"Tenuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense-impressions, ingeniously developed. We can, he argued, know the outer world, because our sense impressions are literally 'impressions' or stamps made by external objects upon our organs. To see, for instance, is to be struck by an infinitely tenuous stream of images, flowing from the object and directly impinging upon the retina. Such streams are flowing from all objects in every direction—an idea which seemed incredible until the modern discoveries about light, sound, and radiation. Thus there ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... will be. She cares for her. And our children have been growing up together—I love to watch it. Isn't that the reality? Doing for them as best we can, making sacrifices of—of every kind. Don't let some tenuous, remote thing destroy ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... pure Self, pure consciousness, Samvid. That is an abstraction. In the concrete universe there are always the Self and His sheaths, however tenuous the latter may be, so that a unit of consciousness is inseparable from matter, and a Jivatma, or Monad, ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... How I knew I cannot say—but now, almost touching them, I did know. Nebulous, yet solid, were they; compact, yet tenuous, dense ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... cabinet were red, with a gold design. On the table, among the lighted candelabra, two white, tarred necks of bottles stuck up out of an electroplated vase, which had sweated from the cold, and the light in a tenuous gold played in the shallow goblets of wine. Outside, near the doors, a waiter was on duty, leaning against the wall; while the stout, tall, important maitre d'hotel, on whose right little finger, always sticking out, sparkled a huge diamond, would frequently stop at these ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... permeated with his fragrance, as though from a lotus of infinity. To be with him, even without exchanging a word for days, was experience which changed my entire being. If any invisible barrier rose in the path of my concentration, I would meditate at the guru's feet. There the most tenuous states came easily within my grasp. Such perceptions eluded me in the presence of lesser teachers. The master was a living temple of God whose secret doors were open to ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... them, staining them rose. With the jump of the sun everything took on color and lost form, plain and hills swimming, seeming to be composed of vapor, the shapes of the mountains shifting every second, tenuous, smoky. The air was crisp, making the fingers tingle. The riders came from their bunk-houses, yawning, sloshing a hasty toilet at a trough with good-natured banter, hurrying on to the shack, where Joe tendered them the prodigious array ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... resultant of all that the past ages have given us, of the things that we have learned in our own day, and of what we are just now learning. With this art Andreyev succeeds in communicating ideas, thoughts, and feelings so fine, so tenuous, so indefinite as to appear to transcend human expression. He does not care whether the things he writes about are true, whether his characters are real. What he aims to give is a true impression. And to convey this impression he does not scorn to use mysticism, symbolism, or even plain realism. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... depths of those eyes and still could not be sure they were not an illusion. The intensity of the creatures' intelligence seemed to shine from within, giving the impression of staring, haunting eyes. They were not organs of sight, but they were the windows of the mind. They were the source of those tenuous flames that seemed to ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... especially when the direct threat to the U.S. is ambiguous, tenuous, or difficult to define. Therefore, when intervention is necessary there is likely to be both a political and practical imperative to have allied or international involvement or at least the political cover of the UN, ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... world, while Emerson's transcendentalism was based on the wider search for the unknowable, unlimited in any way or by anything except the vast bounds of innate goodness, as it might be revealed to him in any phenomena of man, Nature, or God. This distinction, tenuous, in spite of the definite-sounding words, we like to believe has something peculiar to Emerson in it. We like to feel that it superimposes the one that makes all transcendentalism but an intellectual state, based on the theory of innate ideas, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Against the tenuous blue light of the dawn Salazar was gesticulating in the doorway. I felt a sudden repulsion; a feeling of intense disgust. O'Brien lying there, I almost wished alive again—I wanted to have him again, rather than that I should have been relieved of him by that atrocious murder. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... in that evening he passed her in the hall. She was clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an Arabian burnoose, of black embroidered with dull-gold crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite flesh at her throat. A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening of the burnoose. Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead, shone with a thousand various gleams from the gas-light over her head as she moved back against the wall and stood waiting for him to pass. She smiled ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... expound for all the world the real underlying truth of her Revolution. The equality of rights and duties spread from a dream of philosophers to be the doctrine of warriors for freedom. There was her George Washington to hold together the tenuous bands of freedom. She found her James Monroe to lay the foundations of the doctrine that stern moral precepts forbid the violation of sovereign rights of the nations. She brought forth her Andrew Jackson to make the country in his time safe for democracy, and to establish for all ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River—Riviere de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept—the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... atmospheric phenomena, whereas the lines on Mars are on the solid surface of the planet. Why should there be any resemblance between them? Every fact stated in the above quotation, always keeping in mind the physical conditions of the planet—its very tenuous atmosphere and rainless desert-surface—seem wholly in favour of a purely natural as opposed to an artificial origin; and at the close of this discussion I shall suggest one which seems to me to be at least possible, and to explain the whole series ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... obey Nature's universal behest, and change his form from the physical of to-day to the more tenuous of a finer realm. He may die: but his music lives on. He perhaps has played his part in the world symphony and, his present work finished, he lays his instrument aside. This body of ours is the instrument of the spirit: no wedding feast without ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... wood, the steady swish of a sickle was heard; and this made a fearsome noise in the tenuous night. A gigantic man stood there; his head looked over the trees and his wide-stretched arms swung the sickle and a pick-hook; and, stroke by stroke, the foliage and the flowers fell beneath his hands as he passed. The singing gradually ceased, ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... did he abandon the hope of checking his descent. Sometimes he did actually succeed in stopping himself for a moment; but on his attempting to follow up the advantage, the moss always slipped or the sapling let go a tenuous hold and he continued on down. At last the River flashed out below him. He saw the sheer drop. He saw the boiling eddies of the Halfway Pool, capable of sucking down a saw-log. Then, with a final rush of loose round stones, he shot the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... precisely because of this unlikeness that the Japanese beliefs prove themselves reasonable. The profound difference between old-fashioned Western thought and Eastern thought in this regard is, that for the Buddhist the conventional soul—the single, tenuous, tremulous, transparent inner man, or ghost—does not exist. The Oriental Ego is not individual. Nor is it even a definitely numbered multiple like the Gnostic soul. It is an aggregate or composite of inconceivable complexity,—the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will. Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great undiscoverable ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of a warm and mellow summer I betook me up one of the mountains of Wales, {1b} spy-glass in hand, to enable my feeble sight to see the distant near, and to make the little to loom large. Through the clear, tenuous air and the calm, shimmering heat, I beheld far, far away over the Irish Sea many a fair scene. At last, when mine eyes had taken their fill of all the beauty around me, and the sun well nigh had reached ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... a Japanese liner rose black out of the gray fog shadow. But the freighters, the coasters, tramps that went hither and thither over the earth wherever fat cargoes lured them—they were either swallowed in the mist or shadowed to a ghost-like wraith of themselves so tenuous that all detail was lost in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... token that their pursuer had found himself obliged to sprint smartly along the country road to keep any hope of ever again' viewing the wagon which the intervening water-course had withdrawn from his sight. That this hope had grown tenuous was evident in his relinquishment of his former caution, for when they again caught a glimpse of him he was forging along in the middle of the road without any effort at concealment. But as the wagon appeared in the perspective, stationary, hitched to ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... he flies, straight up into the blue, hoping that the wind may blow him far beyond his pursuer's reach, believing that the light atmosphere that suffices to support his frail body may be too tenuous to uphold his heavier enemy. Hoping thus and believing; but realizing at last the unequal contests between their strengths, the failing of his own force, the fateful, certain, deadly approach of the antagonist whose power it is ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... been endued with certain movements by which they attach themselves to one another, and agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused the formation of all things, and the destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all things. The soul itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and subtle atoms. It is probable that when a certain number of these atoms quit the body, sleep ensues; that when nearly all depart, it causes the appearance of death (lethargy, catalepsy); that when they ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... I were dealing with some material and plastic formation. Since that time I have become acquainted with a doctrine that teaches that thoughts are in the nature of things—that a definite thought is a formation in some tenuous medium of matter, just as a cathedral is a structure in gross matter. This is certainly the kind of impression ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... now it lay in his rear, a mystic, dun-colored land of hot sandy waste and silence; brooding, menacing, holding out its threat of death—a vast natural basin breathing and pulsing with mystery, rimmed by remote mountains that seemed tenuous and thin behind the ever-changing misty films that ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... that effigies of things, And tenuous shapes from off the things are sent, From off the utmost outside of the things, Which are like films or may be named a rind, Because the image bears like look and form With whatso body has shed it fluttering forth— ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... paroxysm during which I had seemed to stand a great way off and listen to my own shrieks, there came to me a moment of calm. I knew that my one tenuous thread of hope lay in launching myself into that wild flood that was tearing through into the cove. I was not a strong swimmer, but a buoyant one. I might find refuge on some half-submerged rock on the shores of the cove—at least I should perish in the open, in the sunlight, not trapped ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... and the skies cleared. But all to a different mode and rhythm. A cold white sun shone out of a cold blue sky, diapered, to the north above the indigo and umber moorland and forest, with perspectives of tenuous silken-white cloud. Land and sky were alike washed clean, to a starkness and nakedness calling for warm clothing out of doors, and well-stoked ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gorgeous ribbons of reflected light streaming from pier-head lamps on the further shore. Overhead, the sky, a pallid and luminous blue around the low-swung moon, was shaded to profound depths of bluish-black toward the horizon. Above Brooklyn rested a tenuous haze. A revenue cutter, a slim, pale shape, cut across the bows like a hunted ghost. Farther out a homeward-bound excursion steamer, tier upon tier of glittering lights, drifted slowly toward its pier beneath the new bridge, the blare of its band, swelling and dying upon the night breeze, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... 31 Brucker was close then. It was indeed a red giant; long tenuous plumes of gas spread out for hundreds of millions of miles on all sides of its glowing red core. This mammoth star did not look so cold now, as they stared at it in the viewscreen, yet among the family of stars it was a cold, dying giant with only a few moments ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... other's eyes as they strove to free themselves, to step forward, to clasp the other's outstretched hands. They reached down blindly, tearing at those thorny, clutching entanglements, pulling and tugging at those tenuous, tough words which would not let them say what they meant: sure, hopefully sure that in a moment . . . now . . . with the next breath, they would break free as no others had ever done before them, and crying out the truth and glory that was ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... naked man was a broad, flat monster upon that shimmering tableland. Again he seemed almost invisible; then gigantic and tenuous. ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... from Analogy. Analogy in its most tenuous form is weak as a basis for an actual inference, though it is often effective as a means of expressing an intuitive judgment where the reasons are too subtle and diffused for formal explanation. When Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War said that men do not ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... his intimacy with the banker, if intimacy it might be called, might have surprised his other parishioners if they could have been hidden spectators of one of these dinners. There were long silences when the medium of communication, tenuous at best, seemed to snap, and the two sat gazing at each other as from mountain peaks across impassable valleys. With all the will in the world, their souls lost touch, though the sense in the clergyman of the other's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is, for instance, that odd enjoyment of the tops of trees; those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs, up to which certainly no artist, but only a cat could climb. There is that elvish love of the full moon, as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern, hung in these tenuous branches. That moon is so large and luminous that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it. Then there is the exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish; subjects in which cats are said ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... rarefaction, expansion, dilatation, inflation, subtilization^. vaporization, evaporation, diffusion, gassification^. ether &c (gas) 334. V. rarefy, expand, dilate, subtilize^. Adj. rare, subtile, thin, fine, tenuous, compressible, flimsy, slight; light &c 320; cavernous, spongy &c (hollow) 252. rarefied &c v.; unsubstantial; uncompact^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Supposed Witchcraft, 308, 312 ff. The astral spirit which he conceived was not unlike More's and Glanvill's "thin and tenuous substance." ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... we conceded this, in silence, be it understood, for Westley is respected. But we looked to Solon for a more tenuous subtlety. Nor did he fail us. Two days later Potts upon the public street actually announced his early departure from ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the vapid hero, the two virtuous sisters, the leader of the banditti, the respectable, prosy governess, are a set of dolls fitted ingeniously into the framework of the plot. They have more substance than the tenuous shadows that glide through the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe's first story, but they move only as she deftly pulls the strings that set them ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... succeeding years at Lorane, I raised lots of organically grown food on densely planted raised beds, but the realities of being a country gardener continued to remind me of how tenuous my irrigation supply actually was. We country folks have to be self-reliant: I am my own sanitation department, I maintain my own 800-foot-long driveway, the septic system puts me in the sewage business. A long, long response time to my 911 call means I'm my own self-defense ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... then a deep gorge, blue beneath him. From it his question reascended to him, tenuous and fluttering, like a lost bird ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... entirely indifferent to him or regarded him in any way other than as the chance-found comrade of an hour of trouble, would have served to fix his suspicions. For such, he told himself, would be the first thought of one bent on beguiling—to lead him on by some intimation, the more tenuous and elusive the more provocative, that she found ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... in California, a microcosm of the stupidities of civilization and of the United States of America in particular. The celebrated "atmosphere" of the state was ignored. The town and the types were "American"; it would seem that merely some unadmitted tenuous sentiment had set the scene in the state of the author's birth, but there the concession ended. Even the climate was treated with the scorn that all old cliches deserved. (Her biographers might have contributed the ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... variable, generally prominent, more or less distinctly marked by fine, delicate radiating venules, the margin denticulate, the teeth numerous and slender, supporting the well-defined globose net; network made up of very tenuous threads, forming rather small irregular brownish nodules and showing only here and there a free extremity; stipe generally short, two or three times the diameter of the sporangium, sometimes longer, tapering upward, brown, slender, arcuate ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... opening was sealed and Nerado shot the great vessel into the air. Up and up, out beyond the last tenuous trace of atmosphere, on and on through space it flew with ever-increasing velocity until Nevia's gigantic blue sun had been left so far behind that it became a splendid blue-white star. Then, projectors cut off to save the precious iron whose disintegration ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... It was tenuous, almost a haze. Close examination would have revealed it to be made up of myriads of tiny spores. They resembled those cast forth by one of the bushes Kolin's party had passed. Along the edges, the haze ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... playing so loud that they could pretend not to hear his order; having once been young, they played louder and gayer than ever, and Caroline danced with grace and vivacity, her pink, filmy dress swirling about her, her agile arms playing in supple, tenuous gestures along ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... surprises us with allusions and metaphors of an unusually technical kind, which he somehow renders intelligible even to the non-scientific reader. These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual. The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Shelley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... reached the summit, he glanced down to see the sun steeping the valley in a lake of gold. Near the canyon, enormous rocks loomed protrudent, like fantastic Negro skulls. The pitaya trees rose tenuous, tall, like the tapering, gnarled fingers of a giant; other trees of all sorts bowed their crests toward the pit of the abyss. Amid the stark rocks and dry branches, roses bloomed like a white offering to the sun as smoothly, suavely, it unraveled its golden threads, one by one, ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size—far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul's. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long, drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wheel; and I could not yet see the coast of France. And a thought smote me, and after another ten minutes I turned the ship's head back, my face screwed with pain, God knows, like a man whose thumbs are ground between the screws, and his body drawn out and out on the rack to tenuous length, and his flesh massacred with pincers: and I fell upon the floor of the bridge contorted with anguish: for I could not go to her. But after a time that paroxysm passed, and I rose up sullen and resentful, and resumed my place at the wheel, steering ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading—something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... explorers. On the night of February 24 two or three of the officers and Ledyard were sitting in the mess room of Irkutsk playing cards. They might laugh at Ledyard. They also laughed with him. Wherever he went, went gayety. Gales of boisterous laughter were on the wind. Hopes as tenuous as the wind were in the air. One of the great Bering's sons was there, no doubt telling tales of discovery that set each man's veins jumping. Suddenly a tremendous jingling of bells announced some ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... which therefore made all interested spectators feel uneasy, their relationship had relaxed into a harmless and hearty friendship. But it was Leonetta who was shaking herself loose, and the more tightly Denis clung to the strands of their former intimacy, the more tenuous these seemed to become,—just as if his hold on them were more frantic than their strength ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... feel other gravity than earth's, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... towards a rush of exquisite accomplishment. He began to slip more easily and freely. The brain upon the bed, oddly enough, remembered a tradition of old Egypt—that Thoth created the world by bursting into seven peals of laughter. It touched forgotten springs of imagination and belief. In some tenuous, racy vehicle his thought flashed forth. With a gliding spring, like a swooping bird across a valley, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... matter—the dead do not "return." My story, therefore, be comforted, has no individual instance to record. It may, on the other hand, be held to involve a thread of what might be called—at a stretch—posthumous communication, yet a thread so tenuous that the question of personal direction behind it need hardly be considered at all. For let me confess at once that, the habit of the "thrill" once established, I was not long in asking myself point blank this ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... apparently faint and tenuous thread of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those dark days; many others wrote to the Times asking the source of the quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of the beginning," the Times returned to The White ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the water provided stability of temperature that would have been difficult to achieve without it. Bathed in the tenuous solar atmosphere that extends well beyond the orbit of Earth, and with a temperature over 100,000 C, maintenance of a livable temperature on board the big wheel was not the straight-forward balancing of radiation intercepted/radiation ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... with a steady, invisible glow in the little side chapel behind the pillar; the altar gleamed duskily before them, and it was so still that through the unglassed windows they could hear, from far below in the black countryside, a tenuous bleating of late-dropped lambs. Katharine Howard's beads clicked and her dress rustled as she came up ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... grey plain. The thin air, still scarcely warmed by the rising sun, bit flesh and lung like needles, and they gasped with a sense of suffocation. They dropped to a sitting posture, waiting for their bodies, trained by months in acclimatization chambers back on earth, to accommodate themselves to the tenuous air. Leroy's face, as always, turned a smothered blue, and Jarvis heard his own breath rasping and rattling in his throat. But in five minutes, the discomfort passed; they rose and entered the little ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... and raised the black tubes threateningly. For a moment the Earthmen hesitated and then came on with a rush. From the tubes came rays of intensely violet light. As they fell on the front ranks of the charging Terrestrials, the form, on which the rays impinged grew suddenly tenuous. The sunlight penetrated through the bodies for a moment and then there was nothing but a group of dancing motes of light to mark ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... transmuted into a gleaming flood of orchestral and harmonic color (two flutes, oboe, two harps glissando, string tremolos, cymbals pp). While they talk of the beggars sleeping in a corner of the cave, an oboe and flute trace a tenuous and melancholy phrase (doux et triste) which continues almost to the end of the scene; it leads into a quiet coda formed out of the theme ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... intangible, must therefore be regarded as a substance. Yet further in the remove we find the zodiacal light. Sunlight is but the same, in form of extreme tenuity. The thunderbolt passes from earth to cloud, and instantaneously changes its substantial form to one as tenuous as light; yet, in the transformation, this fluid has not lost its identity. Though unseen, it continues to exist ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... universal issues with which men of all times and places have also struggled, in times of peace as well as war. These issues are articulated here with a clarity that is perhaps only achieved in those times of great testing, tears, and tenuous victory that began in 1776 and that would remain tenuous until ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... sardonically. And in that instant while we were stricken with the shock of it, I saw that the figure was fading. It was a solid human form no longer! A silvery cast had come upon it. Another second passed; it was visibly growing tenuous, wraithlike! It was melting while we stared at it, until in that breathless instant I realized that the wall behind ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... forms in clouds. How often you and I from Mount Cook on the earth have watched their changing and confluent lineaments in the clouds above the New Zealand Alps. It is the same way with Martian spirits. They are tenuous fluids, but the individual pervades them and a material response is evoked, and the light from their surfaces is so halated, intensified, or reduced as to form a figure with a head and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Roman development without a prototype on the Greek stage and neatly refutes Weise and LeGrand by proving that there are no extant Greek fragments sufficient to furnish a ground for any but the most tenuous argument. Above all, he correctly interprets the poet's aim with the dictum: "Praeterquam quod hac persona optime utitur ad actionem bene continuandam id maxime spectat ut per eam spectatorum risum captet." And this from a German youth ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... drop him. Instead, in its death agony, its grip tightened, and the Americans witnessed an incredible sight. Before their very eyes the monster began rapidly to shrink. Its tenuous body telescoped together, becoming thinner and thinner in the process, until on the floor there lay the lifeless body of a snake-like creature not more than ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... freedom and bravery which astonished while it delighted her daughter. She combined twenty styles into one style of terrifying originality. She conceived dresses of a complexity beyond the labor of any but a divinely inspired needle, and others again whose simplicity was almost too tenuous for human speech. She discussed robes whose trailing and voluminous richness could with difficulty be supported by ten strong attendants, and she had heard of a dress the fabric whereof was of such gossamer and ethereal insubstancy that it might be packed into a walnut ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... green and coral lutestring, of white shoulders, in the gold radiance of candles like stiff rows of narcissi. Caroline drifted finally into the chamber back of the dining room, and they could hear the tenuous vibrations of the clavichord. Soon David had disappeared. The elder Penny discovered Myrtle seated sullenly at her mother's side; and, taking her arm, he escorted her in the direction of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... No tenuous threads to weave her nest, She seeks and gathers there or here; But spins it from her faithful breast, Renewing still, ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. But the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man. Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... influence of a good mother. It is not given us to follow each tiny shaft of light in its endless searchings, neither do we note how the riot of the waste places within us is pruned by deft hands into a tenuous symmetry, nor how, in the midst of this life's growth, is laid the foundation of the kingdom of Heaven, by the silent masonry of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space—relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... quickly assuaged by the extraordinary comfort and novelty of his environment. In the great Airedale mansion he experienced for the first time that ultimate triumph of civilization—a cup of tea served in bed before breakfast, with slices of bread-and-butter of tenuous and amazing fragile thinness. He was pleased, too, with the deference paid him as a representative of the cloth, even though it compelled him to a solemnity he did not inwardly feel. But most of all, undoubtedly, he was captivated by the loveliness ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Akasa or Matter, and showed you that all forms of what we know as Matter are but different forms of manifestation of the principle called Akasa, or as the Western scientists call it, "Ether." This Ether or Akasa is the finest, thinnest and most tenuous form of Matter, in fact it is Matter in its ultimate or fundamental form, the different forms of what we call Matter being but manifestations of this Akasa or Ether, the apparent difference resulting from ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... had ended with the river; they walked over a meadow studded with little, many-hued, star-shaped flowers, whose fronds underfoot were soft as a lawn. Yet still the sweet pipings followed them, now loud, now whisper-soft, in a tenuous web of melody. ...
— Pygmalion's Spectacles • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... and as he bent over to kiss her for goodbye a tenuous impenetrable barrier seemed to lie between ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any grayness and bleared satiety ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... before seemed to him empty space is in reality a solid mass of inconceivable density, and that the matter which has appeared to be the one tangible and certain basis of things is not only by comparison tenuous as gossamer (the "web" spun by "Father-Mother"), but is actually composed of emptiness and nothingness—is itself the very negation of matter—then for the first time he thoroughly appreciates the valuelessness of the physical senses as guides to the truth. ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... "the Astral Plane," but the former term is a closer and more definite one. The Akashic Plane, as known to occultists, contains the impressions or "records" of all events that have happened on the earth plane during the present cycle of earth manifestation. The very subtle and tenuous substance of the Akashic Plane—the term "etheric" may best describe the nature of this substance—contains traces and impressions of all the happenings of the past of this earth; and such impressions may be read and seen by the clairvoyant who ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... and more evident to me that the ideal of freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of mutual distrust and fear. The appalling ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... times of the horns of her crescent, so as to embrace almost her entire circumference with a tenuous ring of light, is doubtless due to the same cause, as their visibility should otherwise be limited to a half segment of a circle. The regions thus shining to us are obviously those on which the sun ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... o'clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that she had entered the Walman unobserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace's apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... victorious, and full of inspiration that gray line, ever longer, ever thinner, of men outnumbered two, then three, and at last five to one, whose food and clothing grew scantier with the days, while the bounties of a continent replenished their opponents,—keeping that tenuous line unbroken till very starvation unfitted soldiers to handle muskets which must be used empty if at all, because ammunition was spent! And when we recall that all this was accomplished not because the Union army was cowardly, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... juggling a sizable external debt against the urgent need for expanded public investment. Low prices for key mining and agricultural commodities combined with troubles in the bauxite and sugar industries threaten the government's already tenuous fiscal position and dim prospects ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... of that life-giving blast of mineral-laden gas the tenuous creatures came crowding. There were hundreds of them, thousands of them. And they were still coming, crowding closer and closer and closer, a mass of crawling, yellowish ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... of music—slow and belated as compared to the other arts—has perhaps been due, in part at least, to the fact that the affective imagination, its chief province (imitative, descriptive, picturesque music being only an episode and accessory), being made up, contrary to sensorial imagination, of tenuous, subtle, fugitive states, has been long in seeking its methods of analysis and of expression. However it be, Bach and the contrapuntists, by their treatment in an independent manner of the different voices constituting harmony, have opened a new path. Henceforth ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... continues to slowly reestablish its authority. However, the gradual withdrawal of most UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) peacekeepers in 2004 and early 2005, deteriorating political and economic conditions in Guinea, and the tenuous security situation in neighboring Liberia may present challenges to the continuation ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... that he is by choice a topographer rather than a novelist. Indeed the fact is made sufficiently obvious to the reader of Red Screes (SMITH, ELDER). Its sub-title is A Romance of Lakeland, and so strongly developed is the place-spirit in its author that he is constantly breaking the rather tenuous thread of his story to introduce long descriptions of Cumberland scenery and people, and as this is most easily done by sending his chief characters for walks in the districts that Mr. HEADLAM wishes to talk about the result is that I seldom read a novel in which the protagonists were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... the supernatural alight in her face. In the wood a breath of wind stirred the leaves; the shadows and the fretted lights shifted and swung; all was vague movement and change. Was it a bough that bent and sprang back or a flicker of draperies, dim and green, shrouding a tenuous form that passed like a smoke-wreath? She stared with wide eyes, and it seemed to her that for an instant she saw the figure turn and the pallor of a face, with a mist of hair about it, sway towards her. There was ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... civilization, but yet a thing made in the image and containing in itself the germ of that spirit which is the antithesis of barbarism, based on force, being itself the visible expression of the potency of ideas. The Bad Lands Cowboy brought the first tenuous foreshadowing of democratic government to the banks of the Little Missouri, inasmuch as it was an organ which could mould public opinion and through which public opinion might find articulation. It was thus that a youngster, not ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... then by human beings, but being very insufficiently supplied with air, it necessarily follows that these human beings must be provided in some way with the means of existing in that rare and tenuous atmosphere. Tremendous powers of inspiration and expiration would be required to make that air support the life of the human body. Although Swedenborg could have had no knowledge of the exact way in which ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... was certainly born of poetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to that of the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner, and—if I may coin a word—smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thin reedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went on with lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements and gestures, to describe the little lemon-coloured housekeeper in her gilded cage. Oh, he cried, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... said it to one another—but in low tones—that the valley was Faery. The river went on calling to us all the while. In places it was full of distant cheering, in others crowded with the laughter of a present multitude of tiny things, and always mocking us with innumerable tenuous voices. It grew to be evening. It was nearly two days since ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... highboy lacks A handle or a drawer, the desks are bruised and worn, And even a wide sofa has its cane seat torn. Only in the gloom far in the corner there The lacquer music-stand is elegant and rare, Clear and slim of line, with its four wings outspread, The sound of old quartets, a tenuous, faint thread, Hanging and floating over it, it stands supreme— Black, and gold, and crimson, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... thought to have been an illegitimate scion of the powerful Savile family,[2] with whose name he christened three of his sons. He was perhaps best known as a writer of songs. "Sally in our Alley" is a classic, and he has even a tenuous claim to the authorship of the English national anthem. Carey's Dramatic Works appeared in 1743, the year in which he met his death, almost certainly by his own hand. Several of the plays were successful and particular reference should be made to the burlesques ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... of the great autumn stampede to Dawson were picturesque, for the rushing river was crowded with boats all racing with one another. 'Neath lowering skies, past ghostly shores seen dimly through a tenuous curtain of sifting snowflakes, swept these craft; they went by ones and by twos, in groups and in flotillas; hourly the swirling current bore them along, and as the miles grew steadily less the spirits of the crews ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... and that was the house of the owner of the bay mare. They would doubtless turn him over to the posse instantly. But there was one chance in a hundred that they would not break the immemorial rule of mountain hospitality. For Andrew there was no hope except that tenuous one. ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... planes to each other is that of interpenetrating spheres of matter. The physical plane, consisting of the earth and its atmosphere, is surrounded and interpenetrated by the astral plane, or world, which is an enormously larger globe of exceedingly tenuous matter. This vast sphere of invisible matter is within the earth as well as beyond it, interpenetrating every atom of physical matter to the earth's center. Its grossest grade of matter is so ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... of its own. This power of such an object to become the medium of thought and emotion as well as to convey merely allegorical meaning he gradually discovered; and doubtless he especially valued its function to afford by its crude definiteness a balance to the tenuous and impalpable, the vagueness, refinement, and mystery, to which it is the complement, in his art; he gains reality by its presence for what else, as a whole, might seem too insubstantial, too much a part of that shadow world in which he dreaded to ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... fifty hours that case will be as empty as a flapper's skull. Just to make sure of cleaning up the last infinitesimal traces, though, I'm going to flash a getter charge of tantalum in it. After that, the atmosphere in that case will be tenuous—take ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... chains from the painted ceiling. The intricate perforations of the lamp were inset with colored glass, and the result was a subdued and warm illumination. Odd-looking oriental vessels, long-necked jars, jugs with tenuous spouts and squat bowls possessing engraved and figured covers emerged from the shadows of niches. A low divan with gaily colored mattresses extended from the door around one corner of the room where it terminated beside a kind of mushrabiyeh ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... A brief civil war in 1997 restored former Marxist President Denis SASSOU-NGUESSO, and ushered in a period of ethnic and political unrest. Southern-based rebel groups agreed to a final peace accord in March 2003, but the calm is tenuous and refugees continue to present a humanitarian crisis. The Republic of Congo was once one of Africa's largest petroleum producers, but with declining production it will need new offshore oil finds to sustain its oil ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... representative of debt, will not extinguish it, any more than the smell of a cook-shop will extinguish a ravenous appetite. The insatiable creditor will have money; and the depositories of that essential become, under his assaults, more and more meagre and tenuous. The managers of them at last get alarmed, and begin to withhold their issues of paper; which means that they begin to reduce their loans to the community. The money-market grows "tight," as it is phrased; the money-world feels generally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... that will be replaced after elections are held under a West African - brokered peace plan; rival rebel factions led by Prince Y. JOHNSON and Charles TAYLOR are challenging the SAWYER government's legitimacy while observing a tenuous cease-fire; the former president, Gen. Dr. Samuel Kanyon DOE, was killed on 9 September 1990 by Prince Y. JOHNSON Political parties and leaders: National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL), Augustus CAINE, chairman; ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "It is a tenuous hope, but our only one. Let our men of mundane warfare do their best—it will be useless. But if there be one spark of God-given genius in the world that can point the way to victory, let those in authority ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the fair Frequence swayed in irised wavers. Some against the gleaming rims Their bosoms prest Of the kingcups, to the brims Filled with sun, and their white limbs Bathed in those golden lavers; Some on the brown, glowing breast Of that Indian maid, the pansy, (Through its tenuous veils confest Of swathing light), in a quaint fancy Tied her knot of yellow favours; Others dared open draw Snapdragon's dreadful jaw: Some, just sprung from out the soil, Sleeked and shook their rumpled fans Dropt with sheen Of moony green; Others, not yet ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion. Every observer must have noticed the tenuous, cobweb quality of reasons that are deemed sufficient to the person who thinks he knows, or whose interests lie in a certain direction. The limitations of men seem to make it necessary that pure truth should come to us through ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... are worth fighting for only as prospective means of fighting. The like appeal to the moral sensibilities may, again, be made in the way of a call to self-defense, under the rule of Live and let live; or it may also rest on the more tenuous obligation to safeguard the national integrity of a weaker neighbor, under a broader interpretation of the same equitable rule of Live and let live. But in one way or another it is necessary to set up the conviction that the promptings of patriotic ambition have ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... its ability to administer, than from leaving the local communities to bear their own burdens and remedy their own evils. Our local habit and custom is so strong, our variety of race and creed is so great the Federal authority is so tenuous, that the area within which it can function successfully is very limited. The wiser policy is to leave the localities, so far as we can, possessed of their own sources of revenue and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... me noiselessly, a tenuous shadow, and his bearing was as proud as that of his race had been in the long ago, when they were lords where their white masters ruled. He entered the passage at the back of the mine, through which I had come when I encountered Lacroix the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... in the study, Eben sipped brandy and indulged his abnormality. For him, weaving certainties out of the tenuous threads of hallucination, there developed the spaciousness and might ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for {comm mode}, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below {luser}. Hackers often spell this {turist}, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with {luser} (this also expresses the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms). ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... which tries to prove that the English are the descendants of one of the scattered tribes of Israel. The Sanhedrin which directs the course of contemporary science, is not ashamed to produce whatever theories are advantageous to them. According to certain tenuous evidences in the air it seems that a new theory is being produced according to which the honor of birth relationship with the God-elected Sanhedrin is extended to America and ... Japan. AVIS ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... heavily overcast, and a tenuous white mist rising up from the hensorr trees formed curious shapes and designs. In the distance I could hear the swashing of ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... forces upon what is commonly called matter involved in 'spirit'-photography, materialisation, levitation, the passage of matter through matter, and other forms of apport, although such a distinction, if logically carried out, becomes somewhat tenuous in face of the generally accepted fact that all mental processes are accompanied by physical processes in the brain. In the following pages will be found instances of the phenomenon of the apparent removal of bed-clothing, which raise a question as to the propriety of regarding as exhaustive an explanation ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... vague, unformed apprehension of impending disaster, a presentiment that some day a great evil would befall him. The danger before which he now grew white with fear seemed to realize that fatidic thought, and hang suspended above him on a filament more tenuous than the hair which held aloft the fabled sword of Damocles. That filament was the slender chance that the notebook with which he was occupied when the terrified child precipitated herself into the river, and which he had hastily dropped on seeing her plight and rushing to the rescue, had ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... its existence. It is received and adopted by faith, and serves as an excellent working hypothesis. That is all. Those who accept the undulatory theory of light are necessitated to believe that all space is pervaded by an exceedingly tenuous fluid which is called ether, and that it is in this medium that the waves of light from self- luminous bodies are produced. Nobody has demonstrated the existence of this ether. It is, for the present, accepted by faith, and explains the ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... the top off the wine bottle with a blow from a stone, and, with care to avoid the sharp edges of the glass, he drank long and deep. As he bit greedily into the sandwich, his teeth met on something thin and tenuous, and he pulled the two bits of bread apart. Inside was a scrap of paper. With a curse, he was about to throw the paper away, when some pencilled words caught ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects. The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be crushed unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer's heart not less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil had hardly yet begun, the winter's hunt being ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... them forever in its feeble, dying light; that the river should be endless, and the boat float on and on until, overwhelmed by so much love, they should breathe the last gasp of life away in a kiss as tenuous as ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake, broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she meant to him. What was her significance, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spring to my feet but was horrified to discover that my muscles refused to respond to my will. I was now thoroughly awake, but as unable to move a muscle as though turned to stone. It was then, for the first time, that I noticed a slight vapor filling the cave. It was extremely tenuous and only noticeable against the opening which led to daylight. There also came to my nostrils a faintly pungent odor, and I could only assume that I had been overcome by some poisonous gas, but ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs |
