"Impossibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... places in his character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to put ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... close-fitting, made of loose-woven stuff or so shrunk that they would not meet the boot, displaying feet where the elastic sides wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... got you here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on this 99th National ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... read for an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up suddenly; look at the sea,—and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down, turn sky-blue,—a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... minute, overcome, while a procession of ideas crowded after each other through the flaxen head. It was her birthday; grandpa couldn't get the boat under the tablecloth. This beautiful dog—this impossibly beautiful dog, was a surprise present. He was for her, to love and to play with; to see his tricks every day, to teach him to know her and to run to her when she called. If she was given the choice of the ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions, and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight of all the meals, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... than ever, but they have taken a fancy to Ellaline Lethbridge, and I am playing it for all it's worth. It comes in handy at the moment, and I have no conscientious scruples against using millionaires for pawns. They have an impossibly luxurious motorcar. Sir Lionel thinks it vulgar, but they are pleased with it, as it's still a new toy. I have been making a nice little plan for them, which concerns Ellaline. None of them know it yet, but they will soon, and if it had been invented to please Dick (which it wasn't entirely) ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... fair-appearing good surprised, She dictate false; and mis-inform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love, enjoins, That I should mind thee oft; and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve; Since Reason not impossibly may meet Some specious object by the foe suborned, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned. Seek not temptation then, which to avoid Were better, and most likely if from me Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought. Wouldst ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... anyhow. And in the second place you got me out of a villainous bad temper and turned an ugly goblin into a very happy butterfly. I'm downright ashamed of myself for being so horrid about Rose de Vigne. She isn't at all a bad sort though she is so impossibly beautiful. Your brother is going to dance with her now. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... intellectual development. One might question what common grounds for social intercourse there would be between an American farmer's wife with either grammar-school or high-school education and some European peasant's wife, illiterate, impossibly shy, and downtrodden. ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... followed the children with her look as they silently left the room. She knew not how to enter upon what she had to say. To talk of the law and use threats in this atmosphere of serene domesticity seemed impossibly harsh. But the necessity of broaching the disagreeable ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... his children hungry, and not take bread if it be offered? Who can see his wife lying in sharpest want, and not seek a remedy if there be a remedy within reach? So debt had come upon them, and rude men pressed for small sums of money—for sums small to the world, but impossibly large to them. And he would hide himself within there, in that cranny of an inner chamber—hide himself with deep shame from the world, with shame, and a sinking heart, and ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... latter end of Life, for both, be nothing but a joint anticipation of the grave? Gwen tried to sound the plummet of thought in an inconceivable surrounding, to guess at something she herself might think were she impossibly conditioned thus, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... part of his bargain with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... hand, are vacillating and ill at your ease. You shrink from the hards of life which I steer happily through. But you have no delusions with yourself, and the odds are that when the time comes you may choose the "high that proved too high" and achieve the impossibly heroic. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... looking quite impossibly lovely in a frock of the cheapest kind of material, "run up" by the local dressmaker, and very evidently with no other thought "at the back of her mind" than ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... see him off. She was probably still mad about yesterday. She had been sitting at the counter at the Club Rexall, drinking a soda and reading a movie magazine with a big picture of an impossibly pretty face on the cover—the kind you never see just walking down the street. He had taken the next stool ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... has since been quietly relieved, and need not have been dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have seen an Oxford agricultural laborer's wife looking ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... in his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... which plainly said it was about time, and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down. Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slow three-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for ten miles in ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the lad; and crossing the floor of the great building, he climbed cleverly up to the thatch and passed out, and Archie heard a faint rustling, and then sat listening in the dark till, after what seemed to be an impossibly short space of time, the rustling began again, and a few minutes afterwards Peter, panting heavily, dropped down on his knees ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... this embarrassing subject dragged out into the light of day. Even men who have been chaste themselves—good fathers of families like the major—cannot be unaware of the complications incidental to frightening their women-folk, and setting up an impossibly high standard in sons-in-law. But Sylvia stood by her guns; at last she brought her father to his knees by the threat that if he could not bring himself to talk with Roger Peyton, she, Sylvia Castleman, would do ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... French ships and this coast-line together was a combination correct in conception, and not impracticable. It was spoken of at the time—rumored as a design; and had not the attention and the means of the Emperor been otherwise preoccupied, probably would have been attempted, and not impossibly effected. ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions—first, that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation may ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... I. Supposed to be a copy by Sir Peter Lely from the original, which was painted about 1636, and destroyed in the fire at Whitehall in 1697. Not impossibly, however, the original painting itself, given by the king to the Prince Palatine. In the Dresden Gallery. Size: 4 ft. by 3 ft. 2 in. Cust, pp. ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... hearty tone of conviction. Every day of the two years that I have been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in the house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, but exaggerate it, for it is so much more ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... travel sketches, a man exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. This impersonality persists even ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... to follow the fortunes of the Battalion through the varied scenes of its experience. I should like to talk of happy mornings 'round the line' with Colonel or Adjutant, or cheery lunches with good comrades in impossibly damp and filthy dug-outs, of midnight assemblies before, and early-morning greetings after, successful raids, and of how we inspected Boche prisoners, machine-guns and ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... were sharing; let them do their best to make the result a happy one for themselves, and for the people among whom they had come. They were "making history," for this experience was a wholly new one, which might not impossibly prove helpful some day to others ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... and you Breathe through my soul tonight, You in your gown, impossibly white— I marvel greatly that it fail To glow and pale With iridescent light— How can it hang in silent nun-like folds? Think of the flaming mystery it ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... said quickly, 'please don't think me impossibly rude if I turn you out. Some—some people are coming ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... longed to clasp her to his breast and give her everything she impossibly craved. And now it was he who sighed, and then clinched his hands as if to ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived. It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... erect, Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd She dictate false, and missinforme the Will To do what God expresly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoynes, That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve, Since Reason not impossibly may meet 360 Some specious object by the Foe subornd, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warnd. Seek not temptation then, which to avoide Were better, and most likelie if from mee Thou sever ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... at the truth seemed the most important task in life. The first step, though you think it impossibly difficult, did not dismay him. He had no doubt of discovering his father. That Colonel Boyce should have been killed or even caught was incredible. He was not the man so to oblige his enemies. It was incredible, too, that he would go long into hiding. Away from the importance of bustle ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... circles of the metropolis, and filled with racy anecdotes of the court, as well as of public life generally, could not but have been fascinating, by comparison with the stagnant society of Stratford. Hospitalities on a liberal scale would be offered to these men. Not impossibly this fact might be one principal key to those dilapidations which the family estate had suffered. These actors, on their part, would retain a grateful sense of the kindness they had received, and would seek to repay it to John Shakspeare, now that he ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... went much farther than (p. 021) this in the reflections and moral observations which are scattered up and down the pages of this novel. These represent fairly views widely held at the time in America, and may not impossibly express the personal opinions he himself then entertained. He speaks in one place, in his assumed character of an Englishman, of the solidity and purity of our ethics as giving a superior tone to our moral feelings as contrasted with the French. He goes out of his way to compliment George III. One ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor supplied something undreamed of by the household, but ...
— Progress and History • Various
... afterwards of the news of war. But with him by her side Sylvia found her courage come back to her; the news itself, all that it certainly implied, and all the horror that it held, no longer filled her with the sense that it was impossibly terrible. Michael did not diminish the awfulness of it, but he gave her the power of looking out bravely at it. Nor did he shrink from speaking of all that had been to ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... rejoined Ross gloomily. "We cannot give an alarm. If we could control the valves for half a minute, I'd sink this blessed craft with all on board, myself included, for good and all. But it is no use talking of the impossibly heroic." ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... career, he has told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Felicia could have shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... almost no heroines in novels. There are impossibly good women, absurdly patient and brave women, but few heroines as the convention of worldly thinking demands heroines. There is an endless train of what Thackeray so aptly described as "pale, pious, and pulmonary ladies" who snivel and snuffle and sigh ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... on one arm rested an immense rifle; his other arm was around the waist of the conventional female of such sensational journals, while in front, lying prone upon the ground, were half a dozen Indians, evidently slain by the singular hero in defending the impossibly attired female. The legend related how all this had been effected by the famous Kit Carson. I purchased the paper, returned with it to my room, and after showing it to several officers who had called upon Maxwell, I handed it to Kit. He wiped his spectacles, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... half-a-dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... fire, the hard, greasy settle, Alvina could indeed keep the fire going, with faggots of green oak. But the smoke hurt her chest, she was not clean for one moment, and she could do nothing else. The bedroom again was just impossibly cold. And there was no other place. And from far away came the wild braying of an ass, primeval ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... is not yet complete. England is now apparently expected by many Moslems to separate herself from the Concert of Europe, and not impossibly to imperil the peace of the world, in order that the Turks should continue in occupation of Adrianople. The secretary of the Punjab Moslem League has informed us through the medium of the press that unless this is done the efforts of the extreme Indian Nationalists to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring |
