gnawings

Deer and white footed mice will also eat pretty much whatever they can get their mitts on, those shells remind me of mice gnawings.

A massacre in the forest AYDIN 2009

These long lifeless books, once most dainty, but now become corrupt and loathsome, covered with litters of mice and pierced with the gnawings of the worms, and who were once clothed in purple and fine linen, now lying in sackcloth and ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become habitations of the moth.

The Love of Books : The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury 2007

Hoopdriver was hot, tired, and hungry, and full of the first gnawings of a monstrous remorse.

The Wheels of Chance: a bicycling idyll Herbert George 2006

He felt the gnawings of a strange misgiving, as if he had tampered with powers of unknown breadth and depth, and had loosed forces which he could not control.

Wings in the Night Howard, Robert E. 2006

What is best in a state of brimful, equable suffering is that it does away with the gnawings of petty sensations.

The Arrow of Gold 2006

She had slaked her thirst at the pool, but she felt the gnawings of hunger and began looking about for some of the fruit on which she had sustained herself since exhausting the food she had brought in her saddle-bags.

The Conquering Sword of Conan Howard, Robert E. 2005

She had slaked her thirst at the pool, but she felt the gnawings of hunger and began looking about for some of the fruit on which she had sustained herself since exhausting the food she had brought in her saddle-bags.

The Conquering Sword Of Conan Howard, Robert E. 2005

And finally, if you're someone sitting in some bleak place with nothing but the hungry sounds of the inner gnawings of creative desire chewing at your head, here is something to feed the beast within until you too can rise up Phoenix-like and leave it all behind in your wing-flapping wake, minus the suicidal gun fire, of course.

People of the Dark Howard, Robert E. 2005

Some were seen in such unnatural positions, as to give the idea that they had expired in a faint, when trying to reach something to allay the gnawings of hunger.

A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries 2004

I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

The Great Gatsby 2003