"Dead letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... need of absorbing other ideas than his own, attracted him to circles whose ideas were diametrically opposed to his own. He had friends among men to whom his art, his idealistic faith, his moral conceptions, were a dead letter: they had absolutely different ways of envisaging life, love, marriage, the family, every social relationship:—but they were good fellows, though they seemed to belong to another stage of moral evolution: the anguish and the scruples ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... weather, and somehow that shifting purple haze accented all its languorous lustres. It seemed a vague sort of poetry a-loose in the air, and color had license. The law which decreed that a leaf should be green was a dead letter. How gallantly red and yellow they flared; and others, how tenderly pink, and gray, and purplish of hue! What poly-tinted fancies underfoot in the moss! Strange visitants came from the north. Flocks of birds, southward bound, skimmed these alien skies. Sometimes they alighted on the tree-tops ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... office. Christianity, as well as science, seemed to rise against us in his person. He made a long and eloquent speech, based on the intelligent surmises and popular prejudices that were diffused in a hundred leading articles, and in letters to the editor by men and women, to whom history was a dead letter in modern controversies; for the Press battled this matter for two years, and furnished each party with an artillery ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... How many women do you know who are religious, and yet analyse point by point what they believe in? She lives in the midst of the traditional churches, and is full of reverence by nature; and yet if you knew how fearlessly that woman has torn up the old cerements and taken note of what is a dead letter within, yet preserved her faith in essential spiritual truth, you would feel more admiration for her than even for writing 'Uncle Tom.' There are quantities of irreverent women and men who profess infidelity. But this is a woman of another order, observe, devout yet brave in the outlook for ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Sir William said or thought on the occasion, we have no record. In the good old times he would have eased his conscience by the endowment of an altar, or foundation of a yearly mass; but in the year 1708 such things had long been a dead letter in the East Neuk; and so in lieu thereof he interred him honorably in the aisle of the ancient kirk, where a marble tablet long marked the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
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