"Dumbness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silver candlestick steadily to control any clattering of its extinguisher, he moved on rather like a thief who was also a trained ballerina, holding his breath and pressing his lips together in a supreme agony of dumbness. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Polish Then, oh God, may children perish, like beasts, in their mothers' womb. Then lame their Polish feet and their hands, oh God! Let them be crippled and blind their eyes. Smite them with dumbness ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... a smiling dismissal. Disconcerted, wholly ill at ease, the four went obediently to the library, deserted now that the cotillion was beginning. The two men struggled valiantly with the conversation, but the twins sat stricken to shamed dumbness: no topic could thrive in the face of their mute rigidity. Silences stalked the failing efforts. Mr. White's eyes clung to the clock while his throat dilated with secret yawns; Mr. Morton twisted restlessly and finally let a nervous sigh escape. Dora suddenly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Cousin, Sismondi, Education evidence. Letters. House. 21st.—To-day not for the first time felt a great want of courage to express feelings strongly awakened on hearing a speech of O'Connell. To have so strong an impulse and not obey it seems unnatural; it seems like an inflicted dumbness. 28th.—Spoke 30 to 35 minutes on University bill, with more ease than I had hoped, having been more mindful or less unmindful of Divine aid. Divided in 75 v. 164. [To his father next day.] You ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... for John. 'Upon my heart and life, my dea—' he began. Here Bob's letter crackled warningly in his waistcoat pocket as he laid his hand asseveratingly upon his breast, and he became suddenly scaled up to dumbness and gloom as before. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... the largeness of the implement. Slowly and with sober care he cut slice after slice, each one so thin that the light shone through it. Every head was turned toward him and each burning pair of eyes was fixed upon the precious bread with an expression of animal dumbness, which reminded one of the intent eyes of a hungry dog as it watches a hoped-for morsel. As he advanced step by step, the wounded stretched up shriveled hands, or propped themselves on one elbow to make ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that too much credit was given in that case to the pupil and too ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... would have appeared to me much more worthy of each other, than the two actors of the scene at Chaillot. I will, moreover, grant that we may draw the following inference,—that even men of genius are liable to cross humours; but I must at the same time add that the example is not dangerous, dumbness not being an efficacious method of making one's self valued, or of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam were spoke to by the Court; but neither of them could make any answer, by reason of dumbness ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... character of the reigning conventionalities. The rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the Bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. People are apt to forget that such masks are never worn with ease. They result from the application of an inflexible will, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... that is well, or I like this. We have often asked her, "Madam, do you want anything? Is there anything you wish for? Do but ask, and command us," but we have never been able to draw a word from her. We cannot tell whether her sorrow proceeds from pride, sorrow, stupidity, or dumbness." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,—the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch." But no such charge can be laid at the door of "Rab and his Friends." The very dumbness of Rab, his mute yearning to help, his brave and loyal ministries in the hospital, doubly affecting because wordless and impotent, lend an appeal to this sketch that few sketches of men and women can be ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... he see? could he feel through the faintness, the numbness, While linger'd the spirit half-loosed from the clay, Dumb eyes seeking his in their piteous dumbness, Dumb quivering nostrils, too stricken ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... to herself that this brooding night, with its dumbness, its heat, its vaporous mystery, was affecting her spirit. And she got up from the bench, and began to walk very slowly towards ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... a dwarf, but a gallant knight. At that moment his memory came back to him, and he knew he was Conal, one of the Knights of the Red Branch, and he remembered now that the spell of dumbness and deformity had been cast upon him by the Witch of the Palace of ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... dumb is very small—so small actually as to be negligible. Almost all who are spoken of as deaf and dumb have organs of speech that are quite intact, and are, indeed, constructively perfect. It comes about, however, that dumbness—considered as the want of normal and usual locution—though organically separate from deafness, is a natural consequence of it; and does, as a matter of fact, in most cases to a greater or less extent, accompany or co-exist with it. The ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... was but little wind. There was an inexplicable dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... converting many of the children of Israel, and preparing their minds for the speedy approach of the Messiah; and yet it is stated, that Zacharias "believed not his words," in consequence of which he was smitten with dumbness till the birth of the child. But Mary, though so inferior in age, in situation, and in spiritual advantages, glorified God by a full acquiescence in his declarations; thus exemplifying what the grace of God can accomplish, even in the youngest persons, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... had uttered prior to the infliction of dumbness were words of doubt and unbelief, words in which he had called for a sign as proof of authority of one who came from the presence of the Almighty; the words with which he broke his long silence were words of praise unto God in whom he had all ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary and equally silent, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... silence lasted so long, and he stood so absolutely still, that she began to feel uneasy, even faintly afraid. The nerves in her body were tingling. They could have braced themselves to encounter violence, but this immobility and dumbness tormented them. She wanted to speak, to move, but she felt obliged to wait for him. At last he looked up. He came to her, lifted his hands and laid them heavily ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a general gathering of types. Nobles mixed with the poorest, meanest and most criminal classes, and mingled with their common sorrow. For the most part a dumbness, a silence prevailed. The shock of the national disaster had bereft the people of their powers ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... You know it isn't that. I don't want you off my hands, ever.... That is to say, I—ah—" Here he was smitten with a dumbness, and sat, aghast at the enormity of his blunder, entreating her forgiveness with eyes that, very likely, pleaded his cause more eloquently ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... moment of inactive discontent; to dart with the speed of an arrow but pursue as variant a course as fancy dictated; from twig top to field, feeding upon honeyed nectar and small insects which also loved the flowers and fed upon their sweets. Not perching in sluggish dumbness at the place of feeding but hovering in a fragrant flowery world over the red or white or blue corolla cloth of an ever changing dinner service, leading all the while a life of intense movement, to pass as a bar of light, to stop and rest and as ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... passion of her dumbness she cried out, with arms stretched wide apart, "O Woman, thou ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... to him, fellow, speak to him! I'll have none of this coacted, unnatural dumbness in my house, in ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... was fed with a spoon by a little misbegotten son of Edward Hall's. The old step-father sat always opposite her; he had no use of his legs, and his head was always stiffly screwed round towards the door as if he were peering, but that was the rheumatism. To atone for his wife's dumbness, he chattered incessantly whenever anyone was on that floor; but because he spoke always in Lincolnshire, Mary Hall could scarce understand him, and indeed she had long ceased to listen. He spoke of forgotten floods and ploughings, ancient fairs, the boundaries of fields long since ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... passions may well judge themselves to have an incomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more than what every passion, were it articulate, would assign to itself and to its objects. The dumbness of a passion may accordingly, from one point of view, be called the index of its baseness; for if it cannot ally itself with ideas its affinities can hardly lie in the rational mind nor its advocates be among the poets. But if we listen to the master-passion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... are other cases of three, four, and even six in a family, yet there has been no relationship between the parents. In addition to the born deaf, measles, bronchitis, typhus, scarletina, and other diseases are the causes of deafness, and consequently dumbness. ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... already relieved her so much, that she proposed taking part in the torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed Sacrament went by at the head of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... his tongue of the break with God has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... now,—lay narrow and bare down the hill; the moon had set, and the snow-clouds were graying heavily the pale light above. Only the sharp call of a discordant trumpet broke the solitude and dumbness of the hills. A lonesome, foreboding night. The old man rested his hand on the fence, choking down an uncertain groan now and then, digging into the snow with his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... have been a person that our great Master [20] cast out of another person; therefore the devil herein referred to was an impersonal evil, or whatever worketh ill. In this case it was the evil of dumbness, an error of material sense, cast out by the spiritual truth of being; namely, that speech belongs to Mind instead of matter, [25] and the wrong power, or the lost sense, must yield to the right sense, and exist ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... feeling pretty tired and hungry," Matthew ventured to say at last, accounting for her long visitation of dumbness with the only reason he could think of. "But we haven't very far to go ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... earthquake before it shakes down the edifice! No, the world is not with Christ to-day!—and unhappily it is a fact that Christ's ministers in recent years have done more to sever Him from Humanity than any other power could ever have succeeded in doing. Not by action, but by inertia!—dumbness—lack of protest,—lack of courage! Only a few stray souls stand out firm and fair ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it is better to have it now than later. We have a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Common minds, always impressed by noisy demonstrations, that is to say, by cries and tears, are unable to understand a mute sorrow. Dumbness to them means indifference. She was therefore astonished at the calmness with which Amelie received the message she was charged to deliver. She did not see in the dimness of the twilight that Amelie's face from being pale grew livid. She did ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... said Mrs Todgers, 'how he used to watch your sister; and that a kind of stony dumbness came over him whenever she ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... new prisoner. Of course Ithuel understood all that was said in English, while the very idea of being catechized in French threw him into a cold sweat. In this strait the idea suddenly crossed his mind that his greatest security would be in feigning dumbness. ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... makes his now daily appearance—he comes, as I jubilantly notice, as regularly as the postman—until late in the afternoon. All day, therefore, I must refrain myself and be silent. And I am never one for brooding with private dumbness over my woes. I much prefer to air them by expression and complaint. About noon it strikes me that, faute de mieux, I will go and see Mrs. Huntley, tell her suddenly that Roger is not coming back, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... with a sudden tightening of the brows. There was no blow passed; even the Symbol, which glowed like a star against the night, was not so much as lifted in warning; but the young man tried to retort, and, finding himself smitten with a sudden dumbness, turned with a spasm of fear, and jumped back whence he had come. The crowd of them thrilled expectantly, and when no further portent was given, they began to shout that a miracle should be shown them, and then ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... form shaped by his own fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering. How we long to pierce the thoughts and feel the heart-beats and watch the trickling tears behind that machine-like exterior, that impassible mask! Our imagination is powerfully excited by the dumbness of that fate borne by one whose words never reached the outward air, whose thoughts could never be read on the hidden features; by the isolation of forty years secured by two-fold barriers of stone and iron, and ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... autobiographical novel by Albert Savarus; a sort of "ferocious" Sormano. Represented as a young Sicilian girl, fourteen years old, in the services of the Gandolphinis, political refugees at Gersau, Switzerland, in 1823. So devoted as to pretend dumbness on occasion, and to wound more or less seriously the hero of the romance, Rodolphe, who had secretly entered the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... other troubles, monsieur! her teeth fell out; she became deaf, then dumb; and then, after six months of absolute dumbness, utter deafness, speech and hearing have returned to her! She recovered, just as capriciously as she had lost, the use of her hands. But her feet have continued in the same hapless condition for the last seven years. She has shown marked and well-characterized symptoms of hydrophobia. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... I do look on thee, In whom all joys so well agree, Sweet, think not I am at ease, For because my chief part singeth; This song from death's sorrow springeth: As to swan in last disease: For no dumbness, nor death, bringeth Stay to true love's melody: Heart and soul do ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... said in her musical Italian tones; "and thou would'st not create a pang in my heart? Then never seek to learn wherefore, when at the still tender age of fifteen, I resolved upon consummating so dreadful a sacrifice as to affect dumbness. The circumstances were, indeed, solemnly grave and strangely important, which demanded so awful a martyrdom. But well did I weigh all the misery and all the peril that such a self-devotion was sure to entail upon me. I knew that I must exercise the most ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... few which might have served humanity better by remaining shut. But we may safely assume that despite the general tendency of mountain worshippers to attempt to paint—in colours strong and language divine—the effect on their minds, there are exceptional instances of noble and self-imposed dumbness. Not the dumbness which is ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... rates, and all,— Hath stood with me upon a silent hill, When the last flush of the dissolving day Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere Unconscious of my listening, uttered there The comprehensions of a soul true poised With elemental beauty, giving tongue Unto the dumbness of the blissful air. So have I seen him, too, within his home, When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze Seemed scanning issues from the money list; But comments came not, till my curious eye Led out his meditation into words, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... expounded the true God, the Creator, many a time to you, as well as the creation of the world and the fate that's to come and the transformation of every sort of creature and every sort of beast out of the Apocalypse, but you've persisted like a senseless idol in your deafness and your dumbness and have brought Ensign Erkel to the same, like the veriest ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... rural Vidocq over in the corner and gave him a game of talk that I thought would warm his heart, but he listened in dumbness and couldn't see "no sense in believing the maleyfactor was anythin' ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... wrath, but of human ignorance, vice, or folly. And it was with deep satisfaction that I read in the last Report of the Schools for the Deaf and Dumb a statement of what were considered the most probable physical causes of deafness and dumbness, and a hope that it would be possible, hereafter, to prevent as well as ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... the honeycomb Whereto desire saith 'Yes!' O Senses, weave me from all lovely dust Some home-array, some fair familiar garb For me, exiled. Charm me some rare anointment I may trust Against her query, searching like a barb The dumbness of a heart unreconciled. Clothe me with silver; fold me from dismay; Save me from pity. For I hear her say, ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... a day before the fourteenth of July, not if it was ever so. He adored that little phrase of desperate negation. He was in a state of mind to accept everything that Rose did and said as adorable. Rose had strange audacities, strange embarrassments. Dumbness would come upon Rose in moments which another woman, Jane for instance, would have winged with happy words. She had a look that was anything but dumb, a look of innocent tenderness, which in another woman, Jane again, would not have been ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... persons cured, and the diseases removed, so could I give you account of numberless numbers that have not only been made to live, but to live forever, by drinking this pure water of life. No disease comes amiss to it. It cures blindness, deafness, dumbness, deadness. This right holy water (all other is counterfeit) will drive away evil spirits. It will make you have a white soul, and that is better than a white skin.'—(Bunyan's Water of Life). Whoever offers to purify the heart, and heal a wounded conscience, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to future possession of Canaan, but it led to different wishes as to burial. Perhaps Joseph felt that his position in Egypt required that his embalmed body should for a while remain there. Perhaps he wished to leave with his people a silent witness of his own hope, and a preacher, eloquent in its dumbness, of the duty of their keeping alive that hope, whatever might come ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... there was silence between them—a natural silence, and no dumbness. They had forgotten about themselves in ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share. It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog, unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying kindness. At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and popped a morsel of food into Pa's mouth; but it was Emmy who best understood the bitterness of his soul. It was Emmy, therefore, who would snap at her ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... his fist as if to strike me, and I wonder that I did not run from the cabin and jump ashore, but I stood my ground, more from stupor and what we Dutch call dumbness than anything else. Ace let his fist fall and looked me over with more respect. He was a slender boy, hard as a whip-lash, wiry and dark. He was no taller than I, and not so heavy; but he had come to have brass and confidence from the life he lived. As a matter of fact, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... was, but to him it was all golden with the light of his wondrous treasure. For the sake of this hoard he had given up his companionship with the Dwarfs and his delight in making and shaping the things of their workmanship. For the sake of his hoard he had taken on himself the dumbness and deafness ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... concerning the action of spiritual substances upon animal bodies. At any rate it is unconnected with testimony. If a dumb person was by a word restored to the use of his speech, it signifies little to what cause the dumbness was ascribed; and the like of every other cure wrought upon these who are said to have been possessed. The malady was real, the cure was real, whether the popular explication of the cause was well founded or not. The matter of fact, the change, so far as it was an object of sense, ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... stricken with fear and the dumbness of bewilderment. He stood quite silent, and as he lifted his eyes and let them rest on the stranger's own, they became large with tears—big, ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... many of the believers of the Prophet of Mecca during our long journey. I had some misgivings about his going, for I was afraid that the villagers might suspect his character, and might ill-treat him. For myself I had no fear as long as I could continue to feign dumbness, as my character was easily kept up. He had told the Sheikh's people that I was a Nazarene lad, who was ignorant of their language. Being dumb, they considered me under the ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... after swinish mouths have chewed upon it a day. It is the curse of the old gods upon the heathen. And I fling my curse back at them, for the chains they have hung upon my free hands and the beast-dumbness with which they ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... from which they had fled. But all this extraordinary drama, this intensity of feeling, remained inarticulate. They could only say, "Thank you, Miss Innes; it was very good of you to come to sing for us." It was their very dumbness that made them seem so wonderful. It was the dumbness of these women—they could only speak in prayer—it was that that overcame her. But the Reverend Mother was different. Evelyn listened to her, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... logic, literature, or political economy, no man can speak with more positive and perfect assurance. But on all topics where the conscience—the inner most moral nature—must be the umpire, "the English Opium Eater" is silent. His "silence" indeed, "answers very loud," his dumbness has a tongue, but it requires a "fine ear" to hear its accents; and to interpret them what but his own exquisitely subtle and musical style, like written ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... come, Steve, for hang me if I'm not tired to death trying to talk to this crone, who, to the charms of old age and ugliness, adds that of dumbness. Seen ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of life, or at least he thinks so; though my own private belief is, that the wisest rule upon which a man could act in this world (alas! I did not myself act upon it) would be to seal up his mouth from earliest youth, to simulate the infirmity of dumbness, and to answer only by signs. This would soon put an end to the impertinence of questions, to the intolerable labour of framing and uttering replies through a whole life, and, above all (oh, foretaste of Paradise!), to the hideous ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other sustenance sent by Rogers from ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... merely discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the individual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot cup of the sun, our own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever one ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... then have accosted her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness." (Twelfth Night, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... do without you now, Stir you no more anyhow To yearning concords taught you in your glory; While, your strings a tangled wreck, Once smart drawn, Ten worm-wounds in your neck, Purflings wan With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con Your present dumbness, shape your olden story. ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... of all eyes and a watchful dumbness settled down upon them like a pall. Frantically she tried to remember her instructions. But never had a light conversational manner seemed ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the moment. Mr. Durant was in the office ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... gave the speaker a hug and a kiss that were warm enough to satisfy the loneliest heart. Before she had released him, Ernest had hold of his hand and was trying to make up by the vigor of his hand shake for the embarrassing dumbness which had seized him. ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... yours than of a child Whose dumbness finds a voice mighty to call, In wordless pity, to the souls of all, Whose lives I turn to profit, and whose mute And constant friendship links ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... was no longer an utter dumbness and death over the scene. Forth from the sands, as from the bowels of the reluctant earth, there crept, one by one, loathly and reptile shapes; obscene sounds rang in her ears—now in a hideous mockery, now in a yet more sickening solicitation. Shapes of terror thickened ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... soon as choking rage enabled him to speak. "Silence, I say! ere I strike thee into eternal dumbness. What I have said, I've said. Dost hear me? To-morrow, at the Circus, I will name thy husband, and then and there thou shalt accept him, whoever he may be. I have a reason for wishing this—a reason of State far beyond the comprehension of a mere fool. To-morrow thou shalt accept the man of my choice ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... silent, because that there was no speech of words by which we could say aught of all that did be in our hearts. And truly you to be with me in understanding; for you too, mayhap, to have suffered thiswise of dumbness; even if that it hath not been so great. But yet to make ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... four on the bed; and Milt's inner ear heard a mute snicker from the Gilsons and Saxton. He tried to talk. He couldn't. Bill looked at him and, perceiving the dumbness, gallantly ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... bands of gold set with pearls and diamonds upon her arms, and the diamond ring which had been the pledge of her betrothal. She was very pale, and her eyes were large with anxiety as she asked her question of the two men, whom her appearance had struck with dumbness. Brian turned away with a half-audible groan. Doctor Muir looked at her intently from beneath his shaggy, grey eyebrows, and did ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than any book or any author. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... didst make and knowest whereof we are made, Oh bear in mind our dust and nothingness, Our wordless tearless dumbness of distress: Bear Thou in mind the burden Thou hast laid Upon us, and our feebleness unstayed Except Thou stay us: for the long long race Which stretches far and far before our face Thou knowest,—remember Thou whereof we are made. If making makes ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... an inn-waiter ought perhaps to be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar, it has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, to which he calls my attention. He ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... what I want to find out. The mission I have for you, Dave, is to watch Mulgrum. In a word, I have my doubts in regard to his deafness and his dumbness." ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... immense exhortation that is to pity. It is a remarkable thing that this word dumb should have been so largely applied to animals, for, in reality, there are very few dumb animals. But, doubtless, the word is often used to convey a larger idea than that of dumbness; namely, the want of power in animals to convey by sound to mankind what they feel, or, perhaps, I should rather say, the want of power in men to understand the meaning of the various sounds uttered by animals. But as regards those animals which are mostly dumb, such ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... blood? Can I crave comfort from the care of a faithful yokeman, who is fleeing with yielding oars, encurving 'midst whirling waters. If I turn from the beach there is no roof in this tenantless island, no way sheweth a passage, circled by waves of the sea; no way of flight, no hope; all denotes dumbness, desolation, and death. Natheless mine eyes shall not be dimmed in death, nor my senses secede from my spent frame, until I have besought from the gods a meet mulct for my betrayal, and implored the faith of the celestials with ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... unawares, and making every one uncomfortable, not knowing who might be the next victim stung. True, there was but one person to sting, for Miss Grey never said ill-natured things; but then she said ill-advised and mal-apropos things, and she had such an air of frightened dumbness, such a sad, deprecatory look, that she was sometimes quite as trying as Miss Gascoigne, who spoke out. And oh, how she did speak! Christian, who had never known many women, and had never lived constantly with any, ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... man in the black frock-coat passed on. And I came to understand when the purple beggar had spoken, that the dark citizen had trafficked perhaps with Ind, that in his heart were strange and dumb ambitions; that his dumbness was founded by solemn rite on the roots of ancient tradition; that it might be overcome one day by a cheer in the street or by some one singing a song, and that when this shopman spoke there might come clefts in the world and people ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... explain. There was a tremendous oppression upon her, such as one feels sometimes in a nightmare dream. She longed to speak out, to clear herself in Maurice's eyes, and yet she could not frame a single intelligible sentence. It was as though she were afflicted with dumbness. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... their opinions," &c. On the words: "the tongue of the dumb shall shout," compare Matt. xii. 22: [Greek: tote prosenechthe auto daimonzomenos, tuphlos kai kophos. kai etherapeusen auton, hoste ton tuphlon kai kophon kai lalein kai blepein.] Spiritual dumbness is the incapacity for the praise of God which, in the time when salvation is withheld, so easily creeps in, and which is removed by the bestowal of salvation. The words: "For in the wilderness," &c., state the ground of the leaping and shouting, point to the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... secret messenger returned?—Stand up, slave, behind the back of De Neville, and thou shalt hear presently sounds which will make thee bless God that He afflicted thee rather with dumbness than deafness." ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... pure white duck. Now and then a high-sterned junk drifted by like a phantom galley, then we slackened speed to avoid exterminating a fleet of triangular- looking fishing-boats with white square sails, and so on through the grayness and dumbness hour ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... blessed 'Then.' Blindness and deafness are defects in perception, and stand for incapacities affecting the powers of knowledge. Lameness affects powers of motion, and stands for incapacity of activity. Dumbness prevents speech, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... his other accomplishments, had a faculty for dumbness and said nothing; but a smile which approached a grin formed on his face as he stood eyeing quizzically first one and then the other. Finally, picking up the empty glasses, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... as Fenella was currently called in the island; and the malcontents of the stricter persuasion were convinced, that no one but a Papist and a malignant would have kept near her person a creature of such doubtful origin. They conceived that Fenella's deafness and dumbness were only towards those of this world, and that she had been heard talking, and singing, and laughing most elvishly, with the invisibles of her own race. They alleged, also, that she had a Double, a sort of apparition resembling ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... eager joy in them when Mary entered; but they seemed to calm down again, and she received her only with that placid, sincere air which was her habit. Everything about this woman showed an ardent soul, repressed by timidity and by a certain dumbness in the faculties of outward expression; but her eyes had, at times, that earnest, appealing language which is so pathetic in the silence of inferior animals.—One sometimes sees such eyes, and wonders whether the story they intimate will ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... of the Confederacy refolded the note and put it in his pocket. Presently he rose and left the church and Prescott followed him. An hour later Richmond was stricken into a momentary dumbness, soon followed by the chattering of many voices. The city, the capital, was to be given up. General Lee had written that the Southern army could no longer defend it, and advised the immediate departure of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Cuningham back to the studio, where Lord Findon was now examining Watson's picture with no assistance whatever from the artist, who seemed to have been struck with dumbness. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the first instance, to suit the limited capacity in the matter of elocution of some such performer as Rich; or the original dumbness of the harlequinade figures may be attributable to the strictness with which of old the theatres, unprotected by patents, were prohibited from giving spoken entertainments. What were then called the "burletta houses" were permitted performances of dancing, singing, tumbling, juggling—anything, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Admirable. How this grace Speaks his own standing! What a mental power This eye shoots forth! How big imagination Moves in this lip! To the dumbness of the gesture ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... however much he wanted to do so, and four men were required to bring him; the child was dead and so beyond all human help; the two blind men were undoubtedly beggars and outcasts; the dumb man was possessed of a devil in addition to his dumbness; the group of people who were subjects of his healing power had every manner of disease, but while the people were different and the cases were desperate, Jesus ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... hopeless task to attempt an explanation through mere words. If, after all, she was capable of misconceiving the entire set of his motives during the past two years, expostulation would be futile. In his thoughts of her he fell into a great spiritual dumbness. Never, even in his moments of most theoretical imaginings, did he see himself setting before her fully and calmly the hopes and ambitions of which she had been the mainspring. And before a reconciliation, many such rehearsals must take place ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... One can readily imagine what would happen. The teacher would probably have a theory that no child should begin to talk till he was two or even two and a half years old; and if so, the child would be kept in a state of enforced dumbness till he reached that age. In any case, he would be strictly forbidden to speak till his teacher gave him formal permission to do so. Half-an-hour in the morning, and half-an-hour in the afternoon would probably be set aside for the language lesson. For ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace—was Wharton's advancing figure. But her ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... too, is beset by much uncertainty. Some maintain that the symbolic actions, unless when they are obviously impossible, were really performed; others regard them simply as part of the imaginative mechanism of the book. The dumbness, e.g., with which Ezekiel was afflicted for a period, iii. 26, xxiv. 27, xxxiii. 22, and which has been interpreted as "a sense of restraint and defeat," may very well have been real, and connected, as has been recently supposed, with certain pathological conditions; but it is hardly to ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... The doomed spectatress of this solemn, maddening whirl would fain have shrieked, or even whispered, to break the silence, but she could not. Either her powers of articulation had disappeared in that region of universal dumbness, or the dead atmosphere was waveless, and could vibrate to no sound. She knew, by harrowing experience, the scene that was to come, and she prayed inwardly to God ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Circus they got out, and left me pondering on deafness and dumbness. To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing; for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf—to live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands wandering over the keys, to see birds exulting, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... in whispers about the sad event. But there was no whispering in the house; only the funereal rustling of dresses as the women gathered to their seats disturbed the silence there. None could remember when the little church had been so full before. There was finally a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt Polly entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by the Harper family, all in deep black, and the whole congregation, the old minister as well, rose reverently and stood until the mourners were seated in the front pew. There was another ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... slightest trace of George Sarratt; her illness, pneumonia, the result of a slight chill affecting a general physical state depressed by grief and sleeplessness; her long and tedious convalescence; and that pitiful dumbness and inertia from which she had only just begun to emerge. Hester was thinking too of the nurses, the doctors, the lodgings at Torquay, the motor, the endless flowers and books!—all provided, practically, by Farrell, aided and abetted by Bridget's readiness—a discreditable readiness, ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remember kisses, Remember the dear heart-leap when they came: Not always, but sometimes we remember The kindness, the dumbness, the good ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... not with thy dumbness me deceive, I know before the fitting man all Nature yields, Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice—and thou O sun, As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic, I understand them, I know ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... mean, are invariably told they are the graves of slave-children who have perished by the way, most probably in the arms of their mothers. What wonderful tales of sorrow and anguish could these rocks give, if they were not compelled to eternal dumbness! What sighs, what shrieks of grief have echoed here! How many tears have watered this track! These thoughts saddened our way; but they seemed at the same time to rouse that enthusiasm which is the only adequate ally to those engaged in ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... glanced round the room with her uncannily large eyes—her mother's eyes—taking in all the company. She dropped a little curtsey to Mrs. Penfold, in whom the excitement of this sudden appearance of Melrose's daughter had produced sheer and simple dumbness. She allowed her hand to be shaken by Lydia and Susy, looking sharply at the former; while Susy looked sharply at her. Then she subsided into a corner by Lady Tatham. It was evident that she regarded herself as under that ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... last—"You may want to know what I get by it. But that's my own affair." He really didn't want to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn't; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, with ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... moment did he dream of making the slightest remonstrance; still, the unwisdom of a young girl wandering about in the woods at night after trapped foxes was a patent fact which disturbed the mind of this guardian unto dumbness. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect—rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Claire led Mr. Amidon to the next room, turned him over to Aaron (now wonderfully healed of his dumbness) with a gesture of dismissal; and he was ushered by the negro into a most modern-looking chamber, in which was a brass bedstead with a ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... to the higher table while she remained with the boy who didn't count. But, as luck would have it, to take the empty places, from the head table, vanquished, came Cousin Jim and his partner. Jim now played opposite her, and laughed over his "dumbness" at ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... dynamite; for what could be more pictorial, what more effective, than the explosion of a hansom cab, as it sped rapidly along the streets of London? He felt in one pocket; then in another. The most crushing seizure of despair descended on his soul; and, struck into abject dumbness, he stared upon the driver. He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speak again. You know it's no small matter for a horse to talk. It isn't natural for them. It could only be produced by a mighty effort, and the most natural thing in the world would be for the creature to relapse into dumbness if transferred to ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... had he not spoken at the photographer's? Perhaps she herself had been sufficient reason for his dumbness. He had recognized her, and the espionage of the night in Paris was no longer a mystery. Nora had sent her to follow him; why then all this bitterness, since she had not been told where he had gone? ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... void below—the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the dumbness. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... of rooms on the ground-floor, the drawing-room, the Red Parlour, the Chinese room, the Library. They recalled her childish visits to the house with her grandmother, and a score of recollections, touching or absurd, rushed into her mind—but not to her lips. Dumbness had fallen on her;—nothing seemed worth saying, and she hurried through. She was conscious only of a rich confused impression of old seemliness and mellowed beauty,—steeped in fragrant and famous memories, English history, English poetry, ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mysteries of God's own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal: who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed hand out, but to give relief ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... his transient delirium, the Schoolmaster had awoke in a cell of the Conciergerie, where the insane are temporarily confined. Hearing every one say around him, "He is a furious madman," he resolved to continue to play his part, and pretended dumbness in order not to compromise himself by his answers, in case they should suspect his feigned insanity. This stratagem succeeded. Conducted to Bicetre, he pretended to have other attacks of madness, always taking care to choose the ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... of insanity of joy, of childish excitement came upon Sheila when she had recognized her visitor. She flitted about the room, she laughed, she talked half-wildly—it had been such a long silence—in broken, ejaculatory sentences. It was Dickie's dumbness, as he leaned against the door, looking at her, that sobered her at last. She came close to him again and saw that he was shivering and that streams of water were running from ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... at being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by her own musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do her justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justice in the world—the world that even when universal philosophy should reign would be inevitably ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... solemn evening! How, mournful then is the silence of the innumerable, gray stones and monstrous rocks which try to speak to us like creatures once eloquent and possessing the knowledge of wondrous changes, and the key to problems that everlastingly distress the human mind, but on which the curse of dumbness has ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... to answer, but her moving lips gave no sound. She had thought the world stood always ready to accept self-confessed guilt, and now her throat worked spasmodically until at last her dumbness ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... child she had, that she did not believe to be her own but a changeling, and had put it on the shore at the extreme edge of the tide-reach, and had left it for the space of an hour. When she came back, the child she had left with a numbness on its face and with the curse of dumbness, was laughing wild, and when she came near, it put out its arms and gave the cry of the young of birds. She lifted the "leanav" in her arms and stared into its eyes, but there was no longer the weary blankness, and the little one yearned with the petulant laughing and idle ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... were closed with dignity; the mouth seemed to have unlearnt its coarseness. Silently the tension of Anderson's inner being gave way; he was conscious of a passionate acceptance of the mere stillness and dumbness of death. ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to feel those eyes upon her. All his strength and bigness, all his manhood, huge and unaware, seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood but of her ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is always being driven to personify these ultimate powers; to personify them, or it, as something that takes infernal satisfaction in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... know how the use of the word "dumb" ever became applied to animals, for in reality there are very few dumb animals. Doubtless the word was originally employed to express a larger idea than that of dumbness, and implied the lack of power in animals to communicate successfully with man by sound or language. The real trouble lies with man, who is unable to understand the language spoken or ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... she confessed she saw nothing in the child's hands.' Another witness was the mother of a servant girl, Susanna Chandler, whose depositions are of much the same kind, but with the addition that her daughter was sometimes stricken with blindness and dumbness by demoniacal contrivance at the moment when her testimony was required in court. 'Being brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell into her fits, and being carried out of the court again, within the space of half an hour she came to herself and recovered her speech; and thereupon was ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... been a recognition of danger in the very charm of her attitude, or a twang of digestion, that caused a sudden dumbness to fall on James. He did not remember ever having been quite alone with Irene before. And, as he looked at her, an odd feeling crept over him, as though he had come across something ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... by the doctor. He, too, looked very happy. It was a pleasant hour. Sympathy was in that pretty room, complete human sympathy, and a sympathy that sprang from their vitality, avoiding the dusky dumbness of the phlegmatic. Valentine sat down at the piano and began gently to play. The smoke from the cigars curled away towards the watching pictures; the room ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... mean to reduce you to absolute dumbness. By all means talk of Elaine, if that's the ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... declared to him that his wife, who was childless, should have a son in her old age who should be a great prophet and preacher, proclaiming the Messiah. Since that time, the aged couple, who live south of Jerusalem, have indeed been blessed with a child, the father's dumbness disappearing with its birth and the priest again praising the Lord of his people. To this child has been given the name ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... a broken delivery of the business; but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seem'd almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow;—but in the extremity of the one, ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... his tone might prevail if his words did not. As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and children of the dead man ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... moves on, without look, word, or sign of intelligence. In New York, your Irish coachman grins approval of your order; and even an English flunkey may touch his hat and say, "Yes, Mum." But in the Cuban negro of service, dumbness is the complement of darkness;—you speak, and the patient right hand pulls the strap that leads the off horse, while the other gathers up the reins of the nigh, and the horses, their tails tightly braided and deprived of all movement, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... in the bowels of the earth, may I become a pillar of salt, may the wild beast of the forest tear me to pieces, may my own weapon turn against me in the evil hour, may I be terrified by midnight spectres and hag-ridden, may my body be smitten with leprosy, my eyes with blindness, my tongue with dumbness, my bones by rottenness, if ever I speak one syllable to anybody, be it priest, or child, or father, or condemning judge, or threatening headsman, of anything I have seen, heard or learnt in this place, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Here, here, The testimony comes, that will convince, And put to utter dumbness their bold tongues: See here, grave fathers, here's the ravisher, The rider on men's wives, the great impostor, The grand voluptuary! Do you not think These limbs should affect venery? or these eyes ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... priest said, "merely by the way, as it might be, without meaning harm, if you would ask a blessing for me—Aphrodite's blessing? Easy for you. Of course, it would be nice curing—curing, as they say—stupidity, plain dumbness, as they call such things—curing stupidity as easily as I can cure ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... unanimous melody of so rude and destructive a nature that it seemed as if every string must be broken. This mania spread until even the outlying bassoons, triangles, and celestas were infected. A piercing note of command, however, from a clarinet caused a devastating dumbness to fall suddenly on every instrument except the piano, which continued self-consciously alone. The pianist looked at the ceiling mostly, but one note seemed to be an especial favourite with him, and whenever he played it he looked ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... evil plants as well, but 'tisn't a many. There's hen bane which do kill the fowls and fishes if they eat the seed of it. And there's water hemlock which lays dumbness upon man. ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... till man is dumb, And only then if he be like a child Silently curled within its mother's womb, Or feeding at her breast. There is a wild Way also - when his dumbness is of death. And there's a first and second death. Remember To die so that no god's or angel's breath May quicken into life ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley |
