"Finality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tsin Lung: "Truly, it is as it is said, astute Thang-li, though the encircling wall of a hollow cedar-tree, for example, might impart to the voice in question a less uncompromising ring of finality than it possesses when raised in a silk-lined chamber and surrounded by a band of armed retainers. Nevertheless the pronouncement is one which appeals to this person's sense of justice, and the only improvement he can suggest is that the superfluous Hien should hasten that ceremony ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... darkness, half-expecting that shadowy figure to reappear, descend the ladder, and rejoin me. Then I shook myself together. The fact that our plot was really moving, that Swain was in the enemy's country, so to speak, gave the affair a finality which it had lacked before. It was too late now to hesitate or turn back; we must press forward. I felt as though, after a long period of uncertainty, war had been declared and the advance definitely begun. So it was with a certain sense of relief that I turned away, walked slowly back ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... truth and soberness were spoken in a tone of authority, almost of finality, and yet in the stranger's eyes there shone so kindly and genial a light that far from being repelled by them, we found ourselves discussing with her the loves of poets and philosophers as we descended the steep ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... "satisfactory" continually occurs in Professor James' writings. "Humanism," he says, "conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory,' has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigour and finality." He wishes to break with that view of philosophy which says "the anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor." He is one of those who, having been a lifelong student of philosophy ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... friend, Elizabeth"—there was a sad finality about Malcolm's tone that made Elizabeth shrink from ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... The finality in her voice belied her face, which beamed without a ray of stubbornness or perversity. He did not know how to interpret her; but he felt that he had begun wrong. He half regretted that he had ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... marrying and giving in marriage, it was just as though he had died and gone to heaven. Heaven is the absence of worry and of ambition. Heaven is where you want nothing you haven't got. Heaven is finality. And this was finality. On the September morning, after the honeymoon and the settling down, he arose leisurely, long after his wife, and, putting on the puce dressing-gown (which Alice much admired), he opened the window wider and surveyed that part of the universe which ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... come back at all? Marise had wondered so often. Not Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in it. He had given her up then, totally. But would he come back to haunt her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless drought of drudgery and routine? She feared it, frankly dreaded it at first, and ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... by side for two or three minutes, and then he spoke again; his voice was gentle, but firm and resolved, and there was a sort of finality about his words which clinched into her heart ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... did not seem to hear his explanation as she stood there gazing at him, her mind leaping lightning-like from point to point. "It was that which made you behave so strangely in the garden," she said, and she spoke each phrase with a kind of breathless finality. "You thought that I—I was like those—those other women in the camp." As he tried to take her hand she drew farther away, and stood looking at him out of eyes that were like purple shadows in her white face. It was with a little movement of anger that she ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... little, and when he spoke his voice was almost awful in its passionless sternness, in its despairing finality; it seemed to echo the irrevocable judgment which his words pronounced: "That the crimes against God and each other which had destroyed the parents' life should enter into the children's blood, and that never thereafter should there ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... to hail from very far, the wings of it laden less with hopeful promise than with rare unspoken farewells, gentle yet penetrating regrets; so that Dominic, even while welcoming the refreshment of it, was moved in spirit with impressions of impending finality as though it spoke to him of things finished, laid aside, not wholly without sorrow relinquished and—so far as outward ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... put upon the last word bespoke the finality of her decision that the Outlaw of Torn could be no more than ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... universal heart aches for assurance, for confidence, for finality, for certainty. Mr. Dan Crawford tells of a cannibal chief beside whose deathbed an African boy was reading selections from the Gospel of John. He was impressed by the frequent recurrence of the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... The Compromises of the Constitution. The Missouri Compromise. Cotton and the Cotton-Gin. The Race between Free and Slave States. The Admission of Texas. The Wilmot Proviso. New Mexico and California. The Compromise Measures of 1850. Finality ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... hurdy-gurdy is the call to sterner business also. I know an old lady who, at the first tinkle from the street, will take off her glasses with a finality as though she were never to use them again for the light pleasure of reading, but intended to fill the remainder of her days with deeper purpose. There is a piece of two-legged villainy in her employ by the name of William, and even before the changing of the ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... bees swarm about the pink promises, and the fruit sets and slowly matures to lusciousness in the sun of July. I fancy the wedding, which robbed us all, was hardest for her, for it was in one sense a finality of her life. Whereas if Margaret had regrets—and deep sorrow she had in wrenching herself from the little neighborhood, though she never could have guessed the vacancy she caused by the withdrawal ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... me as though she hesitated for the fraction of a second, but when her answer came, though gentle and sympathetic as before, it contained decision and finality which ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... returned, the finality of her tone indicating that she had explained any possible idiosyncrasy of the ...
— Julia The Apostate • Josephine Daskam
... or asylum for the man of radical ideas. But the boundaries of Virginia were the untrammeled wilderness; any man who could not have his will in the colony had this limitless expanse at his disposal; there could be no finality for him in the decrees of assemblies, if he possessed the courage of his convictions in sufficient measure to make him match himself against the red man, and be independent not only of any special form of society, but of society ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was rather like Hunter himself—polished, perfect, with a note of finality and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping, nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on the white marble mantel was ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... made necessary because the Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of the only raison d'etre of Peking sovereignty, i.e. the old-time military power. The story is, therefore, clear and well-connected and so logical in its results that it has about it a finality suggesting the unrolling ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... himself and the world, whenever these truths suffer temporary obscuration? So viewed, humor is the offspring of love, and also mankind's redeemer, inasmuch as it paralyzes the influence of anger and hatred, emanations from the powers of change and finality, by laying bare the eternal principles and "sweet reasonableness" hidden even in them, and finally stripping them of every adjunct incompatible with the serenity of absolute truth. In whatever mind ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... complete. But Georges was very young. He had a family anxious for his future; they knew of his liaison; they would be hopeful, no doubt, of one day breaking it off and of marrying him to some desirable young person. From the widow's point of view the situation lacked finality. How was that to ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... sweep of his shoulders, his solid legs, his red neck and close-cropped, wiry hair were visible to her strangely. She had a peculiar feeling of acquaintedness and of aloofness, intimate knowledge and a separation of sharp finality caused her to stare at him with so intent a curiosity that Mrs. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... feeling of self-orientation which was so necessary to him could only be depended upon, he felt that in time he would have pluck enough to bear anything. Indeed, total eclipse was less appalling, in its finality, than that miserable sword of Damocles which had been hanging over him for months—robbing him of his manhood—poisoning all the springs ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... any price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... head. "My brother's there at the cabin. I got to set up with him." There was no arguing against that tone of simple and utter finality. ...
— The Invaders • Benjamin Ferris
... be known. They love to talk about their wounds mystically,—telling their own tales under feigned names, and extracting something of a bitter sweetness out of the sadness of their own romance. But a man, when he has been rejected,—rejected with a finality that is acknowledged by himself,—is unwilling to speak or hear a word upon the subject, and would willingly wash the episode out from his heart ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... took on a yellow tinge as she faced him. She must have sensed the finality of his tone, the well-bred insolence that his ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Oakham's object was to urge his client to consent to the lodgement of an appeal against the jury's verdict, and to that end he advanced a multitude of arguments and a variety of reasons. The young man listened patiently, but when the solicitor had concluded he shook his head with a gesture of finality ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... discover that it was yet barely noon-time, crossed to the book stall where he secured something to read and thereby while away the time, and then having sought a comfortable chair in a secluded corner deposited himself in it with an air of finality which indicated that he had no idea of departing from the hotel until after he had ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... said, and waited. Her tone and manner startled him. There was a suggestion of finality in her attitude that was alarming. She continued, ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... ye were an oot-an'-oot Leeberal—nane o' your finality Whigs that took ae bit step in the richt direction, and then durstna venture further. Ye maun vote for the five-pound vote if ye are to be oor ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... both," said Bert with an air of finality. And this solution received the hearty approval and implicit faith of his companions. In one form or another every man on the team was swearing to himself that the prediction should come true, if it lay in human power ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... suffers from the want of finality in legislation. Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith of those pledges, a landlord borrowed ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... forever, he told himself over and over again; nothing ever did. And now with ironic conformity to law, his philosophy had turned on him, demonstrating beyond cavil that not only did the things one longed to be free of come to a sure finality but so did those one pined ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... finality in the gentle voice, Jill sat back on her heels and said, "And then?" and listened without interrupting until the tale ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... see it," said Mrs. Elmore, with finality, and possessed herself of the note. She ran it through, and then flung it on the table and dropped into a chair, while the tears started to her eyes. "What a cold, cutting, merciless ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... a finality about it that gave Juliana pause. She had expected a crumpling, but the offender did not crumple. It seemed another tack ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... finality in his answer that Jim did not like to break, and they walked on in silence till ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... arising and laying his hand upon his servant's shoulder, his voice unsteady with finality, "I have decided, after all, to go to Paris! We will live there, Selim. Do you understand?" with strange fierceness, a great exultation mastering him. "We are to ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... itself a progressive movement instead of a static finality involves some serious alterations in the historic conceptions of the faith, as soon as it is applied to theology. Very early in Christian history the presence of conflicting heresies led the church to define its faith in creeds and then to regard these as final formulations of ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their creeds were professedly based on the canonical Scriptures, it followed that, in the long run, whoso settled ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... There was a finality to this that was uncanny. Janice became sure, right then and there, that Mrs. Bridget Burns would never clear up the wreck Olga Cedarstrom had made of the back kitchen. The girl wished with all her heart that she had boxed ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... and many languages. His own work has been mainly devoted to the preparation of scientifically edited texts, mostly of legal material, but also of extracts from a considerable range of chronicles—work unrivalled in its thoroughness and in its approach to finality. Scattered in the introductions to these texts is a mass of information on points of all kinds, which no student of the times can neglect; while an occasional formal article, like that on Anselm and Archbishop Hugh of Lyons, awakens regret that they are so few. The work of Mr. Round ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... imagination of the reader. Kuprin's pictorial sense is curiously similar to that of Wilbur Daniel Steele, and it is interesting to study the reactions of similar temperaments on widely different substances and backgrounds. Kuprin achieves a chiselled finality of utterance which is as evident in his tragedy as in his comedy, and in some of these pieces a fine allegorical beauty shines prismatically through a carefully ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... he knew you. I shall not feel as if they were quite gone away from me while I can talk to you about them. You will spare an hour now and then to come and sit with me?" She looked round the plain, respectable little room with a quiet finality. "I am too old and tired to ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for any man to get, and Stella won't turn out at all badly; she's taking hold very well for her age. But Advena simply hasn't got it in her, and that's all there is to say about it." Mrs Murchison pulled her needles out right side out with finality. "I don't deny the girl's talented in her own way, but it's no way to marry on. She'd much better make up her mind just to be a happy independent old maid; any woman might do worse. And take ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... like that, but she's bad," concluded Jean, with bitter finality. "I might have fallen in love with Ellen Jorth ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... such finality in the voice that the colour rose to Peg's handsome face. It was the first time she had ever been shut out from Faith's confidence, and she searched her mind wildly for some reason that ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... Magazine, founded respectively in 1817 and 1820. In these no opportunity was neglected to thrust at the inflated pretensions of the established reviews, and, though the animus of rivalry might be suspected of playing its part, the blows usually struck home. There is an air of absolute finality about Lockhart's "Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England," and his characterization of Jeffrey in this article is a bold anticipation of the judgment of posterity.[42] The editor of the London Magazine[43] writes with equal assurance, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... her own country. Towns appeared and disappeared in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike anything she had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In the valley where she had been born and where she had lived all her days everything had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The tiny fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their places and surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains that looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a feeling they ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... measure of verses, song or dance. In music, the word is used of the closing chords of a musical phrase, which succeed one another in such a way as to produce, first an expectation or suspense, and then an impression of finality, indicating also the key strongly. "Cadenza," the Italian form of the same word, is used of a free flourish in a vocal or instrumental composition, introduced immediately before the close of a movement or at the end of the piece. The object is to display the performer's technique, or to prevent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Lanyard crossed to the corridor door, unlatched and opened it an inch, peered out, and gave the sum of what he saw in a gesture of finality, then leaving the door ajar turned ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... to see why I should answer your questions," said the lawyer, with finality. "As to your question," he went on to Larsen with equal coldness, "if you have any doubts as to Mr. Murdock's rights in the stream, you have the recourse of a suit at law to settle that point, and to determine the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... in the afternoon to Como. And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was alone in my boat, but her presence filled ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with cruelty and finality to separate ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with rueful smile. 'But his brother was the servant of a foreign merchant—a Greek from overseas, I think it was—who put the business in his Consul's hands, and so——' The speaker clicked his thumbnail on his white front teeth to signify finality. 'But the poor man himself does not object; it seems indeed that he is glad to go with us. Perhaps by labour and harsh treatment ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... of that day were such as would now be called "old-fashioned Unitarianism." But no creed can be held to be a finality. From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain permanently ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hybridising. For past achievements we are indebted to the untiring labours of specialists, and to their continued efforts we look for further results. Whether the future may have in store greater changes than have already been witnessed none can tell. One thing only is certain, that finality is unattainable, and the knowledge of this fact adds to the charm of a fascinating pursuit. Happily, innovations are no longer received with the suspicion or hostility they formerly encountered. In gardens conducted with a spirit of enterprise novelties are welcome ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... certain tones of Sandy's voice that gave absolute finality to his statements. He used them on this occasion. The argument dropped. In a way Sandy was making the matter a test of Molly. If she was as anxious as she wrote to "fork a bronco," if she understood Sandy and he her, she would feel that he would be waiting with her mount ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... finality in it. Elizabeth recognized it, but her plans were made and she was not ready to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Goldsmith's 'great master,' Garrick feared his criticism, and one cannot but recognize the power of Johnson's personality in the increasing intelligence and consistency of Garrick's interpretations, in the growing vigor and firmness of Goldsmith's stroke, in the charm, finality, and exuberant life of Sir Joshua's portraits; and above all in the skill, truth, brilliance, and lifelike spontaneity of Boswell's art. It is in such works as these that we shall find the real Johnson, and through ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... I don't profess to know much about music, but I do know what I like!" continued Mrs. Kirby with the finality and decision that usually accompany the admission. "People may tell me she has a fine voice, but I detest enormous contralto voices! What I suffered during the last thing she sang as an encore! And that final yell of 'Asthore'! at least an octave below her voice! ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... said in a tone of finality. "After all, there is small likelihood they'll find us now. Besides, it will soon be too dark to go on. Fortunately, the night is warm, and I've got this cloak ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... conduct of life, should be the same in the beginning, now and forever. All other institutions may change, opinions on all other subjects may be modified and improved, but the old theologies are a finality that have reached the ultimatum of spiritual thought. We imagine our religion with its dogmas and absurdities must remain like ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... exhaustion. The flat, powerless voice, dying of its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight. There was only one way in which he could ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... well; the prize which the senate had hitherto bestowed would be indirectly the people's gift, and the nominees of the Comitia would find themselves in possession of departments which were presumably the most important that lay at the disposal of the senate. To secure the finality of the arrangement made by the senate, and to prevent this body subsequently reversing an awkward assignment to which it had unwittingly committed itself, Gracchus ordained that the tribunician veto should not be employed against the senate's ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... there was such a tone of indifference, such an air of utter finality about the brief speech, that she felt she would have been eternally grateful now could she only have passed the low standard demanded by the possession of ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... technique which they formulate, were first discovered and worked out for the short-story in the medium of poetry.[8] The ballad and narrative poem must be, by reason of their highly artificial form, comparatively short, possessing totality, immediateness, compression, verisimilitude, and finality. The old ballad which commemorates the battle of Otterbourne, fought on August 10, 1388, is a fine example of the short-story method. Its opening stanza speaks the last word in immediateness ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... marriage, to a rich and handsome suitor; a valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... said that I was pleased with Romoldo to the enlisted man who was in charge of the officers' mess and who incidentally made some market purchases for me. He said, "You ain't particular," with a finality that left me no defence. He was mistaken, however. I am particular, but at that time I was still in the somnambulance of philanthropy which brought us ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... of finality, or of an utter inclusiveness, for such a work as THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS may be readily disclaimed. To set it up even would seem ridiculous to any one acquainted with the enormous range of the subject. Not so ridiculous, however, may seem ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... General Wood with grim finality. "There's a perfectly safe prison—down below." He glanced into the green abyss above which we were soaring. "I must ask Your Imperial Highness to decide quickly. The Commodore ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... confident about it. One thing seems certain: when the Russians take this jaw-cracking town they will pronounce it quite differently from the Austrian form, whatever that may be. Just think of what happened to Lemberg. There appeared to be a kind of finality about that, but no sooner were the Russians in it than it turned into Lwow. After that anything ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... back to his desk, tore from the pad before him the piece of paper on which he had been scrawling, crushed it, and tossed it into the wastebasket with an air of finality. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... me," McGuire agreed, and there was a tone of finality in his voice as he added: "They've made us do that traitor act ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... barely squeeze through. The land here was higher and dry, and black muck of the same depth as on the drowned land to the south. Payne paddled back to Deer Hammock in silence. Just as they were about to land he drove his paddle into the bottom with a gesture of finality. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more. As a finality he was obliged to confess that he was a bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and the absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community but the individual himself were ingrained in him, am he was no better ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... when the trail lay empty before us. "One time he drink much rum, French gendarme go to arrest him, he bite—" With an eloquent gesture my valet indicated that Neo's teeth had removed in its entirety the nose of the valiant defender of morals. "No good go see him," he added with finality. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... that my chronological table of 1882—although then, relatively, "up to date"—was incomplete. The tables constructed by Mr. Tutin and by Professor Dowden are both more accurate than it was. It is impossible to attain to finality in such a matter; and several facts, afterwards discovered, and mentioned in the later volumes of my previous edition, have been used against the conclusions come to in the earlier ones. I have thus ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... had softened her a little, else she would have been as silent as Betty; for it was from her mistress that Betty had learned this mode of torturing a criminal. So she was just able to return his greeting in the words, 'Weel, Robert,' pronounced in a finality of tone that indicated she had done her utmost, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... nations are burdened with debt. War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the overseas policy of the English—auri sacra fames. Divination of this kind has never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to venture on more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... The finality of it appalled her. She felt as if she were butting her head against a stone wall. She knew that argument and entreaty were of no avail, yet she desperately besought first one and then another of them to save the prisoner. Each in turn ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... received a certain impression from your charming luncheon party of yesterday. Andrew, as you are aware, is not the man with whom a woman can easily make a scene. There was no scene. A hint. With that rat-trap air of finality with which I am, for my many failings, much more familiar than yourself, he said: 'We will cancel our engagement and go to Vichy.' This morning, as I wrote, I was called to Clermont-Ferrand. Madame Patou, you understand, has the temperament of the South. Its generosity ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... hastily came up to the priest, "What were you so glibly holding forth?" he inquired. "All I could hear were a lot of hao liao (excellent, finality.") ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... He did not believe in death.... And I do not.... This sloughing off of the material integument seems to me purely a matter of the mechanical routine of evolution, a natural process in further and inevitable development, not a finality to individualism!... Fertilisation, gestation, the hatching, growth, the episodic deliverance from encasing matter which is called death, seem to me only the first few basic steps in the sequences of an endless metamorphosis.... My father thought ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... I suggested. "These gray November days with their depressing atmosphere of finality may ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... become a Genius-Poet for finality, for tomorrow we graduate. Therefore will all Friendly Ones in reading of these pages have rememberings of that of which I before make statement - "That the business of Genius has been thrust upon me, who have no Ancestors of Geniuses - no Longevity of Hair - no Biliousness of Character" ...
— Seven Maids of Far Cathay • Bing Ding, Ed.
... seated himself, and made Lone Wolf lie down at his feet. Then he took out the remaining sandwich,—which he himself, still shaken from his fall, had no desire to eat,—and contemplatively, in small fragments, he fed it to the wolf's great blood-stained jaws. At last he spoke, with the finality of one whose mind is quite ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact, ever since he had arrived from the station ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... reverend gentleman thought he was to enjoy a lingering hand-clasp he was mistaken, for the gloved finger-tips merely touched his hand and were withdrawn, and the girl turned to her hostess with a smile of finality as if he were dismissed. He did not seem disposed to take the hint and withdraw, however, until on a sudden the great dog came and stood between them with open-mouthed welcome and joyous greeting in the plumy, wagging tail. He ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer, alchemist, conjuror,—compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer,—Browning makes of it the history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intellectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the less as he ushered his visitor out, he felt that there was a certain finality about the action. It was—as far as his private feelings were concerned—the old man's moral exit ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... wall, and which, as he had just learned from Baedeker, was a marvel of color and fine characterization; he stood for a few moments staring with a blank and helpless air, as if, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to question the finality of his own judgment. Then his eyes wandered off to the cornice of the wall, whose florid rococo upholstery won his ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to add, as a finality of my doings and mission in Great Britain, that in Scotland I fully succeeded in establishing commercial relations for traffic in all kinds of native African produce, especially cotton, which businesses are to be done directly and immediately between us and them, without the intervention or agencies ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... a finality in his tone that caused Daphne to go with him meekly, if unwillingly; "Daphne must ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... finality in her tone that struck dismay to Alan's heart. He prepared to entreat and argue, but before he could utter a word, the boughs behind them parted and Captain Anthony ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... crying. Her hopes had faded. There was the note of finality in each word her men had ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... came this way," said the sergeant, with finality. "Hauled over this pass to the Cerberus. Somebody must've knocked this bush loose while workin' at getting 'em along. So he replanted it. Only not good ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde—whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of death—have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in the Temple when ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... better make it swords," said D'Arnot. "He will be satisfied with wounding you, and there is less danger of a mortal wound." "Pistols," said Tarzan, with finality. ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... those habits of judging the world by purely aesthetic criteria which men fed on the sciences of nature are so willing to abandon. Even if a philosophy were true, he could easily fail to relish it unless it showed a certain formal nobility and dogmatic pretension to finality. But I must not describe him so much from my own professional point of view—it is as a vessel of life at large that one ought ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... have been a dream, monsieur," she said with sad finality. "It is folly to encumber one's ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... stood under them, so old and other-worldly, that he seemed already of their circle rather than ours; and he spoke in a voice of feeling for us, but with a simple and courageous finality that sounded the very note of fate. He had called the brethren together (he said) to submit a decision to their consideration, and he desired from them an expression of their willingness to accept and abide by it. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... test is to match a rival's series with one exactly parallel in every particular or to add to a whole some undiscovered part.[4] A charm mentioned in folk tale is "to name every word that ends with lau." Certain numbers, too, have a kind of magic finality in themselves; for example, to count off an identical phrase by ten without missing a word is the charm by which Lepe tricks the spirits. In the Kualii, once more, Ku is extolled as the ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... with a sharp argument between two young fellows at the poker table. No, it was not about the game. One said something; the other shrieked his answer; the first shouted back; the second in a violent burst that had a finality about it slammed down his cards and said something curt, with a solemn rolling ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you, and the two nations may yet have a great work to do together for themselves and for the world. A student of history, knowing how the race has struggled and stumbled onwards through the ages until now, cannot believe in the finality and perfection of any set of institutions, not even of yours. This vast electioneering apparatus, with its strange machinery and discordant sounds, in the midst of which I find myself,—it may be, and I firmly believe it is, better for its purpose than anything that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various |
