|
|
|
More "Possessive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conscience is, like his understanding, a mere form or expression of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right, not from any quality inherent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... when a possible, nay, a probable chance, might for ever have blasted his ambitious hopes, he for the first time spoke of France as his. Considering the circumstances in which we then stood, this use of the possessive pronoun "my" describes more forcibly than anything that can be said the flashes of divination which crossed Bonaparte's brain when he was wrapped up in his chimerical ideas ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... last one," said George, pushing his way through the crowd, and laying his hand on her arm with a possessive and authoritative touch. "Let me put you in, and then I'll ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... laying a strong accent on the pronoun possessive. "Only see what rights and privileges the gentleman is usurping! We live in a free ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... Tommy's opinion. In the Yorkshire dialect, when the possessive case is followed by the relative substantive, it is customary to omit the S; but if the relative be understood, and not expressed, the possessive case is formed in the usual manner, as in a subsequent ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... felt sure he must have known other girls. You didn't talk like that if you were new to it. She was again curious. Once she almost blurted out the question; but she stayed the words in time. It would have been a mistake to ask anything at this stage. It would have seemed possessive. It might have alarmed him. Anyway, she thought, if he has, what does that matter? To her it was an added pleasure, that he might be wise and experienced. It was a greater flattery; it called for greater resource ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... passed by, bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... watched her. His regard was disturbing. It had a quality of insistence. His eyes were cold yet devouring. They were possessive, not clear but opaque. They did not look at her as other eyes did. She felt the blood ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Calendar," above mentioned. In the former he says uotan "is from the pure Maya root word tan, which means primarily 'the breast,' or that which is in the front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzental this word means both 'breast' and 'heart.'" It must be admitted that these explanations are apparently somewhat strained, yet it is possible they are substantially correct, ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... position of the possessive sign in such words as "men's," "writer's." If accurately placed, the writer may be presumed to understand punctuation, and will give evidence of it in ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... refused to recognise her seemed a matter of very small moment now that he had spoken to her again—scolding her and enforcing her obedience to his wishes in that oddly masterful way of his, which yet had something of a possessive tenderness about it that appealed irresistibly ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... until the very eve of their marriage. Then suddenly it seemed to her that all the people she cared for in the world were pushing her away from them towards him, giving her up, handing her over. He became—possessive. His abjection changed to pride. She perceived that she was going to be left tremendously alone with him, with an effect, as if she had stepped off a terrace on to what she believed to be land and had abruptly descended ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... smiled at nothing. Her aunt hardly noticed what was happening to her, but her father, who all her life had seemed hardly to take account of her existence, was interested. In her presence he began to feel like a young man. As in the days of his courtship of her mother and before the possessive passion in him destroyed his ability to love, he began to feel vaguely that life about him was full of significance. Sometimes in the afternoon when he went for one of his long drives through the country he asked his daughter to accompany him, and although ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... Perfected, he would never use them, and his sentences would flow untaught from his pen in absolutely clear reflection of his thought. As an example of what I mean by awkwardnesses, I would cite the use of "whose" as the possessive of "which." I know that adequate authority pronounces this correct, so it is not on that score I reject it. Moreover, I recognize that in myself the repulsion is somewhat of an acquired taste. When I began to write I thus employed it myself, but its sound is so inevitably suggestive of "who" ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... passionately being different from its companions), shame that may always be brought suddenly as a hindrance against them, so that, even under the most favorable circumstances, they live in danger; grow up sensitive and passionately possessive, because so many things all other children have by right, relations who really are relations, a father and the right to use his name, a birth-certificate that does not record their parents' sin, are demanded from them in vain, so ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... saddle, he leisurely looked her over with eyes that smoldered behind half-shuttered lids. To most of her world she was in spirit still more boy than woman, but before his bold, possessive gaze her long lashes wavered to the cheeks into which the warm blood was beating. Her long, free lines were still slender with the immaturity of youth, her soul still hesitating reluctantly to cross the border to womanhood toward ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... house," answered the Baron, taking his cigar from his mouth for the first time since he had lighted it, and holding it out at arm's length with a possessive sweep while he leaned back and looked at the ceiling again. "It all belongs to me," he said. "I took it for the ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... for number, person and case. There are two forms of the dual and plural in the first person. The following table shows the nominative and possessive cases: ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... the beautiful in verse: most obvious in "Sordello," in portions of "The Ring and the Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the manner of poetry. In ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... say to the Amiable Amanuensis and Adaptable Author, "you read your stuff aloud with emphasis and discretion, and I'll chuck in the ornamental part. Excuse me, that's my drink," I say, with an emphasis on the possessive pronoun, for the Soldierly Scribe, in a moment of absorption, was about to apply that process to my liquor. He apologises handsomely, and commences his recital. In the absence of a gong,—one ought never to travel without a gong,—I whack the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... of thinking, this expression "my august confederates." Is there not something astounding about the use of the possessive pronoun in connection with the word "august," implying sovereignty? One wonders what part can they have to play, these confederates, led and dominated by a personality as jealous and self-centred as ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... them; taking angry, purpose-like possession. When she neared the house our sympathy abated; when she came to the broken chest I wished I were elsewhere. We had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke for her with indignant eloquence. "My chest!" it cried, with a stress on the possessive. "My chest—broken open! This is a fine state of things!" I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged—on Francois and his wife—and found I had made things worse instead of better. She repeated the names at first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... silence she wrote again and again to Deering, entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had not been light enough. She should havekept to the character of the "little friend," ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... say Betty did not "waste" any time that night over home-lessons. How can the beginner of a great singer be expected to care whether the pronoun "that" in "I dare do all 'that' may become a man," is relative or possessive? or whether Smyrna is the capital of Turkey or Japan? or even whether the Red Sea has to ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... helpi. Helpful helpema. Helpmate kunhelpanto. Hem borderi. Hem bordero. Hemisphere duonsfero. Hemorrhage sangado. Hemorrhoids hemorojdo. Hemp kanabo. Hen (fowl) kokino. Henbane hiskiamo. Hence de nun. Henceforth de nun. Hepatic hepata. Heptagon sepangulo. Her sxin. Her (possessive) sxia. Hers sxia. Herald heroldo. Heraldic heraldika. Heraldry (science) heraldiko. Heraldry blazono. Herb herbo. Herbalist herbovendisto. Herbivorous herbomangxanta. Herd brutaro. Herdsman pasxtisto. Here tie cxi, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... tongue, feminine; and ege, an eye, neuter. Like nama, the proper names of men ended in a; and we find such names as Isa, Offa, Penda, as the names of kings. Nouns at this period had five cases, with inflexions for each; now we possess but one inflexion— that for the possessive. —Even the definite article was inflected. —The infinitive of verbs ended in an; and the sign to— which we received from the Danes— was not in use, except for the dative of the infinitive. This dative infinitive is still preserved in such phrases as "a house to let;" "bread ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... lay around, very hot and shiny, and content. Large backsheesh was assured, and they looked up at her with pleased possessive eyes, as an achievement of their own; hardly realising how large a part her finely developed athletic powers and elastic limbs had played in the speed of ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... F, l, and s at the end of a monosyllable after a single vowel are commonly doubled. The exceptions are the cases in which s forms the plural or possessive case of a noun, or third person singular of the verb, and the following words: clef, if, of, pal, sol, as, gas, has, was, yes, gris, his, is, thus, us. L is not doubled at the end of words of more than one syllable, as parallel, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... she was saying in a quiet, possessive sort of way. "I didn't think of coming when I jumped into the sea. I made up my mind afterward. I think it was because I met a little man with red whiskers whom you once pointed out to me in the smoking salon on the Nome. And so—I ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... flower-trimmed table. Worth's back was to the room; I saw them over his shoulder, in the lead a tall blonde, very smartly dressed, but not in evening clothes; in severe, exclusive street wear. The man with her, good looking, almost her own type, had that possessive air which seems somehow unmistakable—and there was a look about the half dozen companions after them, as they settled themselves in a great flurry of scraping chairs, that made ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... through alabaster—and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes. Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion—passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'—he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wish to mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram." Yet my classic love aggressive, If you'll pardon the possessive, Is exceedingly impressive When you're passing ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Saturday, February 17th, Chamberlain dined with the Prince of Wales. In noting the invitation in my diary I put down: "The Prince of Wales has asked Chamberlain to dinner for Saturday. I call this 'nobbling my party.'" But the possessive pronoun with regard to the party was not according to my custom. We always said that the party consisted of three in all—two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... fool of herself by marrying a man out of spite. He felt that since an obstinate lover is apt to be an exacting husband, in the end the heavy predominance of Oliver might wring much sincerer tears from her than she had ever shed for himself. But that generosity was but the bright edge to a mainly possessive jealousy. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Proper Inflection Defined Number The Formation of Plurals Compound Nouns Case The Formation of the Possessive Case Gender ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... the nurse's odd way of using the possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... at us through a small square window in the wall at one end of the veranda. Then he came round and once more vaulted the veranda rail, for he seemed to hold ordinary means of entry in contempt. His eye looked very possessive for that of one seeking employment as a guide, but he stood at respectful attention ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... answer in the same way that she had done when she was ill and asked if I liked bitters concealed. She waited as long without reply. The pause grew oppressive, and I spanned it by an assurance of individual possessive happiness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... are not at hand, but these given indicate that, as in most Malay dialects, a noun with a possessive suffix is one ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... mind the general conclusions about the two great classes of mountain scenery which I have just stated, he will, I hope, at last cease to charge me with enthusiasm in anything that I have said of Turner's imagination, as always instinctively possessive of those truths which lie deepest, and are most essentially linked together, in the expression of a scene. I have only taken two drawings (though these of his best period) for the illustration of all the structures of the Alps which, in the course of half a volume, it has been possible ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... conditions, into whose and whom; but that and which always remain the same, with the exception of the possessive case, as noted above. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... form of the possessive was in frequent use, especially after proper names ending ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... room emptied, and she was free to do so, Hepsey, accompanied by the possessive Jonathan, found her way over to the Maxwells. Before she started to tell them the results of the meeting she cast a glance of whimsical affection at her ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... tumult of the camp was to him but a holiday exhibition—the march of an army, the exhilaration of a spectacle; the court as a banquet—the throne, the best seat at the entertainment. The life of the heir-apparent, to the life of the king possessive, is as the distinction between enchanting hope and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and Omega-street. I am ashamed of myself when I remember the foolish cause of this elation of mind. I was going to Yorkshire, the county of which my Charlotte was now an inhabitant. My Charlotte! It is a pleasure even to write that delicious possessive pronoun—the pleasure of poor Alnascher, the crockery-seller, dreaming his day-dream ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... column," answered Banneker with perceptible emphasis on the possessive, "doesn't believe that ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wretched, looking at the door which probably hid Gaga. Even the memory of last night's kisses was stale and unsatisfactory. As she drew her breath in a half-sob, Sally longed suddenly for Toby. She longed for his strong arms, his possessive air, his muscular strength. And as she thought of Toby a tear came to her eye, and she felt that life was not worth living. A consciousness of childish need for support destroyed all her confidence ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... Manethon and [166]Hellanicus, was called Ucsiris, and Icsiris; but by the later Greeks the name was altered to Isiris and Osiris. And not only the God Sehor, or Sehoris was so expressed; but Cnas, or Canaan, had the same title, and was styled Uc-Cnas, and the Gentile name or possessive was Uc-cnaos, [Greek: Uk-knaos: to ethnikon gar Chnaos], as we learn from Stephanus. The Greeks, whose custom it was to reduce every foreign name to something similar in their own language, changed [Greek: Ukknaos] to [Greek: Kukneios], Uc Cnaus to Cucneus; and from [Greek: Uk Knas] formed [Greek: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... frequently found between words having a close syntactical relation, particularly if the initial vowel of the second word is in a constituent syllable. It may occur between the article and its substantive, the possessive adjective and its substantive, a preposition and its object, the negatives no and ni and a following vowel; and after the conjunctions y, que, si, and other words having a weak accent such as desde, coma, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... pride, it grasps in its conquering talons all that belongs to us; for we do not, in life, make any great difference between what is we and what is ours—an insult to our dog, our dwelling, or our work wounds us as much as an insult to ourselves. The possessive pronoun expresses both possession and possessor. In fact, we consider our body ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... extortioner, most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between you ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... "The word chinuchi is a Mongol term derived from Mongol cinoa (pronounced cino or cono which means 'wolf,' with the possessive suffix -ci, meaning accordingly a 'wolf-owner' or 'wolf-keeper).' One of the Tibetan designations for the mastiff is cang-k'i (written spyang-k'yi), which signifies literally 'wolf-dog.' The Mongol term is probably framed on this Tibetan word. The other explanations ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... him on the street, asking for his affection. But he passed them by, for she was waiting for him and he was hungry for the possessive ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... which one can exercise ownership can be conjugated by possessive suffixes for number ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling arm of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and arose unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... has come up to her by this time, and is holding out his hand: silently she lays her own in it, and colors treacherously as his fingers close on hers in a close, tender, and possessive fashion. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... we call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged to ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the addition of a syllable in the possessive case and the plural, and instead of saying that "some little birds had built their nests near the posts of Mr. West's gate," a Sussex boy would say, "the birds had built their nestes near the postes of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... New York; likewise the people are different. And as every Woman-who-goes-hunting-with-her-husband is sure to go through a Yeddar experience, I offer a few observations by way of enlightenment before telling how I killed my antelope. (If you wish to be proper, always use the possessive for animals you have killed. It is a Western ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... name, I think; no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; my brother's—my brother's, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... of resentment swept through her; the patronage in his tone, the indefinable suggestion of possession was, she thought, uncalled for. That he should approve of Frank in that possessive manner was not ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... the vehicle of its expression. Although our pronouns are still declined, the sole inflection of our nouns, with the exception of a few like ox, oxen, or mouse, mice, is the addition of 's, s, or es for the possessive and the plural. Modern German, on the other hand, still retains these troublesome case endings. How did English have the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh. But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine. She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man's reply might have ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... wife (and the possessive pronoun casts about her an atmosphere of importance) has been made uncomfortable, and he is up in arms. His and no one's else is the right to criticise Mary. What business have these people to interfere? He immediately becomes his wife's most ardent ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... same—as though light shone through alabaster—and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes. Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion—passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive—through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control. 'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'—he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness. 'What the deuce will she have made of it, by the end? Why should ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and his possessive instinct had more or less righted things; and her nearness, in the rose-scented dark, rekindled his fervour ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... my way of thinking, this expression "my august confederates." Is there not something astounding about the use of the possessive pronoun in connection with the word "august," implying sovereignty? One wonders what part can they have to play, these confederates, led and dominated by a personality as jealous and self-centred ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world. ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... moods,' 'imperfect tenses,' 'singular numbers,'—I should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as 'Conjunction,' 'possessive pronoun—,' secure so far from poor Tippet's catastrophe. Well, I ventured, and what did I find? This—which I copy from the book now—'If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity'—from 'Promiscuous ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... a quarter. At first the old woman's face was expressionless. But she moved the coin nearer to her eyes and a smile broke and widened until her whole face was a wrinkle of joy. When she turned in the doorway, the interviewer noticed that the hand jammed into an apron pocket was clutched into a possessive fist, cradling the precious twenty ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between you ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... certain difficulties which have been only partially surmounted. As the Cakchiquel, though a written, is not a printed tongue, there has no rule been established as to the separation of verbs and their pronominal subjects, of nouns and their possessive pronouns, of the elements of compound particles, of tense and mode signs, etc. In the MSS. the utmost laxity prevails in these respects, and they seem not to have been settled points in the orthography of ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... longer afraid. After all, strange as he looked, more strangely as he talked, he was her Pierre, her man. The confidence of her heart had not been seriously shaken by his coldness and his moods during this winter. There had been times of fierce, possessive tenderness. She was his own woman, his property; at this low counting did she rate herself. A sane man does no injury to his own possessions. And Pierre, of course, was sane. He was tired, angry, he had been drinking—her ignorance, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... more like the possessive noun, which belongs to another word, but is still a noun. They may be regarded as elliptical expressions, meaning a walk in the morning, a bank in New York, a bill as to tax on ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... sensibilities. He felt ashamed of himself for not being more enthusiastic as he searched records and helped to locate the owner of that particular spot. To John, there was a new tone in Peter's voice, a possessive light in his eyes as he studied the location, and made excursions in several directions, to fix in his mind the exact ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the Amiable Amanuensis and Adaptable Author, "you read your stuff aloud with emphasis and discretion, and I'll chuck in the ornamental part. Excuse me, that's my drink," I say, with an emphasis on the possessive pronoun, for the Soldierly Scribe, in a moment of absorption, was about to apply that process to my liquor. He apologises handsomely, and commences his recital. In the absence of a gong,—one ought never to travel without a gong,—I whack ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... Banneker with perceptible emphasis on the possessive, "doesn't believe that cigarettes are good ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... most frequently found between words having a close syntactical relation, particularly if the initial vowel of the second word is in a constituent syllable. It may occur between the article and its substantive, the possessive adjective and its substantive, a preposition and its object, the negatives no and ni and a following vowel; and after the conjunctions y, que, si, and other words having a weak accent such as desde, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... to Claire de Wissant. As she went down the cliff-side her lovely eyes rested on these sinister, man-created monsters with a feeling of sisterly, possessive affection. She had become so familiarly acquainted with each and all of them in the last few months; she knew with such a curious, intimate knowledge where they differed, both from each other and also from other submarine craft, ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... her, had in them a smile that the girl instinctively resented. Was it a shade too possessive and complacently ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... strove to get that dull piece of English history into her head, as she endeavored to follow the rules of syntax, as the knowledge that she never, never to the longest day of her life, would understand what was meant by the possessive case, alongside with these feeble little efforts to follow her lessons, ran the dark thought of how, by what possible means, she could help Laurie. And more and more as the time went on she felt that she could not keep her promise ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... she cried, putting a possessive hand on Lady's flank while the latter turned her dainty head and regarded the girl out of softly-wistful brown eyes. "I wanted her as soon ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... not so sure of that," he returned stiffly; "but since you wish it I will give your message to—my wife." He always hesitated over the possessive pronoun in ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... was saying in a quiet, possessive sort of way. "I didn't think of coming when I jumped into the sea. I made up my mind afterward. I think it was because I met a little man with red whiskers whom you once pointed out to me in the smoking salon on the Nome. And so—I am your guest, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... are the possessive signs—(') being used when s has been added to denote more than one, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... withdrawal also reacted, though with different effect. For an instant he watched the tall retreating form of this, as he perceived, very perfect gentleman. Then he turned to Damaris, looking her over from head to heel, in keen somewhat possessive fashion. And as, meeting his eyes, bravely ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... inflected for number, person and case. There are two forms of the dual and plural in the first person. The following table shows the nominative and possessive cases: ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... think; no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... "consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." And the best commentary on the saying is just His own life; for He had nothing. There is something very suggestive in Christ's use of the little possessive pronoun "My." We know how we use the word. Listen to the rich man in the parable: "My fruits," "my barns," "my corn," "my goods." Now listen to Christ. He says: "My Father," "My Church," "My friends," "My disciples"; but He never says "My house," "My lands," ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... and sagacious Wallis, to whom every English grammarian owes a tribute of reverence, calls this modification of the noun an adjective possessive; I think with no more propriety than he might have applied the same to the genitive in equitum decus, Trojae oris, or any other Latin genitive. Dr. Lowth, on the other part, supposes the possessive pronouns mine and ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... was a race between the examinations of my justice of peace and his justice of peace. My indolence was conquered by my love of power: I supported the contest; the affair came before our grand jury: I conquered, and Mr. Hardcastle was ever after, of course, my enemy. To English ears the possessive pronouns my and his may sound extraordinary, prefixed to a justice of peace; but, in many parts of Ireland, this language is perfectly correct. A great man talks of making a justice of the peace ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... that language, placed before a noun, is the possessive pronoun, as the second person, thy or thine, and xul, means end, termination. It is also the name of the sixth month of the Maya calendar. Axul would therefore be thy end. Among all the nations which have recognized the existence of a SUPREME BEING, Deity has been considered ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... Smallweed's favourite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue that he begins the words "my dear friend" with the monosyllable "brim," thus converting the possessive pronoun into brimmy and appearing to have an impediment in his speech. Once past this difficulty, however, he exhorts his dear friend in the tenderest manner not to be rash, but to do what so eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a good grace, confident that it must be unobjectionable ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... glare of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... when the party came in to take the long, flower-trimmed table. Worth's back was to the room; I saw them over his shoulder, in the lead a tall blonde, very smartly dressed, but not in evening clothes; in severe, exclusive street wear. The man with her, good looking, almost her own type, had that possessive air which seems somehow unmistakable—and there was a look about the half dozen companions after them, as they settled themselves in a great flurry of scraping chairs, that made me murmur ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... genitive case, jong, is sometimes omitted for the sake of brevity, e.g. u ksew nga (my dog) for u ksew jong nga. The preposition la gives also the force of the possessive case, e.g. la ka jong ka jong (their own). There are some nouns which change their form, or rather are abbreviated when used in the vocative case, e.g. ko mei, not ko kmei Oh mother; ko pa, not ko kpa Oh father. These, however, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... pursuit of Rich Hilary. Until Allys came on the scene it had seemed the pursuit must be successful. They had gone abroad on the same steamer the year before, dawdled through a London season, and come home simultaneously—he rather bored and languid, she of a demure and downcast, but withal possessive, air. She had said they were not engaged—"oh, dear no, only excellent friends," but looking all the while a contradiction of the words. Then unwisely she had taken Hilary to that tiresome tea for the little Rhett girl—and behold! the mischief ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... for the Use of the Apostrophe.—The apostrophe is used to denote the possessive case, to indicate the omission of letters, and to form the plural of signs, figures, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... by the later Greeks the name was altered to Isiris and Osiris. And not only the God Sehor, or Sehoris was so expressed; but Cnas, or Canaan, had the same title, and was styled Uc-Cnas, and the Gentile name or possessive was Uc-cnaos, [Greek: Uk-knaos: to ethnikon gar Chnaos], as we learn from Stephanus. The Greeks, whose custom it was to reduce every foreign name to something similar in their own language, changed [Greek: Ukknaos] to [Greek: Kukneios], Uc Cnaus to Cucneus; and from [Greek: Uk Knas] formed [Greek: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... encroaching as human pride, it grasps in its conquering talons all that belongs to us; for we do not, in life, make any great difference between what is we and what is ours—an insult to our dog, our dwelling, or our work wounds us as much as an insult to ourselves. The possessive pronoun expresses both possession and possessor. In fact, we consider our body as ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... by, bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed observance, and among the student-body ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... was just entering a station, and a moment later their compartment was invaded by a commonplace couple preoccupied with the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at their approach, felt the possessive pride of the woman in love when strangers are between herself and the man she loves. She asked Darrow to open the window, to place her bag in the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while he was thus busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion in his tone, in his way ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... slightly different from that given in his "Native Calendar," above mentioned. In the former he says uotan "is from the pure Maya root word tan, which means primarily 'the breast,' or that which is in the front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzental this word means both 'breast' and 'heart.'" It must be admitted that these explanations are apparently somewhat strained, yet it is possible they are substantially correct, as they appear to receive some support ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... eyes upon him. In their black depths his touch had roused a passion which was by no means all tenderness. There was in it something threatening, something intensely and inordinately possessive. "That means that you didn't think me good-looking at all, as compared with—Chloe?" she ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... possessive personal pronouns are alike in form, and, as in other American languages, are intimately incorporated with the words with which they are construed. A single letter is the root of each: d I, mine, b thou, thine, l he, his, t she, her, it, its, w we, our, h you, your, n they, their; to ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... Pancha, emerging from the alley that led to the Albion's stage door, saw a tall, familiar shape approach from the shadows. Her heart gave a jump, and as her hand was enfolded in a strong, possessive grasp, she could not control the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... gamel. "The ... characteristics of the poetry are the use of archaic forms and words, such as mec for m, the possessive sn, gamol, dgor, swt for eald, dg, bld, etc., after they had become obsolete in the prose language, and the use of special compounds and phrases, such as hildendre (war-adder) for 'arrow,' gold-gifa (gold-giver) for 'king,' ... goldwine gumena (goldfriend of men, distributor ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... them, her own children, her heart swelled and opened wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive, never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its power to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Gilman's sensibilities. He felt ashamed of himself for not being more enthusiastic as he searched records and helped to locate the owner of that particular spot. To John, there was a new tone in Peter's voice, a possessive light in his eyes as he studied the location, and made excursions in several directions, to fix in his mind the ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... st have the addition of a syllable in the possessive case and the plural, and instead of saying that "some little birds had built their nests near the posts of Mr. West's gate," a Sussex boy would say, "the birds had built their nestes near the postes of ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... reveled in having refused his half-hearted invitation, but already she was aware that she would regret it. She was shaken with woman's fiercely possessive clinging ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... reacting upon those about her, gained both for herself and her opinions a degree of consideration to which she was unaccustomed and which she highly relished. Never had Serena presented so bold a front to her philanthropic and very possessive elder sister. Never had she enjoyed so much attention in the small and rigidly select circle of Slowby society, in which she and Miss Susan moved. Serena spoke with authority upon all subjects, on the strength of a purely fictitious affair of the heart. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... of a young goddess, her hair tumbling over her bare shoulders in a splendid golden confusion. Contarini watched her with possessive eyes, as she went and came back, bringing him the drink. She brought him yellow wine of Chios in a glass calix of Murano, blown air-thin upon a slender stem and just touched here and there with drops ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... farms, we may plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive. They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest and bicker round our cathedrals ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... In the Yorkshire dialect, when the possessive case is followed by the relative substantive, it is customary to omit the S; but if the relative be understood, and not expressed, the possessive case is formed in the usual manner, as in a subsequent ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... in a double-lobed fin. Laid out on the platform, it kept struggling with convulsive movements, trying to turn over, making such efforts that its final lunge was about to flip it into the sea. But Conseil, being very possessive of his fish, rushed at it, and before I could stop him, he seized ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Cic. in his Epist. to Lucceius says: If I cannot obtain this favor from you, I shall perhaps be compelled to write my own biography, multorum exemplo et clarorum virorum. When ipse is joined to a possessive pronoun in a reflexive clause, it takes the case of the subject of the clause. Cf. Z. 696, Note; ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... man has come up to her by this time, and is holding out his hand: silently she lays her own in it, and colors treacherously as his fingers close on hers in a close, tender, and possessive fashion. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... beautiful fragment of dreamy metaphor. There is probably a slight misprint in the last line, since the construction there becomes somewhat obscure. "My Love's Eyes" has merit, but lacks polish. The word "azure" in the first stanza, need not be in the possessive case; whilst the use of a singular verb with a plural noun in the second stanza (smiles-beguiles) is a little less than grammatical. "Longing" exhibits the author at her best, the images and phraseology alike showing the touch ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... These possessive pronouns, meus, tuus, suus, noster, and vester, take after them these genitive cases,— ipsius, of himself, solius, of him alone, unius, of one, duorum, of two, trium, of three, &c., omnium, of all, plurium, of more, paucorum, of few, cujusque, of every one, and ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... was driven into an intimate and possessive tone with regard to Buntingford, which was more than the facts warranted, and soon reduced Helena to monosyllables, and a ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... borderi. Hem bordero. Hemisphere duonsfero. Hemorrhage sangado. Hemorrhoids hemorojdo. Hemp kanabo. Hen (fowl) kokino. Henbane hiskiamo. Hence de nun. Henceforth de nun. Hepatic hepata. Heptagon sepangulo. Her sxin. Her (possessive) sxia. Hers sxia. Herald heroldo. Heraldic heraldika. Heraldry (science) heraldiko. Heraldry blazono. Herb herbo. Herbalist herbovendisto. Herbivorous herbomangxanta. Herd brutaro. Herdsman pasxtisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... meet one halfway, give and take; come to terms &c. (contract) 769; submit to arbitration, abide by arbitration; patch up, bridge over, arrange; straighten out, adjust, differences, agree; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; take the will for the deed. % Section IV. POSSESSIVE RELATIONS <— That is, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in hot pursuit of Rich Hilary. Until Allys came on the scene it had seemed the pursuit must be successful. They had gone abroad on the same steamer the year before, dawdled through a London season, and come home simultaneously—he rather bored and languid, she of a demure and downcast, but withal possessive, air. She had said they were not engaged—"oh, dear no, only excellent friends," but looking all the while a contradiction of the words. Then unwisely she had taken Hilary to that tiresome tea for the little Rhett girl—and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... under certain conditions, into whose and whom; but that and which always remain the same, with the exception of the possessive case, as ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though time had now given ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... His, indeed, was the age, and his the soul, for pleasure; the tumult of the camp was to him but a holiday exhibition—the march of an army, the exhilaration of a spectacle; the court as a banquet—the throne, the best seat at the entertainment. The life of the heir-apparent, to the life of the king possessive, is as the distinction between ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... into the work-room, dropped an allusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew anything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights in his eyes, and the inflexions of his ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... is my house," answered the Baron, taking his cigar from his mouth for the first time since he had lighted it, and holding it out at arm's length with a possessive sweep while he leaned back and looked at the ceiling again. "It all belongs to me," he said. "I took it for the ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... trees, into what seemed a thicker thicket, and found it to be a thatch of branches woven to screen the muzzles of a battery. The big guns were all about us, crouched in these sylvan lairs like wild beasts waiting to spring; and near each gun hovered its attendant gunner, proud, possessive, important as ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... chalchihuitl, jade, and cueitl, skirt or petticoat, with the possessive prefix, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... technique improves. Perfected, he would never use them, and his sentences would flow untaught from his pen in absolutely clear reflection of his thought. As an example of what I mean by awkwardnesses, I would cite the use of "whose" as the possessive of "which." I know that adequate authority pronounces this correct, so it is not on that score I reject it. Moreover, I recognize that in myself the repulsion is somewhat of an acquired taste. When I began to write ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive. I can hear her saying to Ethel that there had never been anybody but her, all those years. Praising his faithfulness; holding out her dead happiness, and apologizing to Ethel for talking about it when Ethel didn't ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... considered it," answered the deacon. "Captain Gar'ner volunteered to go across for the doctor in my boat—" with a heavy emphasis on the possessive pronoun—"and we had him to look at the patient. But, if the salt-water be good for consumptive people, as some pretend, I think there is generally little hope for seamen whose ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the genitive case, jong, is sometimes omitted for the sake of brevity, e.g. u ksew nga (my dog) for u ksew jong nga. The preposition la gives also the force of the possessive case, e.g. la ka jong ka jong (their own). There are some nouns which change their form, or rather are abbreviated when used in the vocative case, e.g. ko mei, not ko kmei Oh mother; ko pa, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... addressed). interj., interjection. interr., interrogative. metath., metathesis. n., noun. na, marks a noun as taking the suffixed pronoun in the third singular only. neg., negative. neut., neuter. obj., object. part., particle. partic., participle. pers., person, personal. pl., plural. poss., possessive. pr., pronoun. pref., prefix. prep., preposition. S, Sa'a language. See Sa'a and Ulawa dictionary. sing., singular. sub., subject. suff., suffix, suffixed. term., termination. tr., transitive. U, Ulawa language. See Sa'a and Ulawa dictionary. v., ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... l, and s at the end of a monosyllable after a single vowel are commonly doubled. The exceptions are the cases in which s forms the plural or possessive case of a noun, or third person singular of the verb, and the following words: clef, if, of, pal, sol, as, gas, has, was, yes, gris, his, is, thus, us. L is not doubled at the end of words of more than one syllable, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... assistance of a French-English dictionary from "Il m'a arrache les cheveux," "Il me donne des coups-de-pied," "Il m'a lacere la figure de ses ongles." It is noticeable that our instructor as a rule endeavours to make the possessive pronoun agree with the substantive in number and gender in orthodox Portuguese fashion, and that like a true grammatical patriot he insists upon the substantive having the same gender as in his ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... a friendship not untinged by enmity. His enmity was awakened when she became too possessive in the demands which she made and especially when she let fall criticisms, however mild, concerning Terry. These occurrences set him thinking of the other casuals who had ventured on her doorstep, not meaning to stay, and had ended by hanging up their hats in her hall. Her enmity was roused by the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... she'd had, to fall in love with a mere boy. But she knew in her heart that it was his youth she wanted most, partly because it was Martin's youth, partly because it called to something in her which was not youth, nor yet belonged to age—something which was wise, tender and possessive—something which had never yet ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... regarded her, had in them a smile that the girl instinctively resented. Was it a shade too possessive and complacently ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... putting a possessive hand on Lady's flank while the latter turned her dainty head and regarded the girl out of softly-wistful brown eyes. "I wanted her as ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... the polite forms mean "yours." To translate these terms, "my foolish wife," "my swinish son," is incorrect, because it twice translates the same word. In such cases the Japanese thought is best expressed by using the possessive pronoun and omitting the derogative adjective altogether. Japanese indirect methods for the expression of the personal relation are thus numberless and subtile. May it not be plausibly argued since the European ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the point of this remark, though his eyes were on her. They were not like Rolfe's eyes, insinuating, possessive; they had the anomalistic quality, of being at once personal and impersonal, friendly, alight, evoking curiosity ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... curious, and none is more quaint and delightful than Old St. John's Cemetery at the very core of the town, with streets of quiet, old-time houses on two sides, and busy, bustling, modern thoroughfares on the others. Every citizen of Kingsport feels a thrill of possessive pride in Old St. John's, for, if he be of any pretensions at all, he has an ancestor buried there, with a queer, crooked slab at his head, or else sprawling protectively over the grave, on which all the main ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... vision came to Claire de Wissant. As she went down the cliff-side her lovely eyes rested on these sinister, man-created monsters with a feeling of sisterly, possessive affection. She had become so familiarly acquainted with each and all of them in the last few months; she knew with such a curious, intimate knowledge where they differed, both from each other and also from other submarine craft, not only here, in these ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... softened. Nothing pleased her so much as for Billie to make one family of the three. The young cousin had become such a fixture in her home that she had grown quite jealous of Duncan Campbell's possessive ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had not been light enough. She should havekept to the character of the "little friend," the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may find ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... hand suddenly closed over hers, and at the strong, possessive touch the magnetism of the man made her blood race through her veins. She tried to draw her hand away, but he only held it more tightly, and his face was very engaging as he said, "I've a good mind not to tell you who the other woman is as you are ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... language, placed before a noun, is the possessive pronoun, as the second person, thy or thine, and xul, means end, termination. It is also the name of the sixth month of the Maya calendar. Axul would therefore be thy end. Among all the nations which have recognized the existence of a SUPREME BEING, Deity has ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... to Spanish custom, a matron is known by prefixing her maiden name with de (possessive of) to her ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... method of forming the possessive, based on a misapprehension of the original Anglo-Saxon suffix -es, which was shortened in middle English to -is, and ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... give me," is the simplest type of the approximate arrangement. In pleonasms, which are comparatively prevalent among the uneducated, the same essential structure is seen; as, for instance, in—"The men, they were there." Again, the old possessive case—"The king, his crown," conforms to the like order of thought. Moreover, the fact that the indirect mode is called the natural one, implies that it is the one spontaneously employed by the common people: that is—the one easiest ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... noun to a verb, to another noun, or to a preposition is called its case. There are three cases called the nominative, objective, and possessive. When the noun does something it is in the nominative case and is called ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... ne-daw-yo-em, etc., throughout all the different persons. When these possessive pronouns are used with nouns, nearly all the syllables are omitted, except the first, which is added to the noun in the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... not alone the only unity in us, but it is that which unifies all the rest, uses the "possessive case," and may subordinate all else in us to ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... before. At the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram." Yet my classic love aggressive, If you'll pardon the possessive, Is exceedingly impressive When ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... and his master had become used to his faults. He had one advantage, and that was a consideration. Although he was a Negro by birth he did not speak like a Negro, and nothing is so irritating as that hateful jargon in which all the pronouns are possessive and all the verbs infinitive. Let it be understood, then, that Frycollin was ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... joking. Now, decline He.' 'Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.' 'You see, his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can't say him book.' 'Yes, I do say hymn book, too,' said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... opposite Raven at the table, demure, self-contained, yet playing her wildest. It was a game she knew she was to have entirely alone. The game was that she and Rookie were living here in this house in some such potency of possessive bliss that nothing could separate them. She was careless over the terms of it. She was a child, she was a woman, she was everything Rookie wanted her to be. Here they were together, and the universe, finding the combination, Nan and Rookie, too strong to fight against, had given ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... summarised, further and further, in the dim fire-dust of endless avenues; that was all of the essence of fond and thrilled and throbbing recognition, with a thousand things understood and a flood of response conveyed, a whole familiar possessive feeling ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... at or near its traditional source, the tiny Appalachian spring at the head of the North Branch where in 1746 Thomas Lord Fairfax's surveyors set an inscribed stone to mark the northwestern corner of that possessive nobleman's vast holdings. Abandoned strip coal mines lie within sight of the spot, and it is doubtful that the infant river trickles more than a few yards before receiving its first injection of the acidic mixture of substances ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... about the two great classes of mountain scenery which I have just stated, he will, I hope, at last cease to charge me with enthusiasm in anything that I have said of Turner's imagination, as always instinctively possessive of those truths which lie deepest, and are most essentially linked together, in the expression of a scene. I have only taken two drawings (though these of his best period) for the illustration of all the structures of the Alps which, in ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the man watched her. His regard was disturbing. It had a quality of insistence. His eyes were cold yet devouring. They were possessive, not clear but opaque. They did not look at her as other eyes did. She felt the blood burning in ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... out, the moment the culprits appeared in view. "This is the kind of order you keep in my house—my house!" and he emphasized the possessive pronoun so severely that the poor little word must have had a hard time of it among his ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... quite hand-to-mouth. He had fine gross easy senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid with our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer matter. I make free in these connexions with the plural possessive because if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflexion, of emotion—particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of resentment. No one, I think, paid the ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... Victoria, the eldest, demurred mildly. Ever since she had nursed in France, she had assumed a slightly possessive manner toward the war, as if she had in some mysterious way brought it into the world and was responsible for its reputation. She was tall and very thin, with a perfect complexion, a long nose, and a short upper lip which showed her teeth too much when she laughed. Her hair was fair and fluffy; ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... a possible, nay, a probable chance, might for ever have blasted his ambitious hopes, he for the first time spoke of France as his. Considering the circumstances in which we then stood, this use of the possessive pronoun "my" describes more forcibly than anything that can be said the flashes of divination which crossed Bonaparte's brain when he was wrapped up in his chimerical ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... no other strong solicitation, among artistic appeals to which one may compare it up and down the whole wonderful country, is the felt neighbouring presence of the overwrought Cathedral in its little proud possessive town: you may so often feel by the week at a time that it stands there really for your own personal enjoyment, your romantic convenience, your small wanton aesthetic use. In such a light shines for me, at all events, under such an accumulation and complication of tone flushes and darkens ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... 17th, Chamberlain dined with the Prince of Wales. In noting the invitation in my diary I put down: "The Prince of Wales has asked Chamberlain to dinner for Saturday. I call this 'nobbling my party.'" But the possessive pronoun with regard to the party was not according to my custom. We always said that the party consisted of three in all—two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... around the church with what was almost a possessive eye. These people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him. They had, against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set in the wall on the roll of honor. Small as it ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the position of the possessive sign in such words as "men's," "writer's." If accurately placed, the writer may be presumed to understand punctuation, and will give evidence of ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... grinning at us through a small square window in the wall at one end of the veranda. Then he came round and once more vaulted the veranda rail, for he seemed to hold ordinary means of entry in contempt. His eye looked very possessive for that of one seeking employment as a guide, but he stood at respectful attention ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... more to Flora's subtlety and diligence. It refreshed Madame to see how well the fair strategist kept her purposes hid. Not even Irby called them—those he discerned—hers. In any case, at any time, any possessive but my or mine, or my or mine on any lip but his, angered him. Wise Flora, whenever she alluded to their holding of the plighted ones apart, named the scheme his till that cloyed, and then "ours" in a way that made it more richly his, even when—clearly to Madame, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... Stair's devotion. But then she had always accepted it as quite natural, which it was. Also as calling for no particular notice, except, as it were, for a certain graceful obliviousness on her part, modified by a possessive glance or two from her fearless black eyes—glances for which Stair watched more alertly than he had ever gazed into the night for the signal ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... Westonhaugh's favour. There is an easy air of familiar proprietorship about an Englishman in love that is not to be mistaken. It is a subtle thing, and expresses itself neither in word nor deed in its earlier stages of development; but it is there all the same, and the combination of this possessive mood, with a certain shyness which often goes with ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... quarter. At first the old woman's face was expressionless. But she moved the coin nearer to her eyes and a smile broke and widened until her whole face was a wrinkle of joy. When she turned in the doorway, the interviewer noticed that the hand jammed into an apron pocket was clutched into a possessive fist, cradling the precious ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... fact remarked, that besides the use of his, her, hereof, thereof, of it, and the, it was customary to employ the unchanged word it for the possessive case. I will give an example or two. In the Genevan version, at Rom. viii. 20., we read "Not of it owne wille." This passage is thus quoted in 1611 and in 1622, but in a later edition of the same work, 1656, its ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... little Jack Horner, that ensconces itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,—labels all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"—and moves about the realms of art, science, and letters in a constant fear of having its pockets picked. Think of a man's having vouchsafed to him one of those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Charmian continued, still looking at him with those contemplative and possessive eyes. "Men don't notice what is ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... with dagesh Yod) is not equivalent to uzi (Ayin with qubuts Zayin with dagesh Yod nor vezimrat (Vav Zayin Mem Resh Tav) to vezimrati (Vav Zayin Mem Resh Tav Yod), but that ohzi (Ayin with qamats Zayin with dagesh Yod) is a substantive (without a possessive suffix, but provided with a paragogic "yod"), as in Psalm cxxiii. 1, Obadiah 3, Deut. xxxiii. 16. The eulogy (of the Hebrews) therefore signifies: it is the strength and the vengeance of God that have been my salvation. vezimrat (Vav Zayin Mem Resh Tav) is thus in ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... If he said: "My wife is here," and chose to seize her with possessive grasp, she must meekly fold her hands upon her breast, and say: "Even so, my lord. I am yours. Deal with me as ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... anyone may help himself. However, the finder becomes sole and exclusive owner of a bee's nest as soon as he sets up an indication of his ownership in the form of a split stick with a small crosspiece, and announces his possessive rights on his return to the settlement. The parted trunk has a form and significance similar to that which it has in connection with the selection of a new site. As far as I know a bee's nest once located by one individual is seldom appropriated by another, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... mosaic of the apse the Redeemer holds a book, on the open page of which is written: "The Lord, defender of the church of Pudens." In course of time the ignorant people changed the word Pudentiana, a possessive adjective, into the name of a saint; and the name Sancta Pudentiana usurped the place of the genuine one. It appears for the first time in a document of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the same way that she had done when she was ill and asked if I liked bitters concealed. She waited as long without reply. The pause grew oppressive, and I spanned it by an assurance of individual possessive happiness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer against the man's own pulsating body. She writhed in his arms as he crushed her to him in a sudden access of possessive passion. His head bent slowly down to her, his eyes burned deeper, and, held immovable, she endured the first kiss she had ever received. And the touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close union with his warm, strong ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
