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More "Undecipherable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... derivation, therefore, I am a pretty fair illustration of the mix-up of bloods which seems destined to bring forth some new and yet undecipherable combination on the North American continent. One-half Irish, one-fourth English, and a good deal more than "a trace" of French, would appear to be the showing of a quantitative analysis. Yet, as far as I understand my personality, I think to see in the ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... only this confused and shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... copy of the Defence of Poetry, apparently damaged by sea-water, and illegible in many places. Being prepared for the printer, it is written on one side of the paper only: on the blank pages, but frequently undecipherable for the reason just indicated, are many passages intended for, but eventually omitted from, the preface ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... In other words, its messages may be picked up by friend and foe alike with equal facility. True, the messages are sent in code, which may be unintelligible to the enemy. In this event the opponent endeavours to render the communications undecipherable to one and all by what is known as "jambing." That is to say, he sends out an aimless string of signals for the purpose of confusing senders and receivers, and this is continued without cessation and at ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... breathing of the invalid soon convinced her that she was asleep, however, and she paused in her work long enough to tear open the envelope and spread the letter before her eyes. Vain and puerile curiosity! The characters were undecipherable to her! No picture could be more sorrowful and touching than the sight of this young girl, gazing with a fast beating heart at the unintelligible missive. One thing she remarked, however; the letter was very short, and this fact filled her with ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... answer to offer but that I had made her the arbitress of my fate, and she was welcome to do with me as was her sovereign will. Accordingly I left her, looking like Hebe in her bower, to plunge into a chaos of undecipherable papers, to be deafened with a thousand impossible applications, to marshal lazy departments, to reform antiquated abuses, and, after spending twelve hours a-day in the dust and gloom of official duty, to spend nearly as many hours of the night battling with arrogant and angry faction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... schools with courses advertised in their posted schedules whose titles were completely unintelligible to him, and second hand bookstalls selling battered technical books and journals whose titles were undecipherable in any tongue Bryce could think of. The lunch hour crowds were beginning to pour out into the arcades from elevators and tube trains in a rush to get first place in their ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... which Frank declared to be bluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from India and royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris and students from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers from all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were at last alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morning after they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at the spring ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... him, and these again confused with other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:—as for his sitting down to "draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of them escaped, for all ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... possessed with a demon of activity in travel. In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance of 2500 miles. In 1806 I find him starting 'on a tour round the south coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.' Peace was not long declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where he was in time to see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, 'about twenty of Bonaparte's ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Invitation to Youth, the refrain of which, though partly undecipherable, seems to indicate an Italian origin. I have thought it well to omit this refrain; but it might be rendered thus, maintaining the strange and probably corrupt reading of ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... likes to forgive; only Shakspeare can afford to be careless of his fame, and the rags that his commentators make of him are a warning to all pettier people. We have seen the manuscript of a man already immortal, so interlined, erased, and corrected as to be undecipherable by any but himself and the printer who has been for twenty years condemned to such hard labor; surely others can condescend to the same pains;—yet we doubt if Mr. Reade so much as looks his over ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "La Villa, the country, one soon finds, is always gracious, faithful, and true; if you govern it with diligence and love, it will never be satisfied with what it does for you, always it will add [**Transcriber's Note: undecipherable] to recompense. In the spring the villa gives you continual delight; green leaves, flowers, odours, songs and in every way makes you happy and jocund: all smiles on you and promises a fine harvest, filling you with good hope, delight, and pleasure. Yes indeed, how ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... occurred to me that there was any need to be careful in your presence. The truth is, I have always been an interloper in your home; you will remember how, long years since, when first I went to boarding-school, I told you that . . . (four lines were here undecipherable, being faded and rubbed out). When I look back, I see that in all my life you have been my only friend—which makes me the more unhappy that this has happened. Mind, I don't mean to accuse your family of unkindness; I only say that I, perhaps ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... length of the church. Note (1) the large ambry in the S. aisle, once the lady-chapel, where is also a fragmentary reredos; (2) the curious inscriptions on the inner side of the tower walls, mostly undecipherable, one of which refers to the plague that attacked the town in the fourteenth century; (3) the really fine oaken pulpit, dating from the year 1627. There was formerly a small monastic house in the town, a cell to Westminster Abbey. From the ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... the system of handwriting: and although he was, at the end of the holidays, very far from attaining the perfection shown in the examples produced by his teachers of the marvels they had effected in many of their pupils, he did improve vastly, and wrote a fair current hand instead of the almost undecipherable scrawl that had so puzzled and annoyed a succession of masters at Shrewsbury. After another month spent in London, getting his clothes and outfit, Godfrey started for St. Petersburg. On his last evening at home his father had a serious talk ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... how seven months after that first meeting Stimson of the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris, involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery. The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body so arrogantly well gowned, she had in ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... read," rejoined Thorndyke. "My shorthand is, I think, quite undecipherable; it has been so made intentionally with a view ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... an overwhelming interest to certain problems of history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved: for the demon that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all others had been pronounced undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was to his eye that for the first time there seemed to be an unknown element that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented by the religious sect among the Hebrews entitled the Essenes. Admitting the character and functions of this sect to have been those generally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... every fireside; but in a simple matter-of-fact record of sailors' observations and experiences on a strange coast, oral tradition would not be long in distorting and jumbling the details into a result quite undecipherable. The story of the Zeno brothers, presently to be cited, shows what strange perversions occur, even in written tradition, when the copyist, instead of faithfully copying records of unfamiliar events, tries to edit and amend them. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... intercommunication is so perfect that even birds and flying things can learn from it. They prove their breeding by their perfect taste in dress, the well-bred ever being inconspicuous; and their simplicity conceals enormous, undecipherable wonder. One daisy out of doors is worth a hundred shelves of text- books in the house. Their mischief, moreover, is not revenge, though some might think it so—but a natural desire to be recognised and thought and talked about a little. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. 'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost undecipherable with its little fly-tracks, complicated by abbreviations more or less commercial, behind which the ex-sutler concealed his absolute lack ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... when I have merely supplied authorities, they are not so distinguished. The list which he had drawn up of the works of Alesius was partly in an obsolete form of shorthand, which to me was quite undecipherable. Having been privileged to examine a good many of these rare treatises in various public libraries, I have been able, though only to an inconsiderable degree, to supplement the list; these additions being marked like those in the notes and other appendices. In revising the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:—as for his sitting down to "draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of them escaped, for all that: they are sealed ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the 31st and February the 7th. I do not at all wonder at the condition in which the finances of the United States are found. Hamilton's object from the beginning, was to throw them into forms which should be utterly undecipherable. I ever said he did not understand their condition himself, nor was able to give a clear view of the excess of our debts beyond our credits, nor whether we were diminishing or increasing the debt. My own ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... admirable case of self-sacrifice is that in which no single person appears who is profited by our loss. The scholar, the artist, the scientific man dedicate themselves to the interests of undifferentiated humanity. They serve their undecipherable race, not knowing who will obtain gains through their toils. In their sublime benefactions they study the wants of no individual person, not even of themselves. Yet, turn to a man of this type and try to call his attention ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... years afterward on the coast of Veragua some wandering adventurers found this legend, almost undecipherable, cut in the bark of a tree, "Aqui anduvo el desdichado Diego de Nicuesa," which may be translated, "Here was lost the unfortunate Diego de Nicuesa." But the statement is not credited. The fate ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... and remains of a little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound not sufficient for the name of hill—which are scattered everywhere through those level countries, like places which have never been built, which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity—perhaps, one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old—yet always inhabitable in all the ages, with the same names lingering about, the same surroundings, the same mild rural occupations, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... head or tail of; be at sea &c (uncertain) 475; wonder &c 870; see through a glass darkly &c (ignorance) 491. not understand one another; play at cross purposes &c (misinterpret) 523. Adj. unintelligible, unaccountable, undecipherable, undiscoverable, unknowable, unfathomable; incognizable^, inexplicable, inscrutable; inapprehensible^, incomprehensible; insolvable^, insoluble; impenetrable. illegible, as Greek to one, unexplained, paradoxical; enigmatic, enigmatical, puzzling (secret) 533; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... de Unamuno. I am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner, untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of undecipherable papers. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... heavily from his seat, oppressed by the vast soundlessness, and pushed through curling plants that caught at his heels. The sound of his passage was like crackling thunder. A decaying door was marked, in faded, almost undecipherable letters, "Emergency Stairs." It was half open, and Allan squeezed around its edge. Spiral steps curved down into blackness. He hesitated a moment. He could feel the awful silence, the emptiness below was ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... can pretend that you've just slowly pulled away the envelope that was so useless because of poor old Marthy's undecipherable handwriting and that you've kissed the inner wrapping that reads "Please send this to Miss Trenton (if that's her name). At once." And then—oh then, you can pretend you are reading the first letter you ever had in all this world and ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... nights with angels, and rose to face the day with shut lips that no man might know. He was narrow but deep; and Fortune, his own humanity broad and shallow, could make nothing of him. Did Uri sing when merry and sigh when sad, he could have understood; but as it was, the cryptic features were undecipherable; he could not measure ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... campaign. Wireless communication is not secretive. In other words, its messages may be picked up by friend and foe alike with equal facility. True, the messages are sent in code, which may be unintelligible to the enemy. In this event the opponent endeavours to render the communications undecipherable to one and all by what is known as "jambing." That is to say, he sends out an aimless string of signals for the purpose of confusing senders and receivers, and this is continued without cessation and at a rapid rate. The ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy Conroy—an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic, bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny village in ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... neither tyrant nor slave. He neither knelt nor scorned. With him, men were neither great nor small,—they were right or wrong. Through manners, clothes, titles, rags and race he saw the real—that which is. Beyond accident, policy, compromise and war he saw the end. He was patient as Destiny, whose undecipherable hieroglyphs were so deeply graven on his sad ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... absence of any race affinity between the two. Moreover, Western archeologists keep to their own counsel, and will accept of no other but their own conjectures. And since they have failed to make anything out of the undecipherable inscriptions in an unknown tongue and mysterious characters on the Iapygian monuments, and so for years have pronounced them unguessable, he who would presume to meddle where the doctors muddle would be likely to be reminded of the Arab ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
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