"Lifeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morning she almost determined to go out for a walk but her courage again failed her. Until noon the village street was dull and lifeless, with only one or two people visible at a time, and yet she dared not go down and walk through it. Were she to show herself, all the idle shopkeepers would issue from their shops, to congratulate her on the postmaster's victory, to inquire where he was spending his holiday and ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Durbin hastened below, followed by his agitated summoner. As quickly as his trembling hands permitted, he struck a light and looked around for his child. She had been dashed against a chest, and lay pale and seemingly lifeless, with the red blood oozing slowly from a cut in the temple. Edward Hallett had lifted her before Captain Durbin could lay aside his light, and as he approached him, looking up with a face almost as pale as that which lay ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... men scorn the soulless coward who his manhood doth forget: On a lifeless heap of ashes fearlessly ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... certain. And she saw Geoff, with his little foot caught in the stirrup, dragged at the pony's frightened heels, the stones on the road tearing him, his head knocking against every obstacle; and she saw him lying by the roadside, white and lifeless. She saw everything that could and could not happen, and accused herself for not having sent him to school, out of danger,—for not having kept him by her ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... had opposed and written against the theory. In the meantime, his infant son had cholera, and expired. His medical friends had left him, and crape was tied to the handle of the front door. Standing by the side of his lifeless babe, Dr. Ely said to himself, "If this theory should be true, I might yet save my child." And profiting by the example of Dr. Cartwright in restoring the dead alligator, he restored his child to life. Remitting his efforts too soon—again the infant ceased ...
— Theory of Circulation by Respiration - Synopsis of its Principles and History • Emma Willard
... Possessing a private income, he never was preoccupied with the anxieties of selling his work. He first entered the atelier of Lamotte, but his stay was brief. In the studio of Ingres he was, so George Moore declares, the student who carried out the lifeless body of the painter when Ingres fell in his fatal fit. There is something peculiarly interesting about this anecdote for the tradition of Ingres has been carried on by Degas. The greatest master of pure line, in his portraits and nudes—we have forgotten his chilly ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell, like ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... however, she was seen to struggle, and sink partially below the surface—as if some whirlpool was sucking her underneath; then rising up again, she turned over on her back, and floated lifeless down the current. A long red gash appeared freshly opened in her belly; and the water around was fast becoming tinged with the crimson stream that gushed ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... memory will be dear to you, and that if it had been in your power you would have had for me the same passion which you had for another." He would have gone on, but was so weak that his speech failed him. Madam de Cleves sent for the physicians, who found him almost lifeless; yet he languished some days, and died at last with ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... Salavarrieta by name. Though for her execution three thousand soldiers were detailed, the girl was unterrified by her doom and was earnestly beseeching the loyalists among them to turn their arms against the enemies of their country when a volley stretched her lifeless ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... candle on her writing-table was shining on her hair, her cheek, and chin, that years had so little altered. A pretty picture she made, with just that candle flame, swaying there, burning slowly, surely down the pale wax—candle flame, of all lifeless things most living, most like a spirit, so bland and vague, one would hardly have known it was fire at all. A drift of wind blew it this way and that: he got up to shut the window, and as he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her knees by the side of the lifeless form, raised the head, and saw—the beautiful, deathlike face of the crazy Persian slave. She felt her hand wet with the blood that had soaked the hapless girl's thick, fair hair, and she shuddered; but she resisted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shoulder set to the wheel, and the prayer we make to Jupiter and all the gods is simply this—that this fact may be remembered when the wagon has stopped for ever, and the spent and worn-out wagoner lies lifeless by the roadside. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... there will be now that Miss Mary Anderson, a lovely woman in studied drapery, stands posed at once as a statue, and as a subject for the photographic pictures which will flood the town. Unquestionably Miss Anderson never looked so well as a statue, both lifeless and animated, never comported herself with such grace, never gave such a perfect embodiment of purity and innocence. In marble she was a statue motionless; in life she was a statue half warmed. There are those who believe, or who try to persuade themselves, that this ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... begins another Brahmaic day, in which a new succession of Manus spend, with their progeny, their interminable epochs. And thus one series of epochs follows another, sandwiched in by equally long spaces of lifeless darkness. And this goes on until Brahma has completed his divine life of one hundred years; and then comes the final dissolution. Having gone on as far as this, there is no reason why the imagination should rest at this ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... did not feel. He leaned back impatiently, stifling another yawn, and trying to fix his attention on the stage. Great things were going forward there, and he was not insensible to the stern beauties of the ancient drama. But the interpretation of the play seemed to him as airless and lifeless as the atmosphere of the theatre. The players were the same whom he had often applauded in those very parts, and perhaps that fact added to the impression of staleness and conventionality produced by their performance. Surely it was time to infuse new blood into the veins of the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Mountain black against a rainy sky. To the east a space of light was broadening above the forest; but over that also the clouds hung. Slowly her gaze travelled across the fields to the rugged curve of the hills. She had looked out so often on that lifeless circle, and wondered if anything could ever happen to anyone ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... was locked. Knight, reflecting a moment, searched the pocket of the lifeless woman, and found therein a large key which, on being applied to the door, opened it easily. The fire was out, but the moonlight entered the quarried window, and made patterns upon the floor. The rays enabled them to see ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... source, he complains, has been dried up—its emotions desiccated—by the crushing impact of other hearts, heavy, hard and cold as stone. His heart has become withered and barren, like a lump of earth parched with frost—'a lifeless clod.' Compare "Summer and Winter", lines 11-15:— 'It was a winter such as when birds die In the deep forests; and the fishes lie Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes A wrinkled clod as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... instinct of that capricious and fluctuating conscience which belongs to weak minds, which remains still, and drooping, and lifeless, as a flag on a masthead during the calm of prosperity, but flutters, and flaps, and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves, thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the Mortons, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... portrait busts which he has executed. He talks very freely about his works, and is no exception to the rule that an artist is not apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother artist. He showed us a bust of Mr. Sparks by Persico,—a lifeless and thoughtless thing enough, to be sure,—and compared it with a very good one of the same gentleman by himself; but his chiefest scorn was bestowed on a wretched and ridiculous image of Mr. King, of Alabama, by Clark Mills, of which he said he ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he opened his eyes, smiled, pronounced her name, still smiling and keeping his sunken eyes on her. They were filmy and bluish, like the eyes of the very old; and the hand she lifted and held was the stricken hand of age—inert, lifeless, without weight. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... necessarily more manifest in Washington than elsewhere. There the crime had been committed. There the President's figure was a familiar sight and his voice was a familiar sound. There the tragedy was nearer at hand and more vivid. In the middle of the morning a squad of soldiers bore the lifeless body to the White House. It lay there in state until the day of the funeral, Wednesday. It is safe to say that on the intervening Sunday there was hardly a pulpit in the North, from which, by sermon ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... still her cubs did not rise to follow her, and she returned to them, and with signs of the greatest fondness, went around them separately, placing her paws upon them tenderly, and giving utterance to the same cries of distress. Finding, at last, that they were cold and lifeless, she raised her head toward the ship, and growled in indignation for the murder. Poor creature! the men on board returned her angry cry with a shower of musket balls. She fell between her cubs, and died ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... it must also be shown that the merely mechanical motion of inorganic matter produces that motion which we know as organic motion, and how it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Haeckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand, until they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore. It is amusing to see them come hurrying home when there is a thunder-storm approaching. They come piling in till the rain is upon them. Those ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... was a blessing past praying for, and as the moon swung downward to the hills, Honor Meredith had settled herself at the open window, to watch the lifeless wastes glide silently past, and ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Again and again he struck until the great shaggy head fell back limp. Then his fingers twined themselves like the links of a chain about the purplish throat and he choked until Strang's eyes opened wide and lifeless and his convulsions ceased. He would have held on until there was no doubt of the end, had not the king's wife—the woman whose misery he had shared that night—suddenly flung herself with a piercing cry, between him and the blackened face, clutching at his hands with all ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... be again asked: "How can a being with perfect life produce a world that is lifeless?" In other words, "How can the effect differ from its cause?" The same commentator replies: "Just as lifeless hair can grow out of a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... not, I will disregard the disappointment;" ordered it to be conveyed to his lodging, and paid the price demanded. He then locked his door and opened the chest, when, to his astonishment, he beheld in it a beautiful girl very richly dressed, but apparently lifeless. However, on putting his hand to her mouth, he perceived that she breathed, and was only in a deep sleep, from which he endeavoured to awake her, but in vain. He then took her out of the chest, laid ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... King Billy managed to do it. He sent his eight bullets straight into the dragon's heads, and the huge monster writhed and wriggled and squirmed and squawked, all over the sea from end to end, till at last it floated lifeless on the surface of the clear, warm treacle, and stretched its wicked paws out, and shut its wicked eyes, all four of them, and died. The ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... real as a person, a spirit haunting the luxurious, silent house. He was facing the door, and its heavy mahogany, fixing his attention through his staring gaze, seemed to be shutting him alone with the dead. Save for his trembling self and his wife's painted eyes, the big room was lifeless. It was beyond the closed door that his imagination, now running beyond control, pictured the presence of his frightful guest—his own solitude, coming in ironical answer to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... up the winding street of a small village to the parsonage. She passed a number of cottages picturesquely dilapidated, a store in which a half-dozen men were smoking, and about thirty lounging negroes. On rising ground was a large house, but the village looked forlorn, neglected, almost lifeless. ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... snorted noisily, and rolled wild eyes upon her mistress. Then, unable to believe that her late foe was really no longer a menace to her precious calf, she fell once more upon the lifeless form and tried to beat it out of all likeness to a bear. The calf, who had been knocked over but not hurt in the bear's charge upon Melindy, had struggled to its feet again; and Mrs. Griffis pushed it forward to attract its mother's ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... which followed. The lieutenant signed to the coxswain to come, and then helped him to draw the lifeless body of the poor fellow over the gunwale, and, as decently as was possible, laid the remains of what had once been a big, strong man in the bottom of the boat. A flag was then taken from the locker and covered over him, just as, by a strange ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... have given place to sorrow. Death was soon to destroy the light and comfort of that home. The devoted wife and mother was not strong; and after a severe illness lasting but a few short days, her spirit left the ones she loved and her lifeless body was carried to its last resting place in the cemetery a ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... but the marquise had not the strength to imitate her. Marguerite advanced a few paces, in order that she might continue to enjoy the humiliating grief in which her rival was plunged, and then said, suddenly,—"You do not accompany me to the door, then?" The marquise rose, pale and almost lifeless, without thinking of the envelope, which had occupied her attention so greatly at the commencement of the conversation, and which was revealed at the first step she took. She then opened the door of her oratory, and without even turning ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... triumph or despair may have come and gone through that wayside house since then, what jubilant guests may have entered, what lifeless form passed out. What anguish or what sin may have come between that woman and that child; through what worlds they now wander, and whether separate or in each other's arms,—this is all unknown. Fancy can picture other joys to which the first happiness ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... and useful knowledge the teaching of natural history might put into childish heads, if only science would consider the very young; if our barracks of universities would only combine the lifeless study of books with the living study of the fields; if only the red tape of the curriculum, so dear to bureaucrats, would not strangle all willing initiative. Little Paul and I will study as much as possible in the open country, among the rosemary bushes and ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... fate, all the Mice were seized with fierce anger, and bade their heralds summon the people to assemble towards dawn at the house of Bread-nibbler, the father of hapless Crumb-snatcher who lay outstretched on the water face up, a lifeless corpse, and no longer near the bank, poor wretch, but floating in the midst of the deep. And when the Mice came in haste at dawn, Bread-nibbler stood up first, enraged at his son's death, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the Gorgon's glance for aye The lifeless immortality Reveals in sculptured calmness all Its latest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... clear voice at no great distance rang out, "Fire! gentlemen, and charge!" Then came from between the leaves and bushes a withering volley of bullets from rifle and revolver, striking down the youth, and emptying three saddles, the riders falling lifeless to the ground. In another instant the branches parted, and Arthur Carlton, with his six companions, cleared the low brushwood, and sword in hand dashed into the centre of the ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... no sharp line separating economics from politics. While the two fields are different in character and scope, they are so interrelated and interwoven that any successful attempt to separate them would leave the inquirer with two segments of a lifeless social cadaver. In the course of this exposition it will become increasingly evident, as the political and economic lines cross and re-cross, that the two fields are inseparable parts ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... spirits; but had proceeded but a few miles, when my remaining horse, which I had supposed perfectly sound, reeled and fell in the harness! And before I could relieve him of it, my noble animal and faithful servant, had breathed his last! Without a struggle or a movement he lay lifeless on the cold earth. I was sad. I deplored the loss of my good, and valuable team; but more the mystery and suspicion that hung over the event. I returned home and sat down to devise some plan of ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... was thought no more of; and when she fell upon his bosom, and her mother took their hands and pressed them together, the multitude burst into a shout and blessed them. He strove to speak—he muttered the word "Janet!" but his arms fell from her neck, and he sank as lifeless on the ground. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... than in consequence of any order given, we formed ourselves in a hollow square, with Aina lying apparently lifeless in the centre, and then with gritted teeth we ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... heed to Mrs. Atterbury, to Olympia, kneeling beside her—all her heart, all her senses benumbed in the agony of the cruel blow. Jack moved to the piteous group, and, dropping on his knees, felt the lifeless pulse, and sank back, pale and shrinking, with the feeling that he was a murderer. Mrs. Atterbury turned to ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... star on his shoulder, pulled his hood deep over his head and wandered down the little path, all over the snow, to where the lights were burning. It was lonely, lifeless, that white plain under that burnished sky; and he was all alone, the black fellow on the snow. And he saw the world so big, so monotonously bleak; a flat, white wilderness, with here and there a straight, thin poplar and a row of black, ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... seized the knife, and had his arm already raised to stab Mr Knight in the back, when Frazer shot him dead. At almost the same instant, Luerson struck Mr Knight a tremendous blow on the head with his mallet, which felled him to the earth, stunned and lifeless. He next rushed upon Frazer, who had fairly covered him with the muzzle of his piece, and would inevitably have shot him, but just as he pulled the trigger, the man whom I had seen creeping round behind ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... of me! I should have said it seemed to all appearances lifeless when they saw it," ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... one hollow cavern of vanity—lifeless and lightless, where the ghosts of the sorrows of men moan dismally, and the shadows of men's griefs scream out their wild agony upon the ghastly darkness! Night, through which no dawn shall ever ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... dominance was Cretan, it was short-lived. The security of the island was apparently violated not long after 1500 B.C., the Cnossian palace was sacked and burned, and Cretan art suffered an irreparable blow. As the comparatively lifeless character which it possesses in the succeeding period (III. 3) is coincident with a similar decadence all over the Aegean area, we can hardly escape from the conclusion that it was due to the invasion of all the Aegean lands (or at least the Greek mainland and isles) by some less civilized ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... fierce heat had driven her. The little face among the pillows was no longer rosy and round; blue veins showed at the temples, the lips were colorless, the eyes hollow; the hands, once so brown and strong, were thin and waxy-white; the whole body lay inert,—lifeless, it seemed; and a pang of fear gripped the gentle heart brooding so tenderly ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... in a lifeless tone, which nevertheless had in it a touch of bitterness, "I guess there's no reason why you and your friends should ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... know you too might be dead at this moment for the sake of recovering the lifeless body of a dog? You must be off your head, Eleanor, to do such an utterly insane thing. Whatever were ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... political, religious and moral, that predominated during the period in which his works were produced. Without such information, it will be found impossible, in many matters of the first importance, to grasp the writer's true intent, and much will appear vague and lifeless that was full of point and vigour when it was first conceived; or, worse still, modern opinion upon the subject will be set up as the standard of interpretation, ideas will be forced into the writer's ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... prayers, to place his reliance on God, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy to give repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his friends, his lifeless body had become an offense, in the name of God she received it into her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till the great reckoning-day. From little better than a slave she raised his wife to be his equal, and, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... like to go." Harkless acquiesced at once, with a cheerful voice and a lifeless eye, and the good Tom ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... low enough to take advantage of their helplessness to insult weak women. But here I stand!" she cried, stepping backward, and drawing a gleaming revolver from beneath her cloak. "Search me! but it must be done when the body is lifeless; I'll be a target for the whole of you before I'm searched; so let ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... look beautiful? But you see they are not real; they have no life and no sweetness in them, and they can never make the sick and the suffering happy as real flowers do. My life, with all its advantages, and what people call accomplishments, has been as unreal, as lifeless, as scentless as those wax flowers. It has not pleased God; it has not made others happy; there has been nothing to envy in it, but oh, quite the other way: it should rather be a warning. Tell my girls so, for they have their ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... Oh! The water here never is fresh. It is so tepid and lifeless. Ugh! The water in ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... chief of the Fatimites, when all his brave followers had perished round him, drank his latest draught of water, and uttered his latest prayer, how the assassins carried his head in triumph, how the tyrant smote the lifeless lips with his staff, and how a few old men recollected with tears that they had seen those lips pressed to the lips of the Prophet of God. After the lapse of near twelve centuries, the recurrence of this solemn season excites the fiercest and saddest emotions in the bosoms of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dead body, which had been deposited upon the large table, (at the head of which Harry Wakefield had just presided) until the surgeons should examine the wound. The face of the corpse was decently covered with a napkin. Robin Oig removed the cloth, and gazed on the lifeless visage. While those present expected that the wound, which had so lately flooded the apartment with gore, would send forth fresh streams at the touch of the homicide, Robin Oig replaced the covering, with the brief exclamation, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... to take the cars for Frederick. As we stood waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence to my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... unfairly abetted by a certain Monsieur Lacroix," went on Miss Warren. "That was a terrible practical joke you played on me with the black casquette, you know. They carried us away in the same auto, and they tell me that I looked as lifeless ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... few minutes when she had gone out on the veranda and had seen Stransky bringing in the lifeless body of Grandfather Fragini, she had been engaged since dark in completing the work of moving valuable articles from the front to the rear rooms of the house, which had been begun early in the day ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... to endure. The sick could see the dead sewed up in blankets with a bucket of coal for a weight; then resting on a plank with sailors on each side, the mate would read the brief services appropriate to a burial at sea, the plank was tilted, and the lifeless body slid down into the depths. Such scenes were no benefit to the suffering, for each might think his turn was next, when a bright hope and prospect would be better for ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... took her lifeless hands in his, and held them. He made her meet his eyes. Stern, tender, unflinching eyes they were, with a glint ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... this Jig returned no answer, but in a peculiarly lifeless manner went to his horse and climbed in his awkward way into the saddle. They went ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... material structure and a development of intellectual and moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable analogy; and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up, in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... window found no encouragement in what she saw. The snow had gone, and a vast expanse of grass ran back to the horizon! But it was a dingy, grayish-white, and not green, as it had been in England. The sky was low and gray, too, and the only thing that broke the dreary monotony of lifeless color was the formless, darker smear of a birch bluff that rose out of the empty levels. Her heart throbbed unpleasantly fast as the few remaining minutes slipped away. She started when a dingy mass of something that looked like buildings lifted ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... confidence, I summoned courage to look alternately at Stephania and him, and the hope, the daring hope that I had never yet named to myself, but which was already master of my heart, and its every pulse and capability, dropped prostrate and lifeless in my bosom. If he did but offer her the life-minute of love, of which I would give her, it seemed to me, for the same price, an eternity of countless existences—if he should but give her a careless word, where I could wring a passionate utterance out of the aching blood of my very ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... entered their quiescent winter period. This is the time when the evergreens stand out so prominently on the landscape in such sharp contrast with the others that have been stripped of their broad leaves and now look bare and lifeless. If no pines are to be found in the vicinity, balsam or spruce may be substituted. The lessons should, as far as possible, be observational. The pupils should be encouraged to make some observations for themselves out of school. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... not heeded. Up went the sure-footed athlete until he had almost reached the topmost peak of the barn. Crash! a board gave way under his feet, and down to the ground he was hurled, landing on his back on a pile of heavy boards. Limp and lifeless he lay there, a strange contrast to the vigorous young man who had climbed up the building only a few moments earlier, and the accident seemed to paralyze the faculties of those who saw it happen. It was not the builders or the older persons present who spoke first, but small, dark-eyed, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches, through the chimneypots, and losing itself in a dim horizon of gloom. At intervals a large, lifeless station brought the train to a halt for a moment, and the march was resumed. A clock at one of these stations said a quarter ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... every evening for the last twenty-five years, poring ever his old books, and occasionally jotting down extracts therefrom. He was a broad-shouldered man, tall and straight, about sixty-five years of age. His clean-shaven face was white as marble, its cold and lifeless appearance accentuated by his jet-black hair, strongly-marked eyebrows of the same dark hue, and his unusually black eyes; his nose was slightly aquiline, and his mouth well shaped, though wide; but the firm-set lips and ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,—not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence: as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York four ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... east, shining to guide the chosen kings. It was well for Hugh's power of endurance, that he had heard much the same thing in Scotland, and the same thing better dressed, and less grotesque, but more lifeless, and at heart as ill-mannered, in ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... released from captivity at the end of the year 1774, that he was present at the execution of Pugatchef, and that the latter, recognizing him in the crowd, made him a farewell sign with the head which, a few moments later, was held up to the people, lifeless ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the top of the steps the policeman and cabman could see nothing. Now they stood astounded as they stared down upon an elderly man lying on his back on the steps; another man, apparently lifeless, lying on top of him with his hands upon his throat; and a girl standing a little below them with a smoking ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... Constable Brown, had fallen, and while his comrades were attempting to save him, the thieves had dropped down the steep bank of the river close by, into a boat waiting for them, and got off. The constable was left dead upon the ground, and not far from him lay the old man, also lifeless. But when they came to examine the bodies, while the constable was shot through the head, the other had received nothing but the trifling wound ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this was the fate of Halcyone, a queen of Thessaly, who dreamed that her husband Ceyx had been drowned, and on waking hastened to the shore to look for him. There she saw her dream come true,—his lifeless body floating towards her on the tide; and as she flung herself after him, mad with grief, the air upheld her and she seemed to fly. Husband and wife were changed into birds; and there on the very water, at certain seasons, they ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... had always despised them, for the deference and admiration that they paid her husband if for no other reason. Despised them too, it might be, because they had not seen more in herself, had thought her the dull, lifeless nonentity in whose soul no fires had ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... would much oblige me by drinking it, if he thought he could do it safely, but by no means otherwise. When he did throw his head back, and take it off quick, I had a horrible fear, I confess, of seeing him meet the fate of the lamented Mr. Topsawyer, and fall lifeless on the carpet. But it didn't hurt him. On the contrary, I thought he seemed the fresher ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of Drift accordingly took a pin from the lining of his jacket, and, taking off my coat and waistcoat, proceeded first to prod one of my wheels and then another, but in vain. They just moved for an instant but then halted again, as stiff end lifeless as ever. ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... ears—"Gloria! Gloria in excelsis Deo!"—mingling with the muffled chanting of priests at some distant altar; and he thought he made an attempt to touch the royal velvet pall that draped her beautiful lifeless body, when he was roughly thrust back by armed men with swords and bayonets who asked him "What do you here? Are you not her murderer?"—and he cried out wildly "No, no! Never could I have harmed the child of my love! Never could I hurt ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... just against the touch-hole. With a tremendous crash something black darted through the air and a white smoke brooded over the bridal boat. The bridegroom stood pale and stunned. At his feet lay Borghild—lay for a moment still, as if lifeless, then rose on her elbows, and a dark red current broke from her breast. The smoke scattered. No one saw how it was done; but a moment later Truls, the Nameless, lay ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... consummate rascal; and even after death his hideous corpse was made to serve a deception. He was engaged in a Turf swindle, and it was necessary that he should be regarded as alive on the evening of the Derby day; but he died in the morning, and, to deceive the betting-men, the lifeless carcass of the old robber was put upright in a club window, and a daring sharper caused the dead hand to wave as if in greeting to the shouting crowd—a fit end to a bad life. Crockford's delusion was that his character was marked by honesty and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... sank into darkness, As when a lamp is blown out by a gust of wind at a casement. All was ended now, the hope, and the fear, and the sorrow, All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing. All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience! And, as she pressed once more the lifeless head to her bosom, Meekly she bowed her own, and murmured, ...
— Greetings from Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... his self-respect; to enlarge his sense of responsibility, as well as to teach him the absolute necessity of the subordination of the individual to the needs of the whole. The German army, then, is by no means a lifeless tool that might be used by an unscrupulous and adventurous despot to gratify his own whims or to wreak his private vengeance. The German army is, in principle at least, a national school of manly virtues, of discipline, of comradeship, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... his little girl in such company. Yet he recalled his last trip across the strait, when she had fainted with the heat—fainted again and again—as they had attempted, with such distress and agony, to screen her from a glare as pitiless as a furnace. He remembered dipping her, naked, all but lifeless, into the milkwarm water, till up from the transparent depths the swift, bluish glimmer of a shark warned him to snatch her in. Remembered the hopelessness of it, the terror, the despair, he himself bending to an oar, and offering every inducement his ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... skull, and the great creature fell with a gurgling sound, and lay like a parcel of loose bones across his knees. Valmond raised himself, a strange, dull wonder on him, for as the weapon smote this lifeless creature, he had seen another hurl by and strike the opposite wall. A moment afterwards the dead man was pulled away by Parpon. Trying to rise he felt blood trickling down his neck, and he turned sick and blind. As the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... licentious appetites. It was reported that he conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by promising to spare the life of one to whom she was strongly attached, and that, after she had yielded, he showed her suspended on the gallows the lifeless remains of him for whose sake she had sacrificed her honour. This tale an impartial judge must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority for it is a poem written by Pomfret. The respectable historians ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... man in a dull and lifeless tone, and murmured something in Petroff's ear. It sounded ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... some of the party worked altogether naked like Chinese coolies; and the rush of the wave backwards and forwards at the bottom grew hourly less in the dim light of a couple of engine-room oil lamps whose light just made the darkness visible, the ship all the time rolling like a sodden lifeless log, her lee gunwale under water ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... appearance, with the realisation of the magnitude of that which had been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and practice, and of external circumstances on the history of thought. His history of doctrine has thus a breadth and ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... as before, their preparations for sleep, and heard their conversation. This time the doctor was profuse in his praise of me, but aunt thought I was timid and lifeless; there seemed no spirit about me, as there ought to be, she added, at his age, but this education by females makes girls of boys. I thought to myself, I guess, I shall very soon undeceive you on that point, my dear aunt. The doctor went quietly to bed; aunt stripped ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... again the same day, and wandered away in my madness, even to Egypt and the Libyan sands, and the isles of all the seas, driven on by the terrible gadfly, while I charmed in vain the hearts of men, and the savage forest beasts, and the trees, and the lifeless stones, with my magic harp and song, giving rest, but finding none. But at last Calliope my mother delivered me, and brought me home in peace; and I dwell here in the cave alone, among the savage Cicon tribes, softening their wild hearts with music ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... the awful scene—the bleeding, lifeless form stretched upon the sofa, and the young man standing with a gory knife grasped in his hand—the landlady made the house resound with her shrieks and cries ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the occasional lifting of his head on the pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him, unreal at first: parts only of the dull, lifeless pleasure. There was a sharper memory pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to sleep,—a remembrance of great, cleaving pain, of falling giddily, of owing life to some one, and being angry that he owed it, in the pain. Was it he that had borne it? He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... alive and near, of what other use wilt thou be to me? Do thou, therefore, O irresistible one, revive this son of Abhimanyu,—this child possessed of eyes similar to his,—'even as a rain-charged cloud revives the lifeless crops (on a field). Thou, O Kesava, art righteous-souled, truthful, and of prowess incapable of being baffled. It behoveth thee, O chastiser of foes, to make thy words truthful. If only thou wishest ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to the offices of the G.Q.G. Now and then Foss would come to the window of the car. "Don't move," he would say. The floor-boards were rattled by an icy wind that blew over the face of the snow and up under the car; the brown, silk legs lay prone and stiff between the petrol cans, lifeless now to the knee. She was seized with fits of violent shivering. At one moment she had planned in her despair to call to Foss and tell him she would walk—but she had let the moment pass and now she ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Number Two rolled in, a double header, one engine alive and one dead, but both swathed in snow and frozen steam from cowcatcher to tender, the first puffing its proud triumph over the opposing elements, the second silent, cold and lifeless like a warrior borne from the ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... down the well before any one else reached the spot. Bruce had had the forethought to cut down a swing and bring the rope. In a very few minutes Miss Custer—or what was believed to be her lifeless body—was lying wet upon the grass and the doctor, also dripping, was making a hasty examination of her condition. "I think she will live," was his verdict, "but we must get her home with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... with incantations! Then, O monarch, that mighty warrior my son, fired with wrath, challenged Vivindhya and discharged the weapon at him. And the Danava struck with that weapon, fell down on the ground a lifeless corpse! And beholding Vivindhya slain, and the whole host waver, Salwa advanced again on his beautiful car capable of going everywhere. And, O king of mighty arms, beholding Salwa on that beautiful car of his, the combatants of Dwaraka wavered with fear! But, O thou of the Kuru race, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... purpose, but that the stubborn will has been softened is evident from the slowing down of the rhythm, in measures 285-294. Finally, in the wonderful closing passage, we have a picture of broken resolves and ruined hopes. The theme disintegrates and fades away—a lifeless vision. Although much of the structure in this overture is identical with that which prevails in absolute music—for, after all, the composer must be true to the laws of his medium of expression—there is enough purely dramatic treatment ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the above rules are absolutely fundamental to good Coffee Making, their importance is so little appreciated that in some households the lifeless grounds from the breakfast Coffee are left in the pot and resteeped for the next meal, with the addition of a small quantity of fresh coffee. Used coffee grounds are of no more value in coffee making than ashes are in ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... separates life and death to mortal men! To be at one moment active, gay, penetrating, with stores of knowledge at one's command, capable of delighting, instructing, and animating mankind, and the next, lifeless and loathsome, an incumbrance upon the face of the earth! Such is the history of many men, and such ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... making their last trips for the day. Away to the west, where their faces were turned, the sky was still faintly washed with color, lemon and dusky orange and pale thin green. A single long strip of cirrus cloud was touched with pink, a lifeless old rose, such as is popular among decorators for the silk hangings of a woman's boudoir. And black against this pallid wash of colors the tour Eiffel stood high and slender and rather ghostly. By day it is an ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... went down to the steamer, depressed and anxious, carrying with him the vivid memory of Madge lying white and death-like where he had laid her apparently lifeless form. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... entered the drawing-room pale and agitated. Edmee was pale too. It was a cold, rainy morning. A fire was burning in the great fire-place. Lying back in an easy chair, she was warming her little feet and dozing. It was the same listless, almost lifeless, attitude of the days of her illness. M. de la Marche was reading the paper at the other end of the room. On seeing that Edmee was more affected than myself by the emotions of the previous night, I felt my anger cool, and, approaching her noiselessly, I sat ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... husband and kingdom, in that hour of grief beyond utterance, cursed him in anger, saying, 'I have never even thought of any other person than Naishadha, therefore let this mean-minded wrath subsisting on chase, fall down lifeless.' And as soon as she said this, the hunter fell down lifeless upon the ground, like a ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... say? I wish to goodness I had helped your butler to raise Sir Alan's lifeless body. But about this family dispute. Was ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... of the words had escaped the Colonel's lips, a streak of fire flashed from where the overseer stood, and took the direction of the negro. One long, wild shriek—one quick, convulsive bound in the air—and Sam fell lifeless to the floor, the dark life-stream pouring from his side. The little child also fell with him, and its greasy, grayish shirt was dyed with its father's blood. Moye, at the distance of ten feet, had discharged ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... world for her beautiful feminine spirituality, the roots of which lie buried in noble aspirations and boundless self-denial. In fact, compared with these types, the virtuous of other races seem lifeless, as does an inanimate volume when compared with the living word. Yes, each time that there arises in Russia a movement of thought, it becomes clear that the movement sinks deep into the Slavonic nature where it would but have skimmed the surface ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and sobs, which prevented them uttering any words of consolation. But he could not have listened to them. He fancied he heard the pattering of Nan's little feet, and saw her laughing face. But no! he heard instead the dull and lingering footsteps of Tim, and saw a little lifeless form folded from sight ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... night he dreamt again that Asgard lay in darkness, and that her bright flowers and radiant trees were withered and lifeless, and that the Asa folk, dull and withered also, were sorrowing as ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... coming and going, the sound of the free waves, did not drive me mad. Twist as I will my memory, I cannot recall that Molly of six months ago, whose hours and days passed and dropped all alike, all lifeless, just like the slow tac, tac, tac of our great horloge in the Refectory, and were to go on as slow and as alike, for ever and ever, till she was old, dried, wrinkled, and then died. The real Molly de Savenaye's life began on the April morning when that dear old turbaned fairy ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... never forgot the sick feeling of dread which then came over him. What had he done? He did not hear Archie's excited words; he came hurriedly to the side of the man, who lay lifeless upon the ground with his head on the young fellow's knee. Archie looked up at him with dilated terrified eyes. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his back, had nearly gained the opposite bank when his legs also became powerless and, to our infinite alarm, we beheld him sink. We instantly hauled upon the line and he came again on the surface and was gradually drawn ashore in an almost lifeless state. Being rolled up in blankets he was placed before a good fire of willows and fortunately was just able to speak sufficiently to give some slight directions respecting the manner of treating him. He recovered strength gradually and ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... in the arms of Soldier Joe, who wiped a moisture from the lifeless cheek as he laid the body ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... surface of mountainous districts;—irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone;—breaking up, and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, &c., so rendering parts of the earth habitable which hitherto have been lifeless, are to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Med Ship slowly away from the clump of still-lifeless grain-ships. It was highly improbable that the guard-boat would carry an electron telescope. Most likely it would have only an echo-radar, and so could determine only that an object of some sort moved of its own accord in space. Calhoun let the Med Ship ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... her words brought no comfort to the bereaved mother. She heard nothing; she saw nothing but the quiet little form that lay lifeless before her. When Mrs. Stein was convinced that she could be of no use to her, she went across the room to Elsli, who sat weeping on the footstool by the window, and taking her by the hand, she led her out ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... islanders, perceiving that no help was afforded, forced him under water again, but in a deeper place; yet his great muscular power once more enabled him to raise himself and cling to the rock. At this moment a forcible blow was given with a club, and he fell down lifeless. The savages then hauled his corpse upon the rock, and ferociously stabbed the body all over, snatching the dagger from each others' hands to wreak their sanguinary vengeance on the slain. The body was left some time exposed upon the rock; and as the islanders gave way, through ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... engine bell sounded through the night as with the whiz of escaping steam and scrape and jar of gripping brakes and howl of wheels the train came to a stop at the station. Sanford dropped his coat and sat down again. "I'll have to stay now." His tone was dry and lifeless. It had a reproach in it that cut the wife deep-deep as the fountain of tears; and she went across the room and knelt at the bedside, burying her face in the clothes on the feet of her ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower - stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average farmhouse mantelpiece. Here it forms the most uncheering of winter bouquets, or a wreath about flowers made from the lifeless hair of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... vastly more powerful than others. Trees are not infrequently broken and destroyed by them. We were told that horses and cattle exposed upon the plain were sometimes taken up in the suction of air caused by their progress, carried a hundred rods or more, and then dropped to the ground lifeless. Other stories were heard of the erratic performances of sand-spouts on the Mexican plateau, but they were of a nature requiring too much credulity for us to repeat them ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... gods as Pele, the spirit of the volcanoes, with her five brothers and eight sisters who lived in the flaming caverns of Kilauea; or as Kalaipahoa, poison-goddess of Molokai, and her two sisters, who put a bane on the trees so deadly that they rivalled the fabled Upas of Java, and birds fell lifeless as they attempted to fly above them (a volcanic sulphur vent was probably the origin of this tale); or, as Kuahana, who slew men for sport; or, as Pohakaa, who rolled rocks down the mountains to scare and hurt travellers; or, as the shark and lizard gods that lashed the sea ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner |
