"Immobility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him from the black depths of the mirror above the bureau, a haggard face drained of all life, of all blood, with deep inky pools upon the eyes. A sudden emotion stirred in the chill immobility creeping upward ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... right. That stricken lady, in the habit of a grey nun of Fontevrault, came by night to Paris, and found her brother with John of Mortain. They had been upon the very business. Philip, not all knave, had been moved by the news of Richard's immobility. He had had ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... approached; and what before had been mere talk and threat could now be put into instant action. And so when he had given the King his run, and listened to the royal obstinacy in all its varying phrases of repetition, contradiction, reproach, till it reached its final stage of blank immobility, he ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... business from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul—or across whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained to immobility. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... their spring verdure slumbered peacefully. Far away the shipping in the bacino lay still like enchanted craft. Only a steamer or two, and here and there the black line of a gondola with its standing, solitary rower, broke the immobility of things. And Venice, russet and rose and grey, brooded in the sunset, a city of dreams. They murmured words of wonder and regret. Instinctively they drew near and their shoulders touched. Their clasp of fingers tightened and their breath came quickly, and for a long time ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the preceding arguments (which here return in full force) as to the severance of Eternity into two parts; nor the questions raised by the progression or the immobility of the worlds; let us look only at the difficulties inherent to this second theory. If God pre-existed alone, the world must have emanated from Him; Matter was therefore drawn from His essence; consequently Matter in itself is non-existent; all forms are veils to cover the Divine Spirit. If this ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... vautrent dans leur fauteuil', which is ungraceful and ill-bred, unless where the familiarity is extreme; but a man of fashion makes himself easy, and appears so by leaning gracefully instead of lolling supinely; and by varying those easy attitudes instead of that stiff immobility of a bashful booby. You cannot conceive, nor can I express, how advantageous a good air, genteel motions, and engaging address are, not only among women, but among men, and even in the course of business; they fascinate the affections, they steal a preference, they play ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... say the very same thing we said yesterday and before, because she, as well as we and everything around us, is also the same as yesterday and before. It is very hard and painful for one to live, when nothing changes around him, and if it does not kill his soul for good, the immobility of the surroundings becomes all the more painful the longer he lives. We always spoke of women in such a manner that at times we were disgusted at our own rude and shameless words, and this is quite clear, for the women we had known, perhaps, never deserved any ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... relations of learning, thought and the economic situation in the world at the present time than this cover of the Sacred Grove—the quiet conservatism of the one element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of the other; the contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and extreme mental immobility. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... it is regarded as a sign that the soul of the moribund has returned (see AUTOMATISM). More important perhaps than all these phenomena, because more regular and normal, was the daily period of sleep with its frequent concomitant of fitful and incoherent ideas and images. The mere immobility of the body was sufficient to show that its state was not identical with that of waking; when, in addition, the sleeper awoke to give an account of visits to distant lands, from which, as modern psychical investigations ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... streaks of blood oozed on the damp, plastered hair from the broken scalp. I could but stare at the lump of unconscious flesh that dripped sea-water at my feet. A man, all life and movement one moment, defying the universe, reduced the next moment to immobility and the blackness and blankness of death, is always a fascinating object for the contemplative eye of the philosopher. And in this case it had been accomplished so simply, by means of a stick of wood brought sharply in ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... work. It is very different. You do not understand the psychic immobility of labour. Habits grow stronger as the mentality is simplified. I have heard that there are animals in the zoological garden that still perform useless operations that their remote ancestors required in ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... some measure this gloom of failure underlying their success is a necessary character of all lovely and spiritual creations in this world. Now Michael Angelo's works, because of their Southern impetuosity and volubility, are not so instinct with this divine sorrow, this immobility of the soul face to face with evil, as is Duerer's Melancholy. He inspires and exhilarates us more, but takes us out of ourselves rather than leads ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much gazing at ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace, into the setting of the most powerful ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Stephane with a sheepish air and open mouths. Not one of them stirred. Their immobility, and their seven pairs of fixed round eyes directed upon him, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... Cooper, with fine immobility. "Three-man job, by rights. Will you give us a hand, Collins?" For Price and Mosey were ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... together in bundles or separate muscles, and interlaces and crosses them in every direction. Now, if these fibers remain long in a fixed position, or are involved in inflammation, there is danger of adhesions forming between them, producing permanent immobility; gliding movements are interfered with, and the muscle ceases to perform its function. Inflammation gives rise to effusion, or the formation of a kind of cement which binds together the muscular ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... hearts of the folk who live their lives in the wild, there are bred certain animal traits. The good trapper learns that, like rabbit or bob-cat, he must be able to freeze into statuesque immobility at the sudden appearance of danger. Nature, who does her best to protect her children, sees to it that the trapper's costume soon resembles nothing so much as a hoary tree-trunk. And the men who tramp the wild gradually assimilate the silent, furtive ways of the intelligent forest ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... for gift for Sabah; it keep her good," grinned the boy, and when he delivered that message to his majesty, a smile nearly destroyed the immobility of his features. A slave handed Lewis a package done up in green leaves, and when he curiously loosened the wrappings, a handful of seed-pearls, beautiful in luster and coloring fell in ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... thundering host—which but a second before had seemed inevitably bound to trample down the Legion under a hurricane of white-lathered horses and frenzied, long-robed men—came to a dead halt of silence and immobility. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... mountain-throne of Hamilcar Barcas, and later the spot where in a rude cavern, now sheeted with marble and jasper, "from all the youth of Sicily, Saint Rosalie retired to God." The handicraftsmen of Palermo still occupy almost exclusively the streets named after their trades,—an indication of immobility rarely to be met with nowadays, though Rome displays it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his feet and cold-bloodedly turned the ray on Winters, blasting him into immobility. He turned grimly toward the panel and raced to the slidestairs. If Vidac had a warrant for his arrest, signed by Hardy, then Vidac knew where Hardy was. If he could follow the lieutenant governor, he might possibly ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... Rome, eager to observe its religion, especially its antiquities of religious usage, I assisted at the most curious, perhaps, of them all, the most distinctly marked with that immobility which is a sort of ideal in the Roman religion. The ceremony took place at a singular spot some miles distant from the city, among the low hills on the bank of the Tiber, beyond the Aurelian Gate. There, in a little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... half-naked boy sits merrily upon a galloping stallion, his bare limbs and flying burnous take on the passionate grace of a panathenaic frieze; it befits equally well the repose of old age, crouching at some street-corner in hieratic immobility. ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... its blossom and its accent, immortal and fixed in a more vital proof than the bosom of the wife of Diomedes moulded by the ashes of Pompeii. And if this grace is animated by Watteau, if he looses it from repose and immobility, if he renders it active and moving, it seems that it works with a rhythm and that its measured pace is a dance led by ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... back suddenly in his chair, and for some minutes complete silence reigned in the room. He was evidently thinking deeply, and his eyes were fixed upon the open book with inscrutable immobility. Once he glanced slowly towards Rene Drucquer, who sat with downcast eyes and interlocked fingers. Then he pressed back his elbows and inhaled a deep breath, as if weary ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... gentle smile of appreciation softened the immobility of the forger's face as he again ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... stiffened to immobility, but his little eyes remained fastened on the camera obscura above. All the cunning, patience, and murderous immobility of the rat ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... Aldonza, poor child, with her black hair hanging loose like a veil, for she had been startled from her bed, still sat on the ground making her lap a pillow for the white-bearded head, nobler and more venerable than ever. On it lay, in the absolute immobility produced by the paralysing blow, the fine features already in the solemn grandeur of death, and only the movement of the lips under the white flowing beard and of the dark ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... passing from darkness into light, or as the rapture of some mystical soul, secure in the possession of its God. It was dazzling light, intoxication without giddiness, repose without heaviness, or immobility. I could have lived on thus during as many thousand years as there were ripples on the lake, or sands upon its shores, without perceiving that more seconds had elapsed than were required for a single respiration. When the immortal dwellers in heaven ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... deprived the earth of its alleged immobility, gave a very simple explanation of the most minute circumstances of precession. He supposed that the axis of rotation does not remain exactly parallel to itself; that in the course of each complete revolution of the earth around the sun, the axis deviates from its position ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... than in the United States. Yet here, a majority of the original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... insensible to the caress. His immobility repelled these pleadings. Freya had traveled much through the world, had gone through shameful adventures, and would know how to free herself by her own efforts without the necessity of complicating him again in her net. The story that ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... while—English national consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. She has built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility, than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national political and social organization—the ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Lisle's bronzed face was imperturbable, and Gladwyne had promptly recovered his composure as he realized the mistake. Still, for a moment, he had been badly startled. Nobody noticed Nasmyth, which was fortunate, because his unnatural immobility would have betrayed him. ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... without coughing, that he coughed now without being able to spit; no longer rising from his chair, he who had so often risen for humanity; but drinking dry, eating heartily, saying nothing, but having all the appearance of a living Canon of Notre Dame. Seeing the immobility of the aforesaid canon; seeing the stories of his evil life which for some time had circulated among the common people, always ignorant; seeing his dumb seclusion, his flourishing health, his young old age, and other things ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... of things in itself or in God must also astonish our brief duration. The fixed and constant immobility of nature, in comparison with the continual change which goes on within us, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... that everyone knows in the first moment of disaster. It was this sensation, not any temporising or actual disbelief, that kept him still motionless, staring. Polkinghorne began to feel the proprieties outraged by this immobility. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... this, moving out of the stony immobility in which she gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had moved, was incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex start as though she had been struck. But at the sight of it, the flame in his eyes leaped up. "No, no, no!" he cried with an insistent triumph, "he is nothing ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... that almost beautiful, patience—the quality of her defect of callousness—Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask—the "black" (or, as we should ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... haunted and worried, with a tinge of defiance in it; the owner of the 'bicycle face' has his features set in lines of deadly resolution; the 'golf face' displays fanatical enthusiasm and a puzzled look resulting from a struggle with the vocabulary of the game; the 'poker face' shows immobility and superstition; the 'telegraph face,' according to a well-known New York professor, is 'vacant, stoic and unconcerned,' but the 'telephone face' stands out among all of these in a class peculiar to itself. There are traces of a battle and defeat marked on it; the ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... townsfolk the works had become part of the landscape, and, imaginatively, not much more. But just as they could not contemplate the obliteration of part of the landscape, so it was difficult to conceive permanent idleness at the works. It was a case of the immobility of the non-speculative mind, which is lethargic in hours of exaltation but comfortably steadfast in times ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... leg over the horn of his saddle and sat sidewise. One of his tribunes looked at the other with a flickering smile that was not entirely free of contempt. But his fellow returned a stare that for immobility would have done ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... and Lord Nelville approached the door of the church. "Another glance towards this immense sanctuary," said she to Nelville: "See how little man appears in presence of religion, even when we are reduced to consider only its material emblem! See what immobility, what eternity, mortals can give to their works, whilst they themselves pass away so rapidly, and only survive themselves by their genius! This temple is an image of the infinite, and there is no limit to the sentiments to which it gives birth—to the ideas which it revives—to the immense ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Phoenicians, and Egyptians) were washed away by the flood of time, and their remnants were absorbed by younger and more vigorous peoples. Others (the Hindoos and Persians) relapsed into a semi-barbarous state; and a third class (the Chinese) were arrested in their growth, and remained fixed in immobility. The best that the antique Orient had to bequeath in the way of spiritual possessions fell to the share of the classic nations of the West, the Greeks and the Romans. They greatly increased the heritage by their own spiritual achievements, and so produced a much more ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... cultivated, and ill-adapted by its very freedom for prolonged stability, with Florence; Sparta, firmly based upon an ancient constitution, indifferent to culture, and solid at the cost of some rigidity, with Venice. As in Greece the philosophers of Athens, especially Plato and Aristotle, wondered at the immobility of Sparta and idealized her institutions; so did the theorists of Florence, Savonarola, Giannotti, Guicciardini, look with envy at the state machinery which secured repose and liberty for Venice. The parallel between ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... latter, instead of heading for a ship in waiting for it, opposite Healthful House, have been rowed to a point further down the river? In this case is it not possible that I was carried into the collar of a house? This would explain the complete immobility of the compartment. It is true that the walls are of bolted plates, and that there is a vague smell of salt water, that odor sui generis which generally pervades the interior of a ship, and ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else; a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... sinks down upon her bosom, but, as her immobility continues, he experiences for the first time a faint sensation of fear. This is born of his love for her, and, in a frantic endeavour to recall her to life, he bends down and kisses her passionately. ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... of dead Presidents and Governors looked down at him from their old-time frames ranged in stately ranks along the oaken wainscot. Over the mantel the amazing, Hebraic countenance of a moose leered at him out of little sly, sardonic little eyes, almost bantering in their evil immobility. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... receive us. Tall men they are, robed in violet and purple silks shot through with dragon-patterns in gold. Their lofty fantastic head-dresses, their voluminous and beautiful costume, and the solemn immobility of their hierophantic attitudes make them at first sight seem marvellous statues only. Somehow or other there comes suddenly back to me the memory of a strange French print I used to wonder at when a child, representing ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... reduced to immobility in 1707, the following campaign was to witness another of his wonderful victories. At the head of a mixed force of 80,000 men he was awaiting the arrival of Eugene with an Imperialist army of 35,000, when Vendome unexpectedly took the offensive while he still ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... element, which deprives the morality of China of enthusiasm, its social system of vitality, its order of any progress, and its conservatism of any improvement. It is a system without hope, and so has remained frozen in an icy and stiff immobility for fifteen ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... essentially the divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy, on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... within itself, secure from military attack and economically self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... the few, and she was not to be despised, but her influence was neutralized by the solid immobility of her husband. He had never done anything sudden in his life. Every resolve was the result of a long process of mind, and every act of importance had to be previewed from all possible points. An honest man, strongly religious, and a great admirer of The Pilot, but slow-moving as ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... perhaps twenty seconds after John Aldous announced himself there was no visible sign of life on the part of either Quade or Culver Rann. The latter sat stunned. Not the movement of a finger broke the stonelike immobility of his attitude. His eyes were like two dark coals gazing steadily as a serpent's over Quade's hunched shoulders and bowed head. Quade seemed as if frozen on the point of speaking to Rann. One hand ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... mention the circumstance? Such things were complications on the part of a young lady betrothed to that curious cross-barred phantom of a Mr. Porterfield. But I am bound to add that she gave me no further warrant for suspecting them than by the simple fact of her encouraging her mother, by her immobility, to linger. Somehow I had a sense that she knew better. I got up myself to go, but Mrs. Nettlepoint detained me after seeing that my movement would not be taken as a hint, and I perceived she wished me not to leave my fellow-visitors on her hands. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... left alone in the room, Morgan amused himself by pricking the unfortunate officer with the point of the weapon, at the same time enforcing immobility and silence by the most ferocious threats of a speedy and cruel death. The men outside drank noisily and presently departed, and the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, obscene, monstrous and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... berth was made up, and upon it, lying face downwards, was the form of a stalwart, well-built man, with irons on his legs. I thought for a moment that the poor fellow was asleep; yet, as we stood gazing upon him in silence, I was suddenly impressed by the perfect immobility of the figure, and the oppressive silence that pervaded the cabin. Let a man be sleeping ever so peacefully, you will notice some slight movement due to the inspiration and expiration of his breath; and there will also be the sound of his breathing, as a rule; ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... themselves in accordance with their own appreciation of it. And I cannot believe that it is well for you or for Europe that such things can be accomplished in the eyes of the world, without one nation arising out of its immobility to protest in the name of universal justice. This is to enthrone brute force, where, by the power of reason, God alone should reign; it is to substitute the sword and poniard for law—to decree a ferocious war without limit of time or means between oppressors rendered suspicious ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... in the grate. Her thoughtful mood had flown. Nothing of it remained on her face, a little saddened, nor in her languid body, more desirable than ever in the quiescence of her mind. She kept for a while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction the charm of things that art ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... "on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke. He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... A breath-holding immobility lay over river and garden; no quiver moved in the aspens or shook the leaf-clad towers of the elms and chestnuts. It was as if, instead of being clad in soft and sensitive foliage, they were cast in iron. No note of birds came from the bushes, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... friend?"—"Do not believe it! He had nothing but evil to say of you!"—"What, Sachs? He, too?... I will put out his lamp!" She catches again at his arm, and even at that moment both are startled into immobility by the sound of a lute. Some one approaches, testing as he comes the strings of a lute, if they be in tune. The light has disappeared from the shoe-maker's window. Walther is again for dashing down the lane toward the city-gate and the horses. "But no! Can't you ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... important!" repeated Sarah, in a faltering voice, for, notwithstanding her habitual immobility, in reflecting upon the immense importance of the revelation she was about to make to Rudolph, she felt herself more agitated than she could have thought possible. After a moment's silence, Sarah, no longer able to restrain herself, cried, "Rudolph, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... studio, the famous Pompeian room, on the second floor. I shall never forget the frozen immobility of the three actors in the tragedy. Esther Levenson, wrapped in peacock-blue scarves, stood upright before the black mantel, her hands crossed on her breast. Cecil Grimshaw was lying full length on a brick-red satin couch, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. The dead man sprawled ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... man and woman of the Angelus rest only for the prayer and then resume their work. The Man with the Hoe snatches but a brief respite from his labors. The impression of power suggested by his figure, even in immobility, recalls ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... a moment as motionless as a statue; then, bending slowly forward, still holding one hand partly raised as a signal for the hunter to retain his immobility, he took several steps forward, so lightly and cautiously that there was absolutely no sound at all produced. He then sunk slowly downward, and seemed to concentrate all his faculties into the single one of sight. ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... thanks to their different uniforms, weapons, accoutrements, and aiguillettes; and the whole great picture, that miniature battlefield before the combat, was framed by the majestic towering walls of the Tuileries, which officers and men seemed to rival in their immobility. Involuntarily the spectator made the comparison between the walls of men and the walls of stone. The spring sunlight, flooding white masonry reared but yesterday and buildings centuries old, shone full likewise upon thousands of bronzed faces, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... has his choice of several possible methods of procedure. The simplest, though not the most effective method, is to write out the argument in full, and to memorize it word for word. The weakness of such a course lies in the immobility of its attack and defense. The first speaker for the affirmative may decide beforehand exactly what he will say and the order in which he will say it, but all those who are to follow should adapt their arguments, to some extent at least, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... into another period of immobility and so sat for a long time. Suddenly her face hardened, became coarse, common, vicious in line. Flinging out her hand, she struck me in the breast. 'What do you want of me?' she demanded, in the voice of a harridan. 'What ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... at the door, preceded this time by two commissaires de police. These men entered the room and, amid the unbroken silence and total immobility of the Assembly, summoned the Representatives to disperse. The President ordered them to retire themselves. One of the commissaires was agitated and faltered; the other broke out in invectives. The President said to him: "Sir, we are here the lawful authority and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... point our wires had been cut clean through by a concussion shell and the entanglement looked as if it had been frozen into immobility in the midst of a riot of broken wires and shattered posts. We passed through the lane made by the shell and flopped flat to earth on the other side when a German star-shell came across to inspect us. The world ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... as if a god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... to modify or destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been characteristic of most other ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... felt his arm around her neck. She couldn't move her body. She could only turn her head from his hot breath. For a moment he held her, and yet another moment; and then, terrified at what this strange immobility might mean, she raised her eyes and saw he was not looking at her. Though he held her fast he was not conscious of her. Straight over her head he looked, through the window and down, into the garden. Her eyes followed. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... the prince, attempting to lean forward to look out of the door; but the movement he was obliged to make cost him so much trouble that he soon hastened to resume his immobility. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... spirits. They emerged to the street and turned the corner into the less populous thoroughfare, known commonly throughout Bloomfield as Pearl Street, and there they came upon Uncle Buzz's horse and buggy, standing as if carved from one and the same block of immutable immobility. Even the flies found little of excitement in lighting about the front section of the combination, and only one or two were buzzing about in the general neighbourhood in a ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... at this employ that Finn found his mate when he arrived at the cave that morning from Nuthill. For some moments Finn also gazed down at the victims, pondering over their immobility and his mate's mournful cries. Then, very tenderly at first, he nuzzled the dead puppies. That process flashed a picture into his mind, and he saw again Warrigal's dead children in the Mount Desolation cave. So he understood. His head moved now far more ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... below, armed, helmed. He recognized the uniform of the Wrecker warriors, saw one or two who wore the gray of the Foanna servants. They stood in lines, unmoving, without speech among themselves, men who might have been frozen into immobility and arranged so for some game in which they were the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... father really slept or if, aware of her, he only kept consciously quiet. Did his eyes truly fix her between lids partly open, and was she to take this—his forebearance from any question—only as a sign again that everything was left to her? She at all events, for a minute, watched his immobility—then, as if once more renewing her total submission, returned, without a sound, to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier's eyes as they met those of Sibley. He liked Sibley. At this point it is not necessary to say why. The reason will appear in due time. Sibley's face had always something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier's face had part of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret shadows absent from Crozier's face; but still with some of the El Greco characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... counteract their abnormal muscularity. Thus Lord HALDANE, who in his earlier days thought nothing of walking to Cambridge one day and back to London on the next, has now become more than reconciled to the immobility imposed on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... The calm immobility of the body so lately racked with pain, or restless in feverish tossings, is but a symbol of the deeper stillness of truer repose which remaineth for the people of God and laps the blessed spirits who 'sleep in Jesus.' He meant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... previous position. In inflammation of the throat, as in pharyngolaryngitis, the head is extended upon the neck and the angle between the jaw and the lower border of the neck is opened as far as possible to relieve the pressure that otherwise would fall upon the throat. In dumminess, or immobility, the hanging position of the head and the stupid expression are rather characteristic. In pleurisy, peritonitis, and some other painful diseases of the internal organs, the rigid position of the body ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... precisely the same. No rush of air, no jarring sensation would betray the slightest movement. But for the sight of the Moon gradually growing larger above them, and of the Earth gradually growing smaller beneath them, they could safely swear that they were fast anchored in an ocean of deathlike immobility. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... down upon the red sofa, and buried her head in the rags which covered the bosom of her mother, and wept there. The old woman received her daughter without issuing from her state of immobility, or displaying any emotion. The mother possessed in the highest degree that gravity of savage races, the impassiveness of a statue upon which all remarks are lost. Did she or did she not love her daughter? Beneath that mask every human emotion might brood—good ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... pit vanished. A clear light sprang up in the big room. Simultaneously, Halder felt the nightmare immobility draining from him and the sensation of dreamlike unreality fade from his mind. He turned to the right, found Kilby's eyes already on him, saw the Rellis couple sitting beyond her ... Rane, no longer disguised, looking like a mirror image ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... of the Secret Agents, save to freeze into immobility when the hated voice spoke, gave no sign. They had worries of their own, for no instructions had been given that they bring their own loved ones into the sanctuary of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... after his manner, and was in the act of pouring, when she struck him into immobility with ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... hour before asking her to have patience till he could show his finished work. Now, with her eye upon the door, her ear alert to catch the coming step, her mind disturbed by contending hopes and fears, she sat waiting with the vigilant immobility of an Indian on the watch. She had not long to look and listen. Manuel entered hastily, locked the door, closed the windows, dropped the curtains, then paused in the middle of the room and broke into ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... England went a long way toward establishing a man's intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to strike a filial attitude about their parent's pedestal, there was little to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... body of the men. The popular impression was that there would be no fighting; it was thought that the demonstration Lalor and his men were making would have the effect of bringing the powers to reason, and this opinion was held in spite of past bitter experience of the stupid immobility of the Legislative ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... His Majesty's immobility on certain questions had the practical effect of literally placing them in abeyance in the councils of his Ministers. As it was found to be impossible to form a strong Administration that should unanimously agree with His Majesty, and at the same time possess the confidence of the country, no ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... drawn on a white dust-coat over his other sable garments, but his identity was unmistakable. Viewing him close at hand Harrington perceived that he had large, clear eyes, a smooth-shaven, humorous, determined mouth, and full ruddy cheeks, the immobility of which suggested the habit of deliberation. Physically and temperamentally he appeared to be the antipodes of the reporter, who was thin, nervous, and wiry, with quick, snappy ways and electric mental processes. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... Thursday sat crouched in the saddle, wary as a rattlesnake ready to strike. A sawed-off shotgun lay under his leg within reach of his hand, the butt of a six-gun was even closer to those smooth, girlish fingers. In the immobility of his figure and the steadiness of the blue eyes ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction. The engineer rebounded vertically full length and collapsed again into a vague heap. This heap said 'What's that?' in the muffled accents of profound grief. A faint noise ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... in closer order, and with an indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in court, Hob marched on in awful immobility. There appeared upon the face of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud. Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter, and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the application of a 5 per cent. solution of cocain. Its soft consistence and the fact that it becomes smaller when painted with cocain differentiate it from true hypertrophy of the mucous membrane. Its situation and immobility, its pink colour, and the shrinkage under cocain, distinguish it from the mucous polypus of the nose. The turgescence may involve the whole extent of the mucosa of the inferior turbinated bodies, including their posterior ends. After ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... must watch both gunwales at once, and must preserve an absolutely even keel, in spite of the fact that it generally requires your utmost strength to steer. In really heavy weather one man only can do any work. The other must be content to remain passenger, and he must be trained to absolute immobility. No matter how dangerous a careen the canoe may take, no matter how much good cold water may pour in over his legs, he must resist his tendency to shift his weight. The entire issue depends on the delicacy of the steersman's adjustments, so he must ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... he could look at her,—an unfair advantage, for his dark face, strong in its immobility, was in silhouette against the flush of twilight which illumined hers, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... eyes and froze on his pale cheek. The doctor and Bell looked at him with a sort of terror. Leaning on his stick, he looked like the genius of the North, upright in the midst of the whirlwind, and frightful in his immobility. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... the twenty-four years to which she owned, she struck him as intrinsically young; and he wondered how so evanescent a quality could have been preserved in the desiccating Murrett air. As the play progressed he noticed that her immobility was traversed by swift flashes of perception. She was not missing anything, and her intensity of attention when Cerdine was on the stage drew an ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Kinemon walked resolutely up to the little group. His father gestured for him to go away, but he ignored the elder's command. He must know what had happened to Allen. The stranger in the checked suit was speaking excitedly, waving trembling hands—a sharp contrast to the grim immobility of ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... robe undulated about her little feet. Same face, same figure. It was she indeed; and to prevent any possible doubt of it, she was seated on the back of a huge old- fashioned book strongly resembling the "Cosmography of Munster." Her immobility but half reassured me; I was really afraid that she was going to take some more nuts out of her alms-purse and throw the shells ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... (for having transcended all ignorance), the great Rishi said these words unto his son who resembled a fire wrapped in smoke.[1104] Instructed by what he said, I also, O son, shall again expound to thee that certain knowledge (which dispels ignorance). The properties possessed by earth are immobility, weight, hardness, productiveness, scent, density, capacity to absorb scents of all kinds, cohesion, habitableness (in respect of vegetables and animals), and that attribute of the mind which is called patience of the capacity to bear. The properties ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... stone for hours, enduring the stings of a million insects. Sometimes, not daring to lift his head to look about him, he had to trust to his ears and his hound-like sense of smell for information as to what was going on. And sometimes it was only his tireless immobility that saved him from the stroke of a startled adder or a questioning and indignant crotalus. After long swaying, poised for the death-stroke, the serpent would decide that the menacing thing before it was not alive. It ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old establishments is gone," he said ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad |
