"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... take Penny along?" (Penny was an inconsequential dog that had been given to Clytie by one whom she called Cousin ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... clipped foliage of the Boboli Gardens; far to the left the paved height of the Piazzale Michelangelo rose above the somber sweep of roofs and bridges; an aged bell rang harshly and mingled with the inconsequential clatter on the Lungarno. An overwhelming sense of the mystery of being stabbed, sharp as a knife, at her heart; a choking longing possessed her to experience all—all the wonders of life, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... moment, then shifted to the opposite wall, became fixed there. He sat half turned in his chair. He seemed to grow intent on something, to become wrapped in some fog of cogitation, through which Hollister and his affairs appeared only as inconsequential phantoms. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... inconsequential approaches to a statement with a keen and questioning glance. "The girl went up to the Cat on the early stage, sir. She's ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... munificent. Reading the index of private schools and colleges is important for their children and youth, but still more important for the community upon which unbridled passion, inability to work or to spend properly, inconsequential thinking, mediaeval ideals of caste, etc., can inflict greater injuries than can typhoid ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... and the opening of the season; dogs and the training of dogs; and why some go gun-shy and why some ace blinkers. From sport and its justification, they became inconsequential; and she was beginning to enjoy the freshness of their chance acquaintance, his nice attitude toward things, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... recall the conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could see that ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the other, using each other's materials and conclusions at the right moment and in the right places. The folklorist has the most to do to get his results ready, and to explain and secure his position. He has been wandering about in a somewhat inconsequential fashion, bent upon finding a mythos where he should have sought for a persona or a locus, engaged in an extensive quest after parallels when he should have been preparing his own material for the process of comparative science, seeking for origins amidst human error when he should have turned ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... me that my plot was humbug. What sailorman would mistake a lantern for a lighthouse? Nor were there lighthouses in the days of the buccaneers. He would have scuttled my play in dock and grinned at the rising bubbles. Mark the difference! My manager, ignoring these inconsequential errors, burst from his chair—this is amazing!—and turned a reckless somersault between the table ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... thickly-built man with an abrupt manner continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor. Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Mrs. Toomey saw herself as Kate saw her. Stripped of the virtues in which the girl had clothed her, she stood forth a scheming, inconsequential little coward in a weak ineffectual rack of a body—not strong enough to be vicious, without the courage to be dangerous. Thin-lipped, neutral-tinted, flat of chest and scrawny, without a womanly charm save the fragility that incited pity; to Kate who had idealized ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... public was clamoring for action, and E.H.Q. was, instead, droning on through a mass of inconsequential detail, now while public sentiment was crystallizing, or could be crystallized into placing human welfare over science procedures, now was ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'—a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his pleasant, inconsequential observations, and Gerald lay with closed eyes, quite motionless, until, watching him, Selwyn saw his hand was trembling where it lay clinched beside him. And presently the boy turned ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... was too far along in life to pick up even the rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... was, with red face and black hair which seemed to scramble in all directions at once, and with a mustache which appeared to scamper in even more directions than his hair. Fairchild was a large man; suddenly he felt himself puny and inconsequential as the mastodonic thing before him swooped forward, spread wide the big arms and then caught him tight in them, causing the breath to puff over his lips like ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... her breath. So she was a mere frivolous, inconsequential butterfly, after all. Why try longer to lend the Helping Hand—why not cut things short and be satisfied with the Social Triumph and let it go at that? "I was meaning to ask you to dine with me some evening next week at a settlement I know, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his arms, which ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence—if indeed they gave it a thought—as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighbourly ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... blacksmith's forge. The duty devolved upon him as the overseas apostle of Gallic paternalism to "order everything as seemed just and proper," even when this brought his hand into the very homes of the people, into their daily work or worship or amusements. Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential to have an ordinance devoted to it. As general regulator of work and play, of manners and morals, of things present and things to come, the intendant was the busiest man in ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... would be the very fewest needed, seeing the distance of their operations from home; while Great Britain, relying wholly on her navy for the integrity of her empire, equally cannot afford the hostility of a nation having twenty battleships, and with whom her points of difference are as inconsequential to her as they are ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... horse, drawing her up close beside me, whenever the way permitted, conscious that she must feel, even as I did, the terrible loneliness of our surroundings, and the strain of this slow groping through the unknown. We conversed but little, and then in whispers, and of inconsequential things—of hope and fear, even of literature and music, of anything which would take our minds off our present situation. I smiled afterwards to remember the strange topics which came up between us in the midst of that gloom. And ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... was not over thirty. A dapper, exquisite little man. He was distraught at the sight of this tearful damsel and, very naturally attributed her distress to unpreparedness. Petty was a pretty, inconsequential little creature born to play upon the feelings of one man or another. It did not much matter who he happened to be so long as he could satisfy the sentimental element in her makeup, ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... pathetic references to the life and work of the late Hon. J. W. Sauer, the great Cape politician who had just passed away; then he proceeded to refer at length to sundry inconsequential topics of minor local significance; and, having repeated his great pleasure at seeing them, without making a single reference to the momentous measure that was ravaging the Natives of the country, the Government Secretary resumed his seat amidst looks of astonishment and consternation ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... presents an evil and watchful appearance, or, if a novice at his trade, is hesitating in his replies, the pathological liar has a cheerful, open, free, enthusiastic, charming appearance, because he believes in his stories and wishes their reality. The inconsequential way in which such persons go to work is to be explained by the fact that consciousness of the real situation is partly clouded in their minds. In any special act it is impossible to say whether the consciousness of the lie, fancy, or delusion preponderates. Inability ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... details we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures—an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts. ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... excitement. In ten minutes he went his way, drawing her musing eyes after him. Until he had reached his own door and turned it at the Casa Blanca the two girls on Struve's veranda were silent. Florrie's thoughts were flitting hither and yon, bright-winged, inconsequential, fluttering about Jim Galloway, deserting him for Roderick Norton, darting off to Elmer Page, coming home to Florrie herself. As for Virginia, conscious of a sort of dread, she was oppressed with the stubbornly insistent thought that if Jim Galloway cared to ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... mind the most inconsequential inferences were drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... place in the war legislation by reason of the embargo provision. It appeared an inconsequential clause, judging from the little public attention paid to it; but the President saw a weapon in it that might have more effect in bringing Germany to her knees than Great Britain's blockade of her coasts, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... possible out of this mass of material to tell the story of Robert Burns's life simply and clearly, neither wandering away into the family histories and genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting contemporaries, nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles? What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and an understanding of all that tended to make him the name and the power he is in ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... "You are inconsequential," said Miss Blair. "You cannot start upon a train of sequences in this world unless you go on to the bitter end. Besides, after all, why do you object to lying? I suppose you were brought up to tell the truth, and so was I, and I really think I venerate the truth ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the father, but in the dreamy, inconsequential way of one whose thoughts were elsewhere. "I suppose I shall have to take them ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... or morally—a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide these funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential factors as ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... at work, now, cleaning up. As Kennedy asked him a few inconsequential questions, his eye caught a row of books on a shelf. It was a most complete library of the culinary arts. Craig selected one and turned the pages over rapidly. Then he came back to the frontispiece, which showed a model dinner- table set for a number of guests. He placed the picture ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... to say that he would meet Your Mercies—yes, surely, before you had gone very far, nina." Her tone was a sugared whine, and more than once she peered around at Murguia; while he, for his part, stood by as though overseeing a task. But Jacqueline only allowed herself a little inconsequential sniff, and went back to the really serious business that did worry her. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... donner-und-blitzen style, as Germans have been known to do. Yet they were friends, and the honest Zelter's yearly visits were as a godsend to the old poet, who was often pestered to distraction by visitors who only voiced the conventional, the inconsequential and absurd. Here was a man ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... me about Mr. Blake, anyway? I don't want to hear a lot of inconsequential gossip. I ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... who are not quite forgotten, such as the two Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of thirty years ago. That was the late ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... understand if we did. We reap but have not sowed, gather but have not strewed, and that is ever injurious and never beneficial. Our conceit is flattered and enlarged, our importance magnified, our "dignity"—God save the mark!—made more impressive, and as a result, we are more the target for the inconsequential worries of life. We worry if we are not flattered, if our importance is not recognized even by strangers, and our dignity not honored—in other words we worry that we are not kow-towed to, deferred to, respectfully greeted on every hand and made to feel that civilization, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... at that age one loves to think of life as being implacable. But you will soon discover that she is merely inconsequential, and that none of her antics are of lasting importance; and you will learn to smile a deal more often ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation of the ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... limited senses and our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... convenience sake, the fact of my social inferiority. Centuries of army tradition demanded it; and I discovered that it is absolutely futile for one inconsequential American to rebel against the unshakable fortress of English tradition. Nearly all of my comrades were used to clear-cut class distinctions in civilian life. It made little difference to them that some of our officers were recruits as raw ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... furane-alcohol content of over 5,000 cups of coffee. Thus, in view of the very apparent minuteness of the quantity of this compound present in one cup of coffee, together with the fact that it is not cumulative in its physiological action, the importance of its toxic properties becomes very inconsequential to even the most profuse ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the same kind, interesting to a rural community but considered inconsequential by those conversant ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... puzzling his brain over the inconsequential matter something stirred upon the floor close to his feet, and presently he jerked back a booted foot that a rat had commenced to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but of her sense of beauty. Before long I have a distinct impression of her. Sometimes, as with a woman, this first impression has to be revised; sometimes not. Sometimes, on acquaintance, a single feature, or trait, becomes so important in my eyes that all else seems inconsequential. A noble spirit may cover physical defects; beauty may seem to compensate for weaknesses of character. The spell of a beautiful city which is bad resembles the spell of such a ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza. An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I WEEN and I WEET, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... t' gracious!" he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object in ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... more illogical proceeding? And here follows the treatise,—a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,—conceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling carpenter ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... held out to him. The glances of the company told him Zouche was 'on,' and that it was no good trying to stem the flow of his ideas, or check the inconsequential nature of his speech. Lotys had moved her chair a little back from the table, and with both arms encircling the child, Pequita, was talking to her in low and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... decided to encourage. He employed an expert in each line of feminine endeavor, upon the distinct understanding that the most scrupulous attention should be given to her correspondence: that every letter, no matter how inconsequential, should be answered quickly, fully, and courteously, with the questioner always encouraged to come again if any problem of whatever nature came to her. He told his editors that ignorance on any question was a misfortune, not a crime; and he wished their correspondence ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... emerged, a moment later, from the portals of the club, still chuckling mildly to himself as he struggled into a light evening overcoat. His temper, having run the gamut of boredom, interest, perturbation, mystification, and plain amusement, was now altogether inconsequential: a dangerous mood for Maitland. Standing on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street he thought it over, tapping the sidewalk gently with his cane. Should he or should he not carry out his intention as declared to Bannerman, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... them, 'She prized it, did old Betty Higden; she was true to it; and while she lived, she would never let it be disgraced by falling into the hands of those that she held in horror.' Most illogical, inconsequential, and light-headed, this; but travellers in the valley of the shadow of death are apt to be light-headed; and worn-out old people of low estate have a trick of reasoning as indifferently as they live, and doubtless would appreciate our Poor Law more philosophically on ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... consequence, subsequent, consecutive, execute, prosecute, persecute, sue, ensue, suitor, suitable, pursuit, rescue, second; (2) obsequies, obsequious, sequester, inconsequential, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... laughter, the parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... hotel piazza—an amusement that under the most favorable conditions has its limitations. But to-day—even though the rain had further interfered with his arrangements by making it necessary to cancel the trip he had planned for Marjory and Peter to Cannes—the weather was an inconsequential incident. It did not matter greatly to him whether it rained ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... day Scattergood busied himself in searching out old friends and neighbors of the Newtons. Nothing seemed to interest him which happened later than eight years before, but no event of that period was too slight or inconsequential to receive his attention and to be filed away in his shrewd old brain. He was looking for the answer to a question, and the answer was piled under the rubbish of eight years of human activities—a hopeless ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... leaning back in his chair, with his slow smile drawled in an inconsequential way: "I reckon, now that the financial obsequies of Mr. Jefferson Worth has been indefinitely postponed owin' to the corpse refusin' to perform, that Company bunch will wear mournin' because said funeral didn't ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... which to write home; with his kind of people, to ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And he closed ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... men possessing clear judicial minds defending with all the fervor of fifteenth century fanatics, not the Christian faith per se, but some special interpretation thereof; not the philosophy of religion, but the inconsequential theorems of some sacerdotal "reformer" who has added to the world's discord by founding a new "faith." These various religious divisions have become little more than rival commercial establishments, each peddling its own peculiar brand of saving grace—warranted the only genuine—and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... prevalent among "religious" people. The conversations of church members often are pitiful in their concern for the trivial affairs of the local church and institution, about its building and organizations, its suppers and bazaars. What a pathetic and inconsequential way of serving Christ! He needs, instead, men and women who are out on the frontiers of modern life, representing His message ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... she had to call Ronald three times for dinner, and when he came out of the den she noticed that he closed the door the way one does upon a small child. He chattered about inconsequential matters all through dinner. Corinne knew that his work was going smoothly. A few minutes later she was to ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... saw of it, barrin' a few inconsequential frills that a good eye could make out lacking ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... benefiting you; I could not think the finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... like me any more than I liked him. He thinks I'm frivolous and inconsequential, and totally unfitted for this position of trust. I dare say Jervis has had a letter from him by now ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... pass; and, had not Allah vouchsafed me to thee, ne'er hadst thou escaped this strait into which thou hast fallen, for they would have cast thee into a calamity whence thou never couldest have won free. But I will not call thee to account for thine ignorance, as thou art so little of wit and inconsequential and addicted to hastiness!" Said I to him, "Doth not what thou hast brought upon me suffice thee, but thou must run after me and talk me such talk in the bazaar streets?" And I well nigh gave up the ghost for excess of rage against him. Then ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... her letter in a hurry; but did not post it, in her inconsequential fashion, until the afternoon of the next day, so that Nan got it on the morning of the following day. She read and re-read it; and then, somehow, she wanted to think about it in the open—under the wide skies, near the wide sea. She wanted to ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... inconsequential requests with which she liked to busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many people were not doing something for her, she ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... do not feel this more and so recover their consciousness of an indispensable mission. One wonders that the churches can be so timid and dull and negative, that our sermons can be so pallid and inconsequential. One wonders why in the pulpit we have so many flutes and so few trumpets. For here is a world with the accumulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the purlieus of hell because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very power in which ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... an unknown good.' If I should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... other. He was the last man to cherish an enthusiasm for an inferior race. Indeed, he would have much preferred it should die out altogether and make room for better material. The truth was that his prolonged residence abroad had made the questions of American politics exceedingly vague and inconsequential. He believed them to be ephemeral to the last degree— in the main, mere struggles of parties and partisans for power and spoils; and for their hopes, schemes, and stratagems to gain ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... follow it. What she did not follow was the veiled admiration in Superintendent Fowler's glance at the detective. Those few inconsequential questions had shed a flood of light on Siddle's past and present, yet the informant was blissfully unaware of their real purport. And the way was opened so deftly. The purchase of a chemist's business ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inconsequential conversation and chatter continued for fully half an hour without one word being spoken on the all-important subject they had presumably been brought together to arrange. They touched on everything theatrical, according ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... three or four weeks in this gipsy fashion, mayhap getting a peep at a moose, a wolf, or even a bear (to say nothing of such inconsequential fry as ermine, mink, beaver, and otter), the family arrive at ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... week, and a Mr. Inchpin in the town was reported to be the owner of a number of books. Jason's mother was an Eastern woman and sometimes the loneliness and hardship of her life made her find solace in what seemed to Jason inconsequential things. Still, he was glad of the school, for he was a first-class student and already had decided to take his father's and mother's advice that he study medicine. And the packet, warping in twice a week, was, after all, ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... plot. Nor, perhaps, ought we to expect that it should. An Interlude, as its name implies, was originally only a kind of stop-gap, an entree of light entertainment between other events; and what so welcome for this purpose as the inconsequential dialogue, by-play, and mutual trickery of sundry 'lewd fellows of the baser sort'? When it extended its sphere from the castle banqueting-hall to the street or inn-yard no greater excellence was expected ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... attended to, Mr. McGraw next proceeded to do what he had always done when in a civilized community—spend his money recklessly. He went back to the hotel, called Donna on the long-distance phone and frittered away two dollars in inconsequential conversation. However, he felt amply rewarded for the extravagance when Donna's voice—deep, throaty, almost a baritone—came to him over the wire; the delighted, almost childish cry of amazement which greeted his "Hello, Donna girl" was music to ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... trifle sleepy, dreamily watching the fireflies, the ceaseless noise of the creek in her ears, inconsequential thoughts flitted through her brain—the vague, aimless, guiltless thoughts of a ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... little that escaped the Shad. For some time his curiosity had been stirred by the unusual attentions paid to Skippy Bedelle by his old side-partner, Doc Macnooder. Doc was eminently practical and if Doc devoted any part of his time to an inconsequential underformer, in the language of the day, there ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... his hero, when he talks of his private virtues. His subjects are commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural, and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... more striking to me because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain to ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... of the game of Auction provides for a bidding in which each one of the four suits competes with each other, and also with the No-trump. Using the Bridge count, this does not take place. The two black suits, by reason of their inconsequential valuation, are practically eliminated from the sea of competitive bidding. The Diamond creates only a slight ripple, and even the Heart has to be unusually strong to resist the ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... mind my saying so, Jim, but I had it in my mind to ask you to be a bit inconsequential—especially when Doane was around—about your taking his place. But I ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... incidents converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence whatever, "we came home ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and inconsequential sentences, which seemed like crude ore instead of the molten, burning metal of thought left to cool in graceful molds, he threw aside his pen ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... circles in Germany there is a gushing idealism about the relations of the sexes. In their songs and sayings, as well as in their mythology, there is a laudation of love that is overstimulating. The lines of that inconsequential philosopher, that irresponsible moralist, that ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... sphere and a rascal in another; and since a citizen to fulfil his duty to his country must be honourable and zealous, he must develop the underlying virtues in private life. He must strengthen the individual character, and to do this he must deal with many things seemingly remote and inconsequential from a national point of view. Everything that crosses a man's path in his day's round of little or great moment requires of him an attitude towards it, and the conscious or unconscious shaping of his attitude is determining how he will proceed in other spheres not now in view. Suppose the case ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... my choice, I believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my farther course. "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and importance. These, however, must sooner or later end as they began; they perish in the lie they make; and it were well did not other falsehoods take their places, to prolong a life whose only tenure is inconsequential ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... between as they are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily—otherwise, they would not be business men and ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... good-looking and more intelligent than you would believe," Louise rejoined carelessly. She had put Lawford Tapp aside as inconsequential. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... York, of the fair-spoken yet elusive Higginson. But with every step he found the force of this errand weakening within him. The memory of that gentleman's villany, so burning a moment since, grew steadily fainter and more inconsequential. Failing to locate him, he would of course make a precautionary round of the newspaper offices in New York that night. At the worst, he told himself with the swift fading of his anger, there was only a remote risk of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the strongest circumstantial evidence to wash herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought "weakening," and somehow connected with ethical impropriety. When Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least appeared so to our eyes. She must have been much more so when she was younger. In our town we were all formed upon recognised patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, had all. The wine-merchant, for example, who went to church, eminently ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... pointed out the fact that this wholesale decoration was done immediately after the Rothschilds had floated a rather large and risky loan for his Kingship. This is irrelevant, inconsequential, and outside the issue. That the House of Rothschild with its branches had an open sesame upon the purse-strings of Europe for half a century is a fact. Nations in need of cash had to apply to the Rothschilds. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... things in order to retain your place as a normal being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental, accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work, associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending where another man's rights begin. To these four ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... to learn, and an opportunity to test themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... off. Make no further move." It was only one of many, that arbitrary arrangement of figures, each combination having its own special significance; but, besides these, there was the key to a complete cipher into which any message might be coded, and—But why was her brain swerving off at inconsequential tangents? What did a coder or code book, matter at the ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... turned on Frederick. His right hand had stolen toward his left, but it paused under her look and remained motionless. "Only an old man sitting at a table and—" Why did she pause, and why did she cover up that pause with a wholly inconsequential sentence? Perhaps Frederick could have told, Frederick, whose hand had now fallen at his side. But Frederick volunteered nothing, and no one, not even Sweetwater, guessed all that lay beyond that AND which was left hovering in the air to be finished—-when? Alas! had she not ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green |
