"Shapeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fills it; the northern ridge completely bare, excoriated of all turf and all soil, the very bones and skeletons of the earth; rock reclining upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge terrific mass—a palace of the preAdamite kings, a city of the Anakim, must have appeared so shapeless, and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped after the waters of the flood had subsided. I ascended with some toil the highest point; two large stones inclining on each other formed a rude portal ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... utterly shapeless little face lay, like a crushed beet-root, in a mass of dainty laces almost voluminous enough to have dressed out a bride. As a sort of crowning satire, the face in particular was surrounded by a broad frill, spotted with bunches of pink satin ribbon, and farther encased in a white satin ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... remained awake. He sat in his chamber and wrote. Now and then he would moisten his lips with watered wine. Sometimes he held the pen in midair, and peered into the shapeless shadows cast by the tapers, his broad forehead shining and deep furrows between his eyes. On, on he wrote. Perhaps the archbishop was composing additional pages to his memoirs, for occasionally his thin lips relaxed into an ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... his grip, and with his foot pushed the bundle of dirt further away from him. He groped in his wallet and drew out some silver coins. These he threw, one by one, into the midst of the shapeless rags, and he stooped forward, striving in the darkness to see something of the faces that were wilfully hidden from him, something of the mouths that had uttered the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was strolling in a jardin franais; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowded with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of medieval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the French say) descended into a basin full of dark, cool recesses, where the slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... should unite to build a lofty monument of snow upon the battlefield and crown it with the victor's statue hewn of the same frozen marble. In a few days or weeks thereafter the passer-by would observe a shapeless mound upon the level common, and, unmindful of the famous victory, would ask, "How came it there? Who reared it? And what means it?" The shattered pedestal of many a battle-monument has provoked these questions when none ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on the fireman's box and stood scowling at the retracting index of the steam-gauge. When he was on his feet beside the little Irishman, you saw that he was a young man, well-built, square-shouldered and athletic under the muffling of the shapeless fur greatcoat; also, that in spite of the scowl, his clean-shaven face was strong and manly and good to ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... conditions it will proceed to recrystallize anew. But if the Polycystine urn be broken, no inorganic agency can build it up again. So far as any inherent urn-building power, analogous to the crystalline force, is concerned, it might lie there in a shapeless mass forever. That which modeled it at first is gone from it. It was Vital; while the force which built ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... in this hovel, where the air can scarcely be breathed, and where the barbarous music, mingled with wailings and cries, deafens you! And what an air of antiquity marks all things here! The defaced walls, the low roof that one can easily touch, the granite pillars which sustain the shapeless arches are all blackened by the smoke of the wax candles, and scarred and worn by the friction ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed Speeches of Cromwell are. Wilfully ambiguous, unintelligible, say the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me they do not seem so. I will say, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... to him in her hand, and several men followed her. She approached the unsuspecting youth, and, while his soul was devoutly engaged in prayer, she raised the fatal axe, and, with one blow, severed his skull, and the men with their clubs beat his body into a shapeless mass." ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... genial and gentle, and yet his mouth was the cruellest gash I had ever seen in a man's face. It was a gash. There is no other way of describing that harsh, thin-lipped, shapeless mouth that uttered gracious things so graciously. Involuntarily I glanced at his hands. Like the mate's, they were thick-boned, broken-knuckled, and malformed. Back into his blue eyes I looked. On the surface of them was a film of light, a gloss of gentle kindness and cordiality, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... are, at first, incredulous in respect of the shapeless rumours that they hear. Cook says our people's credit ain't so easy shook as that comes to, thank God; and Mr Towlinson expects to hear it reported next, that the Bank of England's a-going to break, or ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... kind, for he had never beheld a creature like her. Gray was a tall man, but this girl's eyes met his on a level, and her figure, if anything, was heavier than his. Nor was its appearance improved by her shapeless garment of faded wash material. Her feet were incased in a pair of men's cheap "brogans" that Gray could have worn; drops of perspiration gleamed upon her face, and her hair, what little was visible beneath the sunbonnet, was wet and untidy. Altogether she ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... a shapeless hole to these complex dwellings, every possible stage; we have found among animals the rudiments of the different human habitations, certain animals, indeed, having arrived at a degree of civilisation which Man himself in some countries has not yet surpassed, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... those bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... the night, in solitude, tears, On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand, Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head; O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears? What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... one among them—"Surely not in vain My substance of the common Earth was ta'en And to this Figure moulded, to be broke, Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again." ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the shapeless throng of dark thoughts filling his head, a quite irrelevant memory pushed to the front as if in answer to an unspoken question. It consisted of the words spoken by ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... we all," Anders said. He walked on asphalt, surrounded by heaps of concrete, silicates, aluminum and iron alloys. Shapeless, meaningless heaps that made up the ...
— Warm • Robert Sheckley
... hundred-armed giant who walks in the noonday, and sleeps not in the midnight, yet still toiling, not merely for itself and the present moment, but for the race and the future, I have lifted my voice against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shapeless bulk into the path of a noble science it is too weak to strike, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... degraded and irreligious population, belongs exclusively to the advocates of African colonization. For absurdity and inaptitude, it stands, and must forever stand, without a parallel. Of all the offspring of prejudice and oppression, it is the most shapeless and unnatural. But more ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... disorganized; straggling; unmethodical, immethodical[obs3]; unsymmetric[obs3], unsystematic; untidy, slovenly; dislocated; out of sorts; promiscuous, indiscriminate; chaotic, anarchical; unarranged &c. (see arrange &c. 60)[obs3]; confused; deranged &c. 61; topsy-turvy &c. (inverted) 218; shapeless &c. 241; disjointed, out of joint. troublous[obs3]; riotous &c. (violent) 173. complex &c. 59a. Adv. irregularly &c. adj.; by fits, by fits and snatches, by fits and starts; pellmell; higgledy-piggledy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... perceived the southern side of the Serrania, or chain of the mountains of Encaramada. The part nearest the river is only one hundred and forty or one hundred and sixty toises high; but from its abrupt declivities, its situation in the midst of a savannah, and its rocky summits, cut into shapeless prisms, the Serrania appears singularly elevated. Its greatest breadth is only three leagues. According to information given me by the Indians of the Pareka nation, it is considerably wider toward the east. The summits of Encaramada form the northernmost ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Hayden was explained as soon as I saw the volcano in its changed condition. The loud detonations which resembled the discharges of a gun-boat mortar were no longer heard, and the upper part of the crater and cone had in a great measure disappeared, leaving a shapeless and unsightly hole much larger than the former crater, in which large tree-tops were swaying to and fro in the gurgling mass, forty feet below—the whole appearance bearing testimony to the terrible nature of the convulsion which wrought such destruction. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... Again, we find that the trigonae and meliponae, which are veritable and domesticated bees, though of less advanced civilisation, erect only one row of rearing-cells, and support their horizontal, superposed combs on shapeless and costly columns of wax. Their provision-cells are merely great pots, gathered together without any order; and, at the point between the spheres where these might have intersected and induced a profitable economy ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... could restore it. The soft, brown velvet, the laugh, the tear gone for ever. The divine eye was broken—battered as a stone might be. The exquisite structure which reflected the trees and flowers, and took to itself the colour of the summer sky, was shapeless. ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... the furnace. With a quick motion he seized the long tongs. There was a cloud of choking vapour. Kennedy leaped to the switch and shut off the current. With the tongs he lifted out a shapeless ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... shout "Lordy!" and look furtively over their shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but, instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on another. Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to follow lonely travelers along dark roads ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... just risen—shining in his face, shows it to be that of a man over fifty, with the felon in its every line and lineament. It is beardless, pock-pitted, with thick shapeless lips, broad hanging jowls, nostrils agape, and nose flattened like the snout of a bull-dog. Eyes gosling-green, both bleary, one of them bloodshot. For all, eyes that, by his own boast, "can see into a millstone as far as the man ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... stupendous analogy, the growth of a solar system from molecular chaos, the shaping of the earth from the nebulous cub-hood of its youth, through innumerable changes and immeasurable ages, to its present form; and the development of a living being from the shapeless mass of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... to all the Berceau, the news was not very terrible, because it was so vague and distant—an evil so far off and shapeless. