Besides, he knows what awaits him if he budges.
"An Antarctic Mystery"
Jules Verne
But suddenly, from this bark which was so quiet, and which had no other importance than that of a shadow hardly real in the midst of so much night, a cry rises, superacute, terrifying: it fills the emptiness and rents the far-off distances-It has come from those elevated notes which belong ordinarily to women only, but with something hoarse and powerful that indicates rather the savage male; it has the bite of the voice of jackals and it preserves, nevertheless, something human which makes one shiver the more; one waits with a sort of anguish for its end, and it is long, long, it is oppressive by its inexplicable length-It had begun like a stag's bell of agony and now it is achieved and it dies in a sort of laughter, sinister and burlesque, like the laughter of lunatics- However, around the man who has just cried thus in the front of the bark, none of the others is astonished, none budges.
"Ramuntcho"
Pierre Loti
Yet in the essentials of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his position.
"The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters"
George Sand, Gustave Flaubert Translated by A.L. McKensie