"Disentangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Venetian genealogies, which continue the family down to 1418 or 19, because it seems to me certain that all of them do more or less confound with our Polos of S. Giovanni Grisostomo, members of the other Polo Family of S. Geremia. It will help to disentangle the subject if we put down what is ascertained regarding ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... certainly was, and the other, whom Sultan had attacked, was scarce likely to look again upon the light of day. The leader of the band had fallen again to the earth, and was enveloped in the folds of the heavy cloak, from which he appeared to be feebly struggling to disentangle himself. The girl followed the direction of the youth's glance, and explained the matter in ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... heart like Cora and the Doctor, they stood there for a long while, till they heard the rumble of wheels on the bridge and knew they must disentangle. ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... heart-strings; he had been told, doubtless, that two daughters made no impression upon the flinty heart of bureaucratic charity, that in order to soften it one must 'increase and multiply.' He had got himself into a network of falsehood from which, though his better nature recoiled, he had been unable to disentangle himself. But then I remembered how even in Russia he had pursued an illegal calling, how he had helped a friend to evade military service, and again I took up my knife. But the face preserved its reproachful dignity, seemed almost to turn the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... hooks, which entered her right leg above the knee. To her brother's injunction, "Make haste!" she could answer only by a pitiful cry, "I am hooked!" He and the workmen hastened immediately to her assistance, but they could not disentangle her without leaving nearly two ounces of her flesh behind. For some weeks she was an invalid, and at one time it was feared that amputation ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... if anything, will disentangle us from the nets," said the captain, addressing the sub-lieutenant. The latter did not reply, but turned on the captain with ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... unsolicited, and she walked on and on. At last she rested her burden on the parapet of a bridge, and saw the London night, blue and gold, vast water rolling, and the spectacle of the stars like a dream from which she could not disentangle her individuality. Was she to die in the star-lit city, she and her child; and why should such cruelty happen to her more than to the next one? Steadying her thoughts with an effort, she said, "Why not go to the workhouse, only for the night?... She did not mind for herself, only she did ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... Downy's webbed feet were fast in Dinah's kinky hair, and it took some time to disentangle them. Then the cook could get up, which she did with many ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at Snow Lodge • Laura Lee Hope
... books; for I am quite convinced that for that sort of study, seeing not reading is required. That would be true enough if every traveller were honest, if he only said what he saw and believed, and if truth were not tinged with false colours from his own eyes. What must it be when we have to disentangle the truth from the web of lies ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... intervals scattered over Europe, whilst 'all that mighty heart' is, by sleep, resting from its labors, secret eyes are lifted up to heaven in astronomical watch-towers; eyes that keep watch and ward over spaces that make us dizzy to remember, eyes that register the promises of comets, and disentangle ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... comrades; I have the floor," continued Greusel. "I am not attempting oratory, but trying to disentangle a skein in which we have involved ourselves. I wish to receive neither applause nor hissing until I have finished the business. You say it is the case. I say it is not. Roland gave Herr Kurzbold the ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... to disentangle this desert-music that their intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins. But he succeeded only in part. Sand was already in the air. There was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the stream into ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... persuaded himself that his guide had deserted him for the present, in order to give intelligence of a traveller to some gang of robbers with whom he was connected; and that he must of necessity fall a prey to those banditti, unless he should have the good fortune to elude their search, and disentangle himself from the mazes of ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Simpleness — N. simpleness &c adj.; purity, homogeneity. elimination; sifting &c v.; purification &c (cleanness) 652. V. render simple &c adj.; simplify. sift, winnow, bolt, eliminate; exclude, get rid of; clear; purify &c (clean) 652; disentangle &c (disjoin) 44. Adj. simple, uniform, of a piece [Fr.], homogeneous, single, pure, sheer, neat. unmixed, unmingled^, unblended, uncombined, uncompounded; elementary, undecomposed; unadulterated, unsophisticated, unalloyed, untinged^, unfortified, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... very intelligent, maintained that Lokhopa and Lokholu went to the Chambeze; I therefore put it down thus. The streams which feed the Chambeze and the Liemba overlap each other, and it would require a more extensive survey than I can give to disentangle them. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... had seen nothing but the bare walls of barrack rooms, the goat-skin of douars, and the canvas of his own camp-tent. To come once more, after so long an interval, amid the old things of luxury and grace that had been so long unseen wrought curiously on him. He could not fairly disentangle past and present. For the moment, as his feet fell once more on soft carpets, and his eyes glanced over gold and silver, malachite and bronze, white silk and violet damasks, he almost thought the Algerian years were a ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions? But the God was the machine. Each man claimed equality in the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man equally was part of this Godhead. But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of applause. Amis ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Social Idea. It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself in a world of egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realities from the stand-point of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is the proper and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Parliament, or even a count of the Holy Roman Empire! He had thought of both these honours, but there was so much to occupy him—he never had a moment to himself, except at night; and then there was planning and accounting to do, his foremen to see, or some knotty thing to disentangle. But when the big clock in the Manor struck ten, and he took out his great antique silver watch, to see if the two marched to the second, he would go to the door, look out into the night, say, "All's well, thank the good God," and would go to bed, very often forgetting to kiss Carmen, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Vaudremont's pride was perhaps more roused than her curiosity to disentangle the thread of this intrigue. In the absorption of mind to which she was a prey she was no longer mistress of herself. The Colonel, interpreting to his own advantage the embarrassment evident in the Countess' manner and speech, became more ardent and pressing. The old blase diplomates, ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... "Plutarch has no clear idea of the different contests carried on in Euboea. He passes on, without a note of transition, from this war in the island (in 349-348 B.C.) to the subsequent war in 341 B.C. Nothing indeed can be more obscure and difficult to disentangle than the sequence of Euboean transactions."—'Hist. of ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... something of the quality of an attempt to clothe and serve hidden purposes. It could not but be evident to him that the effort of Lady Harman to free herself a little from her husband's circumvallation and to disentangle herself a little from the realities of his commercial life, might lead to such a liberation as would leave her like a nascent element ready to recombine. And it was entirely in the vein of this drift of thought in him that he ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Beatrice, who came down the ladder which led to the upper chambers, took in the scene at a glance. She was a bright little girl of ten years old. Setting down the tray in her hand, she first speedily delivered the captive pussy, and then proceeded deftly to disentangle the wool, rolling it up ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... When they came to the inheritance, it was subject to this mighty incumbrance, and it would be criminal in them to rain or waste the estate, to get rid of the burden at once." With this writer we add also, in the language of Captain Hall, that the "slaveholders ought not (immediately) to disentangle themselves from the obligations which have devolved upon them, as the masters of slaves." We believe that a master may sustain his relation to the slave, with as little criminality as the slave sustains his relation to the master.' * * * 'Slavery, in its mildest form, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... and blade of grass, but it didn't help him much; he had to follow every movement of the fish, and was in great danger of being drawn into the water. The girls came up just at the right moment, held him firm, and did all they could to disentangle his beard from the line; but in vain, beard and line were in a hopeless muddle. Nothing remained but to produce the scissors and cut the beard, by which a small ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... but not the longitude (or place in orbit). Before that date Uranus had been hurried along, and after that date it had been retarded, by the pull of Neptune, and thus the observed discrepancies from its computed place were produced. The problem was first to disentangle the outstanding perturbations from those which would be caused by Jupiter and Saturn and all other known causes, and then to assign the place of an outer planet able to produce precisely ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—a rigor that accepts no excuse—and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... tellin' him," or words to that effect; while in reply to his questions, they made statements superficially so clear and simple, and essentially so bewilderingly involved, that the longest experience could do little more for a constable than teach him the futility of wasting his time in attempts to disentangle them. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... are looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it is only when it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can disentangle the main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just so with what is lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye to encompass. But this is no more the case when our recollections have ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suspended in deliberation. But when a design has ended in miscarriage or success, when every eye and every ear is witness to general discontent, or general satisfaction, it is then a proper time to disentangle confusion and illustrate obscurity; to shew by what causes every event was produced, and in what effects it is likely to terminate; to lay down with distinct particularity what rumour always huddles in general exclamation, or perplexes by indigested[909] ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and the proposed marriage but a detail of that scheme. When it fell through, he desired to turn his back upon Cleves and the rest of the German princes; moreover, he had no further need of Cromwell himself, who was rather in the way of his new plans, unless the minister could find a means to disentangle the imbroglio he had created with ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... the happiest part of your life." I guess my Aunt Libby don't know much. I guess she never worked a week to make a kite, and the first time she went to fly it got the tail hitched in a tall tree, whose owner wouldn't let her climb up to disentangle it. I guess she never broke one of the runners of her sled some Saturday afternoon, when it was "prime" coasting. I guess she never had to give her biggest marbles to a great lubberly boy, because ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... will be! and won't mother be glad! and Uncle Zebedee 'ull have somebody to look to now and keep poor Jonathan straight and put things a bit in order;" while Reuben, bewildered by the thoughts which crowded to his mind, semed unable to disentangle them. Could it be possible that he, Reuben May, was going down to live at Polperro, a place whose very name he had once taught himself to abominate?—that he could be willingly casting his lot amid a people whom he had but lately branded as thieves, outcasts, reprobates? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the Anthology between him and his equally prolific namesake of the next century, Antipater of Thessalonica. The matter would take long to disentangle completely. In brief the facts are these. In the Palatine Anthology there are one hundred and seventy-eight epigrams, of which forty-six are ascribed to Antipater of Sidon and thirty-six to Antipater of Thessalonica, the remaining ninety-six being headed "Antipater" merely. ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... conceived, how frequently, in these extemporaneous controversies, the dull will be subtle, and the acute absurd; how often stupidity will elude the force of argument, by involving itself in its own gloom; and mistaken ingenuity will weave artful fallacies, which reason can scarcely find means to disentangle. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had, Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But—not to have known Margarita? Never to have watched ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... me see that! I must see that!" cried Dolly, with all reserve and caution flown; "to see Capp'en Zeb in the arms of a Frenchman—yes, I declare, two have got him, if not three, and he puts his great back against the mast to disentangle it. Oh, what will he do next? He has knocked down two, in reply to excessive cordiality. What wonderful creatures Frenchmen are! How kind it is of you to show me this! But excuse me, Mr. Carne; there will be twenty people coming to the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... so." He straightened. "The only thing to do is to go after them one at a time and disentangle all the conflicting threads. It looks as though there will be any number of possible false leads and so we must be careful and deliberate. I think I'll question each ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... himself about marriage. No, not deceiving himself, for at the bottom of his heart he could hear the truth. Then, why did he continue this,—it was no better than a comedy, an unworthy comedy, from which he did not seem to be able to disentangle himself; he could not say why. He could not understand himself; his brain was on fire, and he knelt down to pray, but when he prayed the thought of bringing a soul home to the fold tempted him like a star, and he asked himself if Kitty had not, in some of their conversations, shown leanings ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... such an interruption as that broke up the performance for the time being, and Toby was obliged to exert all his authority to disentangle the monkey from ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... started in with his accustomed energy to rape the mysteries of the Costly Life, and become the calmest of its lords. On the whole, I think he did it—thoroughly. I have crowded memories, a little difficult to disentangle, of his experimental stages, his experimental proceedings. It's hard at times to say which memory comes in front of which. I recall him as presenting on the whole a series of small surprises, as being again and again, unexpectedly, a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... they did not scruple to teach the instructed believer that some of the stories that were apparently historical were really purely allegorical. Nowhere, perhaps, is it more necessary to understand this than when we are studying the story of Jesus, surnamed the Christ, for when we do not disentangle the intertwisted threads, and see where symbols have been taken as events, allegories as histories, we lose most of the instructiveness of the narrative and much of its rarest beauty. We cannot too much ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... heroically, but with a full recognition of the fact that they are actually taking place and must in due time be introduced and studied. We live in what is par excellence an age of progress, and it is in part for the sake of perceiving the laws of progress that we first disentangle from them the laws of rest and make a separate study of these. The world from which change is excluded is unreal, but the static laws which can be most clearly discerned by mentally creating such a world have reality. Every ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... examination and clarification of purposes, should precede any selection of external instruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless he first had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised the good? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangle and attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of life and the whole ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... strength of the enemy whom he charged. On this occasion greatly superior forces closed in on both flanks of his command, and a part of the enemy driving away Malone's battalion, gained his rear before he could disentangle himself. Quick fighting and fast running alone saved the regiment, but it was a "hard party" to capture, and it got away with a very slight loss in prisoners. Several men in the extreme rear were sabered, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... frozen in his veins, he crept forwards. Oh! what a noise and a whirr rose afresh among the serpents. Thousands of heads were reared, and tongues were stretched out to sting the intruder to death, but happily for him their bodies were so closely entwined one in the other that they could not disentangle themselves quickly. Like lightning he seized a bit of bread, dipped it in the bowl, and put it in his mouth, then dashed away as if fire was pursuing him. On he flew as if a whole army of foes were at his heels, and he seemed to hear the noise of their approach growing nearer and nearer. ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... villain—that walked straight out of the Elephant and Castle into the Second Act were not, I suspect, any elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author's at the expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on to disentangle the complications, though I confess I half thought that the villain, Mr. LAWRENCE LEYTON, was pulling our legs with a quite deliberate burlesque. On the whole I am afraid this play is but another wreck on that old snag of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... most affectedly an humble servant of Mr. Pell)afn, and seems only to have attached himself to the Prince, in order to make the better bargain with the ministry; he has great parts, but they never know how to disentangle themselves from bombast and absurdities. Besides those, there are two young men who make some figure in the rising Opposition, Bathurst(4) attorney to the Prince; and Potter, whom I believe you have had mentioned in my letters of last ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... dear Julia!" exclaimed Miss Tippet, shutting the door of the room into which they had been ushered, and assisting her friend to disentangle herself from the bedclothes. "Oh! what a mercy we've not all been roasted alive like beef steaks—or—oh! what a sight you are, my darling! You must have got it coming down that dreadful thing—the what's-'is-name, you know. Shall I ring ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... man wakes up out of humor. Frowning and gloomy, he clears his throat angrily and looks from under his brows at Yasha who, supporting a bullock with his powerful shoulder and slightly lifting it, is trying to disentangle its leg. ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of our visual sensations likewise lend themselves to the most varied interpretations; by the side of the efficient cause of an event we find a thousand entangled contingencies which appear so important that to disentangle them we are as much perplexed as the savage, who, unable to discriminate between causes and coincidences, returns to drink at the well which has cured him, carefully keeping to the same hour, the same ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... to desecrate his own tomb. But from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some summary by stating the three things in which his influence seems to me thoroughly good and the three in which it seems bad. But for the pleasure ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... life, which is, of course, very stupid; but stupidity and authority always join forces. Capt. Ward, who, with a squad of police, came to save the innocent citizens of Buffalo, asked if we knew the law, and was quite surprised that that was not our trade; that we had not been employed to disentangle the chaos of the law,—that it was his affair to know the law. However, the Captain showed himself absolutely ignorant of the provisions of the American Constitution. Of course, his superiors knew what they were about when they set the Constitution ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... archipelago is very favourable to race-mixture; and as we know that on some islands there were several settlements of Polynesians, it is not surprising to find a very complex mingling of races, which it is not an easy task to disentangle. It would seem, however, that we have before us remnants of four races: a short, dark, curly-haired and perhaps original race, a few varieties of the tall Melanesian race, arrived in the islands in several migrations, an old Polynesian element as a relic of its former ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... easy to go back so many years and take up one thread in the skein of life, and follow that alone. I will disentangle it as rapidly as I can; but first let us have a ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the rest of the world with that indulgent air they assume at musicales. Everything to my unpractised eye seemed in hopeless disorder; a frightful buzz filled the air, and a blond girl at the big piano was trying to disentangle a lot of music. Near her stood a long-haired young man who perspired incessantly. "Ah!" I gloated. "Nervous! serves him right; he should have stayed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... worldly embarrassments which either their ignorance or their improvidence are almost certain at some time or other to bring them into: then, just at the time when we ought to hasten to help them, and disentangle them, and teach them how to manage better in future, we rush forward to pillage them, and force all we can out of them in their adversity. For, to take one instance only, remember this is literally and simply what we do, whenever we buy, or try to buy, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... night, cast a cloak over his shoulders and hurried forth in the hope of meeting him upon his homeward way. His pulses were beating well-nigh as wildly as those of the fever stricken woman upstairs in the house. He dared not pause to reflect on his purpose, or seek to disentangle the confusion of his thoughts, for fear of being confronted with the hopelessness of their folly. But the exquisite serenity of the night sky, where swam the moon, "a silver splendour;" the freshness of the sweeping breeze that ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... enough to continue. We shall come to no conclusion by thinking about it. All rights are alike to the understanding, and it is always easy to throw extra weight into the ascending scale. Do you makeup your mind, my friend, to act, and act promptly, for me and for yourself. Disentangle and untie the knots, and tie them up again. Do not be deterred from it by nice respects. We have already given the world something to say about us. It will talk about us once more; and when we have ceased ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... village where he is to be quartered, has not reached the end of his troubles. It rarely happens that either the squad or the section actually lodges in the place assigned to them, and this by reason of misunderstandings and cross purposes which tangle and disentangle themselves on the spot; and it is only after several quarter-hours of tribulation that each man is led to his actual shelter ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the Nebraska Company had thrown off the drag-weight of local embarrassment, the Kansas line began to disentangle itself from legal complications; and on July 1, 1865, the enterprise passed into the hands of a management which, if powerless to retrieve the past, was at least determined to make the future secure. At the head of this new organization was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... hear this, as it showed that Aunt Agatha was beginning to come round a bit. There had been some unpleasantness a year before, when she had sent me over to New York to disentangle my Cousin Gussie from the clutches of a girl on the music-hall stage. When I tell you that by the time I had finished my operations, Gussie had not only married the girl but had gone on the stage himself, and was doing well, you'll ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... penance, but only to have all swept away again in the wild and wicked revelry with which Easter came in. Again he described how his heart was ready to burst as he stood by Mrs. Woodford's grave at night and vowed to disentangle himself and lead ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for four men abreast; behind them squeezed men in purple with the Howard knot, bearing pikes, and men in mustard yellow with the eagle's wing and ship badge of the Provost of Paris. In the broader space before the arch of Udal's courtyard they stayed to wait for the horsemen to disentangle themselves from the alley; the Englishmen looked glumly at the tall housefronts; the French loosened the mouthplates of their helmets to breathe the air for a minute. Hostlers, packmen and pedlars began to fill the space behind Udal, and he heard his wife's voice calling shrilly ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... at the sight of the terrible skein. If she did but turn it over to see where to begin, she broke a thousand threads, and not one could she disentangle. At last she threw it into the middle ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... lay there, painfully cogitating in a vain endeavour to disentangle the threads of mingled thought that seemed to be inextricably wound together in his throbbing, struggling brain, two warm drops splashed upon his face, and the same low voice that he had heard ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... such illusive predications except by cultivating our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until we are at home with them? But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound propositions, and to expand the abbreviations of literature and conversation, is a useful logical exercise. And if it seem a laborious task thus to reduce to its logical elements a long argument in a speech or treatise, it should be observed that, as a rule, in a long discourse ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... often seen when people are struggling, with introverted effort, to disentangle a thought which is either too high for quick discernment or too subtle ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... proclamation of your own Divinity, with everything that flows therefrom; and all the knowledge that may be gathered, all the investigations that may be made, they are all part of this great scheme. And the reason why all the religions of the world teach the same, when you come to disentangle the essence of their teaching from the shape in which they put it, the reason that they all teach the same is that they are all giving you fragments of knowledge of the other worlds, and these worlds are all more real than the world in which you are; and they all teach the same fundamental ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... miraculous events of the Gospels could be proved never to have occurred, it would not disturb my faith in Christ for an instant. But I am content, as it is, to believe in the possibility of so abnormal a personality being surrounded by abnormal events, though I am not in a position to disentangle the actual truth from the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... enough." Enough? Alas, too much! He felt himself far too forthpushing in—he would not confess more—a solicitude for her which he could not stifle; an inextinguishable wish to disentangle her from the officious care of those by whom she was surrounded—encumbered. "I've no right to this state of mind," he thought; "none." He reached the gate. ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... thought to be utterly devoid of tenderness, were interpreted in a variety of ways by the cackling society of the town, whose gossip often gave rise to fatal blunders, like those relating to the birth of Agathe and that of Max. It is not easy for the community of a country town to disentangle the truth from the mass of conjecture and contradictory reports to which a single fact gives rise. The provinces insist—as in former days the politicians of the little Provence at the Tuileries ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of the last decade of Barneveld's eventful life his personality may come more distinctly forward perhaps than in previous epochs. It will however be difficult to disentangle a single thread from the great historical tapestry of the Republic and of Europe in which his life and achievements are interwoven. He was a public man in the fullest sense of the word, and without his presence and influence the record of Holland, France, Spain, Britain, and Germany ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Selborne, 1785. Everybody is aware that there are better works on Scotland than Pennant's, and better accounts of birds, those of Selborne included, than White's. But we desire the two heirlooms, as their authors left them, pure and simple. We prefer not to have to disentangle the two pieces of eighteenth century workmanship from the editorial and artistic improvements which have overlaid them. A much-edited writer becomes a partner in a limited company without a vote. His pages are converted by degrees into an arena where others commend him ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... while that lady was confusedly trying to disentangle hat and hair, hat-pin and head, without involving the entire system in a common ruin—"Valeria, we are not a remarkable people at Craddock Dene. We may be worthy, we may have our good points, but ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... and extinct forms can be grouped together within a few great classes; and how the several members of each class are connected together by the most complex and radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of the affinities between the members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... alarm; the horses shied simultaneously outward, while down on the ground between them came two souls with but a single thud, two hearts that squelched as one. In spite of the compunction and sympathy I felt, modesty compelled me to glide unobstrusively away, leaving the souls to disentangle themselves and catch their horses the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count's fault for he could not help being what he was—that (though he tried to hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I have given the historical outline of the story; but if we look into Victor Hugo's "Histoire d'un Crime," and disentangle its facts from its hysterics, we may receive from his personal narrative a vivid idea of what passed in Paris from the night of Dec. 1, 1851, to the evening of December 4, when ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... was frequently on our Lord's lips, and that in very various connections. He sometimes, as in the instance before us, appended it to teaching which, from its parabolic form, required attention to disentangle the spiritual truth implied. He sometimes used it to commend some strange, new revolutionary teaching to men's investigation—as, for instance, after that great declaration of the nullity of ceremonial ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rushed into print in 1712 against Swift's Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue were so obviously moved by the spirit of faction that, apart from a few debating points and minor corrections, it is difficult to disentangle their legitimate criticisms from their political prejudices. As Professor Landa has written in his introduction to Oldmiron's Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley and Mainwaring's The British Academy (Augustan ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... nor by any other such contrivance, but by a very intricate knot of gold cord. There appeared to be no end to this knot, and no beginning. Never was a knot so cunningly twisted, nor with so many ins and outs, which roguishly defied the skilfullest fingers to disentangle them. And yet, by the very difficulty that there was in it, Pandora was the more tempted to examine the knot, and just see how it was made. Two or three times, already, she had stooped over the box, and taken the knot between her thumb and forefinger, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Simpleness. — N. simpleness &c. adj.; purity, homogeneity. elimination; sifting &c. v.; purification &c. (cleanness) 652. V. render simple &c. adj.; simplify. sift, winnow, bolt, eliminate; exclude, get rid of; clear; purify &c. (clean) 652; disentangle &c. (disjoin) 44. Adj. simple, uniform, of a piece[Fr], homogeneous, single, pure, sheer, neat. unmixed, unmingled[obs3], unblended, uncombined, uncompounded; elementary, undecomposed; unadulterated, unsophisticated, unalloyed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to play with, like a tin steam-engine, and then to throw aside. If you once get caught in the net of scouting, you will never disentangle yourself. A fellow may grow up and put on long trousers and go and call on a girl and all that sort of thing, but if he was a Scout, he will continue to be a Scout, and it will stick out all over him. You'll find him back in the troop as assistant or ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... you care to listen. And, what's more, I'll tell it briefly, without trimmings—I mean without unessentials. That's a thing story-tellers never do, you know," she laughed. "They drag in all the unessentials and leave their listeners to disentangle; but I'll give you just the essentials, and you can make of it what you please. But on one condition: that at the end you ask no questions, because I can't explain it and have ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... been in operation since 1907, and the whole political circumstances of Finland have undergone so many striking changes, and so many new factors are at work that to disentangle particular causes and effects is an impossibility. But plainly the Finnish machinery gives a greater freedom to the elector than the Belgian system. The Finnish system in fact encourages the electors to arrange ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... modern world. The past and the present are one and inseparable, and you cannot destroy the former without doing positive damage to the latter. The roots of our civilization lie in the soil of antiquity, and you cannot destroy and disentangle the fibers of the growing tree of civilization from the far-off centuries that are gone, without injuring the whole organism. "If we were to wipe out all the records of the past, what a series of inexplicable riddles would our own history present, and if we were to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... was compelled to step over the traces of some of the other dogs. One of them, in fear of the whip handle, sprang away as Marks approached, and in the movement wrapped its trace around the man's foot. Marks stooped to disentangle his foot, and as he did the dog swung in another direction in an effort ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... exception of the No. 1 in charge, was wounded. Three of their number were temporarily buried by the earth thrown up by the explosion, and it was probably due to that fact that no one was killed. The pit naturally fell to bits and the debris was indescribable, but the Sergeant managed to disentangle himself, and, standing stiffly to attention, reported to the officer on duty, "No. 2 gun out of action, sir!" No time was lost in digging out the injured men, and it was only found necessary to evacuate three of the number to the nearest ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... went well as far as the entrance to the forest; but there the millionnaire, little accustomed to walk over the stumps of underwood and amongst the thorns, he began to drop into the rear, stopping every now and then to rest against some tree, or disentangle his legs from some yards of bramble, puffing and blowing, and ejaculating Oh's! and ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... situation and the demands of hygiene, and now the moral situation and the demands of religion; now the influence on the feministic movement, and now on art and social life; now the situation in the educated middle classes, and now in the life of the millions. We ought to disentangle the various threads in this confusing social tissue and follow each by itself. We shall see soon enough that not only the various elements of the situation awake very different demands, but that often any single feature may lead to social postulates ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... was not room to move for the cats and dogs in the house. 'Lenotchka,' he would shout to her, 'come quickly, here's a spider eating a fly; come and save the poor wretch!' And Lenotchka, all excitement, would run up, set the fly free, and disentangle its legs. 'Well, now let it bite you a little, since you are so kind,' her father would say ironically; but she did not hear him. At ten years old Elena made friends with a little beggar-girl, Katya, and used to go secretly to meet her in the garden, took her nice things to eat, ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... Unquestioning, before which, in your perplexity, Fate forces you—at least once in your life—to bow the head. It makes us wonder if we should believe all the evidences of Immortality we do—were Immortality really a state of Punishment and not of Happiness unspeakable. It is so hard, so very hard, to disentangle our own desires from our own beliefs; so easy to confuse what we ought to believe with what, beyond all else, we want to believe. It sometimes makes one chary of believing anything—in questions Human as well as Eternal. The "Personal Bias"—ever in our ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... own. The Shakespearean drama must incorporate somewhere within its vast limits the personal thoughts and passions of its creator, even although they are for the most part absorbed past recognition in the mighty mass, and no critical chemistry can with confidence disentangle them. At any rate, there are in the plays many utterances—ethical utterances, or observations conceived in the spirit of "a natural philosopher"—which are repeated to much the same effect at different periods ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the French muskets, a feat not the least marvellous in a marvellous fight, and then sent them furiously at the exulting French, who held a strong position amongst the rocks. It is always difficult to disentangle the confusion which marks a great fight. Napier says that it was Cameron who formed line with the 38th under a violent fire, and, without returning a shot, ran in upon the French grenadiers with the bayonet and hurled them triumphantly ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... woman. So far from this being the case, she was still the moving spirit, the chief conductor of the establishment. Whenever any difficulty arose that required an effort of ingenuity and sagacity, she was able in the homeliest words to disentangle it so happily, that those who heard her wondered that it should at all have appeared to them as a difficulty. She was everywhere. In Peter's farm-yard her advice was as excellent and as useful as in her own shop. On his farms she was the better agriculturist, and she frequently set him right ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... take care of the dog, my dear colonel!' cried she; 'for this kind of dog seizes his enemy by the back, and shakes him to death.' The officers, holding their sides, laughed, and begged—no pardon; while Lord Colambre, the only person who was not absolutely incapacitated, tried to disentangle the spur, and to liberate the colonel from the goat, and the goat from the colonel; an attempt in which he at last succeeded, at the expense of a considerable portion of the goat's beard. The eagle, however, still kept his place; and, yet mindful of the wrongs of his insulted friend the ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... patriotic prophecy. They may never have sufficiently realized that this better future, just in so far as it is better, will have to be planned and constructed rather than fulfilled of its own momentum; but at any rate, in seeking to disentangle and emphasize the ideal implications of the American national Promise, I am not wholly false to the accepted American tradition. Even if Americans have neglected these ideal implications, even if they ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... attempt to give you an idea of those scenes which pleased us most, dropping the incidents of the ordinary days, of which many have slipped from my memory, and others which remain it would be difficult, and often painful to me, to endeavour to draw out and disentangle from other thoughts. I the less regret my inability to do more, because, in describing a great part of what we saw from the time we left Kenmore, my work would be little more than a repetition of what I have said before, or, where it was not so, a longer time was necessary to enable ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... let go entirely. You do not even need to look after them to see what he does with them. Your little child comes to you with a tangled cord. It gives it over into your hands, but holds to one end. Now, you know that in order to get the tangle out, you must have both ends. O weary one, Jesus will disentangle all the cares of life, but you must let him have both ends. He does not want your help. You hinder him if you attempt to help him. Cares will come; things that are of a trying nature will assail us as long as we live; but we have a refuge in Jesus; he will bear ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... affectation. To alter is more easy than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence. Those who saw that they must employ conjecture to a certain degree, were willing to indulge it a little further. Had the authour published his own works, we should have sat quietly down to disentangle his intricacies, and clear his obscurities; but now we tear what we cannot loose, and eject what we happen ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... have ensued! Chandler, Wade, Trumbull, Sumner, Stevens, all hurrying to join issue on the dictatorship; to get it before the country ahead of emancipation. Rather, one can not imagine Lincoln daring to play this second card, so soon after the first, except with abundant time for the two issues to disentangle themselves in the public mind ere Congress met. And that was what happened. When the Houses met in December, the Jacobins found their position revolutionized. The men who, in July at the head of the Vindictive coalition, dominated Congress, were now a ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson |
