from his own heart singing for some unexpressed fulfillment. He was barely conscious of going through the trees, with eyes shut tight against the outer world, but soon he was kneeling at the brink of the Pond, while the surge of joy and pain in the song broke on his spirit like waves upon a shore, or love upon a man and a woman—washed back, towered up, and broke on him again. At last on one full glorious phrase it ceased. And at that instant, deep in the Pond, he saw ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... sudden stop at the edge of the gully. Below them one of the troopers was struggling to his feet. The other lay very still beneath his motionless horse. With an angry oath Maenck directed one of his men to remain and help the two who had plunged over the brink, then with the others he rode along the gully searching ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... and think, Before you further go; Think upon the brink of death Of everlasting woe. Say, have you an arm like God, That you his will oppose? Fear you not that iron rod With ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... the help of a low-branching tree. The summit of the great rock was one of the sacred places in the temple of the solitudes; and when the earth became too thickly peopled for comfort, he would come hither to lie on the very brink of the cliff overhanging the spring, heels in air, and hands for a chin-rest, looking down on a removed world mapping itself in softened outlines ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... adage, it was easier to compel young Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to the brink. His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed. He was whistling at the cook's windows after a day of wicked truancy, on an April night, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Naomi Holland opened her eyes. The child she had never loved was the only one to go with her to the brink of the Unseen. ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery



Words linked to "Brink" :   boundary, bound, edge, threshold, limit, border



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