"Effortless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we have received one of those perfect letters from Mary, one of those letters that seem almost to have written themselves, so easily do the words flow, so bubbling and effortless is their spontaneity. There is a great deal in the letter about Mary, not only about what she has been doing, but what she has been thinking, or perhaps, feeling. And there is a lot about us in the letter—nice things, that make us feel rather pleased about something that we have ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... life, to soar up coaxing inclines and slip down easy grades in the powerful car. "No more Teals for me," he cried, in the ecstasy of handling an engine that slowed to a demure whisper, then, at a touch of the accelerator, floated up a rise, effortless, joyous, humming the booming song of the joy in speed. He suddenly hated the bucking tediousness of the Teal. The Gomez-Dep ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... certain care in the selection of the words, but with ease and an absence of effort, as though languages were instinctive to him—as though he could speak any language. And he impressed one with this same effortless facility in all the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... me a lot," Cal said to the two E's, following the review, "that Eden should be more favorable to effortless human existence than Earth." ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... strain of giving herself so generously and whole-heartedly had worn upon the girl disastrously, and—she had had warning and hadn't heeded. Until recently, it is true, Elsie's blithe buoyancy had seemed always the normal, unconscious, almost effortless efflorescence of a lovely nature, as natural as playful grace to a kitten, as simple as breathing. But once or twice back in the fall, Miss Pritchard had been startled into wondering if the sweet instrument wasn't in danger of being strained through constant playing upon it, and ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... question made me suddenly stoop down and lay my fingers on the dead man's open palm. I was conscious as I did so of the extraordinary, appealing helplessness of his hands—instead of being clenched in a death agony as I should have expected they were stretched wide; they looked nerveless, limp, effortless. But when my fingers came to the nearest one—the right hand—I found that it was stiff, rigid, stone-cold. I knew then that Salter Quick had been dead for several hours; had probably been lying there, murdered, all through the darkness ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... was an almost imperceptible nod, but it was enough for Biff, and he dashed out of that door. Half a block ahead of him he saw Ripley hurrying, and took after him with that light, cat-like run which is the height of effortless and noiseless speed. Ripley, looking back hastily, hurried into a saloon, and he had scarcely closed the door when Biff entered after him, in time to see his man standing at the telephone, receiver in hand. It was the work of but an instant to grab Ripley by the arm and jerk him away from the ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... the left, hesitate or hurry in crossing the road, recognise and act upon the bicycle bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process of inference to guide the same group of impulses. Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the more distant purposes of his life that the man enters on a region of definitely rational thought where the dog cannot ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... intellectual athlete in him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in every equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... not bear a very close examination for aesthetic purposes. But, as I watch these vessels drifting down through the golden afternoon, or cheerily beating up against the tide on a breezy morning, the man at the wheel is a very model of unconscious grace and almost effortless ascendency; and his shipmates, grouped about him like floating lotos-eaters, have ever a touch of the fine old Ulyssean vagrancy. Now and then there stands out before the breeze and the sunlight a great canvassed ship, like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... modeled with extraordinary speed, yet his movements had none of the lightning swoops and darts of Stefan's method. Each motion of his powerful hands might have been preordained; they seemed to move with a deliberate and effortless precision, so that she would hardly have realized their speed had the head and face not leaped under them into being. He was a silent worker, yet she felt companioned; the man's presence seemed to fill the ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... were clear marks of violence. I found the old man's body in the moonlight Hanging beneath the window of his chamber, Among the branches of a pine: he could not Have fallen there, for all his limbs lay heaped 75 And effortless; 'tis true there was no blood... Favour me, Sir; it much imports your house That all should be made clear; to tell the ladies ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... labyrinth it was, all long silent and inactive. Again the weird contrast struck Ken, for outside he could still see the scene of vigorous, curious life that the sealmen constituted. Close they came to the submarine's sheer walls of quarsteel, peering in stolidly, then flashing away with an effortless thrust of flippers, sometimes for air from some break in ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... him in what some have thought his noblest work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious—a great, religious painter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian, adapted, it was said, from an ancient statue, yet as novel in design as if Titian had been the first to handle that so familiar figure in old religious art—may represent for us a vast and varied amount of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the original genius of a people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... art of one who walked through the world of things endowed with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape and clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistibly recorded by Homer as the ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... one-and-twenty. In form, she was a perfect woman, light, rounded, and extremely active; all her motions were as graceful, and as undulating as the gently-swelling billow. If she moved quickly, she bounded; if slowly, she appeared to glide on effortless through space. She had taken her lessons of grace in the woods, and her gymnasium had been among the sportive billows of the ocean. It is but of little use me describing her face; for everyone supposes that, in these affairs, the author draws at once, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... me. Secretly, perhaps, neither of us wanted to give the other a chance by stooping for a heavy girl; I knew I was not going to do it. But Paulette must have feared I was. She sprang past me and lifted Marcia with smooth, effortless strength, as if ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... phenomenon to observe how all these young minds, sprung from a stock of such ancient, unquestioning faith, had, so to say, been born "poisoned;" or, to state the matter less metaphorically, had all been born with instincts for the most pitiless and effortless reasoning on ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... cares of a household in which the mother was lacking, the engrossing thoughts which wake with the dawn and which the night puts to sleep, unless it renews them in dreams—one of those instances of indefatigable but apparently effortless devotion, very convenient for poor human selfishness, because it dispenses with all gratitude and hardly makes itself felt, its touch is so light. She was not one of the courageous girls who work to support their parents, give ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... towering, and far-spreading branches under which they lay, effectually protected them from a July sun, which threw its scorching brilliancy over the whole landscape before them. They seemed to enjoy to the full that delightful retired openness which an English park affords, and that easy effortless communion which only old companionship can give. They were, in fact, fellow collegians. The one, Reginald Darcy by name, was a ward of Mr Sherwood, the wealthy proprietor of Lipscombe Park; the other, his friend, Charles Griffith, was passing a few days with him in this agreeable retreat. They had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... stairs and his hurrying, unequal footsteps on the empty street. Cosgrave and Connie Edwards nodded to one another and took hands and were gone. Francey, too, slipped to her feet. She gathered up her hat and coat, her silence effortless. She did not so much as glance at Robert, but at the head of the steep, ladder-like ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... not exist; and that pretence is the end of art and beauty in all things made by man. There is a close connexion between the idea of life expressed in Aristotle's ideal man and the later Greek sculpture. The aim of that sculpture, as of his ideal man, was proud and effortless perfection. Both dread the confession of failure above all things—and both are dull. In Aristotle's age art had started upon a long decline, which ended only when the pretence of perfection was killed, both in art and in life, by Christianity. Then the real ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... spoken, which leadeth The erring from darkness and night; There's an effortless action that sheddeth A sun-world of gladdening light; There's a sweet something-nothing which bringeth A fore-taste of Paradise bliss: Full and large is the love that up-springeth From kind words, a smile, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... had spoken, I was sorry, for some sixth sense told me I had hurt him. With a lithe, effortless grace he rose from his chair and faced me, and his smile, half amused, half tolerant, curved his ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... and rhythm both, when repeated to him a few times with scanning emphasis, took root in that fertile brain which piled his compact forehead so powerfully above his piercing, deep-set eyes, and fell from his infant lips in silvery melody as effortless and spontaneous as the trickling of water or the singing of birds in ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... loin cloth, the man was naked, his smooth skin tanned to a deep brown by the action of sun and wind. He moved with the graceful ease of a jungle cat and when he lifted heavy weights, the action seemed as effortless as the raising ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... vigorous, absorbed attention in a library, gaining strength of mind by resolute encountering of difficulties, by personal effort, we sit around for a month or a season in a club, expecting somehow to take the information by effortless contiguity with it. A book which we could master and possess in an evening we can have read to us in a month in the club, without the least intellectual effort. Is there nothing, then, in the exchange of ideas? Oh yes, when there are ideas to exchange. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... work, or under the lash of some sort of excitement; and as a consequence to our obtaining a sense of real well-being only from the spare energy which accumulates during idleness. Moreover, under our present conditions (as under those of slave-labour) "work" is rarely such as calls forth the effortless, the willing, the pleased attention. Either in kind or length or intensity, work makes a greater demand than can be met by the spontaneous, happy activity of most of us, and thereby diminishes the future ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... ejaculated, their eyes growing the wider as their lips moistened. For behold, the eggs were now cooked to a turn; the long-handled pan was being lifted with the effortless skill of long practice, the omelette was rolled out at just the right instant of consistency, and was being as quickly turned into its ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... unaware of anything unusual in her demeanour. He talked throughout dinner in his calm, effortless drawl, and gradually under its soothing influence she ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... you. See to it that who or what you touch gives you strength, not weakness; uplifts, not debases. The aspiring athlete does not seek to match his strength against inferiors. These give him- -easy victory. Contact with them is for him effortless; they tend to draw him to their plane. Rather, being wise, he shuns them to pit his prowess against such as can give him best, from whom he may learn, out of whom he will take virtue, by whom he will be raised to all that is best in him. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... by that time been dead in me, it might have been pain to me to watch him accomplish unswervingly with his effortless genius the things I had once dreamt ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Fall of Rome now sounded for all aboard. It was a dramatic moment, the possibilities of which suddenly gripped Mrs. Tinneray. She clasped her hands in effortless agony. This lady, as she afterward related to Mrs. Bean, felt mean! She could see in her mind's eye, she said, how it all looked to Hetty Cronney, the Fall of Rome with its opulent leisurely class of excursionists ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... day, the forward partition of the new cabin, fitting his boards meticulously, and driving home each nail with hammer strokes that seemed smooth and effortless, yet sank the nail to the head in an instant. He looked up over his ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... about the same time he formally graduated in serious poetry with his tragedy of Medea. For ten or twelve years afterwards he continued to throw off elegiac poems, some light, others serious, but all alike in their easy polish, and written from the very first with complete and effortless mastery of the metre. To this period belong the Heroides, the later pieces in the Amores, the elaborate poem on the feminine toilet called De Medicamine Faciei, and other poems now lost. Finally, in 2 or 1 B.C., he published what is perhaps ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure, Serenely far there swam in the sunny height A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure Swirling and poising idly in golden light. On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along, So effortless and so strong, Cutting each other's paths, together they glided, Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided Two valleys' width (as though it were delight To part like this, being sure they could unite So swiftly in their empty, free dominion), Curved headlong downward, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... effortless thou glidest on, As doth the swan upon the yielding water, And with a cheek like alabaster cold! But as thou didst divide the amorous air Just opposite the Astor, and didst lift That vail of languid lashes to look in At Leary's ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... thing in the world, even if a man is in good physical condition. There was less weight to contend with, but the mass that had to be pushed along remained the same. The notion that running on Luna was an effortless breeze was one that ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hunting, and Helene had ensured their seclusion from any one who might drop in by a whispered word to the hall porter as they passed into the house. It seemed to her that she had never found Mr. Sabin more entertaining, had never more appreciated his rare gift of effortless and anecdotal conversation. What a marvelous memory! He knew something of every country from the inside. He had been brought at various times during his long diplomatic career into contact with most of the interesting people in ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Wait until, for yourself, you've thought out the consequences,"—that was the voice of cowardice. If she turned back, down the easier path, to-night, it must be under no delusion that she'd ever try to climb again, or find a pair of magic wings that would carry her, effortless, to what she wanted. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... armour of his little world fell away from him. He leaned forward, and looked into the eyes of the woman he loved, and it seemed to him that she sang back to him with a sudden note of something like passion breaking here and there through the gay mocking words which flowed with such effortless and seductive music ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and halt instantly in a new shape; and evenly and steadily the ranked fours swing off, turn out into the road, and go tramping down between the poplars. There has been no flurry, no hustle, no confusion. The whole thing has moved with the smoothness and precision and effortless ease of a properly adjusted, well-oiled machine—which, after all, is just what the regiment is. The pace is apparently leisurely, or even lazy, but it eats up the miles amazingly, and it can be kept up with the shortest of halts from ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... end of us. I had unslung my rifle and held it in full view resting on my thigh, being minded to look as murderous as possible, but she stole all my thunder by suddenly snatching the rifle away and drawing back its bolt to cock the spring with that almost effortless adroitness that ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... those great churches abroad to become soft, melted, able to act. I remember in some cathedral we left little Edy sitting down below while we climbed up into the clerestory to look at some beautiful piece of architecture. The choir were practicing, and suddenly there rose a boy's voice, pure, effortless, and clear.... For years that moment stayed with me. When we came down to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... our carelessness in remaining was due in part to the exhausted state to which we had been reduced, and which made us all rejoice in the comfort of effortless days rather than ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... calm of the mind, the heart and the soul; peace physical, intellectual and moral. In looking at the Hermes they saw, or seemed to themselves to see, the goal, what struggling humanity is meant for—the perfect poise, all faculties under effortless ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... On the other hand, it is not only by the spontaneous development of the implanted life, but by conscious and continuous efforts which sometimes involve vigorous repression of the old self that progress is realised. The two metaphors of our text have to be united in our experience. Neither the effortless growth of the tree nor the toilsome work of the builder suffice to represent the whole truth. The two sides of deep and still communion, and of strenuous effort based on that communion, must be found in the experience of every Christian who has received Christ, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... light was winking on a switchboard. Friday watched the Hawk move in his quick, effortless way to it and pull a lever down, all in the same motion, and then the negro's neck muscles corded as he listened to the sounds that came, choking and barely intelligible, from ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... himself to the car's controls Sutter chose Highway 56 for a driving lesson. He tooled the electric runabout up into the third level, purred out across state at an effortless two hundred, then descended via a cloverleaf to ground tier and entered a maze of subsidiary roads that ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... severity, if the proprietor expected to meditate in that thing? This doubt at least seemed legitimate. Meditation seems to belong to sailing rather than rowing; there is something so gentle and unintrusive in gliding effortless beneath overhanging branches and along the trailing edges of clematis thickets;—what a privilege of fairy-land is this noiseless prow, looking in and out of one flowery cove after another, scarcely stirring the turtle from his log, and leaving no wake behind! It seemed as if all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... expanse of burnt land, upon which the snow was crusted and the road was on a down grade. The team that had panted so hard, with lolling tongues, threw itself into the collars and trotted off again, briskly, while Stefan followed with the short-stepped and effortless flat-footed run that covers so much ground in the north. The girl had to balance herself rather carefully at times, for the surface was by no means a level one. The toboggan swayed and bumped over hidden things that may ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... of its activity, and moreover, his fundamental ideas were so clear that everything fell into lines spontaneously without his being conscious of it later. This "working'' of the imagination is so effortless to fortunate natures that it becomes an ordinary movement. Thus Goethe tells of an imaginary flower which broke into its elements, united again, broke again, and united in another form, etc. His ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides, they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard brought himself to shatter the ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... profusion of perching birds, fly-catchers, finches, and thrushes, that appear in the open country, afford sufficient quarry for the raptorial and predatory species—eagles, hawks, and falcons—whose daring sweeps and effortless undulations are striking objects ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... summit. There we were treated to a short lecture by Professor Owen on the Solan Goose, which was illustrated by the clouds of geese flying over us. They freely exhibited their habits on land as well as in mid-air, and skimmed the dizzy crags with graceful and apparently effortless motions. The vast variety of seafowl screamed their utmost, and gave a wonderfully illustrative chorus to the lecture. It was a most impressive scene. We were high above the deep blue sea of the German Ocean, the waves of which leapt up as if they ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... impressions were merged in a sense of ease, of suavity, of full-blown harmony. Here was no pomp of anatomical lore, of cunning handicraft, but the life seemed to circulate strong and gentle in this exquisite effortless body. And the creature was not merely alive with a life more harmonious than that of living men or carved marbles, but beautiful, equally in simple outline if you chose that, and in subtle detail when that came under your notice, with a beauty ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... blue eyes answering this icy brilliance as they dazzle back from the tawny countenance, with every muscle rippling grace and vigor to meet the proud volition, lithely cutting the air, swifter than the swallow's wing in its arrowy precision, careless as the floating flake in effortless motion, skimming along the lucid sheathing that answers his ringing heel with a tune of its own, and swaying in his almost aerial medium, lightly, easily, as the swimming fish sways to the currents of the tide. Scoring whitely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... a place of which the influence and magic were not good. Even in May, when the lilacs frothed into purple, paved the lawn with shadows, steeped the air with scent; when soft leaves lipped each other consolingly; when blackbirds sang, fell in their effortless way from the green height to the green depth, and sang again—still, something that haunted the place set the heart fluttering. No place is its own, and that which is most stained with old tumults has ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... and they were very serene and calm and confident. She smiled at him, and the new contours into which her face fell with the smile were more perfect than before. He watched the turn of her head, and the grace of the movement was the uttermost effortless grace one dreams that a queen should have. The heart of Ste. Marie quickened in him, and he would have gone down ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... precise, the swinging stride was practised only by Mr. Bross; P. Sybarite, instinctively aware that any such mode of locomotion would ill become one of his inches, contented himself with keeping up—his gait an apparently effortless, tireless, and comfortable amble, congruent with bowed shoulders, bended head, introspective eyes, and his aspect in general of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boom-town's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here and there across the sod, with a peculiar noiseless, effortless motion that made them seem as calm, lazy, and unsubstantial as the mist through which they made their way; even the sound of passing wagons was a sort of low, well-fed, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... his raft with all his earthly possessions bestowed about him, awaiting the rains and freshets that were to waft him effortless into a newer country where he should have a white man's chance. At last the rains came, and he cast off from the bank at that unsalubrious spot where his father had elected to build his cabin on a strip of level bottom subject to periodic inundation. Wishing fully ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... his feet. Mr. Pike, with the back of same right hand, open, smote the man on the side of the face. The loud smack of the impact was startling. The mate's strength was amazing. The blow looked so easy, so effortless; it had seemed like the lazy stroke of a good-natured bear, but in it was such a weight of bone and muscle that the man went down sidewise and rolled off the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... life dragged on, devoid of occupation, and successive days only brought back the same monotonous hours. Tomorrow had ceased to be; she lived like a bird: sure of her food and ready to perch and roost on any branch which she came to. This certainty of food and drink left her lolling effortless for whole days, lulled her to sleep in conventual idleness and submission as though she were the prisoner of her trade. Never going out except to drive, she was losing her walking powers. She reverted ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility, contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work. Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick. Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace, the wild bird-like ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... forces in religious life, then the vaster scientific conclusions of the latter part of the nineteenth century offered a new definition of deliverance. It was not, after all, so much in the travail of the soul as in a serene and effortless self-commitment to a power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, that we were to be saved. We had only to push out upon tides which asked of us neither rudder nor oar, to be brought to our appointed havens. How greatly we have been disillusioned ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... the health habits that should become instinctive and effortless for every worker? What acts can we make our lower nerve centers—our subconscious selves—do for us or remind us to do? The following constitutes a daily routine that should be as involuntary as ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... of peace that was invading her—an odd courage quite unfamiliar—an effortless pluck that had suddenly become the most natural thing in the world to this girl, who, until then, had clutched her courage desperately in both hands, commended her soul to God, her body to ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... sphere of religious faith. It sustains afterwards natural changes from the sincere action of the fear or fancy of successive generations; it takes new color from their manner of life, and new form from their changing moral tempers. As long as these changes are natural and effortless, accidental and inevitable, the story remains essentially true, altering its form, indeed, like a flying cloud, but remaining a sign of the sky; a shadowy image, as truly a part of the great firmament of the human ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... traditional sculptural motive. Its treatment is beautifully educated and its effect refined, chaste, and elevated in an extraordinary degree. No master ever steered so near the reef of "clock-tops," one may say, and avoided it so surely and triumphantly. The figure is light as air and wholly effortless at the same time. There has rarely been such a distinguished success in circumventing the great difficulty of sculpture—which is to rob marble or metal of its specific gravity and make it appear light and buoyant, just as the difficulty of the painter is to give weight and substance to ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... morning; the old red palace of the Cardinal seemed to slumber amid its trees, as if the passage of the centuries had stroked and soothed it into indolent peace. The meadows rested; even the swallows, the restless swallows, glided in an effortless way through the busy air. I could see this, and yet I did not quite enjoy it; something drew me away from perfect contentment, and gradually it dawned upon me that it was the current causing an unsuspected amount of labour in sculling. The forceless particles of water, so yielding ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... labour and repose, society and solitude, music and silence. Sleep comes to them not as it does to us, with a darkening of the vision and a folding of the wings of the spirit, but with an opening of the eyes to deeper and fuller light, and with an effortless outgoing of the soul upon broader currents of life, as the sun-loving bird poises and circles upward, without a wing-beat, ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... Randolph, in an effortless platitude, "liking is the great mystery—whether you take its coming ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... laughter at Mabane's toast. The tragedy of a few hours ago seemed to have passed already from her mind. She was all charm and irresponsibility. The gaunt, bare room, which for years had mocked all our efforts at decoration, seemed suddenly a beautiful place. Easily, and with the effortless grace of her fifteen years, she laughed her way into ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... attitudes at the wheel, with their sinewy hands upon the spokes, now drawing them gently toward them a few inches only to push them as far away again a minute or two later. It looked ridiculously easy; yet there was grandeur in the thought that, by these simple, effortless movements, the destiny of the ship and all within her was to a large extent controlled. There was something almost sublime, to her imagination, in the ability to "guide the furrowing keel on its way along the trackless deep," as she expressed it to herself; ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon—modesty entirely forbids that—but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... occasions, was surprised to note the ease with which Philip entered into the duties of host, making his guests comfortable with the sort of effortless charm that usually comes only with much experience of entertaining. She realized it was the same adaptability he had shown among the mountain folk, and among the simple people of his own parish; and she began to be ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... to hold my attention, or, rather, to have my heart held, without wavering, upon the one supreme reality, the sheer fact of God. These are the moments that I feel to be true worship. These are the times when the effort to have faith is superseded by an effortless assurance born of actual experience. God's reality is felt in every fibre of the soul and brings convincement even to ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... was that she attracted him as well as repelled him. His own daughter had never interested him in that way. Mary moved along frictionless grooves, and to forecast her actions was so effortless that it was automatic. But Polly! many-hued, protean-natured, he never knew what she was ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... those men who could not understand effortless faith; he was crushed by his own lack of success, and bowed down by his own failure. Since he could not rout the enemy single-handed, he believed that the battle was against the Hosts of the Lord. He knew ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... genuine relief and satisfaction of the men there stirred vaguely the thought of the mysteriousness of women, of the entire female sex. Mrs. Haim, charwoman, was just as mysterious as any other woman. As for George, despite the exhilaration which he could feel rising in him effortless and unsought, he was preoccupied by more than women's mysteriousness; the conception of destiny lingered and faintly troubled him. It was as though he had been walking on a clear path through a vast and empty and safe forest, and the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... went back to her guests, and with the effortless ease of long training, she became once more the gracious and tactful hostess. But in her heart, the fear had grown a little stronger, and a specter walked by her side. Once during the evening, her husband looked at her questioningly, and she breathed a few words ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... discerned in habit is economy. Habitual acts do not have to be actively directed by consciousness. While they are being performed, consciousness may be otherwise engaged. "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." While you are brushing your hair or tying your shoes, your mind may be engaged in memorizing poetry or calculating arithmetical problems. Habit is ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... was beside the rider of the stallion, and the man was whistling one of those melodies which defied repetition. It simply ran on and on, smoothly, sweeping through transition after transition, soaring and falling in the most effortless manner. Now it paused, now it began again. It was never loud, but it carried like the music of a bird on wing, blown by the wind. There was about it, also, something which escaped from the personal. He began ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One idea only still ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... for games some boys were playing baseball with much hoarse hooting and frenzied action. He drew near to watch. The ball, misdirected, sailed suddenly toward him. He ran backward at its swift approach, leaped high, caught it, and with a long curving swing, so easy as to appear almost effortless, sent it hurtling back. The lad on the pitcher's mound made as if to catch it, changed his mind, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or definite effect. To describe, one must first of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender greening of April meadows.' I, therefore, more than suspect that the brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy. A pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... characters of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the sunken Polynesian continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of Memphis, nothing. Nothing! They have been tried, and were ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... with a story told to Conwell by an old Arab as the two journeyed together toward Nineveh, and, as you listen, you hear the actual voices and you see the sands of the desert and the waving palms. The lecturer's voice is so easy, so effortless, it seems so ordinary and matter-of-fact—yet the entire scene is instantly vital and alive! Instantly the man has his audience under a sort of spell, eager to listen, ready to be merry or grave. He has the faculty of control, the vital quality ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... and gives a feeling to the listener that the singer, whose work he has enjoyed, has even more in reserve than he has given out. That sense of reserve force is one of the greatest triumphs of art. It is largely the result of effortless breathing, in which it is not necessary or even desirable that the singer always should strive to fill the lungs to the utmost, since that induces an obvious effort which diminishes the listener's enjoyment. Moreover, effort goes against the economy of nature. By keeping this in ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... El Sangre softly. The stallion responded with the faintest of whinnies to the vibrant power in the voice of the master; and at that smooth, effortless pace, he glided down the hillside, weaving dexterously among the jagged outcroppings of rock. A period had been placed after Terry's old life. And this was how he ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... referred to, and entirely lacks the feeling of reaction, or of mental effort. In this case there is no distinct reference to the needs of the self, and a lack of that focusing of attention necessary to give the consciousness a meaning and purpose in the life of the individual. All such passive, or effortless, states of consciousness, which make up those portions of mental existence in which no definite presentation seems to hold the attention, although falling within the sphere of the scientific psychologist, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... no judge of racing, but I love the aspect of sleek, slim horses, and I could applaud a skill in which I had no share. I can keep my seat on most four-legged beasts, but my horsemanship is a clumsy, rough-and-ready affair, very different from the effortless grace of your true cavalier. Mr. Grey's prowess, especially, filled me with awe. He would leap an ugly fence without moving an inch in his saddle, and both in skill and the quality of his mounts he was an easy victor. The sight of such accomplishments ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... bird stands upon the ground, suffices to lift its feet clear. Their movements when in the air are very majestic and beautiful to the eye, being in every respect identical with those of our common hen or red-tailed hawk. They sail along in the same calm, effortless, interminable manner, and sweep around in the same ample spiral. The shape of their wings and tail, indeed their entire effect against the sky, except in size and color, is very nearly the same as that of the hawk mentioned. A dozen ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... were in front of me, speaking the Martian tongue, while I stood looking backward every few steps, delighted to trace the broad river of the canal winding through the desolation for miles beyond. Then I noticed how rapid and effortless is motion in Mars. Volition is so easy and penetrating, the body becomes a mere plaything for the mind. Every function, every part is swayed into vitality by the mind. There is the apparent motion of the limbs, but really ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... smallest measure. To change He would need to go from better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being perfect He cannot become more perfect, and if He were to become less perfect He would be less than God. He is omniscient, which means that He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no future. He is, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him. Love and mercy and righteousness are His, and holiness so ineffable that no comparisons or figures ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... dull and effortless game of chess, yawning between the moves he generally made almost at haphazard, and with attention elsewhere engaged. About five o'clock came the sound of a distant ring, and Seaton jumped up, overturning the board, and so ending a game that else might have fatuously continued to this day. ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... she went overboard, rose swimming with effortless grace. After a dozen strokes or so she turned on one side, glancing back at him. Later, almost among the breakers, she raised one arm in airy signal, but whether to him or to somebody on the raft he did ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... a great show of studying the card and succeeded in pocketing the bill with the same effortless sleight-of-hand that the other had ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... pretence of teaching what very few people are able to teach. We all know how atrociously English is taught, but proclaiming that will not mend matters a bit, it will only render matters worse by making schoolmasters and schoolmistresses shameless and effortless, unless we also show how well English may be taught. The sane course is to begin by establishing the proper way to do the thing, to develop a proper method and demonstrate what can be done by that method in a few selected schools, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... indicative of a different ideal of life in the upper stratum of society, an ideal of effort and efficiency, which is far better than a patrician dilettantism, but has in turn its dangers.We need to recall the line of AEschylus, "All the gods' work is effortless and calm." Or Matthew Arnold's ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... green, showed where sullen snow banks had lately lain. And the sky! Filled with clouds almost as fleecy and as white as June, the sky covered him, and when he raised his eyes to it he saw a triangular flock of geese sweeping to the northwest, serene and apparently effortless. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... bond established by obedience to a single political authority, or by the acceptance of common precedents and ideas. It must be based in some measure upon an instinctive familiarity of association, upon a quick communicability of sympathy, upon the easy and effortless sense of companionship. Such familiar intercourse is impossible, not only in a society with aristocratic institutions, but it can with difficulty be attained in a society that has once had aristocratic institutions. A century more or less of ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... vanished. To get out of the uproar and confusion of things, I had often fancied, would be like exchanging the dusty midsummer road for the shade of the woods where the brook calms the day with its pellucid note of effortless flow, and the hours hide themselves from the glances of the sun. In the forest of Arden I felt sure I should find the repose, the quietude, the freedom of thought, which would permit me to know myself. There, too, I suspected Nature ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... placed aqualung mouthpieces on top of their masks, and swam parallel to the beach. By using snorkels they avoided the effort of lifting their faces out of water to breathe and conserved the air in the tanks. With effective but effortless leg strokes ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... to stretch one's cramped wings to the sun, to ruffle and spread them, as a released bird will, but it was startling to find already little stiff habits arisen, little creaks and hindrances never suspected, that made flight in the high air not quite effortless and serene. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... had the sense of touching Reality at its highest point in a secure and effortless consummation; so far were you from being strung ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... his effortless play, in his superb mastery of the furious gale, one realized that here was one of Nature's masterpieces. He arrested the gaze with his serenity, and in his majesty of flight marked ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... butterflies, Nouronihar and her maidens on tiptoe, with their hair floating in the breeze, stand out in clear relief, as if painted on a fresco. The imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, with all its vagaries, is perfectly coherent. This we should expect ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... marvelous right-arm and fingerboard control, which enables him to produce at will the finest and most subtle tonal nuances in all bowings. Then, too, he overcomes the most intricate mechanical problems with seemingly effortless ease. And his tone has well been called "golden." His own definition of tone is worth recording. He says it should be "In music what the heart suggests, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's Ode to Duty does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic principles. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Nothing more clearly proves the various talents of both the Roman and the American statesman than that they should no more have excelled in their forensic achievements on grand occasions than in those common and trivial affairs of every-day life, so unaffected and so effortless as the writing of letters to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... lost their divine innocence and joy in the shambles, and whose spiritual bodies were scarred, for all the muscular strength gained during their fights, by hunger and frustration and agony. Pain had even marred their song. For what should have been innocence and effortless movement and godlike joy, Mozartean coordination and harmony, was full of terrible cries, and convulsive, rending motions, and shrouding sorrow. And Nietzsche had dreamt of music of another sort. He had dreamt of ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... visual sensations are disposed of in the right way before we obtain any knowledge of the eye. And most wisely has nature seconded her own scheme by obscuring all the sources from which that knowledge might be derived. The light eyelids—the effortless muscular apparatus performing its ministrations so gently as to be almost unfelt—the tactual sensations so imperceptible when the eye is left to its own motions, so keen when it is invaded by an exploring finger, and so anxious to avoid all contact by which the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... the old man, as blade met blade, his sword, in the most effortless way, being edge outward exactly where Roy struck. "Why, do you know, sir, if I'd been in arnest with you, that you would have been spitted like a cockchafer on a pin before you got your blade round ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... character; calm in the unresisted power of intellect and will over the passions, serene in a dignity too absolute and self-contained for pride, but expressing a consciousness of command over others as evident as the unconscious, effortless command of self to which it owed its supreme and sublime quietude. The lips were not set as with a habit of reserve or self-restraint, but close and even as in the repose to which restraint had never been necessary. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... a slight unmistakable figure stepped from the shadow of the verandah down the shallow steps flanked with pots of begonia; moving with the effortless grace that Roy's heart knew too well. Dress and sari were carnation pink. Her golden shoes glittered at every step: and she pensively twirled a square Japanese parasol—almond blossoms and butterflies scattered abroad on silk ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... square, he began to sing softly, wondering that he should have any voice left after what he had suffered; but great singers are not like other men, at least as to their throats, and after a few trials the rich notes floated out deliciously, as effortless and as true, as soft and as strong as ever, in those marvellous love-songs of his own that thrilled all Italy while he ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally—and we need hardly wonder at it—follows the decisive breaking with that on which a man's heart was stayed, and for which he ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort—to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep—that is very beautiful, I think; that is ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... talk with you, Simon." From the effortless way in which she drew a heavy armchair into the position she desired, a shrewd observer might have gleaned a hint of the muscular strength that was her heritage from many a camp and trail. "Hope you ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... latter. There was an article on the front page entitled "London Awake." He read it line by line and laughed. It was all so ridiculously simple. He hurried back to his rooms and wrote a much better one on "London Asleep." He was master of his subject. He wrote of what he had seen with effortless and sublime verity. Why not? Simply with the aid of pen and ink he transferred from the cells of his memory into actual phrases the silent panorama which he had seen with his own eyes. That one matchless hour before the dawn was entirely his. Throughout its sixty minutes he had watched and waited ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... began for Bessie Lonsdale that fantastic ride in which she felt herself being carried forward, as if on the effortless wings of fate itself, to the very scene ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... outdistanced all opposition before on those improvised tracks, he was now meeting a far more equal race. The gray colt's stride was effortless, he was pounding out with power—more than Drew had ever known him to exert. Yet those golden legs matched his pace, reach ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... passion of their lives can ever begin to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has seemed up to this point as if all depended on passivity, let me now assert, with conviction more intense, that all depends on activity. A religion of effortless adoration may be a religion for an angel, but never for a man. No in the contemplative, but in the active, lies true hope; not in rapture, but in reality, lies true life; not in the realm of ideals, but among tangible things, is man's sanctification wrought. Resolution, effort, pain, self-crucifixion, ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... whole hot summer sky stretched just as silent and lonely from horizon to horizon; only the old ferryman, edging along the bank till he was far up stream, crossed the narrower tide and drifted down effortless on the other side; only an old black brig lay at anchor, with furled sail and silent deck, in the middle channel down below the piers, and from her festering and blistering hull it was that all the heat and loneliness and silence of the scene seemed to exude—for ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... her strongly. He stood for a broad freedom, and her revolt against the dependence in which she lived was pointed by his contempt for the dull, easy, effortless life of the big country house. Her mind swayed towards him as she thought of what he had to offer her in exchange—adventure in unknown lands; glory, perhaps not wholly reflected, for there had been women explorers before, and her strong, healthy youth made her the physical equal of ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... view of life so profane, as it were, so independent and so little likely in general to be thought edifying, that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars and their ladies—of horror repaid on his own part by any amount of effortless derision. This proved how little I knew as yet of the English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient's hearth and home. ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... way she liked best to sing. But if he wished it So without more ado the song came. Not one of her gay little carols this time, but a wild Border lament; inimitably sweet, tender, and true. As effortless in the giving, as forgetful of auditors, as if she had been a veritable bird among the branches; for Wych Hazel always lost herself ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... in time, the deftness and precision of his short turns, the promptness with which he compelled them to gather speed after the turn, these were astonishing, enough; but far more astonishing were his grace of pose, his perfect form in every motion, the ease of all his manoeuvres, the sense of his effortless control of his vehicle, of reserve strength greatly in excess of the strength he exerted; these were nothing short of dazzling. His pride in his artistry, for it amounted to that, and his enjoyment of every ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... feet. It was an impressively effortless motion. There was a thick wide torso on short thick legs under the golden fur. The structure was gorilla-like. Pilli might weigh around ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... built craft easily through the water with regular, effortless strokes. Stella sat in the stern, facing him. Out past the north horn of the bay, she broke the silence ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... we were gliding through the forest of pillars; so effortless, so smooth our flight that we seemed to be standing still, the tremendous columns flitting past us, turning and wheeling around us, dizzyingly. My head swam with the mirage motion, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... night! how effortless and free O'er samite black-though green by day—thou movest! And to the whirring music that thou lovest Thy foot advances imperceptibly. Thus hour by hour thy step doth measure— In tranced self-forgetful pleasure Thou'rt rapt; creation's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... been tiresome. The Italians, an eminently intelligent race, have no fancy for displaying their talents where they are not in demand; their chat is perfectly simple and effortless, it never makes play, as in France, under the lead of a fencing master, each one flourishing his foil, or, if he has nothing to say, ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... the five women leaped from the top of the knoll. But they did not fall into the lake. They did not touch its surface. They flew. Flew—and yet it was not flight. It was half-flight. It was scarcely flight at all. Compared with the magnificent, calm, effortless sweep of their girlhood days, it was almost a grotesque performance. Their wing-stumps beat back and forth violently, beat in a very agony of effort. Indeed these stunted fans could never have ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore |
