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More "Numbness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... snow made a numbness steal over him, and his feeble limbs being incapable of carrying him farther, he had to sit down in the middle of an open field. He ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... loved him had ceased to beat in Jonathan's noble breast, and his own crimes had slain his sons. Who can paint the storm of contending passions in that lonely black soul? or were they all frozen into the numbness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... days after this healing, she, with a consciousness that she was running a risk, lifted a heavy weight, and a numbness returned. She confessed the sin to the Lord, and asked Him that, when she had been sufficiently chastened, He would take the trouble away. Gradually, within two days, it disappeared, and ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with the result that they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking coma, with glazed, unseeing eyes, and dragging feet; other white men who summoned up a mockery of bravado and uttered poor jests from between ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... cross the floor, but her limbs refused to act. A terrible numbness had come over them, every muscle of her body seemed to ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... had taken the one child she had, that she did not believe to be her own but a changeling, and had put it on the shore at the extreme edge of the tide-reach, and had left it for the space of an hour. When she came back, the child she had left with a numbness on its face and with the curse of dumbness, was laughing wild, and when she came near, it put out its arms and gave the cry of the young of birds. She lifted the "leanav" in her arms and stared into its eyes, but there was no longer ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... women, had become wonderfully reserved since the arrival of her nieces, and was evidently making a sincere effort to study their diverse characters. Day by day the invalid's health was failing visibly. She had no more strokes of paralysis, but her left limb did not recover, and the numbness was gradually ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... a few weeks. I have never known a case of its being fatal to human beings; but I have seen people subjected by it to great suffering, notably a scientific gentleman, who plucked off a branch and carried it some distance as a curiosity, wondering the while what was causing the pain and numbness in his arm. Horses I have been die in agony from the sting, the wounded parts becoming paralysed; but strange to say, it does not seem to injure cattle, who dash through scrubs full of it without receiving any damage. This curious ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... time everything was pleasant. Dreams came fused with realities; the firelight faded from consciousness or returned fantastic to our half-awakening; a delicious numbness overspread our tired bodies. The shadows leaped, became solid, monstrous. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... OF EXCESSES.—Dr. Dio Lewis says: "Some of the most common effects of sexual excess are backache, lassitude, giddiness, dimness of sight, noises in the ears, numbness of the fingers, and paralysis. The drain is universal, but the more sensitive organs and tissues suffer most. So the nervous system gives way and continues the principal sufferer throughout. A large part of the premature loss of sight and hearing, dizziness, numbness ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Athor in the niche on the hillside was not more white and stony than its living model in the valley. There was no retreat. The fan-bearer stood between her and the Nile, his servant between her and the quarries. She felt the sickening numbness that stupefies one who realizes a terrible strait, from which there is neither ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... was not that he did not care, but that, for the moment, he was too tired and listless to do more than lie still and endure his own discomfort. His side throbbed painfully and there was something curious about his left arm, a dead feeling of numbness that made him wonder whether it was there at all. He glanced down at it with sudden apprehension—he had no fancy for a maimed existence—and was relieved to find it still in place but bent stiffly across his chest wrapped in a multitude of bandages—broken, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... nor fear. Through much suffering, thought and sensation were, to a great extent, dead in her; and, in a sort of emotive numbness, she laid her candlestick in its usual place on the chair by her bedside; and, sitting up in bed, her night-dress carefully buttoned, holding the tumbler half-filled with chloral, she tried to take a dispassionate survey of her life. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... time to think or feel till she had reached the train and taken her seat, and even then the first thing she was conscious of was a sense of numbness within, and frivolous observation without, as she found herself trying to read upside down the direction of her opposite neighbour's parcels, counting the flounces on her dress, and speculating on ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... find an easy spot to lie on. You are always worse before storms. After sitting a little while you stiffen up, feeling much better after moving about. The tendons of your legs have a drawing sensation, and feel as if too short. There is more or less of numbness and paralysis, and a wooden sort of feeling of the leg when walking. You also have lightning-like shocks of pain through the limb, now and then. Your attacks come on every few weeks, and it is the left limb that is affected. You ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... feeling of sentimentality; but it explained nothing, defined nothing, only touched her as a breeze does a flower, and floated away. The dreamy warmth of the fire absorbed her more direct feelings, and for some moments she dozed in a haze of dim sensuousness and emotive numbness. As in a dusky glass, she saw herself a tender, loving, but unhappy woman; by her side were her querulous husband and her kindly-minded mother-in-law, and then there was a phantom she could not determine, and behind it something into which she could not ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... numbness passed over the man. He was dazed; and as wave after wave splashed over his head, he struggled dumbly to reach the ladder. Then under the reaction from the icy shock, an electric thrill of energy and vitality passed ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... hearth did not permeate the discourse and keep his audience comfortable in spite of the bitterest northern blast that ever wrestled with the church-steeple. He reads while the heat warps the stiff covers of the volume; he writes without numbness either in his heart or fingers; and, with unstinted hand, he throws fresh sticks of ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... down, conscious of a tired irresolution in his head and a numbness. Nothing seemed clearly defined, save somewhere within him a monumental sharpness as of pain. Joan's happiness he remembered must be the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... him vacantly for the numbness following the first shock was passing away and all the eating agony of my loss began to fix its ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... that his feet were as heavy as logs—that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... given warning of the danger now become so pressing. The Baron went out of the dining-room in such agitation that he literally dropped on to a sofa in the drawing-room. He was stunned, sunk in the dull numbness of a heavy fall. He stared at a flower on the carpet, quite unconscious that he still held in his hand ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... defective enough little story, crude and young; I never glance at it without longing to write it over; but I cannot read it, to this day, without that tingling and numbness down one's spine and through the top of one's head, which exceptional tragedy must produce in any sensitive organization; nor can I ever trust myself to hear it read by professional elocutionists. I attribute ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... penetrating ever deeper the Red Desert's heart. But of the abhorred Termans we caught no sight. There was only the molten downpour of sun by day, and the desiccating numbness of cold at night. But on the sixth day, as we encamped near an underground pool located by our ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... to die with what dignity she could. Lethargy, sloth, sleep—a dead, dull, dreary sleep—fell like a leaden pall upon her spiritual life, darkening the light that shone but vaguely through the storied panes of her mediaeval windows, while a paralysing numbness crippled her limbs ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... answer, but the pressure against his chest was too severe. His left hand began to slip from Welch's wrist; the fingers wouldn't hold; there was a strange numbness from hand to shoulder. With a smothered groan he tried to tighten his clasp again. Then help came. Eager hands took his burden, and he felt himself being pulled back from the edge. He glanced up once and had a glimpse of somber twilight sky ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... upon my knees beside her bed; All agonies within my heart were wed, While to the aching numbness of my grief, Mine eyes refused the solace of a tear,— The tortured soul's most merciful relief. Her wasted hand caressed my bended head For one sad, sacred moment. Then she said, In that low tone so like the wind's refrain, "Maurine, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fight on, and on. And, truly, all this seems more real to me now in my sleep than it did to me then in its reality; for a dull weight of most desolate hopelessness settled down upon me as I fought out to the end that most hopeless battle—so that my spirit shared in the numbness of my body, and I cut and parried and gave men their death-blows with the stolid energy of a mere ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... such a feeling as this is intrinsically desirable, and is an ultimate end in itself. It is, in itself, undesirable, and it is only a means to an end. By it, our torpid souls are to be awakened from their torpor; our numbness and hardness of mind, in respect to spiritual objects, is to be removed. We are never for a moment, to suppose that the fear of perdition is set before us as a model and permanent form of experience to be toiled ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... remember laughing grimly, wishing them joy of their job—they were welcome to mine! I remember, too, that at last in the darkness I felt that I must give up, and said my prayers; and it was about that time, when I was beginning to feel a certain numbness of mind as well as weariness of body, that as I struck out in the mechanical and weakening fashion which I kept up from what little determination I had left, I came across my salvation—in the shape of a piece of wreckage that shoved itself against me in the blackness, as if it had been some ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... the kidney. The pain in the loins and along the course of the ureter from a stone is attended with retraction of the testicle in men, and numbness on the inside of the thigh in women. It is distinguished from the lumbago or sciatica, as these latter are seldom attended with vomiting, and have pain on the outside of the thigh, sometimes quite down to the ankle or ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... feeling for months of intense emotional experience had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything. There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if to remind him ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... Heaven for practical aid in any practical difficulty—to make of prayer a system of 'begging-letters to the Almighty'—which had of ten quieted or distracted him in his early years of struggle, affected him no longer. His inner life seemed to himself shrouded in a sullen numbness and frost. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Lights. Blurr. Gone. On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail. Spatter. Whirr! Whirr! 'Toward that patch of brown; Direction left'. Bullets a stream. Devouring thought crying in a dream. Men, crumpled, going down.... Go on. Go. Deafness. Numbness. The loudening tornado. Bullets. Mud. Stumbling and skating. My voice's strangled shout: 'Steady pace, boys!' The still light: gladness. 'Look, sir. Look out!' Ha! ha! Bunched figures waiting. Revolver levelled quick! Flick! Flick! Red as blood. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... me, without saying a word, all the while opening his chest, from which he took several flasks, sponges, a little silver vase with a long curved tube, and also several instruments, one of which seemed very keen. I watched my master closely, feeling an inexplicable numbness gradually creeping over me. My heavy eye-lids fell once or twice in spite of myself. I had been seated on my bed of straw, to which I was still chained; but now I was compelled to lean my head against the wall, so heavy had it grown. ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... is shocked. It is a peculiar case. Not once in a score of years do we find such a case. Every nerve is numb, every muscle relaxed, and whether he will live or die depends on arousing him from that numbness." ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... said Lyle, holding out the letter, but speaking with great effort, for the room was growing very dark, and a strange numbness seemed stealing over heart and brain, "this tells that I was stolen from the side of my dead mother who was killed in a wreck—" She could get no farther, and she knew nothing of his reply. A thick darkness seemed to envelop her, fast shutting out all sense even ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... always at the seat of the disease. In hip-disease, the pain is not first felt in the hip, but in the knee-joint. In chronic inflammation of the liver, the pain is generally most severe in the right shoulder and arm. Disease of the kidneys occasionally produces numbness of the thigh and drawing up of the testicle, and commonly causes colicky pains. Inflammation of the meninges of the brain is often indicated by nausea and vomiting before attention is directed to the head. These illustrations are sufficient ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... her. A faintness and numbness that seemed like death, which had been creeping languidly through his veins for some time, darkened his eyes and sealed his lips. He could not see her, and her voice sounded far away. She called again and again upon him, but there was no answer. The deep roar of the storm on the other ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... daughter of the young couple died, then all the members of the family were seized by illness, its onset being on the day following the death of the child. No more of the family died, but M. Dupuy and his daughter suffered from bodily numbness for years afterwards, with partial paralysis and recurrent ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... began to regain consciousness her first sensation was one of numbness. She was cold in the back, and her feet did not seem to exist; but her head was hot and pulsating as though her brain were a living thing. Then her half-open eyes began to take in her surroundings. For another long spell she began to wonder why all around her was green. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... the frenzy left Harrigan and the numbness departed from his arms, he knew that he was growing weaker and weaker. In McTee's eyes he saw the growing light of victory, the confidence. His own wild hunger for blood grew apace with his desperation. He flung himself forward in ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... there, embracing the empty box that had brought him to his death; and for many minutes I sat within a yard of him, detained by the fascination and grim mockery of the picture no less than by physical weakness and a numbness of my brain. My body refused to act, and my mind hardly urged its indolent servant. I was in sore distress for Marie Delhasse,—my vehement cry witnessed it,—yet I had not the will to move to her aid; will and power both ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... though. It is real; but if you go Careless to it, as to dance, You'll see nothing for your glance; Blankness, deafness, blindness, dumbness, Soon will stare you to a numbness. No, my friend; it is not wise To open doors into the skies, As into a little study, Where a feeble brain grows muddy. Wait till night, and you shall be Left alone with mystery; Light this lamp's white softened ray, (Another wonder by the way,) Then with humble faith and prayer, Ope ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... in silence, for almost a mile, with the cold air beating against my body and a colder numbness creeping about the corner ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... with keen delight, and streaming over, surrounded Mose, who stood at bay not far from his horse in the darkness—a sudden numbness in his limbs. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... that your right hand is beginning to tingle. Once again, you practice the technique of visual-imagery, tapping your experiential background for this feeling. You can recall how it feels when your hand goes to sleep. Once you get an initial feeling of lightness, tingling or numbness, reinforce this feeling by the feed-back technique as you did with the eye closure test. As you practice this procedure, it will work with greater effectiveness. The following is a very important point to remember. Be sure ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... tired." Grace made languid efforts to prove that she was weary. There could be no doubt of it. She did not have the endurance possessed by her companion, and even Harriet's strength was leaving her, because of that terrible numbness in her lower limbs, a numbness that was ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... Shrill, envious brute: to wake me from delightful dreams of wealth and magic blessedness with those piercing, deafening notes! Am I not even in sleep to find a refuge from Poverty, Poverty more vile than your vile self? Why, it cannot be midnight yet: all is hushed; numbness—sure messenger of approaching dawn—has not yet performed its morning office upon my limbs: and this wakeful brute (one would think he was guarding the golden fleece) starts crowing before night has fairly begun. ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... still bothered him; kneeling in the gathering darkness he finally isolated it in his mind. It was their hopelessness, the numbness that had crept over them through the centuries. No purpose? But they had lived in peace for thousands of years. No, their death was not merely one of ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... man, "may not amulets or charms, by their secret influence, produce the effects ascribed to them? Who can comprehend by what impenetrable means the bite of a mad dog produces hydrophobia? Why does the touch of a torpedo induce numbness? When these causes and effects are explained," he concludes, "so may the virtue of amulets be accounted for." Ancient philosophers laid it down, as a proof of ignorance, the condemnation of a science not easily understood. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... spite of her numbness and the tension she was feeling, though controlled by her firm will, there came the memory of the red, crying baby, for whose life her own sweet mother had paid so dear a price. And Mabel and Ethel—noisy, merry little girls!—she ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... Colonel was sitting just as he had sat the morning before, when Jake's letter and Eloise's note were brought to him. He had not slept at all during the night, and was in a trembling condition, with a feeling of numbness in his limbs which ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... a stone bench against the garden wall, and hid her face in both her hands, vainly striving to think. It was past midnight. The streets were deserted: a shower of rain was falling over Paris, and she was chilled to numbness. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... tell of the congratulations showered upon me; My hand was wrung by my kind neighbors until it tingled with numbness. Mistress Vetch fell into hysterics—mercilessly ignored by Mr. Pinhorn. And as for Captain Galsworthy, he seemed incapable of doing anything but repeat his question, chuckling aloud "Can anyone tell me why ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... succession of commonplace remarks, expressed with frigid formality: but this might be more my fault than hers, for I really could NOT converse. In fact, my attention was almost wholly absorbed in my dinner: not from ravenous appetite, but from distress at the toughness of the beefsteaks, and the numbness of my hands, almost palsied by their five-hours' exposure to the bitter wind. I would gladly have eaten the potatoes and let the meat alone, but having got a large piece of the latter on to my plate, I could not be so impolite as to leave it; so, after many awkward ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... form that stood on queer shafts of wood come gliding with the speed of the wind from behind the hillock. It straightened out on a stretch of snow, bellowing with a loudness that hammered their eardrums into numbness, and sped lightly along till the queer shafts of wood left the surface and the sleek black object soared up ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... There seemed a numbness on that side, instead of pain. But granting that he loved Emilia ever so deeply, was he a man to surrender his life and his ease and his fair name, in a hopeless effort to remove the ban that the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... tired and worn out when I got to Hillingham. For two nights I had hardly had a wink of sleep, and my brain was beginning to feel that numbness which marks cerebral exhaustion. Lucy was up and in cheerful spirits. When she shook hands with me she looked sharply ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... somewhere," said Emeline, plucking the leaves and unsteadily shifting her eyes about his feet. "I cannot stay on the farm all the time." Through numbness she felt the pricking of ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... distant hills, Through desert places now, and now through vales That flow with plenty; now through sordid towns, Until at last I reach the western seas; Then, ever homeless, to repeat my steps? Death were a blessing, yea, a gentle sleep— To feel delicious numbness seize my limbs, Mine eyes grow heavy, and the weary flight Of immemorial time forever stayed In sleep, in dreamless sleep—would I might die! I am so weary, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... too frightened to move. I felt myself growing numb, weighted to the floor as though my feet had taken root. My arms were hanging like wood; fingers tingling, then growing cold, dead to sensation. And a numbness creeping up my legs; and spreading inward from my arms and shoulders. In a few moments more, I knew the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... pressing with a numbness on my heart, And my lips with mortal dumbness fail the burden to impart. Oh I tell you, Uncle Jared, there is something back of all That a soldier cannot part with when he heeds his country's call! Ask the mother what, in dying, sends her yearning spirit back ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... Frenchman. Twice I tried to say to myself, 'What nonsense! what a farce!' I tried to smile, to shrug my shoulders.... It was no use! All initiative had all at once 'frozen up' within me—I can find no other word for it. I was overcome by a sort of numbness. Suddenly I noticed that he had left the door, and was standing a step or two nearer to me; then he gave a slight bound, both feet together, and stood closer still.... Then again ... and again; while the menacing eyes were simply fastened on my whole face, and ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... it would not be long first, as far as the boy was concerned. He had apparently forgotten the numbness of his limbs and the peril through which he had passed, and in spite of the roughness of the ice and snow he continued to get over it in his extemporised sandals, which had the advantage of not slipping. But the day's toil had been excessive before the accident; and ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... apprehension that the phantom of a dead man held the sleeper by the wrist, and endeavoured to drag him out of bed. He awaked in horror, and still felt the cold dead grasp of a corpse's hand on his right wrist. It was a minute before he discovered that his own left hand was in a state of numbness, and with it he had ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... be temerity to expose ourselves to the first shocks of a very large and strongly irritated gymnotus. If by chance a stroke be received before the fish is wounded or wearied by long pursuit, the pain and numbness are so violent that it is impossible to describe the nature of the feeling they excite. I do not remember having ever received from the discharge of a large Leyden jar, a more dreadful shock than that which I experienced by imprudently placing both my feet on a gymnotus just taken ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to be partially self-enslaved by a routine of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened by its molds. Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness, even when there is a current of intellectual activity. Writers most liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,—a sad condition ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... fallen, or what had happened to him, he had no idea. Beyond a strange feeling of numbness in the head he was conscious of no injury, and he could only imagine that his horse had been shot under him, and that he must have fallen upon his head. The thought that his favorite horse was killed afflicted him almost ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... A numbness settled over Palla's brain. She did not seem to be able to comprehend that this affair concerned Vanya—that this newspaper was telling her that Vanya had been fatally ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... own petard?"' returned the plotter musingly. 'One more quotation: strange! But indeed my brain is struck with numbness. Yes, dear boy, I have, as you say, put my contrivance in motion. The one on which you are sitting, I have timed for half an ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... off through the night, his feet lagging with a blissful fatigue and his mind falling on an equally blissful numbness. As he went the Parson's phrase went with him, stirring his imagination, and when he climbed into the big bed beneath the drooping Christ it worked more articulately within him. "Secret bread ..." he thought; "that's what he called it.... I wonder if Phoebe's is sun—she wanted to pick the sun. And ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... no longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness. Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made them insensible to the less immediate restraints of a religious character. These phenomena are not unusual concomitants of protracted wars. History records numerous examples of the homecoming soldiery turning the weapons ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... with frenzy—great tusks upthrown—a trunk upraised to brain me—huge flat feet that raged to tread me down and knead me into purple mud! I kept the last shot with a coolness I believe was really numbness—then felt his hot breath like a blast on my face, and let him have it, straight down the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... wish I had gone to Stoneborough before coming out here, now that I see what a gratification it would have been if I could have brought a fresh report of old Dr. May. (Somehow, I think there has been a numbness or obtuseness about me all these last two years which hindered me from perceiving or doing much that I now regret, since either the change or the wholesome atmosphere of this house has wakened me as it were. Among these ungracious omissions is what I now am much concerned ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cleared, and he saw the leaves above him drying in the sunlight. Inactivity was at all times intolerable to him to stand thus for hours was an exercise of impatient patience which only his relentless passion made possible; his body yielded to a sort of numbness, whilst the suffering expectancy of his mind only grew keener. He durst not avert his eyes from the door for an instant; his sight ached and ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... there was numbness of mind and body. Then, with every heart-beat and throb by throb, came unbearable agony. A trembling old hand strayed across her face and her father's voice, deep with love and longing, whispered: "Barbara, my darling! Does it hurt ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... element in external nature has had its fluctuations in most ages and climes, and not least so in England. Marvel, in his day, felt the numbness creeping on that comes of divorce from nature, and uttered his plaint ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... dead Christ is taken from the cross. The Descent is managed with singular skill and genuine artistic feeling. The principal actor, who has been suspended for an hour in a most painful and constrained posture, has a corpse-like rigidity and numbness. There is one moment when you can almost imagine yourself in Antwerp, looking at that sublimest work of Rubens. The Entombment ends, and the last tableau is of the Mater Dolorosa in the Solitude. I have rarely seen an effect so simple, and yet so ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to expect death at the next plunge. Gradually weariness grew upon me; a numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of my terrors, until sleep at last intervened, and in my sea-tossed coracle I lay and dreamed of home and ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strange sensation to be free. It was still more strange that it was not a sensation. It was a kind of numbness. She could only feel that she didn't feel. In spite of her repeated silent assertions, "I'm free! I'm free!" any consciousness of ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... of his life was a handful of fagots. One by one they would go to feed the fire, and just so, step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its heat, the frost would begin to gather strength. First his feet would yield, then his hands; and the numbness would travel, slowly, from the extremities to the body. His head would fall forward upon his knees, and he would rest. It was easy. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... night drew near, my numbness of feeling began to pass off; thought came into my brain by plunges. Now I desired; now I hoped. I dressed myself in black silk, and wore a cape of black Chantilly lace. I made my hair as glossy as possible, drew it down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... As made self-hatred on the conscience lay That heavy weight she never moves away? O! where the good man's inner barriers close 'Gainst the world's cruel judgments, and his foes Enfolding truth, and prayer, and soul's repose, Thine is a mournful numbness, or a din, For many strong ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Attention to the state of the bowels, and the relief that may frequently be afforded by a change of diet, come therefore very properly within the sphere of domestic management, in connection with a few simple medicines in common use. The sensations of lassitude or weariness, stiffness or numbness, less activity than usual, less appetite, a load or heaviness at the stomach, some uneasiness in the head, a more profound degree of sleep, yet less composed and refreshing than usual; less gaiety and liveliness, a slight oppression of the breast, a less regular pulse, a propensity to be ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... fifteen miles, Penellan prepared to encamp. The tent was erected against an ice-block. Marie had not suffered seriously with the extreme cold, for luckily the breeze had subsided, and was much more bearable; but the young girl had several times been obliged to descend from her sledge to avert numbness from impeding the circulation of her blood. Otherwise, her little hut, hung with skins, afforded her all the comfort ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... decisive of the mystification of the Commissioners. A deaf and dumb lad, eighteen years of age, and subject to attacks of epilepsy, was magnetised fifteen times by M. Foissac. The phenomena exhibited during the treatment were a heaviness of the eyelids, a general numbness, a desire to sleep, and sometimes vertigo:— the epileptic attacks were entirely suspended, and did not return till eight months afterwards. Upon this case and the first mentioned, the Committee reasoned thus:— "These cases appear to us altogether ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely those things wisdom would ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... exhausted so completely that it could give no support to my spirit; and as the days went on and on—always with the same weed-covered sea around me and the same soft golden mist over me, and I always working wearily but with the stolid steadiness of a machine—so deadening a numbness took hold of me that I seemed to myself like some far-away strange person—yet one with whom I had a direct connection, and must needs sorrow for and sympathize with—struggling interminably through the dull jading mazes ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... a drowsy numbness pains My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering, temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity; or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed endurance, are natural, and normal reactions to ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... a fool," she said, moved actually now by his numbness to his own endowment. "I could beat my head and scream, when I think how you're throwing things away, your time, in that beastly night school, your power, your personal charm. Jeff, you've the devil's own luck. You were born with it. And you simply ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... for the merciful numbness, that was like an anaesthetic in a painful operation. She had a feeling that she would awaken soon and realise fully the terrible calamity that had befallen, but just now, if she kept still it would not hurt ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... perhaps its figure will be better understood when I say it is a flat fish, much resembling the thorn-back. This fish is of a most singular nature, productive of the strangest effects on the human body; for whoever handles it, or happens even to set his foot upon it, is presently seized with a numbness all over him, but more distinguishable in that limb which was in immediate contact with it. The same effect, too, will be, in some degree, produced by touching the fish, with any thing held in the hand; for I myself had ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... Lavretzky encountered Panshin; they saluted each other coldly. Lavretzky went home to his apartment, and locked himself in. He experienced a sensation such as he had, in all probability, never experienced before. Had he remained long in that state of "peaceful numbness"? had he long continued to feel, as he had expressed it, "at the bottom of the river"? What had altered his position? what had brought him out, to the surface? the most ordinary, inevitable though always unexpected of events;—death? Yes: but he did not think ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... completely unnerved, shocked to a peculiar numbness. That God would countenance this depressing episode! The romantic occasion of my first carefully-planned flight after Him was ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... it inhale life or suck it into its trunk? Scarcely realizing what he was doing, the boy focused his gaze upon two dazzling points of light that gradually came nearer, nearer. A peacefulness came over him, and he wondered why he had been so terrified a moment before. Slowly a numbness crept up his limbs; a giddiness attacked him. On came the hypnotic, icy lights, until they were within a few feet of ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... was wiped from his memory for years, and the loss was not much to be regretted. When he tried to think about it, he found nothing but a roaring of wind and of waves in his ears, a numbness of arms as he laboured with the oar tholed abaft to keep her heavy head up, a prickly chill in his legs as the brine in the wallowing boat ran up them, and then a great wallop and gollop of the element ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... was looking through his finger ends, and he noted distinctly his haggard features and the short growth of beard which made him appear jaded and unwashed. Then almost instantly the quickness died out of his perception, and he felt the old numbness creeping back. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... as old and will do our exercises, and will fast, and will meditate. But we will not reach the nirvana, he won't and we won't. Oh Govinda, I believe out of all the Samanas out there, perhaps not a single one, not a single one, will reach the nirvana. We find comfort, we find numbness, we learn feats, to deceive others. But the most important thing, the path of paths, we ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... way it used to rise above "Old Peaky Top," just back of the cabin on Hiawassee. He straightened himself to obtain a better view. A sharp report rang out behind him from the vessel, and he felt a numbness under his shoulder. ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... she saw, and loud exclaim'd:— "O sire, assist me, if within thy streams "Divinity abides. Let earth this form, "Too comely for my peace, quick swallow up; "Or change those beauties to an harmless shape." Her prayer scarce ended, when her lovely limbs A numbness felt; a tender rind enwraps Her beauteous bosom; from her head shoots up Her hair in leaves; in branches spread her arms; Her feet but now so swift, cleave to the earth With roots immoveable; her face at ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... looking as if they were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long day—one of the longest days of my life—browsing ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... moment it took to do this, the officer not so much dismounted as tumbled from his horse, and he now walked stiffly into the public room, stamping his feet to lessen their numbness. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... in a state of terror, from which, for a few minutes, he found it difficult to shake himself free. At length he sate upon the grass, and became sensible, by repeated exertion, that the only personal injury which he had sustained was the numbness arising from extreme cold. The motion of something near him made the blood again run to his heart, and by a sudden effort he started up, and, looking around, saw to his relief that the noise was occasioned by the footsteps of his own mule. The peaceable animal ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... injured man was standing the trip as well as could be expected. He suffered great pain, though at times a sort of numbness came over his limb, as ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... army who uttered one word against their recent comrade. Ivan remembered with relief how, even under the influence of nearly a quart of vodka, he had gently refused Vladimir's generosity. From the very beginning, when, in his numbness, the future had been still unimaginable, Ivan's course had appeared perfectly clear to him. Cast out on all sides, by friends and family alike, he would be beholden to no one in the world. Starve he could, without a murmur, if he did not find work. But charity—to the amount of one kopeck, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open. Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon, the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Moses being obliged to leave by a side door to escape the great numbers of people who were waiting in front of the hotel to pay their respects to the Champion of Israel. About two o'clock we were all much alarmed by Lady Montefiore being suddenly taken seriously ill, with a numbness of her hand and arm, and a dizziness and great pain in the head, which almost deprived her of speech and motion. She was just able to ask for the Prayer Book. Gradually she recovered from the attack, which Sir Moses hoped was only spasmodic, ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... distinctly some sort of craft plunging through the blow. She had not long to wait after that, for the approaching launch was a lean-lined speeder, powerfully engined, and she was being forced. Stella supposed it was one of the Abbey runabouts. Even with her teeth chattering and numbness fastening itself upon her, she shivered at the chances the man was taking. It was no sea for a speed boat to smash into at thirty miles an hour. She saw it shoot off the top of one wave and disappear in a white burst of spray, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... times I filled it. This minute calculation I carried to an extreme. If I wrote for fifty-nine minutes, and then read for seventeen, those facts I recorded. Thus, in my diary and out of it, I wrote and wrote until the tips of my thumb and forefinger grew numb. As this numbness increased and general weariness of the hand set in, there came a gradual flagging of my creative impulse until ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... had an enormous influence upon my fortunes; and I was more adrift in the world than ever before, more in the dark as to what awaited me than when I was lugged along with my head in a sack. I gave her but little thought. A sort of numbness had come over me. I could think of the girl who had cut me free, and for all my resentment at the indignity of my treatment, I had hardly a thought to spare for the man who had me bound. I was pleased to remember that she hated him; that she had said ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... descending snow made a numbness steal over him, and his feeble limbs being incapable of carrying him farther, he had to sit down in the middle of an open field. He did ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... minutes later Dr. Stewart gave Dalzell a third draught. Dan was now recovering steadily from his mental numbness. ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... the Scriptural simile came to him with startling emphasis, bringing on a return of the prickling dismay. The stopping of the paddle-wheels and the rattling clangor of the gang-plank winch aroused him to action and he shook off the creeping numbness and ran aft to rummage under the cargo on the engine-room guards for his precious bundle. When his hand reached the place where it should have been, the blood surged to his brain and set up a clamorous dinning in his ears like ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... follows some stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering, temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity; or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed endurance, are natural, and normal reactions ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... hard to describe. A sort of numbness. Sometimes it's as though there was a heavy iron cap—a helmet on my head. And sometimes it—I don't know it seems as if there were fog, or something or other, inside. I'll take a good long rest this summer, as soon as we can get away. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... seemed as heavy as lead and yet they seemed to move of their own accord without any effort of the will. Our minds became blurred and numb—a numbness that was broken from time to time by a sharp stab of pain whenever a sleeper was placed across ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... time the blessed numbness was gone, and consciousness became once more a torture, the medium of terrors not to be borne. Isaac hated her—she would be taken from her children—she felt Watson's grip upon her arm—she saw the jeering faces at the ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "This feels like a neuro-toxin. Remember snake-bite aid? Well, the numbness is up to my groin now. No place for a tourniquet. And ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... feel thee in my veins: I go with such a will to find my lord, That we shall quickly meet. A heavy numbness creeps through every limb, And now 'tis at my head: My eye-lids fall, And my dear love is vanished in a mist. Where shall I find him, where? O turn me to him, And lay me on his breast!—Caesar, thy worst; Now part us, if thou canst. [Dies. [IRAS ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... sat motionless, fearing to awake her. Finally one of my legs went to sleep, and soon my other leg. Yet it was a welcome discomfort because endured for her. And I suppose the numbness must eventually have crept the length of my body, for, I, too, slept; awaking, I did not know how much later, to find ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... strange-looking atmosphere," Emmett remarked. The pain in his arm and the numbness that was gradually spreading throughout his body had relaxed his mind. He felt so physically detached from his surroundings that he could look at the fog-like gas that swirled about them with interest rather ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... I wish I had gone to Stoneborough before coming out here, now that I see what a gratification it would have been if I could have brought a fresh report of old Dr. May. (Somehow, I think there has been a numbness or obtuseness about me all these last two years which hindered me from perceiving or doing much that I now regret, since either the change or the wholesome atmosphere of this house has wakened me as it ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shocked to numbness by the discovery that humans knew of their presence on Sirene IV. They'd been made aghast by the brisk and competent nullification of their eighty-gee rocket defenses. They'd been appalled by the appearance of a space fleet which—if it had been a space fleet—could ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... excited. Faith in himself revived amidst the glow of common hopes. His worry of the morning had only left a vague numbness behind, and he now once more began to discuss his picture with Sandoz and Mahoudeau, swearing, it is true, that he would destroy it the next day. Jory, who was very short-sighted, stared at all the elderly ladies he met, and aired his theories on artistic work. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... stone bench against the garden wall, and hid her face in both her hands, vainly striving to think. It was past midnight. The streets were deserted: a shower of rain was falling over Paris, and she was chilled to numbness. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... cases of distress in which a well may become a place of refuge, a well is not at all calculated for a prolonged residence—so thought Jack. After he had been there some fifteen minutes, his teeth chattered, and his limbs trembled; he felt a numbness all over, and he thought it high time to call for assistance, which at first he would not, as he was afraid he should be pulled up to encounter the indignation of the farmer and his family. Jack was arranging ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... measured out a portion of the poppy liquor, one-third of the dose he had previously taken, and drank it. No headache or nausea succeeded; he felt his pulse; it became quick and violent; while a sense of numbness overcame him, and he slept. It was but for a few minutes. He awoke with a throbbing brow, and some sickness; but with a sense of delight at the heart, for he had found an opiate, and prescribed ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... don't want visitors,' she said; 'little repose—and all that sort of thing—is what I quire. No odious brutes must proach me till I've shaken off this numbness;' and in a grisly resumption of her coquettish ways, she made a dab at the Major with her fan, but overset Mr Dombey's breakfast cup instead, which was in quite a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... irrascible of women, had become wonderfully reserved since the arrival of her nieces, and was evidently making a sincere effort to study their diverse characters. Day by day the invalid's health was failing visibly. She had no more strokes of paralysis, but her left limb did not recover, and the numbness was gradually creeping upward ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... I set my teeth, and struggled to free myself until the veins in my forehead were knotted and my bonds cut into the flesh. But, alas! I was held as in the tentacles of an octopus. Every limb was gripped, so that already a numbness had overspread them, while my senses were frozen ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... self-martyring invalids, who keep the gout down by taking exhausting walks, eating next to no dinner, and filling the lives of others with their excitable cantankerousness and gloomy forebodings. There was a numbness and yet a sort of over-sensitiveness about his youth; a strangeness which, without giving the least promise of superior genius, merely made him ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... few minutes to work the numbness out of my legs. How they ached! I stepped out of the tent-door like a drunken man ... fell on my face in some bushes and bled from several scratches. The blare of what was full daylight hurt my eyes. I had been writing ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... close. She said to me with a deep emotion, "Ah, the only thing that I desire is that I may continue to FEEL—that brings suffering in abundance with it, but while we suffer we are at least alive. Once or twice in my life I have felt the numbness of anguish, when a blow had fallen, and I could not even suffer. That is the only thing which I dread—not death, nor silence, but only the obliteration of feeling and love." That was a wonderful ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had lavished upon her—she dwelt upon these things; she racked her brain to recall them in order to reawaken her grief and remorse, but in vain. Mind and memory responded to the effort, but her own heart she could not touch. The acute stage was over for the moment, and a most distressing numbness, attended by a sense of chilliness and general physical discomfort, had succeeded it. The rims of her eyes were red and the lids still swollen by the tears of the day before; but the state of weeping, with the nervous energy and mental excitement which had been the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... something, realising that her husband was feeling happy. When she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an intense scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were standing up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the culprit in this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to think swiftly again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of exultation in her husband's ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... feet were as heavy as logs—that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... assist me, if within thy streams "Divinity abides. Let earth this form, "Too comely for my peace, quick swallow up; "Or change those beauties to an harmless shape." Her prayer scarce ended, when her lovely limbs A numbness felt; a tender rind enwraps Her beauteous bosom; from her head shoots up Her hair in leaves; in branches spread her arms; Her feet but now so swift, cleave to the earth With roots immoveable; her face at ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... cavern and looked into it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady motion towards the light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear that cannot move. The two sparks of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves up ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... arrived. For months she had fronted it in bravado, not concealing from herself that it lay in waiting. For years he had been sure that though the inevitable might happen to others it could not happen to him. There it was! He was conscious of a heavy weight in his stomach, and she of a general numbness, enwrapping her fatigue. Even then he could not believe that it was true, this disaster. As for Sophia she was reconciling herself with bitter philosophy to the eccentricities of fate. Who would have dreamed that she, a young girl brought up, etc? Her mother could not have improved ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... plague, this mischief from me, Which, as a numbness over all my body, Expels my joys, and makes ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... home," answered Tony, more faintly than before. He felt a strange numbness creeping over him, and his lips were too parched and his tongue too heavy for speaking. The gentleman took off his own great-coat and wrapped it well about him, placing him at the same time in a more comfortable position. Then he ran quickly to the nearest street, ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... by a deprivation of oxygen.) The vision becomes darkened, and a giddiness soon appears. The voluntary muscles furthest from the heart seem first to be affected, and the feet and hands, particularly the latter, have a numbness at their ends, which increases, until in many cases there is partial paralysis as far as the elbow, while the limbs become fixed. The hands are so thoroughly affected that, when open, the patient is powerless to close them and vice versa. There is a vacant gaze from the eyes and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... how he was simply possessed and exhausted by his musical emotions. They were really fits of ecstasy or convulsions. At first "there was feverish excitement; the veins beat violently and tears flowed freely. Then came spasmodic contractions of the muscles, total numbness of the feet and hands, and partial paralysis of the nerves of sight and hearing; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was giddy and half faint." And in the case of music that displeased him, he suffered, on the contrary, from "a painful sense of bodily ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... she had constantly been at war with her own self for this: she hated and despised herself for that numbness of the heart which had so unaccountably taken all the zest and the joy out of her life. Does one love one day and become indifferent the next? What had become of the girlish love that had invested Maurice de St. Genis with ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... An instant of numbness was followed by the most excruciating pain, and the arm sank limply through the water. Sahwah knew that it was broken. But even then her presence of mind did not desert her. Shoving Gladys out ahead of her with her good arm, she propelled herself with her legs, swimming on her back, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... factor in the reaction to the unexpected. Fatigue, neurasthenia, hysteria and certain depressed conditions render a man more liable to react excessively and badly to surprise. The tired soldier has lessened resources in wit and courage when surprised, for fatigue heightens the confusion and numbness of surprise and decreases the scope of intelligent conduct. Choice is made difficult, and the neurasthenic doubt is transformed to impotence ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... though it was not more than 20 deg. below zero. My blood became so chilled, that I was apprehensive the extremities would freeze, and the most vigorous motion of the muscles barely sufficed to keep at bay the numbness which attacked them. At dusk we drove through Upper Muonioniska, and our impatience kept the reindeers so well in motion that before five o'clock (although long after dark,) we were climbing the well-known slope to Herr Forstrom's house at Muoniovara. Here we found the merchant, not ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... as if it would not be long first, as far as the boy was concerned. He had apparently forgotten the numbness of his limbs and the peril through which he had passed, and in spite of the roughness of the ice and snow he continued to get over it in his extemporised sandals, which had the advantage of not slipping. But the day's toil ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... remember poor Louis's turn for smithwork: how, in old happier days, a certain Sieur Gamain of Versailles was wont to come over, and instruct him in lock-making;—often scolding him, they say for his numbness. By whom, nevertheless, the royal Apprentice had learned something of that craft. Hapless Apprentice; perfidious Master-Smith! For now, on this 20th of November 1792, dingy Smith Gamain comes over to the Paris Municipality, over to Minister Roland, with hints that he, Smith ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... he whispered, "and I believe." He made a weak effort to touch her hand, but failed. He thought that perhaps it was the chill and numbness of death which stole over him and held him bound. When the nurse, whose footsteps they had heard, entered, she found him lying with glazed eyes, and Madame Villefort fallen in ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me, and I don't like it. I'm going home to my father and forget it," I reiterated with a kind of numbness upon me, the like of which I ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... mind, and deprived him of the possibility of coming to any decision. But this moral catalepsy was not the effect of a cowardly dejection, as has been asserted. His great mind remained erect amid the temporary numbness of his faculties; and Napoleon, when he awoke, was but so much the more terrible, and the ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... was aware that his bonds cramped him no longer, found Roger's arm about him, and at his parched lips Roger's steel head-piece brimming with cool, sweet water; and gulping thirstily, soon felt the numbness lifted from his brain and the mist from his eyes; in so much that he sat up, and gazing about, beheld ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... beyond our sight. Elza was standing motionless, too frightened to move. I felt myself growing numb, weighted to the floor as though my feet had taken root. My arms were hanging like wood; fingers tingling, then growing cold, dead to sensation. And a numbness creeping up my legs; and spreading inward from my arms and shoulders. In a few moments more, I knew the numbness would ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... over again and again. And the numbness began to pass away. And the anger was dead. Always she had felt as if she had been led to Africa for some definite end. Did not the freed negroes, far out in the Desert, sing their song of the deeper mysteries—"No one but God ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... protection; for he was on his way to the War Department, at the west corner of the grounds, where in times of battle he was wont to get the midnight dispatches from the field. As the blast struck him he thought of the numbness of the pacing sentry, and, turning to him, said: 'Young man, you've got a cold job to-night; step inside, and stand ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... condition, when they were able to act. "Now, boys, for a race!" cried Tom: "it's the only hope of putting a little life into us, and of keeping off the rheumatism—let us see who will be the first at The Grange!" They accordingly started, running as fast as the numbness of their feet would allow, and soon arrived at the house; but what remarkable objects were Tom and George, when they presented themselves before the eyes of their astonished aunt and cousins! Their dress, soaked with water, was now perfectly ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... returned the plotter musingly. "One more quotation: strange! But indeed my brain is struck with numbness. Yes, dear boy, I have, as you say, put my contrivances in motion. The one on which you are sitting, I have timed for half an hour. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he see? could he feel through the faintness, the numbness, While linger'd the spirit half-loosed from the clay, Dumb eyes seeking his in their piteous dumbness, Dumb quivering nostrils, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... them to harden themselves, and to accustom themselves to the cold, which was not so severe as what yet awaited them; he advised them to expose their skin gradually to this intense temperature, and he himself set the example; but idleness or numbness nailed most of them to their place; they refused to stir, and preferred sleeping in ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Before them was a path worn in the snow, not only by the passing of booted feet, but with more deeply scored marks as if heavy objects had been sledded there. Ross slipped and stumbled in the ruts, fearing to fall lest he be dragged. The numbness of his body reached into his head. He was dizzy, the world about him misting over now and again with a haze which arose from the long ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... escape the great numbers of people who were waiting in front of the hotel to pay their respects to the Champion of Israel. About two o'clock we were all much alarmed by Lady Montefiore being suddenly taken seriously ill, with a numbness of her hand and arm, and a dizziness and great pain in the head, which almost deprived her of speech and motion. She was just able to ask for the Prayer Book. Gradually she recovered from the attack, which Sir Moses hoped was ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... in spite of her numbness and the tension she was feeling, though controlled by her firm will, there came the memory of the red, crying baby, for whose life her own sweet mother had paid so dear a price. And Mabel and Ethel—noisy, merry little girls!—she ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... wounded, among them the captain and first lieutenant. Of what followed I can give you little idea. I gave myself up for lost. A desperate impulse enabled me to march on to what seemed certain destruction. All at once I felt a sensation of numbness in my left arm, and looking down, I saw that the blood was ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... silent those three beautiful sisters sat. The horrible quietude of a suspense that had grown all but insupportable oppressed the guests of Lady Mardykes, and something like the numbness of despair had reduced her to silence, the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... their salutes with a perfunctory bow, but recollect little else, for now that my time was so near, a numbness seemed to cloud my brain and I could think only that this little copse, full of the grey mist of dawn, was perhaps the last object my eyes should ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... some distance from the one in which Mother Peter lived. There were very few people abroad, and no one noticed or spoke to him as he went creeping along, every step sending a pain from the hurt ankle to his heart. Faint with suffering and chilled to numbness, Andy stumbled and fell as he tried, in crossing a street, to escape from a sleigh that turned a corner suddenly. It was too late for the driver to rein up his horse. One foot struck the child, throwing him out of the track of the sleigh. He was insensible when taken up, bleeding ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... the lad felt his limbs grow stiff and almost useless, and a lethargic numbness blunt the keenness of his faculties as the heat went out of him. He had more than usual endurance, and utter cold, thirst, and the hunger that most ably helps the frost, are not infrequently the portion of the wardens of the prairie, but there is a ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... It is a peculiar case. Not once in a score of years do we find such a case. Every nerve is numb, every muscle relaxed, and whether he will live or die depends on arousing him from that numbness." ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... man held the sleeper by the wrist, and endeavoured to drag him out of bed. He awaked in horror, and still felt the cold dead grasp of a corpse's hand on his right wrist. It was a minute before he discovered that his own left hand was in a state of numbness, and with it he had accidentally encircled his ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... hold on life. I cannot overcome the feeling that I am a mere shadow, and have no right to be here among the living. You are so brave, patient, and faithful that I am ever conscious of a sort of dull remorse; but there is a weight on my brain and a despairing numbness at my heart, making everything seem vain and unreal. Please do not blame me. Asking me to feel is like requiring sight of the blind. I've lost the faculty. I have suffered so much that I have become numb, if not dead. The shadows of the past mingle with the shadows of to-day. Only you ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... I hear around me the laughter of mocking demons. It startles my soul—but no longer to rage as it used to. I sit and stare at it with a great, heavy numbness possessing me. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Kalitins' house, Lavretzky encountered Panshin; they saluted each other coldly. Lavretzky went home to his apartment, and locked himself in. He experienced a sensation such as he had, in all probability, never experienced before. Had he remained long in that state of "peaceful numbness"? had he long continued to feel, as he had expressed it, "at the bottom of the river"? What had altered his position? what had brought him out, to the surface? the most ordinary, inevitable though always unexpected of events;—death? Yes: ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... upon him, Lady Maulevrier stood, with clenched hands and frowning brow, staring into vacancy. Her right arm was outstretched, as if she would have waved the intruder away. Suddenly, a strange numbness crept over that uplifted arm, and it fell to her side. From her shoulder down to her foot, that proud form grew cold and feelingless and dead, and she, who had so long carried herself as a queen among women, sank in a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... But God has sent me here to-night with a message to the people which my heart must deliver. It is a duty even more sacred in some ways than what I owe to my own kindred. I am aware that the hearts of the people are shocked into numbness by the recent horror. I know that more than one bleeding heart is in this house, and the shadow of the last enemy, has fallen over many thresholds in our town. What! did I not enter into the valley of ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... existence, the pale moon was gleaming on the landscape. He awakened in a state of terror, from which, for a few minutes, he found it difficult to shake himself free. At length he sate upon the grass, and became sensible, by repeated exertion, that the only personal injury which he had sustained was the numbness arising from extreme cold. The motion of something near him made the blood again run to his heart, and by a sudden effort he started up, and, looking around, saw to his relief that the noise was occasioned by the footsteps ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... are a fool," she said, moved actually now by his numbness to his own endowment. "I could beat my head and scream, when I think how you're throwing things away, your time, in that beastly night school, your power, your personal charm. Jeff, you've the devil's own ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... not always represent the horror, the numbness of fright and the flight in the same way. The artists all admired the change of expression on the dancer's sweet face, where faint distaste gave way to violent repulsion, fright and stark horror. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... with a numbness at the heart. The affair was serious; but courage, and good hope! That sounded grave. He rose from his chair, the pipe between his lips still sending up a spiral of blue smoke. He was asking himself whether he should go in to the next ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... to her arms, is fructified by him, and pours forth the abundance of her flowers and fruits. Them comes summer and kills the spring: Earth is burnt up and withers, she strips herself of her ornaments, and her fruitfulness departs till the gloom and icy numbness of winter have passed away. Each year the cycle of the seasons brings back with it the same joy, the same despair, into the life of the world; each year Baalat falls in love with her Adonis and loses him, only to bring him back to life and lose him ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... for a long time, had been a valetudinarian, and within the same period, on using pretty quick exercise of body, she was subject to attacks of violent anguish in the upper part of the chest on the left side, accompanied with a difficulty of breathing, and numbness of the left arm; but these paroxysms soon subsided when she ceased from exertion. In these circumstances, but with cheerfulness of mind, she undertook a journey from Venice, purposing to travel along the continent, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... my turn, I experienced that sense of nausea, that numbness which always preceded my platform trials, but as my name was called I contrived to reach the proper place behind the footlights, and to bow to the audience. My opening paragraph perplexed my fellows, and naturally, for it ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Victorian, looking as if they were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long day—one of the longest days of my life—browsing through the books, ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... of summer is like a poison in one's blood, with a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things. In Galahad: a Mystery, the frost of Christmas night on the chapel stones acts as a strong narcotic: a sudden shrill ringing pierces through the numbness: a voice proclaims that the Grail has gone forth through the great forest. It is in the Blue Closet that this delirium reaches its height with a singular beauty, reserved perhaps for the enjoyment ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... knees beside her bed; All agonies within my heart were wed, While to the aching numbness of my grief, Mine eyes refused the solace of a tear,— The tortured soul's most merciful relief. Her wasted hand caressed my bended head For one sad, sacred moment. Then she said, In that low tone so like ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... veranda, another sound, and sound was of value to Craven Joicey, since it made a vital note in the circling numbness around him. He could hear whispering voices, and the thump of the Durwan's stick, as that musically-minded man walked round to the back of the house, where his lighted window showed that Craven Joicey did not sleep. Again a voice whispered, and a low sound ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... off his recent numbness. He realized the disturbing parallel in the actions of his grandfather and himself. He had come to the Cedars unconsciously, perhaps directed by an evil, external influence, on the night of the first murder. Now, it appeared, the man he was accused of killing ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... cleverness of the boy's idea, I stretched out my arms, seized a branch overhead, and in spite of my numbness, swung myself up and stood on it, holding by the branch of the great pine close behind the two small trees to which we had ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... sister, sometimes the figure of a person who for the last twenty-four hours had been continually in his thoughts, who seemed at one moment to be sympathising with him and at another to be playing upon his face with a garden hose. Then it all faded away, and a sort of numbness crept over him. He made a desperate struggle for consciousness. There was something cold resting against his cheek. His fingers stole towards it. It was the flask, drawn from his own pocket and placed there by some unseen hand, the top already unscrewed, and the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had come, and Danvers, unfamiliar with death, knew no words of consolation for the father bereft of his firstborn. A numbness mercifully comes during those first hours, which makes it possible to move about and go through strange, meaningless ceremonies with a calm that surprises those who have not known the searing touch ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... paralysis. The whole fabric of his thinking and feeling for months of intense emotional experience had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything. There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if to remind him of what had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... miserable refugees from Malines pouring down from the station. The courage of these Belgians is beyond all words. Save for the two in the freight station yard at Louvain, I have not seen a woman crying! It may be that they are numb, but they have none of the stupidity of numbness. And when you think that these very women will be creeping back to their homes and caring for the German wounded they find there, it gives you a ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... victimized by the most senseless persecution, he was so surprised and confounded by the noise and violence of calumny, that his keen sentiment of injustice underwent a sort of numbness. On seeing himself thus brutally attacked on the one hand, and so feebly defended on the other, by lukewarm, pusillanimous friends, he may have questioned if he were not really in fault, and hesitated, perhaps, how to reply; for he almost ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... in pain and bit and tore the flesh between the shin and the muscles. And Medea and her handmaids fled in terror; but Canthus bravely felt the bleeding wound; for no excessive pain harassed him. Poor wretch! Already a numbness that loosed his limbs was stealing beneath his skin, and a thick mist was spreading over his eyes. Straightway his heavy limbs sank helplessly to the ground and he grew cold; and his comrades and the hero, Aeson's ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... the heart, yet it does not circulate freely, and Nature to every man is a double of himself, so that the universe seems also cold in extremities, as though there were too little original life to fill her veins. The poet is not fire on the hearth to thaw this numbness by foreign heat. He rubs and rouses us to activity, drags us to the open air, puts us on a glowing chase, provokes us to race and climb with him till we also are thoroughly alive. No other gift of his is worth much beside this hope of reaching his side. The great know well ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... a great fire the mill made, lighting the valley for miles. All Cottontown was there to see it burn, hushed, with set faces, some of anger, some of fear—but all in stricken numbness, knowing that ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... in an hour When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk and branches Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning In laurel leaves, in hosts of lambent laurel, Quivering, fluttering, shrinking, fighting the numbness Creeping into their veins from the dying trunk and branches! 'Tis vain, O youth, to fly the call of Apollo. Fling yourselves in the fire, die with a song of spring, If die you must in the spring. For none shall look On the face of Apollo and live, and choose you must 'Twixt death ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the higher ground. But a new misfortune now befell me: I lost my boots. They were strong laced boots, without elastic sides, or any such weak points about them. I had observed before that one was getting loose, but was unable to do anything to it from the numbness of my hands; and after struggling out of a deep drift previous to reascending the hill, I found that I had left this boot behind. There was nothing for it but to go on without, and as my feet were perfectly numbed from the cold, and devoid of feeling, I ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... be standing alone in the big field: the rest was a picture with which she had nothing to do. There was a busy group near the fence, some men came running with a door, and then the sound of a shot broke through her numbness. The mare had been put out of her pain; ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... to behave oddly. He threw a stone, which went in front of Ian and Christina. Then he threw another, which went behind them. Then he threw a third, and Christina felt her hat caught by a bit of string. She drew it toward her as fast as numbness would permit, and found at the end a small bottle. She managed to get it uncorked, and put it to Ian's lips. He swallowed a mouthful, and made her take some. Hector stood on one side, the chief on the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... boys!" shouted I. The next moment a sensation of numbness and death seized me, and I lay like a corpse ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enough on reaching the inn to creep into bed. In spite of his cross-country run he was chilled through. Little shivers ran down his back, and his hands and feet seemed separated by spaces of numbness from the warmth of his body. The brandy arrived, and he swallowed some eagerly; but it had little effect on his chilly apathy. The dinner-bell clanged below. Flint heard it, but he paid no heed to the summons. He had forgotten what it was to desire food. A blur before his ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... proportions. Nothing can take them away—except time and the weariness of a soul too utterly weary to care any longer. But time works so slowly, and the utter weariness of the soul is often so prolonged before, as it were, the spirit snaps and the blessed numbness of indifference settles down upon our hearts. People who can see have the whole of the wonder of Nature working for them in their woe. It is hard to feel utterly crushed and broken before a wide expanse of mountain, moorland, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... a block or two when, through her numbness, crept a dim little shadow of dread. At first it was nothing more than an inner suggestion to hasten her steps, but gradually it became a conscious impulse to outstrip something or some one behind her—some one or something whose ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... stoicism; Chinamen casting stolid, slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with the result that they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking coma, with glazed, unseeing eyes, and dragging feet; other white men who summoned up a mockery of bravado and uttered poor jests ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... at the head or feet of the others. We covered them with willows and then with the earth. When we buried these thirteen people, some of their relatives refused to attend the services. They manifested an utter indifference about it. The numbness and cold in their physical natures seemed to have reached the soul, and to have crushed out natural feeling and affection. Had I not myself witnessed it, I could not have believed that suffering could produce such terrible results. But so it was. Two others ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... followeth; All these are dead; and we alone Remain to weep for what is gone. What is this thing? thus hurriedly To pass into eternity; To leave the earth so full of mirth; To lose the profit of our birth; 200 To die and be no more; to cease, Having numbness that is not peace. Let us go hence; and, even if thus Death everywhere must go with us, Let us not see the change, but see Those who have ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... always previously despised people who acted on impulse without trying to find out the probable consequences. Therefore she stuck to her self-imposed rule that she would have no contact with the man, even by letter, until she could get over the strange numbness of her emotions toward her husband. Then, gradually but thoroughly, she came out of her trancelike infatuation, until she found it hard to remember that it had ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... thirty-one elephants in a few days' shooting. My mishap on the first day had much destroyed the pleasure of the sport, as the exercise was too much for my wounded leg, which did not recover from the feeling of numbness ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... delight Withered from mine! O for a desert sea, The cold sun flashing on the sailing icebergs! Where I might cry aloud on God, until My soul burst forth upon the wings of pain, And fled to him. A numbness as of death Infolds me. As in sleep I walk. I live, But my dull soul can hardly keep awake. Yet God is here as on the mountain-top, Or on the desert sea, or lonely isle; And I should know him here, if Lilia loved me, As once I thought she did. But can I blame her? The change has been too much ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... when I this poem read, No vessel but an ass's head Such frigid fustian could contain; I mean, the head without the brain. The cold conceits, the chilling thoughts, Went down like stupifying draughts; I found my head begin to swim, A numbness crept through every limb. In haste, with imprecations dire, I threw the volume in the fire; When, (who could think?) though cold as ice, It burnt to ashes in a trice. How could I more enhance its fame? Though born in snow, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... all he saw almost indifferently, feeling little, caring little. It was as if a mental and spiritual numbness had possession of every faculty except the manual; he felt at home only while he was working for that short half-hour in the shed. He was not at ease here among this merry careless crowd. He stopped to look in at the windows of a large fine shop for fruits and groceries; he glanced ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... was gone, she felt, as at first, a painful numbness of exaltation. Almo was now certainly ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... "Nothing matters, because I am in an abnormal condition, and while I remain in this condition nothing can really matter to me." Surface and depths were in contradiction, yet she was not even fully aware of that. A numbness held her, and yet she ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... smiling over the world's rim Billy's little son was born alive and unblemished and Billy's wife crept back from the Valley of the Shadow and smiled a bit into Billy's white, stricken face. And Billy looked deep down into the brown eyes of the girl and the terrible numbness went out of his muscles and the icy hardness from around his heart and he slipped out into the morning world to thank the Great Spirit that moved it for His mercy and wonderful gift. He just stood on his front doorstep and, looking about his pretty home and remembering the miracle ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... found Ruth strangely quiet, with a manner which was not indifference to her imminent marriage, but which seemed more like numbness. ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... profit; nothing but the pleasure itself of composition—an enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and perhaps essential to the merit of the work in hand, but which, in the long run, will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart, or the numbness out of his fingers. To this total lack of sympathy, at the age when his mind would naturally have been most effervescent, the public owe it (and it is certainly an effect not to be regretted, on either part), that the author can show nothing for the thought and industry of that portion ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... which he took several flasks, sponges, a little silver vase with a long curved tube, and also several instruments, one of which seemed very keen. I watched my master closely, feeling an inexplicable numbness gradually creeping over me. My heavy eye-lids fell once or twice in spite of myself. I had been seated on my bed of straw, to which I was still chained; but now I was compelled to lean my head against the wall, so heavy had it grown. Noticing the effect ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... me. The rest of my body stood up well to this assault but every few seconds I had the eerie sensation that I was back in my old body, a ghostly superimposition on the living protoplast, as the spinal chord projected its agony outward. Finally the pain subsided, succeeded by a blank numbness. ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... been few times in my life in which speech was impossible, but during the quarter of an hour it took us to reach home words would not come, and numbness possessed my body. A world of possibilities, a world I did not know, seemed suddenly revealing itself, and at its dark depths and sinister shadows I was frightened, and more than frightened. Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... that afternoon he had suddenly developed acute neuralgia of the right side of the head, and this had been followed almost immediately by twitching and numbness of the left arm. Thenard had been summoned and he had diagnosed pressure on the brain, or, at least, irritation from depressed bone, due ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... and whimsically shot into his mind the memory- picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was sensationless between his ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... his will lapse, and surrendered to the sleepy numbness which assailed his brain in waves. He was riding without support by this time, but it was an automatic effort. There was no more real life in him than in a dummy figure. It was not the effect of the blow. It was rather the long exposure and the over-exertion of nerves and mind and body ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... to sip the coffee, and between the heat of the fire and that of the coffee, his blood began to course more freely. All the numbness passed from his brain and with it passed the sense of despair that had been expressed in his gesture, and a sudden hope ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... this very hag were she in another form? Glancing round in the deepening twilight, Balder fancied the dark, still plants and tropic shrubs assumed demoniac forms, bending and crowding about him. The old witch yonder was muttering some infernal spell; already he felt numbness in his limbs, dizziness ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... I seem, I can endure some privations better than you could. Thus hunger produces in me a sort of numbness, which leaves me very feeble—but for you, robust and full of life, hunger is fury, is madness. Alas! you must remember how many times I have seen you suffering from those painful attacks, when work failed us in our wretched garret, and we could not even earn our four francs a week—so that we had ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the cold of the north or of high altitudes. This is the realm of the sleeping-bag, the joy of which is another story. More than once I have had to use a hammock at high levels, since there was nothing else at hand; and the numbness of the Arctic was mine. Every mesh seemed to invite a separate draught. The winds of heaven—all four—played unceasingly upon me, and I became in due time a swaying mummy of ice. It was my delusion that ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... came on; the house was hushed; and Viola, slowly awakened from the numbness and torpor which had usurped her faculties, tossed to and fro on her couch, restless and perturbed. The stillness became intolerable; yet more intolerable the sound that alone broke it, the voice of the clock, knelling moment after moment to its grave. The moments, at last, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... by the good tobacco and the prolonged murmur of the spring and creek. By degrees, the sense of his own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs of thought moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a point, the animal in him stretched itself, purring. A delightful numbness invaded his mind and his body. He was not asleep, he was not awake, stupefied merely, lapsing back to the state of the faun, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of the mystic element in external nature has had its fluctuations in most ages and climes, and not least so in England. Marvel, in his day, felt the numbness creeping on that comes of divorce from nature, and uttered his plaint ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... work, undertaking. tem pest: storm. tem ple: a kind of church. thriv ing: prospering, succeeding. tid ings: news. till ing: cultivating. tim id ly: shyly. tink er ing: mending. tithing man (tith): officer who enforced good behavior. tor por: numbness, dullness. tread: step. tri als: efforts, attempts. troop: an ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... with the Shahnameh. What follows exhibits hardly any signs of either growth or decay. The language becomes more and more encumbered with foreign words; but the grammar seems to have arrived at its lowest ebb, and withstands further change. From this state of grammatical numbness, languages recover by a secondary formation, which grows up slowly and imperceptibly at first in the speech of the people; till at last the reviving spirit rises upwards, and sweeps away, like the waters in spring, the frozen surface of an effete ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... almost lost consciousness of his presence. Her senses were cold and deadened—it was as if her own heart had stopped beating along with Pierrot's. What she saw in the factor's face dragged her out of the numbness of her grief back into the shadow of her own peril. He was standing over her. In his face there was no pity, nothing of horror at what he had done—only an insane exultation as he looked—not at Pierrot's dead body, but at her. He put out a hand, and ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... Hirlaji still bothered him; kneeling in the gathering darkness he finally isolated it in his mind. It was their hopelessness, the numbness that had crept over them through the centuries. No purpose? But they had lived in peace for thousands of years. No, their death was not merely one of decadence ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... passing feeling of sentimentality; but it explained nothing, defined nothing, only touched her as a breeze does a flower, and floated away. The dreamy warmth of the fire absorbed her more direct feelings, and for some moments she dozed in a haze of dim sensuousness and emotive numbness. As in a dusky glass, she saw herself a tender, loving, but unhappy woman; by her side were her querulous husband and her kindly-minded mother-in-law, and then there was a phantom she could not determine, and behind it something into which she could not ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the muscles between revolutions of the pedals, nor any let up on the nervous and muscular strain while the speed lasts. The heart is far more taxed than one realizes at the moment, and that species of tingling or numbness in the nerves and muscles which often results is only a sign that they have both ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... then," asks a wise man, "may not amulets or charms, by their secret influence, produce the effects ascribed to them? Who can comprehend by what impenetrable means the bite of a mad dog produces hydrophobia? Why does the touch of a torpedo induce numbness? When these causes and effects are explained," he concludes, "so may the virtue of amulets be accounted for." Ancient philosophers laid it down, as a proof of ignorance, the condemnation of a science not easily understood. In this way the advocates ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... feet to react against the numbness, to discover whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and she could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. Her fears assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally, and ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
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