"Undecipherable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put it in a much-used envelope addressed to Jimmy Conroy—an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic, bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny village in ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Susan is excited she always begins what she has to say with an "Oh!" I like it). "To think of finding a piece of old yellow parchment with a quite undecipherable cryptogram written on it in invisible ink telling us just where we ought to dig! How perfectly lovely! Why didn't ...
— Our Pirate Hoard - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... seven months after that first meeting Stimson of the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris, involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery. The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body so arrogantly well gowned, ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... rapidly travelling imagination that the past, from each new vantage-ground of sensation, acquired a fascination which to the more sober-footed fancy only the perspective of years can give. Life, in childhood, is a picture-book of which the text is undecipherable; and the youth now revisiting the unchanged setting of his boyhood was spelling out for the first time the legend ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... cast upon the undecipherable letters of the tomb by which we sat, she told me how that once, near before dawn, she had awoke in the twilight to find their places empty where the children had lain at her side, and had sought on, at last to find them even here, weeping and quarrelling, and red with anger. Little by ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... and during all my journey; but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ago, the Camisards ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... began almost helplessly, "I am beyond extrication in debt to thee—thou golden, thou undecipherable mystery!" ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes, which reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging. A man is blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some people the world of men is a confused and undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a simple and pleasant pattern—good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind and cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad, the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are modest, the brave generous, the women ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... and told him to tie the letter to it. He did so. I pulled up a large sheet of dirty wrapping-paper. There were some lines scrawled upon it, in lead-pencil, in the large hand of a schoolboy—almost undecipherable. With some study I made ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... puerile ideas of God and His thought toward man, and such religious hatred and bigotry, bloodshed, suffering, and material stagnation throughout the so-called Christian era. He would approach the Gospels, not as books of almost undecipherable mystery, not as the biography of the blessed Virgin, but as containing the highest human interpretation of truth ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... produced on her by his question, though undecipherable, was extraordinary. She stiffened a little, remaining quite motionless, her eyes on ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... of undecipherable sound struck some equally inarticulate chord of sense, and fell full-fraught with association. The breeze, murmurous amongst the branches, set the leaves rustling like silk attire. Did I imagine ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... read the face of my watch. It was half-past seven; they would not retire before ten, they might not before midnight, and the prospect was unpleasant. In a lull of the wind I could hear from the inside the voice of Flora reading aloud; the words of course inaudible—only a flow of undecipherable speech, quiet, cordial, colourless, more intimate and winning, more eloquent of her personality, but not less beautiful than song. And the next moment the clamour of a fresh squall broke out about the cottage; the voice was drowned in its bellowing, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a wood there is a stone, supposed to be a tombstone of the prophetess Mother Shipton, and bearing an undecipherable inscription. One of her rhymes is well remembered ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian pillar ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... people, whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth, though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner, untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of undecipherable papers. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... it to profitable use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers scribbled over with verses, in themselves an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles freshly begun; letters forgotten, and posted in the table drawer in stead of the letter-box, an error to which absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... days of my apprenticeship, and I had been exceedingly foolish in taking a few notes, which, although undecipherable, perhaps would none the less be used ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... was, at the end of the holidays, very far from attaining the perfection shown in the examples produced by his teachers of the marvels they had effected in many of their pupils, he did improve vastly, and wrote a fair current hand instead of the almost undecipherable scrawl that had so puzzled and annoyed a succession of masters at Shrewsbury. After another month spent in London, getting his clothes and outfit, Godfrey started for St. Petersburg. On his last evening at home his father had a serious talk ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... of Split Mountain stands a lofty wireless tower. For months it has been spitting vain messages to the four winds. Out of the great silences at rare intervals come faint flickers of radio calls, jumbled, indistinct, undecipherable,—but, for all that, definite pulse ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... notes, are enclosed within square brackets; but when I have merely supplied authorities, they are not so distinguished. The list which he had drawn up of the works of Alesius was partly in an obsolete form of shorthand, which to me was quite undecipherable. Having been privileged to examine a good many of these rare treatises in various public libraries, I have been able, though only to an inconsiderable degree, to supplement the list; these additions ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... English Jest-Books, 1864, i., Additional Notes) that Scot, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, quotes the story from this miscellany of the miller's eels, and enabled us, before the Goettingen copy was brought under notice, to complete the text, which is almost undecipherable in the Conybeare ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... the jailers could not see her, broke the seals, appeared surprised at the sight of those undecipherable lines and then, all at ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very clean Chinaman, who appreciated his privilege, since it included a seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no further. The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest, lying ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... belong to a period when the Perpendicular style was at its best and purest. The crypt beneath the chancel is of much interest. The single central pillar supports a fine groined roof. The church has few interesting details, but the magnificent lectern with its undecipherable inscription and a couple of brasses will be noticed. There are but few old houses in the centre ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... to be careless of his fame, and the rags that his commentators make of him are a warning to all pettier people. We have seen the manuscript of a man already immortal, so interlined, erased, and corrected as to be undecipherable by any but himself and the printer who has been for twenty years condemned to such hard labor; surely others can condescend to the same pains;—yet we doubt if Mr. Reade so much as looks his ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wished to confide to me. Most unfortunately I was visiting a sick parishioner several miles away, and did not get the message in time. When I arrived at the Manor he was past speech. He tried to scrawl a few lines on a piece of paper, but the writing was quite undecipherable. If he regretted any earthly act, it was too late then to alter it; he was going to settle his ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... to offer a little contribution of my own. The other day, at the museum, I was delving among the relics of literature of the great Revolution, with a view to finding something that might illustrate our theme. I came across a little pamphlet of the period, yellow and almost undecipherable, which, on examination, I found to be a rather amusing skit or satirical take-off on the profit system. It struck me that probably our lesson might prepare us to appreciate it, and I made a copy. It is entitled "The Parable of the Water ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... travellers congregated together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing, sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred, gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart whithersoever ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... reported that years afterward on the coast of Veragua some wandering adventurers found this legend, almost undecipherable, cut in the bark of a tree, "Aqui anduvo el desdichado Diego de Nicuesa," which may be translated, "Here was lost the unfortunate Diego de Nicuesa." But the statement is not credited. The fate of the gallant little gentleman is one of ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... tightly upon the rifle stock, while his heart, trained for the Wee Kirk, sent a wordless prayer winging its way to heaven. Both tracks, he saw, had undergone a change, and this change, so far as it concerned the footsteps of the man, was in some undecipherable manner—appalling. ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... record, nor a mere cohesion of atomic forces into a brief personality, soon to dissolve again into the elements, but that it is inscribed with ancestral histories, some like the present scene, most of them unlike it and stretching back into the remotest past. These inscriptions are generally undecipherable, save as revealed in their moulding influence upon the new career; but like the invisible photographic images made by the sun of all it sees, when they are properly developed in the laboratory of consciousness ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... abacus making a deafening din, for apparently the smallest sum cannot be added up under Eastern skies without the assistance of this wire frame with the ever-shifting marbles. Cramped fingers move wearily over the yellow parchments, with their long lists of undecipherable hieroglyphics, and the turbaned heads are scarcely raised until the entrance of the Prince necessitates the time-honoured salute of the dodok, the crouching posture assumed in the presence of a superior. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... was indeed not easily understood. A thousand subtle shades, mingling, crossing, contradicting and disguising each other, rendered it almost undecipherable at a first view. As is usually the case with the Sclaves, it was difficult to read the recesses of his mind. With them, loyalty and candor, familiarity and the most captivating ease of manner, by no means imply confidence, or impulsive frankness. Like the twisted ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... handwriting difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did not know till ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... approaching must have been known by the German admiral, for their wireless apparatus had been working unceasingly, telling of their approach, and these signals must have been caught by the German warships, though, because sent in code, they were undecipherable. Nor could the enemy tell, by the sound, just ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... were replaced by German-type beer halls, schools with courses advertised in their posted schedules whose titles were completely unintelligible to him, and second hand bookstalls selling battered technical books and journals whose titles were undecipherable in any tongue Bryce could think of. The lunch hour crowds were beginning to pour out into the arcades from elevators and tube trains in a rush to get first place in their ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... dreamer of that epoch often allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of gold, the locket small; inside two painted miniatures but very diminutive, and both of them young. One would hardly be able to identify a middle aged person from them. There was no mark or initials, save an undecipherable monogram. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... with Lady Fincoss, and Francesca with Miss Clondalkin, a very learned personage who has deciphered more undecipherable inscriptions than any lady in Ireland, when our eyes fell upon ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... an hour later, as he came out upon its margin. A clump of aged spruce was the only woods. On his way to it, he stumbled upon three graves, snow-buried, but marked by hand-hewn head-posts and undecipherable writing. On the edge of the woods was a small ramshackle cabin. He pulled the latch and entered. In a corner, on what had once been a bed of spruce-boughs, still wrapped in mangy furs that had rotted ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that the steamer ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They catch a twang in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and half a score of ocean ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... frosting on the tops. There was even more elaborate reading matter on an excellent early-apple pie which we began to share and eat, precept upon precept. Mrs. Todd helped me generously to the whole word BOWDEN, and consumed REUNION herself, save an undecipherable fragment; but the most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. It must have been baked ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the bar was generally ignorant of the charges against him, for the so-called act of accusation was in most cases, a scrap of paper covered with cramped and illegible hand-writing that frequently proved undecipherable. The president read a name. The person designated, rose and replied to such questions as were addressed to him. If the responses were confused, the prisoner's embarrassment was regarded as a conclusive proof ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... tyrant nor slave. He neither knelt nor scorned. With him, men were neither great nor small,—they were right or wrong. Through manners, clothes, titles, rags and race he saw the real—that which is. Beyond accident, policy, compromise and war he saw the end. He was patient as Destiny, whose undecipherable hieroglyphs were so deeply graven on his sad and ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... to other matters: your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter remains for me undecipherable. I call her, then, your daughter - and a very good name too - and I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house. The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on each side. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... manuscript. Glory be to God, for this means a large amount of work to do. Yet, though the copy is wanted in haste, the original is so carelessly written that I hardly know how to set about my task. Indeed, certain parts of the manuscript are almost undecipherable. I have agreed to do the work for forty kopecks a sheet. You see therefore (and this is my true reason for writing to you), that we shall soon be receiving money from an extraneous source. Goodbye now, as I must begin upon ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... penetrated through a crevice, a slanting, dusty line, and lit up a little area of the dim, musty place. But there was no sound, not even from the scouts, save only the voice of Westy Martin as he read that old, creased, damp, all but undecipherable letter: ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh |
