Sentence examples for were startled out from inspiring English sources

ON DECEMBER 16th 1811, the residents of New Madrid, Missouri, were startled out of their beds by a huge earthquake, which was quickly followed by a second.

Under Penn Station In 1998, New Yorkers were startled out of their long-held belief that every last block of Milford pink granite from McKim, Mead & White's Pennsylvania Station -- columns, walls, cornices and statuary -- was dumped in New Jersey.

We tentatively approached the felled animal with a mixture of guilt and awe and were startled out of our wits when — after a few moments of feigning death — it jumped up and bounded away to join its mates under the nearby gum trees.

Early light was just breaking, and they, too, must have been startled out of sleep.

The shoulders parted, and the officer, whose beret hardly reached the chins of the Americans, was startled out of his single-minded concentration.

Apparently, being startled out of deep sleep by an alarm not only increases levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, but also puts your hormones out of whack, resulting in low moods and inertia.

Just nine months earlier, I had been startled out of my normal life by a headhunter who had read a freelance article I wrote for this newspaper about buying furnishings on the Web.

Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or "wit"—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem.

A new artist and an exciting work - that is what we care about.' Hytner thinks it unlikely, too, that anyone who buys a ticket will be startled out of their seat by what they see: 'After all, very few shows say what they are quite so plainly in the title.' The National was not alone in spotting the potential of this eccentric fringe offering.

The theatrical double entendres and insider innuendos that the populist-minded playwright Terrence McNally serves up in the newly updated version of his 1986 work "It's Only a Play" (at the Gerald Schoenfeld) go around and around and come at you so fast and furiously that you may feel, at times, like a baby being startled out of the hiccups — your laughter is part of your surprise.

Have you ever cranked the volume to hear what someone's saying, only to be startled out of your skin by a sudden explosion?