"Inexplicably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... phenomena forced themselves on her unwilling perception; and she tried to push them back, and to spend every faculty in savouring the ecstasy of that one physical presence which was so close, so enveloping, and so inexplicably dear. But in vain, in vain! The band rioted through the last bars of the waltz, a strange, disconcerting silence and inertia supervened, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the window of the restaurant car, guzzling new potatoes and such Burgundy as could be had in a train. But he was noticeably less garrulous than usual, and his companion also had very little to say until the train was held up inexplicably outside Willesden, ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... object of her attack became inexplicably stupid; he strove for words. "Me no speak good," ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... rose from her place, for there was the witch-face, twilight on the grim features, yet with the aid of memory so definitely discerned that they could hardly have been more distinct by noonday,—a face of inexplicably sinister omen. "Oh, why did I see it to-day!" she exclaimed, the presage of ill fortune strong upon her, with that grisly mask leering at her from across the valley. But the day was well-nigh gone; only a scant space remained in which to work the evil intent ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... chaotic state of affairs on this beautiful summer morning when Mr. Ford had awakened to find his splendid horse, Beauty, the ornament of his stables and the pride of his heart, strangely and inexplicably missing. ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... himself, and drew her out to tell of her own life, and hopes, and ambitions. And there were even more thrilling moments, when the talk ceased, and they sat side by side, silent, yet absorbed, acutely conscious of each other's presence; delightfully, inexplicably confused. ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... order to the keepers of the door, which caused them to speed from the scene as fast as their feet would carry them towards the village where they had been commanded to stay until sunrise, leaving the girl, a prey probably to that inexplicably sensuous feeling which the desolation, and beauty, and pity of this place arouses in some, alone with the man who loved her as ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... gambols of the former were orderly dances of ceremony beside the apparently aimless and wilful contortions of figure, and metamorphoses of shape, in which the latter indulged. They retained, however, all the time, to the surprise of the king, an identity, each of his own type, inexplicably perceptible through every change. Indeed this preservation of the primary idea of each form was more wonderful than the bewildering and ridiculous alterations to which the form itself was every ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... of the Committee of Safety, and the Salicetti party no love was ever lost. It was a general feeling that the refugee Corsicans on the Mediterranean shore were too near their home. They were always charged with unscrupulous planning to fill their own pockets. Now, somehow or other, inexplicably perhaps, but nevertheless certainly, a costly expedition had been sent to Corsica under the impulse of these very men, and it had failed. The unlucky adventurers had scarcely set their feet on shore before Lacombe secured Buonaparte's appointment ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... bitter voice whose mocking echoes had haunted her ears during his absence, but a tone so low and deep and mournful, so inexplicably sweet, and she could not recognize it as his, and, unable to utter a word, she put her hand in his outstretched palm. His fingers closed over it with a pressure that was painful, and her eyes fell beneath the steady, searching gaze ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... either past, present, or to come, which, floating invisibly in the atmosphere, strongly predisposes to that disgust of existence, which, in half an hour after sailing, begins to come upon you; that disgust, that strange, mysterious, ineffable sensation which steals slowly and inexplicably upon you; which makes every heaving billow, every white-capped wave, the ship, the people, the sight, taste, sound, and smell of every thing a matter of inexpressible ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... twisting in my lap. I knew more of Harrie than Selwyn knew I knew, but because he was the one person I did know with whom I had no measure of patience, I rarely mentioned his name. Harrie is Selwyn's weakness, and to his faults and failings the latter is, outwardly, at least, most inexplicably blind. He is as handsome as he is unprincipled and irresponsible, and his power to fascinate is seemingly limited only by his desire to exercise it. "What is it?" I repeated. "What has ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... pig lying on his side bleeding proverbially—then a tall Boer lying headlong down the rocks. On the top—what confusion! Tommy, drunk with delight of battle. Prisoners, wounded, Gordons, Manchesters, Devons—all mixed inexplicably. A Boer gun still in position was a centre for gathering. In another place the ground was strewn with rugs, broken provisions, empty and ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... getting very nervous—inexplicably so for her, who generally kept her head, while she ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... is to visit the underground houses in stone, and the copper mines of Katanga which have been worked for ages (Malachite). I have still a seriously long task before me. My letters have been delayed inexplicably, so I don't know my affairs. If I have a salary I don't know it, though the Daily Telegraph abused me for receiving it when I had none. Of this alone I am sure—my friends will all wish me to make a complete work of it before I leave, and in their ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... but the warmth at her heart remained. She went back to Isabel, and slipped down into the shelter of her arm, feeling oddly shy and also inexplicably happy. Her disappointment had shrunk to a negligible quantity. She even wondered at herself for having cared so greatly about so ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Virginia, while the Pendleton blood in her rose in a fierce rebellion against all that was ugly and sordid in existence. Then her mother's tread was heard descending the short flight of steps, and the sensation vanished as quickly and as inexplicably as it ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... was laid down under the table and made a spot of extra comfort in the middle of the floor. Dark plain wainscotting, heavy furniture of simplest fashion, little windows well curtained; all nothing to speak of; all joined inexplicably to produce the impression of order, stability and repose, which seized upon Eleanor almost before she had time to observe details. But the mute things in a house have an odd way of telegraphing to a stranger what sort ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... black monkies swarming all over everybody and up and down everything, chattering like fiends. Still the Ritualistic Spire keeps turning up in impossible places, and still the intervening rusty rim of a hat inexplicably clouds one eye. There dawns a sensation as of writhing grim figures of snakes in one's boots, and the intervening rusty rim of the hat that was not in the original prospect takes a snake-like—But stay! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... a strong disgust for the impudence of the attempt; and all at once, incredibly, strangely, as though the thing, like a contest with a rival or a friend, had been of profound importance to his career, he felt inexplicably elated at the thought of defeating the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... superior tinting of the American forest, compared with that of Europe, has never been satisfactorily explained, though it seems to be somewhat inexplicably connected with the brightness of the American climate. It is a subject that has not engaged the attention of scientific travellers, who seem to have regarded it as worthy only of the describer of scenery. It may, however, deserve ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... saw a tear in Khalid's eye as he stood there gazing upon her. Poor Khalid! For though we are approaching the last station of the Via Dolorosa, though we are nearing the enchanted domes of the wonder-working, wealth-worshipping City, he is inexplicably sad. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Inexplicably tangled with her feelings for Theo, too, was that anything binding her to him bound her to his father. They were more than father and son, these two, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the policeman touched his arm. At first their nervous, proud, restive airs reminded me constantly of that strange person; and not only the colts, but some times it was some drifting shadow of cloud, some color or some sound, that inexplicably brought him up to mind; and I would plague myself with wondering what was going on in the city, and what was to become of him. But as the days passed and no newspapers came from the city—at least I saw none—and no letters ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... Gertrude. "So should I," she added, throwing in the last three words most inexplicably, as she kept step with the engineer. But she had ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... vanish under electric massage, and that, if he doubted the bona-fides of hairdressers, any doctor would testify to the value of electric massage. But now Edward Henry Machin, strangely discouraged, inexplicably robbed of the zest of existence, decided that it was not worth while to shave off his beard. Nothing was worth while. If he was forty-three and a half, he was forty-three and a half! To become bald was the common lot. Moreover, beardless, he ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... the Hospital," said he. That is, the accident itself had been too sudden and overwhelming to admit of any estimate of the pain it caused; the suffering came with the return of consciousness. Then he added, rather inexplicably:—"It didn't hurted Dolly." ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Hetty, lightly; but the lightness of tone had a certain something of constraint in it. This incident was one of those inexplicably perverse acts of Fate which make one almost believe sometimes in the depravity of spirits, if not in that of men. When Dr. Eben had left home that morning, Hetty had ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... restrain her. Perhaps he realised that tears such as those must have their way. But the touch of his hand was in some fashion soothing. It stilled the tempest within her, comforting her inexplicably. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... he remembered that his accommodating guide had chuckled inexplicably during most ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Homer is to his fighting men; but the war in heaven is an incident in Milton's figurative expression of something that has become altogether himself—the mystery of individual existence in universal existence, and the accompanying mystery of sin, of individual will inexplicably allowed to tamper with the divinely universal will. Milton, of course, in closeness to his subject and in everything else, stands as supreme above the other poets of literary epic as Homer does above the poets of authentic epic. But what is true of ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... There is something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. Its material is inherently variable and untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because unstable. The man who trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... He walked out of a shadow towards the middle of the platform, the most insignificant little pigmy, away there in the distance, a little black figure with a pink dab for a face,—in profile one saw his quite distinctive aquiline nose—a little figure that trailed after it most inexplicably—a cheer. A cheer it was that began away there and grew and spread. A little spluttering of voices about the platform at first that suddenly leapt up into a flame of sound and swept athwart the whole mass of humanity ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... choking down his emotion, and hurriedly ordering the audience chamber to be cleared! How many curious glances would be cast over their shoulders, by the slowly withdrawing crowd, at the strange group—the viceroy, usually so calm, thus inexplicably excited, and the huddled, rude shepherds, bewildered and afraid of what was coming next, in this unaccountable country! How eavesdroppers would linger as near as they durst, and how looks would be exchanged as the sounds of passionate weeping rewarded their open ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... small Whitechapel needle,—it cannot be considered that aptitude of Nature alone has been consulted here either!—The Great Man also, to what shall he be bound apprentice? Given your Hero, is he to become Conqueror, King, Philosopher, Poet? It is an inexplicably complex controversial-calculation between the world and him! He will read the world and its laws; the world with its laws will be there to be read. What the world, on this matter, shall permit and bid is, as we said, the most important fact ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... finger-nail. There was a slight haze everywhere. The lake was a terrible dead-silver colour, the gleam of its surface shot with flecks of blue and a vapoury enamel-green. It was like a gigantic silver shield. Its glint was inexplicably sinister and dead, like the glint on glasses worn by a blind man. In front the steely mist hid the horizon, so that the occasional rock or little island and the one ship in sight seemed hung in air. They were reflected to ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... remote from roundelay, or sparkling cadenza, that drew him to this Calvin maid. A solemn earnestness fell upon his spirits; the starlight bathed his brow, and he found the mystery of the night and nature inexplicably beautiful. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Chang's bargain with Russia. In any case, the Russian warships entered Port Arthur, at first as if for a temporary stay; when two British warships repaired thither the Czar's Government requested them to leave—a request with which the Salisbury Cabinet complied in an inexplicably craven manner (January 1898). Rather more pressure was needed on the somnolent mandarins of Pekin; but, under the threat of war with Russia if the lease of the Liao-tung Peninsula were not granted by ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... so captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name. To Thompson—if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and transmuting them into words—the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... animation: "Bertha is my grandniece,—the granddaughter of my only sister; the ties of blood, if nothing more, would bind me more closely to her than to Madeleine. Possibly there may have been times when I have not been well pleased to see one so dear, invariably, though most inexplicably, eclipsed. Bertha may shine forth in her most resplendent jewels,—her most costly and exquisite Parisian toilet; Madeleine has only to enter, in a simple muslin dress, a flower, or a knot of ribbons in her hair, and she draws ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... property. Mr. Frump tried experiments in blackberry raising, which proved a success, and was, at last accounts, concentrating his talents on the development of a new strawberry seedling. Whenever he went to town, he made a point of carrying back Matthew Maltboy, for whom his regard was inexplicably strong; and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to see his wife, gracefully mounted on the spirited filly, and Matthew, heavily astride of the sober gray, starting off for a morning's ride, while he stayed at home to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... mysteriously grasped and held. New senses in you seem to be released. Something is alert which is never alert—or, at all events, never alert in the same way—in other moments of life. One seems to become inexplicably different. Chichester was aware of all this. At the first sitting nothing happened, and I feared Chichester would wish to give the matter up. But, no! When we rose from our chairs late in the night he acknowledged that he had ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... most inexplicably, Margaret's grandfather showed a total change of opinion in his views as to her marriage. Instead of favoring Harrelstein's pretensions, as he had hitherto done, he now threw the feeble weight of his encouragement into Maximilian's scale; ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... cannon, after a short experiment to the left of the great breach, had shifted their fire to the right of it, and had succeeded in knocking a practicable hole in it before dusk. But either this change of plan had not been reported to the trenches, or the officer directing the assault inexplicably failed to adapt his dispositions to it. The troops for the great breach were filed out ahead of the 38th, which ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... this mission pleased him. Love makes a gain of everything. Nothing tempts a young man more than to play the part of a good genius to a woman. There is something inexplicably romantic in such an enterprise which appeals to a highly-strung soul. Is it not the utmost stretch of devotion under the loftiest and most engaging aspect? Is there not something grand in the thought that ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... ever met a man without wondering what shining sorrows he hides from the world, what contrast between vision and accomplishment torments him? Behind every smiling mask is there not some cryptic grimace of pain? Henry Adams puts it tersely. He says the human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... ball, and knowing that she was pretty. He dreaded the passionate glances which fell upon her, that she not only did not understand but rejoiced in. "Yes," thought he, "that superstition of woman's purity! Quite the contrary, they do not know shame—they lack this sense." He remembered how, quite inexplicably to him, she had refused two very good suitors. She had become more and more fascinated by her own success in the round of gaieties ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... But I may say this much at least: that it seemed, my inspired action had co-operated with the instinctive beliefs of these mysterious tribes—cooperated with their primitive and ancient sense of Beauty. It had, inexplicably to myself, fulfilled their sense of right, which my subordinates would have outraged. I had acted with, instead of ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... carriage of the royal family. The only thing is that I may well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade. I will presently say what I can for that anomaly—and in the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... and coming suddenly upon the river from the scrub behind, I have been dazzled and enchanted with the fairy sight that has burst upon me. The waters have been alive with brilliant fires, moving to and fro in every direction, like meteors from a marsh, and like those too, rapidly and inexplicably disappearing when the footsteps of strangers ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... sadness and guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superstition. Seeking what? Someone he had wronged? The sinister spark inflamed his fancy. His brain whirled. Inexplicably the tale of the fairy mill and the rascal who stole the widow's bag of meal linked itself with the mishap of the night before. Then too Adam had fallen forward in his ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... books which had a way of going into five or ten editions, while the fruits of his own episcopal leisure—"The Wail of Jonah" (twenty cantos in blank verse), and "Through a Glass Brightly; or, How to Raise Funds fora Memorial Window"—inexplicably languished on the back shelves of a publisher noted for his dexterity in pushing "devotional goods." Even this indiscretion the Bishop might, however, have condoned, had his niece thought fit to turn to him for support ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a cul de sac, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. 'I shall do it yet,' I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led to ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... formed. Thus it is impossible to say anything about the ajnana (for no knowledge of it is possible) save so far as manifested in consciousness and depending on this the D@r@s@tis@r@s@tivadins asserted that our experience was inexplicably produced under the influence of avidya and that beyond that no objective common ground could be admitted. But though this has the general assent of Vedanta and is irrefutable in itself, still for the sake of explaining our common sense view ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... derivative desires, which store up in its service whatever honey the surrounding world affords. But if the queen-impulse dies, the death-dealing influence, though retarded a little by habit, spreads slowly through all the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Rose, who had spilled a glass of wine, trying to lift it, in a hand that shook strangely. Her eyes were downcast, her cheeks scarlet, her whole manner palpably and inexplicably embarrassed. ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... music came a banner on which was pictured the same saint, but with seven wings, carried by the Tertiary Brethren dressed in guingon habits and praying in high, plaintive voices. Rather inexplicably, next came St. Mary Magdalene, a beautiful image with abundant hair, wearing a panuelo of embroidered pina held by fingers covered with rings, and a silk gown decorated with gilt spangles. Lights and incense surrounded ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to write my story and tell over again things in their order, I find for the first time how inconsecutive and irrational a thing the memory can be. One recalls acts and cannot recall motives; one recalls quite vividly moments that stand out inexplicably—things adrift, joining on to nothing, leading nowhere. I think I must have seen Beatrice and her half-brother quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover, but I really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands out ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... an end, Mamie Pike came to her for a moment with a cheery welcome, and was immediately surrounded by a circle of young men and women, flushed with dancing, shouting as was their wont, laughing [v]inexplicably over words and phrases and unintelligible [v]monosyllables, as if they all belonged to a secret society and these cries were symbols of things exquisitely humorous, which only they understood. Ariel laughed with ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... Sellingworth was silent. She declined to discuss the disappearance of the jewels. There followed the advent at No. 4 Berkeley Square of Alick Craven, a man of thirty, vigorous, attractive and decidedly a somebody. But inexplicably—at any rate without explanation—Lady Sellingworth retired ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... men, with the Manby's mortar lumbering behind us in a cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from headland to headland.—The maddening excitement of expectation as she ran wildly towards the cliffs at our feet, and then sheered off again inexplicably;—her foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone short off by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her main and mizen. But with all straining of eyes and glasses, we could discern no sign of man on board. Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admiration of the Preventive men, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... I felt myself suddenly transported when I discovered Cosima sitting in a corner of the hall, in deep mourning and very pale, but smiling cheerfully at me. She had returned shortly before from Paris—where her grandmother now lay hopelessly bedridden—filled with grief at the inexplicably sudden death of her sister, and she now seemed, even to my eyes, to be leaving another world to approach me. Our emotions were so genuinely deep and sincere that only an unconditional surrender to the enjoyment ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... sight of one of these newspaper articles, Madeleine fairly cried with mortification and anger. She wanted to leave Washington the next day, and she hated the very thought of Ratcliffe. There was something in the newspaper style so inscrutably vulgar, something so inexplicably revolting to the sense of feminine decency, that she shrank under it as though it were a poisonous spider. But after the first acute shame had passed, her temper was roused, and she vowed that she would pursue her own path just as she had begun, without regard to all the malignity and ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... reaching America he had found his wife's small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to securewhat remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio. But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage. There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the head of the legislature. But it was in His personality, in the atmosphere that flowed from Him, that the marvel lay. It was as the scent of the sea to the physical nature—it exhilarated, cleansed, kindled, intoxicated. It was as inexplicably attractive as a cherry orchard in spring, as affecting as the cry of stringed instruments, as compelling as a storm. So writers had said. They compared it to a stream of clear water, to the flash of a gem, to the love of woman. They lost all decency sometimes; they ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... her, which touched the over-impetuous dame to a fresh pang of penitence. She did not know that the stupid youngster had quite failed to associate her in any way with his suffering. It was only the pot—the big, black thing which had so inexplicably come bounding at him—that he blamed. From Mrs. Jabe's hands he ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever had REALLY cared for him, and a clear certainty she would never care again. And with this sort of thing upon his mind he came out upon Aldington Knoll grieving, and presently, after a long interval, perhaps, quite inexplicably, fell asleep. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... she seemed in a rare good humor, and inexplicably gay. A curious Mona Lisa smile kept bending her lips and twinkling in her eyes. The lowering clouds outside, the creakings of the beams and rafters under the east wind, nor even the drab gloom of her surroundings seemed to dampen ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... detective had been sure of it. Would Miss Dalrymple think more leniently of him than mere unprejudiced people, those who knew less of him than she? His very presence on the yacht, although somewhat inexplicably complicated in recent occurrences, was per se a primal damning circumstance. But she spared him the necessity of answering. She divined now from his blackened features what his position on the yacht must be. He was ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... unit, so inexplicably reactivated, is approaching the fuel world. It is ignoring the battle. It is heading through our fleet toward the Oman half ... handle ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... warning the jam "pulled." Usually certain premonitory cracks, certain sinkings down, groanings forward, grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluctant shiftings of the logs give opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after inexplicably hanging fire for a week, as inexplicably started like a sprinter almost into its full gait. The first few tiers toppled smash into the current, raising a waterspout like that made by a dynamite explosion; the mass behind plunged forward ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... more inexplicably framed than that of one who can dissect and probe past woes, and repeat to the public ear the groans drawn from them in the ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... the intricate problem is unravelled by this means! You, a man of ardent and imaginative temperament, made more or less unhappy by the doctrines of materialism, come to me, Heliobas, a Chaldean student of the Higher Philosophies, an individual whose supposed mysterious power and inexplicably studious way of life entitle him to be considered by the world at large an IMPOSTER!—Now don't look so indignant!"—and he laughed,—"I am merely discussing the question from the point of view that would be sure to be adopted by 'wise' ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... times repeated sounded upon the door. Serviss, baffled and silenced by Clarke's impenetrable gravity, and by something inexplicably submissive, yet watchful, in the face of the girl, felt himself confronted by an intangible, sinister, and inescapable influence. The young clergyman seemed to darken and oppress both women. It was as if they were ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the opening she gave him, and longing only for the moment when he might say good-bye and leave her adorable, maddening presence. "It jars, as you say—not because it isn't all delightful and inspiring in itself, but because"—suddenly he felt an inexplicably savage desire to hurt her, as a man in pain may seek to wound his tenderest nurse—"because not many miles away from here there's a poor mother weeping, like Rachel, for her child, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... away from us, avoiding us helplessly. Then we set warm food by him. I put it to his beak, tried to make him eat. But he ignored it. He seemed to be ignorant of what we were doing, recoiled inside himself inexplicably. So we put him in a basket with cloths, and left him crouching oblivious. His food we put near him. The blinds were drawn, the house was warm, it was night. Sometimes he stirred, but mostly he huddled still, leaning his queer crested head on one side. He ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... different times. 'Thought itself may be matter modified,' says one. 'Rather,' says another of the same perplexed species, 'matter is thought modified; for what you call matter is but a phenomenon.' But are independent and totally distinct substances, mysteriously, inexplicably conjoined,' says a third. 'How they are conjoined we know no more than the dead. Not so much, perhaps.' 'Do I ever cease to think,' says the mind to itself, 'even in sleep? Is not my essence thought?' 'You ought to know your own essence best,' ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased. ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... heard, sharp and sudden, with something inexplicably fearful about it, the patter of running feet. They had heard that sound often enough that night and the night before; but these feet stopped at their own door, and came up the steps, and the runner beat and ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... within are aware that Irish thought upon Irish problems has been undergoing a silent, and therefore too lightly regarded revolution. The surface of Irish life, often so inexplicably ruffled, and sometimes so inexplicably calm, has just now become smooth to a degree which has led to hasty conclusions as to the real cause and the inward significance of the change. To chime in with the thoughtless optimism of the hour will do no good; but a real understanding ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... by this sudden announcement. For the first time in her life she felt a fear that she could not explain. The truth was that she loved, and was not yet fully aware of it. In spite of her fresh grief, she had been inexplicably happy since her last meeting with Matoska, for she had seen in him that which is so beautiful, so compelling in man to the eyes of the woman who loves. He, too, now cherished a real hope, and felt as if he could rush into ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... sudden breath of the sweetness and freshness of her, of hair and young firm skin, of the rustling satin gown, and the little handkerchief that she dropped, and that he picked up for her. He smiled as he gave it, and flushed inexplicably, and his first few words to the bewildered Gardiner were a little shaken and breathless. But Richard was quite himself again an hour or two later, when he sent for Miss Field, and she came into ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... strange guardianship. But now, perhaps because of Gale's poignancy of thought, the contending tides of love and regret, the deep, burning premonition of deadly strife, he was moved to keener scrutiny of the Yaqui. That, of course, was futile. The Indian was impenetrable, silent, strange. But suddenly, inexplicably, Gale felt Yaqui's human quality. It was aloof, as was everything about this Indian; but it was there. This savage walked silently beside him, without glance or touch or word. His thought was as inscrutable as if mind had never awakened in his race. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... these dark months, drawn to the society of two brave people—she was brave in her silences, he in the way in which he stuck doggedly to his work—who each suffered so horribly, so imaginatively, so inexplicably, and, alas, it would seem, so unnecessarily! Of course Carlyle indulged his moods, while Mrs. Carlyle fought against hers; moreover, he had the instinct for translating thoughts, instantaneously and volubly, into vehement picturesque speech. How he could bite in a picture, an ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... do; I assure you they do! And a pretty amount of adoring and waiting upon your husband will require. I wouldn't for the whole universe have my Duke such an awfully exacting, particular, provoking, disagreeably good, or inexplicably naughty animal as ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great poet—a greater than all since Shakespeare—has expressed the latent mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a little ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... staring after him, realizing that his life had hung upon the bending of Walter's finger, and that Walter, with at least two cold-blooded murders to his account, or little more to hope for in this world or the next, had now inexplicably spared him for whose destruction, of life and honour alike, he had a little before been laying such elaborate, ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... like the hum of some giant airplane growing gradually nearer and nearer. A sort of strangled sob came from the back of Cleek's chair, and he turned his head to smile into 'Toinette's wet eyes. In their depths gratitude and sorrow were inexplicably mingled. His hand went out to her; she ran toward him from her place, and in spite of judge and jury, in spite of the order of the law, knelt down there at his side and pressed her warm ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... suspicion against him, and that even if Horrocleave's pate did conceal a dark thought, it would be conjured at once away by the superficial reasonableness of the falsified accounts. But now his mind was terribly and inexplicably changed, and it seemed to him impossible to gull the acute and mighty Horrocleave. Failure, exposure, disgrace, ruin, seemed inevitable—and also intolerable. It was astonishing that he should have deceived himself into an absurd security. The bank-notes, by some magic virtue which ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... But the consequence which he proceeds to indicate and to deplore is calculated to strike his readers with a sense of mild if hilarious astonishment. It is that men of sound judgment and pure taste, quick feelings and clear perceptions, most unfortunately and most inexplicably begin to make their voices "heard in the land." Porson, as all the world knows, observed of the Germans of his day that "in Greek" they were "sadly to seek." It is no discredit to Mr. Whistler if this is his case also; but then he would do well to eschew the use of a Greek term lying ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... I knew, almost as if I had known this story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened, surrounding you; something that might have been sorrowful in someone else (as I can now understand it was), but was not so ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... He remembered how inexplicably queer and shaken he had felt when he awoke. Now he came to think of it, he had been strangely jarred. A mere sound could scarcely ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... planted as if by art with flourishing young silver pines and once in a while a hemlock, some standing in all their luxuriance alone, and some in groups. With now and then a smooth grey rock, or large boulder-stone which had somehow inexplicably stopped on the brow of the hill instead of rolling down into what at some former time no doubt was a bed of water,—all this open strip of the table-land might have stood with very little coaxing for a piece of a gentleman's pleasure-ground. On the opposite side ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... nebulous prospect. Neigh was one of the few men whose presence seemed to attenuate her dignity in some mysterious way to its very least proportions; and that act of espial, which had so quickly and inexplicably come to his knowledge, helped his influence still more. She knew little of the nature of the town bachelor; there were opaque depths in him which her thoughts had never definitely plumbed. Notwithstanding her exaltation to the atmosphere of the Petherwin family, Ethelberta was ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... naturalization, and as to the ill-doing of exotic forms. But certain considerations should be borne in mind in this connexion. In the first place, naturalization experiments fail at least as often as they succeed, and often quite inexplicably. Thus, the linnet and partridge have failed to establish themselves in New Zealand. This may ultimately throw some light on the disappearance of native forms; for these have at times declined without any assignable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... disaster. The object was a small air-craft, of a sort entirely strange to the engineer; yet he knew that it was disabled. One of its queer wings was broken and fluttering, as the little machine dropped, tumbling and twisting erratically, in an inexplicably slow fashion toward the unseen ground. Smith glimpsed a single figure, presumably strapped in ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... number. The divisions of Bixio and Prince Humbert were kept doing nothing all day at a stone's throw from the scene of action. Of the whole 2nd corps d'armee only a trifling detachment ever reached the ground. Inexplicably little use was made of the ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... this that it is the style of the time, modified inexplicably at almost every point by the writer's character. The Bible and the older-fashioned narrative English of Defoe and Smollett have obviously lent it some phrases, and also a nakedness and directness that is half disdainful ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... gone, he found all trace of his usual scruples had inexplicably disappeared. It was natural, and (he said to himself) it was right! What use was this continual sacrifice of the precious hours and days of their youth—for an Idea? Besides, she looked so lovely. A man must be a stone to refuse such a delightful ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... have given Peter, seeing the interest he took in her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of easement he had, inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... white cotton bag is suspended; and all the bags are filled with pebbles; and pebbles have been piled high also about the feet of the statues, and upon their knees, and upon their shoulders; and even upon their aureoles of stone, little pebbles are balanced. Archaic, mysterious, but inexplicably touching, all these ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... but, the first dread of it passed, Mostyn recalled how during the day a hole inexplicably had been cut in that blind; he recalled that it had not been mended, but that the damaged blind had ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... more, after so many years? She wondered how she could have longed to go flying across the desert in Nevill Caird's big motor-car; nevertheless, she never ceased to wish for Stephen Knight. Her thoughts of him and of the desert were inextricably and inexplicably mingled, more than ever since the night when she had danced in the Agha's tent, and Stephen's face had come before her eyes, as if in answer to her call. Constantly she called him now. When there was some fleeting, beautiful effect of light or shadow, she said, "How I wish he ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... found them wholly ingenuous. It seemed that Calendar had not taken her into his confidence, after all. She was, therefore, in no way implicated in her father's affairs. Inexplicably the young man's heart felt lighter. "A mistake; the fellow took me for some one he knew," he ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy, far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... you and was afraid that you would force yourself, from gratitude, to respond to my love, would try to rouse in your heart a feeling which was perhaps absent, and I did not wish that ... because it would be tyranny ... it would be indelicate (in short, I launch off at that point into European, inexplicably lofty subtleties a la George Sand), but now, now you are mine, you are my creation, you are pure, you are good, you are ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... this day from West-South-West, coming on quite unexpectedly, for neither the state nor appearance of the atmosphere gave us the least indication of its approach. Exposed on a lee-shore, it may be imagined that we were by no means displeased to see it as rapidly and inexplicably depart, as it had suddenly ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... there the creeds and rites are not incongruous with their environment of knowledge and culture. There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headed spear or marriage by capture. We argue, therefore, that religions and mythical faiths and rituals which, among Greeks and Indians, are inexplicably incongruous have lived on from an age in which they were natural and inevitable, an ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... letter as well as his own trivial fee. The author counts over money, miscounts it, then in counting forgets all about it, puts the money away and continues the reading of Yorick. The postman interrupts him; the author grows impatient and says, "You want four groschen?" and is inexplicably vexed at the honesty of the man who says it is only three pfennigs for himself and the four groschen for the post. Here is a direct following of the Lorenzo episode; caprice rules his behavior toward an inferior, who is modest ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... the petals of the rose open to the dew, so the human heart sighs for sympathy. Nature is joined together by links identical to all; and the same law that governs the sap, and external freshness of that little herb, rules inexplicably our own affections, and visible demeanour. Do you ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... felt his boat bobbing about inexplicably. He went out to look about him, and in the morning twilight he discovered that the whole aspect of the Mississippi had changed. With the invisible sunrise had come an awe-inspiring spectacle which excited in his mind ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... curious change had come over Nap, a change so unexpected, so foreign to the man's grim nature, that even he, who knew him as did none other, was momentarily taken by surprise. For suddenly, inexplicably, Nap's hardness had gone from him. It was like the crumbling of a rock that had withstood the clash of many tempests and yielded at last to the ripple of a ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... I felt inexplicably angry, then preternaturally cool and competent. For the first time since the Modane episode I was my clear-sighted self. I had been trying futilely to blindfold my eyes, to explain the inexplicable, to be unaware of the obvious. Now with a sort of grim relief I looked the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... from Hunston, he had felt himself enfolded by a mysterious despondency, which he had seemed unable either to account for or to shake off. But now, as the final climax of his business drew near to summon him, he felt his spirits inexplicably rising again. A certain excitement possessed him; he was glad that at ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... might let his eyes remain upon her face. That was a dangerous place for eyes to rest, yet Alonzo Rawson was anxious for the risk. The car flew along the even asphalt on its way to the country like a wild goose on a long slant of wind, and, with his foolish fury melted inexplicably into honey, Alonzo looked at her—and looked at her—till he would have given an arm for another quick corner and a street-car to send his cheek against that veiled, cold cheek of hers again. It was not until they reached the alternate vacant lots and bleak Queen Anne cottages of ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... and, in his understanding, inexplicably, he found himself beset by recurrent memory of the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... saw him [59] ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated. Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure, with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent armour worn by the emperor ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... was a fat woman who was said to pride herself upon being very wise and if necessary, sly. In addition she laughed continually in an inexplicably personal way, which apparently made everybody who heard her feel offended. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... an unconscious tableau as they stood there—he with his hard, set face, she with her heightened color, her inexplicably bright eyes. They stood completely silent for a space—a space that for Loder held no suggestion of time; then, finding the ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... men, I once met Sydney Smith at Dean Milman's house. There was something inexplicably amusing in every word which he uttered. Perhaps this was partly due to the expectation of being amused. He was talking about Lady Cork, who was then extremely old. This was the lady who, as he said, was once so much affected ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... lay wan and moribund before her; only that morning that she had felt her unhappiness greater than she could bear, her difficulties insuperable, her loneliness a misery? For if that were so why did she now feel so different? Why did she now feel inexplicably relieved, inconceivably at ease, almost happy? Why, with the man whom she had thrust into peril lying in extremis before her, and claiming all her gratitude, did she find her mind straying to another? Finally, why, with her troubles the same, with ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... her vindication. Her lucid eyes shone with a sincere benevolence, and her lips seemed to breathe balm while she spoke. His soul startled within itself as if by some strange recognition that agitated him, and drew him inexplicably towards its object. It was not the beauty he beheld, nor the words she uttered, but he did not withdraw his fixed gaze until it encountered an accidental turn of her eyes, which instantly retreated with a deep blush mantling ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... create suspicion in me, but I have seen the man in moments of reverie and abstraction, I have listened to strange and broken words, I have noted a sudden, keen, and angry susceptibility to any unmeant excitation of a less peaceful or less innocent remembrance. And there seems to me inexplicably to hang over his heart some gloomy recollection, which I cannot divest myself from imagining to ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would be more bootless than thrusting traditions upon people who would not know what to do with them. But something about Ann encouraged one to believe she could fit into a background prepared for her. And if she could—would—! The prospect lured—excited. It was as inexplicably intoxicating as a grimace at the preacher—a wink at the professor. It seemed to be saucily tweaking the ear of ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... to him, the one delicious and adorable pain relieving the gray ennui of the rest of it, to remain with him always (even, as it seemed now, in the very article of death) as a reminder of the intolerable sweetness which life, under other conditions, might have contained. And inexplicably, in the midst of his desolation, his heart sang a sort of fierce paean: as a woman, delivered of a man-child, goes triumphing to meet the sordidness of death, so was there in Rainham's rapid acceptance of his fruitless and ineffectual love a distinct sense ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... had always heard that Rodney was a great rider. In truth, he had heard very little about him, one way or another, accepting him as a figure often to be found in the background at his aunt's house, and inevitably, though inexplicably, engaged to his cousin. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... would account for his inexplicably close friendship with her, his devotion to her welfare, and—if she, like himself, were exiled—the secrecy ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... not pretend that his mind felt flattered by this scientific outlook. Every fabulist has told how the human mind has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it; how — appearing suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void; passing half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep; victim even when awake, to its own ill-adjustment, to disease, to age, to external suggestion, to nature's compulsion; doubting its sensations, and, in the last resort, trusting only to instruments ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... didn't matter so much when, as a mere child, she disappeared for thirty days; but when, mother of an incomparable heir of two, she was rapt away in the middle of a picnic for twenty-five years, and returned to find a husband, mother and father inexplicably old and changed, and dreadfully silent about her babe—well, you see for yourself how hopeless everything was. As if there were not enough real tragedy in the world and it were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... Deity was rather indefinite than repulsive. The positive degradation was of later growth. The God of nature reflects the changeful character of the seasons, varying from dark to bright. Alternately angry and serene, and lavishing abundance which she again withdraws, nature seems inexplicably capricious, and though capable of responding to the highest requirements of the moral sentiment through a general comprehension of her mysteries, more liable, by a partial or hasty view to become darkened into a Siva, a Saturn, or a Mexitli, a patron of fierce orgies or blood-stained ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a little wood of cork-trees in the distance, a broken Roman ruin, blue Apennines half hidden in clouds. A few shepherds were going home, looking immense on the flatness, and goats and horses. Song of larks, and suddenly an unexpected booming of surf. Following the sound inexplicably loud, across the deeper black sandy soil, we got to the sea. Most strange against it, a fringe of marshy grass, of bulrushes! Far off the tower of Astura, and the faint Cape of Circe among mists. It ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Inexplicably, sheer mind-force prevailed, without the need for formulating the threat the poor grief-maddened woman might have uttered—she moved unresisted to a swing door which opened on to a kind of verandah. Here was ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... mounted her spectacles, glad of the invitation, and began to read. Her reading was very, slow, and had other faults too, being in that sing-song style to which some people inexplicably like to read Holy Writ; but it was reverent and distinct, and I have heard worse even ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Frankl's beard. The news that "a man named Hogarth" had written to his daughter would hardly have suggested Richard—safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he had seen Richard Hogarth inexplicably ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... a race war; on the contrary, the races are quite inexplicably mixed. Latin joins with Saxon; the Frank is the ally of the Slav; while in the opposing ranks Teuton and Turk fight side ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger? [Would that this was so:—error, superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to the expression ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... an hour earlier than usual. A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling twilight,—that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a cloud,—when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no faintest trace of his identity,—the mystery shrouding the deed presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is something paralyzing in the thought of an ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... admit that some philosophers, when they have written on ethical subjects, have said certain things to which the critical moralist cannot readily assent. He who maintains that certain human intuitions— which it may even appear impossible to reconcile with each other—are inexplicably and infallibly authoritative, seems to leave us without so much as the hope of ever attaining to ultimate rationality. [Footnote: ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... to start in pursuit. This was a mystery worth solving. Moreover, the moment he made sure that these were not man-owned creatures they had become inexplicably dear to him and as they disappeared his heart grew heavy. His running gait carried him quickly in view. They had slackened in their flight a little but as he hove in sight again they took the alarm once more, the foals first rushing to the front and then the whole herd with flying ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... hall that glimmered beyond like the mouth of a cave, when, without the smallest warning, he became suddenly conscious that something attractive and utterly delicious had invaded the stream of his being. It came from nowhere—inexplicably, and at first it took the form of a naked sensation of delight, keen as a thrill of boyhood days. There passed into him very swiftly something that satisfied. "I mean, whatever it was," he says, "I couldn't have asked ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... somehow resemble an achievement, wonderful enough in its way, in unglazed earthenware. The only gleam perhaps that one could find on her was that of her teeth, which one used to get between her dull lips unexpectedly, startlingly, and a little inexplicably, because it was never associated with a smile. She smiled with compressed mouth. It was indeed difficult to conceive of those two birds coming from the same nest. And yet . . . Contrary to what generally happens, it was when one saw those two women together that one ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... reasonable to believe that lust for vengeance was the ruling passion in the Dupont nature, that the creature had hung about the chateau in hope of getting another chance at Duchemin, and had decided to give it up only on discovering —inexplicably, at this hour—that the latter had stolen away under cover of night. But Lanyard didn't believe that. Neither did he believe that Dupont had had any hand in the robbery of night before last, and was now in tardy ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... that had often seemed as if they would make but a dust-heap of his bosom, there he must remain, by the clean, cold hearth, swept and garnished, of the woman he loved—loved strangely, mysteriously, inexplicably even to himself! ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... but a look from Allis's eyes inexplicably enough caused him to hedge very considerably ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... the handle of the door was in his grasp ready to be turned for her. Anne, still inexplicably ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... to a young man to kill a calf, etc. And after a while the supper was served, with all the delicacies the rich and great could afford, and everything appeared that he had ordered—except Sarah's cakes. They were simply and inexplicably non est. ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a frigidarium where five hundred people could swim together; a tepidarium and a calidarium* on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... conduct—I should rather say their manner—was inexplicably mysterious, and it induced me to ferret out its cause. That they were screening some one, was evident, and I could only come to the conclusion that it was you. But, Master Hamish, there were circumstances on your own part which tended to strengthen the belief," added Mr. Huntley, his tone becoming ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the dimly lit aisle, and O'Hagan understood that he had to follow. In silence they passed through a small arch in the chancel and mounted a narrow oak staircase with many corners and tortuous turns and arrived at a small landing with a studded door set in it. Quite inexplicably O'Hagan's heart sank at the sight of it. However, the priest unlocked and opened it, and held it open for him to enter, and without coming in himself, closed it. It was a small oak room with a stone floor, and a curious smell at once ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... and inexplicably elated. He had not realized the extreme potency of mescal. The proprietor of the hotel was mildly surprised when Bartley, remarking that he had been called away unexpectedly, paid the hotel bill. Bartley hastened back to the stable. Across the way ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... so sure of that," said Clarissa. Her sidelong glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although she was inexplicably amused. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... market-place warned the compulsory sightseers that it was time to repair thither and they would not be crushed in the mob. Many set out in a jocular humour, but quickly this gaiety changed; there was something inexplicably sinister in the atmosphere, a menace to freedom, an appalling sense of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... his companion in the journey all the way through India and Persia, to Bagdat. We meant to have inserted these peregrinations as a substitute for those of Coverte, but found the names of places so inexplicably corrupted, as to render the whole ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... inexplicably. Truly the magic was swift and potent. A few more steps, and she was aware of a widening of the hedge. They were emerging into the ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... headlong precipitancy into the story of his love for Cornelia, and of the inexplicably cruel way in which it had been brought to a close. "And yesterday," he continued with a sob in his voice—"yesterday I heard that her father had taken her to Philadelphia. I shall see her no more. ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... remembers with "Could that have been I? But could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else—some one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps," St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale |
