"Insubstantial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the daylight fades the fires of the pit shine more brightly. Mauna Loa, behind, becomes a pale, gray-blue, insubstantial dome, and overhead stars begin to appear. As darkness comes the colors on the lake grow so intense that they almost hurt. The fire is not only red; it is blue and purple and orange and green. Blue flames shimmer and dart about the edges of the pit, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... Oceanides, Jove's warders of the island trees, The tufted pillars tall and stout, And all the bosky camp about, Maintain our lives in sounding shades Of old aeolian colonnades; But post about the neighbor land In woof of insubstantial wear: Our ways are on the water sand, Our joy is in the desert air. The very best of our delights Are by the moon of summer nights. Darkness to us is holiday: When winds and waves are up at play, When, on the thunder-beaten ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... thought, investigation, science flickered out, and Asian religion took its place. Truly the slip-back from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the atheists—the true and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... the shuttered house of a vanished happiness, inhabited by a restless ghost. The gold light from the lamp fell in a pool about her. It revealed startlingly the whiteness of her arms and throat, the blueness of her eyes and the primrose gleam of her polished head. She seemed insubstantial as a dream, environed by shadows. And what did she mean by saying that all her best lay in the past? Surely she had misjudged! With her power of charm she could build her ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... outlines are still unsoftened that the aqueducts are so impressive. They seem the very source of the solitude in which they stand; they look like architectural spectres, and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice," or says ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
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