"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... father, but in the dreamy, inconsequential way of one whose thoughts were elsewhere. "I suppose I shall have to take ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... caring for children she has not wanted. Only the married woman who has been constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes become inconsequential in nature and ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... dealt only with conclusions, Murrell stood revealed as Norton's murderer. Perhaps he read her thoughts, but he had lived in his degenerate ambitions until the common judgments or the understanding of them no longer existed for him. That Betty had loved Norton seemed inconsequential even; it was a memory to be swept away by the force of his greater passion. So he watched her smilingly, but back of the smile was ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Professor Brierly. "What difference does it make. The point I am making is that the mass is taught to pay too much attention to perfectly inconsequential things while they ignore or overlook the things ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... had never lived long enough in one country to become acclimated, you wouldn't feel very responsible, either," said Eleanor in such rueful tones that the girls laughed, although they secretly disapproved of Eleanor's inconsequential attitude. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, how ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... ourselves. We absorb it into that which is integral and immortal—our very essence. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness can never pass away" is a truth of experience, not the idle fancy of the poet. For to have seen the beautiful is not inconsequential, it is not even a responsibility entirely your own; the beautiful thing has also seen you. Henceforth your life can never be quite the same, and the beautiful thing looked upon has either become ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... teens answer readily to the call of ROMANCE. And occasionally, in the twilight hour between afternoon study and the dressing bell, as they gathered in the window-seat with faces to the western sky, the talk would turn to the future—particularly when Rosalie Patton was of the group. Pretty, dainty, inconsequential little Rosalie was preeminently fashioned for romance; it clung to her golden hair and looked from her eyes. She might be extremely hazy as to the difference between participles and supines, she might hesitate on her definition of a parallelopiped, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... I left all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something. Well—perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was gone—glamour, flavour, interest, contentment—everything. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... opening of the season; dogs and the training of dogs; and why some go gun-shy and why some ace blinkers. From sport and its justification, they became inconsequential; and she was beginning to enjoy the freshness of their chance acquaintance, his nice attitude toward ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... brain over the inconsequential matter something stirred upon the floor close to his feet, and presently he jerked back a booted foot that a rat had ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and had settled in Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, not only marked the happy beginning of a period of perfect domestic ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... am so reverential He made me feel inconsequential. I shed some strongly saline tears For bards I ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... mind was completely obsessed with details. He would go to a lecture, or to a play, and invariably, instead of grasping the main argument of the lecture, or the lesson of the play, he saw only a few inconsequential details of action in the play, and remembered only stray and somewhat irrelevant statements made by the lecturer. A novel or an essay appealed to him in the same way. Present to him a business proposition and his whole attention ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... eight in the evening a calm, smooth, brilliant, affable man sat at Vuyning's right hand during dinner. And when the ones who pass their lives in city streets spoke of skyscrapers or of the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or of insignificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big, deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like an Emperor, disposed of their Lilliputian chatter with ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the slipping heritage of individual liberty ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... three or four weeks in this gipsy fashion, mayhap getting a peep at a moose, a wolf, or even a bear (to say nothing of such inconsequential fry as ermine, mink, beaver, and otter), the family arrive at their holding ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... not understand you. You are very inconsequential. It does you a great deal of harm. You intend to leave your home without any reason, without even a pretext. And you wish to run through Europe with whom? With a Bohemian, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... leagues have been joined by the majority of the whole working class. Can anybody talk seriously of the working class turning its attention to a means which gives it no aid whatever as a class, and furnishes its individual members this inconsequential relief only until the time when the class as such has completely, or to a large extent, made use of it? If the German working class is willing to enter upon such a treadmill round, the time before the real improvement of its position will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... rice, fish, pork, and a jar of samshoo (rice arrack) are taken aboard, and by ten o'clock we are underway. Two men, named respectively Ah Sum and Yung Po, a woman, and a baby of eighteen months comprise the company aboard. Ah Sum, being but an inconsequential wage-worker, at once assumes the onerous duties of towman; Yung Po, husband, father, and sole proprietor of the sampan, manipulates the rudder, which is in front, and occasionally assists Ah Sum by poling. The boat-wife stands at the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... circumstantial evidence to wash herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought "weakening," and somehow connected with ethical impropriety. When Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least appeared so to our eyes. She must have been much more so when she was younger. In our town we were all formed upon recognised patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... there?" Her eye turned on Frederick. His right hand had stolen toward his left, but it paused under her look and remained motionless. "Only an old man sitting at a table and—" Why did she pause, and why did she cover up that pause with a wholly inconsequential sentence? Perhaps Frederick could have told, Frederick, whose hand had now fallen at his side. But Frederick volunteered nothing, and no one, not even Sweetwater, guessed all that lay beyond that AND which was left hovering in the air to be finished—-when? ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... sort,—it does not run on class lines, whether of occupation, status or property, nor does it run at all consistently from parent to child. When all is told the argument returns to the safe ground that these variations in point of patriotic animus are sporadic and inconsequential, and do not touch the general proposition that, one with another, the inhabitants of Europe and the European Colonies are sufficiently patriotic, and that the average endowment in this respect runs with consistent ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Well, certainly, at that age one loves to think of life as being implacable. But you will soon discover that she is merely inconsequential, and that none of her antics are of lasting importance; and you will learn to smile a deal more often than you weep ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza. An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I WEEN and I WEET, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... over thirty. A dapper, exquisite little man. He was distraught at the sight of this tearful damsel and, very naturally attributed her distress to unpreparedness. Petty was a pretty, inconsequential little creature born to play upon the feelings of one man or another. It did not much matter who he happened to be so long as he could satisfy the sentimental element in her makeup, and ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of long-established ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... letter in a hurry; but did not post it, in her inconsequential fashion, until the afternoon of the next day, so that Nan got it on the morning of the following day. She read and re-read it; and then, somehow, she wanted to think about it in the open—under the wide skies, near the wide sea. She wanted to ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... assumptions of ungiven powers have been in the detail. The bank-law, the treaty-doctrine, the sedition-act, alien-act, the undertaking to change the State laws of evidence in the State courts by certain parts of the stamp-act, &c. &c. have been solitary, inconsequential, timid things, in comparison with the audacious, barefaced, and sweeping pretension to a system of law for the United States, without the adoption of their legislature, and so infinitely beyond their power to adopt. If this assumption be yielded to, the State courts may be shut ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in plot. Nor, perhaps, ought we to expect that it should. An Interlude, as its name implies, was originally only a kind of stop-gap, an entree of light entertainment between other events; and what so welcome for this purpose as the inconsequential dialogue, by-play, and mutual trickery of sundry 'lewd fellows of the baser sort'? When it extended its sphere from the castle banqueting-hall to the street or inn-yard no greater excellence was expected from it. Its brevity saved it from tediousness, and the Virtues, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... him standing there and entered the tent, feeling that Shanklin was as irresponsible morally as a savage. Evidently the inconsequential matter of an attempt at murder should not be allowed to stand between friends, according to the flat-game man's way of viewing life. It appeared that morning as if Shanklin had no trace of malice in him on account of the past, and no desire to pursue further his underhanded revenge. Conscience ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Make no further move." It was only one of many, that arbitrary arrangement of figures, each combination having its own special significance; but, besides these, there was the key to a complete cipher into which any message might be coded, and—But why was her brain swerving off at inconsequential tangents? What did a coder or code book, matter at ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... Russell Sage and Carnegie Foundations, which we rightly call munificent. Reading the index of private schools and colleges is important for their children and youth, but still more important for the community upon which unbridled passion, inability to work or to spend properly, inconsequential thinking, mediaeval ideals of caste, etc., can inflict greater injuries than ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... talked of trite and inconsequential things. It was very necessary that they become firmly grounded on their new footing of genuine friendship before departing into personalities; and so, for two days, they avoided any but the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... bridle-rein of Eloise's horse, drawing her up close beside me, whenever the way permitted, conscious that she must feel, even as I did, the terrible loneliness of our surroundings, and the strain of this slow groping through the unknown. We conversed but little, and then in whispers, and of inconsequential things—of hope and fear, even of literature and music, of anything which would take our minds off our present situation. I smiled afterwards to remember the strange topics which came up between us in the midst of that gloom. And yet, in ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... some reflections upon affection and upon happiness. "There is no happiness," he said, "without participation; no participation without affection. There is, indeed, in affection a charm that leaves all things behind it, and renders even every calamity that does not interfere with it inconsequential and there is no difficulty, no toil, no labour, no exertion, that will not be endured where there is a view of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... I need not tell you," said Churchill, "is the chief organ in New York of good government, and it is never frivolous or inconsequential. I had hoped that what I sent from Milwaukee would have its effect, and I am glad to see, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate admiration. He had loved to draw her—around his room had been a dozen sketches of her—playing golf, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... any of these pages the reader comes across that which puts him in a mood to chide, may the author not hope that the wrath aroused be not wasted upon the inconsequential painter, but directed toward the landscape that forced the brush into his hand, stretched the canvas, and shouted in irresistible ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... then, as inconsequential, let us say that the trend of cosmic evolution is downward rather than upward, from complex units to simpler units rather than from simple ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... the shabby short-comings in the character of an author, artist or actor are blithely charged to genius, and we are content to let it go at that for fear that other people may think we don't know any better. As for myself, I may be foolish and inconsequential, but heaven will bear witness that I am not mean enough to call ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The fellow had come from somewhere—nobody in Marion seemed to know. He had been ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Liberty Girls, became—so she calmly stated—a "loafer." She wandered around the streets of Dorfield in a seemingly aimless manner, shopped at the stores without buying, visited the houses of all sorts of people, on all sorts of gossipy errands, interviewed lawyers, bankers and others in an inconsequential way that amused some and annoyed others, and conducted herself so singularly that even Mary Louise was ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... placed on opposite pages—all the more striking to me because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... he held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on,' and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in low ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his arms, which he ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sharp criticism he once had felt in Fools' hall, "a nimble-witted jester was lost when you resumed the dignity of your position. But," he added cautiously, as a sudden thought moved him, "this lady has appeared somewhat unexpectedly; the house of Friedwald is not an inconsequential one." ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation from one of the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... and mysterious forest of the mind, I doubt not but that I should achieve the same results as if I had started upon my journey with a dream. If this be true, and I firmly believe that it is, in the case of that universally used and apparently inconsequential word "the," to which the normal person can be expected to have such a large number of associations, of varying degrees of intimacy or remoteness, how much truer is it when we have such a definite mental fact or mental state as a dream as the starting-point ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object in contiguousness to ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental, accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work, associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... principally because he was coming to realize the great change in himself. More and more that change was forcing itself upon him. The stories and novels he had read during the first years of the war, the stories by English writers in which young men, frivolous and inconsequential, had enlisted and fought and emerged from the ordeal strong, purposeful and "made-over"—those stories recurred to him now. He had paid little attention to the "making-over" idea when he read those tales, ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... (says Knight) are elected by the same class as the aldermen, but in very varying and—in comparison with the size and importance of the wards—inconsequential numbers. Bassishaw and Lime Street Wards have the smallest representation—four members—and those of Farringdon Within and Without the largest—namely, sixteen and seventeen. The entire number of the Council is 240. Their ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... travelled on in hopes of finding some better shelter, and now, in the dark night, and a night of tempest too, finds himself on the open heath. To employ his own words, "he could not rest contented with one-sided theories or inconsequential reasonings, and has pursued the argument to its logical termination." He is ill at ease in mind, I hear, and not in robust health; and I am just going to ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... portrait-busts remain to be noticed, which at one time or another have been attributed to Donatello. The Vecchio Barbuto, a thoroughly poor piece of work, and the Imperatore Romano[166] with its sadly disjointed and inconsequential appearance, are works which scarcely recall the touch of Donatello. The bust of a veiled lady is more interesting.[167] In the old Medici catalogue it used to be called Donna velata incognita, or sacerdotessa velata: and it was also called ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... had become unconscious of her physical presence. The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight. "Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... than had been trained in Peep O'Day's direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence—if indeed they gave it a thought—as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighbourly good will, or perchance ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... left the speaker. Through the other's inconsequential talk and apparently careless acceptance of the fact of arrest the engineer had noted the tense gathering of the ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... was a hunter out of his domain. He would always feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens and unknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said: "Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequential sense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard the woman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling of companionship about it that made the ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... price around two hundred thousand dollars. That, however, is not the greatest risk that I have in mind. On board this craft are five people without whom it would be rather hopeless for anyone to go on building the Pollard type of boat. Therefore, besides risking a valuable craft and our own rather inconsequential lives, we go further and put the United States Navy in danger of having only a couple of our boats. Now, the fact is, we want the Navy to have three or four dozen of our submarine craft, for we ourselves believe implicitly in the great worth ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... during the meal, though once or twice it seemed to Westray that the organist gave inconsequential replies, as though he were thinking of something else. This was no doubt the case, for, after they had settled before the fire, and the lambent blue flames of the driftwood had been properly admired, Mr Sharnall ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... inconsequential producer of hashish and heroin; some heroine and cocaine processing mostly in the Bekaa valley; a Lebanese/Syrian eradication campaign started in the early 1990s has practically eliminated the opium ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... events! Tragedies swing on such inconsequential hinges. It is so exasperating to look back over the path of a calamity and see how easily it might have been averted! If one man in the little town of Lawrence a generation ago had eaten two pieces of pie-plant ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs. Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony's knee with her ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of inconsequential testimony, and of reasoning to match; the 'irregular ramble,' as Sir John Hawles has termed it. Snagge's book was discussed; how Ralegh borrowed it from Burleigh's library; and how Cobham had it, whether by gift from Ralegh, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... note taken fifteen years ago of a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Sir Walter, which faintly echoes an oratorical style whose master is no longer with us. It lacks the inconsequential emphasis, the terrific vigour of the gesture, and the impression conveyed by the speaker's intense earnestness, that really, by-and-by, he would say something, which compelled the attention of new members and strangers in the gallery. But if the reader imagines portentous pauses represented by the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... writer of 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, if he will ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... Howard, 567) towards the stronger affirmation of the complete and sufficient sovereignty of the United States. Yet in December, 1870, the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, Carpenter presenting the Report, after an incomplete, and in some respects an inaccurate and inconsequential[M] recital of judicial opinions, made ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... dragged the limp body through the door of the laboratory and propped it in a chair. It required but a moment for him to see that Shelton's injury was inconsequential. He had only been stunned and already showed ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... analysis, or a bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is "George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... floor, studying Watusk's words from every angle. The result of his cogitations was nil. Watusk's mind was at the same time too devious and too inconsequential for a mind like Ambrose's to track it. Ambrose decided that he was like one of the childish, unreasonable liars one meets in the mentally defective of our own race. Such a one is clever to no purpose: he will blandly attempt to lie away the presence ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "Is—inconsequential! The main point is—the 'Frisco Pet is dead. Gillett won't speak; you won't; Lord Ronsdale can't. Another to whom I am about to tell the story, will, I ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural, and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide these funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential factors ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... minutes in an agony of indecision over whether to carry an umbrella on this particular trip; whether to wear black shoes or tan shoes today; whether to go calling or to stay at home and write letters this afternoon. Such a person is usually in a stew over some inconsequential matter, and consumes so much time and energy in fussing over trivial things that he is incapable of handling larger ones. If we are certain that we have all the facts in a given case before us, and have given each its due weight so far as our judgment will enable ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... the most inconsequential approaches to a statement with a keen and questioning glance. "The girl went up to the Cat on the early stage, sir. She's ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... star-maker was the fact that he wove a great deal of himself into the character of the stars. In other words, the personal element counted a great deal. When somebody once remonstrated with him about giving up so much of his valuable time to what seemed to be inconsequential talks with his women stars, ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... strait into which thou hast fallen, for they would have cast thee into a calamity whence thou never couldest have won free. But I will not call thee to account for thine ignorance, as thou art so little of wit and inconsequential and addicted to hastiness!" Said I to him, "Doth not what thou hast brought upon me suffice thee, but thou must run after me and talk me such talk in the bazaar streets?" And I well nigh gave up the ghost for excess of rage against him. Then I took ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... mind the most inconsequential inferences were drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... blush at will. Were the wistful eyes, the earnest lips, only shamming? It cost him some bitterness to decide that they were. Her beauty fascinated, while it hardened him. Eternally, the beauty of women meant the undoing of men, whether they played the simple, inconsequential game of baseball, or the great, absorbing, mutable game ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... Yorick." He determines to journey where it is most sentimental and passes the various lands in review in making his decision. Having fastened upon Germany, he questions himself similarly with reference to the cities. Yorick's love of lists, of mock-serious discrimination, of inconsequential reasonings is here copied. The call upon epic, tragic, lyric poets, musicians, etc., which follows here is a further imitation of Yorick's list-making and ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Saint-Saens's music could withstand. It is easy to inveigh against the notion frivolous fribbles and trumpery trappings receive more attention than the fine music which ought to be recognized as the soul of the work, the vital spark which irradiates an inconsequential material body; but human nature has not yet freed itself sufficiently from gross clogs to attain so ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Events, are consequential or inconsequential irrespective of their size. The wars of Troy were fought for a woman, and Charles VIII, of France, bumped his head against a stone doorway and died because he did not stoop low enough. And to descend from history ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in looks, ordinary in intelligence, some subtle marks of superiority, that made them at a glance superior to the common run. This ecstasy of snobbishness deluded me as to the women only—for, as I looked at the men, I at once felt myself their superior. They were an inconsequential, patterned lot. I even was better dressed than any of them, except possibly Mowbray Langdon; and, if he showed to more advantage than I, it was because of his manner, which, as I have probably said before, is superior to that of any human being ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... her feel alive. Even when she disapproved of him, she was conscious of him. She put him resolutely out of her mind, to have him reappear in her dreams, not as a lover, but as some one dominant and insistent, commanding her to do absurd, inconsequential things. ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the incidents converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence whatever, "we came home to a late supper, well ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... you have always thought me immature, young in experience, negligible as to wisdom, of an intellectual capacity inconsequential. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... home; with his kind of people, to ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And he closed ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... his coat and set to work silently, withholding speech for a double reason. He could not trust his tongue, and he was not given to inconsequential chatter. If she did not recognize him—well, there was no good reason why she should remember, if she chose not to remember. He could lend a hand and go his way, just as he would have been moved to lend a hand to any one ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... miracle, the miraculousness—I don't know there is such a word, but there should be—of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me. And I find myself saying over and over: "WHAT have I ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Mercies—yes, surely, before you had gone very far, nina." Her tone was a sugared whine, and more than once she peered around at Murguia; while he, for his part, stood by as though overseeing a task. But Jacqueline only allowed herself a little inconsequential sniff, and went back to the really serious business that did worry her. She ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... I saw of it, barrin' a few inconsequential frills that a good eye could make out lacking ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... of the same kind, interesting to a rural community but considered inconsequential by those ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... ladies with inconsequential tales, the rodeo outfit therefore rose up and was gone before the light, raking the exposed lowland for its toll of half-fed steers; and even Rufus Hardy, the parlor-broke friend and lover, slipped ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... by the longest way around, to his office in the Temple Court, hoping to find work which would help him through the forenoon. It was an idle hope. From a State-wide shower of political correspondence the daily mail had dropped suddenly to an inconsequential drizzle, and there were no callers. Here, again, he saw, or thought he saw, the all-powerful hand of the machine. He had been used for a purpose, the purpose of hoodwinking and deceiving the voters. That purpose having been served, he was to be dropped—was ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the indistinct voices of water, commingling in a monotone—and the road ceases to be, as the cool silver of a mountain stream cuts through it, with seemingly inconsequential meanderings, but with the soft arrogance of a power too great to be denied. And the indistinct voices, left behind, fade to unimaginable sounds as the stream patters down its gravelly course, contented beyond ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the immensely significant fact of November, 1860. It made a great impression on the whole country. For the moment it made the fierce talk of the Southern extremists inconsequential. Buoyant Northerners, such as Seward, felt that the crisis was over; that the South had voted for a reconciliation; that only tact was needed to make everybody happy. When, a few weeks after the election, Seward said that all would be merry ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Bland protested and explained and defended himself. But Johnny had already drifted off into troubled meditation rendered somewhat vague and inconsequential by his rapid changes of financial condition, moods, environment—the brief ecstasy of his triumphant flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's whining voice failed to register anything but a dreary ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... any particular mineral has a considerable range, and a medium has been taken. The possible error is inconsequential for the purpose ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... her tendency to wander away from the direct line and ramble about among irrelevant and inconsequential trifles. Sometimes these rambles are altogether entertaining and enable her pupils to pass the time pleasantly, but they lack "terminal facilities." They lead from nowhere to nowhere in the most fascinating and fruitless meanderings. Such expeditions bring ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... has been regarded as something of a test of mental endurance, for which the recompense, if not the antidote, must be sought in periods of indulgence in the frivolous and the sensational. Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is the inconsequential, the crude, the obtuse, that are dull in literature, as in life; and stupidity in various languages might well be entitled to rank among the Seven Deadly Sins of Dante. Even in the greatest literature there is much that the child may easily learn ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... appearance, or, if a novice at his trade, is hesitating in his replies, the pathological liar has a cheerful, open, free, enthusiastic, charming appearance, because he believes in his stories and wishes their reality. The inconsequential way in which such persons go to work is to be explained by the fact that consciousness of the real situation is partly clouded in their minds. In any special act it is impossible to say whether the consciousness of the lie, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... his fingers softly over hers. She withdrew her hand quickly, but the look that she turned him found his face sober, his dark eyes warm with sympathy. And then with a swift inconsequential impulse born of ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... paternalism to "order everything as seemed just and proper," even when this brought his hand into the very homes of the people, into their daily work or worship or amusements. Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential to have an ordinance devoted to it. As general regulator of work and play, of manners and morals, of things present and things to come, the intendant was the busiest man in ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... them are good-looking and more intelligent than you would believe," Louise rejoined carelessly. She had put Lawford Tapp aside as inconsequential. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... reservation to violate one of the provisions of that Constitution—one of the conditions of the compact—without which the Union could never have been formed. The tone of political morality which could make this possible was well indicated by the toleration accorded in the Senate to the flippant, inconsequential excuse for it given by one of its most eminent exemplars—"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"—meaning thereby, not that it would be the part of a dog to violate his oath, but to keep it in the matter referred to. ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation of the multitudes, yet all these are but secondary ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... offended silence; but then, probably recollecting that he would hear the whole story at the Settlement, or simply because he could not keep still any longer, his face cleared, and he resumed his engaging, inconsequential babble. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter alternative, the girl acknowledged ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... a conspicuous place in the war legislation by reason of the embargo provision. It appeared an inconsequential clause, judging from the little public attention paid to it; but the President saw a weapon in it that might have more effect in bringing Germany to her knees than Great Britain's blockade of her coasts, stringent as the latter had proved. It developed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... woman or girl had the right to pass his door if she so desired, and that he was an idiot for thinking otherwise. The argument was only slightly adequate. But Alan was not interested in mysteries, especially when they had to do with woman—and such an absurdly inconsequential thing as a handkerchief. ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily—otherwise, they would not be business men and would not be possessed of twenty-five hundred ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... inconsequential rhodomontade of Mr Slick is one of those startling pieces of levity that a stranger often hears from a person of his class in his travels on this side of the water. The odd mixture of strong religious feeling and repulsive looseness ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... who was rambling on in her old inconsequential way, presently added, "but Rod is merely SMUG. I happened to mention some building in New York—I didn't know what to talk to the man about! He immediately told me that the Mason building down town was reinforced concrete throughout. I said that I had always missed the orchards in the ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... happier talents. I would rather have a Birch, or a Hawkins, appear heavy, cold, and prolix, than that anything material which concerns a Tillotson, or a Johnson, should be lost. It must also be confessed, that an anecdote, or a circumstance, which may appear inconsequential to a reader, may bear some remote or latent connexion: a biographer who has long contemplated the character he records, sees many connexions which escape an ordinary reader. Kippis, in closing the life ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... vainglorious, and these traits of his character have given rise to a number of rather inconsequential stories. He was a most excellent conductor of orchestra, and Doctor Burney mentions having heard him lead a band in such a bold and masterly manner as he had never before witnessed. Soon after ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... inwardly and outwardly, both of space and importance. These, however, must sooner or later end as they began; they perish in the lie they make; and it were well did not other falsehoods take their places, to prolong a life whose only tenure is inconsequential ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... he was, with red face and black hair which seemed to scramble in all directions at once, and with a mustache which appeared to scamper in even more directions than his hair. Fairchild was a large man; suddenly he felt himself puny and inconsequential as the mastodonic thing before him swooped forward, spread wide the big arms and then caught him tight in them, causing the breath to puff over his lips like the exhaust of ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper |
