"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sets off the gunpowder, but the real cause of the killing is the fact that the gunpowder is there, lying around loose, and ready to be touched off. What engenders this gunpowder state of mind would make a valuable sociological study, but it may well be that a seemingly inconsequential fact may so embitter a boy or man toward life or the human race in general that in time he "sees red" and goes through the world looking for trouble. Any cause that makes for crime and depravity makes for murder as well. The little boy who is driven ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... warrior who is hearing it should, as one born to be a soldier, be brave and fight, lest his sorrow for the slain be taken for fear; since "nothing is better for a warrior than a just fight," and "loss of fame is worse than death." Then follows (with the usual inconsequential 'heaven') "If thou art slain thou wilt obtain heaven, and if thou art victorious thou shalt enjoy earth; therefore, careless of pleasure and pain, get ready for the fight, and so thou wilt not incur sin. This is the knowledge ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... hero, when he talks of his private virtues. His subjects are commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural, and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the ceiling and told me that my plot was humbug. What sailorman would mistake a lantern for a lighthouse? Nor were there lighthouses in the days of the buccaneers. He would have scuttled my play in dock and grinned at the rising bubbles. Mark the difference! My manager, ignoring these inconsequential errors, burst from his chair—this is amazing!—and turned a reckless somersault between the table ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... shooting and the opening of the season; dogs and the training of dogs; and why some go gun-shy and why some ace blinkers. From sport and its justification, they became inconsequential; and she was beginning to enjoy the freshness of their chance acquaintance, his nice attitude toward ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... same man to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between them—possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a process in the course of which the idea of God tends to ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... dragged the limp body through the door of the laboratory and propped it in a chair. It required but a moment for him to see that Shelton's injury was inconsequential. He had only been stunned and already showed signs ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... inconsequential approaches to a statement with a keen and questioning glance. "The girl went up to the Cat on the early stage, sir. She's coming back ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence—if indeed they gave it a thought—as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... floor, studying Watusk's words from every angle. The result of his cogitations was nil. Watusk's mind was at the same time too devious and too inconsequential for a mind like Ambrose's to track it. Ambrose decided that he was like one of the childish, unreasonable liars one meets in the mentally defective of our own race. Such a one is clever to no purpose: he will blandly attempt to lie away the ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... now revealed her as plainly as though he had known her all her days. She comprehended none of life's big problems; the relations of men to one another had not compelled her attention; the fine, deep impulses of sympathy had not touched her. She was selfish, self-centered, light, inconsequential—a woman who danced from under the burdens of life and laughed at those who were forced to ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... neighbourhood differences, the studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... rocking their cradles: during which all visible objects become indistinct to them. An uniform soft repeated sound, as the murmurs of a gentle current, or of bees, are said to produce the same effect, by presenting indistinct ideas of inconsequential sounds, and by thus stealing our attention from other objects, whilst by their continued reiterations they become familiar themselves, and we cease gradually to attend to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... consumers' leagues have been joined by the majority of the whole working class. Can anybody talk seriously of the working class turning its attention to a means which gives it no aid whatever as a class, and furnishes its individual members this inconsequential relief only until the time when the class as such has completely, or to a large extent, made use of it? If the German working class is willing to enter upon such a treadmill round, the time before the real improvement of its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... half a dozen inconsequential letters before coming to the one which troubled him most. For many minutes he stared reflectively at the typewritten message from New York. Miss Keating frowned severely and tapped her little foot somewhat impatiently on the floor; but ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... creature, as Mr. Furnival in his mercy called him,—he, Mr. Furnival, could not charge his conscience with saying that he believed him to have been guilty of any falsehood. On the contrary, he conceived that Kenneby had endeavoured to tell the truth. But he was one of those men whose minds were so inconsequential that they literally did not know truth from falsehood. He had not intended to lie when he told the jury that he was not quite sure he had never witnessed two signatures by Sir Joseph Mason on the same day, nor did he lie when he told them again that ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... aside the cloak of the everyday. A "celebration" meant that you were different. Humdrum life and habits must be relegated to the background. It was permitted that, unabashed, you be as silly, as frivolous, as inconsequential, as boisterous, as lighthearted, as delightfully irresponsible as your ordinary concealed boyishness pleased. Customary repressions had nothing to do here. This was a celebration! And in the aforementioned our very wise woman would ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... in the Cabinet and his well-known views on this question were strong reasons for watchful and careful prevision. It was obvious to Mr. Wilson from the outset that insurmountable difficulties lay in his path, but he brushed them aside as if they were inconsequential. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... unapproached in this respect. A few other portrait-busts remain to be noticed, which at one time or another have been attributed to Donatello. The Vecchio Barbuto, a thoroughly poor piece of work, and the Imperatore Romano[166] with its sadly disjointed and inconsequential appearance, are works which scarcely recall the touch of Donatello. The bust of a veiled lady is more interesting.[167] In the old Medici catalogue it used to be called Donna velata incognita, or sacerdotessa velata: and it was also called Annalena Malatesta: ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is "George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a cumulative effect ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... am," he replied. "And then again, making a place away out here homelike never struck me as being anything but an inconsequential detail. I'm not trying to make a home here. I'm after a bundle of money. A while ago, if you had been here and suggested it, you could have spent five or six hundred, and I wouldn't have missed it. But this contract came my way, and gave me a chance to clean ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... their swords into ploughshares and then confess that they have never been taught to plough. That's where I shall score—by beating my sword into a pen. But what to write about—! Everything will seem so little and inconsequential after seeing armies marching to mud and death, and people will soon get tired of hearing about that. It seems as though war does to the individual what it does to the landscapes it attacks—obliterates everything personal and characteristic. ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... desirable means of gaining a livelihood. The new order has given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily—otherwise, they would not be business men and would not be possessed of twenty-five hundred dollars. Nan only realized ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a feeling that those inexplicated incidents in your novel might have been elucidated by their consequences if you had chosen a person whose actions were of the kind to have some important consequences. In tying up to an inconsequential person you lost ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... amusement that under the most favorable conditions has its limitations. But to-day—even though the rain had further interfered with his arrangements by making it necessary to cancel the trip he had planned for Marjory and Peter to Cannes—the weather was an inconsequential incident. It did not matter greatly to him whether ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... long brown lock from his fair brow, came Solon Denney to his feet. With flawless self-possession he read, and I, disgraced, cowering in my seat, heard words that burned little inconsequential brands forever into my memory. Well do I recall that the middle-aged gentleman regarded the young man with a look of surprise, and inquired, "What security can you give me?" to which the latter answered, "Nothing ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the ladies with inconsequential tales, the rodeo outfit therefore rose up and was gone before the light, raking the exposed lowland for its toll of half-fed steers; and even Rufus Hardy, the parlor-broke friend and lover, slipped away before any of them were stirring and rode far up along the river. What ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... of 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, if he ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... gracious!" he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object in contiguousness ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... state of mind the most inconsequential inferences were drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... rice, fish, pork, and a jar of samshoo (rice arrack) are taken aboard, and by ten o'clock we are underway. Two men, named respectively Ah Sum and Yung Po, a woman, and a baby of eighteen months comprise the company aboard. Ah Sum, being but an inconsequential wage-worker, at once assumes the onerous duties of towman; Yung Po, husband, father, and sole proprietor of the sampan, manipulates the rudder, which is in front, and occasionally assists Ah Sum by poling. The boat-wife stands at the stern and regulates the length of the tow-line; the baby puts ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... but one father I understood perfectly. We chatted in a inconsequential way for a short time. In the course of our conversation I happened to mention that I wrote, professionally. To ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And he closed ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... for three or four weeks in this gipsy fashion, mayhap getting a peep at a moose, a wolf, or even a bear (to say nothing of such inconsequential fry as ermine, mink, beaver, and otter), the family arrive at their ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... That, however, is not the greatest risk that I have in mind. On board this craft are five people without whom it would be rather hopeless for anyone to go on building the Pollard type of boat. Therefore, besides risking a valuable craft and our own rather inconsequential lives, we go further and put the United States Navy in danger of having only a couple of our boats. Now, the fact is, we want the Navy to have three or four dozen of our submarine craft, for we ourselves believe implicitly in the great worth of ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... doctrine. But the anti-determinists wildly confuse a perverted determinism of ends with a scientific determinism of means. And only the former determinism is truly fatalistic. This confusion is to be found equally central in Henry Oldenburg's inconsequential letters to Spinoza and in Bernard Shaw's shamelessly silly Preface to Back to Methuselah. Fundamental confusions remain astonishingly stable ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... kind, interesting to a rural community but considered inconsequential by those conversant with ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... a great deal of himself into the character of the stars. In other words, the personal element counted a great deal. When somebody once remonstrated with him about giving up so much of his valuable time to what seemed to be inconsequential talks with his ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... particular mineral has a considerable range, and a medium has been taken. The possible error is inconsequential for ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... was Jack. This was my broad-browed, frank-faced, golden-haired, bright, smiling, incoherent, inconsistent, inconsequential, light-hearted, hilarious Jack—the Jack who was once the joy of every company, rollicking, reckless, and without a care. To this complexion had he come at last. Oh, what a moral ruin was here, my countrymen! Where now were his jests and gibes—his wit, that was wont to set the table in a roar? ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... immense enjoyment of his importance, the story of the tragedy as he had related it at the inquest. Sam Lucas gave him all the rope he wanted, even led him into greater excursions than Sol had planned. Round-about excursions, to be sure, and inconsequential in effect, but they all led back to the tragic picture of Joe Newbolt standing beside the dead body of Isom Chase, his hat in his hand, as if he had been interrupted on the point ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... way this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty—they, too, would utter an impotent "Wicked!" ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... schedule she was studying, yet he had to concede that she was giving a splendid imitation of an experienced hand. Her acting annoyed him. He turned toward Hilmer with an indifferent comment on the weather and the talk veered to inconsequential subjects. Helen continued her scrutiny of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;" St. Austin's great work, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... You won't mind my saying so, Jim, but I had it in my mind to ask you to be a bit inconsequential—especially when Doane was around—about your taking his place. But I ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of questions, many of them intrinsically inconsequential yet important to the exile, had to be put by the officer and answered by the author. Finally came one which ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the colony moved him to speak often, the intendant's activity was prodigious. Ordinances, edicts, judgments and decrees fairly flew from his pen like sparks from an anvil. Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential for a paternal order. An ordinance establishing a system of weights and measures for the colony rubs shoulders with another inhibiting the youngsters of Quebec from sleigh- riding down its hilly thoroughfares in icy weather. Printed in small type these decrees of the intendant's make up a bulky ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... happiness. "There is no happiness," he said, "without participation; no participation without affection. There is, indeed, in affection a charm that leaves all things behind it, and renders even every calamity that does not interfere with it inconsequential and there is no difficulty, no toil, no labour, no exertion, that will not be endured where there is a ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... at the girl before him with new interest. Out of her chatter he had at last garnered one important fact. His mind, trained to seize upon the vital and instantly discard the inconsequential, clutched the bit of information, and turned it over. From the first Carroll had scouted the idea that the dead man's fiancee might have been responsible for his death; but still it was a line of investigation which ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... limited senses and our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence whatever, "we came home to a late supper, well repaid for our day's outing." These compositions ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of her physical presence. The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight. "Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... This medley of inconsequential conversation and chatter continued for fully half an hour without one word being spoken on the all-important subject they had presumably been brought together to arrange. They touched on everything theatrical, according ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... benefiting you; I could not think the finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! that I should do this, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... time, has, in his Recollections, placed on opposite pages—all the more striking to me because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs. Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony's knee with her parasol ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... knew the whereabouts, in Hunston or New York, of the fair-spoken yet elusive Higginson. But with every step he found the force of this errand weakening within him. The memory of that gentleman's villany, so burning a moment since, grew steadily fainter and more inconsequential. Failing to locate him, he would of course make a precautionary round of the newspaper offices in New York that night. At the worst, he told himself with the swift fading of his anger, there was only a remote risk of any unpleasant ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... the irregular fulmination of salutes. That it was already the day of the annual Fall Review seemed incredible to Roger Brevard. He was indifferent to the activities of the Common; but when he heard that the Nautilus was sailing in the middle of the afternoon he left his inconsequential affairs ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and entered the tent, feeling that Shanklin was as irresponsible morally as a savage. Evidently the inconsequential matter of an attempt at murder should not be allowed to stand between friends, according to the flat-game man's way of viewing life. It appeared that morning as if Shanklin had no trace of malice in him ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... President, I ask you! Here were eight rational beings, all standing at the threshold of life, all at a most impressionable age, who valued the chance to acquire such minor and inconsequential chattels as kid gloves above a period of pleasurable instruction in a magnificent treasure trove of the Old Masters. In my then spent condition the admission, so frankly vouchsafed, left me well-nigh speechless. I could only murmur: "Young ladies, you pain me, you grieve me, you ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... both of space and importance. These, however, must sooner or later end as they began; they perish in the lie they make; and it were well did not other falsehoods take their places, to prolong a life whose only tenure is inconsequential succession,—in other words, Fashion. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... any other in the Kingdom. Instead of a spire, it has a huge, castellated, octagonal tower, and while it was several hundred years in building, a harmonious design was maintained throughout, although it exhibits in some degree almost every style of church architecture known in England. Ely is an inconsequential town of about seven thousand inhabitants and dominated from every point of view by the huge bulk of the cathedral. Only a portion of the space inside the vast building was occupied by seats, and though the great church would hold many thousands of people if filled to its capacity, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... to this place on the right was seated a goodlooking young puncher, whose age might have been estimated at twenty-three. "Skinny" they called him because of his exceeding slenderness. At the moment Ferguson settled into his seat the young man was filling the room with rapid talk. This talk had been inconsequential and concerned only those small details about which we bother during our leisure. But now his talk veered and he was suddenly telling something that gave promise of consecutiveness and universal interest. Other voices ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... latter,—Harrington still travelled on in hopes of finding some better shelter, and now, in the dark night, and a night of tempest too, finds himself on the open heath. To employ his own words, "he could not rest contented with one-sided theories or inconsequential reasonings, and has pursued the argument to its logical termination." He is ill at ease in mind, I hear, and not in robust health; and I am ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Edith—Edith whom he hadn't met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate admiration. He had loved to draw her—around his room had been a dozen sketches of her—playing golf, swimming—he ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... alas! it is not like that I] This speech is confused, and inconsequential, according to the disorder of ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... be given to relief of the members of the Commission from the necessity of detailed attention to comparatively inconsequential matters which, under the existing law, must receive their direct and personal consideration. It is in the public interest that the members of the Commission should not be so pressed by minor matters that they have inadequate time for investigation and consideration of the larger questions committed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... creature he was, with red face and black hair which seemed to scramble in all directions at once, and with a mustache which appeared to scamper in even more directions than his hair. Fairchild was a large man; suddenly he felt himself puny and inconsequential as the mastodonic thing before him swooped forward, spread wide the big arms and then caught him tight in them, causing the breath to puff over his lips like the exhaust of ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... breath. So she was a mere frivolous, inconsequential butterfly, after all. Why try longer to lend the Helping Hand—why not cut things short and be satisfied with the Social Triumph and let it go at that? "I was meaning to ask you to dine with me some evening next week at a settlement I ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'—a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... greatest miracle, the miraculousness—I don't know there is such a word, but there should be—of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me. And I find myself saying over and over: "WHAT have I ever ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Kennedy credit for a tactfulness that I didn't know the old fellow possessed. He carried through the preliminary questions very well for a pseudo-doctor, appealing to me as his assistant on inconsequential things that enabled me to "save my face" perfectly. When he came to the critical moment of opening the black bag, he made a very appropriate and easy remark about not having brought any sharp shiny ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... therefore either taciturn or presents an evil and watchful appearance, or, if a novice at his trade, is hesitating in his replies, the pathological liar has a cheerful, open, free, enthusiastic, charming appearance, because he believes in his stories and wishes their reality. The inconsequential way in which such persons go to work is to be explained by the fact that consciousness of the real situation is partly clouded in their minds. In any special act it is impossible to say whether the consciousness of the lie, fancy, or ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... careless indifference to the minor details of life. Neither ever dated a letter, and both invariably forgot all anniversaries, even having to be reminded of their own wedding-day by his scandalized mother. What Mr. S. S. McClure called Fanny Stevenson's "robust, inconsequential philosophy of life" permitted her to accept with calm situations which would have driven another woman to distraction. Even in that sad colony of the sick she found compensations, and writing ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the mighty Peden, the other traffickers in vice were inconsequential, mere retailers, hucksters, peddlers in their way. They were as vicious as unquenchable fire, certainly, and numerous, but small, and largely under the patronage of the king of the proscribed, Peden of the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... to an unknown good.' If I should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... mathematics. He was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing, but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on,' and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... and were in hazard of falling into confusion.—The tutor embraced his pupil close in his arms.—Four hundred women were taxed, who have, no doubt, been the wives of the best Roman citizens.—Men not born to action are inconsequential in government.—Collectitious troops.—The foot, by their violent attack, began the fatal break in the Pharsaliac field.—He and his brother, with a politic, common to other ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... used perhaps than for the closing speeches of Mrs. Park, chairman of the association's Congressional Committee, and Mrs. Catt, its president. A greater contrast can scarcely be imagined than that between their statesmanlike quality and the rambling, inconsequential, prejudiced character of Mr. Bailey's. "After the eloquent address of the last speaker," began Mrs. Park with delicious satire, "I sympathize with the committee and the audience who will have to return to the plain subject of the Federal Amendment for Woman Suffrage.... I think those who ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... laughter, the parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter alternative, the girl acknowledged it with a strained imitation of her usual ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... provisions of that Constitution—one of the conditions of the compact—without which the Union could never have been formed. The tone of political morality which could make this possible was well indicated by the toleration accorded in the Senate to the flippant, inconsequential excuse for it given by one of its most eminent exemplars—"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"—meaning thereby, not that it would be the part of a dog to violate his oath, but to keep it in the matter referred to. ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a sense; but always he had ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Q.C., rose with a swagger and a rustle of his silk gown, and proceeded to set forth the theory of the defence. He said he did not purpose to call many witnesses. The hypothesis of the prosecution was so inherently childish and inconsequential, and so dependent upon a bundle of interdependent probabilities that it crumbled away at the merest touch. The prisoner's character was of unblemished integrity, his last public appearance had been made on the same platform with Mr. Gladstone, and his honesty ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... improvement in plot. Nor, perhaps, ought we to expect that it should. An Interlude, as its name implies, was originally only a kind of stop-gap, an entree of light entertainment between other events; and what so welcome for this purpose as the inconsequential dialogue, by-play, and mutual trickery of sundry 'lewd fellows of the baser sort'? When it extended its sphere from the castle banqueting-hall to the street or inn-yard no greater excellence was expected from it. Its brevity saved it from tediousness, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... evidently Ida May Bostwick was wedded to the tawdry conveniences and gayeties of city life. Tunis could not wholly understand why any sane person should assume this attitude; in fact, he suspected a good deal of it was put on. How could a girl, even one as inconsequential and flighty as Ida May evidently was, hold in contempt the offer he had brought her from Cap'n Ira ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the world," I assured him gayly, and arousing myself from my depression I spent the next hour in gay, inconsequential chatter in an attempt to prove to Dicky that I ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... house once, to consult the news-tape. It was crowded with Earth events—excitement, confusion everywhere—inconsequential reports, they seemed, by comparison with what had gone before. But of helios from Mars, or Venus, there were none reported. Of Venus, the tape said nothing save that each of our westward stations was vainly calling in turn, as the planet dropped ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... his throat. Johnny quickly drowned the thought in a flood of inconsequential nonsense, a trick he had learned as a green pilot. He might sleep though, if sleep were a possible thing in this cold emptiness. No one, to his recollection, had ever done so outside a ship or station—the space psychology types ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set me to musing—thinking—searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... of trite and inconsequential things. It was very necessary that they become firmly grounded on their new footing of genuine friendship before departing into personalities; and so, for two days, they avoided any but the most ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Indeed, he would have much preferred it should die out altogether and make room for better material. The truth was that his prolonged residence abroad had made the questions of American politics exceedingly vague and inconsequential. He believed them to be ephemeral to the last degree— in the main, mere struggles of parties and partisans for power and spoils; and for their hopes, schemes, and stratagems to gain temporary ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... shows how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation of the multitudes, yet all these are but secondary and insignificant ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... like a mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me; the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... these small middle nations were inconsequential. They simply adapted their politics or faith to the nation that for the time had them under its heel. What semi-original religion they possessed was an amalgamation of the religions of other nations, and their gods of bronze, terra-cotta, and enamel were irreverently sold in the market like ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... become the solid and inevitable expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of cause or effect, it is an indulgence ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... recall the conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... criticism he once had felt in Fools' hall, "a nimble-witted jester was lost when you resumed the dignity of your position. But," he added cautiously, as a sudden thought moved him, "this lady has appeared somewhat unexpectedly; the house of Friedwald is not an inconsequential one." ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... great events! Tragedies swing on such inconsequential hinges. It is so exasperating to look back over the path of a calamity and see how easily it might have been averted! If one man in the little town of Lawrence a generation ago had eaten two pieces of ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... have not sowed, gather but have not strewed, and that is ever injurious and never beneficial. Our conceit is flattered and enlarged, our importance magnified, our "dignity"—God save the mark!—made more impressive, and as a result, we are more the target for the inconsequential worries of life. We worry if we are not flattered, if our importance is not recognized even by strangers, and our dignity not honored—in other words we worry that we are not kow-towed to, deferred to, respectfully greeted on every hand and made to feel ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not see how any American can justify—legally, or logically, or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide these funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential factors as ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... her lap. If there were in her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... too, we find men possessing clear judicial minds defending with all the fervor of fifteenth century fanatics, not the Christian faith per se, but some special interpretation thereof; not the philosophy of religion, but the inconsequential theorems of some sacerdotal "reformer" who has added to the world's discord by founding a new "faith." These various religious divisions have become little more than rival commercial establishments, each peddling its own peculiar brand ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... receive him, and in the most expressionless manner held out his hand. His eye lost every particle of lustre and seemed to sink back and down. The chairman of the committee stated the point he had in view. Mr. Tilden asked him to restate it once or twice; made curious and inconsequential remarks, appeared like a man just going to sleep, and finally said: "I will see you on the subject on a future occasion." The committee withdrew. In one moment he resumed the conversation with the brilliancy and ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... final fracas in the Copau foundry on the bank of Canal Pyramus. Overly optimistic, Luke's new boss had struck out at the chunky, red-headed Earthman during an inconsequential argument and had promptly measured his length in a sand pile as a hamlike fist crashed home in return. They had picked up the foreman and taken him to the infirmary where it was found that his skull was fractured and that he had little chance for life. There were the red police after ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... suggested by a reason insufficiently inspired by the contemplation of the divine handiwork is fatally incoherent, for we thus pretend to substitute ourselves for God, and God thenceforth leaving us to ourselves, surrenders us to all the discordant effects of an inconsequential ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... the Council (says Knight) are elected by the same class as the aldermen, but in very varying and—in comparison with the size and importance of the wards—inconsequential numbers. Bassishaw and Lime Street Wards have the smallest representation—four members—and those of Farringdon Within and Without the largest—namely, sixteen and seventeen. The entire number of the Council is 240. Their meetings are held under the presidency of the Lord Mayor; and the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... his answer, Alaire was only too glad to give up the wheel, for her nerves were indeed unsteady and she was grateful for an opportunity to think out the best course to pursue in this unexpected difficulty. Later, as she listened to Law's inconsequential talk with Dolores and Jose, and watched the way he handled the car, she marveled at his composure. She wondered if this man could have ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... you see," said the strange young man, "I have built me a log shack back in the hills where I amuse myself writing verses—which, fortunately, no one reads—and doing equally inconsequential things. Now I'm going down for a few days in the city. I can only go when the weather is fine and when winter sets in, I must come back and bury myself with no companions except some books and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... JOANNA makes a third at table. They are all a little inconsequential, as if there were still some ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... answer is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental, accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work, associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending where another man's rights begin. To these four ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation from one of the poets. It never ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... of any breadth of vision. His mind was completely obsessed with details. He would go to a lecture, or to a play, and invariably, instead of grasping the main argument of the lecture, or the lesson of the play, he saw only a few inconsequential details of action in the play, and remembered only stray and somewhat irrelevant statements made by the lecturer. A novel or an essay appealed to him in the same way. Present to him a business proposition and his whole attention would be absorbed by some chance remark. He was a devoted ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... evening a calm, smooth, brilliant, affable man sat at Vuyning's right hand during dinner. And when the ones who pass their lives in city streets spoke of skyscrapers or of the little Czar on his far, frozen throne, or of insignificant fish from inconsequential streams, this big, deep-chested man, faultlessly clothed, and eyed like an Emperor, disposed of their Lilliputian chatter with a wink ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... sharply, having come into the room and closed the door, "I have a word to say. I told Mr. Mann I would come here and explain why my niece cannot take part in any such foolish and inconsequential exhibition as this that ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... William James has advised us that a deleterious thought may be exorcised by willing another that is sunny. I tried to command a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were closed but intent. Yet you never know where the most promising image will transport you through some inconsequential association. I recalled a pleasing day in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that brought Eothen into my mind, by chance. And instantly, instead of seeing Sfax in Tunis, I was looking down from a window on a black-edged day of rain, watching an unending procession of moribund figures jolting over ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... inconsequential producer of hashish; a Lebanese/Syrian eradication campaign started in the early 1990s has practically eliminated the opium and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... back in his chair, with his slow smile drawled in an inconsequential way: "I reckon, now that the financial obsequies of Mr. Jefferson Worth has been indefinitely postponed owin' to the corpse refusin' to perform, that Company bunch will wear mournin' because said funeral didn't come off as per schedule. ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... moment or two in the same inconsequential vein, then, other people being presented, she nodded an amiable dismissal; and, as he stepped ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... recognized their wives and mothers in those serene faces, and manhood forbids that you should hoot at your own blood-and-bone kin womenfolk. So they changed the subject. They began to talk, a perfect hurricane of inconsequential comments on every imaginable subject except the subject of women and ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... souls, derived from the propinquity of bodies, inevitably tend? A common source of being is to produce community of sentiment; identity of matter, identity of impulse! Then again,—he is thy father! He gave thee life, thou art his flesh and blood—and therefore he must be sacred to thee! Again a most inconsequential deduction! I should like to know why he begot me;** certainly not out of love for me—for I ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... manner continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor. Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body—not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... come to the teaching of Muggleton, we find ourselves in a tangled maze of nonsense far too inconsequential to allow of any intelligible account being given of it. Jacob Boehm's mistiest dreams are clearness itself compared with the English prophet's utterances. Others might talk of the divine cause or the divine power or the divine person, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... years old, Brangwen sent her to the dames' school in Cossethay. There she went, flipping and dancing in her inconsequential fashion, doing very much as she liked, disconcerting old Miss Coates by her indifference to respectability and by her lack of reverence. Anna only laughed at Miss Coates, liked her, and patronized her in ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... rather have a Birch, or a Hawkins, appear heavy, cold, and prolix, than that anything material which concerns a Tillotson, or a Johnson, should be lost. It must also be confessed, that an anecdote, or a circumstance, which may appear inconsequential to a reader, may bear some remote or latent connexion: a biographer who has long contemplated the character he records, sees many connexions which escape an ordinary reader. Kippis, in closing the life of the diligent ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... prior, disgusted with the endless and inconsequential debates and wars between Islam and Christianity, he had betaken himself to Cipango, [Footnote: Supposably Japan.] wherever that might be. There, in a repentant hour, he had conceived the idea of a Universal Religious Brotherhood, with God for its accordant principle; ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... a conspicuous place in the war legislation by reason of the embargo provision. It appeared an inconsequential clause, judging from the little public attention paid to it; but the President saw a weapon in it that might have more effect in bringing Germany to her knees than Great Britain's blockade of her coasts, stringent as the latter had proved. It developed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... settled in Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, not only marked the happy beginning of a period of perfect domestic and family life, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the Challon are my morality and outlook, whether I wish it so or not." Tim might have been making a pleasantly inconsequential remark about the weather for all the importance he seemed to attach to his statement, yet his eyes held the strained, tight-lipped face. "The insight and understanding bequeathed by the Challon are sufficient to keep Homer's mind sane under long stress, ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... died slowly from the dark eyes of the woman, until to the watching husband they seemed inky pools of languor. The leaping flames held her attention and her lips were parted in an inscrutable half-smile. Already her thoughts were becoming pleasantly languid, dwelling on such inconsequential things as how blue the water had been—and that after all to-morrow does not ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, how ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... in dismissal of the inconsequential, Mr. Podmore went to lunch. He had comfortable quarters at the Queen's Hotel, just a block from the Union Station, and after a light lunch in the big dining-room he idled about the rambling old rotunda for an hour or ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Bland protested and explained and defended himself. But Johnny had already drifted off into troubled meditation rendered somewhat vague and inconsequential by his rapid changes of financial condition, moods, environment—the brief ecstasy of his triumphant flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's whining voice failed to register anything ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Stratton; "but I found out all I wanted to know, nevertheless. You see, I shall have to ask what appears to be a lot of rambling, inconsequential questions because you can never tell in a case like this when you may get the key to the ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... that day Scattergood busied himself in searching out old friends and neighbors of the Newtons. Nothing seemed to interest him which happened later than eight years before, but no event of that period was too slight or inconsequential to receive his attention and to be filed away in his shrewd old brain. He was looking for the answer to a question, and the answer was piled under the rubbish of eight years of human activities—a hopeless ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... wondered again what her name was. He ran through the catalogue of the names he himself would have chosen for a heroine—Gladys, Ethel, Mildred Millicent!—none of them seemed to suit her. He tried again. Margaret, Beatrice, Lucy, Joan! Joan possibly—or he said to himself, in the last inconsequential thoughts as he fell asleep, it might be—the ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... is easy to inveigh against the notion frivolous fribbles and trumpery trappings receive more attention than the fine music which ought to be recognized as the soul of the work, the vital spark which irradiates an inconsequential material body; but human nature has not yet freed itself sufficiently from gross clogs to attain ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a kind of traveler who repays this hospitality by defiling the walls with his inconsequential name, scratched in or scrawled on, and by toting away as a souvenir whatever portable object he can confiscate when nobody is looking. Up in the bell tower the masonry is all defaced and pocked where these vandals have dug at it with pocketknives; and as we were coming away, one of them—a ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... puzzling his brain over the inconsequential matter something stirred upon the floor close to his feet, and presently he jerked back a booted foot that a rat had ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and since a citizen to fulfil his duty to his country must be honourable and zealous, he must develop the underlying virtues in private life. He must strengthen the individual character, and to do this he must deal with many things seemingly remote and inconsequential from a national point of view. Everything that crosses a man's path in his day's round of little or great moment requires of him an attitude towards it, and the conscious or unconscious shaping of his attitude is determining ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... finds the theme most congenial to her interest and to her powers. That theme is the struggle of some elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him—or more frequently her—by numbing circumstances. The early, somewhat inconsequential Alexander's Bridge touches this theme, though Bartley Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy. Pioneers and artists, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... clamoring for action, and E.H.Q. was, instead, droning on through a mass of inconsequential detail, now while public sentiment was crystallizing, or could be crystallized into placing human welfare over science procedures, now ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... at my ease. I was in the presence of a knight; but he was first and last a man. Straight to the point he went. He never puts a man through that bugbear of the soldier, a host of seemingly inconsequential questions; he has the particulars of each man who is likely to come under his direction ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... women, and babies. You'll hear the thumping of their moccasined feet every hour of the day. They'll overrun your front porch and seek you out in the sacred precincts of your kitchen, mostly about things that are totally inconsequential." ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman |