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... Ivan rose as the party entered, greeted Soudeikin and saluted the officer, hardly glancing at the two pale, haggard women in their rough grey shapeless gowns and hoods as they stood beside the men to whom ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... crooked twig, or rather on an ugly likeness of a twig rested askew a blind, ugly, shapeless, outspread mass of something utterly and inconceivably distorted, a mad leap of wild and bizarre fragments, all feebly and vainly striving to part from one another. And, as if by chance, beneath one of the wildly-rent salients a butterfly ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... light extends, Of this great work to thee shall be the fame: When with their ships the long-hair'd Greeks shall take Their homeward voyage to their native land, This wall shall by the waves be broken through, And sink, a shapeless ruin, in the sea: O'er the wide shore again thy sands shall spread, And all the ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals either without saying a word or, at best, snapping me up and saying that I got far better treatment than a ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... in a strange gauzy garment of exquisite colors, apparently shapeless, yet now and then revealing her perfect figure like a bather seen through undulating billows, she was lovely. Two wands were held in her taper fingers, whose mystery only added to the general curiosity, but whose weird and cabalistic ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... shaped bulge in the ground, which, swaying backward and forward, increased and increased in stature, till it attained the height of some seven or eight feet. Van Hielen could not compare this with anything he had ever seen. It was monstrous but shapeless—a mere mass of irregular lumps, a dull leadish white, and vibrating horribly in the moonlight. He thought of the children; but where they had stood he saw only two greenish-yellow spheres that, twirling round and round, suddenly approached him. As he started back ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... of 'many among us,' who 'will be found upon inquiry, to fancy God in the shape of a man sitting in heaven, and have other absurd and unfit conceptions of him.' As though it were possible to think of shapeless Being, or as though it were criminal in the superstitious to believe 'God made man after his own image.' A 'Philosophical Unbeliever,' who made minced meat of Dr. Priestley's reasonings on the existence of God, well remarked ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks' nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St. Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a pleasanter ending. The charter of James—for the town ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn observed, "something simply slick about all these old quatrangleses," crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always returned to his exile's room, where he now began to hear the new voice of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn't care whether he loved it ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... a long, gold-framed mirror hanging between the windows. The "pretty blue eyes" I saw, but I saw also the straw-coloured hair, the broad nose sprinkled with freckles, and the sturdy legs disguised by the shapeless breeches, which my mother had cut out of a discarded dolman she had once worn to funerals. It was a figure which might have raised a laugh in the ill-disposed, but the women before me carried kind hearts in their bosoms, and even grandmama's chilling scrutiny ended in nothing worse ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... apparently acceded to; for, at the sound of his powerful voice, the figure sank upon the ground, exhibiting a shapeless ball of black, without life ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... high shapeless cap, made of a goat's skin, with a flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the sun from me as to shoot the rain off from running into my neck: nothing being so hurtful in these climates as the rain upon the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... eye, lean your trust Upon unstaid perverseness! now ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... waist— Shapeless grows the shapely limb, And although securely laced, Spreading is the figure trim! Stouter than I used to be, Still more corpulent grow I— There will be too much of me In the coming ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... death's-head, and one saw only by a faint gleam in the hollows of the eye sockets that he was alive. And the dried-up muscles of the body gave it no roundness, and the upstretched, naked arms consisted only of shapeless bones, covered with shrivelled, hardened, bark-like skin. He wore an old, close-fitting, black robe. He was tanned by the sun and black with dirt. His hair and beard alone were light, bleached by the rain and sun, until they ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... not remember. As concerns such trivial things, the days that followed my mother's death are all misty in my mind; but I do recall (for when Skipper Tommy had made my mother's coffin he took me to the heads of Good Promise to see the sight) that the big seas of that day pounded the vessel to a shapeless wreck on the jagged rocks of the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils: where she lay desolate for many a day thereafter. But the sea was not quick enough to balk our folk of their salvage: all day long—even while the ship ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... be challenged to bring forward a single instance of their expressing, or even appearing to have noted, the great laws of structure above explained. Their hills are, without exception, irregular earthy heaps, without energy or direction of any kind, marked with shapeless shadows and meaningless lines; sometimes, indeed, where great sublimity has been aimed at, approximating to the pure and exalted ideal of rocks, which, in the most artistical specimens of China cups and plates, we see suspended from aerial pagodas, or balanced upon peacocks' tails, but ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... coat-sleeve and the red of his hand. At that useful member he could not help looking with a sigh, as he had often done before—for it was not a handsome hand. It was broad and red, and the fingers were thick and stumpy, with very coarse deep wrinkles at every joint. His nails also were flat and shapeless; and he used to be continually gnawing them till he had succeeded in getting them down to the quick—and they were a sight to set one's teeth on edge. Then he extracted from the first-mentioned trunk a white pocket ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... The dim shapeless feelings which had taken possession of De Scuderi's mind on Olivier's first entry into the room, had now acquired form and content—and in a fearful way. She saw the son of her dear Anne innocently entangled ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... latter angry and pulling him, the former weeping and imploring. He would go with neither, and at last they vanished both. He sat solitary on the side of a bare hill, and below him was all that remained of Castle Warlock. He had been dead so many years, that it was now but a half—shapeless ruin of roofless walls, haggard and hollow and gray and desolate. It stood on its ridge like a solitary tooth in the jaw of some skeleton beast. But where was his father? How was it he had not yet found him, if ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... suffered no pain and with no obscuration of his mind until the last ten minutes. Kate had nursed him with pious care: she was alone with him and closed his eyes about four o'clock in the morning. At first she was overcome with hysterical passion, and this was succeeded by shapeless thoughts which streamed up in her incessantly as the mists stream up from a valley at sunrise. Not until day broke did she leave the room and waken ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... expressive opening phrases lead to decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musical fabric by ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... How utterly absurd! He had actually positively disliked this beautiful creature all the winter! He was astonished at his own bad taste. Before him stood his wife on the kitchen hearth, her figure rendered shapeless by her advanced state of pregnancy. And he had once thought her ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... gun was in action. Shortly after this bombardment started, the German trenches were covered by a great cloud of smoke and dust and a pall of green lyddite fumes. The first line of German trenches, against which the fire was directed, became great shapeless furrows and craters filled ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... had introduced the others more for the purpose of gaining time to study this hulking, limp-kneed man who stood before him like a gorilla crouched for a spring and squeezing a soft straw hat into a shapeless lump ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... presented as it must have appeared after the sack and utter destruction by the Turks in 1571. It looked as though a town had been shattered and utterly destroyed by an earth-quake, whose terrible tremblings had shaken every house to its foundation, and left nothing but shapeless heaps of squared stones. O Turk! insatiable in destruction, who breaks down, but never restores, what a picture of desolation was here! Three centuries had passed away since by treachery the place was won, and from that hour the neglected harbour had silted up and ceased to be; ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... feet in depth. It was a place rather dingily lighted, the darkest portions having incandescent lights, filled with machines and work benches. At the latter laboured quite a company of girls and some men. The former were drabby-looking creatures, stained in face with oil and dust, clad in thin, shapeless, cotton dresses and shod with more or less worn shoes. Many of them had their sleeves rolled up, revealing bare arms, and in some cases, owing to the heat, their dresses were open at the neck. They were ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... clothes from the three bodies, and the naked forms were kicked into almost shapeless masses, before they were eventually hurled over the embankment into the swirling ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... another aspect. She wore a large foul apron of sacking, which made her elegant body quite shapeless, and she was kneeling on the red-and-black tiled floor of the kitchen, with her enormous cracked boots sticking out behind her. At one side of her was a pail full of steaming brown water, and in her red coarse little hands, which did ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... His dresser hurls himself on the basket, as though he owed it a grudge. He tears off the lid. He dives head foremost into a foam of trousers, coats, and many-coloured shirts. He comes to the surface breathless, having retrieved a shapeless mass of stuff. He tears pieces of this stuff apart, and flings them, with apparent malice, at his chief, and, somehow, they seem to stay where he flings them. The chief shouts from a cloud of orange wig and patchwork shirt for a soda-and-milk, and from some obscure place of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... desolation. Only a few months before, I had seen this then flourishing town in all its beauty and pride. Now, nothing remained but a vast collection of roofless houses, with blackened, shattered walls, and shapeless heaps of stones and rubbish. Shops, magazines, costly dwellings, and elegant churches, all had ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... advantages as yielding a rich harvest of tadpoles. While the mature intelligence might have considered these miniature lakes as highly undesirable, the young Montgomerys were not unmindful of their blessings. As babies, clothed in shapeless garments, they launched upon the green slime their tiny fleet of chips, and, grown a little older, it was here they waded in the happy summer days. The very dump-carts came and went like perpetual argosies, bringing riches—discarded furniture ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... clothes—they were even more shoddy and disreputable. His brows gathered critically as he surveyed the wretched boots, the mismated socks, the frayed, patched trousers, the greasy flannel shirt, the ragged coat, and the battered, shapeless slouch hat. Matched closely enough to the originals to pass without question, gathered from here and there, painstakingly, with infinite trouble during the week that had passed, were the ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... work with her pencil. "Come out, hussy," she screamed to Reicht, "more in front of him, and keep the fool inspired and beautiful. Oh, why had I not this maniac for my good centurion? They went and brought me a brute with a low forehead and a shapeless beard." ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... only wished to stand; to stand and stare. He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of another heaven. But this was a dome of heaven made by man. The gold and green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate plumage. Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... endurance usually enabled him to trail it to its last hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his adventures in Alaska, his eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm, and he would live over again the red-blooded years that yielded him "shapeless harvests of ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... no response. He hurriedly advanced, the four men following quietly. He turned the angle of the corridor, and ran so rapidly that by the time the officers had come in sight of him again he was twenty steps away. He ran past a huge, shapeless object, sprawling, crawling, and floundering along, and arrived at the body of ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... to bear on with his eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and leaves, and bits of black or dark-brown bark, were all exactly copied in the bird's plumage. And then she did sit so close, and simulate so well a shapeless, decaying piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a companion, and, guiding his eye to the spot, noted how difficult it was for him to make out there, in full view upon the dry leaves, any semblance to a bird. When the bird returned ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... to his table and placed the parcel there before him. It was the more shapeless and disordered from the warm clutch of her despairing hand. He took it up and carelessly unrolled it. The paper lay open in his palm; he saw and dropped the necklace to the table. There it lay, glittering ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my horrified gaze no decent trace of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hunger for a meal. They were beef for the army, and never again, I suppose, would it be allowed to them to fill their big maws and chew the patient cud. There, on the brown, ugly, undrained field, within easy sight of the President's house, stood the useless, shapeless, graceless pile of stones. It was as though I were looking on the genius of the city. It was vast, pretentious, bold, boastful with a loud voice, already taller by many heads than other obelisks, but nevertheless still in its ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... hurry thence. Miss Thompson hovers there and gazes: Her housewife's knowing eye appraises Salt and fresh, severely cons Kippers bright as tarnished bronze: Great cods disposed upon the sill, Chilly and wet, with gaping gill, Flat head, glazed eye, and mute, uncouth, Shapeless, wan, old-woman's mouth. Next a row of soles and plaice With querulous and twisted face, And red-eyed bloaters, golden-grey; Smoked haddocks ranked in neat array; A group of smelts that take the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the valleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the clear road lines of moral truth ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... was. That shapeless, unrecognizable mass, melted, expunged, flat as a bladder under an unexhausted receiver, drained of its air, was poor Satellite's body, flying like a rocket through space, and rising higher and higher in close company with the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... she was the same, and felt that by a glance he could almost trace back her life through its awful descent to the time when she was a beautiful and innocent girl. As a swift dark tide might sweep a summer pinnace from its moorings, and dash it on the rocks until it became a crushed and shapeless thing, so passion or most untoward circumstances had suddenly drawn this poor young creature among coarse, destructive vices that had shattered the delicate, womanly nature in one short year ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... dismal side street there darted past her a small, shapeless figure in crumpled cap and apron: evidently a member of that lazy, over-indulged class, the domestic servant. Judging from the talk of the drawing-rooms, the correspondence in the papers, a singularly unsatisfactory ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... the domain of art all Is shapeless. The ugly is of the domain of art, if art give it form. Is there anything more beautiful than Iago? If he be looked upon merely as a contrast to Othello, then we are in the position of those who looked ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... sacred wood, described with such sublime horror by Lucan, was in the neighborhood of Marseilles; but there were many of the same kind in Germany. * Note: The ancient Germans had shapeless idols, and, when they began to build more settled habitations, they raised also temples, such as that to the goddess Teufana, who presided over divination. See Adelung, Hist. of Ane Germans, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... restored, albeit for once running under the open sky. These were the ways that Graham had seen from the little balcony in the hour of his awakening, not nine days since, and the hall of his Trance had been on the further side, where now shapeless piles of smashed and shattered masonry ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Exmes, now hardly more than a village, is the church. This stands on the general mass of high ground from which the castle hill juts out. It is a building of no small interest, both from what it has to show and from what it has not. At first sight it seems utterly shapeless. What first catches the eye is a very pretty apse of good Flamboyant work, with windows in two ranges, of which all in the upper and some in the lower are blocked. We see also at the same glance that something just to the west of the apse has been destroyed or ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... from the same Whose eyes shone erst like Titan's glorious beam: 'Daughter,' she says, 'fly, fly, behold thy dame Foreshows the treasons of thy wretched eame, Who poison gainst thy harmless life provides:' This said, to shapeless air ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... called iyacaskuni, meaning, literally, "under the flat." The roof is nearly square as well as flat, and the edifice, with its spreading base, suggests a truncated pyramid; but as it is roughly covered with earth heaped over the entire structure it is externally little more than a shapeless mound. Plate LXXXIX is an exterior view of one of these special hogans, which is also shown in plan in ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... had she a right,—that was the worst question,—to break it now? She wandered on, out of the church, away from the beautiful old ivied tower, which seemed to look down on her with grave reproach from the staidness of years and wisdom; wound about over and among the piles of shapeless ruin and the bits of lichened and moss-grown walls, yet standing here and there; not saying to herself exactly where she was going, but trying if she could find out the way; till she saw a thicket ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... badly with a saw. Later, highly-perfected engines appear, and, wholly special, the sewing-machine and the typewriter: it is impossible to sew with the typewriter or write with the sewing-machine.—In like manner, when at the lowest round of the organic ladder the animal is simply a shapeless jelly, homogeneous and viscous, all parts of it are equally suited to all functions; the amoebae, indifferently and by all the cells of its body, can walk, seize, swallow, digest, breathe, and circulate all its fluids, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... this. Schuylkill was here a pure and translucid current, broken into wild and ceaseless music by rocky points, murmuring on a sandy margin, and reflecting on its surface, banks of all varieties of height and degrees of declivity. These banks were chequered by patches of dark verdure and shapeless masses of white marble, and crowned by copses of cedar, or by the regular magnificence of orchards, which, at this season, were in blossom, and were prodigal of odours. The ground which receded from the river ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... be," said the Skeptic. "The effect is the same. At sight of her my cravat gets under my ear, my coat becomes shapeless, my shoes turn pigeon-toed. We have to dress for dinner every night ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... outline, but, yielding to aerial currents, had been rent from base to crown, and now its scattered fragments lay in wild confusion along the whole sweep of the western horizon. Down into these shapeless ruins the moon had plunged, and her pure light was struggling to penetrate their rifts, and pour its blessing upon the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... had gnawed it to death. He gives an illustration showing the serpent in situ. He also quotes the case of a woman who conceived by a mariner, and who, after nine months, was delivered by a midwife of a shapeless mass, followed by an animal with a long neck, blazing eyes, and clawed feet. Ballantyne says that in the writings of Hippocrates there is in the work on "Diseases", which is not usually regarded as genuine, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... table-land is dim and shapeless, like the thick mist of a sultry summer's day, hanging over hill and valley. It is most convenient to the common working mind to retain and hold fast in a history only so much as is needful for the great catastrophe. The people are content to abide by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... wind, the latter ship was merely a good sailer; her great superiority commencing only when she brought the breeze forward of the beam. It has been supposed that the stranger, when first seen, was about fifteen miles distant, his canvas appearing both small and shapeless; but some doubts now began to be entertained, equally as to his rig, his size, and his distance. If a large or a lofty vessel, of course he must be materially further off, and if a large or lofty vessel it ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... race. Birds of the boldest wing and brightest hues—the denizens of the woods and the waters—of every variety of plumage, habit, song, and size—from the splendid macaw and toucan to the uncouth pelican and the shapeless puffin—from the gigantic ostrich to the beautiful but diminutive golden wren; in short, all the birds which are congregated in this spot come, literally, from every corner of our globe. The great alpine vulture may have sailed above the heights of Hohenlinden; the Egyptian vulture ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the Passy Barrier. From moment to moment, some huge vehicle, painted yellow and black, heavily loaded, noisily harnessed, rendered shapeless by trunks, tarpaulins, and valises, full of heads which immediately disappeared, rushed through the crowd with all the sparks of a forge, with dust for smoke, and an air of fury, grinding the pavements, changing all the paving-stones into steels. This uproar delighted ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches! Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... were amusing to Miss Lovel. They beguiled her away from those shapeless visions of days to come. She began to read, at first with very little thought of the page before her, but, becoming interested by degrees, read on until her companion ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... station, while the train was surrounded by motley crowds of Bedouins, Arabs and Egyptians, the women being veiled to the eyes, a fact for which we probably had reason to be devoutly grateful, if we but knew it, as there was nothing in their shapeless figures to ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... another dazzling experience. It came in his eleventh week, when he was as heavy as two terriers, though still somewhat shapeless, and gristly, rather than bony, as to his limbs. Colonel Forde walked into the garden one afternoon, followed very sedately by the Lady Desdemona, now sleek and shining, and more aristocratic-looking than ever. Jan was dozing in the front porch, and Finn away somewhere in the orchard. Jan sprang ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... of the Isle of Monte-Cristo is no more!" he replied, sadly. "At my command it replaced with its magnificence the rude and shapeless grottoes, at my command ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... from the forest a number of strips of the outer bark of white birch, in its green state pliable as cotton, thick as leather, and light as air. These he had cut into arbitrary patterns known only to himself, and was now sewing as a long shapeless sort of bag or sac to a slender beech-wood oval. Later it was to become a birch-bark canoe, and the beech-wood oval would ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... era, and through its mighty open arches and buttresses Jim saw fleecy clouds scudding across the western sky, A stone saint, muffled in burlap, had just been swung up into his windy niche, but had not yet discarded his robes of the world. Hambleton was regarding the shapeless figure with mild interest, wondering which saint of the calendar could look so grotesque, when a sound drew his attention sharply to earth. It was a small sound, but there was something strange about it. It was startling as a flash in ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... hence we see that the old churches of part of Lancashire and most of Cheshire, and a large portion of Shropshire, are of red sandstone. Some of it has stood very well, while some has decayed into shapeless masses. There is a tendency to exfoliate parallel to the exposed or worked surface, in all stones, irrespective of the way of the bed, but more so where the stone is set up on edge, or at right angles, to its quarry bed. It is interesting and peculiar ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... we gaze, it breaks and falls In shapeless masses, like the walls Of a burnt city. Broad and red The fires of the descending sun Glare through the windows, and o'erhead, Athwart the vapors, dense and dun, Long shafts of silvery light arise, Like rafters ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... arrived at the end of half an hour. During that time the girl had seen a dreadful sight. Three men had passed her, dragging a cart, which she saw by the light of the moon was painted red. Within this cart she perceived shapeless objects, long planks and singular ladders, all painted the same color. They were dragging it toward the bastion Montrevel, the place used for the executions. Amelie divined what it was, and, with a cry, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... to whom a later age would fain have attributed all the disgrace, and which, more perhaps than even heavier offences, excited the classical indignation of Petrarch, and made him sympathise with Rienzi in his hopes of Rome. Still may you see the churches of that or even earlier dates, of the most shapeless architecture, built on the sites, and from the marbles, consecrating (rather than consecrated by) the names of Venus, of Jupiter, of Minerva. The palace of the Prince of the Orsini, duke of Gravina, is yet reared above the graceful arches (still visible) of ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and ragged woods The roaring Foyers pours his mossy floods; Till full he dashes on the rocky mounds, Where through a shapeless breach his stream resounds." ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... really think that is necessary?" she answered, and crushing the paper into a shapeless mass, the colonel turned upon his daughter ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... a place of damp desolation. They looked at their dwelling with dismay. It was slimy, dripping; it hummed hollow with the wind, and was strewn with shapeless wreckage like a half-tide cavern in a rocky and exposed coast. Many had lost all they had in the world, but most of the starboard watch had preserved their chests; thin streams of water trickled out of them, however. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... eyes; and an old skirt had been hung over a chair to keep it from little Willie. Between mother and child sat Ann Mullins, rocking herself to and fro over the fire, and groaning from time to time—a shapeless sullen creature, brutalised by many children and much poverty—of whom Marcella was ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... confusing noises around her—the surging of the waves, the murmur of the wind, the shrieks of the drowning, and the noises made by the colliding of the various objects that were drifting around on the water—all seemed to resolve themselves into words in the same way as shapeless clouds sometimes form themselves into pictures. And this was what ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... shoulders drooped as he thrust stiff fingers deep within the shapeless coat pockets. He slowly withdrew his right hand holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He tore a three-cornered flap in the cover, looked at the brightly coloured contents, replaced the flap and returned the parcel, his ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... belong to the ancient Russian Artel, or Labor Union, which prevents competition beyond a certain point. When the price has been fixed, after due and inevitable chaffering, one lomovoi grasps his shapeless cap by its worn edge of fur, bites a kopek, and drops it in. Each of the other men contributes a marked copper likewise, and we are invited to draw lots, in full view, to determine which of them shall have the job. The master of the Artel sees to it that there is fair play on both sides. If an ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... Presently a blast struck us which, had we not clung together, would have blown us down. At the same time, looking up, I saw the house literally rocking. Down came one wall, and then another, the roof fell in, and in one instant it was a heap of shapeless ruins. ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... approach. He adds that the labour never ends, for, if a place goes out of repair, the violence of the rain will soon destroy it. "Stones and torrents wash down the soil; the terraces are broken through; the heavy rains bring down a shapeless mass of ruins; everything returns rapidly to its former state." Thus it is that parts of Palestine at present exhibit such desolate features to the traveller, who wonders how it ever could have been ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the open door you saw countless stars in a heaven that was still almost blue. Captain Butler wore a sleeveless under-shirt, showing his fat white arms, and a pair of incredibly dirty trousers. His feet were bare, but on his curly head he wore a very old, a very shapeless felt hat. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... stems were covered with lichen and mosses of beautiful variety, and some looking strangely like green ice-crystals. Presently we came to a little broken-down rude kind of chapel in the midst of the wood. It was built of stone; and masses of stone, shapeless and moss-grown, were lying scattered about on the ground around it. At a little rough-hewn altar within it stood a Christian priest, blessing the elements. Overhead, the great dark sprays of the larches and cone-laden firs swept its roof. I sat down to rest on one of the stones, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... large closely cropped head. His face was heavy, pale and cleanshaven. His eyes, which were of bluish slate-colour, relieved his unhealthy pallor and shone out plainly above the vivid orange tie he wore. Between these rival features the lips appeared very long and shapeless and colourless. He bent his head and felt with two sympathetic fingers the thin hair at the crown. Little Chandler shook his head as a denial. Ignatius Galaher put on his ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... there an image more striking than his "shapeless sculpture"? Of sculpture in general, it may be observed that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This, at least, is the general opinion. But, always excepting the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... running with all possible speed to reach the screen before my touch could soil the down on their exquisite wings. I stumbled, and fell, so suddenly, there was no time to release them. The black one sailed away with a ragged wing, and the yellow was crushed into a shapeless mass in my hand. I was accustomed to falling off fences, from trees, and into the creek, and because my mother was an invalid I had learned to doctor my own bruises and uncomplainingly go my way. My reputation was that of a very brave little girl; but when I opened my ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, 45 And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring wall; And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler's hand, Far, far away, thy children leave the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith |
