"Penumbra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered through these media. The greatest mastery of technique will therefore come short of perfect adequacy and exhaustiveness; there must always remain a penumbra and fringe of suggestion if the most explicit representation is to communicate a truth. When there is real profundity, — when the living core of things is most firmly grasped, — there will accordingly be a felt inadequacy of expression, and an appeal to the ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... these exquisite, ghastly first- flowers, which are rather last-flowers! Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them: snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses, flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished in mortification, jets of exquisite finality; Come, ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... that it is more than a little difficult to mark their precise significance. Often they are mere fragments of themes, mere patches of harmonic color, evasive and intangible, designed almost wholly to translate phases of that psychic penumbra in which the characters and the action of the drama are enwrapped. They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness, their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... question. But to will is not to do; and Mr. O'Connell, with a true loyalty to his one object of private aims, has not maintained the consistency of his policy. All men know that he has adventured within the limits of conspiracy; that could not be for his benefit. He has touched even the dark penumbra of treason; that could not but risk the sum of his other strivings. But he who has failed for himself in a strife so absolute, for that only must be distrusted ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... grasp the reality of Change, for it is adapted to solids and to concepts, it resembles the cinematograph film. Then he has tried to show us that in Perception there is really much more than we think, for our intellect carves out what is of practical interest, while the penumbra or vague fringes of perceptions which have no bearing on action are neglected. By his advocacy of a real psychological Time, in opposition to the physical abstraction which bears the name, he again brought out ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... not received a final answer. Greece is fighting for an empire over Turks. Ireland is fighting the British Empire to obtain the right to do what she wants in the world. The business penumbra of the United States has begun to cover Mexico. Five or six constituents of old Russian have cut free. But France has become imperial and would impose a ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of the soul, when ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... orbs, or rather globes, by which all things are held together. One is the celestial, the outermost, embracing all the rest,—the Supreme God himself, [Footnote: Here crops out the Pantheism—the non-detachment or semi-detachment of God from nature—which casts a penumbra around monotheism and the approaches to it, almost always, except under Hebrew and Christian auspices.] who governs and keeps in their places the other spheres. In this are fixed those stars which ever roll in an unchanging course. Beneath this ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... and rich Turkey rugs, and here the Bayfield household ordinarily had the lamps set after dinner and gathered before the fire, talking little, enjoying the long pauses filled with the hiss of logs and the monotonous drip and trickle of water in the penumbra. ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this far and difficult path; for it is the man we must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings. Fielding's voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of Stevenson's life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very penumbra of death. Yet Stevenson spoke always as gallantly as his great predecessor. Their "cheerful stoicism," which allies his books with the best British breeding, will keep them classical as long as our nation shall value breeding. It shines to our dim eyes now, as ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... followed suit. The lamplight, striking across his face beneath the greenish penumbra of the shade, discovered a countenance ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... church, whose porch had been restored; symbolical, perhaps, of our entry into a world from which, happily, the old things had passed. The church was empty, for this was market day. Through its gloom, as through the penumbra of antiquity, shone faintly the pale forms of a few recumbent knights, and the permanent appeal of their upturned hands and faces kept the roof aware of human contrition. Above one of the figures was a new Union Jack, crowned with laurels. The sun made too vivid a scarlet patch ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... fail entirely, the conjunction taking place so far from the node that the Moon does not touch the Earth's shadow. The whole interval of time over which a series of lunar eclipses thus extend will be about 48 periods, or 865 years. When a series of solar eclipses begins, the penumbra of the first will just graze the earth not far from one of the poles. There will then be, on the average, 11 or 12 partial eclipses of the Sun, each larger than the preceding one, occurring at regular intervals of one Saros. Then the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... moment before this flat defiance reached the brain of the big man through the penumbra of his mental fog. When it did, he strode across the room with the roar of a wild animal and snatched the girl to him. He would show whether any one could come between ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... artist—whatever the artist meant his work to express: that it expresses. Yet, since this can never be certainly and completely discovered, there must always remain a large region of undetermined interpretation. Now for judging the relevancy of this penumbra of meaning and association the following test applies—does it bring us back to the sensuous medium of the work of art or lead us away? Anything is legitimate which we actually put into the form of the work of art and keep there, while whatever merely hangs loose around it is illegitimate. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker |
