"Shrivel up" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has been properly carried out, the victim becomes blue, that is, he feels the effects in himself at once, and, unless he employs the countercharms of some more powerful shaman, his soul begins to shrivel up and dwindle, and within seven days he is dead. When it is found that the spell has no effect upon the intended victim it is believed that he has discovered the plot and has taken measures for his own protection, or ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a sudden impulse she plucked up the paper, but as suddenly let it drop again, for, looking at his grave face, her little fame seemed to shrivel up. "But give a dog a bad name you know——You were there on Monday night. Did you see ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... little boy's father called him to the window to see the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,—Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we shall not see ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a hoarse whisper from Pat to Abe; "I made sure the poor bhoy wud shrivel up. Sich a witherin', blistherin' tongue lashin' wud scorch the hide av the owld divil himsilf." He looked admiringly after the Seer. "D'ye think, now, that the poor lad will be afther tacklin' the job alone, like he said? ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... followed. First one, then another, climbed uppermost and dived back, swooped out and wheeled in again, so that the two planes seemed to clear each other only by inches. Then it looked as if they closed and interlocked. I expected to see both go crashing, when suddenly the wings of one seemed to shrivel up, and the machine ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... being: then he would abandon himself to a fit of enthusiastic confidence: and over his secret soul his idealism would cast the glowing light of a flashing poetry. Then, suddenly, he would fall back: he would shrivel up into sulky silence: and Christophe would find ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... grace for suspicious people. And the possession of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up; but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship. The Greatest ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... she will shrivel up," said the old witch, with much content. "You are a great wizard, ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... was, up against the Senator himself. Course it was my cue to shrivel up and do the low salaam; but all I can think of at the minute is to look him over ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... Robert, I'll take Shakespeare away; and I'll shrivel up within myself, and put on my bonnet and ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... it was. Even while the party were looking at it, the flower continued to shrivel up, till it became as dry and fragile as when the doctor had first thrown it into the vase. He shook off the few drops of moisture which ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... shrivel up and drop off," he said.... "Still if I keep on in this direction, I am safe to strike the Lumberland ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... The very soul in him withered with dread, and he seemed to shrivel up bodily, and to grow feeble, and old, and wilted, like a leaf that the frost has touched. He had awaked out of his dream, and the outer darkness was staring in upon ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... of his heart, was killed in Macedonia, the Duke still came to the little upper room for his communion of remembrance. Hour after hour he would sit looking from the great window out over the wide green valley, mourning bitterly, and feeling his heart shrivel up within him, his body grow crabbed and cold, and his face sour ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... far they'll have got by the time she's thirty-five. You know that when she's forty there'll be two little lines like thumb-nail marks beside her ears, just here, and you know that when she's forty-five the dear little lobes will begin to shrivel up, and that when she's fifty the corners of her ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... was in this very uncomfortable state of mind, with the jungle wrapped in profound silence as well as gloom, there broke on the night air a wail so indescribable that the very marrow in Nigel's bones seemed to shrivel up. It ceased, but again broke forth louder than before, increasing in length and strength, until his ears seemed to tingle with the sound, and then it died away to ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for all a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... use attempting to light a pipe all at once. Your better course now is to drop little bits of paper into the likely places in the fire, and have a spill ready to apply to the one that lights first. It is an anxious moment, for they may merely shrivel up sullenly without catching fire, and in that case some men lose their tempers. Bad to lose your temper ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... Bob! Mrs. De Peyster, in her dim corner, tried to shrivel up into yet darker obscurity. Breathlessly she felt herself upon the precipitous edge of ultimate horror. For Judge Harvey—Judge Harvey of all persons—to be the one to discover her ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan of horror, taking her poor white ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... in such a way that no one could possibly unclasp the necklace without awaking her. Loki stood hesitatingly by the bedside for a few moments, and then began rapidly to mutter the runes which enabled the gods to change their form at will. As he did this, Heimdall saw him shrivel up until he was changed to the size and form of a flea, when he crept under the bed-clothes and bit Freya's side, thus causing her to change her position without being roused ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... like that of a cucumber. Still, though the form is different, the purpose of the two cotyledons and the juicy stem in the seedling Opuntia is the same as in the Cereus; and, as the growing point develops, the cotyledons shrivel up and fall off, the plant food they contained having passed into that part of the young seedling which was to be permanent. The seedlings of these two genera serve as an illustration of the process of germination from seed of all the Cactuses; and it must be evident that there is much that is singular ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... proud of her, if it had to listen to her the way we do. There's some exports it doesn't pay to advertise, I guess, and she and her sister are that kind. Every time they laugh I can see that Lady Erkskine shrivel up like a sensitive plant. I hope she don't think all American girls ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was at an end. The display was over. Abruptly Caterham seemed to contract, to shrivel up into a yellow-faced, fagged-out, middle-sized, middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if he were stepping out of a picture, and with a complete assumption of that, friendliness that lies behind all the public conflicts of our race, he held out ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... some time," she said honestly. "But every time I mention it to her she seems to shrivel up, so you'd best go in of your own accord, and I'll ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... or make provision for sustainment when the time of suffering and anxiety should come, or the time of health and strength be over when yet she must live on; when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and condition of an Aztec—even then was he able to reason with himself: "She ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... longer. We want really to know about him: to hear the beginnings and endings of those stories and of many others. And that is exactly what we are going to do. The prisoner is going to tell us his own true story in his own real words. There is no need for our fancy wings any longer. They may shrivel up and drop off unheeded. For that prisoner is GEORGE FOX, and he belongs to English history. He has left the whole story of his life and adventures written in two large folio volumes that may still be seen in London. The pages are so old and the edges ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... that thou thinkest to make mock of him? Seest thou not yonder sun, into how many a barren and filthy place he darteth his rays? Upon how many a stinking corpse doth he cast his eye? Hath he therefore any stain of reproach? Doth he not dry and shrivel up filth and rottenness, and give light to dark places, himself the while unharmed and incapable of receiving any defilement? And what of fire? Doth it not take iron, which is black and cold in itself, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the forest. Certain individuals are endowed by nature with temperaments which make them take naturally to a social life and shine there. In it they find their natural element. They develop freely just where others shrivel up and disappear. There is continually going on unseen a "natural selection," the discarding of unfit material, the assimilation of new and congenial elements from outside, with the logical result of a survival of the fittest. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... of great contraction and dilatation. No idea can be formed of the beauty of these animals either from dried specimens or from those preserved in alcohol. Of course, in either case, they lose their color, become shrunken, and the movable appendages about the mouth shrivel up. One who had seen the Holothurian only as preserved in museums would be amazed at the spectacle of the living animal, especially if his first introduction should be to one of the deep, rich crimson-colored species, such as are found in quantities in the Bay of Fundy. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fluid was used it was boiled, while the supposed criminal's name was repeatedly mentioned. The moment the liquid began to boil, they commenced to address their imaginary spirits in the following terms: "Is the party on whom I pour this water guilty or not? If he is, may it scald him and shrivel up his skin." If the application of the boiling liquid did not injure the suspected person he was declared innocent, but if it burned him he was pronounced guilty. People anxious to know the result of approaching warlike engagements put a vessel full of water, mixed with particular ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... mortality, to be snuffed out like a candle, to fade like a flower, to pass away like a breath. Is all that penetrating intellect, that creative fancy, that vaulting ambition, those noble passions, those far-reaching hopes, to come to nothing, to shrivel up into a pinch of dust? It is not so, it cannot be. Man is the flower of this wide world, the lord of creation, the crown and consummation of all things, and it is to wrong him and his creator to imagine that the grave is ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the partnership, that he can not take out a great deal without putting a great deal in, for selfishness always reaps a mean, despicable harvest. It is only the generous giver who gets much. There is nothing which will so shrivel up a man; and contract his capacity for happiness as selfishness. It is always a fatal blighter, blaster, disappointer. We must give to get, we must be great before we can get great enjoyment; great in our motive, grand in our endeavor, sublime ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to beg by idle, good-for-nothing parents. I stand up only for the aged poor, because, be they good or wicked, they cannot help themselves. If a man fell down in the street, struck with some dire disease that shrunk his muscles, unstrung his nerves, made his heart tremble, and his skin shrivel up, would you look upon him and then pass him ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... not mushrooms, men and not monkeys, at the head of plant and animal life; and that Nature herself is wholly indifferent as to which of the two establishes its preeminence—then he will feel the chill upon his soul, he will shrivel up within himself, the very fountain-spring of Beauty will be frozen up, and never again will he see Beauty in any ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... direction. I turned the pages of a book of pity and of death more beautiful than that of Pierre Loti. I could hear at last the great cry for sympathy, which is the music of this strange suffering world, and, listening to it, in my heart there rang an echo. The cruelty in my nature seemed to shrivel up. I was more gentle than I had been, more gentle than I had ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... miracle, but strikin' Jerry Clifford for ten cents and gettin' it would be a bigger one. Why, that feller's got fists like—like one of those sensitive plants my mother used to have in the settin'-room window when I was a boy. You touch a leaf of one of those plants and 'twould shrivel up tight. Jerry's fists are that way—touch one of 'em with a nickel and 'twill shut up, but not until the nickel's inside. No, ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... "cynical," or "ironical," or "quizzical," it gives no impression of what it is. It is a mixture of all four, and yet laughing, and—and—tender, and insouciant, and gay. He is himself, and there could never be any one like him. One feels as if all common things must vanish and shrivel up ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... cracks or fissures which form in the crust of the planet when it begins to shrivel up ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the woman, who seemed literally to curl and shrivel up beneath her anger. "Don't be angry with me, Miss Stella, because I can't bear it. I only said it because it was true. I will ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... a poor joint of meat, before it has been half baked I have seen it start from the bone, and shrivel up scarcely ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... however, she seemed to shrivel up, and the bad nights extended into the days. Emily ascribed the change to the lack of going out into the air, and always found reasons for the increased languor and weakness; till at last there came a day when my poor little sister seemed ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time the sun was high in the heavens and blazing right down upon our heads with an intensity of heat that almost seemed to shrivel up our hair, making us feel as if a red-hot cinder was laid on top of it. There was not much wind, that having died away soon after daybreak, the tornado having spent all its force and blown itself out; but the sea was still rough, the heavy rolling waves washing over us every now ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... which makes it hard to evaluate. The ad-men have to be figuring what they're going to do next half-century, so that they'll be there with the right thing when the time comes. But it seems they don't like what they see. People have to buy what the ad-men are selling, or the ad-men shrivel up, and already the trend seems to be showing up. People aren't in such a rush to buy. Don't have the same sense of urgency that they used to—" Her hands fluttered. "Well, as I say, it's all up in the air. Let the boys analyze for a while. The suicide business is a little more ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... ... he could not be civil to them, however hard he might try to be so, but his feeling in the presence of people who disliked him, was one of powerlessness: he was tongue-tied and nervous and very dull, and his faculties seemed to shrivel up. There was a look of cold efficiency about Rachel Wynne that frightened him. She seemed to be incapable of wasting time or of waywardness. Her career at Newnham, Roger had told him, had been one of steady brilliance. "There wasn't ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... not stop to think work and good cheer will put these creatures to flight. Sing your song, laugh your laugh, and make work, if none is at hand. Then only will these poor miserable prowlers shrivel up and ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained the animal head only upon a man's shoulders. He was felt to be cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath, and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of shifting sand. The contrast between this evil being and the beneficent couple, Osiris and Isis, was striking. Nevertheless, the theologians of the Delta ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... been killed, like any one of half a dozen others who have bit the dust, for any word that one of my 'friends' had said to warn me. When the race cry is started in this neck of the woods, friendship, religion, humanity, reason, all shrivel up like dry leaves ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... up a piece of paper and held it in the flame, and we saw it burn and glow and shrivel up ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... you to stay, Peter," he tried to explain. "It's best for you to stay—with me. For I think they are going a far distance, and will come to a land where you would shrivel up and die. Besides, you could not go in the canoe. So be good, and remain ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... as a means of removing the membraneous skin, the quills are plunged into heated sand, the high temperature of which causes the external skin of the barrel to crack and peel off, and the internal membrane to shrivel up. The outer membrane is then scraped off with a sharp instrument, while the inner membrane remains in a state to be easily detached. For the finest quills the heating is repeated two or three times. The heat of the sand, by consuming or drying up the natural moisture of the ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... it is of very bad quality, being nauseous in taste and somewhat thick and viscous. Frost following immediately on a fall of snow or sleet, when the trees are still wet, will irretrievably damage the fruit, causing it to shrivel up and greatly diminishing the yield of oil, while the oil itself has a dark color, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... Neale back again, as she had always had him without thinking of it, if she could have her faith in him again, the skies might shrivel up like a scroll, but something eternal would remain in ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... generations, up, till mountain-eyed, To welcome earth-ward, God's Supreme delight. Imagination swirls in swallow flight, Giddy with Beauty, deepening—Oh, how glide From star to star, to the haloes, season-dyed And countless! Its wings shrivel up like night. ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... "that is one of the most curious features of the life-history of the Pacific salmon. As soon as the fish are nearly ready for spawning, all their digestive parts shrivel up, so that they can't eat. In the male salmon, too, the end of the upper lip turns into a sort of hook so that the fish can't even open his mouth wide enough to eat anything. Then in the fresh water their scales turn slimy and, as they often get injured ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... porch. Baby Carter was on the mat at our feet, bulging his eyes and swelling his cheeks in futile efforts to extort a squeak from a chinquapin whistle his father had made for him. The kind that, as you may recollect, kept the whistle in them over night, and did not shrivel up. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... is assured that he is not fit to think for himself, and to do so would be a sin. Man, in his present crude state, holds somewhat the same attitude toward reason that an Apache Indian holds toward a camera—the Indian thinks that to have his picture taken means that he will shrivel up and blow away in a month. And Stanley relates that a watch with its constant ticking sent the bravest of Congo chiefs into a cold sweat of agonizing fear; on discovering which, the explorer had but to draw his Waterbury and threaten to turn the whole bunch into crocodiles, and at once they ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... voice. To make an impression on Gladys Todd had become the business of my life. I was glad that I had come to McGraw, because here I had met her. McGraw's past and future were of no moment to me; her growth was nothing. She might shrivel up until I was the only student, yet I should still be happy in my nearness to Gladys Todd. And what of Penelope? I did think of Penelope that night as I sat alone in my room, cocked on two legs of my chair, gazing blankly at the ceiling. I remembered the foolish, childish promises ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the sake of your principles," she went on, almost angrily, "your stupid, canonical and dry-as-dust little principles, you've let your life shrivel up." ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the meaning of the word, it is clear that its use in my text is distinctly metaphorical, and that it suggests to us that the unloving, like those cities full of uncleanness, when they are brought into contact with the infinite love of the coming Judge, shrivel up and are destroyed. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... weight is rolled away From off my soul, and I can breathe again! Her glance doth shrivel up my very heart, And all that bitter hate, hid deep within My bosom, well nigh ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... stars, of my abasement then, Judged and condemned by that poor lover's pledge, Lying there like a messenger of heaven, Breathing of peace and love, mid deadly hate. Glory! thou mirage on this desert life, Charming the weary on to water springs That shrivel up to barrenness ere reach'd! Thou shadow of a shadow that departs As the eye scans its bodiless outlines! Thou golden-imaged Ruin and Despair! When this earth cracks, like a poor blasted rock, Before the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... that he had gained a point. "Then look to it well," he said, austerely. "Be careful how you act. Do nothing rash. For either the soul of the god is in the heart of Lavita, the son of Sami; and then, since I refuse to eat it, it will decay away, as Lavita's body decays, and the world will shrivel up, and all things will perish, because the god is dead and crumbled to dust forever. Or else it is in my body, who am god in his place; and then, if anybody does me harm or hurt, he will be an impious wretch, and will ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... specifically measured for a suit, looks over the material out of which it is to be made, perhaps ventures to mention some predilections as to the cut, and takes his departure with a light heart. The fact that the cloth is cheap, unshrunken goods, which will shrivel up at the first shower or severe humidity, and will, at all events, get wrinkled out of shape in a few days, does not dash the hopeful prisoner's jocundity; nor even the consideration that the "prison cut" will be instantly recognized all over the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... it feels to be called a 'dreadful thing' by a man like that? Well, it simply made me shrivel up and have shivers ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul that he was commonly called "Papa" by his friends and disciples, was one of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... orchids nearly so many empty testae; but this goes for nothing, as unnatural conditions would account for it. I suspect, however, from the variable size and transparency, that a good many of the seeds when dry (and I have put the capsule on my chimney-piece) will shrivel up. So I will wait a month or two till I get the capsule of some large Vandeae for comparison. It is more likely that I have made some dreadful blunder about Acropera than that it should be male yet not a perfect male. May there be some sexual relation between A. Loddigesii and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... grooving the external surface; the arteries are enclosed by hard osseus tubercles at the base of the horns, which coalesce and render them impervious, and, the supply of nutriment being thus cut off, the envelopes shrivel up and fall off, and the animals perfect the desquamation by rubbing their horns ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale |
