"Unimaginable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... times a flash of light suddenly gleam athwart the mind, and it seem as though we were about to get a glimpse into the inner heart of being, the brightness quickly dies, and only the surfaces of things remain visible. Oh, the unimaginable length of ages when on the earth there was no living thing! then life's ugly, slimy beginnings; then the conscious soul's fitful dream stretching forth to endless time and space; then the final sleep in abysmal night with its one star of hope twinkling before the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... pane, how incredible it is that myriads of them twittering and buzzing together should be the song of April, the murmur of June. And this Sanctus-bell that tinkled so inadequately, almost so frivolously when sounded by a server in Meade Cantorum church, was yet part of an unimaginable volume of worship that swelled in unison with Angels and Archangels lauding and magnifying the Holy Name. The importance of ceremony was as deeply impressed upon Mark that morning as if he had been formally initiated to great mysteries. His coming confirmation, which had ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... was ready at length, she stood for a second or two to gather her strength. She still felt ill and dizzy, as though the world she knew had suddenly fallen away from her and left her struggling in unimaginable space, like a swimmer in deep waters. But she conquered her weakness, and, drawing aside the tent-flap once more, she ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Mart of funerals. Martie remembered the counterpane on the bed and the limp madras curtains at the windows. She put her gloves in a bureau drawer lined with folded newspaper, and hung her wraps in the square closet that was, for some unimaginable reason, a ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,—the memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius, gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous pile,—a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Athens: he was bidden to lie down to sleep in the temple of the Goddess. Dreaming, he found himself transported into an unknown country. There stood a palace of unimaginable splendour and prodigious size. The Goddess Pallas appeared at the gate, surrounded by ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... was not judged satisfactory, he removed it and brought another. Many did not like this mode of service; they would be helped to buy; unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed any aid toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave them every imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling before them like a man whose many gods came to him one after the other to be worshiped; while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he presented was on the counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a sudden calm, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... thoroughness which characterises Irishmen when back-sliding into unimaginable cruelties. Should a boycotted man enter chapel, the whole congregation rose as with one accord and left him alone in the building. Considering the sensitive and pious disposition of the average Irishman, such ostracism was even more poignant than ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread—taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... O reader, the Child himself has answered; but for Ben-Hur there were only the words of Balthasar, "On the earth, yet not of it—not for men, but for their souls—a dominion, nevertheless, of unimaginable glory." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... how atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement in process, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its efficient cause still ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the slightest idea, but with the courage of youth, presuming, with the prudence of middle-age, that he would not really be called upon to perform so unimaginable a feat, he put two fingers up to ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... books and yet be permitted to keep his private existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian [2] epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay concealed in the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... these things, he said—certainly not now—nor those labels and signposts to a doubtful, unimaginable land. He needed Amy herself, or, at least, some hint or sound or glimpse to show him that she indeed was as she had always been; whether in earth or heaven, he did not care; that there was somewhere something that was herself, some definite personal being of a continuous ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... satisfaction in being minute. His head of hair would have done honor to a Brutus;—nothing could be more richly flowing, or possess a brighter gloss. It was of a jetty black;—which was also the color, or more properly the no color of his unimaginable whiskers. You perceive I cannot speak of these latter without enthusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun. At all events, they encircled, and at times partially overshadowed, a mouth utterly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... by nature implacable or whether their inveterate hostility proceeded from some cause of disquiet or apprehension unimaginable by us it was too probable they might ere long force upon us the painful necessity of making them acquainted with ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the meal—carrying it on a big tray, and with another man to carry a folding table, and yet another to help. Such a display of silver and cut glass! Such snowy linen, and such unimaginable viands! There were piles of sandwiches, each one half a bite for a fairly hungry man. There was jellied game, and caviar, and a pate of something strange and spicy. Nothing was what one would have expected—there were eggs inside ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... may be right. Under this tiny consciousness of ours lie vast fields of subconscious intelligence as yet unexplored. Beyond our earth are still greater mysteries, unimaginable, unthinkable. ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... consequence of the Rishi's boon, disappeared. The ignorant and senseless robbers struck one another. And striking one another thus, they perished and with them that wonderful prince on the earth. And those men of wicked deeds sank in an unimaginable and awful hell. Seeing that son of his, obtained through the Rishi's boon thus slain, that great ascetic, viz., king Srinjaya, afflicted with deep sorrow, began to lament in piteous accents. Beholding the king afflicted with grief on account of his son, and thus weeping, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the future, my good friend,' said Flora, 'so far as earthly events are concerned; for how often have I pictured to myself the strong possibility of this horrid issue, and tasked myself to consider how I could support my part; and yet how far has all my anticipation fallen short of the unimaginable ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... shipbuilders, and seamen, who declared that the plan was feasible in every particular, that it is hard to think they could all have been mistaken in thus supporting the leading engineer of the day. It may easily be supposed that every other imaginable and unimaginable objection was raised, but to one and all Eads gave ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... respite for about twenty days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and on a Sunday, that I went out into the streets; rather to run away, if possible, from my torments than with any distinct purpose. By accident I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had heard of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound it was at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... back of his head, and to these he was firmly bound; he knew not, as it were, what these thoughts were; he did not wish to stir them up, but he felt them continually. At times they would come to him all of a sudden, oppress him more and more, and begin to crush him with their unimaginable weight, as though the vault of a rocky cavern were slowly and terribly descending upon ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... horse she lay down on her back, and at once everything was lost except the sky. Over her body, supported above solid earth by the warm, soft heather, the wind skimmed without sound or touch. Her spirit became one with that calm unimaginable freedom. Transported beyond her own contentment, she no longer even ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the Black Sea in a midnight ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... only extended about a mile along the shore, instead of four; and there were but one quay and two bridges. Now superb quays line the river on either side, and there are six bridges, and Heaven only knows how many churches for the accommodation of all the denominations imaginable and unimaginable, from Pere Lavigne's very beautiful and very orthodox church, in which Monsignor Capel has preached in Lent, down to Leon Pilate's, where collections are made for the evangelical missions presided over by Mrs. Gould and W.C. Van Metre. There is a Greek church ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... Southampton in a boat bound for South America lands the traveller at Vigo, or three days at Lisbon, where the brilliant sun and blue sky, the judas-trees in the Avenida, the roses, the palms, and the sheets of bougainvillia, are such an unimaginable change from the cold March winds and pinched ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, unfathomable, unplumbed; inconceivable, unimaginable, unheard-of. of cosmic proportions; of epic proportions, the mother of all, teh granddaddy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... surmised this would be the way of it," said Jurgen. "And yet as always there is a simplicity in the methods of the Philistines which is unimaginable by really clever fellows. And as always, too, these methods are unfair to us clever fellows. Well, I am willing to taste any drink once: but this is a very horrible device, none the less; and I wonder if I have the pluck ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... heaven Glow'd bright, as, like a viewless river, swell'd The deepening music!—Silence came again! And where I gazed, a shrine of cloudy fire Flamed redly awful; round it Thunder walk'd, And from it Lightning look'd out most sublime! Here throned in unimaginable bliss And glory, sits The One Eternal Power, Creator, Lord, and Life of All: Again, Stillness ethereal reign'd, and forth appear'd Elysian creatures robed in fleecy light, Together flocking from celestial ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... uncertainty, setting his heel upon all reflection, avoiding every issue. To-night he could escape those accusing thoughts no longer; to-night he was more than ever bitter with himself. What folly was this which had sprung up in his life—folly colossal, unimaginable, as unexpected as though it had fallen a thunderbolt from the skies! What had happened to ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of the ten dollars he had handed to the driver of the run-about. It had given them twenty minutes of pleasure, and it seemed unimaginable that anyone should be able to buy amusement at that rate. With ten dollars he might have bought her an engagement ring; she knew that Mrs. Tom Fry's, which came from Springfield, and had a diamond in it, had cost only eight seventy-five. But she did not know ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer, and whose spirits rose with eating as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor. Then, he thought, how soon he'd turn his back upon the old school-house, snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... start up and flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst of the fire. She smiles, she dies, you will never see her ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saint had its own peculiar power over some bodily region or over some particular disease. And so the faithful were guarded by a legion of protecting influences against everything from coughs to sudden death. There is almost an unimaginable range of relics. Parts of the true Cross possessed supreme value. St. Louis of France was brought back almost from death to life by the touch of the sacred wood. The bones and hairs of saints, rings which they had worn and all ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... the passage I meant, and it shows that Whitman, at any rate, did not share Wilson's feeling that the immortality of the soul is unimaginable." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... strange one that my last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship should be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others besides myself the same appearance had played a part in the various stages of that business: luring some to what they little imagined, filling some with unimaginable terrors. But ours was the last smoke raised in the story; and with its dying away the secret of the Flying ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... on foot," commanded Warrington. "Get under cover and watch. Stay here until you're relieved, unless something particularly worth reporting happens; in that case, hurry and report. For instance"—he hesitated, trying to imagine something out of the unimaginable—"suppose the risaldar-major were to come out, then give him the message and come home with him. But—oh, suppose the place takes fire, or there's a riot, or you hear a fight going on inside— then hurry ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... traversal.(6) The harmonic properties of poles and polars are given, but Desargues seems not to have arrived at the metrical properties which result when the infinite elements of the plane are introduced. Thus he says, "When the traversal is at an infinite distance, all is unimaginable." ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... suitable to the nature and intentions of that Self. The highest Brahman, whose nature is fundamentally antagonistic to all evil and essentially composed of infinite knowledge and bliss—whereby it differs from all other souls—possesses an infinite number of qualities of unimaginable excellence, and, analogously, a divine form suitable to its nature and intentions, i.e. adorned with infinite, supremely excellent and wonderful qualities— splendour, beauty, fragrance, tenderness, loveliness, youthfulness, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... eyes open frightfully wide now. The tropical afternoon was lengthening the shadows on the hot, weary earth, the abode of obscure desires, of extravagant hopes, of unimaginable terrors. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... followed on her mistress's footsteps—"oh, Janet! how much more delightful to think that all these fair things have been assembled by his love, for the love of me! and that this evening—this very evening, which grows darker every instant, I shall thank him more for the love that has created such an unimaginable paradise, than for all the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... districts, without communicating the malady in any instance, to the persons with whom they lived; upon the healthiness of ports, from which it has been said to have been introduced, &c. Dr. V. is not, as some of his countrymen have been, unwilling, from some unimaginable cause, to make use of the immense mass of American evidence; though he observes, and with justice, that experiments should be repeated in France, in order to set the public mind at rest in that kingdom. He proposes the employment of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... had all crowded near to listen. It was now the social hour for campers. By the camp-fire more reminiscences followed; and the two guides chimed in it with moose stories, bear stories, panther stories, wild tales of every imaginable and unimaginable kind of adventure, until the lads thought no mythology which they had ever learned could rival ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... rounded over more subdued films of white and grey, with lightly crisped and curled edges like hoar frost on fallen leaves, and minute clusters of upright orange stalks with pointed caps, and fibres of deep green, and gold, and faint purple passing into black, all woven together, and following with unimaginable fineness of gentle growth the undulation of the stone they cherish, until it is charged with color so that it can receive no more; and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, as anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed with a soft, dark ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of Pauline has never been discovered, but, possibly with a few traits borrowed from Madame de Berny, she is what Balzac describes in the last pages of "La Peau de Chagrin" as an "ideal, as a visionary face in the fire, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a floating apparition, which no chance will ever ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... sorts of unimaginable tailoring, in jaunty colored cap or flapped sombrero, his pipe dangling from his button-hole, his hair and beard displaying every eccentricity under heaven, the Paris student, the Pays Latiniste pur sang, lived and had his being. Poring ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... of the Gods") I have tried to render my sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty; I say that much and I have said all that I ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... they had for dessert, were the only things that gave them unmixed satisfaction. With anything but pleasure they made the discovery that the chief ingredient of Majorcan cookery, an ingredient appearing in all imaginable and unimaginable guises and disguises, was pork. Fowl was all skin and bones, fish dry and tasteless, sugar of so bad a quality that it made them sick, and butter could not be procured at all. Indeed, they found it difficult to get anything ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... disillusioned, as Miss Amelia. The very image of a life without love was intolerable to her since she had known George—for love meant George, and only George, in her thoughts. That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the instant. She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one else. It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered. No, without ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... about this Juve! And you regularly fed us up with this villain, so mysterious, so extraordinary, who was never run to earth, could not be captured, was capable of the most inhuman cruelties, capable of devising the most unimaginable tricks and stratagems—this Fantomas!" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... in a meditative way, "I wonder what would happen if there were no dramatic critics." To which came the reply, that there would be no performances, since performances without an audience are almost unimaginable, and every spectator acts to some extent as ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... no matter, he was about to appear before the eyes of his faithful subjects—or at least a portion of his bodyguard, who would not fail to talk about the matter to the rest of the people—apparelled in unimaginable splendour, and such a trifle as a little discomfort from excessive heat was as nothing compared with the sensation which he ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Stamp your bleedin' 'obnyles (hobnails) on his fice, and fetch it hout! This wye!" As he took the rifle from number five, the sergeant major's face seemed to be transformed into a living embodiment of envenomed hate, his attack, thrust, recovery, gathering in intensity until with unimaginable fury he leaped upon the prostrate figure, drove his bayonet through to the hilt, stamped his hobnails upon the transfixed enemy, jerked his weapon out, and stood quivering, ready for any foe that dared ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... on this side of the fort, the road Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow, And winds with short turns down the precipice; And in its depths there is a mighty rock Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustained itself with terror and with toil Over the gulf, and with the agony With which it clings seems slowly coming down; Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour, Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans; And leaning, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... rattled into place, but he sighed just after; and both the laugh and the sigh were Magdalena's, grim as the former may have been. That had been a time of peace and perfect content, and he could never forget it, not though he lived long years of unimaginable bliss with Helena—which he probably would not. A part of his life, limited and stunted a part as it was, belonged irrevocably to Magdalena. He concluded, after some hard thinking, that it was his best ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... minutes prolonged itself interminably, and a swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of existence ... and then the figure in the doorway—it was Hull, she saw, Hull—turned deliberately and, still slightly swaying, moved back and off, as if absorbed into that incomprehensible light that had given ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... up and down the roadway and was channelled now and then by lumbering lighted cars; it became a protecting jostle about them. Ellen turned and saw the Chinaman's flat face creased with a grin. He had been savouring the women's terror under his tongue, sucking unimaginable sweetness and refreshment from it. Mrs. Melville was shedding angry tears and likening the Chinese to the Irish—a people of whom she had a low opinion—(Mr. Melville had been an Irishman)—but Ellen felt much sympathy as one might bestow upon some disappointed ogre in a fairy tale for ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... was a chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... could not reproduce in description, and probably not by practice, the inevitable monkey-contortions, the unimaginable animal agility, by which I transfer my weight to the clumsy links of this almost invisible chain. The size of the staple from which it hangs dissipates all fears in respect to its strength. Hand ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... leave of Mrs. Horn. Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being with Beaton, gave no sign of going. Mela was still talking to the student of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family, the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they had all led before she came to them. He was not a blind devotee of art for art's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thing unthinkable, unimaginable, with the Duchessa by his side, and the golden day ahead of him. By skilled manoeuvring, and avoiding the recognized hours of meal-time, they managed to escape further contact ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... if impelled by the volition of another intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the mass of wool and wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle, through the wrapping, and felt—the thrill of unimaginable joy ran through her. It was not ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even improbable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them understandable—that he logically account for them, that he give them plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity, so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions, and, vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. If God grant health and permission, this subject will be treated of systematically in a work which I have many years been preparing on the Productive Logos, human and divine, with, and as an introduction to, a full commentary on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... frozen, yet conscious sleep! I had no more to stand up! had only to lie stretched out and still! How cold I was, words cannot tell; yet I grew colder and colder—and welcomed the cold yet more and more. I grew continuously less conscious of myself, continuously more conscious of bliss, unimaginable yet felt. I had neither made it nor prayed for it: it was mine in virtue of existence! and existence was mine in virtue of a Will ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... past!—out into the thick blackness, where maybe the fiery heads of Bel and the Dragon may lift themselves upward and leer at him!—or he may meet the frightful menace of some monstrous Mexican deity, once worshipped with the rites of blood!—out—out into the unknown, unimaginable Amazement must the poor naked Soul go shuddering on the blast of death, to face he truly knows not what!—but possibly he has such a pitiful blind trust in good, that he may be re-transformed into some pleasant living consciousness that shall be more agreeable even than that of Pope of Rome! ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... fire all round him,— Who moved along the molten west, And over the round hill's crest That seemed half ready with him to go down, Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,— As if there were to be no last thing left Of a nameless unimaginable town,— Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken Down to the perils of a depth not known, From death defended though by men forsaken, The bread that every man must eat alone; He may have walked while others hardly dared Look on to see him stand where many fell; ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and the author expresses his estimate of its value in the following words, —"What unimaginable nonsense!" He then goes on to make the following memoranda as to the plot. It should be remembered, however, that all this part of the romance was written ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all this, there are great sombre forests in these lands, with trees whose age is unimaginable, and fires amongst the herbage are rare. All beneath the trees is water, and the air is full of warm steam and wetness. For a man to live in that constant hot damp is very mortifying to the strength. But strength is wanted, and cunning also beyond the ordinary, for these dangerous lands ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... it till this feat were done, and the peerless Gyda his own. He proceeded accordingly to conquer, in fierce battle, a Jarl or two every year, and, at the end of twelve years, had his unkempt (and almost unimaginable) head of hair clipt off,—Jarl Rognwald (Reginald) of More, the most valued and valuable of all his subject-jarls, being promoted to this sublime barber function;—after which King Harald, with head thoroughly cleaned, and hair grown, or growing again to the luxuriant beauty that had no ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... unguessable, for although dim moonlight filtered through it, he did not know where the moon was, nor how far such light could penetrate through moving water. Somewhere it met rock-bottom and boiled there, for a roar like the sea's came up from deeps unimaginable. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and unimaginable message: "I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls." A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian sea,—the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,—the sudden spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean, —the iris-colors and astounding shapes of the hills,—the unimaginable magnificence of palms,—the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,—the fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed—but only the enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely beginning ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... evil could befall us, the abundant home where all wants were supplied, and where the shyest and timidest child could feel at ease and secure. It is all coming again, brother, and amidst the august and unimaginable glories of that future the old feeling of being little children, nestling safe in the Father's house, will fill our quiet hearts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... setting, our Universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little and received as much from the years that now we can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as ruined save by 'the unimaginable touch of Time.' Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, she has lost not one; while Cambridge (I believe) has parted only with Cavendish. Some have been subsumed into newer foundations; but always the process has been one of merging, of blending, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... recognizable features. We have reached the time when we will not suffer anybody to turn our great ones into gods or demigods, and to remove them far from us to dwell, like absentee deities, on a remote Olympus, or in an unimaginable Paradise; we must have them near, intimates whom our souls can converse with, and our hearts love. Such an intimate was Roosevelt living, and such an intimate will he be dead. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt—those are the three whom Americans will cherish and revere; each ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... merry immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very high, beautiful things—the reality. I haven't got it, but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever shall—but it takes all the fun out of the mud—and at times I fear it takes all ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, has become for me one of the nobilium poculorum of story. And thus did the ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempest of wind—to what unimaginable ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... She would shut her eyes, and take hold of my hand. Englishmen, she had heard, were good at climbing. Their heads were steady. Then we became silent. There were no signs of Castro. Where could he have gone? What could he be doing? It was unimaginable. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... preposterous than ever. Two hours before it would have been unimaginable; one hour ago I had merely been offering aid to a young woman in distress; now she was occupying my rooms and I was hurrying along Tenth Street, careless as to my destination, and feeling as though the whole world was ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... pressed with a question that could not be evaded he would either refuse to answer or tell the truth. But what had I just heard? No answer to any question. A voluntary statement, precise in terms, that was utterly false. The unimaginable had happened. It was almost as if some one I knew well, in a moment of closest sympathy, had suddenly struck me in the face. The blood rushed to my head, and I stood still on the grass. I stood there ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... fields of wheat stubble and pastures and crossed two brooks. The curiosity of Langdon and St. Clair was overwhelming but they restrained it for a long time. They could tell by his appearance that he had passed through unimaginable hardships, but they were loath ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... branches of the animal, and there may conceivably be an infinite number of other "kingdoms" in which it may be either undeveloped, or very differently developed, or superseded by some other manifestation by us unimaginable. Its development indeed seems to be concurrent with the development of a locomotive faculty—a striking confirmation of the theory that it is in our activity that we derive the suggestions which call forth the exercise of the Understanding ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... we reached our first balanced budget, I asked that we meet our responsibility to the next generation by maintaining our fiscal discipline. Because we refused to stray from that path, we are doing something that would have seemed unimaginable seven years ago: We are actually paying down the national debt. If we stay on this path, we can pay down the debt entirely in 13 years and make America debt-free for the first time since Andrew Jackson ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... thoughts ran through Tommy's head. A madman dabbling in science might do incredible things, horrible things, and then demand assistance to undo an unimaginable murder.... ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... ears, as we approached, a certain wailing melody, thin, quavering, distant, weird. As it rose upon the hot afternoon air it seemed absolutely strange, unimaginable, impossible. The spine ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... He knew, by that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life. But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was facing a stone wall; there was no further ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent leaves an unimaginable splendour. This was the very effect which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to reproduce in their noblest work—the Gothic cathedral and church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass. The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... nurse's hands, soft hands, persuasive hands, hands that could practise impossible audacities with impunity. Imagine a woman, uninvited and unpermitted, arranging his collar and necktie for him in the largest public room of the Grand Babylon, and then talking about his little moles! It would have been unimaginable! Yet it happened. And moreover, he had not disliked it. She sat back in her chair as though she had done nothing in the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... had regarded the operation as a complete loss of the money whose payment it involved. Ten years! It was an eternity! And even then his father would have some preposterous suggestion for rendering useless the unimaginable fifty pounds! Meanwhile the weekly deduction of eighteenpence from his miserable income was an exasperating strain. And then one night the secretary had told him that he was entering on his last month. If he had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and incredible things, such as Rickman's, Mrs. Downey's, St. Pancras Church, and the editor of The Museion (whose last letter he had left unanswered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and unimaginable past. It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden. He was never very far from her. The east window looked across the courtyard to the window of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... into the plain—the immense azure plain, with its grand symphonic harmonies of form and color. O land of dreams fulfilled, of satisfied longing! when across these thousands of miles I recall your entrancing charm, your unimaginable beauty, I sometimes wonder if you were not a dream, if you have any place in this real existence, this lower earth: are you still delighting other eyes with the rapture of your loveliness, or were you only an illusion, a vision, which vanishes like the glow of sunset or "golden exhalations ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... painter could imitate, every charm, every grace, every form that one could dream of. These wombs are transverse, odoriferous and transparent, ever open for love and more tempting than all the flesh of women. The unimaginable designs of their little bodies inebriates the soul, and transports it to a paradise of images and of voluptuous ideals. They tremble upon their stems as though they would fly. When they do fly do they come to me? No, it is my heart that hovers ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... recognise. I have seen it said that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to get through Pickwick" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough, and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it "describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of society" that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus. What he gives is full ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... this conception of man's activities infinitely more wonderful, and infinitely more comprehensible than is the conception that his activities may be accounted for by the existence of an unknown, unimaginable, and intangible force called ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... feared to lose him,—if she chose to keep him; but it might be that there were terms on which she would not care to keep him. If, it was still an almost unimaginable "if," he could not, would not come once more to see clearly, then, as lover, he must be put aside, and even as friend learn that she had little use for a friendship so warped from ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity, was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... produce we find here, though pasturage and cheese-making are their chief occupations, and fruit crops are produced in other parts. We find, as has been before mentioned, fruit-trees everywhere, corn, fruit, and vegetables all growing with unimaginable luxuriance. The pastures are also very fine, but we see no cattle out to graze; the harvest work requires all hands, and, as there are no fences between field and meadow, there is no one to tend them. The ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... an open place in the cool of evening. A grey-blue sky above, with the faintest glitter of first stars! I was alone. The past was a mystery; my future unexplored, full of the unimaginable; the ultimate future of course like ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... preordained, then, that the syllabuses which the Department issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have few merits and many defects. Yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle, they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the teachers in England had to work by them would have made them potent agencies for evil. To be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for a teacher, and a misfortune for the school that ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... of pearls, rubies and diamonds (which still glorify the tiaras of the pope and emperors)—all these were sold for a few sous or were trampled in the snow by the ignorant shepherds and cowherds of the Alps. After such an unimaginable tragedy, Duke Charles, like a beaten child, weeping with rage and sick with despair, at last roused himself to send with the consent of the Duchess Yolande a deputation to treat with the Confederates; and this deputation was sent to Count Louis of Gruyere. Announcing ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... lagoon, to which the green shores of the island gently sloped. The beauty of this lagoon would need a Ruskin's pen to reproduce it in all its exquisite and manifold colouring. Submarine coral forests, of every hue, enriched with sea-flowers, anemones, and echinidae, of unimaginable brilliancy; shoals of the brightest fish flashing in and out like rainbow gleams; shells of gorgeous lustre, moving slowly along with their living inmates; fairy foliage of fantastic sea-weeds stirred into tremulous motion by ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... butterfly, the whole plump pendulous face appears to vibrate with emotion, the body becomes stiff with feeling, the lips depressed with tragedy, and the dark eyes shine with the suppressed tears of an unimaginable pathos. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the masters ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... appendage must occasion a slight increase in the need of nutriment, and in so far must be a detriment, although its detrimental effect would not be worth speaking of except in relation to "Darwinism," according to which, "selection" has acted through unimaginable ages, {50} and has ever tended to suppress any useless development by ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... wrongs which the fathers suffered, and at the enormities which the slaves were enduring. The "fathers were never slaves, never bought and sold like cattle, never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion, never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters," but all these woes and more, an unimaginable mountain of agony and misery, was the appalling lot of the slaves in the Southern States. The guilt of this nation, which partners such a crime against human nature, "is unequaled by any other on earth," and therefore it is bound to instant repentance, and to ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... figures, grotesquely contorted in the mist, the child's wide blue eyes traced out, as the other moonshiners climbed too down the rugged face of the crag, all burdened with bundles of varying size and unimaginable contents—food, clothing, or such appliances of their craft as the hurried revenue raiders had chanced to overlook. The little boy must have contended with fear in this awesome environment, the child of gentlest nurture, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Down through unimaginable thousands of feet, straight and swift swept the machine, making such a sweep as the eagle in its pride would never have dared. People held their breath to watch, expecting every moment some catastrophe. But the machine kept on an even keel, and in a few moments I joined with ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... have ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten not into mere creaming foam but into masses of accumulated yeast which hang in ropes and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Hausfraus make fritters of everything imaginable, and sometimes unimaginable. Mary was told one day by a German neighbor how she prepared a fritter ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... popping down again." These shelters, a long line of them, are littered thick with empty cartridge cases, hundreds in each; one thinks involuntarily of grouse-driving. Bodies, still unburied, lay about when I was there. Such odours! such sights! The unimaginable things that the force of shot and shell can do to poor, soft, human flesh. I saw soldiers who had helped to do the work ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... than necessary. But through the narrow door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and of a stairway which led with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... Yule this was unimaginable disaster. She had never dreamt that Marian, the still, gentle Marian, could be driven to revolt. And it had come with the suddenness of a thunderclap. She wished to ask what had taken place between father and daughter in the brief interview ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... second year after these Letters), on looking round at the works done since last review, in sight of all the Garrison he embraced Lefebvre, while commending his excellent performance; which filled the poor soul with a now unimaginable joy. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... thought of evil,— while more often still it assumed a restlessly watchful expression as though it were the eye of a fiend-inquisitor intent on the detection of some secret treachery. Poised between those fair white breasts it glared forth a glittering Menace; . . a warning of unimaginable horror; and Theos, gazing at it fixedly, felt a curious thrill run through him, as if, so to speak, a hook of steel had been suddenly thrust into his quivering veins to draw him steadily and securely on toward some ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... we understand that the most remarkable fact about the historic meeting is that the leaders of two great republics met with minds and hearts set upon justice. They were determined that the weak who had suffered unimaginable wrong should not fail to secure justice because they were weak and they were equally of a mind that the high and mighty who were responsible for these wrongs should not escape justice because they were high ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... still evening, one glimpse of the river—the river, he remembered even at this instant, that came down from Hathersage and Padley and his old home. But there was no open vision, such as he had half hoped to see, no unimaginable glories looming slowly through the veils in which God hides Himself on earth, no radiant face smiling into his own—only this arena of watching human faces turned up to his, waiting for his last sermon.... He ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the vacant Beyond, into ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... too vast, too multiform and too glorious for any definition which we could understand? Is it because in the end it will involve for some, if not for all, majesty on unfathomed majesty, and glory upon unimaginable glory such as at present far outpass the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... of the world took the story with an unexpected calm. Like Hiroshima, it was too unexpected, too big, too unimaginable. There was a hooker somewhere, and they went about their business annoyed, angry, ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... him, that it was he who was doomed, that already behind the curtains of life destiny was staging his death—and what a death!—he could no more foresee than he foresaw the Paliser Case, which, to the parties subsequently involved, was then unimaginable, yet which, at that very hour, a court of last resort ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... takes itself out of the way. As I walked homewards I paused midway on the barren ridge to gaze back on the scene I had left, and then the recent adventure began to take a semi-ludicrous aspect in my mind. All that circumstance of preparation, that mysterious prelude to something unheard of, unimaginable, surpassing all fables ancient and modern, and all tragedies—to end at last in a concert of howling monkeys! Certainly the concert was very grand—indeed, one of the most astounding in nature—-but still—I sat down on a stone and ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... beauty of form, brilliant colouring, and perfect melody, can never be known to our woods and groves. These rarest avian gems may not be removed from their setting, and to those who desire to know them in their unimaginable lustre, it will always be necessary to cross oceans and penetrate into remote wildernesses. We must go rather to regions where the conditions of life are hard, where winters are long and often severe, where Nature is ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... came before," he went on, quickly and miserably. "First a sense of something that was not mere darkness, infinitely distant, but swooping down upon me at an unimaginable speed, broadening more quickly than the sense could follow—and then it was daylight all about me, and I was in the world, seeing, hearing, and—yes, and speaking, speaking, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... was no doubt an extraordinary, an unimaginable one, but it had to be met. When he returned to the box, Prosper had himself in hand, and, sitting a little farther back than before, he watched the second act with ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Colossal oil-tanks, painted red, disfigure the shore. Each tank holds 4,000 tons of oil, 30,000 tons per month being the usual export. Kerosene taints the air, but is considered to be innocuous, and to drive away the curse of mosquitos. The unimaginable and ferocious heat makes every step a terror, during a snail's progress up a wooded road. Sun-hat and white umbrella scarcely mitigate the scorching rays on this perilous promenade, but there is only a day at disposal, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the nastiness of his teacher's being there, and gave himself up to the peculiar intoxication such personages always had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of the railway, or reed shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt heaped up from hell to heaven, of their priests, and kings. But this is wonderful to me—oh, how wonderful!—to see the tender and delicate woman among you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin |
