"Bodiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like worms in a starless gloamin'; My hert like a sponge that's fillit wi' gall; My sowl like a bodiless ghaist sent a roamin', To bide i' the mirk till ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... although it was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too, was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back, a half-senseless heap, against the barn wall; the blind, mad rage, as much ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... resplendent, bodiless, spotless, without sinews, pure, untouched by sin, all-seeing, all-knowing, transcendent, self-existent; He has disposed all things duly for ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... be," muttered Seguin. "There are no others here. Indians! No! There never were such as them. See! they are not men! Look! their huge horses, their long guns; they are giants! By Heaven!" continued he, after a moment's pause, "they are bodiless! They are phantoms!" ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... he had to rise by spiritual apprehension in order to be consoled. And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,—philosophically bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation, a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest mystic stood helpless. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... his glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Highlanders, the Australians and the Zulus, the Red Indian jongleur is visited by the spirits. He covers a hut with the skin of the animal which he commonly wears, retires thither, and there converses with the bodiless beings.(2) The good missionary like Mr. Moffat in Africa, was convinced that the exercises of the Jossakeeds were verily supernatural. "Ces seducteurs ont un veritable commerce avec le pere du mensonge."(3) This was denied by earlier and wiser Jesuit missionaries. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Bodiless Lord of love! Show him once more to me a minute's space, My Krishna, with the love-look in his face, And then I come ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... swarms Of shapeless, bodiless, tailless forms; (Like bottled-up babes that grace the room Of that worthy knight, Sir Everard Home)— All of them, things half-killed in rearing; Some were lame—some wanted hearing; Some had thro' half a century run, Tho' they hadn't a leg to stand upon. Others, more merry, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... said that when life is ended here, The spirit is borne to a distant sphere; That it visits its earthly home no more, Nor looks on the haunts it loved before. But why should the bodiless soul be sent Far off, to a long, long banishment? Talk not of the light and the living green! It will pine for the dear familiar scene; It will yearn, in that strange bright world, to behold The rock and the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... body, unseen and unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others, shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its very existence, conceiving humanity as a bodiless creature, with face and hands to express emotion, and just enough malformed legs and feet to be either standing or moving; further, beneath the garments there was nothing. The realists of the fifteenth century tore ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... black interwoven trunks. Or, rather, he saw the sparkle of some bright stones on her neck, and the whiteness of her brow; but for the rest, only a suggestion of lovely lines; as it were, a Spirit of the Wood, almost bodiless. ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it be right— This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, Laughingly through the lattice drop— The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully—so fearfully— Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring sould lies hid, That o'er the floor and down the wall, Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall! Oh, lady dear, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... window, just looking out. Presently the jack-o'-lanterns, lighted now, began to make blobs of gold in the furry darkness of the street. She could not at first make out who held them. It was strange to watch the fiery, grinning heads, flying, bodiless, from place to place. But she identified the lanterns in the court by the houses from which they emerged. The three small ones on the end at the left meant Dicky and Molly and Tim. Two big ones, mounted on sticks, came from across the way—Rosie and Arthur, of course. Two, just alike, ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Zoromes now hastened into the observation room of the space ship where more of the machine men were excitedly examining the mysterious space craft, their thought impulses flying thick and fast like bodiless bullets. ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... go to that country where dwells the Beloved, the ravisher of my heart! There Love is filling her pitcher from the well, yet she has no rope wherewith to draw water; There the clouds do not cover the sky, yet the rain falls down in gentle showers: O bodiless one! do not sit on your doorstep; go forth and bathe yourself in that rain! There it is ever moonlight and never dark; and who speaks of one sun only? that land is illuminate with the rays of ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... not by the door— Love's Hour—till she and I shall meet; With bodiless form and unapparent feet That cast no shadow yet before, Though round its head the dawn begins to pour The breath ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... alone. The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady's bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of dead beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be reviver. Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence. Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... regard to this triad of plays are briefly these. Thomas Lord Cromwell is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them afterwards ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Brahms, in the G Minor Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts' moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form that to follow every outline of it may be ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... one another again, this helpless father and daughter—never, till they met bodiless, in ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... and a fearful," he answered, "for there shall my Spirit meet them who watch the gates, and who knows what may chance when the bodiless one that yet hath earthly life meets the bodiless ones who live no more ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... I visit bodiless Strange gloomy households often at odds, And wonder if Man's consciousness Was a mistake ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... that," answered Marget. "Folks should not be on the road when the bodiless walk. They might be in their way, and so get ill ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... regarded the whole of the stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical novel proper—that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim—and I suppose no sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... limit of her view. Every window was heavily curtained, like her own. Some of the upper ones had green sunblinds. Scarcely any sound! Mysteries brooded without as well as within the flat of Madame Foucault. Sophia saw a bodiless hand twitch at a curtain and vanish. She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage on a sill in the next house. A woman whom she took to be the concierge appeared in the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a ray of sunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... said that he was terrifying, a bodiless head, a gaping mouth, a dragon eager to swallow the moon of the youth of the world. But now we are no longer afraid. The flowers go, the leaves go, the waves in the river go, and we shall also follow them. Ah, blind Minstrel, ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... the poetry of this age and the supernatural traditions of a former one, that the belief in them was still extant, and in full force and visible operation among the vulgar (to say no more) in the time of our authors. The appalling and wild chimeras of superstition and ignorance, "those bodiless creations that ecstacy is very cunning in," were inwoven with existing manners and opinions, and all their effects on the passions of terror or pity might be gathered from common and actual observation—might be discerned in the workings ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... toward the west. The result was unexpected. A ghostly triple echo, which the lower tone of their earlier conversation had failed to elicit, answered him from the opposite shore. In broad daylight an echo will suggest mystery and a bodiless, impish mocker, even to an unimaginative mind, but now the effect was intensified tenfold by the silence and darkness that enclosed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... are the influences which affect the spirit and touch the heart. Are there bodiless creatures around us, moulding our thoughts into darkness or brightness, as they will? Whence, otherwise, come the shadow and the sunshine, for which we ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... his having a body follows as a matter of course [Footnote: This is one of the tenets of Râmânujas as well as Pûr.naprajñas.]; for in all effects, as pots and the like, the maker is seen to have a body and not to be bodiless. ...
— The Tattva-Muktavali • Purnananda Chakravartin
... for it was only this week that I have been reading The Twilight of the Gods. There was the disintegrating recollection of that book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory of mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which uniformed officials treated the essential institutions of civilization. All this gave me the ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... five-and-twenty I think it would be more apropos to wear a full-blown rose, quite ripe, and ready to drop off the stalk for want of being pulled—heigh-ho!" "But pray, my lady," said I, "how do you like the concert?" "Alas!" said she, languishingly, while she laid her hand upon my shoulder, "what are these bodiless sounds and vibration to me? and yet what an exquisite sweetness in the songs of the northern part of our island:—'Thou art gone awa' from me, Mary!' How pathetic and divine the little airs of Scotland and the Hebrides! But never, never can I think of that same Doctor Johnson—that CONSTABLE, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... those ailments have to do with the body and these with the mind that they are essentially different. Very many experiences of the body are similar in a way to what goes on in the souls of men, no matter how bodiless the latter may be. The soul contracts under the influence of fear and expands under that of wrath. Pain humiliates men and audacity puffs them up. The correspondences then are very close and therefore ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... are not A pastoral fable—pipes in the liberal air, 50 Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd;[121] My soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment[122]—born and dying With the blest ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... like an eerie flower. She had adorned the two long black plaits of her hair with the brilliant phosphorescence of Ear of the Ghost Woman, the strange fungus found on old trees, a favored evening adornment of the island belles. The handsome flowers glowed about her bodiless head like giant butterflies, congruous jewels for such a temptress of such a frolic. The mysterious light added a gleam to her velvet cheek and neck that made her seem like the ghost-woman of old legend, created to lead the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... form appeared on the threshold, Clad in armor of steel, a sombre and sorrowful figure! Why does the bridegroom start and stare at the strange apparition? Why does the bride turn pale, and hide her face on his shoulder? Is it a phantom of air,—a bodiless, spectral illusion? Is it a ghost from the grave, that has come to forbid the betrothal? Long had it stood there unseen, a guest uninvited, unwelcomed; Over its clouded eyes there had passed at times an expression Softening the gloom and revealing the warm ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... persisted in pulling against the string that tied him to the tail of Widow Wattles's great tom-cat, was now trailed ignominiously upon his side, with soiled fur and outstretched neck—the last joint, and only dead one, of this bodiless tail. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... belonging to the angels' faces in the shop below, grown up, with other heads attached to make them mortal. Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and distended, as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who were depicted as constantly blowing those instruments for ever and ever without any lungs, played, it is to be ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... out imagination is, in small, And with the making-difference that must be, Mirror of God's creating mirror; all That shows itself therein, that formeth he, And there is Christ, no bodiless vanity, Though, face to face, the mighty perfectness With glory blurs ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... sources of supply, save one, were sealed. This one source of supply was the cavern in which we stood. These were members of the ruling class, and outside was the rabble, starved and unhappy, living on the faint seepage of the vital fumes, without which they became almost bodiless, and the helpless slaves of those ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... longing for a closer companionship, she set out to find her adored sun; and as she sighed, 'Shall I find him never?' some one from a grotto near by answered, 'Ever?' 'Who are you?' cried the maid. 'I am a bodiless spirit,' was the answer, 'the voice of one that is gone. I tell impossible things. I am the shadow of the past, the substance of events to come. Man is a mocker.' 'Can you tell me where to find my lover?' asked the maid. Echo ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... father, and finally exhibited the golden branch, at sight of which Charon's wrath relaxed, and he made haste to turn his back to the shore, and receive them on board. The boat, adapted only to the light freight of bodiless spirits, groaned under the weight of the hero. They were soon conveyed to the opposite shore. There they were encountered by the three- headed dog Cerberus, with his necks bristling with snakes. He barked with all his ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... phosphate of lime. She has muscles, not flabby, slender ribbons of empty sarcolemma. She has blood, not a thin leucocytic ichor. I have no sympathy with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women. If I am to be a pessimist, I will be one out and out, and seek to destroy the race in a high-handed and manly way. Indoor life, inactivity, lack of oxygen in the lungs, these are things which in time produce a white skin, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... fearfully absurd, Hobgoblin rites, and moon-struck reveries, Distracted creeds, and visionary dreams, More bodiless and hideously misshapen Than ever fancy, at the noon of night, Playing at will, framed in the madman's brain. ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... there was no law for her, nor any rule. She existed for herself alone. Then ensued a long struggle with everybody, in which she broke down at last, when she had run the full length of her resistance, and sobbed her heart out, desolate; and afterwards, in a chastened, washed-out, bodiless state, she received the understanding that would not come before, and went her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Arupa world, there is yet no escape from the changes of time; his learning, then, is to acquire the changeless body; for where no change is, there is peace. Thus the possession of this changeful body is the foundation of all sorrow. Therefore, again, all who are wise make this their aim—to seek a bodiless condition; all the various orders of sentient creatures, from the indulgence of lust, derive pain; therefore all those in this condition ought to conceive a heart, loathing lust; putting away and loathing this condition, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... had passed and the stars were coming out, but it was still pitch black under the pines; so dark that I started like a nervous woman and went near to panic when a horse snorted at my very ear, and a voice, bodiless, as it seemed, said; "Well, now; the Lord be praised! if here ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... to wait in anticipation of a hurry-up call, he whiled away the time by browsing in his Dickens. He knew no other author, neither did he wish to. His epidermis was soaked with Dickensology, and when inspired by gin and bitters he emitted information at every pore. To him all these bodiless beings of Dickens' brain were living creatures. An anachronism was nothing to Hawkins. Charley Bates was still at large, Quilp was just around the corner, and Gaffer Hexam's boat was moored in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... that the lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual. A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling twilight,—that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a cloud,—when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no faintest trace of his identity,—the mystery shrouding the deed presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is something paralyzing in the thought of ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... saw a mass of them draw themselves up into the likeness of a tent skyscraper high; hang so for an instant, then writhe into a monstrous chimera of a dozen towering legs that strode away like a gigantic headless and bodiless tarantula in steps two hundred feet long. I watched mile-long lines of them shape and reshape into circles, into interlaced lozenges and pentagons—then lift in great columns and shoot through the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... simple enough,—signifying no more than transmigration: you have lived millions of times in the past, and you are likely to live again millions of times in the future,—all the conditions of each rebirth depending upon past conduct. The common notion is that after a certain period of bodiless sojourn in this world, the spirit is guided somehow to the place of its next incarnation. The people, of course, believe in souls. But there is nothing of all this in the higher doctrine, which denies transmigration, denies the existence ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... objection will perhaps be raised, viz. that as experience teaches that potters and so on direct their implements through the mediation of their own bodies, we are not justified in holding that a bodiless Supreme Lord directs the material and instrumental causes of the universe.—But in reply to this we appeal to the fact of experience, that evil demons possessing men's bodies, and also venom, are driven or drawn out of ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... pendulum-swing this steady tread of time. Time was such an intangible thing, and yet what a Juggernaut! There was nothing of it which he could get hold of to wrestle, and yet it was more powerful than Samson to throw him in the end. Sly, subtle, bodiless, soulless, impersonal; expressed in the big clock above the city, and in milady's dainty watch rising and falling upon her breast; sweeping away cities and nursing to life violets; tearing down and building up; killing and begetting; bringing laughter and tears, it is consistent in ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... similar to the angels. For the angels are the army of God, bodiless and happy souls."27 But, through the power of evil, all who yield to sin and vice lose that estate of bright and blessed immortality, and become discordant, wretched, despicable, and, after the dissolution of the body, are thrust down to gloom and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... yet far as the poles from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in antithesis to Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... asks me For Gormflaith, then for Gormflaith, then for Gormflaith, And I ask everybody else for her; But she is nowhere, and the King will foam. Send me no more; I am old with running about After a bodiless name. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... Buildings had bought none of them. In short, Tetterby's had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too evidently Co.'s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor's-rates nor the assessed taxes, and having no ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... threatening, but pleading—something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman's voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... on this plain, which had no visible boundaries. A roll-call was proceeding. A resounding and mysterious voice called out names, and at each name a man stepped briskly from the crowds and saluted and walked away. But there was no visible person to receive the salute; the voice was bodiless. George became increasingly apprehensive; he feared a disaster, yet he could not believe that it would occur. It did occur. Before it arrived he knew that it was arriving. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... two, Noiseless as the silver dew; Hearts that had no need of speech In the silence spoke to each; And along the sapphire blue, Shot with shafts of sunset through, Fell a voice, a bodiless breath— ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... an immense pity for the man; perhaps less for the man than for the soul in pain. At the back of his words some torment burned at red heat, remorselessly. He sought relief. Perhaps he sought it from me because I was as apart as a woman from his physical splendour, a kind of bodiless creature with just a brain and a human heart, the ghost of an old soldier, far away from the sphere of poor passions and ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... mirth beseem the Giant Warder of this ancient city? Is this becoming demeanour for a watchful spirit over whose bodiless head so many years have rolled, so many changes swept like empty air - in whose impalpable nostrils the scent of blood and crime, pestilence, cruelty, and horror, has been familiar as breath to mortals - in whose sight Time has gathered in the harvest of centuries, ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... opportunity of giving some additional information respecting the Timorees. It appears that after killing an enemy they, like the New Zealanders, preserve the head by baking it; and, during meals, place food in the mouth of their bodiless foe. On the death of a Rajah, a favourite slave or two is killed and buried with him; some weapons, also, are laid in the grave, in order that the deceased may not want for anything in the next world; this clearly shows that they have an idea of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes |
