"Fragility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... use force of any kind, spiritual or physical, on the girl whom he doubly loved—the girl whom he held in his arms every night for years with a passionate tenderness due to his feeling of her physical fragility and her social unhappiness, rather ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli's marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy. It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Weakness.— N. weakness &c. adj.; debility, atony[obs3], relaxation, languor, enervation; impotence &c. 158; infirmity; effeminacy, feminality[obs3]; fragility, flaccidity; inactivity &c. 683. anaemia, bloodlessness, deficiency of blood, poverty of blood. declension of strength, loss of strength, failure of strength; delicacy, invalidation, decrepitude, asthenia[obs3], adynamy[obs3], cachexy[obs3], cachexia[Med], sprain, strain. reed, thread, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... O'Moy was the natural product of such treatment. There had ever been something so appealing in her lovely helplessness and fragility that all her life others had been concerned to shelter her from every wind that blew. Because it was so she was what she was; and because she was what she was it would continue to ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... not often smiled, when I then denied the strength of the Colossus and asserted his fragility, when I used to say: "He must not die with a halo of glory; let him witness rather the bankruptcy of his moral estate and give proof of the pettiness of his character and evidence of his unbridled lust for power. Let the effrontery of his ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... of saddle which, under these circumstances, would cover the horse best without incommoding him during the short periods that he is permitted to repose? Have we reflected upon the kind of saddle which, offering the least fragility, exposes the horse to the least danger of sore back? All the cuirassiers and the dragoons of Europe have saddles which they call French saddle, the weight of which is a load for the horse. The interior mechanism of these saddles is complicated and filled with weak bands of iron, which ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... this room, with all the care necessitated by his fragility. It was not intended to break his second ear in the hurry of moving. Leon ran to light the fire under the boiler, and M. Nibor created him Fireman, on ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... or craft we can search the history of ages and find some vestiges or beginnings among the earlier civilisations. Possibly owing to the exquisite fragility of Lace, there is a complete absence of data earlier than that of Egypt. The astonishing perfection in art handicrafts of all descriptions which we find in China many hundreds of years before the Christian era shows no vestiges of a manufacture ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... apparent roots. It is a grand and wonderful passage waterway: and one the return boats cannot manage at all, there being no towing path, so that the oarsmen have to put their boats on carts and drive them across the land. This is not an easy job, because the length and fragility of the boats mean risk of breaking their backs. Great ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... vicissitude, beaten by the rough winds of life—men of mailed and impervious fortitude, ready to affront a world, prepared for torment and armed for death—men, who presented all imaginable contrast to the weak nerves, the light hearts, the tender fragility of childhood, crowded round the infants, smoothing their rugged brows and composing their bearded lips to kindly and fostering smiles: and then the old man opened the scroll and he taught the infants to repeat after him that beautiful prayer which we still dedicate to the Lord, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Although the exceeding fragility of his physical constitution might not have allowed him, under any circumstances, to have lingered long on earth, yet at least he might have been spared the bitter sufferings which clouded his last hours! With a tender and ardent ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Brazilians, and that he had provided for exigencies such as this. Moving the piles of thread and embroidery silk to the side of the table, he touched a spring, and a lid flew up. The table, though presenting the appearance of fragility itself, was really of iron, and contained a vault that would puzzle the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... veil and he looked at her closely. She was still as beautiful as he had thought her last night, but her complexion was pallid almost to fragility, and there were faint violet ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... women, fragility, delicacy, dependence, beauty, grace,—it is by these weak weapons that ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... of the best family, and in every way a desirable husband. He was himself getting old, he said, and it was necessary that his daughter should marry. Your mother loved me dearly, as I did her. Gentle soul, with her soft, dark, appealing eyes, with her flower-like fragility and womanly dependence. Ah me! it was hard that your grandfather should have been ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... dance halls and unorthodox evenings brought in by some of the girls. The laziness of mornings after a gay night, the shadows under the eyes, the lounging, the hoarse voices, all spread an odor of dark perversion over the work-table which contrasted sharply with the brilliant fragility of the artificial flowers. Nana eagerly drank it all in and was dizzy with joy when she found herself beside a girl who had been around. She always wanted to sit next to big Lisa, who was said to be pregnant, and she kept glancing curiously ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... needed much more than a postillion. She needed certainly a retinue of servants. He was not quite sure that she did not need a nurse, for she was a creature of an exquisite fragility, with the pouting face of a child, and the childishness was exaggerated by a great muslin bow she wore at her throat. Her pale hair, where it showed beneath her hood, was fine as silk and as glossy; her eyes had the colour of an Italian ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... others, in order to complete pressing orders. In the gaslight those pale-faced Parisians, sorting pearls as white as themselves, of a dead, unwholesome whiteness, were a painful spectacle. There was the same fictitious glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels. They talked of nothing but ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... that the girl had almost an ethereal appearance. Something clutched at his heart, iced his blood; for Myra Duquesne seemed a creature scarcely belonging to the world of humanity—seemed already half a spirit. The light in her sweet eyes was good to see; but her fragility, and a certain ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... constantly breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I think, the longest life that can be hoped for it. Since I have heard of the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours. There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... born in Dundee. All the family were delicate, and it was not long before Mary was left with only two sisters and a brother—Susan, John, and Janie. Mrs. Slessor's fragility prevented her battling successfully with trial and misfortune, but no children could have been trained with more scrupulous care. "I owe a great debt of gratitude to my sainted mother," said Mary, long afterwards. ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... built in times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place, the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... the polished floor of the broad hall and Mrs. Peyton Stewart, Peggy's aunt by marriage, stood in the doorway. Under one arm she carried her French poodle. Stooping she placed it upon the floor with the care which suggested a degree of fragility entirely belied by the bad-tempered little beast's first move, for as Peggy advanced with extended hand to greet her aunt, Toinette made a wild dash for the Persian cat, which onset was met by one dignified slap ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... your happiness Subject to instability In a moment falls to the ground, And as it has the brilliancy of glass It also has its fragility." ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed with what I may call her fragility. As at the time I caught her arm when helping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress or rough handling befall her, to see her crumble away. I have never seen body and spirit in such perfect accord. Describe her verse, as the critics have described ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... of aircraft their comparative fragility is added as a reason for their unfitness for commercial uses. The engines cost from $2000 to $5000 each, are very delicate and usually must be taken out of the plane and overhauled after about 100 hours of active service. The strain on them is prodigious for it is estimated that the number of ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... the sight of the palace of Fontainbleau, the place where he had so lately descended from the throne, and where he now re-appeared as conqueror and sovereign, would make some impression on him, and impel him to think of the fragility of human grandeur. I watched him attentively; but he did not appear to me, to experience any emotion. Immediately on his arrival, he rambled over the gardens and the palace with as much pleasure and curiosity, as if he came to take possession of them for the first ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... rose-maiden, dress, hair, and face glowing in a warm pink hue; anon, the rose changed into a faint metallic blue, which gave a ghostlike effect to the slim form; again, she was all white—a dazzling, unbroken white, in which the little oval face assumed an air of childlike fragility and pathos. As she sat with her hands folded on her knee, and her head resting against the dark cushions of her chair, more than one of the company watched her with admiration: but Darsie was too much occupied with her own thoughts ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in the girlish eyes, gave to her vigorous loveliness the distinctive touch of feminine grace, that enchanting modesty which we look for in these angels of peace and love. Yet there was no suggestion of fragility about her; and, surely, with so grand a woman's frame, so attractive a face, she must possess a corresponding warmth of heart and ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... like a Bush-rancher. Beneath the fur coat, which he flung off when he had kissed his daughter, he was dressed as one who lived in the cities, though his garments were evidently far from new. He was tall, but his spareness suggested fragility, and his face, which emphasized this impression, had a hint ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... amounting to ossification of cartilage, whereby the supple cartilage, losing its animal content, becomes practically bone by deposit of lime particles. This would also account in a common-sense manner for the fragility of the bones of the aged, the brittleness being due to calcareous deposits in the substance of the bone itself, in excess of the normal mineral contents of the bones in youth. The function of the seminal ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... hothouse; it was rather that of some classic flower, lavender or crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified, long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied to sturdiness—the inner sturdiness not inconsistent with an outward semblance of fragility—the tenacity of strength by which the lavender scents the summer and the crown-imperial adorns the spring, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... slouched down and pinned close against her darker hair. It showed up the whiteness of her face, which even the saltwinds could not whip into colour, under the coating of white cosmetic almost imperceptibly laid on. Osborn loved that hat, as he loved the graceful tilt of her skirt and the fragility of her blouses; and sometimes it occurred to him to question why men's wives couldn't wear things like that. One sunny afternoon they had, when, instead of playing bridge, they sat in a sheltered corner ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... officers were selecting partners up and down the room, but the politicians, their secretaries, the prefects, and the sub-prefects had not yet moved from the doorways. The platitudes of public life were written in their eyes. But these made expressions were broken at the sight of some young girl's fragility, or the paraded charms of a woman of thirty; and then each feared that his neighbour had discovered thoughts in him unappropriate to the red ribbon which ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the lower limbs less superb. These were, indeed, the ne plus ultra of good legs. Every connoisseur in such matters admitted the legs to be good. There was neither too much flesh, nor too little,—neither rudeness nor fragility. I could not imagine a more graceful curve than that of the os femoris, and there was just that due gentle prominence in the rear of the fibula which goes to the conformation of a properly proportioned calf. I wish to God ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... evidently found himself hampered rather than helped by the employment of the boy; and as to the moonshiner's sentimental partisanship, for the sake of an old attachment to the dead-and-gone mountain girl, there was hardly anything in the universe so tenuous as to bear comparison with its fragility. "A few drinks ahead," he said to himself, with a sneer, "an' he won't remember who Malviny Hixon was, ef thar is ennything in the old tale—which it's ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... there was blue at the windows. Against the wall a clavichord, set aside as obsolete, raised its dusky red ebony box on grooved legs. Myrtle was seated at it picking out an air from Belshazzar. She held each note in a silvery vibration that had the fragility of old age. Ludowika was by the fire, quartered across a corner; there was no stove, and the wood burning in the opening sent out frequent, pungent waves of smoke. She coughed and cursed. "Positively," she declared, "I'll turn salt like a ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... but against which he seemed suddenly to have conceived a violent spite. Luckily a considerable quantity of snow overlaid the ice, which, acting as a buffer, in some measure mitigated the violence of the concussion; while the very fragility of her build diminishing the momentum, proved in the end the little schooner's greatest security. Nevertheless, I must confess that more than once, while leaning forward in expectation of the scrunch I ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... and Bocchi say that Donatello, recognising the value of his work, grouped his figures so that the limbs and drapery should offer few protruding angles, in order to minimise the danger of fracture. It was his insurance against the fragility of the stone: when working in bronze such precautions would be less necessary. It is quite true that in the larger figures there is a marked restraint in this respect, while in his bas-reliefs, where the danger ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... problem as a psychological one and to introduce physiological considerations. He finds the elements of beauty to be:— (1) smallness; (2) smoothness; (3) gradual variation of direction in gentle curves; (4) delicacy, or the appearance of fragility; (5) brightness, purity and softness of colour. The sublime is rather crudely resolved into astonishment, which he thinks always retains an element of terror. Thus "infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with a delightful horror.'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the possible use of these specimens it should be noticed that similar stool-like objects are made of clay, the softness and fragility of which would render them unsuitable for use as mealing plates or mortars, and it would also appear that they are rather fragile for use as stools. I would suggest that they may have served as supports for ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the knowledge of good and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with astonished hatred upon a world that had ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... respect, admiration, obedience; but there was about Donnegan something which touched her in an intimate and disturbing manner. She had felt the will-o'-the-wisp flame which burned in him in his great moments. It was possible for her to smile at Donnegan; it was possible even to pity him for his fragility, his touchy pride about his size; to criticize his fondness for taking the center of the stage even in a cheap little mining camp like this and strutting about, the center of all attention. Yet there were qualities in him which escaped her, ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... father's chair, his long legs hanging over one arm—an attitude that those who had ever been under Mrs. May's discipline thought impossible in the drawing-room; but Aubrey was a rival pet, and with the family characteristics of aquiline features, dark gray eyes, and beautiful teeth, had an air of fragility and easy languor that showed his exercise of the immunities of ill-health. He had been Ethel's pupil till Tom's last year at Eton, when he was sent thither, and had taken a good place; but his brother's vigilant and tender care could not save him from an attack on the chest, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... possessed an abundance of this world's goods. How doubly odd that she should allow her physician to order her about in so peremptory a fashion! Probably no one else dared to, she looked arrogant enough herself, for all her fairness and fragility. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... was finally explained. My cousin then told me about my home and my family; but I must confess that I paid little attention to the good news that he brought me, so excited and preoeccupied was my mind. Even then I could not help thinking of the fragility of the heart in its affections. We soon separated, and I hurried to my room, which seemed to me on ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Fantasia, here we have the thing! The music falls on our ears like the insuppressible outpouring of a being stirred to its heart's core, and full of immeasurable love and longing. Who would suspect the composer's fragility and sickliness in this work? Does it not rather suggest a Titan in commotion? There was a time when I spoke of the Fantasia in a less complimentary tone, now I bow down my head regretfully and exclaim peccavi. The ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that she was lean, slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired, because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband characteristically ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... cavaliers received presents from their king without shame. Let us add that in these times of lax morality they had no more delicacy with respect to the mistresses; and that the latter almost always left them valuable and durable remembrances, as if they essayed to conquer the fragility of their sentiments by the solidity of ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appearance of DELICACY, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it. Whoever examines the vegetable or animal creation will find this observation to be founded in nature. It is not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any of the robust trees of the forest, which we consider as beautiful; ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... writings to help regretting that her life was cut off before she had accomplished more, but to still such regrets we cannot do better than realize (as a kind friend remarked) "how much she has been able to do, rather than what she has left undone." The work which she did, in spite of her physical fragility, far exceeds what the majority of us perform with stronger bodies and longer lives. This reflection has comforted me, though I perhaps know more than others how many subjects she had intended to write stories upon. Some people have spoken as if her forte lay ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... plate—common, medium, and best; and the best—plates, dishes, and all, was of chased silver gilt. The banker, to avoid overloading the table with gold and silver, had completed the array of each service with porcelain of exquisite fragility in the style of Dresden china, which had cost more than the plate. As to the linen—Saxony, England, Flanders, and France vied in the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... of porous vessels is added their fragility, their high price, and the impossibility of obtaining them of the dimensions that large apparatus would call for. The selection of asbestos cloth is therefore clearly indicated; but, as it does not entirely separate the gases, except ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful than we had been in solving the problems which it had set itself, but it demonstrated the fragility of many things which were supposed to be solid, and to young and active minds it seemed like the lowering of a curtain of ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... weight in the world's marts of thought. The physical constitution of the New Man is comparatively delicate and fragile; but as a china vase is not necessarily less sound than a stone jug or iron kettle, so delicacy and fragility in man are no proof of disease. The ominous prognosis of this doctor, therefore, seems no occasion for despair, perhaps not even for alarm. But to perceive what different harping can be performed on this string, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... especially to show how dainty little maidens may be. Eight years she might have been, and, possibly, a trifle more, or less. Her little waist and little black-stockinged calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but slightly ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... exquisite rose colour, and the dark liquid eyes and softly smiling mouth had an affectionate pensiveness far lovelier than her last year's bloom, and yet there was something painful in that beauty—it was too like the fragility of the flower fading under one hour's sunshine; and there was a sadness in seeing the matronly stamp on a face so young that it should have shown only girlhood's freedom from care. Arthur indeed was boasting ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small wrinkly visage and ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... pressed forward to greet her and she smiled with a warmth of gratitude. Dick, watching her from the bay window, was surprised by the delicacy of her face, by a look of fragility. She was dressed very simply in a coat and short skirt of white, her shoes and her gloves were of white suede, her hat ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... them as it is easy to conceive of her being; and Priscilla, again, is a feminine nature of unique calibre, as weird but not so warm as Goethe's Mignon, and at the same time a distinctly American type, in her nervous yet captivating fragility. In Priscilla and Phoebe are embodied two widely opposed classes of New England women. The male characters, with the exception of Donatello and Hollingsworth, are not so remarkable as the feminine ones: Coverdale and Kenyon come very close ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... and slender girls; queer girls with lean, wiry bodies; deceptive girls with bodies curiously plastic under the appearance of fragility; here a young miracle of physical culture; there a girl with the pointed breasts and flying shoulders, the limbs, the hips, the questing face that recalled some fugitive soul of the woods and mountains; long-nosed, sallow, nervous Jewish girls; English girls ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... notice the picture, and though she supposed it to be the portrait of some near relative of the young girl, she could not help thinking how completely and exactly her opposite it was in every particular—black hair for blonde, strength for fragility, and the fire of those dark eyes for the calm, childlike innocence of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the very essence of fragility, as they break from the parent tree at a touch; and yet one of the willows furnishes the tough, pliable and enduring withes from which are woven the baskets of the world. The willows, usually thin in branch, sparse of somewhat pale foliage, of so-called mournful mien, are ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... Edwin, though he tried to be sedate, nothing but a frisking morsel by the side of the vast monument. Compared with the architectural grandeur of Mr Varlett, his thin, supple, free-moving limbs had an almost pathetic appearance of ephemeral fragility. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... with the slow, gliding gait, which, together with her fragility, sometimes lent her an ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... all her slimness and fragility; she felt all the girl in herself and all the dominant man in him, and all the empty space around them. She went hot. Her sight became dim. She was ecstatically blissful; she was deeply ashamed. She desired the experience to last for ever, and him and herself ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... always been a pretty woman of that ethereal type of beauty that is not noticeably diminished by fragility. Persis, looking her over, estimated that the thirty pounds the doctor credited her with losing had been appreciably increased since he made his appeal for aid. At the same time, the dressmaker admitted with grudging admiration the effectiveness ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... the stairs, softly opened the door of the first bedroom, and peeped in. Finding that her shorn Samson was asleep she entered to the bedside and stood regarding him. The fevered flush on his face from the debauch of the previous evening lessened the fragility of his ordinary appearance, and his long lashes, dark brows, and curly back hair and beard against the white pillow completed the physiognomy of one whom Arabella, as a woman of rank passions, still felt ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... should certainly be known that varlet is the true word. A miserable world is a parenthetical exclamation, frequent among melancholy men, and natural to Jaques at the sight of a fool, or at the hearing of reflections on the fragility of life. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... to the fragility of the bones met with in general paralysis of the insane, locomotor ataxia, and other chronic diseases of the brain and spinal cord. The bones are liable to be fractured by forces which would be insufficient ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... come to achieve a shameful victory, but to give myself to you without reserve, to render you my conqueror and my king. Prove your love by making me happy, break down the barrier which I kept intact, despite its fragility and my ardour, and if this sacrifice does not convince you of my affection you must ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... unfading. We are not compelled to compress our enjoyment within a given time; we do not awake each morning with the thought that we may not outlast the daylight; we are not hurried and fevered with the sense of our fragility. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them must be seized now: Satan cannot afford to wait because his kingdom has an end. But God can afford to wait because of His Kingdom there is ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... strong men's touching illusion as to the frailness of women and their spiritual fragility, it seemed to Anthony that he would be destroying, breaking something very precious inside that being. In fact nothing less than partly murdering her. This seems a very extreme effect to flow from Fyne's ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... person gave the impression of extreme fragility, sustained by strength of will. It was the same with her delicate face, haloed round by her sunny hair, ready to float in every breeze. The small mouth was thin and decided, and the large, full blue eyes could be soft or stern as ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... determined effort to live without his drug; the abstinence emphasized his fragility and he was cold, even in the heart of the long sunny day; but the effort stayed him with a flickering vitality, bred visions, renewed hopes of the future. He repeated the names of places, opera houses—the San Carlo, in Naples; the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... been startled to find how his premonitions in regard to her had come true. One year he had said to himself: she will be paler than usual; I wonder if she has been ill. And he had found that she had been ill, and there was a fragility and pallor about her that seemed to him quite heart-breaking. Again he had said to himself: she will be wearing crape as in the old times; I wonder why. And when he had come to her she had told him of her mother's death a few months previous. So to-day he had known of that ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... carefully trimmed beard and immaculately white waistcoat gave him the conventional "professional" look. Near a window was a big chair, among the pillows of which reclined a young girl with a pale, sweet face and that appearance of fragility which comes of long-continued illness; beside her stood an anxious-looking young man whose haggard countenance told of a sleepless night and a ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... of a Parisian spring night filled the room, touching the white walls—the white bed—a bowl of flowers upon the dressing-table and its fairy-like reflection in the mirror—to a subtly insidious fragility that verged upon the unreal; and the boy, quivering to his tangled sensations, felt this unreality quicken his self-distrust, touch and goad ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... asked one of the women, raising her parasol dangerously among such fragility and pointing to one object among many in a case ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... help her husband fill the muchpayne, drive the plough, load hay, corne, and such other, and go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, egges, chekyns, capons, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of cornes." But now there is everywhere complaint of the growing delicacy and fragility of the English female population, even in rural regions; and the king of sanitary reformers, Edwin Chadwick, has lately made this complaint the subject of a special report before the National Association. He assumes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... that in the spring of 1842 such thoughts seemed to be even more frequently in his mind than usual. He was only in his forty-seventh year, but he dwelt darkly on the fragility of human existence. Towards the end of May, he began to keep a diary—a private memorandum of his intimate communings with the Almighty. Here, evening after evening, in the traditional language of religious devotion, he humbled himself ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... appearance of childish, I might almost say of girlish, frivolity. In person, her improvement was great; though an air of exceeding delicacy rather left an impression that such a being was more intended for another world, than this. There was ever an air of fragility and of pure intellectuality about my poor sister, that half disposed one to fancy that she would one day be translated to a better sphere in the body, precisely as she stood before human eyes. Lucy bore ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... at once that it was a spirit which had already outworn its frame—a slight, pale, delicate, and transparent creature, every thought and feeling shining through, and every word and movement tremulous with fragility. * * * We said farewell with no thought that ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... of my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks, which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rate the assurance is consoling that this error, which we have attempted neither to conceal nor extenuate, is the single one perceptible in the private life of Madame de Longueville. But let us turn aside from these wretched instances of feminine fragility in one of the loftiest minds, in order to follow Conde and the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... since the two young ladies had been like twin roses on one stalk. Now they parted with red cheeks and hostile sentiments and cutting words. How ardent is the warmth of youth! how unspeakably delicate the fragility ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... had not been reading, for her fingers were playing carelessly with the uncut leaves. Against her soft black dress the whiteness of her face and hands showed almost too intense a contrast, and yet there was no hint of fragility in her appearance. From head to foot she was abounding with energy, throbbing with life, and though Carraway would still, perhaps, have hesitated to call her beautiful, his eyes dwelt with pleasure on the noble lines of her relaxed figure. Better than beauty, he admitted the moment afterward, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... to his feet and looked at her, and then, all of a sudden, as he looked, Rowcliffe became young again; charmingly young, almost boyish. And, as if faintly amused at her youth, faintly touched by her fragility, he smiled. With a mouth and with eyes from which all austerity had departed he ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... spiritual feminine conceptions of the classic painters, had he seen a loveliness more ethereal. Her skin was so exquisite, the coloring of her hair and eyes and of her lips was so delicately fine that it gave her the fragility of things bordering upon the supernal—of rare exotics, of sunset and moonbeam effects. No, he had been under no spell of illusion as to her beauty. It was a reality—the more fascinating because it waxed and waned not with regularity of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... especially, he noted what had from time to time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which once bound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... efficacy; support, stay; intensity, vividness; virility; vehemence, violence, force, impetuosity; fortitude; robustness, lustiness, stoutness, brawniness, muscularity, thew, sturdiness. Antonyms: debility, delicacy, fragility, weakness, impotency, frailty, infirmity. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... necessarily delicate, and many have been known to live to extreme old age. Miss Mackenzie's Jack, one of the most beautiful of the breed ever known, lived to see his seventeenth birthday, and even then was strong and healthy. Their fragility is more apparent than real, and if they are not exposed to cold or damp, they require less pampering than they usually receive. This cause has been a frequent source of constitutional weakness, and it was deplorably a fault in the Italian Greyhounds of ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... its extraordinary fragility—arising from the muscles being articulated quite through the vertebras. If struck with a switch, the body is easily broken in two or more parts. Sometimes, indeed, the creature breaks off its own tail, by a remarkable habit it possesses of contracting the muscles with great ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the various elements of knowledge. Having recognised that there are no phenomena of which the first cause is still accessible, science has resumed the examination of her ancient certitudes, and has proved their fragility. To-day she sees her ancient principles vanishing one by one. Mechanics is losing its axioms, and matter, formerly the eternal substratum of the worlds, becomes a simple aggregate of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... started down the grass-grown pathway to the gate where the hunters stood hitched. The young man dropped back a few paces to satisfy himself that she was not concealing some hurt. He knew her half-masculine contempt for acknowledging the fragility ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... Seer." These charming essays will bear preservation; none are more saturated with cultivated taste and literary allusion, and in none are more graceful pictures painted on a slighter canvas. If there is an occasional impression of fragility and superficiality, it is yet wholly in character, and seems not to interfere with the peculiar charm. Hunt, for instance, writes a delightful paper on the theme of "Cricket," without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever having ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... upon her, a slight, slender girl with bedraggled dress and disheveled hair, her face, pale and quiet, a little stern in sleep, and her long, dark lashes lying on her cheek, he seemed to see her fragility, her prettiness, her femininity as never before. But for him she might at that very moment have been a broken, ruined girl lying back in that cabin of the Blands'. The fact gave him a feeling of his importance in this shifting ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... appeared. This one was about the same size, and gave the same impression of fragility. This one had ears, all right—and a pair of gleaming, two-inch horns on his forehead as well. I'll be eternally roasted, Rolf thought. Now ...
— The Happy Unfortunate • Robert Silverberg
... of the past. "But you mustn't let us give you a lot of trouble while we're here. You don't look over-strong." Her glance rested kindly on her hostess's young face. In spite of its dewy blue eyes and clear skin with the tinge of wild-rose pink in the cheeks, it conveyed a certain impression of fragility. She looked almost as though a vigorous puff of wind might blow ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... by his fire, smoking thoughtfully. His lifelong neighbour and successful rival in love had passed away a few days before, and Mr. Clarkson, fresh from the obsequies, sat musing on the fragility of man and the inconvenience ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... has two sides, and by far the more delightful side is the one of having originals. There is a glamor about old furniture, a certain air of fragility, although in reality it is usually much stronger than most of our modern factory output, which adds to the charm. With furniture, as with people, breeding will out. When one has inherited the furniture, the charm is still greater, for it is pleasant to think of one's own ancestors ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... the negress was really alarmed, fearing that if the girl did rally her mind would be affected. But Rosa was young and, despite her fragility of form, she was strong—too strong, it seemed to her, and possessed of too deep a capacity for suffering. How she ever survived those next few days, days when she prayed hourly to die, was a mystery. And when she found that she could at last shed tears, what agony! ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers. Nay, so far from our admiration of the jewel shaft being dependent on its doing work for us, it is very possible that a chief part of its preciousness may consist in a delicacy, fragility, and tenderness of material, which must render it utterly unfit for hard work; and therefore that we shall admire it the more, because we perceive that if we were to put much weight upon it, it would be crushed. But, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... when a worker is turned into queen, it is here neither the form nor the capacity of the cell that produces this change; for from an egg laid in a large cell and afterwards transferred to that of a worker (a most difficult operation, because of the microscopic minuteness and extreme fragility of the egg, but one that I have four or five times successfully accomplished) there will issue an undeniable male, though more or less atrophied. It follows, therefore, that the queen must possess the power, while laying, of knowing or determining the sex of ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... appeared, carrying the little boy. Lady Tranmore took him on her knee and caressed him. He was a piteous, engaging child, generally very docile, but liable at times to storms of temper out of all proportion to the fragility of his small person. His grandmother was inclined to look upon his passions as something external and inflicted—the entering-in of the Blackwater devil to plague a tiny creature that, normally, was of a divine and clinging sweetness. She would have taught him religion, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "that last is truly a Dutch recommendation, Mr. Pleydell—crystal—and hearts would lose all their merit in the world, if it were not: for their fragility." ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... little but too much prominence to the strong incidents of the story—a story written as a comment on love's warfare with death—written to show that confronted as a man is every moment by signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond Orion where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything else—a story written further to show ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... that last is truly a Dutch recommendation, Mr. Pleydell; crystal and hearts would lose all their merit in the world if it were not for their fragility.' ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a moment and seemed to glimpse something of the iron will that lay at the heart of her beauty and fragility. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... she was so fine and dainty, with soft white hair curling around her gentle and melancholy face. Mrs. Forsythe dressed in delicate grays and lavenders, and her fingers were covered with rings, and generally held some filmy fancy-work. Her invalidism had only given her an air of interesting fragility, which made Lois long to put her strong young arms about her, to shield her lest any wind might blow ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... attraction in a woman, and this may be so to very strong natures, but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary empire over men are those with a certain virility in their character and passions. If with this virility they combine a fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in another way at the same time, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu-moulding had been knocked off here, and the inlaid-wood chipped away there, and the tortoiseshell cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors—monuments of man's fragility. "This is what life comes to," they said in their silent fashion. This faded rubbish in buhl and marqueterie was useful enough to Mr. Lovel, however; and on his canvas the faded furniture glowed and sparkled with ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... to persuade her to run away with them. She's a timid child; and she has been coddled and cosseted all her life till she is delicate to fragility," Miss Lambart protested. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall. And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in between. There was such an air of fragility about it all that you hated to touch it—and I, for one, took my whip down lest it shook bare too ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or three miles away on ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... that gesture, was struck by a wild surmise, leading him to study the prisoner more narrowly. Allowing for the alien structure of bone, the nonhuman skin; this creature was delicate, graceful, in its way beautiful, with a fragility of limb which backed up his suspicions. Moved by no pressure from the other, but by his own will and sense of fitness, Shann stooped to cut the control line of ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... so pale as she uttered these words that Brigit leant forward with a gesture of reassurance. In spite of her fragility she was, from the habit ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her. The contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sum of pocket-money, and deducting from this, in part at least, the estimated value of whatever he destroyed. From the day this rule was adopted all destructible articles seemed to have lost a great part of their fragility." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... because town-bought morocco slippers were few and far between; the excitement of a silk gown; the distress of a brother, whose trousers for fete occasions were remodelled from an older brother's "blue broadcloth worn to fragility—so that Robert [the younger brother] said he could not look at them without making a rent;" and again the anticipation of the father's return from Philadelphia with gifts of ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... clearness of her complexion, the wavy smoothness of her abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so dainty in her fragility that one longed and yet scarcely dared ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness, as of temple pillars, or unguided wandering of feeble tendrils on the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the storms of ages, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... that I should ever pen so sad a line! Fired with an abstract love of Virtue, she, My Dian of the Ephesians, Lady Adeline, Began to think the Duchess' conduct free; Regretting much that she had chosen so bad a line, And waxing chiller in her courtesy, Looked grave and pale to see her friend's fragility, For which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... beautiful in her way, was yet of an entirely opposite type. She was of medium height, and her form, though well rounded, was slender almost to fragility. Her head was small, and covered with rippling, jet black hair. Her eyes and eyebrows were black as jet; her features were delicate and regular; and her complexion was of a clear, ivory-white. She wore a crimson, merino dress, plainly ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... to neutralize his own faults. Love should be cumulative, since it cannot be stationary. If it does not increase, it decreases. Love, like confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and of most exotic fragility. It must be constantly and tenderly cherished. Every noxious and foreign element must be carefully removed from it. All sunshine, and sweet airs, and morning dews, and evening showers must breathe upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... guard against most carefully is gluttony, so far as boys are concerned. With girls the tendency often is to eat far too little. A false delicacy, a feeling that paleness and fragility are beautiful and feminine, inclines the young girl often to eat less than she desires; and the stomach accustoms itself to the insufficient supply, till the reception of a reasonable meal is an impossibility. Or if they eat improper food (hot breads and much fat and sweets), the same result ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its steadiness of poise—its assured standing on the clear softness of the abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... face. The pale oval under the great heavy crown of glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed more shadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... and merriest,' one must ask—'Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?'—one must realise that 'murder is full of holes.' Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... important. She had outrun her vital income and mortgaged future years; if foreclosure threatened, she maintained her old power of taking no heed of disagreeable things, however imminent. She was still very handsome and wished to go on being that to the end; fortunately fragility had always been her style and always ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... stated, the fact may not seem calculated to affright, in reality there was something so weird about this unnatural bloom that I dropped it on the table. As I did so I uttered an exclamation; for in spite of the stranger's assurances on the point, I had by no means overcome my idea of the thing's fragility. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the Poet, in pursuance of his more general philosophic intention, which involved a moving representation of the helplessness of the Social Monad—that bodily as well as moral susceptibility and fragility, which leaves him open to all kinds of personal injury, not from the elements and from animals of other species merely or chiefly, but chiefly from his own kind,—if the Poet, in the course of this exhibition, had caused poor Gloster to be held down in ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... fell in with Andora's summary division of her works of art into articles safe or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it only to the extent of occasionally substituting some less precious or less perishable object for the particular fragility on which her son's desire was fixed. And it was with this intention that, on a certain fair spring morning—which worethe added luster of being the baby's second birthday—she had murmured, with her mouth in his curls, and one hand holding a bitof Chelsea above his dangerous clutch: ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... must decide upon some course at once, and a terrible indecision paralysed his ideas. He loved his people so tenderly, he was so anxious to make them happy, and yet—and yet! If he loved one better than the other it was perhaps his father, because of the pitiful weakness, because of the fragility which seemed to call for a protective gentleness. The old man had altered little in the five years. James could not remember him other than thin and bent and frail, with long wisps of silvery hair brushed over the crown to conceal his baldness, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... pursuit of this their resolution, promised, confirmed, swore, and covenanted amongst them all, by the pure faith they owe to the nocturnal Sanct Rogero. But O the vain enterprises of women! O the great fragility of that sex feminine! They did begin to flay the man, or peel him (as says Catullus), at that member which of all the body they loved best, to wit, the nervous and cavernous cane, and that above five thousand years ago; yet have ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... And the fragility which the head suggested the body confirmed, for he was not framed to labor. The burden of the noble head had bowed the slender throat and crooked the shoulders, and when he moved his arm it seemed the arm of a skeleton too loosely clad. There ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... has said: "In proportion as he lost the support of the public, Napoleon took pleasure in thinking that it was the lack of a future and not his own misdeeds that threatened his proud throne with premature fragility. The desire to make firm what he felt trembling beneath his feet, became his dominant passion, as if, with a new wife in the Tuileries, the mother of a male heir, the faults which had armed the whole world against him would be only causes without effects." And Thiers ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Empire will read the dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties of democracy with acquiescence. There are many questions, of which the terms are no sooner stated than we at once see that a certain and definite answer to them is impossible. The controversy as to the relative fragility, or the relative difficulty, of popular government and other forms of government, appears to be a controversy of this kind. We cannot decide it until we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a great ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... on fairly now, be thankful, and try to do your duty, and to do your best, as a Christian man and a prudent man, and then leave the rest to God. Your children are about you; no doubt they may die, and it is fit enough that you should not forget the fragility of your most prized possessions; it is fit enough that you should sometimes sit by the fire and look at the merry faces and listen to the little voices, and think what it would be to lose them. But it is not needful, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... that a cold or hot atmosphere, dry or humid, tranquil or agitated, impresses on the medium through which the observations have inevitably to be made; the feeble being resumes all his advantage; by the side of such wonderful labours of the mind, what signifies the weakness, the fragility of our body; what signify the dimensions of the planet, our residence, the grain of sand on which it has happened to us to appear for ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... one of innocent candor. The somber garments emphasized the colorless purity of her complexion; her hair was fair, and she had large, pathetic blue eyes. Her beauty was somehow heightened by a hint of fragility: in her widow's dress she looked very forlorn and helpless; and the man yearned to comfort and protect her. It did not strike him that she had stood for some moments enduring his compassionate scrutiny ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... dyes resembling the natural tints. I see tables and pieces of wood valued at the price of a senator's estate, which are all the more precious, the more knots the tree has been twisted into by disease. I see crystal vessels, whose price is enhanced by their fragility, for among the ignorant the risk of losing things increases their value instead of lowering it, as it ought. I see murrhine cups, for luxury would be too cheap if men did not drink to one another out of hollow gems the wine to be afterwards thrown up again. I see ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... something so weird about this unnatural bloom that I dropped it on the table. As I did so I uttered an exclamation; for in spite of the stranger's assurances on the point, I had by no means overcome my idea of the thing's fragility. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... bench round the circle where the fountain was tossing high its jets in play with the sunshine. She was looking very much the woman of the fashionable world, and the soft grays, shading into blues, that dominated her costume gave her an exceeding and entrancing seeming of fragility. Arkwright thought her eyes wonderful; the sweet, powerful yet delicate odor of the lilac sachet powder with which her every garment was saturated set upon his senses like ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips |
