"Finality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friendship and a short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm of restful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man's side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... up—and us," retorted the sandy-haired man, with finality. "I was raised East, and I know the sort of doin's they hanker after. To-morrow mornin' we'll begin. I'll show you; you'll see," he finished in a louder tone, as Teresa's clanging supper bell sent them in a stampede ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... argue that point. She was gone.... And she had carefully refrained from slamming the door. Somehow that trifling act of restraint impressed him with a sense of finality oddly ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... them also. His manner proved it. As soon as you mentioned shorthand he became suspicious and showed uneasiness and anger. I tell you again," with an air, of finality, "he's your man." ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... Something in the finality of her words seemed to him curiously eloquent of her state of mind. She did not move on. She seemed, indeed, to have the air of one anxious to say more. In that ruthless light, the advantages of her elegant clothes and graceful carriage were suddenly stripped away from her. She was the ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with a tone of finality, speaking through strains of the "Wild, Wild Women"—"optimism is the opening out of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God, it is a ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... supreme object of the individual love and devotion should be humanity. The rational demonstration of the truth of this system is sought in the course of history, which is claimed to prove Positivism the finality of social evolution. You will find anything else you want to know about it in the books. I dare say you will not be converted; but if you were nineteen instead of twice that, with Hippolyte Regnier to indoctrinate you, I fancy the result ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... room. I wouldn't let it trouble you any. It is a fine charity, and this is such a good place for a child to play. Isabel will take one for a week, if I will, and I said I would. There is just time, before I go away," Phebe said with an air of finality which would have ended the subject, had it not been ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... and tell your wife that I'm a bold, bad man and I won't come." Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality. ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... seemed to him the prototype of all that was gentle and lovable, possessed a strength of character incredible in one of her years and appearance. He realized that he was only distressing her by his presence. The timidity of her manner was no sign of weakness, and there was finality even in that earnest look which ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of intellectual recreation on a work of portentous dullness. Therefor the literary audience has its sense of humour—they amused themselves for a while by recommending the book to their friends, and the sales crept steadily up to four thousand, and there stayed with an unmistakable air of finality. If the book had had any real literary merit its life would have started at that point, for the weary comments of reviewers and the strident outcries of publishers tend to obscure rather than reveal the permanent value of ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... should affect an equal hesitation. Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's place in literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and it tries to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can manage ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... took on a yellow tinge as she faced him. She must have sensed the finality of his tone, the well-bred insolence that ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... discourse, especially in the harmonic side of it, Wagner has made very great variations from the practices of his predecessors, even the most free of the instrumental writers—Schumann. His modulations are carried into more remote keys, and the tempered scale is taken as a finality of our tonal system. All the keys are brought near, as he treats them, and in any key any chord whatever can be introduced without effecting a modulation, provided it be so managed that the sense of tonality ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regarded as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to the flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... The finality in her voice belied her face, which beamed without a ray of stubbornness or perversity. He did not know how to interpret her; but he felt that he had begun wrong. He half regretted that he had ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... ask some one else, Miss Grandis. You know that I do not pretend to be kind," Olga interrupted, not rudely but with finality. ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... before Sunday came. The spirit of the future, with the charm of the unknown, put up her lips instead. Old Jolyon was not restless now, and paid no visits to the log, because she was coming to lunch. There is wonderful finality about a meal; it removes a world of doubts, for no one misses meals except for reasons beyond control. He played many games with Holly on the lawn, pitching them up to her who was batting so as to be ready to bowl to Jolly in the holidays. For she was not a Forsyte, but Jolly was—and Forsytes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... unchanged, then! This time he recognized the note of finality in her tone. All the time and thought he had given to this matter were wasted. He had failed, and he knew why. He seldom permitted himself the luxury of anger, but he felt all the poison of bitter hatred stirring within him at that moment, and craving for some sort of expression. There was nothing ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... demeanor gave no adequate expression. From some ancestral source she had derived a strain of the passive fatalism by which alone one can submit uncomplainingly to the inevitable. By the same token, when once a thing had been decided, it became with her a finality, which only some extraordinary stress of emotion could disturb. She had acquiesced in her brother's plan; for her there was no withdrawing; her homesickness was an incidental thing which must be endured, as patiently ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... father, with a finality in his tone that caused Daphne to go with him meekly, if unwillingly; "Daphne must return ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... these among the statutes of Table X, of which all but one item come from Cicero's discussion of Sacred Law in his De Legibus, II. 23. 58-24. 61, in the concluding portion of which Cicero seems to speak with some finality that he has given all the regulations regarding religion found in the Twelve Tables. Moreover these two rules come from Gaius, who flourished more than two centuries after Cicero. But if every Supplementary Law resembling the subject-matter ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... Margery. He seemed to bear it better after he knew you. I shall not feel as if they were quite gone away from me while I can talk to you about them. You will spare an hour now and then to come and sit with me?" She looked round the plain, respectable little room with a quiet finality. "I am too old and tired to live ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ranger. That was his rebuff to Duane—his slap in the face to an interfering ranger service. If Longstreth was crooked he certainly had magnificent nerve. Duane almost decided he was above suspicion. But his nonchalance, his air of finality, his authoritative assurance—these to Duane's keen and practiced eyes were in significant contrast to a certain tenseness of line about his mouth and a slow paling of his olive skin. In that momentary lull Duane's scrutiny of Longstreth ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... of putting his finger on weak spots and causing irritation that resulted in action. As on two previous occasions, the pair stopped at Chuan Kai's Oriental Eating Palace, and there Bassett gave voice to what he considered as a finality. ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... conversation had ceased to interest him. So, evidently, had his letters, for he thrust them from him with an air of finality as he rose to his feet and glanced at his watch. It was not yet very late, but with the waning of summer the days were growing perceptibly shorter and the light in the office where the two men were talking ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory. Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal with lawyers and land-grabbers. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... picture which Hinduism has drawn of the finality of life to its followers? After the weary fugue of births and rebirths, with its interludes of many heavens and hells, the "self" passes on into final union with the Divine Soul. It loses all consciousness and ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... as human infallibility. There is no finality in human knowledge and human progress. Fixed authority in matters of knowledge or belief is an ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... a somewhat imposing residence, on the outskirts of the city, Burns announced: "Can't take you in till I've made this call," and stopped his engine with a finality which seemed to indicate that he should be in no haste to start ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... Dimension that people talk of, but that fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it. The explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though I tried honestly I couldn't get the hang of it. My mathematics stopped with desperate finality just as he ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... a ring of finality in her tone that struck dismay to Alan's heart. He prepared to entreat and argue, but before he could utter a word, the boughs behind them parted and Captain Anthony ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to thrust at the inflated pretensions of the established reviews, and, though the animus of rivalry might be suspected of playing its part, the blows usually struck home. There is an air of absolute finality about Lockhart's "Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England," and his characterization of Jeffrey in this article is a bold anticipation of the judgment of posterity.[42] The editor of the London Magazine[43] writes with equal ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was never to see again. He was thinking of his ride through the South to Mobile, of the misery in stubborn heroism, of the suffering everywhere, matching that in the dreary fever camp of the Old Brigade. He was thinking of all the beautiful Southland torn and ravaged and of the lowering cloud of finality. Of the Army of Northern Virginia so hard pressed; of the doom of Surrender, a knell already sounded, perhaps. Never had Jacqueline seen such bitterness on a human face. It was a man's bitterness. And almost a desperado's. At least there was the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... time a controversy raged as to whether sex is determined at the time of fertilization, before or after. Biologists now generally prefer to say that a fertilized egg is "predisposed" to maleness or femaleness, instead of "determined." The word "determined" suggests finality, whereas the embryo appears to have in the beginning only a strong tendency or predisposition toward one sex type or the other. It is now quite commonly believed that this predisposition arises from the quantity rather than the quality ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... slight tightness of the chest before I gave out the first course of my first command to the silent night, heavy with dew and sparkling with stars. There was a finality in the act committing me to the endless vigilance of my ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... he said. Leaning back, nursing his chin in his hand, he watched her with a gloomy sort of brooding. "You know what it is I'm waiting for. You know I won't go without it." His words came sadly, but doggedly, with a grim finality, as if he gave himself up to the course he was following as something he knew was inevitable. The faintness of despair came over her. Only the narrow table was between them, yet all at once, with the mention of the ring, he seemed a ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... turned and came out on the Ridge Road. He was tired and broken, and resolved to stay in camp until they arrested him. Then perhaps she might have some pity on him. Who was the other man she loved? or had she merely said that to give finality to her refusal? In his present mood he pictured the worst, and imagined her the wife of some neighboring farmer—perhaps even of Stoliker. These country girls, he said to himself, never believed a man ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... allowance for your education during your good behavior. He made me the judge. I'm your trustee and I can't conscientiously let you have any more money to drink up and gamble with. It's over and done with." He rapped with an air of finality on his desk ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... Morley is astute enough to be ready to take what he can get. 'We do wrong,' he said, writing after the breakdown of the Kilmainham Treaty, 'in being content with nothing short of perfection and finality. If we see our way to the next step, that is enough.' 'Perfection' in Irish affairs would perhaps be that Irish opinion should be organized in a convention at Dublin, and then, tempered by a full course of revolution, should come to the conclusion, that the Union after all was the best thing ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... disappeared. There was too much in his mind to admit of expressing it, but, even had he felt conversational, there was a finality about his dismissal that left no opening. He went away charged with a grim determination. Here was the chance he had been ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... will is in sort a preliminary death. Making hers, Charity felt herself already gone, and looked back at life with a finality as from beyond the grave. It was a frightful thing to review her journey ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... and his stepfather received the news of Powers' marriage with many misgivings and rebuked him severely for having made such a choice, finally vowing that they disowned him and never wanted to see him again. With a finality not at all disconsolate John Powers set about to polish his Indian wife for the polite society of his mother, so he sent her to school, ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... note of this in his pocket-book with an air of finality, and asked Miss Heredith to see that the servants were sent to the library one by one, to be questioned. Miss Heredith said she would arrange it with the housekeeper, and was then politely escorted to ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... might say, 'resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.' 'Even so,' I make reply,—'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... turned when he looked at Joan's face. Was its unusual gravity due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling—that she, too, had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so. He believed so. She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less triumphantly irresponsible. She sat, like a child, with her hands in her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they were the emotions of love—the sense of the splendour of love, the headlong passion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is, there is ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... regard to a divine world. Confess, Tournebroche, my boy, that acts the most reprehensible in the opinion of men can lead to a good end, and do not try to reconcile the justice of men with the justice of God, which alone is just, not in our sense but with finality. And now, my boy, you'll greatly oblige me by looking into Vossius for the signification of five or six rather obscure words which the Panopolitan employs, and wherewith one has to do battle in the darkness of that insidious manner which astonished ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... mantelpiece, not a plate in a rack, but had come there by the design of her brain. Without possessing much artistic taste, Leonora had an extraordinary talent for domestic equipment, organisation, and management. She was so interested in her home, so exacting in her ideals, that she could never reach finality; the place went through a constant succession of improvements; its comfort and its attractiveness were always on the increase. And the result was so striking that her supremacy in the woman's craft ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... are, could have refused nothing. But Fitzhugh would not come out of his feather-bed. And when madame herself came, looking like a princess even at that early hour, he only pulled the bedclothes a little higher with an air of finality. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is the title-page of a treatise on The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... friend of Clay, became President; the Cabinet was reorganized, Webster becoming Secretary of State. One by one during the month of August all the features of the "Omnibus Bill" became law. The great majority of the Southerners indicated their ready acceptance of the compromise as a "finality"; and radicals like Jefferson Davis, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William L. Yancey retired from public life, either voluntarily or by compulsion of the people. The big cities of the East and the Northwest celebrated the passage of the crisis with ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... Regulation 710.1 says that any orbital debris constituting a demonstrable menace to navigation may be destroyed at the discretion of this office." He brushed his hands together with finality. ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... origin. These are actual, visual facts, as is the sunrise on the Solstice. Around these arises a clamour of conflicting claims, each possibly containing much of real importance, each probably expressing some clue to guide the future worker on his way, but none containing that element of finality which is once and for all time to quell the storm of controversy which has ever raged about this ancient ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... less as he ushered his visitor out, he felt that there was a certain finality about the action. It was—as far as his private feelings were concerned—the old man's moral exit ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the tone of a man who knows it's all wrong—"all right; but the time 'll come when you'll wish I'd—You ain't doin' the girl enough good to make up for the harm you're doin' yourself." He broke off again, and said in a tone of finality: "I'm done. I'm all through, and I c'n see you're through with Jim Hartley. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... family and friends took on themselves the means they thought most likely to make that disappearance a finality." ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... critic, whether of music, the plastic arts, of poetry or fiction or philosophy, he is of those who never attain finality; but he is always stimulating, provocative of thought, and by virtue of this quality, not invariably possessed by critics, he is entitled to a distinctive place ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... prefer to take his word." Stanton's tone of overbearing finality made Nancy clench her hands with rage. She turned ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... afterwards, not as a thing that hurt her, but as an unpleasant incident of the day, like the rudeness of a stranger, and yet not to be forgotten. It had the importance of extreme finality; his answer ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... Paige, with an accent of finality. "That is," he added, with the air of one who observes a courteous form, "unless some of the grand jurors wish to ask ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... land here was higher and dry, and black muck of the same depth as on the drowned land to the south. Payne paddled back to Deer Hammock in silence. Just as they were about to land he drove his paddle into the bottom with a gesture of finality. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... call it a mighty smart performance!" cried Hope in a tone of finality which brought a hearty ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... flashlight tested the flaccid neck by bending the head to one side and back sharply. He ended this inspection by letting the head fall back to the moist earth. It landed with a thud of finality. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... back to his desk, tore from the pad before him the piece of paper on which he had been scrawling, crushed it, and tossed it into the wastebasket with an air of finality. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... particular volume before me is called The War Lord of Mars (METHUEN). I may add that it closes with the heroic Carter hailed as Jeddak of Jeddaks, which sounds eminently satisfactory, though without conveying any definite promise of finality. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... just that when Hiram said it. There was now in Tweet's question a tone of finality. Hiram felt that his reply would end the matter. Swiftly his mind grasped for a judicious rejoinder and settled on "No." He could not bring himself to part with this semblance of friendship ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... "Enough," for a finality knocking the ashes from his pipe, "we talk and keep talking, and still stand where we did. What do you say for a walk? My arm, and let's a turn. They are to have dancing on the hurricane-deck to-night. I shall fling them off a Scotch jig, while, to save the pieces, you hold my loose ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so—the rest is silence, and what of work we may still ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... mystically,—telling their own tales under feigned names, and extracting something of a bitter sweetness out of the sadness of their own romance. But a man, when he has been rejected,—rejected with a finality that is acknowledged by himself,—is unwilling to speak or hear a word upon the subject, and would willingly wash the episode out from his heart if it ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... Bellews with finality. "She's Mahon-controlled, but she hasn't got what it takes to go crazy. A Mahon unit fixes a machine so it can loaf and be a permanent dynamic system that can keep acquired habits of operatin'. It can take trainin'. It can get ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... in ordinary thought and speech, cannot finally be maintained In morality—and this is vital to its character—everything is both means and end, and so neither in distinction or separation, and all thinking about it which presupposes the finality of this distinction wanders into misconception and error. The thinking which really matters in conduct is not a thinking which imaginatively forecasts ideals which promise to fulfil desire, or calculates means to their attainment—that is sometimes useful, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... They were the only visible and positive evidence of the doctor's calling in life, and when I knew him better in after years, I discovered that they were the only drugs he admitted to a place in the profession of healing. To the day of his death, he administered these alternatives with a high finality and an imposing presence. It was told of him that he considered but one symptom, and this he discovered with his hand on the patient's pulse and his eyes on a big loud-ticking watch in a hunting case. If the pulse was quick, he ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... friend, Elizabeth"—there was a sad finality about Malcolm's tone that made Elizabeth ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... us to be tidy, we've just got to be," said Nancy with finality, and Josephine and Jane were summoned to help eat the last of Judith's chocolates, and lend their brains to a scheme "for furthering extreme and painful neatness," as ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought he was an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher up than he was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and that man's secretary and his own had determined all the details, and he didn't count at all. He was a pawn in the hands of firm-partners and assorted secretaries. "Let me know what my job's to be and ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... pretension of trying this question over again: he reminded himself that his ambiguity was subjective, as the philosophers said; the result of a mood which in due course would be at the mercy of another mood. It made him curse, and cursing, as a finality, lacked firmness—one had to drive in posts somewhere under. The greatest time to do one's work was when it didn't seem worth doing, for then one gave it a brilliant chance, that of resisting the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... method of checking the current of the melodic phrase with such emphasis and determination as to convey the impression of finality; either absolute finality, as we observe it at the very end of a composition, or such relative finality as is necessary for the completion of some independent section of the piece,—conclusive as far as that section is concerned, though not precluding the addition of other sections to this, ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... hour for his peace of mind and his fame, Dor decided to leave illustration and become a historic painter. He evidently regarded genius as a Pandora's gift, an all-embracing finality, an endowment that could neither be worsened nor bettered, being complete ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... wherever, in constructing your barrier, you employ ignorant engineers, who have not duly calculated the depth and velocity of the current; whenever you raise your dam to such a height that no flood will carry away the waste waters; whenever you talk of finality to the torrent, saying, thus long shalt thou flow, and no longer; whenever you put upon your power a larger wheel than it can turn—you are slowly but surely preparing for that flood which will overwhelm your work, destroy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... words, hastily came up to the priest, "What were you so glibly holding forth?" he inquired. "All I could hear were a lot of hao liao (excellent, finality.") ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... in speaking, the rhythm or measure of verses, song or dance. In music, the word is used of the closing chords of a musical phrase, which succeed one another in such a way as to produce, first an expectation or suspense, and then an impression of finality, indicating also the key strongly. "Cadenza," the Italian form of the same word, is used of a free flourish in a vocal or instrumental composition, introduced immediately before the close of a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... punished; and he knew that no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more. As a finality he was obliged to confess that he was a bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and the absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community but the individual himself ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... action unless I invoke its aid," said he. "And that is something I shall never do," he added, with finality. ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the Lambeth Conference." Whether it is a new mind in Lambeth Conferences we need not consider; it is certainly no new mind in the Anglican Church, but is precisely its characteristic attitude of not claiming perfection or finality for itself, but of looking beyond itself to Catholic Christendom, and longing for the time when reunion of the churches which now make up its "broken unity" will enable it to speak with the same voice of authority with which it did in ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... up at him, in dumb sorrowful appeal. She closed the ivory fan, clasping her hands upon it. The unquestioning finality of her patient silence, goaded Jim Airth to madness, and let loose the torrent of his fierce wild protest against ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... than themselves by the nose? Surely that were too much honor for an antagonist to concede to them. More surely still, if a man's intelligence is not proof against deception by inferiors in argument, he can never reach finality in a process of reasoning, and logical proof for him ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... books were gone from the old book-case; the furniture itself was being carried away, the marble-topped table being the last piece left. The woman was washing the parlor floor, slopping on the soapy water with that air of finality that made Ellen Robinson realize that the old home was broken up at last. Grimly she walked into the dining-room, and saw immaculate empty closets and cleanly shining window-panes. As far as the work had progressed ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... he said with finality. "I owe it to the expedition to return as soon as possible. Furthermore, there's the matter of the authorities. We assured the British we would adhere strictly to our one ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a "short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however, "dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather pretentious synonym ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... was over, and Frank was left behind. With awful finality it came to him that there was nothing he could do. It was clear that Phaestra had wanted his pal, needed him—come for him. From the fact that Frank remained behind it was evident that she had succeeded in retaining ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... shut with a note of finality, and Dr. David Moss stared at it gloomily. "I hope so," he said. But nobody ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... the minor events which lead up to it, is scarcely less remarkable as exhibiting in the original author, whoever he was, a sense of art, a sense of finality, the absence of which is the great blot on Romance at large, owing to the natural, the human, but the very inartistic, craving for sequels. As is well known, it was the most difficult thing in the world for a mediaeval romancer to let his subject go. He must needs take it up from generation ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... plunged into the thicket. MacRae did not try to follow. He did not even move. He looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately. Still, he assured himself, it had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood. Betty would never look at him again with that disturbing ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete finality of the moral of Captain Brassbound's Conversion. Of course, it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be smooth and sweet-tempered. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... were beyond words, the concerted effort of four forts, the giant field cannon, machine guns and rifles. My heart stands still when I remember the thundering of those forts, the premeditated destruction, the finality which each boom! bespoke, and the thousands of human beings up there fighting like madmen. The latter, in the wild confusion of fire, battle and the blackness of the night, finished by shooting into each other by mistake as their officers were ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... Without claiming finality for the findings of modern psychology, we can consider some results of the science as established. They are sufficiently well established, at any rate, to provide a starting-point for our investigation. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... detailed and authoritative, embodied the results. It was succeeded, in 1837, by a descriptive volume bearing the imposing title, Der Mond; oder allgemeine vergleichende Selenographie. This summation of knowledge in that branch, though in truth leaving many questions open, had an air of finality which tended to discourage further inquiry.[927] It gave form to a reaction against the sanguine views entertained by Hevelius, Schroeter, Herschel and Gruithuisen as to the possibilities of agreeable residence on the moon, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... time, antiquarianism is perhaps the most futile;" and Mr. Vansittart wiped his mouth with an air of finality. ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... finality.] If your name comes out at the inquest, to talk of anything but retirement from public life is perfect lunacy ... and you ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... pastors to the poor, "Be content with your lot," was a preachment entirely in harmony with the aims of the trading class which, in order to make money, necessarily had to have a multitude of workers to work for it and from whose labor the money, in its finality, had to come. In the very same breath that they advised the poverty-stricken to reverence their superiors and to expect their reward in heaven, the ministers glorified the aggrandizing merchants as God's chosen men who were called upon to do ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... and stood close to Rhoda's chair. He looked down at her, and when he spoke there was a change in his manner. Now there was a finality in his tone that ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... breath sharply. There was the solemnity of finality in his tones. Where was he going? What might happen to him? She realized that the journey he was about to make was in connection with the plot that she and Chief Fleck were seeking to uncover. Evidently he anticipated peril in what ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... I saw that the struggle between us had begun—the struggle against her timidity and conventionality. "No, not tonight." This in her tone for finality. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... assurance that Lois had rejected the idea of remarriage, even for Phil's sake, had not shaken her resolution. Lois's return had dimmed the glow of his second romance. And Nan and Rose had gone to call on her—an act whose finality was not ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... The words came with a slowness that meant finality. "Why need to-morrow or a year from now be different from to-day ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... humanists, as they were called, won the day; and the great reform which they effected was of incalculable service to mankind. But the Nemesis of all reformers is finality; and the reformers of education, like those of religion, fell into the profound, however common, error of mistaking the beginning for the end ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... appeal to a bourgeois, a philistine ideal of beauty, of interest, they do it with a perfection that is pleasing in itself. No one else does it half so well. To minds to which they appeal at all, they appeal with the force of finality; for these they create as well as illustrate the type of what is admirable and lovely. It is as easy to account for their popularity as it is to perceive its transitory quality. But not only is it a mark of limitation to refuse all interest to such a work as, for example, M. Cabanel's "Birth of ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... was much younger than the majority of her father's guests—a man not made but still early in the making, the glamour of promise rather than the stark light of finality upon him. This affected her; for at eighteen, a career, be it never so distinguished, which has reached its zenith, in other words reached the end of its tether, must needs have a touch of melancholy about it. With the heat of going on in your own veins, the sight of one who ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... very willing to fight for him if I can do him good by fighting. The situation is unusual. You probably do not realise what this means to me. Is there to be no finality in your resentment? Honestly I get rather tired ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... procure a factitious support in the country by stimulating a fresh demand for parliamentary reform. A year or two before, he had provoked the dissatisfaction of the "Advanced Liberals," as they called themselves, by insisting on the finality of the Reform Bill of 1832, and by advising his followers "to rest and be thankful" for what had been then obtained. But now he began to advance an opinion that that act required "some amendments to carry into more complete ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... gave a little half-cry, half-gasp; and from the look on his face the woman saw that he realized what was missing. He peered at her, with alert and narrow eyes, for a full minute of unbroken silence. Then, with a little movement of finality, he turned away and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... helplessly trapped, then she pressed her fingers an instant to her eyes and straightened. "You never will forgive yourself," she said; not in anger, not in judgment, but in a tone so low, so sad, it seemed to express not only regret but finality. ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... Onondagas, who are called "Fire-Keepers" (of the origin of the name "Fire-Keeper," I will treat further, anon) then speak to the motion, or upon the measure, and, finally, decide everything; and they are, in view of this power of finality of decision with all questions, regarded as the most important Chiefs among the confederated tribes. The decision of the "Fire-Keepers" does not, by any means, always show concurrence in what may have been the consensus of opinion expressed by previous ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... that decision, the Republican papers of the day denounced the protest as hardly less than treason. But the Republicans of an earlier day were not so reverential toward the Supreme Court as an infallible authority. Could the court as a finality outlaw the negro from the common rights of man, and prevent Congress from establishing freedom in the national domain? Not so thought the men who led the Republican party and the sentiment of the North. The New York Legislature, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... tribunal lacked jurisdiction to try the case, the Court divided, five-to-four, as to the grounds of the decision. The point on which the Justices differed was which department of the Government had authority to say with finality what regions lie within the theatre of military operation. Claiming this as a function of the courts, the majority held that the theatre of war did not embrace an area in which the civil courts were ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... and greatest of revolutions in the nature of the case absolutely differed from all former ones in the finality and completeness of its work. In all previous instances in which governments had abolished or converted to public use forms of property in the hands of citizens it had been possible to compensate them in some other kind of property ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... me as though she hesitated for the fraction of a second, but when her answer came, though gentle and sympathetic as before, it contained decision and finality which I could ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... himself dead, and the disgrace, the shame going on. Or, rather, properly speaking, he could not imagine himself dead. He was possessed too strongly by the sense of his own existence, a thing of infinite duration in its changes, to grasp the notion of finality. The earth ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... in fear: the moment when she should tell John the story of her flight. Her manner, indeed—for one who could have understood it—proved a curious thing; that never, throughout their separation, had she ceased to believe that she should see her husband again. There had been no finality in her action. In her eyes the play had been always going ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... meeting it is impossible at present to say more than that it must have cleared away misconceptions on all sides If they have learnt anything as to the finality of the act of annexation—that I have no power to undo it, and do not believe that it will ever be undone, in the only sense in which they will ask it—I have, on the other hand, been shown the stubbornness of a determination ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... theology when once it has been erected into a dogma. As maintained by Mr. Browning, this belief held a saving clause, which removed it from all dogmatic, hence all admissible grounds of controversy: the more definite or concrete conceptions of which it consists possessed no finality for even his own mind; they represented for him an absolute truth in contingent relations to it. No one felt more strongly than he the contradictions involved in any conceivable system of Divine creation and government. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to explain," said hard old Marthy with grim finality. "I'll do what explainin's to be done. C'm in. Don't stand there like a stump. And shut the door. It's cold as a barn ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... over to the window and read the letter again. The only thing about it that really struck him was its note of finality. ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... I care for any coffee," she said, with an air of careless finality. "I think I will go back ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... from the Irish benches ... there was not one of those speeches which fell short of what we have declared to be in our opinion necessary for the acceptance of this Bill. That is where we look for a durable and solid statement as to finality. We find the word finality not even eschewed by the generous unreserve of the honourable member for North Longford[96] who attached the character of finality to the Bill.... What said the honourable member for Kerry[97] ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... awhile startled him more than the imminence of war. He might have been thrilled over the wild race, the reckless dash, as of unbridled horses, with which a nation long in suspense hurtled toward a finality; but it was an elation thoroughly dampened by dread. As the days had passed, however, and nothing more terrible happened, his courage came creeping back, even growing into modest bravado. Excursions to the country with his rifle ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... followed by a shout of rejoicing, he continued. "And I'm sure that when Harry makes a mistake we'll all be as considerate of his feelings as we are able. But Tom washes the dishes as a penalty for using slang!" he announced in a tone of pleasant finality that ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... finality of the voice the boy quivered like a helpless thing, and his stuttering ejaculations came as if shaken out of him by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... address; but I should deeply grieve to leave England without seeing him. He and Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much grieved to bid farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at some indefinite time; rather foolishly perhaps, for it will tend to take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect, is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the completion of unity in accordance with general laws, operate to the destruction of its influence, but it hinders reason from attaining its proper aim, that is, the proof, upon natural grounds, of the existence of a supreme intelligent cause. For, if we cannot presuppose supreme finality in nature a priori, that is, as essentially belonging to nature, how can we be directed to endeavour to discover this unity and, rising gradually through its different degrees, to approach the supreme perfection of an author of all—a perfection which is absolutely necessary, and therefore ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... cold finality in her voice, that the poor confidant's expansiveness withered up within her beyond even the hope of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... learn, it means irrevocable ruin and loss. In spite of God's love and pain for them on Earth and in Hades, they seem at last to have destroyed in themselves everything of good, and so placed themselves beyond possibility of restoration for ever. The judgment has clearly the ring of finality. There seems nothing more to be said. And so, with pain in our hearts responding to the pain of the Father, we are forced to leave them in the darkness and mystery in ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... brother Not in hatred so to part— And the fissure in the hearth Growing momently more wide. Then the glances 'tween the Fates, And the doubt on every side, And the patience under gloom In the stoniness that waits The finality of doom. ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... guard went out, and the key turned in the lock with a click which had a sound of finality about it that left no room ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... plain, was very firmly convinced that his own cosmopolitanism was a European finality and was worth all that it had cost. What would he have said if he could have looked ahead a hundred years and beheld the nations still snarling at each other's heels in the same ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... to him. He will be compelled to answer . . . "the atrocious regularity of things and their obscene necessity." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... said, and waited. Her tone and manner startled him. There was a suggestion of finality in her attitude that was alarming. She continued, ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... Parable of the Potter is followed by a metrical Oracle which has all the marks of Jeremiah's style and repeats the finality of the doom, to which the nation's forgetfulness of God and idolatry have brought it. Once more the poet contrasts the constancy of nature with his people's inconstancy. Neither the metre nor the sense of the text is so ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... spoke he sauntered away with an air of finality, while Balcom shrugged his shoulders and gave orders to ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... so pretty, so engaging, and had so much charm and magnetism that I remember having regretted, very solemnly, and with youthful finality, that we did not belong to the same generation. I was sorry that she was not fifteen or sixteen like myself; so that I could be in love with ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the bees swarm about the pink promises, and the fruit sets and slowly matures to lusciousness in the sun of July. I fancy the wedding, which robbed us all, was hardest for her, for it was in one sense a finality of her life. Whereas if Margaret had regrets—and deep sorrow she had in wrenching herself from the little neighborhood, though she never could have guessed the vacancy she caused by the withdrawal of her loved presence—her own life was only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... conventional story of China, continue in the old groove. To this day, of course, we are far from having really worked through every period of Chinese history; there are long periods on which scarcely any work has yet been done. Thus the picture we are able to give today has no finality about it and will need many modifications. But the time has come for a new synthesis, so that criticism may proceed along the broadest possible front and push our knowledge ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... back with you myself," he announced, in a tone of finality, "and go on to the Mess for Mackay afterwards. The worst is over now, and you'll only let yourself in for a demonstration if your men find out that any harm has come to you." The diplomatic suggestion had the desired effect; and they rode leisurely back to the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... with a big loose coat, and she was wrapping it round her friend with a finality that meant more struggle than poor tired Marjorie was capable of making. After all, another half-hour of discussion would not matter. The end would be the same. She went down with them to the big car that stood outside, and even managed ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer |
