"Complicating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the least. He had supposed all the time that Hilma took his meaning. His old suspicion that she was trying to get a hold on him stirred again for a moment. There was no good of such talk as that. Always these feemale girls seemed crazy to get married, bent on complicating the situation. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... along the square, was nearly empty. He found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... policy of the powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the greatest change of all, the substitution for the ambitious Churchman of old, with a coat of mail under his rochet, of the absolute and impracticable preacher who gave no dispensations ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... girder? Or what will happen if we take two girders away? Will the stone fall or not? These questions belong to the domain of practical reasoning because to take a girder away, or else introduce fresh ones, lies within the power of the disputants. But no practical men would think of complicating the discussion by calculating what would happen if they suspended the action of gravitation, in which case the stone would need no support whatever; for to suspend the action of gravitation is within the power of nobody. If two men are debating in the middle of the night at midsummer ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... generations just preceding. Physically and nervously, the woman of to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother and her mother's mother. The high tension of modern life and the complicating of woman's everyday existence have doubtless contributed to this result. And who of us can say, until a careful scientific investigation is made, how much the rapid development of tuberculosis and ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... present generation. By going back to the old French legend and to J. Bedier's book Le roman de Tristan et Yseult (1900), the author was able to present that most tragic of all love-stories from a different angle. By complicating the plot through the introduction of the second Isolde, jealousy became the secondary, though hardly less powerful theme. This deviation from the comparatively simple plot of the German story is of course more difficult of comprehension upon the stage. It is not easy to convince an audience that ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... society. They have really nothing of their own. They merely manage property for the benefit of others. Capitalists who become such through trading in money are a temporarily necessary evil. They may not be evil at all if their money goes to production. If their money goes to complicating distribution—to raising barriers between the producer and the consumer—then they are evil capitalists and they will pass away when money is better adjusted to work; and money will become better adjusted to work when it is fully realized that through work and work alone may health, wealth, ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... likely to be afforded by any electoral arrangement, I am sorry to say. We are unable however to countenance the creation in a permanent form of a nominated Second Chamber. But in view of the position of native affairs, in view of the disadvantage of complicating the elections, to which all classes in the Transvaal have been so long looking forward, and most particularly because of the extra delays that would be involved in the creation of a new elective body, the Cabinet have resolved for this Parliament only, and as a purely ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... aunt off; but as they were entering the arbour a plan for further complicating matters popped into her head, and ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... sense of [Greek: gati], in exchange for, which is capable of complicating all the others I have mentioned; likewise there are four meanings for the verb [Greek: neo], which means in turn to go, to flow, to thread or weave, to heap. There is more still.... And notice, please, that I have not at my disposition ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... Yet the evil of slavery continued its fatal gnawing at the heart of the nation. By 1855-6 the old question was up again in much the same form. The atmosphere was clouded, the black shroud of the approaching storm already discernible on the horizon. A hundred minor problems united in complicating the discussion of the one all-important thing. Another leader was wanted to set the battle in array, to mark out the lines of conflict. Webster and Calhoun were gone, but another was to come to preserve "liberty and union, one and inseparable." This man was Abraham Lincoln, and ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... chairman. When he stopped gyrating, and nodded, Miss Blunt came to the edge of the platform, and held up her hand as if determined to stem this tide of unfavourable comment upon the dreadful women who were complicating the Election ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... for our calculation. The Rob Roy had been carried by two tides; one this way, the other that. She had sailed on three different tacks, that is, in various angular directions, and with different speeds, and these complicating forces had acted for times very uncertain. Where is she now? an all-important question for settling the start point in a night cruise, and on a ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... incline rather to an accidental corruption of Sichem into Sychar, although he feels the great difficulties in the way of such an explanation. Ewald condemns the "Talmudische Studien" of Delitzsch as generally more complicating than clearing up difficulties, and his views as commonly incorrect, and, whilst agreeing with him that Sychar cannot be the same place as Sichem, he points out that the site of the valley of the well of the Talmud is certainly doubtful. [33:2] He explains his own views, however, more ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... likely to prejudice his case, Lane went on recruiting for his brigade. Indeed, he commended himself to Fremont, who, in his capacity as major-general of volunteers and in charge of the Western Military District, assigned him to duty in Kansas, thus greatly complicating an already delicate situation and immeasurably heaping up difficulties, embarrassments, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... one's own need, at the best, would have seemed to be but some trick for not communicating it. The effect of a reserve so merely, so meanly defensive would in most cases, beyond question, sufficiently discredit the cause; wherefore, though it was complicating to be perpetually treated as an infinite agent, the outrage was not the greatest of which a brave man might complain. Complaint, besides, was a luxury, and he dreaded the imputation of greed. The other, the constant imputation, that of being able to "do," would have no ground ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise and gives his appetites ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... time, if we regard these problems as similar in nature to the problems that have been presented to our predecessors. Because always, in dealing with the problems of our own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondary issues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largely clouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catch sight of the underlying principle and study it apart from any difficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that same ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... of Great Britain in claiming the island at this time is considered of the highest importance, as it is feared that it may have been claimed merely for the sake of complicating ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... This was complicating matters, and making things interesting indeed. The Indians, leaving the boys their guns loaded with ball, and enjoining perfect silence upon them, took up their own weapons and noiselessly withdrew. So gloriously bright was the night in that land where fogs and mists are almost unknown, and ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... expected to marry each other. In complete but blissful ignorance that the other existed, the young legatees fell in love with persons unmentioned in the will and performed the highly commendable but exceedingly complicating act of matrimony. This emergency, it is humane to suspect, had not revealed itself to ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... but, somehow, before he was fully aware of what he was saying, he had begun to pour into Major Selby's sympathetic ears the story of his romance. Encouraged by the other's kindly receptiveness, he had told him all—his love for Jill, his hopes that some day it might be returned, the difficulties complicating the situation owing to the known prejudices of Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim concerning girls who formed the personnel of musical comedy ensembles. To all these outpourings Major Selby had listened with keen attention, and finally had ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... for a long time but we didn't come to anything in the end. There's something mystical about the proud man, in your sense. Perhaps you are right from your point of view, but if you take the matter simply, without complicating it, then what pride can there be, what sense can there be in it, if a man is imperfectly made, physiologically speaking, if in the vast majority of cases he is coarse and stupid and deeply unhappy? We must stop admiring one another. We must ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... now complicating themselves on the head of poor Daniel Thwaite. The packet which the Countess addressed to him did not reach him in London, but was forwarded after him down to Cumberland, whither he had hurried on receipt of news from Keswick that his father was like to die. The old man had fallen in a fit, ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... complexity of its tendencies. But instead of seizing these in some central and vital point, and setting them forth in a work whose very simplicity would conceal its depth from most readers, Gutzkow has adopted the easier and more clumsy method of multiplying his characters and complicating the actions of his drama. Thus it is hardly possible for it not to be tedious and a failure. But we can speak of it more fairly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... equipment; most of these advances take place in OECD nations; only a small portion of non-OECD countries have succeeded in rapidly adjusting to these technological forces; the accelerated development of new industrial (and agricultural) technology is complicating already grim ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to be a pony it immediately became a span, for she never moved without Hans. If the children chose Hans for the father-bird, Ella intrusively and suffragistically fluttered into the nest, too, sadly complicating the family arrangements. They seldom spoke, but sat stolidly beside each other, laying the ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... advance the solution of the important problem of which, as is only natural, my mind is full. I have learnt nothing more, unless it be the immensity of the sacrifice which God required of me. A thousand painful details which I had never thought of have cropped up, with the effect of complicating the situation, and of showing me that the course dictated me by my conscience opened up a future of endless trouble. I should have to enter into long and painful details to make you understand exactly what I mean; and it must suffice if I tell you ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... for all. Why confine oneself by the bonds which others had invented, tyrannizing over the future of the men who were to come after them? The dead, ever the accursed dead, trying to meddle in everything, complicating our existence! ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a lemon-crested cockatoo, reproduced the voices of little hungry pigs. He lived indoors on a stand over a tray, with a chain round one leg, and was very clever at mounting and descending by the combined use of beak and claws, without complicating himself with his chain. He got loose one day, and ascended one of the chestnut trees, and a volunteer went up after him by a ladder. Cocky resented his interference, flew at him and bit his finger to the bone. His beak was a very powerful weapon, and, until I made him a new tray with a zinc-covered ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... number of doubtful and even suspicious reports of the bird's occurrence outside of these boundaries, it is generally agreed by the soundest observers that its travels do not extend much north of the city of York, or much west of a line drawn through Exeter and Birmingham. By way of complicating the argument, we know, on good authority, that the nightingale's range is equally peculiar elsewhere; and that, whereas it likewise shuns the departments in the extreme west of France, it occurs all over the Peninsula, a region extending considerably farther into the sunset than either ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... single chamber legislature and was to be selected or nominated rather than elected. This damned it right away from the democratic standpoint, and the defence of The Times that "the system of delegations would probably have the advantage of being the simplest inasmuch as it would avoid complicating the electoral machinery" was not very forceful. The supreme test to be applied to any plan of Irish Government is whether it provides, beyond yea or nay, for the absolute unity of Ireland as one distinct nation. ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... tell me why you invented all this tricky yarn, complicating it by bringing in the sham journey ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... feed—Simeon Holly was not worrying about that part any longer. Crops showed good promise, and all ready in the bank even now was the necessary money to cover the dreaded note, due the last of August. The complicating elements in regard to David were of ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... universality of their studies and their knowledge, and that frightfully laborious life of theirs; which may help us to understand the habits and ways of a semi-barbarous society, but can never exist in ours. He does not see, the innocent dreamer, that civilization, by strangely complicating all social conditions, absorbs for business, for interests, for pleasures, thrice as much time as a less advanced society required for the same purposes. Look at the savage in his hut; he hasn't anything to do. Whereas ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Sociology." The first of these volumes presents a statement of the several sets of factors entering into social phenomena. These factors are, first, human ideas and feelings considered in their necessary order of evolution; secondly, surrounding natural conditions; and, thirdly, those ever-complicating conditions to which society itself gives origin. Under the caption "The Inductions of Sociology," are set forth the general facts, structural and functional, gathered from a survey of societies and their changes; in other words, the empirical generalizations that are arrived at by comparing different ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... sufficiently surprising without the introduction of complicating contradictions, becomes quite mysterious when compared with the accounts given by Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet and Francois Peron, the joint authors of the official history of the French voyage. It is astonishing in itself, because a vessel sent out on a voyage of exploration ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... individualism. This factor after all, however, was economic. The motives prompting the thousands of negroes were not always the same, not even in the case of close neighbors. As a means of making intelligible these complicating factors it is necessary to watch the process as it affected the several migrants. The economic motive stands among the foremost reasons for the decision of the group to leave the South. There are several ways of arriving at a conclusion regarding the economic ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... proportional representation. Count Goblet d'Alviella states that "all the objections that were brought against the system before its introduction have been set at naught. The proportional method instead of complicating, as was foretold, both the voting and the counting, has worked with greater ease than the old one. The electors understood at once what they were to do, and the counters made fewer mistakes than before." Wurtemberg furnishes another ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... had started from the same place, we would of course overtake them in just the number of days they had the start of us, since the distance covered at any constant positive acceleration is proportional to the square of the time elapsed. However, there are several complicating factors in the actual situation. We started out not only twenty-nine days behind them, but also a matter of five hundred thousand light-years of distance. It will take us quite a while to get to their starting-point. I can't tell even that very close, as we will probably ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... amount of moisture in the ground, the state of the soil in reference to the all-important question of whether it carries or not, the temperature of the air, and last, but not by any means least, the condition of the quarry, be it fox, stag, or hare, are all questions of vital importance, complicating matters and preventing a solution of ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Servia. This declaration of war, complicating forty-eight hours after the situation brought about by the rupture of diplomatic relations, lent color to the assumption that there had been a premeditated plan to make war, a systematic programme for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... increases it causes awkward, straddling, dragging movement of the hind limbs, or lameness on the affected side. The spermatic cord often increases at the same time with the testicle, and the inguinal ring being thereby stretched and enlarged, a portion of intestine may escape into the sac, complicating the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... lords, have found out a method of complicating errours which none of their predecessors, however stigmatized for ignorance and absurdity, have hitherto been able to attain; they have been able to reconcile the extremes of folly, and to endanger the publick interest at the same time, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... at the dressing-table, and, seeing the paled face, drew the black brows closer, confronting a complicating truth. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her. As his faculties unfold she adds quality after quality to his list: progressing from hardness and softness to roughness and smoothness, from colour to polish, from simple bodies to composite ones—thus constantly complicating the problem as he gains competence, constantly taxing his attention and memory to a greater extent, constantly maintaining his interest by supplying him with new impressions such as his mind can assimilate, and constantly gratifying him by conquests over such small difficulties ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... debating, can a Civil Constitution of the Clergy be so much as got to paper; and then for getting it into reality? Alas, such Civil Constitution is but an agreement to disagree. It divides France from end to end, with a new split, infinitely complicating all the other splits;—Catholicism, what of it there is left, with the Cant of Catholicism, raging on the one side, and sceptic Heathenism on the other; both, by contradiction , waxing fanatic. What endless jarring, of Refractory ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Praetorian prefect, shortly assumed the title of emperor, and marched against Gallienus, the son and colleague of Valerian, who had been left to direct affairs in the West. But another rival started up in the East. Sapor conceived the idea of complicating the Roman affairs by himself putting forward a pretender; and an obscure citizen of Antioch, a certain Miriades or Cyriades, a refugee in his camp, was invested with the purple, and assumed the title of Caesar. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... not exist, but only the long, lax, and retractable prepuce, that is considered a perfectly physiological condition, the prepuce is liable to cause very distressing and complicating annoyances during the progress of other diseases. The writer has noticed that cases with a thick, leathery, and redundant prepuce, even when perfectly retractable, are more liable to require the use of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... My object would have been as well served if the card had gone no further. But my infernal sense of humour prompted me to make a bid for complicating the mystery. I dropped my arm, of course, as Jesson turned to her, and it never occurred to Salome that the hand which had placed the card beside her was any other than that of her neighbour on the left, Jesson. Before she could address ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer |
