"My Antonia" by Willa Cather: Captivating Verbs

Jake roused me and took me by the hand.

No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.

No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.

The woman had on her head the same embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted from the train at Black Hawk.

Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over them, brandishing a butcher knife.

Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.

We burrowed down in the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky.

The great fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things.

He tramped out through the long cellar and dropped the heavy door behind him.

"Your grandfather is rich," she retorted fiercely.

When we found him, everything was decent except," —Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,—"except what he could n't nowise foresee.

have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.

I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered.

They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.

Ambrosch shrugged his shoulders and sauntered down the hill toward the stable.

Anna Hansen shook the reins and they drove on, while I zigzagged back to my inlet and clambered up behind an overhanging elm.

If we ran after her and tried to appease her, it

Mrs. Shimerda, leaning out of the window, enjoyed the situation keenly, and was sorry when Ántonia sent Mary away, mollified by an apronful of bottle-tomatoes.

Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them.

They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones.

At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.

Often she was tempted to tell Martha that the child must be kept at home, but somehow the memory of his foolish, happy face deterred her.

The popcorn man wheeled his glass wagon under the big cottonwood by the door, and lounged in the sun, sure of a good trade when the dancing was over.

Now there was a place where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself

"That's too bad," Tiny simpered.

The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at once die out.

I knew it would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan.

The first time I deceived my grandparents I felt rather shabby, perhaps even the second time, but I soon ceased to think about it.

You're not going to sit around here and whittle store-boxes and tell stories all your life.

In some way he depended upon the excitement he could arouse in her hysterical nature.

My bedroom, originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study.

He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.

I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things.

When Armand, with the terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.

When Armand, with the terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.

We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to hinder me or hold me back.

You won't hasten the day none that way.'

I marveled at her calm.

Their mother came to the door with us, and we tarried for a moment to look out at the white slope of the corral and the two ponds asleep in the moonlight, and the long sweep of the pasture under the star-sprinkled sky.