"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the couch, and lay staring at the ceiling—waiting. Here in this dismal room, alone and facing death with a courage amazing to behold, she made a picture which so stirred me that despite earlier wounded feelings I went to her side. The little hands were cold and inert when I took them, but her ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... dates, however, from some considerable time back. For more than thirty years now the Aire Saint-Mittre has presented a different appearance. One day the townspeople, far too inert and indifferent to derive any advantage from it, let it, for a trifling consideration, to some suburban wheelwrights, who turned it into a wood-yard. At the present day it is still littered with huge pieces of timber thirty or forty feet long, lying here and there in piles, and looking like ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the girl he stopped short, and his brow puckered more than before. One felt that, coming from the shadow, he was dazed and startled by the brilliant mountain sunshine; and the eyes were dull and alarmed. It was a handsome face in a way, but a little too heavy with flesh, too inert, like the rest of his body and his ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... which fell to Esteban, for the well had been long unused, its sides were oozing slime, its waters were stale and black. He was on the point of fainting when he finally climbed out, leaving the negroes to hoist the dripping, inert weight which he had found at ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... how nice raw, pink baby-rabbit would taste if she got the chance to sample it. She didn't. At least, she hadn't for an hour and a half; but, then, what's an hour and a half to a cat? Apparently the silver tabby could wait, just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... intermarriage, not only with cousins but with double first cousins in several cases. Intermarriage has chiefly caused weakness of character leading to drink, not lack of brains or a certain amount of physical strength, but a very inert ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with shame. So I will hand this "progressive chain of being" over ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... as they are, exist for the audience, and not the audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... all that we can do for him at present," said I, as I moved across the sluggishly rolling deck toward Cunningham. I stooped beside him, and at his direction lifted the tangle of rigging beneath which the boatswain was lying, while he proceeded to cast off the lashings that had saved the inert body from being washed overboard. Then between us we dragged the man out to a clear spot on the deck, where Cunningham knelt, supporting the head and shoulders, while I tore open the front of the thin vest and laid my hand upon the broad, hairy chest. The heart was beating, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... gave no sign of interest. His fingers finished rolling the cigarette. Not another muscle of the inert body moved. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... ever in action, for ever in contention, and from excelling in them all other mortals, what advantage derive we? I would not ask what satisfaction, what glory? The insects have more activity than ourselves, the beasts more strength, even inert matter more firmness and stability; the gods alone more goodness. To the exercise of this every country lies open; and neither I eastward nor you westward have found any ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... for years. But what a life! An inert mass below the waist, and, above it, a sick heart, and a brain as sensitive as ever to realize the horrid calamity. Even I, who know and abhor the man's crimes, shudder at the punishment Heaven ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... lay back in her steamer chair, her hand abandoned to him. And when her mirth had passed a slight sense of fatigue left her silent, inert, staring at nothing. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... NOSES.—The Roman nose indicates a martial spirit, love of debate, resistance, and strong passions, while hollow, pug noses indicate a tame, easy, inert, sly character, and straight, finely-formed Grecian noses ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... of having done anything right, but the honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the inert: that was what remained to you. We are not all expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that. But will a gentleman of your reverend ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... umbilical cord if the mother should fail to do it in her own natural way. Sometimes a puppy may be enclosed within a membrane which the dam cannot readily open with tongue and teeth. If help is necessary it should be given tenderly and with clean fingers. Occasionally a puppy may seem to be inert and lifeless, and after repeatedly licking it the bitch may relinquish all effort at restoration and turn her attention to another that is being born. In such a circumstance the rejected little one may be discreetly removed, and a drop of brandy on the point of the finger ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... so intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy in the cerements of the past. At the beginning of the century, there were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... snatched the hat from Jimmy's forehead, and stared at an inert heap. Jimmy lay senseless, and he looked like death. Dannie rushed down to the water with the hat, and splashed drops into Jimmy's face until he gasped for breath. When he recovered a little, he shrank ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... friendship was to exercise a great influence on public affairs. What part Anne would take in the contest which distracted England was matter of deep anxiety. Filial duty was on one side. The interests of the religion to which she was sincerely attached were on the other. A less inert nature might well have remained long in suspense when drawn in opposite directions by motives so strong and so respectable. But the influence of the Churchills decided the question; and their patroness became an important member of that extensive ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon a change of administration. The constituent who held the office of marshal was brave enough, but he had grown elderly and inert. He was, in truth, a joke. The gamblers laughed at him and the cowboys "played horse" with him. The spirit of deviltry was stronger than it had ever been in the history of ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... The osmotic force will not force fat drops through membranes, and to explain their passage through the walls of the intestine requires something additional. We are as yet, however, able to give only a partial explanation of this matter. The inner wall of the intestine is not an inert, lifeless membrane, but is made of active bits of living matter. These bits of living matter appear to seize hold of the droplets of oil by means of little processes which they thrust out, and then pass them through their ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... physiological action. Subsequently the ordinary tinctures were distilled, and the extracts thus obtained dissolved in the above menstruum, as far as was possible, in most cases the residuum being found to be inert. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... State in the early part of Cleveland's second term, died in May, 1895, being succeeded by Richard Olney, transferred from the portfolio of Attorney General. In a day, Cleveland's foreign policy, hitherto so inert, became vigorous to the verge of rashness. Deeming the Monroe Doctrine endangered by Great Britain's apparently arbitrary encroachments on Venezuela in fixing the boundary between Venezuela and British ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... touch of the match, the gas burst into light and burned with a steady flame. Ardan immediately bent anxiously over the prostrate bodies of his friends. They lay on each other like inert ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Dr. McDonnell caught hold of the inert body and lifted it to the car. Two old women and one more aged man they carried from that hall-way of despair to the motor which had been left throbbing ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... drew the weapon and held it in his hand, then cautiously descended. He passed the inert form of the officer on the rail, and not until he reached the last step did he see the doctor and the chief machinist by ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... of the free people of color." But when this benevolent association asked for the use of Rose-street Meeting-house, their request was not only refused, but condemned as disorderly. Affairs were certainly in a very singular position. Both branches of the Society of Friends were entirely inert on the subject of slavery. Both expressed pity for the slave, but both agreed that "the way did not open" for them to do anything. If individual members were thus driven to unite in action with other sects upon a subject which seemed to them ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... exclaimed, my voice startling me with a sudden echo. The dogs stood motionless, watching me. I knew by this time that they would not try to prevent my approaching the house, and the knowledge left me free to examine them. I had a feeling that they must be horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet they did not look hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Cummins. But at the scene of the murder, the stage-driver of the present generation tells his passengers that Darcy was paroled several years ago, after spending thirty years in prison. He may add that Darcy, the ex-convict, is an inert and lifeless creature, married to a paroled woman as lifeless ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... invisible. It is hard to express what I mean, but those will understand who have personally found themselves opposed by a member of any regular order whom they wish to influence. It has been well said that there is no such obstacle in life as the inert resistance of a thoroughly lazy man; but in certain circumstances that is far inferior to the silent opposition of a conscientious person belonging to a large body which declines, on grounds of belief ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... and women coming and going almost imperceptibly through our streets, crowding at certain times around certain buildings, or waiting for one knows not what, without apparent movement, in the depths of their dwellings, might conclude therefrom that they, too, were miserable and inert. It takes time to distinguish the manifold activity ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... strength. No argument of mine, however, could convince my Manbo friends to the contrary. The spirits had consumed the soul, and there remained, according to their staunch belief, nothing but the outward form and inert bulk ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his grief—unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she calls to him, and as even then ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Condalmiero was that of a modern battleship which is disabled and surrounded by foes in full possession of their motive power; the great galleon floated inert upon the waters while the galleys could fight or fly as they wished. The captain of the galleon, however, had no alternative save to surrender or fight; but there was no hesitation on his part, for a more gallant officer never trod the decks of ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... Models may form our taste as critics, but do not excite us to be authors. I fancy that our own emotions, our own sense of our destiny, make the great lever of the inert matter we accumulate. 'Look in thy heart and write,' said an old English writer,* who did not, however, practise what he preached. And ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the rim of the burner. This is best seen when the gas is turned low—with a batswing burner, for instance—turned so low that only a small non-luminous flame is left, the space between burner and flame will appear as great as the flame itself, while, if the gas is mixed with an inert diluent like carbon dioxide, the space can be very ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... She could hardly expect it. Yet as she continued to meet his gaze with all the seriousness the moment demanded, she beheld those burning orbs lose some of their demand and the fingers, which had lain inert upon the bedspread, flutter gently and move as if to draw attention to his wife and the three beautiful children clustered ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... over; he had done his bit. For a long while he remained there inert, his patient, haggard face bent, his eyes fixed upon the floor. He felt very old, very much used up, and the labor of thinking was unbearable. When the fire had died and a chill had crept into the room he roused himself to note that it had grown ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the fulgid sun looks down Upon a stagnant earth where listless men Laboriously dawdle, curse, and sweat, Disqualified, unsatisfied, inert, — It seems to me somehow that God himself Scans with a close reproach what I have done, Counts with an unphrased patience my arrears, And fathoms my ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in port, perhaps a Scandinavian boat, inert, enormous, helpless, while the little tugs chatter, around it and finally get hold of it, and tug it slowly around with its nose pointing out to sea. Lumber schooners come in slowly and rhythmically, long and low and clean. The Vallejo boat, looking like a rocking horse, goes importantly ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... move Souls inert to life and love. But there's one who doth inherit Angel gift and angel spirit, Bidding tides of gladness flow Through the realms of want and woe; 'Mid lone age and misery's lot, Kindling pleasures long forgot, Seeking minds ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... finished, Damis thrust back on the Viceroy's chin with a sudden effort. There was a dull crack as Glavour's neck broke and Damis gently lowered the inert bulk to the floor. He felt a touch on his arm as he straightened up. He whirled like a cat and Lura shrank back with a frightened gesture. Damis opened his arms and in an instant the Earth-girl was folded ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... pale and inert, her beautiful black hair making an ink stain on the pillows. She stretched an exhausted hand to him, and looked at him earnestly and affectionately. To both of them their lives ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... arid formulae, such as infinity, the Absolute Being, and the Universal Cause, are conceptions projected into the real and palpable bosom of unfathomable life by the very enemy and antagonist of life, the aboriginal emotion of inert malice. This is why so often in the history of the human race the conception of "God" has been the worst enemy of the soul. The conception of "God" by its alliance with the depressing mathematical formula of "infinity" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... secret of eminence in the realm of industry or art or invention is this: that the worker has wrought in his luminous mental moods. In its passive, inert states, the mind is receptive. Then reason is like a sheathed sword. Thought must be struck forth as fire is struck from flint. But under inspirational moods the mind begins to glow and kindle. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of Mr. Sherman was the central figure. There was not the slightest trace of feebleness in his impassioned tones. Except once or twice, as he hesitated a moment or two for a word to express his thought, there was not a reminder that the brain at seventy may be inert or the fire ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... cause of solicitude. She was stupid, slow and idle about her lessons, tearful on the slightest provocation, inert at all times and generally ailing, though never actually ill. She never looked clean, no matter how faithfully her maid toiled over her; she could somehow reduce, in an amazingly short time, the neatest attire to the semblance ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... sediment of character, that malice which is disinterested and inactive, and not only incapable of drawing a dagger but even of writing an anonymous note, this no writer but Dostoievski has had the penetration to reveal. He has shown us at the same time mere inert goodness, lying passive in the soul, without ever serving ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... convulsions; or lastly the pain itself, which attends torpid actions, is liable to expend or exhaust much sensorial power without producing any increased actions; whence the low pulse, and cold extremities, which usually attend hemicrania; and hence when inert, or inactive sensation attends one link of associated action, the succeeding link is generally rendered torpid, as a coldness of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... "Don't you see that the inertia of spirit is motion, as that of matter is rest? Now compare this universal spirit to a river flowing tranquilly, and which in itself gives no evidence of motion, save when it meets with some inert point of resistance. This point of resistance has the effect of action in itself, and you attribute to it all the eddies and ripples produced. You must see that your own immobility is the cause of the phenomena of life which give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to any kind of decided action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent, dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a man of honour and sensitive feeling, on ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... sanctified by all the golden legends of poetry—and of all Greece no people was less alive to the poetical inspiration. Devoted, for the most part, to pastoral pursuits, the Boeotians were ridiculed by their lively neighbours for an inert and sluggish disposition—a reproach which neither the song of Hesiod and Pindar, nor the glories of Thebes and Plataea, were sufficient to repel. As early as the twelfth century (B. C.) royalty was abolished in Boeotia—its territory ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beforehand. Holding his spear with both hands he used it as a British yeoman of old handled a quarter-staff, and a whistling blow caught the reptile a couple of feet below the head, which dropped inert, the vertebrae being broken, and a series of blows from other spears, one aimed at the tail, ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... pleasure-loving country youth, who took life as it came, with little thought for the morrow. Events had proved that he had latent and undeveloped force. In the material world we find substances that apparently are inert and powerless, but let some other substance be brought sufficiently near, and an energy is developed that seems like magic, and transformations take place that were regarded as supernatural in times when ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... on the veranda Galen Albret's identity alone was evident. Grim, four-square, inert, his very way of sitting his chair, as though it were a seat of judgment and he the interpreter of some fierce blood-law, betrayed him. From under the bushy white tufts of his eyebrows the woodsmen felt ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... and sluggishly over the boat's edge as though wishing to contemplate with their sea-green eyes this medley of white and dark bodies. The ship-wrecked men rowed with nervous desperation; then they lay down inert, recognizing the uselessness of their efforts, lost in ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... would be a blank. He would have no mind. He could not get started to think. He could not get started to act. He would belong to a lower scale of life than the tiny animal that floats with the waves and the tide in the ocean without power to direct its own course. He would be but an inert mass of flesh ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... field relations with all time behind and before, and all eternity above and beneath. Not but that we see the seamy side too—the depths as well as the heights. We get glimpses of the awful sin of the heart; we are made to feel the force of corrupt nature's mere inert resistance to good influences; we have to feel the pain of the slowness of the movement of goodness, as perhaps no other men do. Yet love and undying faith in the value of the soul and hope for all men are the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... to take this seriously. It is not to be understood as mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an inert mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures, a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not try to by-pass it if we would follow on in this holy pursuit. We must ascend a step at a time. If we refuse one step we ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... relief and blessed peace. She lay on her bed, now smiling, now inert, eyes closed, weak and relaxed, but already aware from time to time of the beginnings within herself of new vitality, food for her child. Her body felt profoundly changed, and so it was with her spirit. Again the ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... not he; not even a merciful judge; he was a man full of weakness and a son full of love. He remembered nothing of what his brother had told him; he neither reasoned nor argued, he merely laid his two hands on his mother's inert body, and not being able to pull the pillow away, he exclaimed, kissing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... willing to go forth and fight men with men's weapons for the freedom to live and die unmolested in their own native land; but against the blandly-smiling, white-helmeted, sun-spectacled, perspiring horde of Cook's "cheap trippers," what can they do save remain inert and well-nigh speechless? For nothing like the cheap tripper was ever seen in the world till our present enlightened and glorious day of progress; he is a new-grafted type of nomad, like and yet unlike a man. The Darwin theory asserts itself proudly and prominently in bristles of ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... of his fingers, Gregory felt the body of the islander relax. Then he became conscious in a vague sort of way, of movement. They were rising to the surface or sinking lower to the bottom. Why couldn't he tell which? He freed his legs from the inert form which twined itself about him, and kicked weakly. The red-bearded man slipped from him at the effort and he narrowly escaped losing his hold upon his throat. He kicked again. If he could only get one gulp of air he could make it. In spite of the ever-increasing ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... I felt that fierce temptation. There she lay, the one woman who had ever seriously come into my life, sleeping so near to me that I could bend down and rest my hand on the inert form over which the snow drifted ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... to utter a single word. I saw him, after he had searched the dead man's pockets, raise the inert body with its awful featureless face and drag it to the bulwarks. Then I ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... quinquina to Louis XIV in 1679 for two thousand louis d'or, a pension and a title. That the profession was divided in opinion on the subject was probably due to sophistication, or to the importation of other and inert barks. It was well into the eighteenth century before its virtues were universally acknowledged. The tree itself was not described until 1738, and Linnaeus established the genus "Chinchona" in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... peculiar loneliness of the Seer that the medical trade unions afford the reforming physician. That is inevitably and sufficiently accorded him by the "unwillingness of the masses to enter into the thoughts of the Seers."[19] An ignorant and inert people will always follow a charlatan, because they like to do things which are mysterious and involve ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... "One day I was inert, apathetic, sluggish in my movements, careless of all things and all persons around me. On the next I was aroused, excited, with every nerve and faculty strung. I was becoming suddenly intoxicated, and soon the drunkenness of love ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... molecular whorls of the living muscle, linked together for a while in the intricate figures of the dance of life, giving and taking energy as they dance, and then we should see how, loosing hands, they slipped back into the blood as dead, inert, used-up matter."—Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology in the University ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the afternoon the heavy machine was still motionless—inert upon the ground. We need not attempt to describe the scene which took place as the impatience of the multitude increased. Sneers of derision made themselves heard on all sides. A universal murmur, rapidly developing into a clamour, arose amongst ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... the prisoner had stood balancing himself, first on one foot, then on the other, with shoulders stooped and arms inert. Under the strongest light one could observe his extreme thinness, his hollow cheeks, his projecting cheek-bones, his earthen-colored face dotted with small red spots and framed in a rough, straggling beard. Prison life had caused ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... and fill, retreat and return to the charge, he was able to endure being struck at, turn and turn about, by his own party, by the opposition, by the court, by the clergy, because to all such attacks he opposed the inert force of a substance which was equally soft and consistent; thus he reaped the benefits of what was really his misfortune. Harassed by a thousand questions of government, his mind, like that of an old lawyer who has tried ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... when in their natural condition, and even after disintegration the quantity of the essential elements of their food, which are present in an easily assimilable state, is at no one time very large. But this is of comparatively little importance, for the soil is not an inert unchangeable substance; it is the theatre of an important series of chemical changes effected by the action of air and moisture, and producing a continued liberation of its constituents. This decomposition is effected ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... strong tinge of fatalism; no hopeful make-believe to the dying that death was other than death; no covert, diligent, desperate economies of the vital spark; but a frank, helpless reception of the dread angel as a royal guest, and a pious, inert consent to let the dying die. Before either Hugh or Ramsey could come from the cabin the twins had reached the bedside and had been received with a final lighting up of the boy's spent powers, which his mother made no effort to restrain. In a feeble, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... extracted an ample apology to you from that young nobleman. And let me add, one that I, that we, must impose it upon an old son to accept. He does! Come, come. And you shall see, Richie, society shall never repose an inert mass under my leadership. I cure it; I shake it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their houses pillaged, and in some cases burnt. Now comes the crowning disgrace. That the Tower of London, garrisoned by 1,200 men, and which ought to have defied for weeks the whole rabbledom of England, should have opened its gates without a blow being struck, and the garrison remained inert on the walls while the king's mother was being grossly insulted, and the two highest dignitaries of the state with others massacred is enough, by my faith, to make one forswear arms, put on a hermit's dress and take to the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... with the full light of day in her eyes. She felt tired, but not inert, languid and luxurious, rather, and explored to the full the happiness of stretching. Round about her were huddled the drowsy boys; on the slopes of the steep place where she lay she could see the goats browsing on lentisk ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... imagination and the impotent forms of the will. In its normal and complete form will culminates in an act; but with wavering characters and sufferers from abulia deliberation never ends, or the resolution remains inert, incapable of realization, of asserting itself in practice. The creative imagination also, in its complete form, has a tendency to become objectified, to assert itself in a work that shall exist not only for the creator but for everybody. On the contrary, with dreamers pure and simple, the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... must have been employed to produce such vast upheavals. One cannot help contemplating with awe the possibility of the world again becoming violently rent and shaken to its foundations by the forces which though now comparatively inert, still exist beneath us and occasionally give sad proof of their undiminished power. In the present day the slow but continued action of this subterranean power is in some parts perceptible (as in South America) and we have no guarantee that it may not suddenly ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... the astral plane, the physical body is, of course, temporarily discarded. It is then in the condition known as sleep, or trance. Sleep is the natural withdrawing of the consciousness from the physical body. When the separation occurs in the case of the medium it is called a trance. The cause of the inert condition of the physical body is the same in both cases—the withdrawal of the consciousness of the ego. The physical body is then unoccupied, but the consciousness maintains magnetic connection with it. In death that tie is severed and the consciousness can return to ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... molecular structure seems already to have removed us sufficiently far from the idea of a simple inert mass, which might be primordial and self-caused. But we have not yet done. Even imagining the extreme subdivision[1] of the particles in one of Dr. Crookes' vacuum globes, the particles are still water. But we know that water is ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... his opponent. Again, when he took a preliminary canter before the drug had time to act, he moved with great strength and with the freedom of a greyhound; yet within three minutes he was no more than an inert mass of flesh and bone. I say to the inexperienced gambler, "Draw your own conclusions, and if, after studying my words, you choose to tempt fortune any more, your fate—your evil fate—be on your ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... much material unfused and untransformed by emotion. These elements foreign to the nature of poetry clog many of his lines. The enumerated objects in his catalogue or inventory poems often remain inert objects only. Like many mystics, he was hypnotized by external phenomena, and he often fails to communicate to his reader the trancelike emotion which he himself experienced. This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... interfered with our lines, sickened us even to look at them. They were always to be seen lying on a log or snag in the water. As you approached they either crawled down like an octopus, or dropped, in a boneless, inert mass, without a splash. Their slimy, scaleless skins were a muddy yellow, and in general they resembled an eel with legs. Even the blacks looked on them with disgust, though they are particularly ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... bystanders, and goes back to the place puffing and blowing like an otter, after a half-hour's burst. Is this dancing? Shades of the filial and paternal Vestris! can this be a specimen of the art which gives elasticity to the most inert confirmation, which sets the blood glowing with a warm and genial flow, and makes beauty float before our ravished senses, stealing our admiration by the gracefulness of each new motion, till at last our ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... truth. The building of a ship from the time that her keel is laid until she is making her way across the ocean is a slow and gradual process; yet there is a cataclysmic epoch opening up a new era in her history. It is the moment when, after lying for months or years a dead, inert, immovable mass, she is suddenly endowed with the power of motion, and, as if imbued with life, glides into the stream, eager to begin the career ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... unrepresented by the BURIN? If Mr. Henry Le Keux were to execute it in his best style, the world might witness in it a piece of Art entirely perfect of its kind. But let the pencils of Messrs. Corbould and Blore be first exercised on the subject. In the mean while, why is GALLIC ART inert? ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... appeal to his father; then he was withheld by the dread that an angry discussion would be the only sequence. He knew that his father's pride, sustained by that of his grandmother, was unconquerable, and that the sentence, which condemned him to a dreary, inert, and profitless existence, would only be ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... a blurred dream—that he was lying inert on the verandah, with Franklin and the girl lying beside him.... The house was being searched.... Then the muttering shapes were standing here. Lee felt himself being picked up. And then he was carried silently out into the darkness. The motion ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... one moment, and the next was almost flung by his swerving horse into a vehicle that blocked the road. Its blurred outlines presently resolved themselves into an automobile, crouched in the bottom of which was an inert huddle ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Titanic, a mass of 40,000 tons, moving through the water at 20 knots an hour, a marvel of the science and skill of man, crashes into an iceberg, because the trained intelligence directing her errs—and is reduced at once to an inert mass of iron and brass. The mighty fleet of Russia meets the Japanese fleet in Tsushima Straits; and because the trained intelligence that directed its movements seriously erred, in an engagement decided in less than an hour, is stripped of its power and glory, and transformed into a disorganized ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... the ground before them, inert, almost as if dead. But his eyes, his troubled, frightened eyes, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... excess in drink and the like cannot approach a certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller life—either in a spiritual or the human way—is implanted ineradicably in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind of apathy, the craving is there—to be aroused surely enough at some dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of disappointed love is the most ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David, beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day a woman kept up the fire. Her name ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... daylight, of night, of shadows moving by walls, of footsteps behind. Only a little while ago he had walked free-hearted and careless. This growing habit of skulking was gall and wormwood. Once in his room, which was directly over the office of the American consulate, he fell into a chair, inert and breathless. What a night! What a series ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... and disgusted by this sign of weakness, and he was not so blinded by the mist of his potations but that he perceived the shrinking reluctance of her touch as she aided Lucius in lifting him into the bed. His inert, lumpish form was at the moment hideously repulsive to her, and physical contact with him a dreaded thing. What was left if he lost that self-control which had made him admirable? She had always been able to qualify his other shortcomings by saying, "Well, anyhow, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... MORE PEOPLE PRAY? Why do not all of us worship more often? Many lack a quickened sense of a sacred Presence. Though aware of material things, they are inert to the things of the spirit. They wait to be spiritually awakened. Most of us persist in feeling that we are self-sufficient. We feel we are adequate for all ordinary affairs, and it is only when we find ourselves in overpowering situations that we recognize we are not self-sufficient, ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... repeat all the arguments, by which I have proved [Book II. Part III. Sect 3.], that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection, it will be easy to recollect what has been said upon that subject. I shall only recall on this occasion one of these arguments, which I shall ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Journey was a dull, vague, conglomerate, cinder-scented babble of grinding wheels and shuddering window frames; but the voices of the Traveling Salesman and the Young Electrician were shrill, gruff, poignant, inert, eternally variant, after the manner of human voices which are discussing the affairs ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... form of living and growing plants, rising above the ground, and covering the earth with verdure and beauty, and then, for the six months that remain, it withdraws from the view, and exists only in the form of inert and apparently lifeless roots and seeds, concealed in hidden recesses beneath the ground. Proserpina was thus considered the type and emblem of vegetation, and she was accordingly worshiped, in some sense, as the goddess of resuscitation and life, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... man? Where are you hurt?" The tail fluttered once; the eyes lost the look of life. Jolyon passed his hands all over the inert warm bulk. There was nothing—the heart had simply failed in that obese body from the emotion of his master's return. Jolyon could feel the muzzle, where a few whitish bristles grew, cooling already ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... combined with oxygen; and when the latter gas is removed, by introducing into a bottle of air some substance for which the former has an affinity, the nitrogen is left in a state of purity. It is a transparent gas, which is incombustible and extinguishes flame. It is a singularly inert substance, and is incapable of directly entering into union with any other element except oxygen, and with that it combines with the greatest difficulty, and only by the action of the electric spark—a peculiarity which has very important bearings on many points ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... later the Duke became visible round the corner of the hut, dragging by the collar the now inert body of the second man. The Duke dragged him across the open space towards the trilithon. Behind this ruin was a hollow, irregular spot, overgrown with furze and stunted thorns, and riddled by the old holes ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Manasseh: poor, mad Manasseh. But he was so wild and outrageous in his talk, that it was all his mother could do to keep his state concealed from public observation. She had for this purpose given him a sleeping potion; and, while he lay heavy and inert under the influence of the poppy-tea, his mother bound him with cords to the ponderous, antique bed in which he slept. She looked broken-hearted while she did this office, and thus acknowledged the degradation of her ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the remedy is not difficult. It is to grow clover less frequently on such soils. Sufficient time must be given to enable more of the inert potash in the subsoil to become available. Another way would be to apply potash somewhat freely to these soils, and subsoil them where this may ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... and forth again; again he stopped: "It is not because I think they are too good, nor is it because I am too inert or cowardly, that I keep my compositions under lock and key. I would have to have wheels in my head if I did not have sense enough to know that the effect of a piece is just as much a part of it as heat is a part of fire. Those people who claim that they can quite dispense with recognition and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... those domestic matters which make up the comforts of a family—distracted at the situation of her daughter, and bewildered by the rapid succession of troublesome events which so short a period of time had given birth to, she fell into an inert state of mind as different as anything could possibly be, from her former ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the hostesses who are so cried up. In their houses I always find two fashionable barristers, and a thunderstruck audience, in which no one dares to be judge. The only art these ladies have is to make the man of genius ridiculous, and the ordinary man dumb and inert. One comes away from such houses saying, 'Those were fine speeches,' and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... recession of the water gave him time to lift the inert body and throw it across his shoulder, and thus, while the second giant roller broke at his hack he gripped with his torn hands into the sharp shale and held on. As it ebbed he hoisted her to ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... help it; he never knew quite which it was. But he did not eat. Instead of moving about with the other horses, nose to ground, mouthing the bunch-grass, he would mope by himself well away from the other horses, standing with head hanging and ears inert, all in motionless silence. As the water-holes became farther apart, and the grazing worse yet, he did this more and more, until the white horse, evidently seeing his lack of spirit, became a source of downright aggravation, frequently taking lightning nips ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... explosive; Q the number of calories disengaged by a unit of weight of the explosive; c equals the specific heat at constant volume of the gases; V the volume in cubic centimetres of a unit of weight of the explosive; v the volume occupied by the inert materials of the explosive. The volume of gas produced by the explosion of 1 kilogramme of nitro-glycerine (at 0 deg. and 760 mm.) ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... But only a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... intolerable, but her brave heart did not flinch under that exquisite pain. Though she could not speak, she strove to reward him with a valiant smile, and even conquered the gush of tears that gave momentary tribute to her agony. And now she lay in a dead faint, pallid and inert, while Royson said bitter things about Alfieri. He blamed the Italian for all this mad business, and vowed harsh vengeance on him if ever they met again. He was quite unable to help Irene. He had less than the average man's vague knowledge of the right treatment to adopt ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Mr. Gubb, the inert form of the young woman in his arms, glanced around with a startled gaze. He stood miserably, not knowing what to do, when suddenly he saw Policeman O'Toole coming toward him down the hall. Policeman O'Toole was leading by the arm a man whose wrists ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... does seem to speak decisively. 1st. The whole body of the church was to take an active share in its concerns; the various faculties of its various members were to perform their several parts: it was to be a living society, not an inert mass of mere hearers and subjects, who were to be authoritatively taught and absolutely ruled by one small portion of its members. It is quite consistent with this, that, at particular times, the church should centre all its own power and activity in the persons ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... the border-land through which Lena's little feet had lately trod, many and serious thoughts had come to her; thoughts of which those about her were all unconscious, as she lay seemingly inert and passive from exhaustion, except when pain forced complaint from her; and chief among these had been the recollection of the unpleasant relation which for some time had existed between herself and ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... shelves before me, that something of the haste and terror of a night five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted by the necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been hurriedly unpacked, its contents hidden here and locked away, and some other content, inert and heavy, had taken ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all imply the same thing. Will, and a confidence in its efficiency, "travel through, nor quit us till we die." It is this which inspires us with invincible perseverance, and heroic energies, while without it we should be the most inert and soulless of blocks, the shadows of what history records and poetry immortalises, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... character of Philip's acts, upon their atrocity, and so forth; and, in the second place, you who sit and listen, better qualified though you doubtless are than Philip for using the language of justice and appreciating it at the mouths of others, are nevertheless absolutely inert, when it is a question of preventing him from executing the designs in which he is now engaged. {4} It follows as the inevitable and perhaps reasonable consequence, that you are each more successful in that to which your time and your interest is given—he in actions, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... that morning had only begun to form in the void, was grouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were its gravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant with unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms. Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the dawn, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... that mute pleading to be carried which Glory could not resist, yet the little creature soon grew intolerably heavy, and her face buried beneath her nurse's chin seemed to burn into the flesh, the blue eyes closed, the whole plump little body settled limp and inert, and a swift alarm shot through the ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... English were degenerating into clownishness, the Franks into effeminacy; and though Christianity continually raised up most brilliant lights—now on the throne, now in the cathedral, now in the cloister—yet the mass of the people lay sluggish, dull, inert, selfish, and half savage. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and pointed at by his own equals—his own little world—cuts him to the soul. And if you can succeed in breaking his pride, and destroying this sensitiveness, then he is a lost being. He can never recover his self-esteem, and you have chucked him half way—a stolid, inert, sullen victim—to the perdition of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... earth's surface to forty or fifty miles above our heads; together everywhere, but everywhere as entire strangers to each other as two Englishmen who have never been introduced! I should be a good deal puzzled to say what nitrogen does in the air: he is there as an inert body, and leaves all the business to the oxygen. When we breathe, for instance, the nitrogen enters our lungs together with its inseparable companion, but it goes out as it went in, without leaving a trace of its passage. ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... and inert, she dragged herself about the village. She could not get away from it because of the steep hills she would have had to climb. A small, unhappy ghost, she haunted the fields in the bottom and the path along the beck that led ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... eyes. Alan was lying inert beside me, roped and with a black gag around his face and in his mouth. We were in a huge dim open space. Presently, as my vision cleared, I saw that the dome was overhead. This was a circular, hundred-foot-wide room. It was dimly lighted. ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... inert mass, a dozen of these voracious beasts appeared round the boat; and, without noticing us, threw themselves upon the dead body and fought with one ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... beneath the pall, the plumes, the flag? Be sure she saw him laid there at his manly length, inert, with cheeks only a little paler than they had been as he stood looking down into her eyes a moment before he strode away. In truth, the searchers, opening his grave in Quebec, had found a few bones, and a skull from which, as they lifted ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of anguish he paused by the chair there, afraid that he could not make the last effort, raise his almost inert bulk up to the point where he could reach the Redax release. For a second of unusual clarity he wondered if there was any reason for this supreme ordeal, whether any of the sleepers could be aroused. This might now be a ship of ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... been too sharp for them. Learning that they were bent on "disembodying" me, and not liking the sound of the word, I had very quietly removed myself from my regiment to the Staff. Thus for a few happy months we see the W.O. rendered inert. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... back, and the sciatic hastening to escape from it. It is not difficult to imagine that these, to a certain degree, will sympathize with the healthy and also the morbid state of the rectum; and that, when it is inert, or asleep, or diseased, they also may be powerless too. Here is something like fact to establish a very important theory, and which should be deeply considered by ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... it? It was simple: she was a peasant. That tells the whole story. She was of the people and knew the people; those others moved in a loftier sphere and knew nothing much about them. We make little account of that vague, formless, inert mass, that mighty underlying force which we call "the people"—an epithet which carries contempt with it. It is a strange attitude; for at bottom we know that the throne which the people support stands, and that when that support is removed nothing ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... an enemy. War against Spain had been declared, October 19, 1739. He had then recently commissioned a fifty-gun ship, the Portland, and in her sailed for the West Indies, where he remained until the autumn of 1742; but the inert manner in which Spain maintained the naval contest, notwithstanding that her transmarine policy was the occasion of the quarrel, and her West Indian possessions obviously endangered, removed all chance of active service on the large scale, except ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... the Sudan the inert recipient of foreign influence when it came. According to credible legend, the "Great King" at Byzantium imported glass, tin, silver, bronze, cut stones, and other treasure from the Sudan. Embassies were sent and states like Nupe recognized the suzerainty of the Byzantine emperor. ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... this craze for the scientific stand-point is not merely overdone—it is radically vicious. Human destinies cannot be treated as if they were inert objects under the microscope. The cold-blooded logical way of treating a problem is in almost every case the wrong way. Heart and imagination to me are more vital than intellect. I have the courage to be illogical, to defy facts for ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... she convinced that both she and the dog were wrong in their diagnosis. The young man's face was deadly white, his cheeks gaunt. It was evidently a grave matter. For a moment or so she had a qualm of fear lest he might be dead. She bent down, took him in her capable grip and composed his inert body decently, and placed the knapsack he was wearing beneath his head. The faintly beating heart proved him to be alive, but her touch on his brow discovered fever. Kneeling by his side, she wiped his lips with her handkerchief, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... remained of the spring term. School would close on May twenty-eighth. Already Washington had become insufferably warm, and even Columbia Heights School situated upon its hill, was very trying. The girls were almost too inert to work and spent every ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... heavy moustache and three or four weeks' growth of beard. So much only had I noted at first glance, whilst stooping under the heavy curtain of foliage. A few steps more, and, looking down on the waxen skin of that inert figure, I ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... him. She had felt the inert weight of his heavy body and knew that he was beyond helping himself. "No. Is there no house near? There's Alec ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... advantages afforded to him by this great error of policy committed by the most formidable enemy of England. In all the Treasury journals published in London Bonaparte was never spoken of under any other name than that of the "assassin of the Duc d'Enghien." The inert policy of the Cabinet of Vienna prevented the manifestation of its displeasure by remonstrances, or by any outward act. At Berlin, in consequence of the neighbourhood of the French troops in Hanover, the commiseration for the death of the Due d'Enghien was also confined to the King's cabinet, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... You appear to me to have no proper idea of the difference, wide as the heavens apart, of the profound breach between your learned man, who is enlightened and accustomed to think, and the heavy, awkward, stupid, and inert consciousness of mankind's beasts of burden, whose thoughts have taken once and for all the direction of fear about their maintenance, and cannot be put in motion in any other; and whose muscular power is so exclusively exercised that the nervous power which produces intelligence is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to him softly, and placed a long kiss on her lips. She remained inert, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. Her toque fell, her hair dropped ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "you are now acquainted with the composition of Thomas Roch's explosive. Does it really possess the destructive power that the inventor attributes to it? Has it ever been tried? May you not have purchased a composition as inert as a ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... paradise is yet the monarch of the outward world,—so, in the landscapes of Salvator, the tree, the mountain, the waterfall, become the principal, and man himself dwindles to the accessory. The Matter seems to reign supreme, and its true lord to creep beneath its stupendous shadow. Inert matter giving interest to the immortal man, not the immortal man to the inert matter. A ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... vestige of colour from Esther's cheek. Her terrified gaze swept over the disordered room, up to the face of the man who stood there so silently, then down again to the inert woman upon the bed. Once, not long ago, she had seen a drunken man asleep ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... activity was the almost noiseless buzzing as the hotel android ran the cleaner over the living room. Presently even that ceased, and Tommy lay relaxed and inert, sleepily watching the curtains blow in and out at the open window. Thirty stories above the street the noises were pleasantly muffled and remote, and his senses drifted aimlessly to and fro on the ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm |
