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More "Immobility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overlooked Stonehouse. Apart from his conspicuous clothes, his immobility and white-set face must have inevitably drawn her attention to him. Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with a kind of bonhomie—almost a Masonic understanding—and the uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her. She hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... order to counteract their abnormal muscularity. Thus Lord HALDANE, who in his earlier days thought nothing of walking to Cambridge one day and back to London on the next, has now become more than reconciled to the immobility imposed on the occupant of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... herself that she found, this vehement flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of London an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It lifted her delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of her own comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must have ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... properties, because they can be transported so easily to any part of the world. On the other hand, materials of large bulk and low unit value, such as coal, iron ore, and clay, may have highly varying values independently of their physical characteristics, because of their relative immobility. But the values even of gold and precious stones represent a combination of intrinsic qualities and of demand. A diamond is made of carbon but is more valuable than coal or graphite because it appeals ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... observed. It is only in cases of severe injury, where the articular portions of the bones are damaged at the time of infliction of the injury, and where the articulation remains exposed for weeks at a time, together with immobility of the parts because of attending pain, that permanent ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... directed his gaze too far away; and suddenly a dark patch of deep shadow in the undergrowth close by materialised itself into the black hide of a stag only as it dashed off. It had been standing within fifteen paces of the elephants, knowing the value of immobility as a shield. At last its nerve failed it; and it revealed itself by breaking away. But as it fled Colonel Dermot's rifle spoke; and the big deer crumpled up and fell crashing through the vegetation to the ground. The second elephant's mahout, a grey-bearded Mahommedan, slipped instantly to ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... are apodal, they are not condemned to absolute immobility in their cells; for they can move by a spiral motion. During the first three days, this motion is so slow as scarcely to be perceptible, but it afterwards becomes more evident. I have then observed them perform two complete revolutions ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... the Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... was firing into silence. Something rattled and flopped in a chute at his elbow. He turned, irritably. That Mr. Pierce's attention should have been diverted even for a moment by this was sufficient evidence that he was disconcerted by the immobility of the foe. But his glance quickly reverted and with added weight. Heavily he stared, then ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I had last seen in the railway carriage at Sittingbourne. He was, as usual, imperturbable, sardonic, terrifying. His face, which chanced to be lighted by the rays of a deck lantern, had the pallor and the immobility of marble, and the dark eyes held ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... delicate, cunningly mingled tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains on her long white hands. In her dark immobility, among the rich, clear objects scattered so artfully about the sun-lighted chamber, she had a marvellous effect of being the chief figure in some modern French artist's impressionistic "interior." She gave a distinct sense of having ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... that she loved him, that she had never loved any one except him. It was unfortunate that the night was so long. She did not dare to look at her watch for fear of seeing in it the immobility of time. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... who had shown much more agitation and feeling than any of those present would have credited him with, had taken off his big loose coat and laid it on the ground, and at once Varick had followed his example. But as Bubbles lay there, in the dreadful immobility of utter unconsciousness, both Blanche Farrow and Helen Brabazon believed her ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... what this new movement might mean, Mr. Gryce paused where he was and waited for the man to advance. Seeing this, the mute, to whose face and bearing had returned the respectful immobility of the trained servant, handed over the articles he had brought, and then noiselessly, and with the air of one who had performed an expected service, retreated to his old place in the antechamber, where he sat down again and fell almost immediately ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... sea was a puddle of liquid lead. No stir in the waters—ominous immobility! The ocean is never less tamed than when it is ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... life, actually squandered his last breath in the pursuit of his own elusive tail. But there are few of us who would care to see the monumental calm of our fireside sphinx degenerate into senile sportiveness. Better far the measured slowness of her pace, the superb immobility of her repose. To watch an ordinary cat move imperceptibly and with a rhythmic waving of her tail through a doorway (while we are patiently holding open the door), is like looking at a procession. With just such deliberate dignity, in just such solemn state, the priests of Ra filed between the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... which, from fragments of dress still clinging to the wasted remains, they saw to be that of a woman. It was in vain to question the imperturbable savages, who, wrapped to the throat in their buffalo-robes, stood gazing on the scene with looks of wooden immobility. Two strangers, however, at length arrived. [Footnote: May 1st. The Spaniards reached the fort April 22d.] Their faces were smeared with paint, and they were wrapped in buffalo-robes like the rest; yet these seeming Indians were ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... but none the less comprehensive scrutiny, saw before her a man of thirty-three or four years, erect of figure, with a clean-shaven face and gray eyes. One thing she noticed about him was a certain odd immobility of carriage, which was not in any way to be mistaken for lassitude or lethargy; on the contrary, it reminded her of a coiled spring. He was somewhat above the middle height, and he had rather lean hands, and he wore no jewelry except an unobtrusive scarf ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... beyond any human power to disturb, and which the blood of common life did not color, with its death-like pallor, sealed lips, enormous eyes enlarged with black lines, the lids no more lowered than those of the sacred hawk, inspired by its very immobility a feeling of respectful fear. One might have thought that these fixt eyes were searching for eternity and the Infinite; they never seemed to rest on surrounding objects. The satiety of pleasures, the surfeit of wishes satisfied as soon as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... deeply impressive, too, to watch the long lines and masses of troops,—each unit full of youth, strength, energy, enthusiasm, hope,—standing perfectly silent, absolutely motionless, like statues, for full an hour and a half. Their deep silence and immobility seemed to produce a sympathetic condition in the spectators. There was no laughing, ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... passive fidelity, what she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready instrument. This third ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... printed in black on a white ground; the eye is thus in presence of the most absolute contrast which can be imagined. The third peculiarity lies in the arrangement of the characters in horizontal lines, over which we run our eyes. If we maintain during reading a perfect immobility of the book and the head, the printed lines are applied successively to the same parts of the retina, while the interspaces, more bright, also affect certain regions of the retina, always the same. There must result from this a fatigue analogous to that ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... Bessel's stars are exempt from the general drift of the group. They are being progressively left behind. The inference is obvious that they do not in reality belong to, but are merely accidentally projected upon, it; or, rather, that it is projected upon them; for their apparent immobility (which, in two of the six, may be called absolute) shows them with tolerable certainty to be indefinitely more remote—so remote that the path, moderately estimated at 21,000,000,000 miles in length, traversed by the solar system during the forty-five years elapsed since the Konigsberg measures ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... the first time unfolded his arms. With some appearance of caution he balanced his unstable footing into absolute immobility. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... brocade robe undulated about her little feet. Same face, same figure. It was she indeed; and to prevent any possible doubt of it, she was seated on the back of a huge old- fashioned book strongly resembling the "Cosmography of Munster." Her immobility but half reassured me; I was really afraid that she was going to take some more nuts out of her alms-purse and throw ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... in the small of the back and loins of an aching character may occur. These symptoms may constitute the only evidence of locomotor ataxia and last for years; but sooner or later there are added absence of knee cap bone reflex (knee jerk), and immobility of the pupil. The loss of the knee jerk is always observed in time. The pupil fails to respond to light while it still accommodates for distance, called Argyll Roberston pupil. There may be imperfect control of the bladder with slow, dripping or hasty urination. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... His Majesty's immobility on certain questions had the practical effect of literally placing them in abeyance in the councils of his Ministers. As it was found to be impossible to form a strong Administration that should unanimously agree with His Majesty, and at the same time possess the confidence of the country, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... single tear escaped from his eyes and froze on his pale cheek. The doctor and Bell looked at him with a sort of terror. Leaning on his stick, he looked like the genius of the North, upright in the midst of the whirlwind, and frightful in his immobility. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the skyline of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... aspen leaf. My system, which I thought proof against every accident, had vanished: I acknowledged an avenging God who had waited for this opportunity of punishing me at one blow for all my sins, and of annihilating me, in order to put an end to my want of faith. The complete immobility which paralyzed all my limbs seemed to me a proof of the uselessness of my repentance, and that conviction ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I left him to his immobility. His hold on life was as slender as his hold on sanity. I was oppressed by my lonely responsibilities. I went into my cabin to seek relief in a few hours' sleep, but almost before I closed my eyes the man on deck came down reporting a light breeze. Enough to get under ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... stirred from his survey of the Atlantic Ocean. He had a somewhat disturbing capacity for remaining motionless—like a stealthy and predatory bird which depends on immobility for aggressive ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... sable garments, but his identity was unmistakable. Viewing him close at hand Harrington perceived that he had large, clear eyes, a smooth-shaven, humorous, determined mouth, and full ruddy cheeks, the immobility of which suggested the habit of deliberation. Physically and temperamentally he appeared to be the antipodes of the reporter, who was thin, nervous, and wiry, with quick, snappy ways and electric mental processes. It occurred ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... a young actress to appear in one of his tragedies, he tied her hands to her sides with pack thread in order to check her tendency toward exuberant gesticulation. Under this condition of compulsory immobility she commenced to rehearse, and for some time she bore herself calmly enough; but at last, completely carried away by her feelings, she burst her bonds and flung up her arms. Alarmed at her supposed neglect of his instructions, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... man, of the same youthful cast of figure as his nephew, and a far lighter and more springy step, with features and colouring recalling those of his niece, as did the bright sunny playful sweetness of his manner; his dark handsome eyes only betraying their want of sight by a certain glassy immobility that contrasted with the play of the expressive mouth. It was hard to guess why Bessie should have shunned such an uncle. Alick took Rachel to the bedroom above the library, and, like it, with two windows—one overlooking churchyard, river, and hay-fields, the other commanding, over the peacock ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered. Suddenly it flashed through her mind why he had come. Her heart gave a great beat against her chest. The thought had never entered her head. She sat down and waited for him to speak. He did not move. There was a singular immobility about him when ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... and face, more opposite extremes of beauty. If the one was strikingly characteristic of warmth, the other was no less indicative of coldness. Fair, even to paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed by the observer, but certainly unallied to softness. Still was she beautiful—coldly, classically, beautiful—eminently ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... method of interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently conservative, the Lutheran States became the stronghold of rigid immobility, and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the Swiss reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause with politics. Zurich and Geneva were ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... king began to look puzzled, and to feel as vexed as he dared, with the consciousness weighing heavily upon him that he was playing with frightfully keen edged tools. He did not know what to make of this persistent immobility; it was uncanny, sinister, portentous, almost appalling. He would try again. He did try again, not once but nearly a dozen times, varying the form of words, more or less, every time; and, of course, with the same ill success. At length, in chagrin and disgust, he gave ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... deplorable mood. Both seemed more sensible to "Whoa" than to "Hadaap." Podagrous beasts, yet not stiffened to immobility. Gayer steeds would have sundered the shackling drag. These would never, by any gamesome caracoling, endanger the coherency of pole with body, of axle with wheel. From end to end the equipage was congruous. Every part of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... evolution at all—no squirreling,— but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus as they went; more balanced living, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... a man, soul and body, heart, hand, and spirit, stood beside the other, who was a shadow, and beside her, who was a woman—and the tragedy began in the prologue of contrast. Strength to weakness, motion to immobility, the grace and carriage of manly youth to the sad restfulness of helpless, hopeless limbs that never again could feel and bear weight; that was the contrast from which there was no escaping. On the ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... he continued, "was in London, in a museum. An Italian boy in the dress of his country, a model, was standing in front of a picture which represented a sunlight effect on a Roman landscape. The boy held his head stretched out. Amid the immobility of the indifferent attendants, and in the dampness and drabness of a London day, this Italian boy radiated light. He was deaf to everything around him, full of secret sunlight, and his hands were almost clasped. He was praying to the ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... around, all was as he had left it. Aldonza, poor child, with her black hair hanging loose like a veil, for she had been startled from her bed, still sat on the ground making her lap a pillow for the white-bearded head, nobler and more venerable than ever. On it lay, in the absolute immobility produced by the paralysing blow, the fine features already in the solemn grandeur of death, and only the movement of the lips under the white flowing beard and of the dark ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... complete within itself, secure from military attack and economically self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility and isolation ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... with his direct purposes and solid immobility. You could be of use to Leslie, because he had a single eye; he knew what he wanted, and requested you to obtain it for him. That was simple; he didn't make your task impossible by suddenly deciding that after all he didn't ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... interesting writer goes on to say, "on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke. He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He looms at you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... a moment, his grandfather seemed not awe-inspiring, but just a frail old man, paralyzed into almost complete immobility, lying here almost pathetically happy to have his grandson at last with him. An old man, with nothing of the mystic about him—an old man who had been—unknown to the savants of his Earth—perhaps the greatest ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... always feels that he must appear on parade—one of those alert, highly intelligent young women so extremely apt to reduce an ordinarily intelligent young man to a state of gibbering idiocy or stupid immobility. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... to go somewhere," she insisted, placing her two hands upon his shoulders. She attempted to give him a little shake, with the result that she shook only herself. His physical immobility was so suggestive of his mental attitude that she desisted, with sudden meekness, and the point was apparently settled as he wished. He possessed himself of her hand, and began to stroke the inside of her arm, as if he had discovered ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... At this time of their watch, the water close to them would be often agitated by some impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which the informer, well used to the river, kept ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... next asked why he got there. As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else; a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like it in my ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... boat, which I obligingly sent spinning from the lorcha with one long, strong kick. Then I was alone on the deck, which suddenly looked immense, stretched on all sides, limitless as loneliness itself. A heavy torpor fell from the skies and amid this general silence, this immobility, the cabin door alone seemed to live, live in weird manifestation. It had been left open, and now it was swinging and slamming to and fro jerkily, and shuddering from top to bottom. Half in plan, half in mere irritation at this senseless, incessant jigging, I sprang toward it and with ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the simplicity of an ascetic and the elegant manners of a prelate. His look, and indeed his whole face, tell how onerous is the sacred office which he exercises: to preside, namely, at the instruction of these thousands of young priests, who afterwards are to carry faith and peace and immobility to more than ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul—or across whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained to immobility. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... stars, or stars Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault: When, like a city under ocean, To human things he grows a desolation, And is made a habitation For the fluctuous universe To lave with unimpeded motion. He scarcely frets the atmosphere With breathing, and his body shares The immobility of rocks; His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity; His mind more still is than the limbs of fear, And yet its unperturbed velocity The spirit of the simoom mocks. He round the solemn centre of his soul Wheels like a dervish, while his being is Streamed with ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... emerged upon the desert, she fell silent. A spaciousness as of endless vistas enthralled and, a little, awed her. On all sides were ranged the disordered ranks of the cacti, stricken into immobility in the very act of reconstituting their columns, so that they gave the effect of a discord checked on the verge of its resolution into form and harmony, yet with a weird and distorted beauty of its own. From a little distance, there came a murmur of love-words. Io moved softly forward, peering ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "In examining these mental impressions, I have found that they follow the motions of the eyeball exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous objects, and that they resemble them also in their apparent immobility when the eye is displaced by an external force. If this result (which I state with much diffidence, from having only my own experience in its favour) shall be found generally true by others, it will ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... astonishing beauty, with a slight, elegant figure, and dressing with much taste and richness, but without ostentation. She is very talkative and lively,—much more so than is usual with persons occupying so high a position. The emperor impressed me by a sort of immobility of features, and the almost extinguished ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... I heard little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth. My poor father did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts and most ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... perhaps, be rough to Mr. Clavering. He is so very hard. Hannah shall do it. Will you make her understand?" Mrs. Clavering promised that she would do this, wondering, as she did so, at the wretched, frigid immobility of the unfortunate woman before her. She knew Lady Clavering well; knew her to be in many things weak, to be worldly, listless, and perhaps somewhat selfish; but she knew also that she had loved her child ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... reached almost the middle of the room. The vigour, the instinctive precision of that spring, were something amazing. I just escaped being knocked over. She landed lightly on her bare feet with a perfect balance, without the slightest suspicion of swaying in her instant immobility. It lasted less than a second, then she spun round distractedly and darted at the first door she could see. My own agility was just enough to enable me to grip the back of the fur coat and then ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion than any ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... watched his strange adversary with visible anxiety. His superhuman calm had an effect upon him. In vain, appealing to his reason, did he tell himself that in so unequal a combat all the advantages were on his side. The immobility of the blind man froze him. He had settled on the place where he would strike his victim. He had fixed upon it! What, then, hindered him from putting an end ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... respectable part of the nation. They are, as they pretend, the virtuous part of the people, because they are quiet; as if virtue consisted in immobility! There is a canting Scotchman in London, who publishes a paper called the 'Champion' who is everlastingly harping upon the virtues of the 'fireside,' and who inculcates the duty of quiet submission. Might we ask ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... Massasoit remained standing precisely as Winslow had found him with his warriors half hid among the trees as motionless as himself. Winslow leaning against a great white birch on the edge of the little glade rested his left hand upon the hilt of his sword, and setting the other upon his hip imitated the immobility of the savages, and in his glistening steel cap and hauberk, his gauntlets and greaves, his bristling moustache and steady outlook, presented the fitting counterpart to the savage grandeur of Massasoit. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... found only in movement, for a modification which takes place in the soul can only be manifested in the sensuous world as movement. But this does not prevent features fixed and in repose also from possessing grace. There immobility is, in its origin, movement which, from being frequently repeated, at length becomes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. The civil war makes it more speedy, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... again plunged in doubt. His mind beset with hallucinations, persisted in believing that she whom he had loved so well was on the point of awakening, and as faint nervous contractions, due to the recent action of the plaster, broke at intervals the immobility of the corpse, this semblance of life served to maintain Jacques in his blissful illusion, which lasted until morning, when a police official called to verify the death ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... more began to walk up and down the room every now and then taking a stolen glance at Miss Horn, a glance of uneasy anxious questioning. She stood rigid—a very Lot's wife of immobility, her eyes on the ground, waiting ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... water from the grounds, waited a few minutes, breathed upon them with the religious breath with which her lips, as a child, touched the paten at the village church. Then she leaned over them, with her head thrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixed intently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. She sought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations and the almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away. She fatigued her eyes by gazing ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... to come across a wall which is less thick and less hard than usual. I see others who spend as many as three hours on a single operation, three long hours of patient watching for me, in my anxiety to follow the whole performance to the end, three long hours of immobility for the insect, which is even more anxious to make sure of board and lodging for its egg. But then is it not a task of the utmost difficulty to introduce a hair into the thickness of a stone? To us, with all the dexterity of our fingers, it would be impossible; to the ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... "do you realize what centuries of suppression are doing to my sex? Do you understand that woman is degenerating into an immobility—an inertia—a molluskular condition of receptive passivity which is rendering us, year by year, more unfitted to either think or act for ourselves? Even in the matter of marriage we are not permitted by custom to assume the initiative. We may only ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... never changed from his look of stony immobility. If he mourned for his patient wife of more than half a century, no outward sign betrayed his feelings. If his spirit suffered with suppressed grief, his strong frame bore up under it ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... mule-bells and larger bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... over the preceding arguments (which here return in full force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... prolonged stability, with Florence; Sparta, firmly based upon an ancient constitution, indifferent to culture, and solid at the cost of some rigidity, with Venice. As in Greece the philosophers of Athens, especially Plato and Aristotle, wondered at the immobility of Sparta and idealized her institutions; so did the theorists of Florence, Savonarola, Giannotti, Guicciardini, look with envy at the state machinery which secured repose and liberty for Venice. The parallel between Venice and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the vanishing myth of the "strong man," the rule of the individual despot, the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood sacrifices. For in common with other men of his type, he stood equally for industrial advancement and for domestic immobility. The body social might move, but the units that formed the body ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... at him, his face a mask of immobility. "That sounds all right," he said, with slow emphasis. "I reckon you'll put ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... like this, it now became evident that his face was one of those which are, all along, intended for death—intended, that is, to lie waxen and immobile, to show to best advantage. In life, there had been too marked a discrepancy between the extreme warmth of the girl's colouring and the extreme immobility of her expression. Now that the blood had, as it were, been drained away to the last drop, now that temples and nostrils had attained transparency, the fine texture of the skin and the beauty of the curves of lips and chin were visible to every eye. Only one hand, so the LEICHENFRAU ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to the caress. His immobility repelled these pleadings. Freya had traveled much through the world, had gone through shameful adventures, and would know how to free herself by her own efforts without the necessity of complicating him again in her ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... enduring the stings of a million insects. Sometimes, not daring to lift his head to look about him, he had to trust to his ears and his hound-like sense of smell for information as to what was going on. And sometimes it was only his tireless immobility that saved him from the stroke of a startled adder or a questioning and indignant crotalus. After long swaying, poised for the death-stroke, the serpent would decide that the menacing thing before it was not alive. It would slowly ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... had been cut clean through by a concussion shell and the entanglement looked as if it had been frozen into immobility in the midst of a riot of broken wires and shattered posts. We passed through the lane made by the shell and flopped flat to earth on the other side when a German star-shell came across to inspect us. The world between the trenches was lit up for a ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... twenty seconds after John Aldous announced himself there was no visible sign of life on the part of either Quade or Culver Rann. The latter sat stunned. Not the movement of a finger broke the stonelike immobility of his attitude. His eyes were like two dark coals gazing steadily as a serpent's over Quade's hunched shoulders and bowed head. Quade seemed as if frozen on the point of speaking to Rann. One hand was ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... on their own interests. Few words passed in conversation—here and there an exclamation wrung from grief was answered by some neighbouring grief—a word every quarter of an hour —sombre and haggard eyes—movements quite involuntary of the hands— immobility of all other parts of the body. Those who already looked upon the event as favourable in vain exaggerated their gravity so as to make it resemble chagrin and severity; the veil over their faces was transparent and hid not a single ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility of the bazar. People looked at their playbills to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot upon her ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... his car, he had pulled the chauffeur out of his seat by the scruff of his neck. The sight of the Mauser had cut short all remonstrance, and under its compulsion the little man had pulled open the bonnet and extracted the sparking plugs. Having thus secured the immobility of his capture, the masked man walked forward, lantern in hand, to the side of the car. He had laid aside the gruff sternness with which he had treated Mr. Ronald Barker, and his voice and manner were gentle, ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... looked at the dying embers in the grate. Her thoughtful mood had flown. Nothing of it remained on her face, a little saddened, nor in her languid body, more desirable than ever in the quiescence of her mind. She kept for a while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction the charm of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... their remnants were absorbed by younger and more vigorous peoples. Others (the Hindoos and Persians) relapsed into a semi-barbarous state; and a third class (the Chinese) were arrested in their growth, and remained fixed in immobility. The best that the antique Orient had to bequeath in the way of spiritual possessions fell to the share of the classic nations of the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... Imitation imito. Immaculate senmakula. Immaterial negrava. Immature nematura. Immediate tuja. Immediately tuj. Immense vasta. Immense (size) grandega. Immerge trempi. Immerse subakvigi. Immigrate enmigri. Immigrant enmigranto. Imminent minaca. Immobility senmoveco. Immoderate malmodera. Immodest nemodesta. Immolate oferbucxi. Immoral malbonmora. Immorality malbonmoreco. Immortal senmorta. Immortality senmorteco. Immovable senmova, nemovebla. Immutable nesxangxebla. Imp diableto. Impair difekti. Impart komuniki, sciigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... employ that Finn found his mate when he arrived at the cave that morning from Nuthill. For some moments Finn also gazed down at the victims, pondering over their immobility and his mate's mournful cries. Then, very tenderly at first, he nuzzled the dead puppies. That process flashed a picture into his mind, and he saw again Warrigal's dead children in the Mount Desolation cave. So he understood. His head moved ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... the top cushion into a different position, with what was energy for her. There was silence for a minute. Rachel sat looking grimly into the fire, the personification of determined immobility. Sir Thomas was shading his eyes with his hand. He was drinking just then a very bitter cup: and it was none the sweeter for the recollection that he had mixed it himself. His favourite child—for Blanche was that—seemed ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... lady betrothed to that curious cross-barred phantom of a Mr. Porterfield. But I am bound to add that she gave me no further warrant for suspecting them than by the simple fact of her encouraging her mother, by her immobility, to linger. Somehow I had a sense that she knew better. I got up myself to go, but Mrs. Nettlepoint detained me after seeing that my movement would not be taken as a hint, and I perceived she wished me not to leave my fellow-visitors on her hands. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... gloom he divined a new swiftness in her step, a certain sinuosity of movement that suddenly melted into immobility. A red spot had appeared close by, burned now on blackness; it was followed by another's footstep. A man, cigar in hand, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... though perfectly sound with reference to such passages as Joshua x. 12-14, where an event is described as it appeared to those who witnessed it, is not admissible in such a passage as Psalm xcvi. 10, where the supposed immobility of the earth is alleged as a proof of God's sovereignty, and is made the foundation of the duty of proclaiming that sovereignty among the heathen. When the supposed proof was found to be a fallacy, the statement in support of which it was alleged would be more or less shaken. In such a passage, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... safely asserted that more than ten thousand persons visited it, in order to obtain one look at him: many were in tears, others stood long immoveable, and seemed as though they wished to behold his face; there was something inexpressibly striking in his immobility amid all this movement, and something mysteriously touching in the prayer which was heard so gently and so uniformly murmured amid that confused murmur of whispered conversation. The funeral service ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... heated brow, but vigorous enough to keep them moving. Often, too—indeed nearly always—I have found that after exhausting my all too scanty stock of patience, and making an "exposure" in despair, the errant blossoms and leaflets would settle down into perfect immobility, as if to say, "There! don't be cross—we'll behave," ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... thesis, point. The review is like much American poetry. It is worthy, and occasionally admirable, but as a type it is weakened by amateur mediocrity in the art of writing. The family magazine is like the American short story. It has conventionalized into an often successful immobility. Both must move again, become flexible, vigorous, or their date will be upon them. And the family magazine, the illustrated literary magazine, is the most interesting vehicle of human expression and interpretation that we Americans ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... have said; but Lisle's bronzed face was imperturbable, and Gladwyne had promptly recovered his composure as he realized the mistake. Still, for a moment, he had been badly startled. Nobody noticed Nasmyth, which was fortunate, because his unnatural immobility ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... Instantly, the immobility of the being ceased. A long black arm was flung up and outward in his direction, a silent command to him to ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled accents of profound grief. A faint noise as of thunder, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... almost Oriental in its immobility. He did not even look interested. He merely considered after ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... clergy themselves, drawn by their secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... reproduction of what has already been produced. The ever-new impressions give rise to continuous changes of sounds and of meanings, that is, to ever-new expressions. To seek the model language, then, is to seek the immobility of motion. Every one speaks, and should speak, according to the echoes which things arouse in his soul, that is, according to his impressions. It is not without reason that the most convinced supporter of any one of the solutions of the problem ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... "Papenka," or to kiss his hand; and the matter of the wedding came to as abrupt a termination as though it had never been mooted. Yet also he never failed to press his late host's hand, whenever he met him, and to invite him to tea; while, on the other hand, for all his immobility and dry indifference, the Chief Clerk never failed to shake his head with a muttered, "Ah, my fine fellow, you have grown too proud, you have ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... combination as Koreff furnished it. While Trask was desperately willing his face into immobility, the screen lighted. It wasn't Andray Dunnan; that was a disappointment. It was almost as good, though. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... of ancient tradition, showed themselves as restless and as prone to modify or destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and the sun shone through them petulantly. As we climbed the rollers, or sank into their trough, the outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed, suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty of mountains contrasted with the weltering waste of water round us—now blue and garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squally rain-storms, and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy. Each of these vignettes was photographed for one brief second ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to say in regard to the great final contrast—the contrast between the immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the personal greatness of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... our side of the street, hugging the wall, with its hood over its eyes, preserved its attitude of obstinate immobility. Newlands' car, hugging the wall on the other side of the street, stood discreetly apart from the discussion. But a Belgian military ambulance car ran up, smaller and more alert than ours. And a Belgian Army Medical Officer strolled up to see what ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... trail became fresh he often paused to scrutinise closely, to smell, even to taste the herbage broken by the animal's hoofs. Once he startled a jay, but froze into immobility before that watchman of the woods had sprung his alarm. For full ten minutes the savage poised motionless. Then the bird flitted away, and he ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... held the letter under the red shade of the lamp, the usual immobility of his icy face gave way to a ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... tranquilly, and which in itself gives no evidence of motion, save when it meets with some inert point of resistance. This point of resistance has the effect of action in itself, and you attribute to it all the eddies and ripples produced. You must see that your own immobility is the cause of the phenomena of life which give you your apparent existence;—our individuality to you may be just as much the effect of your personality; you find us only responsive to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... morning and we traveled down to Woking together. He had had no answer to his advertisement, he said, and no fresh light had been thrown upon the case. He had, when he so willed it, the utter immobility of countenance of a red Indian, and I could not gather from his appearance whether he was satisfied or not with the position of the case. His conversation, I remember, was about the Bertillon system of measurements, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... border-land of art and society, who lived daintily and talked about life with unconventional freedom. Slight in figure, with very black hair, and eyes of cloudy gray, an olive complexion, and features trained to an immobility proof against emotion or surprise, the whole poised as we would say in the act of being gentlemanly, it is needless to say that he took himself seriously. His readiness, self-confidence, cocksureness, Philip thought all expressed in his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... somewhat stupefied by the continual rotation and their enforced immobility. They spoke but seldom and must have dozed frequently, for Phoebe was much surprised to find, on looking at the clock, that it ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... tourists who annually pass through Christiania, it was more than tempting, it was irresistible to point out, in slow advance along Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a table in the Grand Cafe, "our greatest citizen." To this species of demonstration Ibsen unconsciously lent himself by his immobility, his regularity of habits, his solemn taciturnity. He had become more like a strange physical object than like a man among men. He was visible broadly and quietly, not conversing, rarely moving, quite isolated and self-contained, a recognized public spectacle, delivered ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... life this morning in the ride between Vacz and the capital. And how, since the telegraph lines were closed to the German agent, could this person have been put upon the scent? It hardly seemed possible that this was an agent of Germany. And yet as the miles flew by, the stranger's silence, immobility and unchanging expression got on Renwick's nerves. He was in no mood to do a ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country. But it having been afterwards discovered, that the imperial crown was the palladium, which by its immobility could preserve peace in the empire, it was thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and therefore the crown is at present placed on the throne for some hours every morning. His ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... advantage of being able to move freely without fear of damaging the crops. Some days in succession were spent in Battalion, Brigade and Divisional Training, and all learnt by experience how much the inevitable stagnation and immobility of long-continued trench warfare dull the initiative and lessen the quickness of mind and body. The days were strenuous; reveille, as a rule, was at 4 a.m., and work began at 6 and lasted until 1, leaving the afternoons ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... magnificent; the evening, now falling, was clear; the sky limpid and transparent. From that height the houses of Rome were spread out silent, with an air of solemnity, of immobility, of calm. It appeared a flat town; one did not notice its slopes and its hills; it gave the impression of a city in stone set under ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... application of a 5 per cent. solution of cocain. Its soft consistence and the fact that it becomes smaller when painted with cocain differentiate it from true hypertrophy of the mucous membrane. Its situation and immobility, its pink colour, and the shrinkage under cocain, distinguish it from the mucous polypus of the nose. The turgescence may involve the whole extent of the mucosa of the inferior turbinated bodies, including their posterior ends. After anaesthetising ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... manners of a prelate. His look, and indeed his whole face, tell how onerous is the sacred office which he exercises: to preside, namely, at the instruction of these thousands of young priests, who afterwards are to carry faith and peace and immobility to more than three hundred ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... rise, and approach to where I sat. I did not look up, I could not; but I felt his gaze burning through my half-closed lids, and terrified lest I should reveal my weakness and my hopes, I set my lips together, and stilled the beatings of my heart, till I must have struck his sense with the chill and immobility of a totally insensible woman. The despair which the sight caused him, showed itself in ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... sense of relief was experienced by the crowd, and they began to jostle one another a little in order to file past the coffin. The women, whose piety, grief and contrition were contingent upon their immobility and their kneeling posture, were at once recalled to their customary frame of mind by the movement and the encounters of the procession. They exchanged amongst themselves and with the men remarks relating to ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... able to spit; no longer rising from his chair, he who had so often risen for humanity; but drinking dry, eating heartily, saying nothing, but having all the appearance of a living Canon of Notre Dame. Seeing the immobility of the aforesaid canon; seeing the stories of his evil life which for some time had circulated among the common people, always ignorant; seeing his dumb seclusion, his flourishing health, his young old age, and other things too numerous to mention—there ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... about to leave the table when the shrill screams of a distant whistle sliced through the noise of the crowd. Voices broke off in mid-sentence and bodies froze into immobility. As the siren's piercing tones faded the restaurant's customers looked at one another in silent terror. Then, as the shock wore off and unanswered questions were beginning to fly, a man suddenly ran ...
— This One Problem • M. C. Pease
... evident what does not afford our mind the contentment which self-evidence gives. I do not accuse of presumption, on that account, all the learned men who [101] stammeringly have endeavoured to suggest, as far as in them lay, the immobility and the sovereign and eternal efficacy of the understanding, of the will and of the power of God, through the infallibility of divine election and divine relation to all events. Nothing of all that interferes with my surmise that there is some depth which is hidden from us.' ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... every bit of life and heart had been pumped out of him, and that he was very young, and very foolish to attempt to make any change in "the good old ways" of the parish, which for so many years had stunted its growth and had acquired the immobility of the laws ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... accents of women's voices; but they were not a voluble race, and the forms of their speech still followed in great measure the semi-scriptural idioms which had been so prevalent among Cromwell's soldiers years before. They were undemonstrative; but this very immobility conveyed an impression of power in reserve which was more effective than ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... The immobility of this figure under the moon's rays was terrible. I felt my tongue freezing, my teeth clinched. I was about to cry out in terror when, by some incomprehensible mysterious attraction, my glance fell below, and I distinguished, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... words, across the silence the click of gunlocks was heard as the Vigilantes levelled their weapons at the crowd. From my position near the condemned men I could see the shifting components of the mob freeze to immobility before the menace of those barrels. At the same instant the man who had been appointed executioner jerked the box from ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... as motionless as a statue; then, bending slowly forward, still holding one hand partly raised as a signal for the hunter to retain his immobility, he took several steps forward, so lightly and cautiously that there was absolutely no sound at all produced. He then sunk slowly downward, and seemed to concentrate all his faculties into the single one of sight. This ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... stood out the gigantic pylons of the palace of Rameses Meiamoun, with its huge pylons, its enormous walls, its gilded and painted flagstaffs from which the colours blew out in the wind; and further to the north the two colossi sitting in postures of eternal immobility, mountains of granite in human shape, before the entrance to the Amenophium, showed through a bluish haze, half masking the still more distant Rhamesseium, and beyond it the tomb of the high-priest, but allowing the palace of Menephta to be seen at ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the skyline of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... nature, the climate and the scenery, exert an appreciable and an acknowledged influence on the mental characteristics of a people. The sprightliness and vivacity of the Frank, the impetuosity of the Arab, the immobility of the Russ, the rugged sternness of the Scot, the repose and dreaminess of the Hindoo are largely due to the country in which they dwell, the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the landscapes and skies they daily look upon. The nomadic Arab is not only indebted to the country in which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... perhaps twenty seconds after John Aldous announced himself there was no visible sign of life on the part of either Quade or Culver Rann. The latter sat stunned. Not the movement of a finger broke the stonelike immobility of his attitude. His eyes were like two dark coals gazing steadily as a serpent's over Quade's hunched shoulders and bowed head. Quade seemed as if frozen on the point of speaking to Rann. One hand was still poised a foot above the table. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... his plump leg over the horn of his saddle and sat sidewise. One of his tribunes looked at the other with a flickering smile that was not entirely free of contempt. But his fellow returned a stare that for immobility would have done credit to ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... claws. His head sunk between his shoulders. Of the eyes, only red pin-points showed in the twitching face. I stood stone-still, struck into utter immobility. My brain was trying to urge me to fly, fly! This is the Black Death, Sophy! the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... ludicrous; and finding all these of no avail, he tried to make the Indian understand him by repeating English words very loudly and distinctly again and again. The Indian sat with his eye fixed steadily upon him, and in spite of the rigid immobility of his features, it was clear at a glance that he perfectly understood his military companion's character and thoroughly despised him. The exhibition was more amusing than politic, and Tete Rouge was directed to finish what he had to say as soon as possible. ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... castle, this was silent. Silent, but not deserted. There were men below, armed, helmed. He recognized the uniform of the Wrecker warriors, saw one or two who wore the gray of the Foanna servants. They stood in lines, unmoving, without speech among themselves, men who might have been frozen into immobility and arranged so for some game in which they were ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... bitter griefs in a strong, healthy man's voice, erect in the center of the parlor, looking mechanically, distractedly at Maria-Jose with his dreamy eyes; the concentrated effort of his memory brought to his face an involuntary immobility which Maria-Jose, most ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... words unto his son who resembled a fire wrapped in smoke.[1104] Instructed by what he said, I also, O son, shall again expound to thee that certain knowledge (which dispels ignorance). The properties possessed by earth are immobility, weight, hardness, productiveness, scent, density, capacity to absorb scents of all kinds, cohesion, habitableness (in respect of vegetables and animals), and that attribute of the mind which is called patience of the capacity to bear. The properties of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent, to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the wide-eyed, terrified ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... my heated brow, but vigorous enough to keep them moving. Often, too—indeed nearly always—I have found that after exhausting my all too scanty stock of patience, and making an "exposure" in despair, the errant blossoms and leaflets would settle down into perfect immobility, as if to say, "There! don't be cross—we'll behave," when it was ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... impression I ever had of noonday sunlight," he continued, "was in London, in a museum. An Italian boy in the dress of his country, a model, was standing in front of a picture which represented a sunlight effect on a Roman landscape. The boy held his head stretched out. Amid the immobility of the indifferent attendants, and in the dampness and drabness of a London day, this Italian boy radiated light. He was deaf to everything around him, full of secret sunlight, and his hands were almost clasped. He was praying to the ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... much as turn a head to note their passing. There were many balconies on each building and not a one that did not hold its silent party of richly trapped men and women, with here and there a child or two, but even the children maintained the uniform silence and immobility of their elders. As they approached the center of the city the girl saw that even the roofs bore companies of these idle watchers, harnessed and bejeweled as for some gala-day of laughter and music, but no laughter broke from those silent lips, nor any music from the strings of the instruments ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... asked why he got there. As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else; a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like it ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... protect themselves from one another. This tendency resulted, he thinks, in the arrest of the entire animal world in its evolution toward higher and higher forms. These shells and armors begat a kind of torpor and immobility which has continued down to our day with the echinoderms and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and I are here without imprisoning shells on our backs; but how or why did we escape? Bergson does not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was there ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... a low chair with the guitar in her lap and her feet stretched out upon a stool. Her companions, two young men, hardly more than boys, were standing near a table on which stood a bottle of liquor. All had been stricken into instant immobility by the sudden interruption of the ranger. Each stared with open mouth ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... line and out in No Man's Land. You have to crouch and move warily now. Zing! A bullet from a German sniper. You laugh and whisper, "A near one, that." My first trip to the trenches was up to No Man's Land. I went in the early dawn and came to a Madame Tussaud's show of the dead, frozen into immobility in the most extraordinary attitudes. Some of them were part way out of the ground, one hand pressed to the wound, the other pointing, the head sunken and the hair plastered over the forehead by repeated rains. I kept on wondering what ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... about that (Housemaid) is trained to respect my disorder I can forget you only when I am with you I have to pay for the happiness you give me I love myself because you love me Ideas they think superior to love—faith, habits, interests Immobility of time It is an error to be in the right too soon It was torture for her not to be able to rejoin him Kissses and caresses are the effort of a delightful despair Let us give to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... in the distant darkness, a line continuous at first, but afterwards resolvable into individual units of lamps as he walks further along the straight road. Many a weary wayfarer has watched those lamps hang changeless in the distance, and chafed at their immobility. They seem to come no nearer to him for all the milestones, with the distance from Hyde Park Corner graven in old figures on their lichened faces, that he has passed. Only the increasing sound of the trains tells him that he is nearing his goal, and by degrees the dull ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Court we may trace the rise of question after question—that is, of conflict after conflict—as to the respective rights of the Federation and the individual States. From the history and from the immobility of the constitution, we may perceive the extent to which the existence of a Federal pact checks change, or, in other words, reform. Every institution which can lay claim to be based upon an organic law acquires a sort of sacredness. Under a system of Federalism, the Crown, the ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... with reference to such passages as Joshua x. 12-14, where an event is described as it appeared to those who witnessed it, is not admissible in such a passage as Psalm xcvi. 10, where the supposed immobility of the earth is alleged as a proof of God's sovereignty, and is made the foundation of the duty of proclaiming that sovereignty among the heathen. When the supposed proof was found to be a fallacy, the ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... inmediaciones f. pl. vicinity. inmediato immediate. inmensidad f. immensity. inmenso immense. inmortal immortal. inmortalidad f. immortality. inmotivado without motive, ungrounded. inmovil motionless. inmovilidad f. immobility. inofensivo inoffensive, innocent. insecto insect. insensato mad, senseless. insigne notable, great. insignia badge, insignia. insoportable insupportable. inspirar to inspire. instante m. instant. instintivo instinctive. instruir to instruct, educate. insultante ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... an uneventful hour. Long before it ended the sound of footsteps had entirely ceased; but we thought it best to take no chances, and waited for the last minute our impatience would allow us. Then, uncomfortable and stiff from the long period of immobility and silence, we rose to our feet and made ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... little rhetorical action, hardly moves at all in the pulpit, stirs neither head nor hand except upon special occasions; but he has a powerful voice, he pours out his words in a strong, full volume, and the force he has in this respect compensates for the general immobility he displays ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... long way toward establishing a man's intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to strike a filial attitude about their parent's pedestal, there was little to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth. My poor father did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... different uniforms, weapons, accoutrements, and aiguillettes; and the whole great picture, that miniature battlefield before the combat, was framed by the majestic towering walls of the Tuileries, which officers and men seemed to rival in their immobility. Involuntarily the spectator made the comparison between the walls of men and the walls of stone. The spring sunlight, flooding white masonry reared but yesterday and buildings centuries old, shone full likewise upon thousands of bronzed ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... knees, frantic to press her down once more into the chair, terrified at the rigid immobility of the upright figure, Mrs. Coblenz paused then, too, her clasp falling away, and leaned forward to the open sheet of the newspaper, its black ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... protective devices he has to invent to save himself from such a humiliating situation, that, by way of elevating him, we first compare him to plants and flowers, and then actually try to keep him as far as possible in the state of physical immobility of vegetables, subjecting him to the same sensations, reducing him to slavery. But he never becomes the "plant with angelic perfume" we would fain believe him to be; rather do signs of corruption ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... majority of the original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... too far, and France was not too near to prevent the incalculably smooth working of a striking and far-reaching political move. It was the kind of thing that England's Prime Minister, with his extraordinary frankness, with his equally extraordinary secretiveness, insight and immobility, delighted in; and Slavonia and its ambassador knew, as an American high in place had colloquially said, "that they were up against a proposition which would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... larvae of bees are apodal, they are not condemned to absolute immobility in their cells; for they can move by a spiral motion. During the first three days, this motion is so slow as scarcely to be perceptible, but it afterwards becomes more evident. I have then observed them perform two complete revolutions ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... arm across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda, with her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his children. The sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic in expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible to discover what he thought. Bushy grey eyebrows shaded his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... romance of that new thing of iron and steam so affrighting to other men of his generation. A lover of light in all its swift prismatic changes, he was naturally a lover of speed. He realized that speed was one of the two most romantic things in the world. The other is immobility. At present the two extremes of romantic expression are the Sphinx and—the automobile. Unless you can realize that an automobile is more romantic than a stage-coach, you know nothing about romance. Soon the automobile will have its nose put out by the air-ship, and we shall not need to ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... exhibit in her person and face, more opposite extremes of beauty. If the one was strikingly characteristic of warmth, the other was no less indicative of coldness. Fair, even to paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed by the observer, but certainly unallied to softness. Still was she beautiful—coldly, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... I never attempted to explain); I saw the lantern jaws, the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of the hips; and the movements of these figures as they came and went seemed to me no whit less extraordinary than their sepulchral immobility as they sat round ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... of his going differed from that of all the other kindreds of the wild. He went not furtively. He had no particular objection to making a noise. He did not consider it necessary to stop every little while, stiffen himself to a monument of immobility, cast wary glances about the gloom, and sniff the air for the taint of enemies. He did not care who knew of his coming, and he did not greatly care who came. Behind his panoply of biting spears he felt himself secure, and in that security he moved as if he held ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... but also became more difficult to live with as she got better. For example, when she came out of catatonic-like immobility, she became extremely promiscuous, and was determined to sleep with my husband. In fact she kept crawling into bed with him with no clothes on. Either we had to forcefully remove her or the bed would be handed over to her—without a resident man. Christine then decided (logically) that I was ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... sits merrily upon a galloping stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age, crouching at some street-corner in hieratic immobility. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fine white hands lying in her lap, a lady. She reminded him, in that first vision of her, of "Phiz's" pictures of Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, and always afterwards that connection remained with him. Her thin, spare figure had something intense, almost burning, in its immobility, in the deep black of her dress and hair, in the white sharpness of ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... more ancient than the things created, by the quantity of time, but rather by the simplicity of His divine nature. For that infinite motion of temporal things imitateth the present state of the unmovable life, and since it cannot express nor equal it, it falleth from immobility to motion, and from the simplicity of presence, it decreaseth to an infinite quantity of future and past, and since it cannot possess together all the fulness of its life, by never leaving to be in some sort, it seemeth to emulate ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... illnesses and in severe acute disorders the great exhaustion is shown by the child lying upon its back, with its face turned toward the ceiling, in a condition of complete apathy. It may remain like a log, scarcely breathing for days before death takes place. Perfect immobility may also be seen in children who are entirely unconscious ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of London an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It lifted her delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of her own comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must have bundled together ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... as Plato says (Cf. De Coelo ii, 13), be confronted on either side with two portions of food equally appetizing and at an equal distance, he is not moved towards one more than to the other; and he finds the reason of this in the immobility of the earth in the middle of the world. Now, if that which is equally (eligible) with something else cannot be chosen, much less can that be chosen which appears as less (eligible). Therefore if two or more things are available, of which one appears to be more (eligible), ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... had to lean closer to the light and frown to make out the print of his book. The sight of his stolid immobility merely sharpened their hunger, for there was never any passion in this hulk of a man. When he relaxed over a book the world went out like a snuffed candle for him. He read slowly, lingering over every ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... the most singular, the maddest impulses; it was one of the supreme moments of his life. He knew that all depended upon his absolute immobility; yet something in his brain was prompting him—prompting him—to gather the witch to his breast; to return that poisonous, that vampirish kiss, and then to crush out life from the small ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... intrinsic properties, because they can be transported so easily to any part of the world. On the other hand, materials of large bulk and low unit value, such as coal, iron ore, and clay, may have highly varying values independently of their physical characteristics, because of their relative immobility. But the values even of gold and precious stones represent a combination of intrinsic qualities and of demand. A diamond is made of carbon but is more valuable than coal or graphite because it appeals to the esthetic taste. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... your hand on the hearts of women, in both places you will find a great furnace."[170] Or, as Marro has finely put it, the passivity of women in love is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron toward it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed preoccupation in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... are accentuated so as to dominate the idea they invariably enfeeble its expression. With M. Rodin one does not think of his material at all; one does not reflect whether he used it well or ill, caused it to lose weight and immobility to the eye or not, because all his superficial modelling appears as an inevitable deduction from the way in which he has conceived his larger subject, and not as "handling" at all. In reality, of course, it is the acme of sensitive handling. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... sound—he had made Mrs. Worthingham out as all at once perfectly pleased to see him, completely aware of what he had most in mind, and singularly serene in face of his sense of their impediment. It was as if for all the world she didn't take it for one, the immobility, to say nothing of the seeming equanimity, of their tactless companion; at whom meanwhile indeed our friend himself, after his first ruffled perception, no more adventured a look than if advised by his ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... closer order, and with an indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in court, Hob marched on in awful immobility. There appeared upon the face of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud. Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter, and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slightest movement. But for the sight of the Moon gradually growing larger above them, and of the Earth gradually growing smaller beneath them, they could safely swear that they were fast anchored in an ocean of deathlike immobility. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... emerged to the street and turned the corner into the less populous thoroughfare, known commonly throughout Bloomfield as Pearl Street, and there they came upon Uncle Buzz's horse and buggy, standing as if carved from one and the same block of immutable immobility. Even the flies found little of excitement in lighting about the front section of the combination, and only one or two were buzzing about in the general neighbourhood ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... it? I looked across at Semyonov, who was now seated on Vera's right hand just opposite Boris Grogoff. He was very quiet, very still, looking about him, his square pale beard a kind of symbol of the secret immobility of his soul. I fancied that I detected behind his placidity an almost relieved self-satisfaction, as though things were going very much better than he ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... drawing-room and was on the verge of weeping. There were also in the room her husband and a certain Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov, a distant cousin of Nikolai Artemyevitch, a retired cornet of sixty years old, a man corpulent to the point of immobility, with sleepy yellowish eyes, and colourless thick lips in a puffy yellow face. Ever since he had retired, he had lived in Moscow on the interest of a small capital left him by a wife who came of a shopkeeper's ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... bring them forth with the ease and silence which they themselves desire. Mr. Pendyce went to his bedroom determined to say no word of what he had resolved to do. His wife was asleep. The Squire's entrance wakened her, but she remained motionless, with her eyes closed, and it was the sight of that immobility, when he himself was so disturbed, which drew from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... programme. They begin by stating that they will sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essential elements of their poetry will be courage, daring, and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified serene immobility, ecstasy, and sleep; they will extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. They declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its frame adorned by great ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... morrow? Have you watched for him beside the brackish waters of the lick, where, perched upon a rude, high scaffold built beside a tree, mosquito-bitten and uneasy, you waited and suffered, preserving an absolute silence and immobility until came ghost-like flitting figures from the forest to the shallow's edge, when the great gun, carrying the superstitious number of buckshot, just thirteen, roared out, awakening a thousand echoes of the night, and, clambering ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... few miles to the northward and westward of Carimata had hardly altered its position half a mile during all these hours. The calm was absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but an impressive immobility. Nothing moved on earth, on the waters, and above them in the unbroken lustre of the sky. On the unruffled surface of the straits the brig floated tranquil and upright as if bolted solidly, keel to keel, with its own image reflected in the unframed and immense ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... semicircle of hills, the slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow sands, the streaming green of ravines. All that had the crude and blended colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the suspicious immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed so perfectly the accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of the world seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... man who finds that he must do this or that in such a way had better beware; he is getting old, no matter what his age.[1] For we grow older as we lose mobility,—in joints, muscles, skin and our ways of doing, feeling and thinking! It is a transitory stage of the final immobility of Death. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... her thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching almost to her throat—her small oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a sudden check to Hagar's shrewish clamor. The squaws stiffened to immobility and listened stolidly, their eyes alone betraying the curiosity they felt. Off somewhere at the head of the tiny pond, hidden away in the jungle of green, a voice was singing; a girl's voice, and a strange voice—for the squaws knew ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... not go over the preceding arguments (which here return in full force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is non-existent; ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... colorless face those wonderful openings of black light seemed to look through and beyond us. For an instant there was no stir. Hundreds of faces set toward her, held by the wonder of her. Fong Ling's yellow visage moved for the first time from its immobility with a sort of awe, a dread. And when my gaze came back to her, I noticed that, with the dropping of her hands to join the finger-tips, she had left, where that little, pressing fist had been, a blur of red ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... midst of the splendors of her court and language," says Guizot, "the Spanish government felt itself weak, and sought to hide its weakness under its immobility. Philip IV. and his minister, weary of striving only to be conquered, looked but for the security of peace, and only sought to put aside all questions which would call for efforts of which they felt themselves incapable. Divided and enervated, the house of Austria had even less ambition ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... I see a horse!" was the startling exclamation of Dot, whom her mother had supposed, because of her stillness and immobility, to ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... involuntary and excludes devotion. Hence he says pointedly: "Lest that which we are free to do be done without devotion and unwillingly." On the other hand the necessity resulting from a vow is caused by the immobility of the will, wherefore it strengthens the will and increases devotion. Hence the argument ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... based upon an ancient constitution, indifferent to culture, and solid at the cost of some rigidity, with Venice. As in Greece the philosophers of Athens, especially Plato and Aristotle, wondered at the immobility of Sparta and idealized her institutions; so did the theorists of Florence, Savonarola, Giannotti, Guicciardini, look with envy at the state machinery which secured repose and liberty for Venice. The parallel between Venice and Sparta becomes still more remarkable when we inquire into the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... headache, pain in the small of the back and loins of an aching character may occur. These symptoms may constitute the only evidence of locomotor ataxia and last for years; but sooner or later there are added absence of knee cap bone reflex (knee jerk), and immobility of the pupil. The loss of the knee jerk is always observed in time. The pupil fails to respond to light while it still accommodates for distance, called Argyll Roberston pupil. There may be imperfect control of the bladder with slow, dripping or hasty urination. Later the control ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility of the bazar. People looked at their playbills to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot upon ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... symptoms of scrofula. 2. Chronic cutaneous affections, especially of the scalp. 3. Severe injuries of the bones of the head; convulsions. 4. Impaired vision, from whatever cause; inflammatory affections of the eyelids; immobility or irregularity of the iris; fistula, lachrymalis, etc., etc. 5. Deafness; copious discharge from the ears. 6. Loss of many teeth, or the teeth generally unsound. 7. Impediment of speech. 8. Want of due capacity of the chest, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... time of their watch, the water close to them would be often agitated by some impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which the informer, well used to the river, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... utterly needless to bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... "on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke. He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He looms at you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts were a thousand ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... till it was too dark to see the sights of the rifles. We, the spectators, were assigned posts to see the spectacle as at the theatre, and went to them just after sundown. The straggling fire of the early twilight stopped, and there was an unbroken silence and immobility which lasted perhaps twenty minutes, and until everything had become vague and indefinable in the deepening twilight, when we heard the signal, given by a trumpet call, and instantly the steep sides of the two ridges were crawling with gray shadows, and a terrific fire burst out from the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... now to consider the much discussed question of the rotation or immobility of the earth. Plato's doctrine on this subject is contained in the following words:—'The earth, which is our nurse, compacted (OR revolving) around the pole which is extended through the universe, he made to be the guardian and artificer of night and day, first and eldest ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... wasted no moments on self-reproach or panic. While he was still rolling under his jeep, his mind had been busy with plans to retrieve the situation. Something touched the heel of one boot, and he froze his leg into immobility, at the same time trying to get the big Smith & Wesson free. The shoulder-holster, he found, was badly torn, though made of the heaviest skirting-leather, and the spring which retained the weapon in place had ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... drapery, her eyes weariedly fixed on the one corner of the room, in the direction of which she was obliged to turn her head. The monotonous attitude contributed to plunge her mind into that dull despair which produces immobility—Michael Vanbrugh had never ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and drops to his knees. His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his helmet drops on his heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to the sky. Hurriedly the rush of the rank has split open to respect his immobility. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... about her little feet. Same face, same figure. It was she indeed; and to prevent any possible doubt of it, she was seated on the back of a huge old- fashioned book strongly resembling the "Cosmography of Munster." Her immobility but half reassured me; I was really afraid that she was going to take some more nuts out of her alms-purse and throw ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... divined a new swiftness in her step, a certain sinuosity of movement that suddenly melted into immobility. A red spot had appeared close by, burned now on blackness; it was followed by another's footstep. A man, ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... you realize what centuries of suppression are doing to my sex? Do you understand that woman is degenerating into an immobility—an inertia—a molluskular condition of receptive passivity which is rendering us, year by year, more unfitted to either think or act for ourselves? Even in the matter of marriage we are not permitted by custom to assume the initiative. We may only shake ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... the secular mind a superfluous bit of asceticism. If the Church would direct her maternal solicitude to the peasant's drinking, and leave him to eat what he pleases, she might exercise a beneficial influence on his material and moral welfare. Unfortunately she has a great deal too much inherent immobility to attempt anything of the kind, so the muzhik, while free to drink copiously whenever he gets the chance, must fast during the seven weeks of Lent, during two or three weeks in June, from the beginning of November ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... can forget the face of Chaliapine as the Mogul King in Prince Igor, when a mask covering its upper portion made him seem like a Phoenix at the end of its thousand wise years, awaiting in condescension the burning nest and what did it not gain from that immobility ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... as far behind the age in his astronomy as in his geology. He blindly follows the Infidels of the last century in their attack on Joshua's miracle, arresting the sun and moon, as inconsistent with their science; which taught the immobility of the sun and moon, it seems, and was entirely ignorant of the modern discovery of the grand motions of the fixed stars, including our sun, and of the dependence of all the planets, including our earth and moon, upon that grand motion ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... consciously quiet. Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this—his forebearance from any question—only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events, for a minute, watched his immobility—then, as if once more renewing her total submission, returned, without a ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... back suddenly in his chair, and for some minutes complete silence reigned in the room. He was evidently thinking deeply, and his eyes were fixed upon the open book with inscrutable immobility. Once he glanced slowly towards Rene Drucquer, who sat with downcast eyes and interlocked fingers. Then he pressed back his elbows and inhaled a deep breath, as if weary ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... the glacier had not disputed their passage; it maintained the silence and the immobility of marble; nothing but the snarl of the surging flood re-echoed from its face. But with the suddenness of a rifle-shot there came a detonation, louder, sharper than any blast of powder. The Norwegian cursed; ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... lack-lustre eyes a semblance of martial resolution. The battalion deployed, facing about, or formed square under the endless fluttering of snowflakes. A cloud of horsemen with fur caps on their heads, levelled long lances and yelled "Hurrah! Hurrah!" around their menacing immobility, whence, with muffled detonations, hundreds of dark-red flames darted through the air thick with falling snow. In a very few moments the horsemen would disappear, as if carried off yelling in the gale, and the battalion, standing still, ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... on the starboard side, was the mysterious being whom I had last seen in the railway carriage at Sittingbourne. He was, as usual, imperturbable, sardonic, terrifying. His face, which chanced to be lighted by the rays of a deck lantern, had the pallor and the immobility of marble, and the dark eyes held me under ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... instead of heading for a ship in waiting for it, opposite Healthful House, have been rowed to a point further down the river? In this case is it not possible that I was carried into the collar of a house? This would explain the complete immobility of the compartment. It is true that the walls are of bolted plates, and that there is a vague smell of salt water, that odor sui generis which generally pervades the interior of a ship, and ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... and, turning her back on him, gazed, motionless, toward the bay. There was something arresting and curiously dramatic about the whole performance, something that hinted of impending tragedy. The slight figure with its listless droop and stony immobility caught and clutched the sympathies of Nathan Spear as he was passing by. The man was Alec McTurpin; the girl, no doubt, some light o' love from a neighboring pueblo. Yet there was a disturbing ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... consciousness all day long. It was all very well to dress oneself carefully, compose one's face, and start off punctually at half-past four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven only knew what would come of it all, and when Katharine, after sitting silent with her usual immobility, wantonly drew from her pocket and slapped down on the table beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra herself, his composure deserted him. What did she mean by ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... invention would violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of the immobility of the earth. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... him for a moment or two with eyes of glowering resentment; but in the end he put forth a hand not wholly steady and took the sheet held out to him. Monck stood beside him in utter immobility, gazing out over the valley with a changeless vigilance that had about it ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... clock. As he did so his gaze rested on a small photograph standing at the side of it. He scanned it eagerly. It was a face of dark Castilian beauty. He turned and looked at Beauvais long and earnestly. There was an answering gaze, an immobility of countenance. Maurice experienced a slight shock. The haze over his memory was dispersed. The whole scene, in which this man loomed in the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... to the approaching cloud of dust. Silently the two watched it until it resolved into a rider loping easily along. In fifteen minutes he drew rein, his pony dropped immediately from a gallop to immobility, he swung into a graceful at-ease attitude across his saddle, grinned amiably, and began ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... emanated on the heels of the thought more quickly than one word could have been uttered. The six men who operated the disintegrator rays were stung out of their startled immobility, and the soft hum of the atomatic power ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... but David noticed that even with the permission, cautious curves settled round his uncle's eyes, and his face assumed that business-like immobility which ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... you may dream; you can't avoid it," he observed lazily, and closed his eyes; and neither taunts nor jeers nor questions, nor fragments of shells flung with intent to hit, stirred him from his immobility. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... became dumb in its immobility, half sheen, half night, with its arcades, the soothing plash of water, with its expiring lights, in a suggestion of Castilian severity, enveloped by the exotic softness ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... their weapons outside. They seemed scarcely to breathe as they ranged themselves in a line and looked down upon Scottie Deane. Not a sign of emotion came into their expressionless faces, not the flicker of an eyelash did the immobility of their faces change. In a low, clacking monotone they began to speak, and there was no expression of grief in their voices. Yet Billy understood now that in the hearts of these little brown men Scottie Deane stood enshrined like a god. Before he was cold in death they ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... came out of the shadow of the trees and looked towards the height crowned by the Palazzo d'Oro, where from the upper windows twinkled a few lights showing the position of the room where the "master of the world" lay stretched in brainless immobility, waited upon by medical nurses ever on the watch, and a wife of whom he knew nothing, guarding him with the fixed devotion of a faithful dog rather than of a human being. Going onwards in a kind of abstract reverie, he came to a halt again on reaching the shore, enchanted by the dreamy loveliness ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... gesticulating multitude, the light hats of the women and the waiters' white aprons standing out in bold relief against the background of dark clothing, and in the broad aisle in the centre, where the swarm of promenaders en vignette forms a striking contrast to the immobility of the statues, the unconscious palpitation with which their chalky whiteness and their glorified ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Thursday sat crouched in the saddle, wary as a rattlesnake ready to strike. A sawed-off shotgun lay under his leg within reach of his hand, the butt of a six-gun was even closer to those smooth, girlish fingers. In the immobility of his figure and the steadiness of the blue eyes was a ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... involve an inattention to the actual impression of the moment. To erroneously attribute a feeling to another through an excess of sympathetic eagerness is often to overlook what a perfectly dispassionate observer would see, as, for example, the immobility of the features or the signs of a deliberate effort to simulate. This inattention will, it is obvious, be greatest in the poetic attribution of life and personality to natural objects, in so far as this approximates ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... feelings instead of words,—as the sensation of the eye passing from darkness into light, or as the rapture of some mystical soul, secure in the possession of its God. It was dazzling light, intoxication without giddiness, repose without heaviness, or immobility. I could have lived on thus during as many thousand years as there were ripples on the lake, or sands upon its shores, without perceiving that more seconds had elapsed than were required for a single respiration. ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Immature nematura. Immediate tuja. Immediately tuj. Immense vasta. Immense (size) grandega. Immerge trempi. Immerse subakvigi. Immigrate enmigri. Immigrant enmigranto. Imminent minaca. Immobility senmoveco. Immoderate malmodera. Immodest nemodesta. Immolate oferbucxi. Immoral malbonmora. Immorality malbonmoreco. Immortal senmorta. Immortality senmorteco. Immovable senmova, nemovebla. Immutable nesxangxebla. Imp diableto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... articular surfaces and ankylosis, is seldom observed. It is only in cases of severe injury, where the articular portions of the bones are damaged at the time of infliction of the injury, and where the articulation remains exposed for weeks at a time, together with immobility of the parts because of attending pain, ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... his strength, which in this case relieved my painful feelings. And the man seemed to have done nothing. Except for the change of position in order to use his feet, which made us all start by its swiftness, my recollection is that of immobility. But he had bent the bars wide apart. And now he could get out if he liked; but he dropped his legs inwards, and looking over his shoulder beckoned to the soldiers. 'Hand up the water,' he said. 'I will give them all ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... From Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much gazing at bad statues of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and not for another—not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside Jean-Baptiste—in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of being. At first he did the work ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... became visibly uneasy. Her features expressed strong emotion, but they quickly resumed their former immobility. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... then he took her home. He was a little frightened, for there was something not like her in the way she had taken it, a sort of immobility that might, he thought, cover heartbreak. But she smiled when she thanked him, and went very ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... impose on human progress the limits of his own mind. Let his hierarchy become masters of the world, and the effect would probably be like that produced by the ascendency of a hierarchy (enlightened no doubt for its time) in Egypt, a brief start forward followed by consecrated immobility for ever. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
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