"Propinquity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together, and provided no sums for the purpose, he was not unwilling that they should live by plunder. And perhaps his real intention was to extort from Rome the means of paying his troops by the mere exhibition of the danger arising from their propinquity while they remained unpaid. Upon the whole we are warranted in supposing that Bourbon and Frundsberg would hardly have ventured on the course they took if they had not had reason to believe that it would not much displease ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... could yield, having apparently failed in some undertaking which had demanded for its fulfilment not only tattered clothes and grimy hands, but menial service with a beggarly and disease-ridden employer, whose very propinquity must have been positive torture to the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... keenly enlisted in the scrutiny. There might be wolves along the track—the country was not wanting in them; or, more to be feared, there might be a panther lurking along some great overhanging forest bough. There was need to be vigilant. Either of these savages would make his propinquity known, at a short distance, to the senses of an animal so timid as the horse. Or, it might be, that a worse beast still—always worst of all when he emulates the nature of the beast—man!—might be lurking upon the track! If so, the nature ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... cell of the reverend Padre; not from any personal fear of his disreputable neighbors, though he was fully alive to their peculiarities, but from the nomadic instinct which was still strong in his blood. He felt he could not yet bear the confinement of a close room or the propinquity of his fellow-man. He would rest on the veranda until the moon was fairly up, and then he would again take to ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown. I ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... men disappeared at the end of the Butte, then returned and, this time, doubtless embarrassed by the propinquity of the German officers, penetrated a few paces into ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... conquering of the air—of Marta's sudden severance from the habit of a lifetime—of Jo's faith in her—of Kurt wrestling with his conflict between love and conventions. "Does he care, really, as much as he thinks he does," she wondered, "or is it just the lure of—propinquity? How shall I find out? Oh, there is too much on my mind! How careless and how like Hebby to leave his priceless ring about. What would he think if he knew the thief was ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... it all happened so quickly, they were married in Vienna in 1815, and—well, you know Propinquity is the Devil's middle name, too—they were divorced in 1905 after a brief married ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... in that atmosphere is blurred and meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of passion and propinquity. Love is rare; physical necessity is common to all men and women; it is absurd to expect the growth of the one and the satisfaction of the other often to coincide. Nature is apparently indifferent and does not demand ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... was delighted at the propinquity of his favourite beverage and decided that he would always remain in the cellar, regaling himself with the vintage. His thirst increased at the prospect, so he produced a gimlet, bored a hole in the vat, and drank and ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... singing, our gondola just touching the others on each side, those in turn touching others, so that a musician from the barge could cross from one to another, presenting the hat for contributions. In spite of this extreme propinquity, I feared the collector would fall into the water when he received the offering of Poor Jr. It was "Gra-a-az', Mi-lor! Graz'!" a hundred times, with bows and grateful ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... is equally clear and proportionably as abundant in both: the pillars are quite as regularly formed, and the lesser has an advantage over its rival in two or three broken columns, which give to it the semblance of a temple in ruins. There is also in this cave a strange propinquity of salt and fresh water pools, the situation of two of which struck me as peculiarly curious. They were divided from each other by a piece of rock not much thicker than a man's hand; and yet the water from the one tasted as if it had been taken from ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... has admittedly derived his basic material from the North American aborigines, he never, so far as I am aware, claimed that his impressive and noble score constitutes, for that reason, a representatively national utterance. He perceived, doubtless, that territorial propinquity is quite a different thing from racial affinity; and that a musical art derived from either Indian or Ethiopian sources can be "American" only in a partial and quite unimportant sense. He recognised, and he affirmed the belief, that racial elements are transitory and mutable, and that provinciality ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... Then in a moment he was calm again, only for that inward glow of rage. "People don't really love each other until after marriage. Love is born of propinquity and thrives on usage and custom. You only think you love this girl. It's after two people have been through a good deal together that they ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... 1759 he entered the class of moral philosophy under Adam Smith at Glasgow. Perhaps his father had thought that in the more sedate capital of the West, and in close propinquity to Auchinleck, there would be less scope for the long career of eccentricities upon which he was now to enter. If such, however, had been the intention, it was destined to a rude awakening. All his life Bozzy affected the company of players, among whom he professed to find 'an animation ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... hides in the main the secrets of its series, and betrays only an illogical succession of events. Minds cruder than the average see only a jumble of happenings in the life they look upon, and group them, if at all, by propinquity in time, rather than by any deeper law of relation. Such a mind had Dame Quickly, the loquacious Hostess in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." Consider the famous speech in which she accuses Falstaff of breach of promise to ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... naive. She was impressed by his nearness; but Lane saw that it was the fact of his being a soldier with a record, not his mere physical propinquity that affected her. She seemed both bold and shy. But she did not show any modesty. Her short skirt came above her bare knees, and she did not try to hide them from Lane's sight. At fifteen, like his sister Lorna, this girl had the development of a young woman. She ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... most enthusiastic lover of the sea must abjure his predilections, when brought to the ordeal of the steamer Champion. Crowded like rabbits in a hutch or captives in the Libby into such indecent propinquity with his kind that the third day out makes him a misanthrope,—fed on the putrid remains of the last trip's commissariat, turkeys which drop out of their skins while the cook is larding them in the galley, beef which maybe eaten as spoon-meat, and tea ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... remote and inaccessible." Could he win the love of a girl like Amanda Reist? She gave him her friendship freely, would she give her love also? A woman like Amanda could never be satisfied with half-gods, she would love as she did everything else—intensely, entirely! He remembered reading that propinquity often led people into mistakes, that constant companionship was liable to awaken a feeling that might masquerade as love. Well, he'd be fair to her, he'd let separation ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... silent, save for the faintly regular respiration of the girl who bent near his shoulder. Her breath was fragrant upon his cheek. The consciousness of her propinquity almost stifled him.... One fears that Maitland prolonged the counterfeit study ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... horizon he could distinguish a dense mass which was the trees surrounding the Abbey House, and between the trees there glimmered a faint light which might proceed from some rising star, or from Angela's window. He preferred to believe it was the latter. The propinquity made him very happy. What was she doing? he wondered— sitting by her window and thinking of him! He would ask her on the morrow. It was worth while going through that year of separation in order to taste the joy of meeting. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... faded flowers, flushed faces, torn gloves, blushes, blanc-mange, cold chicken, jelly, sponge cakes, spooney young gentlemen doing the attentive, and watchful mammas calculating what precise degree of propinquity in the crush is safe or seasonable for their daughters to the mustached and unmarrying lovers beside them. There are always the same set of gratified elders, like the benchers in King's Inn, marched up to the head of the table, to eat, drink, and be happy, removed from the more profane ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... longer a necessity for the old gentleman to sacrifice himself to the greed of the Tresslyns. But Mr. Thorpe refused to listen to this new and apparently unprejudiced argument. He was firm in his determination to clip Anne's claws; he would take no chances with youth, ultimate propinquity, and the wiles of a ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... condition, which seemed to have something sinister in it. On the other hand, the most abrupt encounter with him moved her to no emotion as it had moved her prototype in the old days. She was indifferent to, almost unconscious of, his propinquity. He was no more than a statue to her; she was a ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... had come Stephen La Mothe, and the very reaction from acute suspicion had drawn her towards him. Repentance for an unmerited blame is much nearer akin to love than any depths of pity. Then to repentance was added gratitude, to gratitude admiration, and to all three propinquity. Blessed be propinquity! If Hymen ever raises an altar to his most devoted hand-maid it will be to the dear goddess Propinquity! Yes! these days had been very ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... indeed, it was not until sixty years afterwards, under Pope Gregory XI., that Italy regained possession of the Holy See; and historians called this long absence the Babylonish captivity. Philip lost no time in profiting by his propinquity to make the full weight of his power felt by Clement V. He claimed from him the fulfilment of the fourth promise Bertrand de Goth had made in order to become pope, which was the condemnation of Boniface VIII.; and he revealed to him the sixth, that "important ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... one of many children may think; every action of the former assumes such prominence that it is examined and cross-examined, and very often sent to Coventry; whereas, in a large family, the happy-go-lucky offspring has his little light dimmed, and therefore less remarked, through the propinquity of others. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... Pemberton," exclaimed Miss Madigan, flustered by propinquity to greatness, "this is Kate, the Miss Madigan ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... nobleman so bent on it, Mr. Delaford knew that the force of true affection was not to be stayed, no more than the current of the limpid stream, and had yielded the point; and, though, perhaps, his experience might have spared her the contaminating propinquity of the low rabble, yet, considering the circumstances, he did not regret his absence, since he was required for my lady's protection, and, no doubt, two fond hearts had been made happy. Then, in the ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... accordingly, with a visage of professional length and most grievous solemnity, distribute among the pall-bearers little cards, assigning their respective situations in attendance upon the coffin. As this precedence is supposed to be regulated by propinquity to the defunct, the undertaker, however skilful a master of these lugubrious ceremonies, did not escape giving some offence. To be related to Mrs. Bertram was to be of kin to the lands of Singleside, and was ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the deep shade of the land; but the arms of the sentry on her forecastle glinted in the moonbeams as he paced his lonely watch, and sung out, as the bell struck twice, his accustomed long-drawn cry of 'All's well!' Just beyond her, in saucy propinquity, lay a slaver, bound for the coast of Africa—a beautiful, graceful craft. Still farther out the crew of a clumsy French brig were chanting the evening hymn to the Virgin. Ships from every civilized country lay anchored, in picturesque groups, in all ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... with experience, had discovered that a brilliant mind on parade might be amusing, but that, like its duller fellows, it retired to barracks and found contentment in the same humdrum existence as they. The birth of eternal, enduring love was but a matter of propinquity. Sitting on the front doorstep of an afternoon talking and strolling down to the drugstore every evening for soda-water, Darby and Joan discovered that existence apart was worse than death. And so might Joan's richer sister in the old carved chair, under the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... friendships are often made by propinquity, neighbourhood, adjacent homes, and constant meetings in ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... immorality charges in the Court at Lower Hutt the prosecuting officer attributed the delinquency, in part, to the association of boys and girls in co-educational schools. This directed the attention of the Committee to the effect on morality of the propinquity of ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... Linnaeus, and which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that something more is included in our classification, than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is included; and that propinquity of descent,—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings,—is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of {414} modification, which is partially revealed to us by ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... got under full headway he fairly tore up all the tongues by their roots and trampled them under foot in the rush of his stinging invective. Although of Italian origin, "Gassy" was born near the site of the Tower of Babel, and its propinquity and influence gave him that varied volubility in expressing fine shades of meaning in many languages that made him the pride of the profession of which he was a distinguished light. His ebullitions ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... possibly wrecking, his trusting and hospitable host. But the mere fact that his imagination could dwell upon such an issue as reckless flight, inflamed his impatience, and his desire to see Concha daily during these last few weeks of propinquity. Finally, he sought the co-operation of Father Abella—Santiago was in Monterey—and that wise student of maids and men gave ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... position. So far as I can judge, Mary and Mr. Will Axworthy are quits. If he has had a good time in her society, she has had an equally good time in his, and he does not enjoy her letters so much as he did her propinquity." ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... as such was amazed, dismayed, and cruelly embarrassed. If she was a simple bather from some vicinity hitherto unknown and unsuspected by him, it was clearly his business to shut up his glass and go back to his garden patch—although the propinquity of himself and the lighthouse must have been as plainly visible to her as she was to him. On the other hand, if she was the survivor of some wreck and in distress—or, as he even fancied from her reckless manner, bereft of her senses, his duty to rescue her was equally clear. In his dilemma ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... deduction of his line of ancestors, with their various intermarriages, and inwardly deprecated the remorseless and protracted accuracy with which the worthy Sir Everard rehearsed the various degrees of propinquity between the house of Waverley-Honour and the doughty barons, knights, and squires to whom they stood allied; if (notwithstanding his obligations to the three ermines passant) he sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry, its griffins, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... continually doing so—in the talk, I should see him, hear him, and share the rapture. But the revelation was not to be. You might think that to hear him called 'Gabriel' would have given me a sense of propinquity. But I felt no nearer to him than you feel to the Archangel who bears ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... fact that she is technically an enemy. So I applied, stating the facts, to the Chief Constable, who, with a promptitude and a courtesy which I desire to acknowledge, sent a sergeant to interview me. Struggling against that sense of general and undefined guilt which the propinquity of a police officer always inspires and striving to assume an air of frank and confident honesty, I approached the sergeant and learnt from him that, this being a prohibited area, the Chief Constable could not give the required permission ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... any sentiments except for you. And only the inconvenient propinquity of that man Annan prevents me from ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... devolving upon us than the obvious one of treating her with all respect. It is possible that she might come to feel a preference for one of us—a sense of gratitude, the natural sentiment of her coming womanhood, even the fact of continual propinquity might encourage it. Isobel is charming; she will be beautiful. The position, if any one of us relaxed in the slightest degree, might become critical. You must understand what I mean, I am sure, even if I am not expressing it very ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... solve. What is the meaning of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated vengeance, or does she count on the fear of danger to ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... well-shaped, though scarred and roughened by the rasp of the hot straw. The warmth of the sun seemed to cling to his brown face; a joyous vitality emanated from him, and he had mental gifts. She felt lightly thrilled by his propinquity. ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... much propinquity adds fuel to love's fire. Unknown, even to himself, Roger's passion had been gradually rising towards flood-tide. Man being by nature a contradictory animal, the attitude assumed by his mother and cousin towards the woman who was to be his wife had seemed to fan rather than smother ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... going to tell us a ghost story!" said Kate, drawing her chair nearer to her uncle's; and then, finding this did not satisfy her sense of propinquity to the source of the expected pleasure, drawing a stool from the corner, and seating herself almost on the hearth-rug at ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... workshops in delicious propinquity and solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room and the girls' bedroom. In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches. It ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... also have secured the Squire's enmity, and might have caused him a fit of apoplexy. And surely, as it was, the lovers were not lost to each other. To wed is often fatal to romance; but it is expecting too much to suppose that lovers will reason that too much propinquity is often worse than obstacle. The road between them was a good one—the letter-carrier made three trips a week, and an irascible parent could not stop dreams, nor veto telepathy, even if he did pass a law that one short visit ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... elaborate their romance, if it was such, from this point. Gradually, hastened by the awful propinquity in a third-rate boarding-house, Haldane really came to believe—as along the line of least resistance—in his personal incapacity and his loneliness; gradually Ida Locke began to realize that, for the first time, this Love she had read of and dreamed ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... from the subject which he had brought up. Just what there was about him or the subject to arouse her so strangely he did not pause to inquire of himself, for his thoughts were not coherent just then; he, too, was stirred by her nearer propinquity as she leaned forward, ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite ubiquitous persecution. He sees himself the appointed scion of a Chosen Race, the only race to which God has ever spoken, and perhaps the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Glarus seemed to me to be threading a loneliness beyond all worlds and beyond all conception desolate. Even in more populous waters, when no sail notches the line of the horizon, the propinquity of one's kind is nevertheless a thing understood, and to an unappreciated degree comforting. Here, however, I knew we were out, far out in the desert. Never a keel for years upon years before us had parted these waters; never ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. He describes (La Vie des Abeilles, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness "consistait aux beautes d'un jardin et parmi ces beautes la mieux aimee et la plus visitees ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... &c. adj.; proximity, propinquity; vicinity, vicinage; neighborhood, adjacency; contiguity &c. 199. short distance, short step, short cut; earshot, close quarters, stone's throw; bow shot, gun shot, pistol shot; hair's breadth, span. purlieus, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... The number of sentry posts required will depend on the assumed propinquity or distance of the enemy, strength of obstacles, ease with which sentry posts can be re-enforced and other local conditions. Normally by day this should be one sentinel for each platoon and at night three double sentinels for each platoon. ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... his desire and the fulfillment of his revenge, though steadfastly foreseen by Joe Noy from the moment when first he set foot in London and began his search, now for a moment overwhelmed him at the prospect of their extreme propinquity. Had anything been needed to strengthen his determination on the threshold of a meeting with Joan's destroyer, it was the startling vision of Joan herself from which he had just departed. No event had brought the magnitude of his loss more cruelly to the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... a great shock to me, Phyllis," said he, when he had seated himself, not too close to her. He did not wish her to fancy that he was desirous of having a subtle influence of propinquity as an ally. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... observe a curious mark of propinquity which the poet notices, with respect to the hands of the father and daughter. Lord Byron, we suspect, is indebted for the first hint of this to Ali Pacha, who, by the bye, is the original of Lambro; for, when ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... her simple trust in him, were a part of the magic light which the new idealism had shed over the old social structure. His was, in short, a love large enough to include other emotions: a widening rather than a contraction of the emotional range. Youth and propinquity have before now broken down stronger defences; but Fulvia's situation was an unspoken appeal to her lover's forbearance. The sense that her safety depended on him kept his sentimental impulses in check and made the happiness of the moment ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... in Hainault. In no other was the party of the Calvinists so powerful, and the spirit of rebellion for which the province of Hainault had always made itself conspicuous, seemed to dwell here as in its native place. The propinquity of France, to which, as well by language as by manners, this town appeared to belong, rather than to the Netherlands, had from the first led to its being governed with great mildness and forbearance, which, however, only ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... an attic window to put one in sympathetic relations with cathedral spires! At this height we and they, for a part of their flight upward, at least, were on a common level—and we all know what confidences come about from the accident of propinquity. They seemed to assure us as never before when sitting at their feet, the difficulties they had overcome in climbing heavenward. Every stone that looked down upon the city ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... pointed out, close to Folly Bridge, a house profusely decorated with figures and indescribable ornaments, which he informed our freshman was Blackfriars' Hall, where all the men who had been once plucked were obliged to migrate to; and that Folly Bridge received its name from its propinquity to the Hall. They were too late to see the Vice-Chancellor wind up the clock of Christ Church; but as they passed by the college, they met two gownsmen who recognized Mr. Larkyns by a slight nod. "Those ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... belch, eructate sticky, adhesive house, domicile eye, optic walker, pedestrian talkative, loquacious talkative, garrulous wisdom, sapience bodily, corporeal name, appellation finger, digit show, ostentation nearness, propinquity wash, lave handwriting, chirography waves, undulations shady, umbrageous fat, corpulent muddy, turbid widow, relict horseback, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... them to my rich neighbour; I preferred to leave them before I saw them the prey of a tyrant, whose rank had triumphed over my industry, and who is now able to boast that he can travel over ten leagues of senatorial property untainted by the propinquity of a husbandman's farm. Houseless, homeless, friendless, I have come to Rome alone in my affliction, helpless in my degradation! Do you wonder now that I am careless about the honour of my country? I would have served her with my ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an infatuation for her,—I thought I was in love with her,—though I never quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... become partners on Berande," he said, at the same time experiencing a feeling of fright at the prospect that was tangled with a contradictory feeling of charm, "either I'll fall in love with you, or you with me. Propinquity is dangerous, you know. In fact, it is propinquity that usually gives the facer to ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... "It's propinquity," she laughed. "You haven't seen any other woman for days and weeks. Wait until you are strong enough to come down to one ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... Thus these reasons of propinquity, joined to reasons of self-love and a real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... been cut off on the ground that they did nothing to earn them, she offered her services as his paid secretary. "Propinquity" did its work and she was soon in a position to offer him the privilege of an experimental kiss, thus incidentally justifying the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... certain grave dignity and reserve in his dealings with her. This was a matter which need not have troubled him, for Nature has a way of taking into her own keeping the bearing of young men toward young women when the two are thrown much into each other's company. Propinquity is a tremendous force in the life of humanity. It has caused as many love affairs as the kicking of other men's dogs has caused street fights—which numbers into infinity. Consequently, while Bob worried much and selected a number ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... nothing of the sort. So in this matter of his experience of the previous night, and generally of the strange and almost unnatural sympathy in which he found himself with this lady, common sense and the results of his observation and experience pointed to the whole thing being nonsense—the result of "propinquity, Sir, propinquity," and ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... in the North were anti-Southern in larger proportion, probably, than at any other time during the struggle of the sections. We have seen that numbers of them had frankly declared for the Union. Politics had proved weaker than propinquity. There was a moment when it seemed—delusively, as events proved—that the North was united as one man to oppose ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... got to the gate h was apparent that the house was lit in every chamber. The windows that pierced the tall gables threw beams of light into the darkness, and the open door poured out a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling's ghost, grey, eerie, full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness, a thing ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Blair had never gone to Prince Albert there is no knowing what might have happened, after all. Carey, so powerful in propinquity, might even have ended by learning to love Tannis and marrying her, to his own worldly undoing. But Elinor did go to Prince Albert, and her going ended all things for Tannis ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!—the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!—and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed!—he did not err!—there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... arm from her hiding-place. Who were they? Oh, some of her mamma's gentlemen friends lounging in for an afternoon call. They spoke in a low, rapid tone, and their conversation only reached her because of her propinquity. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... justice of heart. He has a mind, and when he opens it at all, he opens it freely to her. Jane becomes attached to her "master," as Pamela-like she calls him, and it is not difficult to see that solitude and propinquity are taking effect upon him also. An odd circumstance heightens the dawning romance. Jane is awoke one night by that strange discordant laugh close to her ear— then a noise as if hands feeling along the wall. She rises—opens her door, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... officers lived in tents, while the remainder were accommodated in billets. The training was mainly devoted to the attack. The British and the enemy trenches were taped out on some cornfields, in propinquity to the hamlet, and the forthcoming attack was rehearsed time and time again by all the battalions in the Brigade. Great attention was paid to synchronisation of watches, and the immediate reporting of all information. Maps and aeroplane photographs of the ground were studied with meticulous ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... snowing when Johnny reached the capital. He had been parachuted into the enemy's motherland, naturally, because propinquity alone assured the ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... herded together, for one day, perhaps two, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the petty annoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 'bearing it cheerfully'—whatever that may mean. Blue Bonnet loves figures of speech. Her comparisons are really very amusing sometimes. I hardly know what to make of her sudden tolerance of this girl; whether it is a case of propinquity, duty, or over-generousness on Blue Bonnet's part. At any rate, she seems to have espoused the cause ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... Mary, indulgently. "I don't mean you and papa. But isn't it propinquity that makes marriages? So many people say so, there must ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... she is rehearsing with young Jefferson Jones or little Madison Addison. In the golden afternoons they ride together—not in the fine turn-outs supplied by the office-clerks, nor yet on horse-back, but in guiltless country wagons guided by Jersey Jehus, where close propinquity is a delightful necessity. Ten miles of uninterrupted beach spread before them, which the ocean, transformed for the purpose into a temporary Haussmann, is rolling into a marble boulevard for their use twice a day. On the hard level the wheels scarcely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... passed his hands over his eyes and made a hasty sign of the cross. Opportunity, propinquity, a sudden temptation—these had assailed him and for one moment all the devils of hell were let loose in this good man's brain and heart. The silence seemed eternal that followed on his movement; as the air ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... situated somewhere on the borderland of romance, a kingdom where there is no law but the mutual interest of the wayfarers. Judith and Peter had been pitifully new at the game of life when the gods vouchsafed them the equivocal blessing of propinquity. Judith was but lately come from the convent at Santa Fe, and Hamilton from the university whose honors availed him little in the trailing of cattle over the range or in the sweat and tumult of the branding-pen. It was a strange election of opportunity ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... concern. Both, unfortunately, lived in Boston and were likely any day to come face to face round the corner of some or other narrow street of that small town. That reciprocal exasperation engendered by reasonable propinquity, so essential to the life of altercations, was therefore a perpetual stimulus to both men, confirming each in his obstinate opinion of the other as a malicious and dangerous enemy of all that men hold dear. Thus ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... certainly not lessened as I saw Curzon passed from one to the other at table, "like a pauper to his parish," till he found an asylum at the very foot, in juxta with the engaging Mister Donovan. A propinquity, if I might judge from their countenances, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... for one of those couples, a man and woman. The man was a well-known speculator,—cool, yet reckless and pleasure-loving; the woman, good-looking, picturesquely attractive, self-conscious, and self-possessed. Our propinquity was evidently neither novel nor discomposing. As she settled her skirts in her place, her bright, dark eyes swept our table with a frank, almost childish, familiarity. The younger members of the Club quite unconsciously ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... And consequently, at the end of ten minutes, Tristram found himself in irons in the lazarette, condemned to pass the night with two drunken men, whose snores were almost comforting in the pitchy darkness; for, as he told himself, human propinquity, if not exactly sympathy, is the first step towards it. He had been listening to this snoring for four hours, when a hatchway above him was lifted, and a lantern shone down into the lazarette. It was carried by a corporal, ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gratified as I was myself; for he, too, had both pleasure and improvement in Emily Morton's society. It has often been said that the English East-India ships are noted for quarrelling and making love. The quarrels may be accounted for on the same principle as the love-making, viz., propinquity; the same proximity producing hostility in whose sterner natures, that, in others of a gentler cast, produces its opposite feeling. We sailed, and it is scarcely necessary to tell the reader how much the tedium of so ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... they had been. Miss Jessie Stevens did not bother him by coming up every five minutes to see what he thought of her dictation, as she had been wont to do. He was rather glad of this; it saved him importunate glances and words, and the propinquity of girlish forms, which had been more trying still. But what was the cause of the change? It was evident that the girls regarded him as belonging to Miss Conklin. He disliked the assumption; his caution took alarm; he would be more ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... the floor, containing fire, and the magician sat down by it. He placed the little boy before him, and poured ink into the hollow of the boy's hand, and bid him look into it steadily. I think the mother rather quailed, at seeing her child in such propinquity with "the Enemy;" but recovered herself on being exhorted to defy the devil and all his works. And the thing was not entirely without danger from another quarter; for it was understood the Pasha had directed a special edict against all dealing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... isn't the kind that endures through long years of absence, but the kind that endures through long years of propinquity. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... IS INCLUDED, and that propinquity of descent—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings— is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... of lightning, downward he darted and seized the snake by the back. The voracious crab held on, not liking to lose his prey, till he found himself borne upwards from the ground, and in unpleasant propinquity to the frigate bird's sharp beak. He must have felt that if he did not let go at once, he would be dashed to pieces; still, as a miser clutches his bags of gold, did Mr Crab the snake. Fortunately for him, the frigate bird had flown seaward, so that when ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... dream his feet were in them; ten years' probation seemed to vanish at the sight!—we wept! He spoke—could we believe our ears? "Marvel of marvels!" despite the propinquity of the Bluchers, despite their wide-spreading contamination, his voice was unaltered. We were puzzled! we were like the first farourite when "he has a leg," or, "a LEG ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... received not one penny in money from their parents, who gave them food only, and the wretched pallets on which they slept with their grandmother in the barn, where their brothers also slept, curled up in the hay like animals. Neither father nor mother paid any heed to this propinquity. ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... interpretation of the senses, why may not the loved be brought near without that aid, through the more subtile and more potent attraction of sympathy? I do not mean nearness in the sense of memory or imagination, but that actual propinquity of spirit which I suppose implied in the recognition of Presence. Nor do I refer to any volition which is dependent on the known action of the brain, but to a hidden faculty, the germ perhaps of some higher faculty, now folded within the present life like the wings of a chrysalis, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stake everything on propinquity, Jeeves. Propinquity, in my opinion, is what will do the trick. At the moment, as you are aware, Gussie is a mere jelly when in the presence. But ask yourself how he will feel in a week or so, after he and ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... place seems to me to be one which I ought seriously to consider. It is generally agreed that propinquity is the cause of most marriages, but I think that a girl ought to be very careful not to let propinquity get the better of her. She should regulate ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... one he had pushed into the heel of Tishy's fist. It had, as he thought it would, clinched the matter. He had never been unaware of the menace of Cloherty, R.A.M.C., but he was confident in the three forces that he had at his command—authority, bribery, and propinquity. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... he realised that a man might firmly believe in Affinity, and, through a chain of unfortunate circumstances, become the victim of Propinquity. He had known of such instances and was now face to ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... Propinquity is a great incentive to pleasant conversation, for there are few people that can talk the pretty nothings and sparkling witticisms, whereof parlor conversation properly consists, across space to people stranded against the opposite wall. Therefore ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... after the Olympia had been made over into a larger Tivoli Opera House that Frank met Aleta Boice. She was a member of the chorus. Their acquaintance blossomed from propinquity, for both had a fashion of supping on the edge of midnight at a little restaurant, better known by its sobriquet of "Dusty Doughnut," than by its real name, which long ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... also benefiting the important trade between the two countries. The investment of American capital in Mexico has been estimated at $1,000,000,000. The responsibility of endeavoring to safeguard those interests and the dangers inseparable from propinquity to so turbulent a situation have been great, but I am happy to have been able to adhere to the policy above outlined-a policy which I hope may be soon justified by the complete success of the Mexican people in regaining the blessings of peace ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... boy is all right in the world Damnable propinquity Hugging the chain of denial to his bosom I have a good memory for forgetting Importunity with discretion was his motto It is good to live, isn't it? Know how bad are you, and doesn't mind Strike first and heal after—"a kick and ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... family created a good deal of interest in the limited society of the lake, and not entirely of a friendly nature. Needless to say, the adolescent members of it were all more or less engaged to each other, which, being rather the result of propinquity than uncontrollable preference, the maidens noticed with angry surprise the admiration excited in the bosoms of their swains by the apparition of Bluebell on their hitherto uninvaded waters. Alec Gough and Bernard ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... wonderfully happy weeks to Debby and her friend; for "propinquity" had worked more wonders than poor Mrs. Carroll knew, as the only one she saw or guessed was the utter captivation of Joe Leavenworth. He had become "himself" to such an extent that a change of identity would have been a relief; for the object of his adoration showed no signs of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the idea that the principle source of error in all human investigations lay in the liability of the understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of an object, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity. "To estimate properly, for example," he said, "the influence to be exercised on mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distance of the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished should not fail to form ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... those who should know, that most of them are used in that way. Whether as a sacrifice to the fiery god Quetzalcoatl, or whether from a fondness lor human flesh, no one has yet been able to determine. In fact, with all their propinquity to this place, there is little known about them. Few who have visited their towns have had Gode's luck to get away again. No man of these parts ever ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... story would show that mere friendly propinquity may constitute a danger. Last summer an honest, straightforward girl from a small lake town in northern Michigan was working in a Chicago cafe, sending every week more than half of her wages of seven dollars to her mother and little sister, ill with tuberculosis, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... distinguish between meum and tuum? Prove that their values vary inversely as the propinquity of the owners. ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... of that kind. The "raza Latina" of eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... forceful magic about the combined influences of propinquity and sea air, as these are enjoyed by the idle passengers upon a great ocean liner. They do, I think, tend to advance intimacy and accelerate the various stages of intercourse leading thereto, and therefrom, as nothing else does; more particularly ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... unquiet and display alarm as soon as they are aware that a lion is approaching them in the night. Horses going along a bridle-path that used to leave the town at the back of the old dens of the carnivora in the Berlin Zoological Gardens were often terrified by the propinquity of enemies who were entirely unknown to them. Sticklebacks will swim composedly among a number of voracious pike, knowing, as they do, that the pike will not touch them. For if a pike once by mistake swallows a stickleback, the stickleback will stick in its throat by reason of the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... their first intimation of a matter of such great import to them. Therefore the commandant attached much significance to this account of an alarm at Blue Lick Station, because of a menace from the nearest French at Fort Toulouse, often called in that day, by reason of this propinquity, "the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Every man felt the same. I have often mentioned it to my comrades. Say what you like, said I, but slay my mother if ever since the old man strangled himself, things did not seem, as it were, in their natural propinquity. 'Twas the phrase ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... merely to a readily intelligible historical association. If the Bantu and Bushmen are so sharply differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that the former are relatively recent arrivals in southern Africa. The two peoples developed in complete isolation from each other; their present propinquity is too recent for the slow process of cultural and racial assimilation to have set in very powerfully. As we go back in time, we shall have to assume that relatively scanty populations occupied large territories for untold ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... terrible pleasure from the contact. Afterward, though he never suspected it, desire for him became a consuming passion, and I remember on one occasion, when on a holiday, I occupied the same bed with him, the excitement of his propinquity brought on such a formidable attack of heart palpitation that my father called in the family physician on our return home. Needless to say my heart was found quite sound. The desire still remains after all these years, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... invented. It was so in Greece, and it is so now. The theater occasionally is good for you. But let the play you go to see be high-grade. Inferior performances on the stage will destroy your taste as surely as will the continued propinquity of poor pictures. The ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... and more aggressive form. I woke in the darkness with the impression that some one was standing outside my bedroom door listening. As I became more awake the impression grew into positive knowledge. Though there was no appreciable sound of moving or breathing, I was so convinced of the propinquity of a listener that I crept out of bed and approached the door. As I did so there came faintly from the next room the unmistakable sound of someone retreating stealthily across the floor. Yet, as I heard it, it was neither the tread of a man nor ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the world; So few great souls, love ordered, well begun, In answer to the fertile mother need! So few who seem The image of the Maker's mortal dream; So many born of mere propinquity - Of lustful habit, or of accident. Their mothers felt No mighty, all-compelling wish to see Their bosoms garden-places Abloom with flower faces; No tidal wave swept o'er them with its flood; No thrill of flesh or heart; no leap of blood; No glowing ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... men," cried the captain, "right wheel;" and setting his men an example, he did gallop with what speed he might from the propinquity of the wall. As for myself, I was in some sort relieved by the knowledge that the noble mansion still continued in possession of the Viscount Lessingholm; and comforting myself with the assurance that no evil could befall my daughter Waller while under his protection, I did contrive to seize ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... rare glimpses which he got of her nowadays made it absolutely impossible for him to conduct his wooing on a business-like basis. A diffident man cannot possibly achieve any success in odd moments. Constant propinquity is his only hope. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... days after the first of many dinners with the boys, Tootles played her cards with the utmost care. The foursome became inseparable, bathing, sailing and motoring from morning to night. If there was any truth in the power of propinquity, it must have been discovered then. Howard attached himself to Irene whom he found something more than merry and amusing,—a girl of indomitable courage and optimism, in fact. He liked her immensely. And so Tootles paired off with Martin ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... and propinquity made her more than usually conscious that he was red and massive, and that beads of moisture had caused the dust of the train to adhere unpleasantly to the broad expanse of cheek and neck which he ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... and naming of things, they were living together, the five of them, in an air in which an ugly effect of "blurting out" might easily be produced. He came back with his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing himself, for her ear, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... favoring chances of solitude, propinquity, and daily opportunity. Seldom away from Clara for a day together, he was in condition to take advantage of any of those moods which lay woman open to courtship, such as gratitude for attentions, a disgust with loneliness, a desire for something to love. It was a great thing for him that ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... He had laughed the possibility to scorn, in other days, holding the passion to be the sober child of propinquity, sympathy, consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame, after due time to kindle, by the appearance of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... soil and seed again. The world to-day has not entered the outer courts even of the physical beauty of romance. The lower the orders of human understanding, the easier it is for the young men and women to accept their mates. It is often a matter of propinquity—the handiest. The women of the lower classes do not bring an alabaster bowl to one certain spring of pure water. There seems to be a red enchantment upon the many—the nearest will do. The great loves of the world have not thus come to be. Great women, carrying the whitest fires, have waited ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... standing, looking on with envious eyes, meditating some attack, some interruption, some excuse for an interpolation, but her courage had failed her and she had not dared to approach. The Duke had known nothing of the hovering propinquity of Mrs. Bonteen, but Madame Goesler had seen and had ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... nothing else to be done; and at least his listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the steam trains flying in opposite directions are scarcely less agitating to the nerves than their transits through the tunnels. The velocity of their course, the propinquity or apparent identity of the iron orbits along which these meteors move, call forth the involuntary but fearful thought of a possible collision, with all its horrible consequences. The period of suspense, however, though exquisitely painful, is ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... alternative. She had come more than a thousand miles to meet this man by plan, by arrangement. Oh, no (so she argued), it could not be true that there was but one man for one woman, one woman for a man, in all the world. Annie must have been right. Propinquity did it—was that not why men and women nearly always married in their own village, their own social circle? Well, then, here was propinquity. Object, matrimony! Would propinquity solve all this at last, as though this were a desert island, they two ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... sentry-go by pulling a chaplain's leg. They confessed it to me months afterwards in France. However, I was unsuspecting and had come submissive into the great war. I said that if they would remove their bayonets from propinquity to my person—because the sight of them was causing me a fresh attack of the pains that had racked me all day—I would go with them to the guardroom. At this they said, "Well, Sir, we'll let you pass. We'll take your word and say no more about it." ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... leaping with life should have, for chief outlet, the narrow mental channel of the excellent couple between whom she was now being borne to the Gaines garden-party? All her friendships were the result of propinquity or of early association, and fate had held her imprisoned in a circle of well-to-do mediocrity, peopled by just such figures as those of the kindly and prosperous Dressels. Effie Dressel, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Brent's, had obscurely but safely ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... indeed quite unconscious of Fitzpiers's propinquity. She was thinking of something which had little connection with the scene before her—thinking of her friend, lost as soon as found, Mrs. Charmond; of her capricious conduct, and of the contrasting ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... him as a strange old man who interested him despite himself. There was pity, but nothing filial in his feelings. For filial love only grows out of propinquity and a firm respect which must keep pace with the growing demands of a daily ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... doing, and what they had amassed - I think they mentioned nine hundred crowns. They had companions in the neighbourhood, some of whom they were expecting; they took no notice of me, and conversed in their own dialect; I did not approve of their propinquity, and rising, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... continue to be most cordial, as befits those of neighbors between whom the strongest ties of friendship and commercial intimacy exist, as the natural and growing consequence of our similarity of institutions and geographical propinquity. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
