"Gropingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing (about six years old, perhaps,—but I know not whether a girl or a boy), with a humor in its eyes and face, which the governor said was the scurvy, and which appeared to bedim its powers of vision, so that it toddled about gropingly, as if in quest of it did not precisely know what. This child—this sickly, wretched, humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow, whom it must have required several generations ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... away!" growled out Sir Beverley. But with the words his hand came gropingly forth and fastened in a hard grip on Piers' arm. "You talk like a Sunday-school book," he said. "What the devil did you do ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... most dreadful spiritual desolation. The Faith that he had again found and accepted as a great gift, with an outburst of thanksgiving, seemed to be withdrawn from him. For days and days doubts and misgivings troubled him so that he walked as a blind man, gropingly. And with the doubts there came a myriad of evil thoughts to torment him. He could not read nor pray; he had to cling blindly to ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... out some brandy and went to him. He knelt down by his side and tried to administer it. But Bertrand could not drink. He could only gasp. Yet after a moment his hand came out gropingly and touched ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... the narrow little doors of the tower, which at night were barred on the outside. Removing the bars, he felt for the balustrade of the stairs which commenced quite near the doors and began to ascend. In his absentmindedness he forgot the lantern; he therefore went up gropingly, stepping carefully and feeling with his feet for ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... for a moment. It was hard to put what he felt into words. "I dunno just how t' say it," he said, gropingly, at last, "but it makes me want t' go gunnin' fer them wolves b'fore they hamstring her. It—well—it don't seem t' me like it was a pitcher, somehow. It seems like the reel ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... face and a curious expression in her eyes, Eve moved forward. She had released Loder's arm as they crossed the hall; and now, reaching the stairs, she put out her hand gropingly and caught the banister. She had a pained, numb sense of submission—of suffering that had sunk to apathy. Moving forward without resistance, she began to mount ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... I had wandered through long years, A life of years, still seeking gropingly A thing I dared not name; now I could see In the still dawn a hope, in the soft tears Of the deep-hearted violets a breath Of kinship, like the ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... and the trickle that ran down his cheek. She laid his head down with a gentleness wholly unconscious, and looked again at Burns. "I've killed him," she said in a small, dry, flat voice. She put out her hands gropingly and fell forward across Gil's inert body. It was the first time in her life ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... His hand came upwards gropingly, and took the soaked handkerchief from her. He dabbed his face with it, and slowly, with her ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... entrance. That was all we could make out of it, for as you can imagine the light was almost non-existent. The thing glided steadily, untouched or unmindful of the shots we threw at it. When it came to the first of the crazy uprights supporting the roof timbers it seemed to hesitate gropingly. Then it drew slowly back a foot or so, and darted forward. The ensuing thud enlightened us. The thing was one of the long, squared timbers we had noted outside; and it was being used as ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... window open, he gropingly moved back to his desk, struck a vesta and kneeling, went carefully through the dead man's pockets. A scrap or two of paper he took possession of. With the aid of another vesta he found his way to the cabinet for more brandy. Physically he required stimulant. Flitch had been a big heavy man ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... the beginning of 1847, was a paralytic; Mme. Recamier was blind. Every day at 3 o'clock M. de Chateaubriand was carried to Mme. Recamier's bedside. It was touching and sad. The woman who could no longer see stretched forth her hands gropingly towards the man who could no longer feel; their hands met. God be praised! Life was dying, but ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... nothing except to be put under ground? Mademoiselle dared not think about it, and yet she kept on thinking. The mystery of the death-agony, of which she knew nothing, attracted and terrified her. The anxious interest of her affection turned to her maid's last hours, and she tried gropingly to take away the veil and repel the feeling of horror. Then she was seized with an irresistible longing to know everything, to witness, with the help of what might be told her, what she had not seen. She felt that she must know if Germinie had spoken before she died,—if she had expressed ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... which gave them piquancy. I could not reply; something rose in my throat, and the caressing voice continued: 'You are pale. Do you feel ill? What can I do? Come with me to the artists' room; my secretary is there.' I put out a hand gropingly, for I could not see clearly, and I thought I should reel and fall. It touched his shoulder. He took my arm, and we went; no one had noticed us, and I had not spoken a word. In the room to which he guided me, through a long and sombre corridor, there was no sign of a secretary. I drank some ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... gropingly, he arose to his feet, holding tight to the edge of the table. Behind him unheeded the rough-built arm-chair crashed to the floor. He stood there upright and motionless, looking straight before him, his face formidable. At first his speech was disjointed. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the gloom of the half-lighted hallways or on the creaky stairs. His landlady he saw but once a week—on Saturday, which was settlement day. She was a forlorn, gray creature, half blind, and she felt her way about gropingly. By the droop in her spine and by the corners of her lips, permanently puckered from holding pins in her mouth, a close observer would have guessed that she had been a seamstress before her eyes gave out on her and she took to keeping lodgers. Of the character of the establishment the innocent ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... her side now, and with a low cry threw herself upon her knees before the man, and stretched her arms toward him gropingly. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... church hymns in a pleasant voice and thumped a little heavily on the piano after learning her piece.... She used to say, years afterward,—"I have no gifts; I was never clever with books. I like life, people!" and she would stretch out her hands gropingly ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... bosom, with fingers already growing stiff, and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. And she stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in the thick, numbing darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the motherless ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that the young and successful mountebank, although dead set on the perfection of his mountebankery, and, in serious fact, never dreaming of a work-a-day existence outside the walls of a Variety Theatre yet had the tentacles of his being spread gropingly, blindly, octopus-like, to the major potentialities of life. Even when looking back upon himself, as he does in the crude manuscript, he cannot account for these unconscious, or subconscious, feelings. He has no idea of the cause ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... this shock, Pierre Lanier gropingly stumbles along the Thames bank, following the drifting boat. Through all this bewilderment, self-preserving interest guides his course. Keeping close watch of that relaxed, dozing form, he recklessly tramples all impediments. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... were foolish, which he did not concede, all the world was his companion in foolishness. Blindly and gropingly he was still going in search of his kingdom. He ignored the gossip which his championship of Maisie had called forth. He despised it. It made him the more compassionate toward her—the more determined to help her to weather ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... his gun above his head. As he held it thus, he put out his left hand gently, inch by inch, gropingly. Extended full length, it touched nothing. Slowly he moved it in a semi-circle, the gun in his right hand always ready to come crashing down. His fingers touched the wall, then moving back assured him that no one was within reach. Lifting a foot slowly, ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... felt with infinitely greater force a little later, when the period of solitude was over, and Hadria found herself in the midst of a little society whose real codes and ideas she had gropingly to learn. Unfamiliar (in any practical sense) with life, even in her own country, she had no landmarks or finger-posts, of any kind, in this new land. Her sentiment had never been narrowly British, but now she realized her nationality over-keenly; she felt herself almost grotesquely ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... thick of it. It was Manuel's boat, as Castro had guessed, and the other boats were rallying upon it gropingly, keeping up a ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... It had showed him happiness only to take it away again. After seven years of prosperity, his little son is drowned one summer's day in the river. Death and nameless misfortunes again invade the home of Vassily. One does not live there any more, one prowls around gropingly in a mournful stupor. From morning till evening, his wife comes and goes, silent and indifferent to everything, as if she were looking for some one ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... fears of her newly created world assailing her, she felt rather than saw the flood of the sunlight when she stepped to the door gropingly, and stood, stick in hand, looking out. Yes, that was the sun. But it was hard to reason which way was north, which way lay the east, which was ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough |
