"Deaden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Czech disposition towards festivities; I do know that it is contagious. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the Church of Rome encouraged the converted Hussites to keep things merry and bright on every available saint's day so as to deaden all recollection of Hus's martyrdom, but this is a deeper matter which we will discuss later. The fact is that the Czech is by nature gay and cheerful and an expert merrymaker, as who would not be in a country like Bohemia, with ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... punishment, but for conscience's sake. Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God's ordinance. He sees you. Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... shut out all signs of the dreary dawning light. Walters followed us in a few seconds and set a tray of glasses and bottles on the table. I flung off my overcoat and sat down in an arm-chair, pressing the palms of my hands hard on my forehead in the vain effort to deaden the tearing pain. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations. ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... prolonged a little beyond the usual hour, doth it not set half the audience asleep? as I question not I have by this time both my children. Well, then, like a good-natured surgeon, who prepares his patient for a painful operation by endeavouring as much as he can to deaden his sensation, I will now communicate to you, in your slumbering condition, the news with which I threatened you. Your good mother, you are to know, is dead at last, and hath left her whole fortune to her elder daughter.—This ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realise all these ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... from dwelling upon the past or the dreaded interview with Mr Bayfield. He did not know how sharp was the pang his companion felt as the old thorn tree came in sight, nor how she bit her lips and clenched the rail of the high gig with a grasp that gave her physical pain to deaden the terrible ache at ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... the first business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... appeared to gain by this change. He got stout and robust, and able to go through a greater amount of physical labour than in former days. What seemed to contribute to sooth and quiet—or, perhaps, deaden—his mental energies, was the habit of smoking, which he acquired from his companions. He would smoke for whole days and weeks, either working in the garden, or sitting on the stump of a tree in Epping Forest, without uttering ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... thrown on the dead-plate, and when ignited pushed on to the bars as before, and so it is continued. It is expected that the smoke while passing over the bright fire towards the bridge will be ignited, but only a very small portion of it becomes flame, and the smoke tends to deaden the bright fire to a great extent. The door has to be opened so frequently in this method, and in pushing the coals from the dead-plate to the bars a large amount of live fuel drops down into the ash-pit, and if this should be thrown ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor
... perceived that Carroll was forced, however willingly, to labours beyond her strength, to irksome confinement, and to that intimate and wearing close association with the abnormal which in the long run is bound to deaden the spirit. He lost sight of his own grievance in the matter. With perhaps somewhat of exaggeration he came mightily to desire for her more of the open air, both of body and spirit. Often when tramping back to his hotel he communed savagely with ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... party. Sire Bertrand and Jean de Metz were accustomed to such stealthy expeditions; they knew the byways and were acquainted with useful precautions, such as binding up the horses' feet in linen so as to deaden the sound of hoofs on ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... arose from the defenders. Again and again the heavy ram struck, in the same place. The wall tottered beneath the blows; and would soon have fallen, had not Josephus ordered a number of sacks to be filled with straw, and let down by ropes from the walls, so as to deaden the ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... might expect, the black, woolly-headed children of Nature show a strange distaste for glossy beads; so much so indeed, that the Venetians find it necessary to deaden the natural brilliancy which all glass obtains when it becomes cold, by grinding it, and thus softening the otherwise ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... doctor. But the poor woman's pains ceased as soon as she realized that Michaud was gone; for her mind was so preoccupied by the danger her husband ran at that hour of the night, in a lawless region filled with determined foes, that the anguish of her soul was powerful enough to deaden and momentarily subdue those of the body. In vain her servant-woman declared her fears were imaginary; she seemed not to comprehend a word that was said to her, and sat by the fire in her bed-chamber listening to every sound. In her terror, which increased every moment, she had the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... on the saddle, their blankets in a roll behind them, their sabres clanking at their sides. This noise and movement and the tramp of many horses' hoofs has a curious effect upon one. The bugles play—presently you hear them afar off, deaden'd, mix'd with other noises. Then just as they had all pass'd, a string of ambulances commenc'd from the other way, moving up Fourteenth street north, slowly wending along, bearing a large lot of wounded to ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... to Mme. de Beauseant. The man's vanity and the lover's conscience further exaggerated this pain, and a sincere pity for her seized upon him. All at once the immensity of the misery became apparent to him, and he thought it necessary and charitable to deaden the deadly blow. He hoped to bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame of mind by gradually reconciling her to the idea of separation; while Mlle. de la Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, should be sacrificed ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... home in this strange, new country. With my passion for the sea, and it so near, I could not be utterly desolate. To sit on these cliffs, reddening now in the sunset and watch the outgoing tide, sending imaginary messages on the departing waves to far-off shores, would surely, to some extent, deaden the sense of utter isolation from the world of childhood and youth. Mrs. Blake shook my hand warmly, repeating again the invitation to visit her at Daniel's, while she gathered up her huge basket and started for the door ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... tendency, excepting in the case of a few sensitive and tender spirits, is to deaden the consciousness of guilt, to still the remonstrances of the self-convicted mind, and to enable men of no religion and of no morals to hear these doctrines proclaimed from the pulpit without any salutary disquietude of heart. They do not really ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... for a local anesthetic," he remarked. "This is the sort of thing that might be injected into an arm or leg and deaden the pain of a cut, but that is all. It wouldn't affect the consciousness or prevent any one from resisting a murderer to the last. I doubt if that had anything directly to do with his death, or perhaps even that this is Cushing's blood ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... the intellectual sphere. There can be no doubt that the mere size of the States and Governments of the present age exercises a deadening effect on the minds of individuals. As the vastness of London produces inertia in civic affairs, so, too, the great Empires tend to deaden the initiative and boldness of their subjects. Those priceless qualities are always seen to greatest advantage in small States like the Athens of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or the Geneva of Rousseau; they are stifled under the pyramidal mass of the Empire of the Czars; and as a result there ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... islands and vessels, lighting them up for an instant, and then closing over again. My route took me about three miles outside Nahant and in full view of the end of the promontory. There was now a clear course, except that occasionally a huge patch of floating seaweed would suddenly deaden and then stop the boat's headway, compelling me to back water and clear the bow of the long strands. It was at first very startling to be thus checked when running at full speed; the sensation being that some one has grasped the boat and is pushing her back. With the resistance come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... May 6, 1801, Coleridge speaks of his eldest boy, Hartley, then in his fifth year: "Dear Hartley! we are at times alarmed by the state of his health, but at present he is well. If I were to lose him, I am afraid it would exceedingly deaden my affection for any other children I may have." Then he writes the lines that we now have as the Conclusion to Part the Second; and adds: "A very metaphysical account of fathers calling their children rogues, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was nothing loth. Young, beautiful, vain, selfish, she yet possessed a woman's susceptible heart; though surrounded with luxury, dress, pomp, show, which are said to deaden the feelings, and in some measure do deaden them, Lady Maude insensibly managed to fall in love, as deeply as ever did an obscure damsel of romance. She had first met him two years before, when he was Viscount Elster; had liked him then. Their ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... which leads he knows not whither: it may bring him to a shore whence he has no ship to sail from; it may end in an abyss he cannot bridge. The thickets rend and sting him, poison may colour a tempting grain or berry, frost may deaden his energies and lull him to the sleep that knows no waking. He has but little aid from science: beyond food and medicine he carries little more than a watch, a compass, a rifle, and a cartridge belt. Beyond all instruments and weapons are his skill, agility, gumption, diplomacy. And these resources ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... The great quantity of hay opposite—or straw, I believe it actually was—seemed to deaden the sound of his voice, but the silence, too, had become so oppressive that I welcomed his torrent and even dreaded the moment when it would stop. I heard, too, the gentle ticking of my watch. Each second uttered its voice and dropped away into a gulf, as ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... circumstance thereafter he became as completely unconscious as though they had ceased to be, though once or twice he was aware of a merciful hand that gave him opium to deaden—or was it only to prolong?—his suffering. And aeons and eternities passed over him while he lay in the rigour of perpetual torments, not trying to escape, only writhing in futile anguish in the bitter ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... was the crucifying of another Jew or two to them? Before they lift the cross or fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhaps only the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer a draught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deaden agony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be in full possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all His unclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closed against the offered mercy. He would not drink because He would suffer, and He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the reason, and throws us upon the thought of what there is behind the veil. This curiosity is a strong part of worship and of praise. To think that we know everything about God, is to benumb and deaden worship; but mystical thought quickens worship, and the beauty of Nature raises mystical thought. So long as a man is probing Nature, and in the thick of its causes and operations, he is too busy ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... get what rest was possible. In contrast with the previous three months the men were fed well and given many kinds of articles extra to the rations. They received socks which were worn over the boots so as to deaden the sounds ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... know me, when you imagined me insensible to your merit and forgetful of the happy days of our childhood,—the recollection of which has a thousand times made my tears flow. I thank Heaven that the evils which I have suffered have had no tendency to deaden my ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... your great things at the cost of justice, than I do of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a medium in everything. There has never been any question in our controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the flesh, though, by the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits; or in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects that must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy's behaviour astonished ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... does not take it at all passionately. A mother weeps a day for a dead child or her husband, but death is said not to bring tears from any man. Death causes no long or loud lamentation, no tearing of the hair or cutting the body; it effects no somber colors to deaden the emotions; no earth or ashes for the body — all widespread mourning customs among primitive peoples. However, when a child or mature man or woman dies the women assemble and sing and wail a melancholy dirge, and they ask the departed ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... horse which Mr. Wingate drove stood quiet in the road, else the matter might have had a different ending; for had she run and dragged her now helpless master, he would surely have been killed. As it was, she did not move, so there was nothing to deaden the sound of the sharp blows Fayette administered; and in the silence of the place and ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... young man is filled with a sense of dignity. We smile at the picture of "Miss Philura's" confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her Creator a petition for the much-desired boon of a husband. But really, why shouldn't she want one? Many a young woman, in order to deaden her senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is really an awkward attempt at sublimation, makes a fetish of dress and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience; ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... must get his play before the public somehow, and that, even if it is not his play now, yet the first two acts are as he wrote them, and that, if only to feel the thrill of the audience at that great scene between the Burglar and the Bishop (his creations!) he must deaden his conscience to the absurdity of a happy ending. But does he succumb? No. Heroically he tells himself: "Anyway, I can publish it; and I'm certain that the critics will agree with me that——" But the critics are too busy to bother about him. They ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... tornado lasted without interruption; the sun had set, and the darkness was opaque. It was impossible to move against the force of the wind and the deluge of water which descended. Speak, we did not, but shut our eyes against the lightning, and held our fingers to our ears to deaden the noise of the thunder, which burst upon us in the most awful manner. My companion groaned at intervals, whether from fear, I know not; I had no fear, for I did not know the danger, or that there was a God to judge ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... our calling will turn away from earthly things. If you believe that God has summoned you to His kingdom and glory, surely, surely, that should deaden in your heart the love and the care for the trifles that lie by the wayside. Surely, surely, if that great voice is inviting, and that merciful hand is beckoning you into the light, and showing you what you may possess there, it is not walking according to that summons if ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Fruit should be cooked by stewing, or by gentle simmering; hard boiling will destroy the fine flavor of all fruits, and especially of berries and other small fruits. Cinnamon, cloves, or other spices, should not be added, as their stronger flavors deaden or obliterate the natural flavor, which should always be preserved as perfectly as possible. If desirable to add some foreign flavor, let it be the flavor of another fruit, or the perfume of flowers. For Instance, flavor apple with lemon, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... one to get away," commented Foyle. "The stairs lead direct to the hall, and there are only two rooms to pass. This carpet would deaden footsteps too." ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... the steps, "for at five my train goes." Yet the five o'clock train bore no Roger Montrose From New York. Mrs. Travers had asked him to dine. A tete-a-tete dinner with beauty and wine, To stir the man's senses and deaden his brain. (The devil keeps always good chefs in his train.) It was ten when he rose for departure. The room Seemed a garden of midsummer fragrance and bloom. The lights with their soft rosy coverings made A glow like late sunsets, in some tropic glade. The world seemed afar, ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... wrapped his handkerchief about his big right hand, producing a sort of cushion to deaden the sound of a blow with the fist and to protect his knuckles; for all his strength was to go into that one mighty blow. If both men came into the room, his chance was smaller; but, in either event, the first blow was to ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... despairing mood, sitting at the tables of the eating-house, in the black smoke of the lamp and the tobacco; sad and tattered, speaking lazily to each other, listening to the wild howling of the wind, and thinking how they could get enough vodki to deaden ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... cast about among all manner of impracticable plans for escaping it. Of these the most promising—although I had no money—was to give the Stimcoes leg-bail and run home; the most alluring, too, since it offered to deaden the torment of uncertainty by keeping me employed, mind and body. I must follow the coach-road. In imagination I measured back the distance. If George Goodfellow walked to Plymouth and back once a week, why might not I succeed in walking to Minden Cottage? Home was home. I should get counsel ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... down-town streets, produce an appalling combination of discords. The streets of New York are not more crowded than those of London, but the noise in London is subdued. It is more regular, less jarring and piercing. The muffled sounds in London are due partly to the wooden and asphalt pavements, which deaden the sounds. London must be soothing to the New Yorker, as the noise of New York is at first ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... meth. Jurisp., x. 716.] The houses had gutters along the eaves, but no conductors coming down the walls, so that the water from the roofs was collected and came down once in every few yards in a torrent, bursting umbrellas, and deluging cloaks and hats. The manure spread before sick men's doors to deaden the sound of wheels was washed down the street to add to the destructive qualities which already characterized the mud of Paris. An exceptionally heavy fall of snow would entirely get the better of the authorities, filling the streets from side to side with pools of slush, in which fallen ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Those works were our favourite theme for satirical verse, which we did not pain our Professor by publishing. Professor Henry Morley lectured hour after hour to successive classes in a room half way down the passage, on the left. Even overwork could not deaden his enormous vitality; but I hope that his immediate successor does not lecture so often. Outside the classrooms I remember the passages, which resembled the cellars of an unsuccessful sculptor, the library, where I first read Romeo ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... for there could be no thought of trying any course of treatment, as the sick were not there to be doctored, but simply to be cured by the lightning stroke of a miracle. And so he mainly confined himself to administering a few opium pills, in order to deaden the severer sufferings. He had been fairly amazed when accompanying Doctor Bonamy on a round through the wards. It had resolved itself into a mere stroll, the doctor, who had only come out of curiosity, taking no interest ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Why, every imagination of the thoughts, or of the motions that were in the heart to sin, was evil, only evil, and that continuously. The imagination of the thoughts was evil—that is, such as tended not to deaden or stifle, but such as tended to animate and forward the motions or thoughts of sin into action. Every imagination of the thoughts—that which is here called a thought, by Paul to the Romans, called a motion. Now the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... tobacco. But he was anxious to be scrupulously polite to Iver, and thus to deaden the pangs of conscience. Resigned though miserable, he went with them to the smoking-room. Colonel Wilmot Edge looked up from the Army and Navy Gazette, and glanced curiously at the party as they passed his table. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... for his son to gratify his taste for sweet sounds. But through the assistance of a servant, the boy obtained an instrument, which he kept in the garret; and there, when opportunity offered, with the strings of his "clavichord" so covered with pieces of cloth as to deaden the sound, he practised music until he became a proficient in harmony. It was not, however, until his father took him on a visit to see an elder brother, who was in the family of the Prince of Saxe-Weisenfels, that he became acquainted with ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... the efforts of the philanthropic gentlemen. Furthermore the efforts of these gentlemen greatly harm the workers, for at times when the workers can attain success through the use of the strike, these philanthropists interfere, and deaden the initiative and aggressiveness of the strikers. Often this causes strife between the strikers themselves. They lose confidence in one another, and the existence of the organizations which the workers succeeded in building up through their ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... separated them, one going to Camp Ayer, in Massachusetts; one to Camp Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, and the rest to camps in States between. In one Middle West community a German father and son went so far as to deaden pain through cocaine and then cut off the finger of the right hand. It is generally understood that both the father and son are now in two widely separated penitentiaries, reflecting each in his own cell upon the folly of treason and the crime of becoming ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... hastened to cover up and deaden the colours of the sky, and the almost equally gorgeous tints of tree and hedge; and, by the time Mr Robins reached the Grays' cottage, darkness had settled down as deep as on that evening four months ago, when he carried the baby ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... the last ragged, trailing remnants of his frockcoat, and hurled them from him. Then, thrusting his fingers into the hair which he had once been so careful to preserve, he pulled it out by handfuls at a time, as though he hoped through physical pain to deaden the mental agony ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... are opposed, is a delusion. It is doubtless true that as states of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend to exclude each other. And it is doubtless also true that an extreme activity of the reflective powers tends to deaden the feelings; while an extreme activity of the feelings tends to deaden the reflective powers: in which sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antagonistic to each other. But it is not true that the facts of science ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... building containing the big swimming-bath was undamaged, and the spring which fed the bath still gurgled cheerfully into it. Wherever there was water, the shock seemed to have been neutralised, for I imagine that the water acted as a cushion to deaden the earth-wave. Neither the electric lighting nor the telephones ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... been brutalized by the persistence of life in spite of crime; her gray hair ripples like sand under receding waves; her profile is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of misery over them—dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman, is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... brick walls, no unnatural need or circumstance, no confusing inventions, no gasping haste, no specious distractions, no clamour of wheel and heartless voices, to blind the soul, to pervert its pure desires, to deaden its fears, to deafen its ears to the sweeter calls—to shut it in, to shrivel it: to sicken it in every part. Rock and waste of sea and the high sweep of the sky—winds and rain and sunlight and flying clouds—great hills, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... to now had looked around full of curiosity, began to be afraid. To deaden their fear they ate the sandwiches they had brought. Paul encouraged them, and refused the sausage which ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... of course. It was clear that he had forgotten the catastrophe that had parted him from Hamlyn's Purlieu, and yet, strangely, he asked no questions. Lucy was tortured by the thought of revisiting the place she loved so well. She had been able to deaden her passionate regret only by keeping her mind steadfastly averted from all thoughts of it, and now she must actually go there. The old wounds would be opened. But it was impossible to refuse, and she set about making the necessary arrangements. ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... you to good and reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness which both working in one's self and received from others is the true source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a short repose in a deep and well-built library, into ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... straw is used for bait. The boat sails to a distance of about 90 miles off the land and run back before the prevailing wind, until they are about nine miles from the shore or until they lose the fish. When the fisherman gets a bite the wind is spilled out of the sail so as to deaden the boat's way. The fish is then got alongside, promptly gaffed, and got on board. Tunny sells for about three halfpence a pound in Lequeito. The season extends from June to November. Bream are taken in the winter and spring, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... prendre la lune avec les dents [Fr.]. collapse, faint, swoon, fall into a swoon, drop; go by the board, go by the wayside; go up in smoke, end in smoke &c (fail) 732. render powerless &c adj.; deprive of power; disable, disenable^; disarm, incapacitate, disqualify, unfit, invalidate, deaden, cramp, tie the hands; double up, prostrate, paralyze, muzzle, cripple, becripple^, maim, lame, hamstring, draw the teeth of; throttle, strangle, garrotte, garrote; ratten^, silence, sprain, clip the wings of, put hors de combat [Fr.], spike the guns; take the wind out of one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the first to own a double-barreled shotgun; previous to that he had killed fourteen white, and two brown bears with his bow and arrow. The older people laugh as they relate how those standing near the man firing would place their hands over their ears to deaden the sound, while the little girls cried, declaring the big noise hurt ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... recognised claims to appointment and promotion, thus giving to the poor and meritorious at least an equal chance with the man of wealth and the base hireling of party. In actual service the system of exclusive seniority cannot exist; it would deaden and paralyze all our energies. Taking advantage of this, politicians will drive us to the opposite extreme, unless the executive authority be limited by wholesome laws, based on the just ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... very small safe had been "souped," and now sagged open. Books and papers littered the floor, and were strewn over a mattress that, evidently dragged from the inner room, had been swaddled around the safe to deaden the ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... that you see advertised as "Headache Cures" are dangerous poisons if taken in too large doses; and most of them in small doses weaken the heart. They are what we call narcotics; they just deaden the nerves to pain without doing anything whatever to ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... was a task that it wrung his heart to perform. His horse must be put out of pain. He took off his coat, rolled it over his horse's head, inserted his gun under its folds to deaden the sound and to hide those luminous eyes turned so ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... bangs on the wall, behind her bed and to the side; there was no furniture there to crack, and it was mostly on the outside wall, so she finally became uncomfortable, and buried her head in the clothes to deaden the sound. She "doesn't believe in ghosts," but thinks the house "very queer," and says that far and wide in the country round it is spoken of as "haunted," though no one seems to know of any story, as to the cause, except that, very improbable, ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... moment, ranging up so close to the other brigantine that we almost grazed her side, when we exchanged broadsides at precisely the same instant, with terrible effect on both sides. At the same moment our topsail was thrown aback to deaden our way, and as the Guerrilla passed ahead our helm was put hard up and we paid square off across her stern, firing our starboard broadside into her as we did so. The result this time was absolutely ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... moment. "Does your compadre smoke?" "No, sir," said the lady, astonished at this irrelevant question, and perhaps the more so, as the count's aversion to smoking was so well known, that none of his smoking subjects ventured to approach him without having taken every precaution to deaden any odour of the fragrant weed which might lurk about their clothes or person. "Does he take snuff?" said the viceroy. "Yes, your Excellency," said his visitor, who probably feared that for once his Excellency's wits were wool-gathering. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... now remained to the pilgrims. Madame Vetu, whose eyes were open but who saw nothing, sat like an insensible being in the broad sunlight, in the hope possibly that the scorching heat would deaden her pains; whilst up and down, in front of her, went Madame Vincent ever with the same sleep-inducing step and ever carrying her little Rose, her poor ailing birdie, whose weight was so trifling that she scarcely felt her in her arms. Many people ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... all that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;—yes, on these last names her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to a door before which hung heavy curtains; but these curtains did not deaden the sound entirely. Indeed, as Helen hesitated, with her hand stretched out to seize the portiere, she ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... transported Napoleon with joy. Credulous from hope, perhaps from despair, he was for some moments dazzled by these appearances: eager to escape from the inward feeling which oppressed him, he seemed desirous to deaden it by resigning himself to an expansive joy. He therefore summoned all his generals, and triumphantly announced to them a speedy peace. "They had but to wait another fortnight. None but himself was acquainted with the Russian character. On the receipt of ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... solemnities, honors, and graces, but which can never replace the familiar one that is gone. There was something mournful in the lingering of this aged lady—blind, deaf, and bereaved in her latter years; but she was not mournful, any more than she was insensible. Age did not blunt her feelings, nor deaden her interest in the events of the day. It seems not so very long ago that she said that the worst of living in such a place (as the Lake District), was its making one unwilling to go. It is too beautiful to let one be ready to leave it. Within a few years the beloved daughter ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... nine o'clock and pitch dark when the column moved out of Molteno and struck across the black gloom of the veld, the wheels of the guns being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was known that the distance was not more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and the guides were still unable to say that they had reached their point it must have become ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which I had bought from an Indian fakir once in Murzapoor. The man was an impostor, whose tricks did not impose on me. But the drug, however he came by it, was reliable. It was a poison which produced a mild form of cerebritis that dulled but did not deaden the mental powers. It acted almost identically whether administered sub-cutaneously or, of course in a larger dose, internally. I brought it home with the intention of giving it to a friend who was interested ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the road and down a short, grassy embankment. At Anguish's suggestion Lorry wrapped his handkerchief tightly about the heavy end of his cane, preparing in that way to deaden the sound of the blow that was to fall upon the Vienna man's head. Then they threw aside their hats, buttoned their coats tightly, and sank down to wait, with bounding hearts and tingling nerves, the arrival of the abductors, mutely ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then? Was it what he had lost—the familiar world—rather than what ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... or not, but supposed there was, and, if so, he would be likely to hear the grapnel when we threw it up and it hit the stones. We thought we could get over this difficulty by wrapping the grapnel in cotton wool. This would deaden the sound when it struck, but would not prevent the points of the hooks from holding to the inner edge of the wall. Everything now seemed all right, except that we had no object in view after we got over the wall. I always like to have some reason for doing ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... methods—for disintegrating and scattering, in this way getting ready for use in new forms, that which is hoarded and consequently serving no use. There is also a great law continually operating whose effects are to dwarf and deaden the powers of true enjoyment, as well as all the higher faculties ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... becomes such that, without reasoning, we accept the doctors' reasons. And yet there is one point on which they are beginning to yield and to agree. They are slowly consenting, when there is no hope left, if not to deaden, at least to lull the last agonies. Formerly, none of them would have dared to do so; and, even to-day, many of them hesitate and, like misers, measure out drop by drop the clemency and peace which they grudge and which they ought ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Uncounted Cost. The first and most obvious effect of opium, for example, is to deaden pain and to arouse pleasure; but while the drug is producing these soothing sensations, it interferes with bodily functions. Secretion, digestion, absorption of food, and the removal of waste matters ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... periodical visits to the hollow-tree. It was close on nine o'clock when he passed stealthily down the lane, keeping close to the park wall. A soft rain was falling, the first since the prolonged drought, and though it made the road heavy and slippery in places, it helped to deaden the sound of the young man's furtive footsteps. The air, except for the patter of the rain, was absolutely still. Henri de Montorgueil paused from time to time, with neck craned forward, every sense on the alert, listening, like any poor, hunted beast, for the slightest sound which might betray ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... when the child understands and can reproduce in substance the definition of desert? Far from it! That definition is as dry and barren as the desert itself; it tends to deaden rather than quicken. The pupil must go far beyond the mere cold understanding and reproduction of a topic. He must see the thing talked about, as though in its presence; he must not only see this vividly, but he must ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... passions. Many a scene of blood and crime that pure cold eye had rested on; but on few more ghastly than this, where two men, with a lighted corpse between them, waited panting, to kill and be killed. Nor did the moonlight deaden that horrible corpse-light. If anything it added to its ghastliness: for the body sat at the edge of the moonbeam, which cut sharp across the shoulder and the ear, and seemed blue and ghastly and unnatural by the side of that lurid glow in which the face and eyes and teeth shone horribly. But ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men, any more than with their ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... an event which must, as he believed, whenever it should occur, prove the ruin of his own fortunes. For this purpose, so soon as he saw a cloud upon the brow of the royal stripling, he hastened to devise for him some new and exciting pursuit, which might tend to deaden his remorse for the past, and to render him more conscious of the value of that moral emancipation which he had purchased at so fearful a price; but ere long even this subtle policy failed to dissipate the apprehensions of the favourite. Like all persons who occupy a false position of which ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... history as a colony to intensify the good-nature of our people—at any rate, so far as extravagance in vicarious charity is concerned. Our sensitiveness to suffering has been greatly stimulated by the comparative absence from our towns of those sights of misery and squalor that deaden the feelings by familiarity; and the lavish life we have led since 1870 has made us free-handed to the poor and impatient of the trouble required to find out whether our charity ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... the stranger was out on the path in front of the house. Then, keeping as much as possible in the shadows, the boy followed. He stole along, walking on the sod to deaden his footsteps, and soon found himself on the main highway. Just ahead of him he could see the figure of the man. He tried to see if he knew the stranger, but ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman
... the dark, they suffer At their heart a spasm of fear; And, their inward pain to deaden, Sing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... assembled on deck, it will hear no more noise than the buzzing of a big bee, as the exhaust is led away below the water-line. It won't be bad in the cabins either, even when they keep the sliding door open, for this screen of thick sail-cloth will deaden what sound there is. And it was a smart idea to utilize the power of the magneto to light up the whole ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of marginal seas ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... meaning of this scene. These men had done their best to pervert his morals, and to deaden the voice of his conscience, and now that he had hoped to earn their praise by an affectation of cynicism they were displeased with him. Before, however, he could ask a question, Tantaine ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... of the valley arise other sounds, not all of them loud. The stream, here and there falling in cataracts, does something to deaden them. Only now and then there is the neigh of a horse, and intermittently the bark of one of the bloodhounds, as if these animals had yielded, but yet remain hostile to the intruders. They hear human voices, too, but no shout following that of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... lot of mortals, to endure pain and anguish. When people are ill, the physician is summoned, and in trouble we are at hand. Things are as we take them—the gravest face may have a wart, upon which a jest can be made. When you have once laughed at a misfortune, its sting loses its point. We deaden it—we light up the darkness—even though it be with a will 'o the wisp—and if we understand our business, manage to hack the lumpy dough of heavy sorrow into little pieces, which even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... strong, to deaden This pain; then Roger and I will start. I wonder, has he such a lumpish, leaden, Aching thing, in place of a heart? He is sad sometimes, and would weep, if he could, No doubt, remembering things that were,— A virtuous kennel, with plenty of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... for all those whom they control, and, as soon as that tension is released at the highest point, a perfunctory performance with all its well-known side features, the waste and the idleness, the lack of originality and the unwillingness to take risks, must set in and deaden the work. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... with a deadly insistence upon the masonry of the wall. Meanwhile the enemy from the ramparts are doing their best to set the shed on fire, to break off the ram's head with heavy stones, to pull it upwards by a noose, or to deaden the effect of the shock by lowering stuffed sacks or other buffer material between it and the wall. At another point, in place of the shed, there is rolled forward a lofty construction like a tower ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... dear one! I have described this gentleman in such detail to deaden my heartache. I don't live without you; I am constantly seeing you, hearing you. I look forward to seeing you—only not at our house, as you intended—fancy how wretched and ill at ease we should be!—but you know where I wrote to you—in ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... of the passage, which was silent and padded, as if to deaden the footfall, were narrow little doors, their size and arrangement suggestive of the cells of a Victorian prison. But the upper portion of each door was of the same greenish transparent stuff that had enclosed him at his awakening, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp to deaden its vibrations." ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... There is doubtless a purism in taste, a rigid fantastical demand of perfection, a horror at approaching the limits of impropriety, which obstructs the free impulse of the faculties, and if excessive, would altogether deaden them. But the excess on the other side is much more frequent, and, for high endowments, infinitely more pernicious. After the strongest efforts, there may be little realised; without strong efforts, there must be little. That too much care does hurt in any ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... after Margaret's flight, Arthur Burdon had thrown himself again into the work which for so long had been his only solace. It had lost its savour; but he would not take this into account, and he slaved away mechanically, by perpetual toil seeking to deaden his anguish. But as the time passed he was seized on a sudden with a curious feeling of foreboding, which he could in no way resist; it grew in strength till it had all the power of an obsession, and he could not reason himself out of it. He was sure that a great danger threatened ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... could not conceive of a business partnership failing to be annulled by one partner who brought suit against another; yet we expect the marriage relation to survive this. As a matter of fact, such is its vitality that it often does. But many times the result of court action is only to deaden once and for all the tiny spark from which marital happiness might have been rekindled. As long as it survives, both man and wife feel in their inmost hearts that, no matter what his offense, to "take him to court" is treason against the intangible bonds ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, had ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... a safe weighing three hundredweight some burglars last week used cushions and mats to deaden the sound. We are greatly pleased to note a tendency to study residents a little. After all it is most irritating to be awakened by noisy burglars ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... outward cold But inward chill thy bosom froze, Made thee deny with falsehood bold Thy Lord and Master to his foes. When we find cheer at Satan's fires The world is there to work us harm, To deaden all our pure desires With its deceitful ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... the word to himself a thousand times to deaden his suspense and apprehension. Business affairs took much of his time, but Nan's situation took most of his thought. For the first time he told John Lefever the story of Nan's finding him on Music Mountain, of her aid in his escape, and the sequel of their friendship. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman |
