"Indistinctness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to twinkle like objects seen through a thin smoke, whilst each of the tall stems of the cocoa—nut trees on the beach, when looked at steadfastly, seemed to be turning round with a small spiral motion, like so many endless screws. There was a dreamy indistinctness about the outlines of the hills, even in the immediate vicinity, which increased as they receded, until the Blue Mountains in the horizon melted into sky. The crew were listlessly spinning oakum, and mending sails, under the shade of the awning; the only exceptions to the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the Beautiful and Beauty on the one hand, and the Poetical and Poetry on the other, has generally been seen, when seen at all, vaguely; that is to say, seen as the Beautiful and the Poetical themselves have been seen—"in a mirror darkly." This indistinctness seems to have grown out of the faulty views of nature taken by the speculators. . . . . . . . . . In brief, then, Nature is an effect—a product—of a Power lying behind or above it; and it stands, accordingly, to that Power in the relation of an effect to a cause. That cause we shall ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the present good was all in all to Kirstie; he must talk - and talk lamely, as necessity drove him - of what was to be. Again and again he had touched on marriage; again and again been driven back into indistinctness by a memory of Lord Hermiston. And Kirstie had been swift to understand and quick to choke down and smother the understanding; swift to leap up in flame at a mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity and her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thence became excessively difficult. If the colt had traversed this route, its little foot had made no impression on the soil; and when we got on the ironstone hills, we altogether lost the traces of the horse. Both the native and myself imagined, from our seeing no tracks of the colt, from the indistinctness of those of the horse, and from the circumstance of the boy's telling us that Mr. Elliott intended to proceed eighteen miles down the river, that we had followed the wrong marks; just therefore as night began to fall I moved back ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... own person, his sublime conception. The head alone is finished, or nearly so; and has a most extatic expression. The globe of the earth seems to sink from beneath the floating figure, which is just sketched upon the canvass, and has a shadowy indistinctness which to my fancy added to its effect. Guercino's chef-d'oeuvre, the Resurrection of Saint Petronilla, (a saint, I believe, of very hypothetical fame,) is also here; and has been copied in mosaic ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... details the alleged horrors of "alcoolismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the recited answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the Catholic system of learning by rote instead of permitting the development of individual power to think were as marked even in the colegio, corresponding roughly to our high schools. Even there the ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... most operatic drapery-display. I saw scores and scores of public waltzing-girls last summer, and among them all I saw but one who understood the art, or, at any rate, who practised the art, of avoiding an indecent exposure. In the glare and glamour of gas-light it is only flash and clouds and indistinctness. In the broad and honest daylight, it is not. Do I shock ears polite? I trust so. If the saying of shocking things might prevent the doing of shocking things, I should be well content. And is it an unpardonable sin for me to sit alone in my own room and write about what you go into a great hall, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... strain, with my anxiety to lose none of my time and opportunities, finally told on my eyes. One day, while working hard on the view of Neuchatel, I felt something snap behind my eyes, and in a few minutes I could no longer see my drawing; the slightest attempt to fix my vision on anything caused such indistinctness that I could see neither my work nor the landscape, and I was obliged to suspend work altogether. In a few days we went to Basle, and, after a rest, my vision came back partially, and we went to Laufenburg, where Turner had ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... however, to suppose that the articulation was by any means perfect, and expectancy no doubt had a great deal to do with my recognition of the sentence; still, the articulation was there, and I recognized the fact that the indistinctness was entirely due to the imperfection of the instrument. I will not trouble you by detailing the various stages through which the apparatus passed, but shall merely say that after a time I produced the form of instrument shown in Fig. 9, which served very ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... the preacher seemed troubled with unusual indistinctness of vision. He took his glasses from his nose more than once, violently rubbing them with his spotless handkerchief. Taking up his book for the third time, his eyes or his spectacles seemed still to be at fault. Perplexed and irritated, ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... tawny eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... distance. Here its judgment, which now becomes more of a process of conscious inference, is determined by a number of circumstances which, through experience and association, have become the signs of differences of depth in space. Among these are the degree of indistinctness of the impression, the apparent or retinal magnitude (if the object is a familiar one), the relations of linear perspective, as the interruption of the outline of far objects by that of near objects, and so on. In a process so complicated ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... mythology of Greece was first introduced into Rome by the poets, and was in no wise interwoven with the national recollections, as was the case in so many ways with those of Greece. The ideal of a genuine Roman Tragedy floats before me dimly indeed, and in the background of ages, and with all the indistinctness which must surround an entity, which never issued out of the womb of possibility into reality. It would be altogether different in form and significance from that of the Greeks, and, in the old Roman sense, religious and patriotic. All truly creative poetry must ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... been reproduced with great care by the photographic process. I thought best not to permit them to be retouched, preferring occasional indistinctness to modern tampering with the originals that would make them ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius
... recall even the undertow of my thoughts while he was speaking. I remember my pity and affection for him in his misery growing and stirring within me, my realisation that at any risk I must help him. But then comes indistinctness again. I was beginning to act. I know I persuaded him to put himself in my hands, and began at once to plan and do. I think that when we act most we remember least, that just in the measure that the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Before the beginning of the month nearly all the young crows and koels have emerged from the egg, and the great majority of them have left the nest. Young house-crows are distinguished from adults by the indistinctness of the grey on the neck. They continually open their great red mouths to clamour ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... because it is a short one, and therefore a convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or formalism; and which shall give to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the great merit of being, at least, perfectly clear and definite. In some particular cases, the principle may be difficult of application; but in the principle itself, as defined in this passage, there is not the slightest uncertainty or indistinctness. The author is very careful, however, to except from its operation all persons who are not in the maturity of their faculties, as well as all those backward nations who are not capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. The condition of society in which alone this liberal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... says, and so said my lady, but the Baroness would have you. It's all the Baroness's doing, and if she says a thing, it must be done; so you must just get up and come." Mr. Esmond delivered these words with the most amiable rapidity and indistinctness, running them into one another, and tacking about the room as he spoke. But the young Virginian was in great wrath. "I tell you what, cousin," he cried, "I won't move for the Countess, or for the Baroness, or for all the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... with the loch glittering in the sun, and the hills beyond it softly outlined with the indistinctness that mountains usually wear in summer, but with the soft summer coloring too, greenish-blue, lilac, and silver-gray varying continually. In the woods behind, where the leaves were already gloriously green, the wood-pigeons were cooing, and the blackbirds and mavises singing, just as if ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... time Susan had joined Virginia on the sidewalk, and the liquid honey of Mrs. Pendleton's voice dropped softly into indistinctness. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Aed Abrait." While he spoke his form quivered like a smoke, twinkling in misty indistinctness in the blue twilight, and ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of anxiety to the Indian Government; but, as Kaye writes,[Footnote: Kaye's War in Afghanistan.] 'far out in the distance beyond the mountains of the Hindoo Koosh there was the shadow of a great Northern army, tremendous in its indistinctness, sweeping across the wilds and deserts of Central Asia towards the frontiers of Hindostan.' That great Northern army, as we know now, but did not know then, was the column of Perofski, which had left Orenburg for the attempted conquest of Khiva, but which ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... under water as clearly as in air; but instead of being flat, they are very convex, consequently our eye stamps a concave lens of high power into the water, and it is the seeing through this concave eyeglass which our eyeball makes for itself, that causes the indistinctness of our vision. Knowing the curvature of the eyeball, it is easy to calculate (as I did in the memoir mentioned above) the curvature of a convex lens of flint-glass that should, when plunged into water, produce effects of an exactly equal and contrary value, exactly neutralizing the ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the others: "Winkler was a good-looking man. Might he not have had a rich love somewhere? Might not the money have come from her, the money that was found in his pocket?" Muller's voice trailed off into indistinctness at the last words, and the fire died out of his eyes. Then ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... his attendant Moth. And I have no doubt that many other resemblances might be discovered by careful investigation. We cannot wonder that Endymion attracted Shakespeare, for it is the most "romantic" of all Lyly's plays. Indistinctness of character seems to be in keeping with an allegory of moonshine; and even the mechanical action cannot spoil the poetical atmosphere which pervades the whole. Here if anywhere Lyly reached the poetical plane. ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... reflected from bright substances in the walls of many; these matters engaged Robin's attention for a while, and then began to grow wearisome. Next he endeavored to define the forms of distant objects, starting away, with almost ghostly indistinctness, just as his eye appeared to grasp them, and finally he took a minute survey of an edifice which stood on the opposite side of the street, directly in front of the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a large, square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony, which rested ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a similar indistinctness in the human actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora." They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... we rose and fell. Here and there stretched great stains of black herbage. Every object is magnified and changed to the eye. The heat and the swinging motion of the camel produce a slight dizziness, and the outer world assumes a hazy indistinctness of outline—something like dream-landscapes. There is a desert-intoxication which must be felt to ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... covered with tall groves of palms, some two miles distant. The elevated shores, and the green tops of the trees, were plainly visible; but just at the point where land and water met, there was a kind of hazy indistinctness in the view. We were sailing directly from it, and I could not understand how we had passed as near as we must have done, without observing it. Browne, catching sight of it almost at the same time with myself, uttered an exclamation that quickly aroused ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... itself menaced Bengal. The authors of the Regulating Act Of 1773 had established two independent powers, the one judicial, and the other political; and, with a carelessness scandalously common in English legislation, had omitted to define the limits of either. The judges took advantage of the indistinctness, and attempted to draw to themselves supreme authority, not only within Calcutta. but through the whole of the great territory subject to the Presidency of Fort William. There are few Englishmen ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
