"Enthralling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the one who spoke last-Freeme Cole, a man who was the fighting wonder of Howard's boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered, faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man. Yet there was something epic in the old man's stories, something enthralling in the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... motive, bluntly disclosed in the wager scene, seems coarse, unnatural, and offensive. Its plot, really simple, moves heavily and perplexes attention. It is a piece that lacks pervasive concentration and enthralling point. It might be defined as Othello with a difference—the difference being in favour of Othello. Jealousy is the pivot of both: but in Othello jealousy is treated with profound and searching truth, with terrible intensity ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... novelty of character, or alluring eloquence of style, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeeding generations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in the whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver of enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulator of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded and well-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that he exhibited no truths of genuine ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... that ambition backed by wealth and power can give—that is, the faithful love of a beautiful woman, loved truly in return. This boy was loved by one who was capable with her witching loveliness of satisfying every desire, enthralling the imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches—as might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling fountain—the very ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... with that of Farmer Jones's Bull, for instance, or the visit of a real live Earl? Certainly not the former, while as for the latter it was at best a half-way grip between the two; perhaps farther, if anything, from the supreme Bull, the great enthralling interest that was to be vested in her letter to Dave, to be written at the next favourable climax of strength, nourished by repose. Some time in the morning—to-day she was far too tired to think ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... was too gross a departure from delicacy of thought and phrase, and Miss Le Pettit, the prick stirring, perchance, signified as much by the cold manner in which she brought back the conversation to the more correct and really more enthralling ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... Porter not to speak of his betting transactions. He had denied taking the money—that was but natural; he had been forced to admit replacing it—that was conclusive. Indeed it seemed a waste of time to investigate further; it was utterly impossible to doubt his guilt. Mesh by mesh, like an enthralling net, all the different threads of convicting circumstances were drawn ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... re-read the solemn phrase: So long as ye both shall live, she was seized with panic. To be married for ten, twenty, forty years, perhaps, with never the hand of happy chance—the wonderful, enthralling "might be" of life—to help her to endure it! With a little stifled cry she sprang up and began pacing the room restlessly—up and down, up and down, her slim hands clenching ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... honor to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted. Wholly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling men's minds with prejudices, forcing their judgment, or employing any of the weapons of quasi-religious sedition; indeed, such seditions only spring up, when law enters the domain of speculative thought, and opinions are put on trial and condemned on the same footing as crimes, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... to labor for democracy and socialism with his pen. He has commenced the publication in one of the journals of a new romance, called La bonne Aventure. From a few chapters, it is evident that it will possess the enthralling interest of most of his works, and will display his varied and vast talent in the portraiture of character and the invention of incident. He is as intent as ever Mr. Cooper was, upon making the novel a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the platform,—"I do hope he is as interesting as he looks; appearances are deceitful sometimes." But no one of that audience found Pierre Baudouin's appearance deceitful. He was more than interesting,—he was enthralling as he went on with his almost loving consideration of his subject, setting before his hearers, in a melodious voice and very good English, some of the results of his great knowledge and experience. You could have heard a pin drop, as the saying goes, ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... the bungalow, their home, the scene of such happy hours, so many dreams and hopes, such heart-enthralling labors, hundreds ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Paul is absolutely the same, in Himself, for us. We will, in His name, place ourselves in the way of His working, that He may so shew us His fair countenance that we may not be able not to live, quite really, for Him as the enthralling Interest ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... was too trivial to interest him), on the disappearance of Giannoli from her house and her suppositions as to his fate—a theme of which she never wearied. I managed to slip by without attracting her attention, so absorbed was she with the enthralling mystery, only to find myself in for another almost worse danger. For there at the corner of P. Street and the Euston Road stood the Bleeding Lamb, surrounded by a hooting and uproarious crowd. He had, it appeared, interrupted the Gospel-preaching ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... light on the cause of these spells, we must turn to a comment made by the invaluable Mr. Martin some time afterward. Referring to the lady to whose voice he was now listening in silence (which shows how great the enthralling of her voice was), he said: "When you saw her, or heard her, or managed to be around, any, where she was, why, if you couldn't git up no hope of marryin' her, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... foreboded ill, as a serious wrangle between two of the preceding speakers threatened to end in a challenge to a duel, still a fashionable diversion. But Lincoln intervened with a speech so enthralling that the hearers forgot the dispute and heard him out with rapture. He had found the proper way to manage his voice, never musical, by controlling the nasal twang into a monotonous but audible sharpness, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... hazelnuts or the slender peanuts were easy to nip with the tongs, but the big English walnuts, or queer-shaped Madeira nuts were very difficult. Great delicacy of touch was necessary, and the children found the new game enthralling. ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... exaltation). How lovely that would be! Oh, you are so unspeakably good to me! It is too enthralling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... therefore, I should not tell you this story at all. I should say to myself, "No! It is a good story, it is a moral story, it is a strange, weird, enthralling sort of a story; and the public, I know, would like to hear it; and I should like to tell it to them; but it is all about myself—about what I said, and what I saw, and what I did, and I cannot do it. My retiring, anti-egotistical nature ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... give liberally to charity, but they give impersonally, not generously; they are in reality utterly selfish, engrossed in the enthralling game of becoming successful or more successful men, sacrificing their homes, their families and their health—for what? To get on; to better their position; to push in among those others who, simply because they have outstripped the rest in the matter of filling their ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... watched and listened, had the genius of Brockhurst appeared more potent or more enthralling. For a space she rested in it, asking nothing beyond that which sight and hearing could give. It was very good to breathe the scented air and be lulled by the inarticulate music of nature. It was good to cease from self and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... oral publication applies to the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the foundation of Christianity. By the lips of a single bard, or of a series of bards, otherwise of public declaimers or reciters, the world was first familiarised with the many enthralling tales strung together in those peerless masterpieces. Again, at a period of very nearly five hundred years (484) before the epoch of the Redemption, the Father of History came to lay the foundation, as it were, of the whole fabric ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... voice, scarcely recognizable it was so changed—all a mere phantasy born of a dream—all, what is so much in this life of ours, a mockery, a mistake, a vague hope without roots, a shadowy heaven that had no place in fact, the cold residuum of enthralling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... hard. Gilfoyle was assailed by an epilepsy of inspirations. In place of "Kalteyer's Peerless Gum," he proposed the enthralling title, "Breathasweeta." Others had mixed pepsin in their edible rubber goods of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... in this enthralling story, and slept on each other's nice clean shoulders a little, just before the dawn. And such a dawn! Such infinite softness of air, such dew-drenched verdure! It is a backward spring, they say, but to me the woods are ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Tyburnia, Bayswater, Kensington, Chelsea, etc., has the impress and character of the time of its greatest popularity and fashion and of the class by which it was principally inhabited. It has always been the city's fate to have its past overgrown and stifled by the enthralling energy and life of the present. It is as a hive that has never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is more or less the fate of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... men and women—out of whom, at a mere touch, virtue seems to go: converse with them is stimulating; contact enthralling. And yet, ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... stood watching him. Had he turned quickly he might have seen in her eyes something of the expression for which he had looked so often. But reading the riddle of the robberies was too enthralling a subject, and so he missed his opportunity, for when she crossed to the hand-rail against which he was sitting, every suggestion of the expression had gone ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... proportion of women, though latent under ordinary circumstances, is easily aroused by stimulation, and in every popular revolt the wildest excesses are the acts of women. (3) In this small but important group we find women of rare and beautiful character who, hypnotized by the enthralling influence of an idea, and often having no great intellectual power of their own, are even unconscious of the vulgarity that accompanies them, and gladly sacrifice themselves to a cause that seems to be sacred; these are the saints and martyrs of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... god's enthralling, Back with the reeds of the stream; Deaf to the Vision calling, And dead to ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... not unwittingly giving a staggering blow to the art of acting in so doing—that the reason Rosalind is not more often embodied "in a competent and enthralling manner is that her enchanting quality is something that cannot be assumed—it must be possessed; it must exist in the fibre of the individual, and its expression will then be spontaneous. Art can accomplish much, but it cannot supply ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... sweet, methinks the voice of waters falling From cliffs that echo back their murmurous song; Less sweet the summer sound of breezes calling Through pine-tree tops sonorous all day long; Than are thy rhymes, the soul of grief enthralling, Thy rhymes o'er field and forest borne along: If she but hear them, at thy feet she'll fawn.— Lo, Thyrsis, hurrying ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... "It's a regular romance—quite in your line, Mr. Grant, of course, but none the less enthralling because, as you so happily phrased Miss Martin's lesson in astronomy, ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... which seems its inevitable drawback," because "the mind of the reader always bent to pick up clews receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art." They hoped to find a new way of handling the old tale of mystery, so that they might get the profit without paying the price. But already in his criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge' had Poe showed why disappointment ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... sun set we revelled in the glories visible from our balcony, and thoroughly enjoyed the charms of the Northern night. Midnight suns must be seen to be understood, the gorgeous lights are enthralling. Our souls were steeped ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie |
