"Impressionable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... undoubtedly a man of impressionable heart, and had many affairs such as Heine had; but they were not deep or lasting. That he should have made a favorable impression on the women whom he met is not surprising, because of his social standing, his chivalry, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... not a free-thinker—the phrase is always a mockery—but a man of extraordinary power, a man as great as a man can be without faith, the conjunction struck him. Moreover, the strongest men are naturally the most impressionable, and consequently the most superstitious, if, indeed, one may call superstition the prejudice of the first thoughts, which, without doubt, is the appreciation of the result in causes hidden to other eyes but ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... words the abbreviations stand for, that he becomes Ph. D. and can not translate his title,—these are side issues. But it is forgotten that the total examination in which the public school pupil presents his hastily crammed Latin and Greek, never implies a careful training in his most impressionable period of life. Hence the criminalist repeatedly discovers that the capacity for trained thinking belongs mainly to the person who has been drilled for eight years in Greek and Latin grammar. We criminalists have ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... taken down, because he had rung out the signal for revolt. Yet the cries of "Noel, Noel!" continued every step of the progress through the town, until they gave way to a silence that had an even greater effect upon the impressionable boy. For he was welcomed at the great western gate of the Cathedral by the Archbishop Guillaume de Lestrange, and by him was led before the sepulchre in which the heart of Charles V. lay buried, bearing testimony ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... "Vive Bonaparte!" which came from the lower part of the Rue du Mont Blanc, and swept like a sonorous wave toward the Rue de la Victoire, told Josephine of her husband's return. The impressionable Creole had awaited him anxiously. She sprang to meet him in such agitation that she was unable to ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Caldew, always impressionable, became uneasy under his companion's silence, and that uneasiness was tinctured in his mind with such a dread of the possibility of mistake that it flowed forth in ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... eyes that left him a bit wistful at thought of this? There was not a detail of her features, of her dress, of her speech, that he could not see now as vividly as though she were still standing before him. That was odd, too. He was not ordinarily so impressionable. It occurred to him that he would not like her to know what he was about to do. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... standards of value. City children who have access to the theatre often get their heroes from the stage; and the same thing may be said about the drama as about fiction. It is only the too highly colored and exaggerated melodrama that is likely to be objectionable for the impressionable youth. The moving-picture shows, which are coming to supply so many of the children with their chief opportunity to learn life, have been, on the whole, fairly wholesome; and the movement to secure more adequate censorship of the films will probably leave these sources of instruction perfectly ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... and impressionable, this gifted Irishman, with a trace of the melancholy of his race and all of its cheer. Melancholy was the one mood in which Joan did not seem to flutter just ahead. Always then she followed, gentle, compassionate and shyly tender. He was quick to find it out and wily enough to feign it when ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... ascertained the following facts, which may guide every horse-owner in the application of electricity to an animal that is opposed to being shod: (1) To a horse that defends himself because he is irritable by temperament, and nervous and impressionable (as happens with animals of pure or nearly pure blood), the shock must be administered feebly and gradually before an endeavor is made to take hold of his leg. The horse will then make a jump, and try to roll over. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... Marie de Zanoni.' So far as I have been able to gather, the affair was a love match. The lady, it appears, had no end of suitors, both in and out of the profession; it has even been hinted that she could, had she been so minded, have married an impressionable young Austrian nobleman of independent means who was madly in love with her; but she appears to have considered it preferable to become 'an old man's darling,' so to speak, and to have selected the middle-aged ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... defrauded of at least one early ramble in the woods and fields. It is well, in the impressionable season of life, to realize, if only occasionally, how much of the sweetest air, the brightest and best hours of the day, people spend in bed. Any one who goes out every day before breakfast knows how very seldom he is kept in by bad weather. For ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... blessings of the new faith had attracted them too, and the certainty of finding their beloved among the Christians had been an added inducement to crave instruction from Zeno. And it had been given them in so zealous and captivating a manner that, in their impressionable hearts, the desire for learning had soon been turned to firm ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... verse, the people following lamely, for they did not know the words; but the children, proud of their superior knowledge, and with a glow in their impressionable little hearts, sang exultantly—this song ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... which influenced him profoundly, appeared in 1829, and the first performance of "Hernani" was February 25, 1830. There is no record that he formed important literary friendships in either England or France, but, clannish as the emigrados appear to have been, an impressionable nature like Espronceda's must have been as much stirred by the literary as by the political revolution of 1830; the more so as the great love adventure of his life occurred at this time. The Mancha family followed the other emigrados to London, just when we cannot say. In course of time Teresa ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... fond of these theatrical announcements, which answered the purpose he designed, of attracting the sympathy of the impressionable French people. The following is a short summary of the mode in which Italy was really freed "from the Alps to the Adriatic":—Lombardy was surrendered to Sardinia 11th July, 1859; the treaty ceding Savoy and Nice to France was signed 24th ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... his poetry that can be so called is small. But a great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Dave Wardle giv' Mrs. Tapping. It really sent your flesh through your bones, all on edge like, to see a child fly up in the air like that. So she testified, embellishing her other physiological experience with a new horror unknown to Pathologists. Mrs. Riley, less impressionable, kept an even mind in view of the natural invulnerability of childhood and the special guardianship of Divine Omnipotence. If these two between them could not secure small boys of seven or eight from disaster, what could? The unbiassed observer—if he had ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Monsieur Rodin referred to the papers before him, evidently much puzzled. It seemed that Madame had been recognized in the Bois by the impressionable Frenchman who I had believed, had been attracted ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... advantage of the fact that Miss Doris Gray, an impressionable young English girl, receptive to sympathetic admiration and half in love with me—suppose, I say, I took advantage of this fact, and we marry in ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to love her, is not the same as virile intellect. It is more and it is less. A woman must have a mind open, delicate, sensitive, refined, impressionable. She has no need of either power or initiative in thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry, and that faculty of assimilation which, in a little while, raises her to an equality with him who shared her life. Her greatest quality must ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... shape and the detailed personal history of the Olympians. In this connexion we must not forget the power of hallucination, still fairly strong, as the history of religious revivals in America will bear witness,[26:1] but far stronger, of course, among the impressionable hordes of early men. 'The god', says M. Doutte in his profound study of Algerian magic, 'c'est le desir collectif personnifie', the collective desire projected, as it were, or personified.[27:1] Think of the gods who have appeared in great crises of battle, created sometimes by the desperate desire ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city. But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... say, 'Why have I brought up a son whom I loved and who loved me, for whom I have undergone a thousand cares and toils, who, thanks to my prayers and my example, was impressionable to good influences, and from whom, after my long and weary course, I hoped to receive attentions like those which I have given him? Why does he now ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his casement and looked at the weather-beating rain and yeasty water. He counted, rather nervously, the pulses between each pair of the bell's deep tones. He was impressionable to circumstances, and the coincidence of storm and passing-bell awed him.... "Either the God of Nature suffers or the fabric of the world is breaking";—he remembered a scrap of talk wafted towards him (as he stood in attendance) from some humanist at Lorenzo's table only yesterday, above ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... to use it. Some of the most daring and successful outrages of the past years had been carried out under his direction, and executed by these youths. He always made a point of choosing men who were highly strung and impressionable. He was known to boast that after three interviews with him he could make anyone, either man or woman, into ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... clothes were missing was not likely to be discovered in an inn until suspicion was aroused. Ronald laid his plans well, but how was he to know that in his path to the pit he walked over soil as plastic and impressionable as wax?" ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... atmosphere of the class-room, we claim, should be as near as possible, that of the home. The parents have a right to see that it should be so. Is this possible in a neutral school? Its very negative character impregnates the class-rooms with an irreligious feeling which the impressionable mind of the child cannot but notice. How is the child to grow up with the feeling of Religion's importance in life if the ban is placed upon Religion the moment he passes the threshold of the school-room? "What we most ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... said Mrs Jefferson brusquely, "you won't try to see her, for it's my belief that she's not the woman any man can look at and forget, and you poets are mostly impressionable." ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... let me put you right on one question. Dicky is not in love with this girl yet. If he were, he would not wish any meeting between you and her. He is interested and attracted, of course, as any impressionable man with an eye for beauty would be if thrown in constant companionship with her. And, forgive me, but I am sure you have taken the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... whispered Betty, her eyes glowing. I suppose to an impressionable girl these things really are of absorbing interest. For myself, bongos intrigue me even less than pongos, while dongos frankly bore me. ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... and impressionable as he was, may have been moved at this; but assuredly his resolution of not being reunited to Lady Byron was not shaken. His only reply was to show me a letter he had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... conscious of an ascent to be surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social status, breed respectively the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... revulsion of feeling swept through the impressionable people. Her departure had been watched, the fall observed, and the serious nature of the accident was soon known; all hurried to the spot where she lay, full of sympathy and distress. Jean, perhaps not altogether ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... imagination is stimulated, without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this personage, is in fact hypnotised ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... relations between the two men were delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met, Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it. It was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as it ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... its geography, had the misfortune never to be conquered at one fell swoop by an alien race of conquerors. Such a conquest may not at first sight strike one as a blessing, but it is, if it takes place when a people is in an early, fluid, and impressionable stage, as may be seen from a comparison of countries which have undergone it with countries which have not—a comparison, for instance, of England with Ireland or Germany. Perhaps the nearest parallel in the history of Wales to the Norman Conquest of ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... from the moment we heard who she was that your impressionable nature would fall a victim, but you can't write a story of her alone; you will want your hero and one or two other people. I suppose, now, that very handsome young fellow with the fastidious get-up will about suit you for the hero. He does look rather lover-like ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and in a steady, unmoved voice tell Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn what had happened. The faded beauty merely smiled, and lifted her eyes to the chandelier with the expression that had melted the hearts of a thousand and one impressionable subalterns. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... She held out her hands like a child, to the least impressionable boatman. In an instant she was clasping ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... window forced himself quite deliberately to look the plain facts in the face. He compelled himself to envisage this beautiful girl with her tragic eyes for just what his reason knew her to be—an adventuress, a decoy, a lure to a callow, impressionable, foolish lad, the tool of that arch-villain Stewart and of the lesser villain her father. It was like standing by and watching something lovely and pitiful vilely befouled. It turned his heart sick within him, but he held himself to the task. He brought to aid him the vision of his lady, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... When the Christian world awakens to its profound significance, and when its ideals and methods are raised, even to a level with those of the public schools, the other grave problems will be near their solution. If the individual is thoroughly taught during the impressionable years of childhood and youth, the fundamental principles of ethics and religion, society and the state will have no difficulty in meeting their problems; but if not, these will perforce continue to ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... Alice, again forgot his second daughter's vagaries, but a much sterner and more formidable interview was in store for him; it was one thing to conquer Alice, who was impressionable, and had a soft heart, and another to encounter the stony visage and rather ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... to put any nonsense in her head," she mused. "What a piece of luck!—that she happened to be in that car that day. Of course, the fact that he saved her life has cast a glamour of romance around him—Violet is very impressionable—and it may take time to disenchant her. I hope that nurse was vigilant and did not allow her to see much of him; however, one thing is sure, she won't get a chance to ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... always a fighter. Jefferson was a lover of peace, given to quiet, hating quarrels and bloodshed, and at times timid in dealing with public questions. Washington was deliberate and conservative, after the fashion of his race. Jefferson was quick, impressionable, and always fascinated by new notions, even if they were somewhat fantastic. A thoroughly liberal and open-minded man, Washington never turned a deaf ear to any new suggestion, whether it was a public policy or a mechanical invention, but to all alike he gave careful consideration ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... quickly gone, vanishing into the throng like a flash of red flame. For a breathless moment Winston's admiring gaze followed, conscious merely of her dark beauty, her slender, graceful figure. He was young, impressionable, and there was rare witchery about the girl which momentarily fascinated him. His attention shifted back to Farnham with a swift remembrance of the stern purpose which had brought him there. The gambler was playing out his case silently, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... by the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this romantic place he passed the most impressionable part ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... circumstances—suspicious, I admit. Far be it from me to speak in defence of such a person as Mrs. Wade; I think she is a source of incalculable harm to all who are on friendly terms with her—especially young and impressionable women; but you must trust my judgment in this instance: I am convinced she is not guilty. Her agitation in the coroner's court has no special significance. No; the solution of the mystery is not so ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... thought which should have controlled them was wanting. She squandered the wealth of her nature in obedience to social conventions; she was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her scruples degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than force of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with more brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a coquette, and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant life and gaiety, reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the verge of poetry, and humble in the ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... passive and impressionable condition which is called hypnotic, mesmeric, somnambulic, or somniloquent, it has long been known that the subject may be absolutely controlled by the operator, or by a simple command or suggestion, or by his own imagination. This has been so often demonstrated ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... fails to marry her sons to the right people. Perpetually Hatchways is wiping the eye of Holmer, and this touches the nerve of the great lady. Her sons, Wickford, the authentic but hardly reigning duke, and Lord Iveagh Suir, the queer impressionable (on whom the author has spent much pains to excellent effect), both take their troubles to Ernestine. And a young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations and characters from his coign of privilege—a device adroitly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... Flamineo and the shame-stricken Vittoria refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere of the poem by the passing presence of their virtues. The shallow and fiery nature of the fair White Devil herself is a notable example of the difference so accurately distinguished by Charlotte Bronte between an impressionable and an impressible character. Ambition, self-interest, passion, remorse, and hardihood alternate and contend in her impetuous and wayward spirit. The one distinct and trustworthy quality which may always ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets made one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five miles away... Yet the French, with an odd perversion of race-vanity, still persist in speaking of themselves as a "nervous and impressionable" people! ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... are less strongly made; but in intellect they are superior to any of the half-casts. They possess a very great aptitude for mechanical employments, great dexterity and a remarkable degree of imitative talent, which, if well directed, might be brilliantly developed. They are exceedingly impressionable, and all their feelings are readily exalted into passions. Indifferent to all out sensual enjoyments, they indulge in the fleeting pleasure of the present moment, and are regardless of the future. There is a certain class ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... was not still alive because he was innocent, since for all the good that this very doubtful innocence of his was likely to be even to his own conscience, he might almost as well have been guilty. Nor was he alive because he feared to die. He did fear to die horribly, but to the young and impressionable, at any rate, there are situations in which death seems the lesser of two evils. That situation had been well-nigh reached by him last night when he set the hilt of his sword against the floor and shrank back at the prick of its point. ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... towards his, the poise of her head, all of her listening intently while he talked . . . one could see how he was dominating her. A man with such a personality as his, regularly hypnotic when he chose, and practised in handling women, he would be able to do anything he liked with an impressionable creature like Marise, who as a girl was always under the influence of something or other. It was evident that he could put any idea he liked into Marise's head just by looking at her hard enough. She had seen him do it . . . helped him ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king has quarrelled with Titania, and has vowed never to be reconciled to her until he shall find two lovers constant to each other through ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... mother's mind had stood the strain bravely, but it gave way at last; not, however, until that fatal winter journey to New Hampshire, when cold, exposure, and fatigue did their worst for her weak body. Religious enthusiast, exalted and impressionable, a natural mystic, she had probably always been, far more so in temperament, indeed, than her husband; but although she left home on that journey a frail and heartsick woman, she returned a different ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the hidden keg of gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians, and it will even be found to have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and almost identical in form appear and appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... regular gang of strollers. It is exhilarating, do you know, this feverish existence, this life in front of the footlights. But, for the love of Heaven, shut the door, Marie, there is a frightful draught blowing on me. This hourly struggle with the public, the hisses, the applause, would, with my impressionable nature, drive me mad, I ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction, while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... a man is impressionable, impulsive, emotional. This one was, and had no gift at hiding his feelings; or if he had it he took no trouble to exercise it. He carried his soul's prevailing weather in his face, and when he entered a room the parasols or the umbrellas went up—figuratively speaking —according to the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... school. It was not the custom of the family; and Mrs. Allison could not be induced to break the tradition. There was accordingly a succession of tutors, whose Church-principles at least were sound. And Ancoats showed himself for a time an impressionable, mystical boy, entirely in sympathy with his mother. His confirmation was a great family emotion, and when he was seventeen Mrs. Allison had difficulty in making him take food enough in Lent to keep him in health. Maxwell was beginning ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dear," said Mrs. Enderby to Nell, "I will not allow you to tell her. Indeed, I am a little nervous about the matter, for Hetty is such a strangely impressionable girl one never knows what way she will take things. I must break ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... suggests all that these dominant cities represent of congestion of industrial and social pressure, and their powerful effects upon new Americans in their most impressionable period. ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... burlesque some synagogue chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coarse Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by any means. He was good-natured, extremely impressionable, and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... in wistful regret, it may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay. Our word GAY, it is said, is itself Celtic. It is not from gaudium, but from the Celtic gair, to laugh; {84} and the impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. He loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... averred, as he stole away into the hall, there was a sound followed him as between a groan and a cry. Hearing which statement, an impressionable charwoman went into hysterics, and had to be recalled to her senses by a dose of gin, suggested and taken ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... itself to me unexpectedly, and always with an unwholesome effect. This I have found happen generally in times of physical depression, and the same air no doubt exerted a similar influence on Sir John, which his impressionable nature rendered from the first ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into lines of beauty in certain lights. It is well that this is so, for it helps to dispel an illusion of the imaginative and impressionable when first they visit San Pasqual—the illusion that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... impressionable Della. "Don't tell me, Mrs. Cullen! I can most see 'em meself, right here in me own kitchen! Poor Tom! To think whin I bought me new hat, only last week, the first time I'd be wearin' it'd be to his funeral. ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... down again, and then the melancholy voice lulled her into a vague interval of thoughtless inactivity. I promptly seized my opportunity, and in a moment her whole mind was full of me. She was an excitable, impressionable sort of girl, and when once I had obtained an entrance into her mind I found it the easiest thing in the world to dominate her thoughts. Though she stood, and sat, and knelt, and curtseyed, and articulated words, her thoughts were entirely absorbed in me. I crowded out the Magnificat ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... his apparent roughness Wyvis Brand was an impressionable man. He had come into the room cold, tired, not quite in his usual health, and more than usually out of humor; and instead of the ordinary sight of Janetta—a trim, pleasant, household-fairy sort of sight, it was true, but not of the wildly exciting kind—he ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... An Impressionable Person (carried away by the local influence—to the Man at the wicket, blandly). Could you kindly oblige me by exchanging this "Note in Black and White" for an "Arrangement in Silver ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... impressionable young fellow, Quinny!" said Gilbert. "I won't call you 'sloppy' again because I'm tired of telling you that, but really that's what you are. You've only got to see a beautiful woman for a couple of seconds and you start buzzing ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... then have curative influence on the nerves. There can be no doubt that, whatever may have been the value of his theories, he cured a large number of patients, evidently producing a state which we would call today a hypnoid state and often simply appealing to the natural suggestibility of the impressionable minds. Among his pupils, usually called mesmerists, was Puyseyur, who discovered, in 1784, the state which was called artificial somnambulism, a kind of sleep in which the ideas and feelings of the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... enemy. He took no interest in politics, but one day when a brutal ruffian, who had assaulted a lame native, escaped because the easy-going sheriff was too slow in pursuing, Charley was heard to exclaim, "Oh, if I were sheriff!" The man who heard him was both impressionable and practical. He said that Charley's face, when he made that remark, looked like Christ's might have looked when he was angry, but the hearer also remembered that the sheriff-incumbent's term of office had nearly expired, and he quietly gathered a few ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... relationships from his neighbour who as a child, was dragged to listen to the brilliant exhortations of Robert Ingersoll, the enemy of all revealed Devils. In due course of time, both men may forget their early training and never again visit either church or lecture hall. But the influence of these impressionable years stays with them and they cannot escape showing it in whatever they ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... defects of character in the Indians, if they are frequently moderated, thanks to the religion that they profess, wholly disappear but with difficulty, and generally even have some influence on the private life and religious character of the natives. Since they are, therefore, more superficial and more impressionable to new things than those of other races, they would perhaps be less constant in their Catholic practices, sentiments, and convictions, and would feel more easily than do others the evil influences of false doctrines ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... called on to deal specially with the problem of increasing manifestations of sexual depravity they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... concerned for their welfare and has told me many things, among others something of a certain lady to whom they are devoted and who has a remarkable influence over them. It has interested me, too, for they are at the most impressionable, susceptible period of their lives and a wise influence can do much for them. I am glad to meet 'The Little Mother ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... are those in which, as we look back upon them, we seem to have been impressing, impressionable, creative, and receptive at the same time. The alternating currents of these moods are so swift that they seem simultaneous, and the immeasurable swiftness with which they pass from one to the other is the soul's instinctive ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... chapel somewhere in the Bernese Oberland during the summer months. Energetic, athletic, a great talker and squire of dames—in all honesty and correctness, this last, well understood, for there wasn't a word to be breathed against the good cleric's morals. But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious, as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs. Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of her internal organs? Recumbency was a mania with her and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... which Skippy derived from his periodic application of ostracism was in the immediate success it achieved on his roommate's impressionable temperament. At present, being in an exceedingly grouchy mood, he drew forth a pad and pencil and tendered them with a plain intimation that only thus would he ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... the first I shall try to prove that the great scientific development of our time has inspired hopes in the mind of all classes, hopes which it has not realised to the satisfaction of the most impressionable, therefore the most exacting and unreasonable minds. How such minds have returned with greater conviction to the belief in the existence of something more powerful than science, a something which can alleviate the evils from which they suffer, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... receptive and impressionable, they come expecting to receive satisfaction and enjoyment for the money they have expended in the purchase of a ticket, or because they have some other interest in the proceedings. Presumably if they were ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... not only uncommon cleverness but also great suppleness of body. As usual, these qualities, together with the qualities of voice, the magnificent dress, and the carefully cultivated long hair, won for the actor demoralising influence over too large a number of the more impressionable and untrammelled Roman dames. ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Roka there was no difficulty in following the line which Hendry and the supercargo had taken; their footsteps showed deep in the soft, sandy soil, rendered the more impressionable by the heavy downfall of rain a few hours before. And even had they left no traces underfoot of their progress, the countless broken branches and vines which they had pushed or torn aside on their way through the forest were a sure ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... It was only at a later period that it was the cause of unkind tittle-tattle. In the beginning of Maurice's residence at Brayfield eulogy attended it and applause was never far off. People said that Maurice was impressionable, and that the vision of pain upon which the medical student's eyes must look so closely had robbed him of the natural buoyancy of youth. Poor young man, they thought enthusiastically, he suffers with those who suffer. And this was considered—and rightly considered—a very touching ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... creatures suffering misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and it was possible to help and save them. His emotion was profound: there was no difficulty In communicating it. Christophe was easily impressionable, and he in his turn was moved. When he heard Olivier's story he tore up the page of music he had just been writing, and called himself a selfish brute to be amusing himself with childish games. But, directly after, he picked up the pieces. He was too much under the spell of his music. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... counterpart in the most ancient of tribal communities. Women even more than men are slaves of their tribal instincts; they are as susceptible to the dictates of fashion as their ancient sisters were impressionable to the movings of the tribal spirit. The local spirit which is so inherent a trait of the countryman, particularly in the case of the Scotsman, Irishman, and Welshman, is another, and often a very powerful, ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... some good fellow who would make her happy. And she would be happy. The poor girl would love her children to distraction; for motherhood, which develops the whole of a woman's nature, would give full scope to her overflowing sentiments. She has never cared for any one, however. Yet her impressionable nature is a danger to her. She knows this herself, and when she saw that I recognized it, she admitted the excitability of her temperament to me. She belongs to the small minority of women whom the slightest contact with others causes to ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... there was an interview though nobody knows about it, and that's where they met—she fell asleep, which sounds an odd thing to do in the midst of such a gale as was raging on Christmas Eve, and so was overwhelmed. But who can say? Impressionable and unhappy women have done such deeds before now, especially if they imagine themselves to have become the object of gossip. Of course, also, the mere possibility of such a thing having happened on his account would be, and indeed has ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... reached the proportions of a very amiable selfishness. "She has the habit of detesting those who are unhappy," said the witty Abbe Galiani, "for she does not wish to be so, even by the sight of the unhappiness of others. She has an impressionable heart; she is old; she is well; she wishes to preserve her health and her tranquillity. As soon as she learns that I am happy she will love me ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... understood—in countries that have no similar institution. But, imagine one hundred thousand youths of the wealthiest, healthiest, and most influential classes passed during each generation at the most impressionable age, into a sort of ethical mold, emerging therefrom stamped to the core with the impress of a uniform morality, uniform manners, uniform way of looking at life; remembering always that these youths fill seven-eighths of the important positions ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... twins twiddled their legs and looked sentimentally at the ocean. They were a pair of pink and white little things with china-blue eyes and the fairest of hair, and they were very impressionable; and when they thought of Selwyn they looked unutterable things at the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... brother-in-law I'd like you to have, my dear," she said to Tip, "but if you'd seen some of the men Joanna's taken up with you'd realize it might have been much worse. I'm told she once had a most hectic romance with her own shepherd ... she's frightfully impressionable, you know." ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... For a brief period in his life it seemed as though peace might come back. Maximilian's death in 1519 followed by Charles' election to the Empire placed the sovereignty of Western and Central Europe in the hands of three young men, who were chivalrous and impressionable, Henry and Francis and Charles: only the year before they had been treating for universal peace. If they would really act in concord, it seemed as though the Golden Age might return, and Christendom show a united face against the watchful and unwearying ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Dick Sherwood was the victim Maggie and Barney and Old Jimmie were so cautiously and elaborately trying to trim! It seemed an impossible coincidence. But no, not impossible, after all. Their net had been spread for just such game: a young man, impressionable, pleasure-loving, with plenty of money, and with no strings tied to his spending of it. That Barney should have made his acquaintance was easily explained; to establish acquaintance with such persons as Dick was Barney's specialty. What more natural ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... hurled at my innocent head, during the impressionable years of girlhood, by the pale and determined Congregational ministers with gold-bowed spectacles, who held forth in the meeting-house of my maternal ancestry (all honor to their sincerity), had taken little hold upon my mind, still, the vital drop of the Puritan was in my blood, and the fear of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... Fenner. "She is the only child I ever have had in my practice who managed to reach earth as all children should. During the impressionable stage, no one expected her, so there was no time spent in worrying, fretting, and discontent. I don't mean that these things were customary with Ruth. No woman ever accepted motherhood in a more beautiful spirit; but if she would have protested at any time, it ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... Magsie would be a rage! Magsie's young favors would be sought far and wide. Magsie's summer home, Magsie's winter apartments, Magsie's clothes and fads, these would belong to the adoring public of the most warmhearted and impressionable city in the world! Rachael saw it all coming with perhaps more certainty than did even the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gay, it was brilliant. Life flowed fast and it was astonishingly vivid. A restless society, always seeking something new flitted from house to house. Dick, young and impressionable, would have been glad to share a little in it, but his time was too short. He went once with Colonel Winchester to the theatre, and the boy who had thrice seen a hundred and fifty thousand men in deadly action hung breathless over the mimic struggles of a few ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the two men worked like magic upon the impressionable mind of young Robert, who sat listening. Long after all had retired for the night he lay awake, his little mind away in the future, living in the earthly paradise which had been conjured up before him by the warm, inspiring sentences of this miners' leader, and joyful in the contemplation ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, who thanks to his size and sturdiness, lends himself admirably to an experiment of this kind. I operate upon a dozen, in the corselet, on the breast, on the belly and, by preference, on one of the hind legs, far removed from the impressionable nervous centers. No matter what part my injector attacks, the effect produced is the same, or nearly. The insect falls as though struck by lightning. It lies on its back and wriggles its legs, especially ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Transparent o'er the Neva beamed The firmament in mellow light, And when the watery mirror gleamed No more with pale Diana's rays,(17) We called to mind our youthful days— The days of love and of romance! Then would we muse as in a trance, Impressionable for an hour, And breathe the balmy breath of night; And like the prisoner's our delight Who for the greenwood quits his tower, As on the rapid wings of thought The early days of life ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... many times before, yet they are a joy eternal, a changing joy of which neither the eye nor the mind ever grows weary. Both he and Merrihew were foremost in the press against the forward rail. To the latter's impressionable mind it was like a dream. In fancy he could see the Roman galleys, the fighting triremes, the canopied pleasure-craft, just as they were two thousand years ago. Yonder, the temples and baths of Nero of the Golden House; ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... her, after all," Wingrave continued coolly. "She possesses powers which you yourself have already admitted, and you, I should say, are a fairly impressionable person, so far as her sex is concerned. Confess now, that she did not leave ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our schools, there is in them a uniform standard of morals. Schools, that neglect or suppress the daily reading of the Bible, do not keep the vision of those attending them on the christian ideal, or develop the christian motive in them, during the most impressionable period of their lives. ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... as an art culled from the classics, from pro-German[1] economists and historians, from poets such as Shelley, and from German[1] higher critics of the Bible—were taught to fifth form boys with crude impressionable minds, the result would be Bolshevism. We agree that under careful guidance much of ultimate political value can be taught from history and literature. But it must be done with infinite care, and opinions must be excluded from the teaching. That is ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... a grave danger; for if, in the impressionable period of youth, attention is given to one kind of knowledge, it may very likely be withdrawn from another. A life of sheltered study does not allow a boy to learn the hard facts of the world—and business is concerned with reality. The ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... word. Its ancient walls, hallowed by long tradition, formed a peaceful and sweet harbour of rest for a woman's life,—and the tranquil dignity of her old-world surroundings with all the legends and memories they awakened, soon had a beneficial effect on Maryllia's impressionable temperament, which, under her aunt's 'social' influence, had been more or less chafed and uneasy. She began to feel at peace with herself and all the world,—while the relief she experienced at having deliberately severed herself by both word and act from the undesired ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... explanation of the fact that white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish is almost irresistible when ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... certainly had fallen into not a few bad habits, especially of late. He had obviously and rapidly deteriorated; and it was true that he had become slovenly. He drank more and had become more tearful and nervous; and had grown too impressionable on the artistic side. His face had acquired a strange facility for changing with extraordinary quickness, from the most solemn expression, for instance, to the most absurd, and even foolish. He could not endure solitude, and was always craving ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he wishes to be successful and popular, he must suit himself to the tastes of his public; and even if he be indifferent to immediate fame, he must, as belonging to one of the most impressionable, the most receptive species of humankind, live in a sense WITH and FOR his generation. To meet this demand upon his genius, Chaucer was born with many gifts which he carefully and assiduously exercised in a long series of poetical experiments, and which he was able felicitously to ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... one fear he had swallowed the poker as a preliminary to the interview, and was bearing himself in accordance with the unyielding fact. The result was highly effective, and gave Mr. Gwynn a kingly air not likely to be wasted on impressionable ones such as the President and General Attorney. When the four were seated, Richard, using the potential name of Mr. Gwynn, proceeded to speak, while Mr. Gwynn at ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... through the impressionable man. The tiny fingers seemed to close round his heart.... It was a bonny, good-natured, gurgling scrap—and the pure eyes looked truthfully into ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... earnest men there, eagerly engaged in canvassing the general affairs of the world, and more especially their own particular ventures, hopes, anticipations, investments therein. If you are an artist, or indeed at all impressionable in matters of taste, you will, I fear, be painfully affected by a marble figure near the centre of the hall, which many persons assert to be a statue of the Queen of these realms—a calumny which I, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... invariably be addressed in classical language from the moment of their birth. So should they learn to speak English undefiled from their earliest utterance. "How," demanded Sir Oracle, "can a mother reasonably expect her child to learn correct speech, when she continually accustoms its impressionable gray matter to such absurd expressions and distortions of our noble tongue as thoughtless mothers inflict every day on the helpless creatures committed to their care? Can a child who is constantly called 'tweet itty wee singie' ever attain to any proper conception of his own being ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... her ardent reply, accompanied by a gesture, the freedom of which suited her style and person as it would not have done those of a less impressionable woman. And, seeing that I had no intention of leaving the spot where I stood, she moved at last from where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked, pausing to ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... of Reed was that the only way to work out the freedom of Ireland was by force of arms. Mat at first was inclined to laugh at the idea; but an impressionable and vehement nature such as his was ill calculated to cope for a lengthened time with a nature precise, cold, and stubborn like that of Reed. Strength of will and tenacity of opinion make their way against better judgment, especially if there can be no doubt of the sincerity of ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... given to travel by both motor car and bicycle was here self-evident. The Hotel du Grand Monarque literally swarmed with tourists, one and all French folks taking their ease at their inn. And our neighbours do not take their pleasure solemnly after the manner of the less impressionable English. Stay-at-home as they have hitherto been, home-loving as they essentially are, the atmosphere of an inn, the aroma of a holiday, fill the Frenchman's cup of hilarity to overflowing, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and favorite, and his letter to his nurse in New York gives a good idea of how the place affects a bright, impressionable child. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... when in 1801 he mounted the throne over the body of his murdered father: a mystic melancholy liable at any moment to issue in extravagant action. At first, indeed, this exercised but little influence on the emperor's life. Young, emotional, impressionable, well-meaning and egotistic, Alexander displayed from the first an intention of playing a great part on the world's stage, and plunged with all the ardour of youth into the task of realizing his political ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of genius," she declared, "must be impressionable. We ought to set ourselves to discover your ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been intended that the boy should see on this ecclesiastical pilgrimage, he returned to Rome at the end of three months with his quick, impressionable mind stuffed with food for reflection. Though he had seen the glories of the Church, worshiped in her matchless temples, and sat at the feet of her great scholars, now in the quiet of his little room he found himself dwelling upon a single thought, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... youngest man in the exploration party, was in the lounge listening to them. Chandler was a nice kid, clean-cut and right out of the finest tradition of Earth, but Chandler was, like all boys barely out of their teens, impressionable. He was particularly impressionable in these, his first months ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... fundamental and persistent self-consciousness—persistent in dreams, and even in the calmest sleep, which is always accompanied by a vague sensation—is the consciousness of a living subject, active, impressionable, exercising his will, capable of emotions and passions. It is not the consciousness of an inert thing, passive, dead, or extrinsic; for animal life consists in sensation of greater or less intensity, but always of sensation. Consequently, such ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the hymns were highly impressionable and fresh. At this stage the time was not ripe enough for them to accord a consistent and well-defined existence to the multitude of gods nor to universalize them in a monotheistic creed. They hypostatized unconsciously any ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... final resolve to declare war the Emperor, Empress, and Ministers went to St. Cloud. After some discussion Gramont told me that the Empress, a high-spirited and impressionable woman, made a strong and most excited address, declaring that "war was inevitable if the honour of France was to be sustained." She was immediately followed by Marshal Leboeuf, who, in the most violent tone, threw down his portfolio and swore that ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pole of psychic influence, we find those persons who believe firmly that the other person has power over them, and who are more or less afraid of him. This belief and fear acts to make them particularly sensitive and impressionable, and easily affected by his psychic induction. This is the reason that the so-called witches and sorcerers and others of evil repute have been able to acquire such a power over their victims, and to cause so much trouble. ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... twenty-one years old; and then they were turned loose upon the world, like a pair of young bears, with a couple of hundred pounds of capital apiece to shift for themselves with. Uncanny, very; I don't like the look of it. Not at all the sort of people an impressionable girl like our Elma should ever be allowed to see too ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... former sudden departure, and of running a gauntlet of inquiry concerning his marriage to the aristocratic Miss Warwick of South Carolina; the fear that some one at Patesville might have suspected a connection between Rena's swoon and his own flight,—these considerations so moved this impressionable and impulsive young man that he called a bell-boy, demanded an early breakfast, ordered his horse, paid his reckoning, and started upon his homeward journey forthwith. A certain distrust of his own sensibility, which he felt to be curiously inconsistent with his ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... temperament impressionable to the sun, air, trees, children, women, men, cattle, landscapes, the ocean. Such swift, vivid notation of the fluid life about him is rare; it would be photographic were it not the personal memoranda of a selecting eye; it would be ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... prisoner, under sentence for something which she could not understand. She turned hither and thither in her appeal for help and understanding, and everybody turned aside as if she were an outcast. The iron of injustice began to enter her soul. She was at the impressionable age, when she felt deeply every injury done her. She thought much of Ann Barnes and Martin Christiansen, her two friends. They would have understood. They would have answered the questions, told her the truth which her mother hinted at yet failed to explain. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... ten years in age between her daughters, and it was the younger of the two whose education was being completed. Johanna, the elder, had been a disappointment to her mother. Left to her own devices at an impressionable age, the girl had developed bookish tastes at the cost of her appearance: influenced by a free-thinking tutor of her brothers', she had read Huxley and Haeckel, Goethe and Schopenhauer. Her wish had been for a university career, but she ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... as ready to write on one side as to fight on the other. He was a rolling stone, and had been a rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty. Yet you can see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the life of the clubs. She had gone through life as ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... man, with a broad brow and a pleasant gentleness of expression. The eyes were fine and thoughtful, and there was a combination of intellectual force with great delicacy of line in the contour of the head and face which was particularly attractive, especially to women of the more cultivated and impressionable sort. His thin grayish hair was rather long—not of that pronounced length which inevitably challenges the decision of the bystander as to whether the wearer be fool or poet, but still long enough to fall a little carelessly ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to exert over this impressionable, mobile, almost too ardent nature, an influence which was to determine its direction. His father had advised him to choose his friends with care, and not yield himself to the first comer. He was not only incapable of doing that, but equally incapable of yielding himself to anybody. Do we ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... NOT QUARRELSOME. As a species, man appears to be the most quarrelsome animal on the earth; and the same quality is strongly reflected in his most impressionable servant and companion, the domestic dog. Nearly all species of wild animals have learned the two foundation facts of the philosophy of life— that peace is better than war, and that if one must fight, it is ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... practical competence. The more plastic a being is to experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure. What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character, namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Asensio's house—" "It is cold before the dawn—" ... Poor little Rosa! He had always thought of her as so proud, so high-spirited, so playful, but another Rosa had written this letter. Her appeal stirred every chord of tenderness, every impulse of chivalry in his impressionable Irish nature. She doubted him; she feared he would not come' to her. Well, he would set her doubts at rest. "O God! Come quickly, if you love me." He leaped to his feet; he dashed ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... her personality; there was not one of us on board the Ertak who had not. And she had not exercised her wiles on any of us save Hendricks; with the shrewdness which had made her the leader she was, she had elected to fascinate the youngest, the weakest, the most impressionable. ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... sharp-cut features a steamer has since been wrecked and sunk, and its expression of gloomy fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited "the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing and cameo cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she had received ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... dimensions, and that a geometrical projection, such as a plan or elevation, only partially represents its appearance, he advocates the more general use of perspective drawing in designing. By this is not meant the making of pretty sketches after the design is all determined, to mislead impressionable clients, but the serious study of a design to determine its appearance from different points of view. In fact his suggestion is that the usual order of proceeding shall be reversed, and that the design shall be made in perspective and then translated ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... noticed a change in him—and that very night he spoke to me. For such an impressionable fellow, he had really extraordinary tenacity, and, spite of the course of Herbert Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... this time that the labourers began to think the young master rather more important than the old one; but for their connivance, James Rooney could never have been drawn into Fenianism. The conspiracy was just the thing to fascinate the boy's impressionable heart. The poetry, the glamour of the romantic devotion to Mother Country fed his starved idealism; the midnight drillings and the danger were elements in its attraction. James Rooney drilled with the rest, swore with them their oaths of fealty ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... direct change from the Washington Square studio to the ample house of the Hutchinsons, and it was as well for her that a change in Jimmie's fortunes had taken her back to the Winchester and enabled her to accustom herself again to the amenities of gentler living. Like all sensitive and impressionable children she took on the color of a new environment very quickly. The strain of her studio experience had left her a little cowed and unsure of herself, but she had brightened up like a flower set in the cheerful ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... to his friends, his impressionable soul, his devotion to church, his yearning for education and enlightenment, his thrift, industry, devotion to country, fidelity to the flag shown upon hundreds of battle-fields, must be admitted and command the admiration of all fair-minded men. Let him add to all these attributes, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... divided his words with such cynical scission, relaxed separately into the inane lines of superstitious fear, and the luster of his restless eyes seemed to have degenerated into that surrounding dullness of sickly white which would have provided the impressionable Lal Lu with an easy fortitude to deny the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens of France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen Rizzio murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with the Earl of Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Men like Elmer Ford aren't fit to have charge of a child. You don't know him, but he's just an unscrupulous financier, without a thought above money. To think of a boy growing up in that tainted atmosphere—at his most impressionable age. It means death to any good ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... "Oh, impressionable youth! 'thou art the gilded sand from which the kiss of a wave washes every impress.' Tune thy myriad atoms to imitate the rock, and gird thyself with strength to meet the battery of onrushing breakers ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... fortune, save of that part of his landed estate on which his wife's jointure was settled; and even from this incumbrance he was very soon freed. His wife died in the second year of marriage, leaving an only son,—Graham. He grieved for her loss with all the passion of an impressionable, ardent, and powerful nature. Then for a while he sought distraction to his sorrow by throwing himself into public life with a devoted energy he had not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at home whom I knew intimately (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one of whom, Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation the spring before); she seemed refreshingly original, impressionable and plastic.... ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the county of the same name, a widow named Susanna, and she was well-to-do according to the modest standard of the times. She was blest with a goodly family of sons and daughters, among whom was Mary Almira, a maiden fair to look upon and impressionable withal. Now it befell that Mary Almira, while still very young, was sent to school at the Academy in Leicester, Mass., where she met, and, in the language of the law, formed "a natural and virtuous attachment" with a student named Jeremiah, sent thither by his ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... kindness. He showed him an ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand passion of science became henceforth the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson |
