"Inarticulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ordinary people towards international understanding. And the country counts for something, too. Its natural obstacles compel admiration for an Army which has achieved so much in spite of them. And I am sure that no British gunner, however inarticulate, who has served in Italy, and especially those young fellows who, when war broke out, stood only on the threshold of their manhood, with their minds still wide open for new impressions, has not felt some sort of secret thrill ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... feelings that can be spoken. Language breaks down in the attempt to express our deepest emotions and our truest love. For all the deepest things in man, inarticulate utterance is the most self-revealing. Grief can say more in a sob and a tear than in many weak words; love finds its tongue in the light of an eye and the clasp of a hand. The groanings which rise from the depths of the Christian soul cannot be forced into the narrow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... white with snow. He shook himself gaily like a dog. As he passed his mother, who was sweeping the passage, he lifted her up, giving little inarticulate cries of affection such as one makes to a tiny child. Poor old Louisa struggled in her son's arms: she was wet with the melting snow: and she called him, with a jolly laugh, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... beyond his own boundary. Even sections of the land which denounce the boycott as folly, if not suicide, have taken up the political slogan of the Babu (Bande Mataram—Hail, Mother!) and are demanding, mostly in inarticulate speech, such rights and privileges as they imagine themselves to ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... But he cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... mother came to call him he was lying half uncovered in a wild confusion of scattered bed-clothes; and his arms and body were jerking as a dog's that dreams. She saw a sort of convulsion pinch and pucker his face; then he made some inarticulate sounds—as it were a frantic negation; and then the noise of his own cry awakened him. He looked wildly round and lifted his hands as though he expected to ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some remote period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use of certain sounds as symbols for emotions—emotions that otherwise would have been expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by them—then we have the beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which is still ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the matter? Was his Virginia ill? Even as he spoke her voice broke upon the middle of a note—then stopped. One hand clutched the harp, the other flew to her throat from which came only an inarticulate sound like a struggle for utterance. Terror was in the innocent eyes and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the doorway, and cuddling upon her knee a little baby dressed in coarse, but spotlessly white garments. A whistle sounded on the still air, and through the waving grain strode a stalwart man, an eager, expectant light in his bronzed face. The girl sprang to meet him with an inarticulate cry of joy, and wife and baby were soon clasped ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... recollected his time-mellowed old club in St. James's Street—Boodle's—of which he had been so fond. Then came his affliction. The thought of it all struck him suddenly; and, clenching his hands, he murmured some inarticulate words through his teeth. They sounded strangely like a threat. Next instant, however, he laughed bitterly to himself the dry, harsh laugh of a man into whose very soul ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... inarticulate disappointment. At the first two words he had sprung to his legs, having never encountered ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... were alone in the little smoking room. The former was almost inarticulate. The night porter brought them brandy, and ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than was necessary. That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals. The evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than usual and dilating ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... is the inarticulate expression of the pain we feel on seeing a proselyte escape us just as we were on the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... know him as a creature of unplumbed reserves. The matter in hand was so vital that he could not touch it with firm hands or voice. He spoke at his worst, and he knew it; concluding an incoherent and slightly inarticulate recital of the reasons which ought to keep Scaife in his house at night with a lame "Two heads ought to ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... he haint pitched upon a likely place to settle yet,"—said Mr. Simlins, in a manner equally careless and devoid of reliable information. Squire Deacon gave a little inarticulate reply. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... by Tessibel's hand on his head, he laid down again making whining noises in his throat, inarticulate expressions of his love ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Carlier did not disappear, but remained above on this earth, that, somehow, they fancied had become bigger and very empty. It was not the absolute and dumb solitude of the post that impressed them so much as an inarticulate feeling that something from within them was gone, something that worked for their safety, and had kept the wilderness from interfering with their hearts. The images of home; the memory of people like them, of men that thought and felt as they used to think and feel, receded into distances ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the first time Mr. John Mangam gave evidence of life. He did not speak, but he made an inarticulate noise between a grunt ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... compromised with the manufacturing interests. The Conservatives, still more protectionist in temper, voiced in Parliament little criticism of this policy, and the free trade elements among the farmers were as yet unorganized and inarticulate. Signs of this protectionist revival, which had in it, as in the seventies, an element of nationalism, were many. A four-story tariff was erected. The lowest rates were those granted the United Kingdom; then came the intermediate tariff, for the products of countries giving Canada ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... An inarticulate sound emerged from zu Pfeiffer's mouth. Birnier's eyes caught the sheen of the photograph upon the wall. Escape! Lucille! Almost involuntarily he stretched out a hand and took Lucille's letter from the table. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... rocking his sugar-loaf head, And staring at a bough from morn to sunset, See-sawed his voice in inarticulate noises.'" ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... movement away from him ceased. She gave a little inarticulate murmur of obedience. Simply as a child, she settled her face into the hollow ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... from the people themselves, so, in his moral speculations, he was unwilling to refer any of the phenomena of nature to a final cause. When pushed, indeed, very hard, Bletson was compelled to mutter some inarticulate and unintelligible doctrines concerning an Animus Mundi, or Creative Power in the works of Nature, by which she originally called into existence, and still continues to preserve, her works. To this power, he said, some of the purest metaphysicians rendered a certain degree of homage; nor was he ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... sink. Then that new-born hope was doomed to disappointment—that fancy was all folly! His miseries would be only deeper for the brief taste of happiness. He could not reply; he only muttered some inarticulate words, which Philippa did ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... boy walked toward the inn, the old doctor and Liska had hurried onward to the rectory. They were met at the door by the aged housekeeper, who staggered down the path wringing her hands, unable to give voice to anything but inarticulate expressions of grief and terror. The rest of the household and the farm hands were gathered in a frightened group in the great courtyard of the stately rectory which had once been a convent building. The physician hurried up the stairs into the pastor's apartments. These were ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... individuals. It was a mass—a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very distant surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy with the warm, ammoniacal odour of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... hoodoo. I can't win—" The sentence died in the man's throat, became an inarticulate ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... which the medicine-man was looked upon as an adept at invoking, and whose counsel was ever diligently sought by the superstitious natives. The conjurer crept within his skin-covered lodge, where, crouched upon the earth, he filled the air with inarticulate invocations to the surrounding spirits; while outside, squatted on the ground, the dusky auditors looked and listened with awe. Suddenly the lodge began to rock violently, by the power of the spirits, as the Indians deemed, though Champlain ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... dismay. They are, indeed, the great danger of France, and it is amongst the educated and articulate classes of France that they prevail. If the educated and articulate classes in France were as sound in their way as the inarticulate peasant is in his, France would present a different spectacle. Not "imagination and sensibility" are so much required from the educated classes of France, as simpler, more serious views of life; a knowledge how great a part conduct ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Forrest. I see it now, though. I think he's a prince, and as near worth being in your family as anybody could be. I'm sure we'll be great friends, and tell Lark for me that I am waxing enthusiastic over his good qualities even to the point of being inarticulate. Tell her how happy I am over it, a good deal happier than I've been for the past several days, and I am wishing them both a world of joy. I'm having one myself, and I find it well worth having. I could shake you, Carol, ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... self-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thought grew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite serious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was to sink back upon inarticulate ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... breath her inarticulate benisons, Biddy passed through her mistress's room into her own. She was very tired, for she had been watching without intermission for nearly five hours. She almost dropped on to her bed and lay as ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... this novel, indeed, many potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment. Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3] a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright. In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently suited ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... priestess, her hair stood upright upon her head, her looks grew wild, she foamed at the mouth, a sudden and violent trembling seized her whole body, with all the symptoms of distraction and frenzy.(92) She uttered, at intervals, some words almost inarticulate, which the prophets carefully collected, and arranged with a certain degree of order and connection. After she had been a certain time upon the tripod, she was reconducted to her cell, where she generally continued many days to recover from her fatigue; and, as ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the eye. He had known men who would ride at the devil himself, make it a point of honour to swindle a friend out of a few pounds! Odd place this 'Monte'—sort of a Garden of Eden gone wrong. And all the real, but quite inarticulate love of Nature, which had supported the Colonel through deserts and jungles, on transports at sea, and in mountain camps, awoke in the sweetness of these gardens. His dear mother! He had never forgotten the words with which she had shown him the sunset through the coppice down ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... on at her ease; Pons was too angry to say a word. He writhed on his bed, painfully uttering inarticulate sounds; the blow was killing him. And at this point, as usual, the scolding turned suddenly to tenderness. The nurse dashed at her patient, grasped him by the head, made him lie down by main force, and dragged the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the water's edge and gazed across defiantly at the little boys, who were clustered together at the far end of the pond. They were not her match at sarcasm and so were forced to answer with inarticulate jeers. For a few seconds no more words were exchanged. Then one of the boys attempted ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... Novelist became aware of a Frenchman, who was eagerly listening in the front row of the stalls, suddenly exclaiming to himself, under his breath, "Ah—h!"—having instantly caught the situation! The sound of that one inarticulate monosyllable, as he observed, when relating the circumstance, gave the Reader, as an artist, a far livelier sense of satisfaction than any that could possibly have been imparted by mere acclamations, no matter how ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... with caresses and extravagant promises. She would not uncover her eyes, however, for any one, and her heart-broken wailing was not hushed till Brackett thrust his way through the crowd, growling inarticulate blasphemies at them all, and bore her back to her room. When he emerged twenty minutes later no one asked him about Rosy-Lilly's prayers. As for Rosy-Lilly, her feelings were this time so outraged that she would no longer ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... still as the hour-glass. Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:— So this winged hour is dropped to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... demented wretch to do. With the strength of frenzy he dashed his head and body relentlessly against the unyielding bars of the cage. He fell back crushed and bleeding, foaming at the mouth with a bloody froth, and making inarticulate beast noises in his throat. Then, as the madness again took hold of him, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, he flung himself once more at the bars, and, after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the floor. For hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... ragged shapes shot in and out among the crowd, ducked under horses' feet and cut wild zigzags across the street like flying goblins. The sense of their cry was indistinguishable, but it was the same—the same inarticulate shape of sound on every tongue. First one throat, then another took up the raucous singsong shout, then all together again, as if the pack were in full cry on the scent of something. What was this fresh quarry of the press, Flora wondered, that made it give tongue so hideously? The hunting note ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... and the brute's sitting on me," said Hilary Leigh to himself as he vainly struggled to get free and shout for help. He did utter a few inarticulate noises, but they were smothered in the folds of the thick cloak, and he felt as if he were about to be smothered himself. Getting free he soon found was out of the question, so was making use of the weapons with which he was armed, for his wrists were wrenched round behind his back and ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... and he now daily grew weaker. His eyes, though still fierce and penetrating, were sunk into hollow cavities. His body was emaciated, his hands were thin to transparency, his voice was sometimes inarticulate, and he could hardly walk without support. Still, there seemed no immediate cause for anxiety, and, as will be seen from the following letter [628] (15th October 1890) to Mr. David MacRitchie, he was busy evolving ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... stopped suddenly. For Poirot, uttering a hoarse and inarticulate cry, again annihilated his masterpiece of cards, and putting his hands over his eyes swayed backwards and forwards, ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... room—dead silence ensued—not an eye but was directed upon him, or else, sunk in timidity, settled upon the floor; and young ladies seriously lost the power, for a time, of doing more than murmuring a few confused, half-inarticulate syllables, or half-inarticulate sounds. The solemnity, in fact, of a first presentation, and the utter impossibility of soon recovering a free, unembarrassed movement of conversation, made such scenes really distressing to all who participated ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... distinct psychological changes since the sea spewed them up. When consciousness returned, they gathered into a little terror-stricken, gibbering group. At first they babbled. At first inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives, exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that started with subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion. It was as though ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... huddled, a pitiable group, among the rocks at the base of the hill. Now upon the conviction that the charge of the Dervishes must come first upon them, they had sprung upon their animals with shrill, inarticulate cries of fear, and had galloped off across the plain. A small flanking-party of eight or ten camel-men had worked round while the firing had been going on, and these dashed in among the flying donkey-boys, hacking and hewing with a cold-blooded, deliberate ferocity. One little boy, in a flapping ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pierced deep into the ball of his thumb. In an instant the sleeping demon of insanity awoke. With eyes blazing and frame trembling with fury, he sprang to his feet, seized the knife, and with a hoarse, inarticulate shout, turned upon Bert, who, paralysed with terror, stood rooted to the spot half-way between the idiot and the door. It was a moment of imminent peril, but ere Crazy Colin could reach the boy, his hoarse cry was echoed by a shrill shriek from behind ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes Of her old sanctuary, A deity obscure and legendary, Of whom there now remains, For sages to decipher and priests to garble, Only and for a little while her letters wedged in marble, Which even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases, And the inarticulate snow, Leaving at last of her least signs and traces None whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places. "She will love well," I said, "If love be of that heart inhabiter, The flowers of the dead; The red anemone that with no sound Moves in the wind, and from another ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... came near, and the beat of the horse's hoofs could be heard, a cry almost inarticulate, not to be described, shrill and agonizing in its intensity, broke simultaneously from the anxious women. It was one cry from many hearts, all at the last point of endurance. Thomas Worth understood it. He flung his hat up, and answered with a ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... get the connection, in his mind, over the telephone. The wires seemed to be cut, and he cried out in anxiety and distress. Then he grew more and more feeble, and gasped more and more, and became almost inarticulate, in his efforts. He was distressed. But suddenly he got it. He screamed out very loud, relieved, satisfied, ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... soul is inarticulate. There is that in me which I would pour out. Oh! why is it that the noblest actions of humanity speak not to my soul? All life is inadequate—but not in the sense of the world. I would joyfully be silent, obscure, dead to all the world, if this alone which is in ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... a hoarse, inarticulate cry, and turned sharply round. His hands went up to his head. Then he veered suddenly, and went fiercely ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... guardians were bearing her past the trader's house. She had the little light prison room to herself all that wintry morning, and there, disdainful of bunk or chair, enveloped in her blanket, she squatted disconsolate, greeting all questioners with defiant and fearless shruggings and inarticulate protest. Not a syllable of explanation, not a shred of news could their best endeavors wring from her. Yet her glittering eyes were surely in search of some one, for she looked up eagerly every time the door was ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... He made inarticulate sounds of refusal, and then came and sat down beside her, close beside her, so that he was almost touching her. He felt a fantastic desire to take her in his arms and kiss her, and overcame the madness by an effort. "I don't ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Cagots, both male and female, from other cabins near, hovered round them, tenderly administering to their wants, and preparing such balms to heal their wounds as their simple knowledge afforded. They accompanied these friendly offices with tears and passionate gesticulations, accompanied by half inarticulate exclamations, such as savages, unused to speech, might do in a strange ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... burning on the table with that awful unconsciousness and simplicity of detail which makes the scene of real tragedy so terrible. Beside it lay a belt and leather pouch. Madison Wayne suddenly dashed forward and seized it, with a wild, inarticulate cry; staggered, fell over the chair, rose to his feet, blindly groped his way down the staircase, burst into the road, and, hugging the pouch to his bosom, fled like a madman down ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... named Hazlitt, who knew him in 1798, and has enshrined him in the first of his charming papers, entitled "Winterslow Essays." Hazlitt admits his feebleness of purpose, but speaks of his genius, shining upon his own (then) dumb, inarticulate nature, as the sun "upon the puddles of the road." Coleridge at that time was a Unitarian minister, and had come to preach, instead of the minister for the time being, at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt rose before daylight (it was in January), and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... righteousness, they had learnt from the soi-disant disciples of John Wesley. So Frank Headley had to make up, at starting, the arrears of half-a-century of base neglect; but instead of doing so, he had contrived to awaken against himself that dogged hatred of popery which lies inarticulate and confused, but deep and firm, in the heart of the English people. Poor fellow! if he made a mistake, he suffered for it. There was hardly a sadder soul than poor Frank, as he went listlessly up the village street ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... he began arduously, 'of our first quarrel before we were married, the evening after your aunt Rose died at Llandudno—do you remember? You threw open the window, and I think—I saved your life.' A pause followed. Then a queer, almost inarticulate voice added, 'At least, I am ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... thought, he checked the bursting words that threatened from his lips; allowed his pent-up breath to escape inarticulate; to his normal size and appearance shrank back when it ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... being the tree, every branch and leaf bound, after its sort, to be nutritive and productive for the Army's behoof. That, probably for any Nation in the long-run, and certainly for the Prussian Nation straightway, life or death depends on the Army: Friedrich Wilhelm's head, in an inarticulate manner, was full of this just notion; and all his life was spent in organizing it to a practical fact. The more of potential battle, the more of life is in us: a MAXIMUM of potential battle, therefore; and let it be the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,—pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... cheek upon her head, And tears dropt down it, but the king of men Replied not. Then the maiden spake once more. 'O father! say'st thou nothing? Hear'st thou not Me, whom thou ever hast, until this hour, Listened to fondly, and awakened me To hear my voice amid the voice of birds, When it was inarticulate as theirs, And the down deadened it within the nest?' He moved her gently from him, silent still, And this, and this alone, brought tears from her, Although she saw fate nearer: then with sighs, 'I thought to have laid down my hair before Benignant ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... handsomer and prouder-looking than any man in the room, looking down upon me and offering me his arm! I think I felt as I should if a lifeboat came to take me off a wreck—in a modified degree, I mean. I took his arm with a few rather inarticulate words of thanks, and we strolled through the other rooms, he listening to me with such earnest attentiveness, bending his head at every word, seeming so absorbed in me, so forgetful of the women who gazed at me as if I were a pariah, and the men who smiled on them as they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... totally unprepared for the undammed flood of confidence which had burst from the lips of the habitually taciturn Carrick. The tattered rags of the fellow's humble past were spread before him in all their pathetic squalor. He saw, as though a living thing, the barren, inarticulate childhood. He heard, under compulsion, the tale of youth's indefinable longings, with the meagre story of a love which lacked not its own shabby tragedy. The delicacy of a gentleman, who had intruded where he had no right, had caused him to draw back with an apology; ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... if we are to let hymnology witness, it has received as little as it has asked in times past. To call upon Christ's name, to bless God for goodness and mercy, suffice it; and no form of words enabling it to do this seems to be found too feeble, or affected, or grotesque. For anything more, the inarticulate tones of music are as adequate to devotion as the sublimest formula that Milton or Dante could have shaped. It is only since religion has been so much philosophized, and has in so great degree ceased to be a passion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... out an inarticulate howl of fury and sprang at him, nails raking. Corporal Kavaalen caught her wrist before she could ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... depended for western civilisation hitherto, on written records of one kind or another. When literary memoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes been available, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, though inarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but modern culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilities connected with the investigation of past events, which are independent of fallible evidence transmitted to us by ancient writers. The world at large ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... Its articulate thousands know what its inarticulate millions are doing or thinking. The Government and the educated Indians may think that the Khilafat movement is merely a passing phase. The millions of Mussalmans think otherwise. The flight of the Mussalmans is growing apace. The newspapers contain paragraphs in out of the way corners informing ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... words, but it is well enough understood. So that all peace projects that shall hope to find a hearing must make up their account with it, and must show cause why they should be judged competent to balk any attempted offensive. In an inarticulate or inchoate fashion, perhaps, but none the less with ever-increasing certitude and increasing apprehension, this state of the case is also coming to be an article of popular "knowledge and belief," wherever much or little thought is spent on the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... whole of May this concert of sophistry and calumny went on: now sinking into low, deadly whispers; now swelling into an uproar that rolled like a mighty, muddy river in flood through every Allied capital, ministering to the inarticulate craving of the public for fresh sensations, thrilling its nerves, and feeding its hate and fear of King Constantine. At the end of the month the curtain went up, and M. Venizelos stepped forward to {188} make the declaration ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... from which a much better surgeon than Wayland could not have rescued him, for the bullet had passed clear through his body. He was sensible, however, at least in part, for he knew Tressilian, and made signs that he wished him to stoop over his bed. Tressilian did so, and after some inarticulate murmurs, in which the names of Varney and Lady Leicester were alone distinguishable, Lambourne bade him "make haste, or he would come too late." It was in vain Tressilian urged the patient for further information; he seemed to become in some degree delirious, and when he again made a signal ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sprang at them with an inarticulate roar of welcome. He wrung their hands, pounded their shoulders, laughed, cried, swore, all at once. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... Lydia to the ground, held both of her hands, started to speak, then with a half inarticulate, "Thank you, Lydia, and good-by till to-morrow," he jumped into the ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... forward, for no one could resist Lady Eleanor's smile, and opened his mouth confidently to speak; but he made only a few inarticulate sounds, and then thrust his knuckles into his eyes and ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... in their dim, inarticulate, brilliant, and heroic- worshipping ways misappraising humans, dogs think of their masters, and love their masters, more than the facts warrant. "Master" means to them, as "Mister" Haggin meant to Jerry, a deal more, and a great deal more, than it ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... them fly still further from the subject. The force of her language is not sufficient to bind down and rivet our sympathies to the theme; and the lyrical portions of the drama, in particular, are so inarticulate, that we are compelled to pronounce this composition—partial to it as its authoress is—the least ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... by the bed of the princess, and implored her to say what frightful accident had so disfigured her. Princess Amelia was incapable of reply! Her lips were convulsively pressed together; she could only stammer out a few inarticulate sounds. ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... she left the room in silence, she cast on the old man, as she turned away, a look, which, in spite of the wine he had drunk, and the wine he hoped to drink, he felt freeze his very vitals—a look it was of inexplicable triumph, and inarticulate doom. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that weird light that he thought he was losing his senses—stood before him. It moved forwards with staring eyeballs and white and open lips from which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no living man! With a single desperate, almost superhuman effort Stephen Forsyth bounded aside, leaped from the window, and ran like a madman from the house. Then the apparition trembled, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which the highest literary pathos is poor ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... discovered that something was amiss. Willing as he was to do his full share of the talking, he became aware that except for inarticulate commonplaces he was having to do ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest "Never!" I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... eyes: and then, dragging herself, her bridal robes trailing behind her, to the door, she tried to call after him, to detain the man whom she adored, and who was flying from her; but her voice failed her, and, with one wild, inarticulate cry, she fell forward on her face, with a horrible realization of the immense void which filled the house, this morning gay and joyous, now ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... When they see the Light, and know the Truth, it will be as bad over here as it is in Russia to-day, and, Mrs. Asquith," he added, "why should this be? We have men of ideas, and are young and keen; why must what is fine be inarticulate? You won't believe me, but in this very hotel I heard one man ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... at the portrait). And I did curse thee? At midnight? on my knees? And I believed Thee perjured, thee polluted, thee a murderess? 305 O blind and credulous fool! O guilt of folly! Should not thy inarticulate fondnesses, Thy infant loves—should not thy maiden vows, Have come upon my heart? And this sweet image Tied round my neck with many a chaste endearment 310 And thrilling hands, that made me weep and tremble. Ah, coward dupe! to yield it to the miscreant Who ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... or the lieutenant's English. A few days before she had laughed at what seemed to be a funny story, and had later learned that it was an announcement of the death of the lieutenant's grandmother. To-day she confined her answers to inarticulate murmurs which might be interpreted as either assents or ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... had the immense practical advantage of compressing into two short words the answer to the inarticulate demands of millions of men and women in all countries. At the time this slogan was formulated, I had not yet come to the complete realization of the great truth that had been thus crystallized. It was the response to the overwhelming, heart-breaking appeals ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... going," answered Joel. An inarticulate growl was the only response, and Joel took the stairs at leaps and bounds, and nearly upset Mrs. Cowles in ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Divide the bright light of the brass, and make His helmet as a windy and wintering moon Seen through blown cloud and plume-like drift, when ships Drive, and men strive with all the sea, and oars Break, and the beaks dip under, drinking death; Yet was he then but a span long, and moaned With inarticulate mouth inseparate words, And with blind lips and fingers wrung my breast Hard, and thrust out with foolish hands and feet, Murmuring; but those grey women with bound hair Who fright the gods frighted not him; he laughed Seeing them, and pushed out hands to feel and haul Distaff and thread, intangible; ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... distance and plain to see, upon her high poop came a woman, hooded and cloaked, who stood gazing earnestly towards us. Other eyes had noticed her also, for up from our crowded decks rose a hum, an evil murmur that swelled to a cry fierce, inarticulate, bestial, whiles all eyes glared upon that slender, shapely form; presently amid this ravening ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... of alternate hope and doubt with Bles Alwyn. Strength and ambition and inarticulate love were fighting within him. He felt, in the dark thousands of his kind about him, a mighty calling to deeds. He was becoming conscious of the narrowness and straightness of his black world, and red anger flashed in him ever and again ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... poor little lad, one sees All children and all mothers' knees: All voices inarticulate That cry against the hymns of hate; All homes, by Thames or Rhine or Seine, Where cradles will not ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... went up softly and laid his hand on her shoulder, and felt so the slight convulsive shiver that ran over her. But his inquiries could get nothing but monosyllables in return; hardly that; rather inarticulate utterances of assent or dissent to his questions or proposals. Was ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... disorder of one, or perhaps of both, of the contending armies. The third, a nocturnal tumult, received the whimsical name of the night of barking, from the discordant clamors, which were compared to the inarticulate sounds of the fiercest animals. The morning of the succeeding day [2011] determined the fate of Persia; and a seasonable whirlwind drove a cloud of dust against the faces of the unbelievers. The clangor of arms was reechoed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... voice of thunder—'Sit down, you audacious, snarling, pugnacious ram-cat.' Scarcely had the words fallen from his lips, when roars of laughter rang through the court. The judge himself laughed outright at the happy and humorous description of the combative attorney, who, pale with passion, gasped in inarticulate rage. The name of ram-cat struck to him through ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... to and fro under the violence of his emotion. At last, with a cry of agony, he dashed his hands upon his forehead. The veins were swollen up like thick cords, and his voice was almost inarticulate in its ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... victory to a sentiment; who abolished the hateful "secret chancery," torture, monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg, "desiring rather to raise a monument in the hearts of the people"? There was something inarticulate there, surely—in the would-be musician who must shut himself up for hours to scrawk madly, passionately, on a crazy violin, and whose last request was for his confidant and instrument. "What is history," ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... eating-house that I patronised soon became filled with a crowd of furtively watching customers. I began to sympathise with the feeling of Royal personages trying to do a little private shopping under the unsparing scrutiny of an irrepressible public. And still, with all this inarticulate shadowing, which weighed on my nerves almost worse than open hostility would have done, no attempt was made to interfere with my liberty. Later on I discovered the reason. At the time of the murder on the lonely highway a series of important bloodhound trials had been ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... and averted his eyes peevishly; his companion—lean, flushed cheekbones, a military red moustache below a sharp, salient nose—approached at once Sophia Antonovna, greeting her warmly. His voice was very strong but inarticulate. It sounded like a deep buzzing. The ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... have you been? Tell me at once!" At the theater, when Pa lost his temper, she could reckon on a mighty fillip, and then it was over: Pa was sorry, rather than otherwise. Ma, on the contrary, would nag for hours; muttered inarticulate phrases about "devil," "wild bull," and "taming her;" there was no end to it. Lily champed the bit! A star, indeed! Was that being a star? She thought differently! She had seen others drive up to the theater in their motors, accompanied by gentlemen carrying flowers, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... beside the outer world of sense an inner world of thought-relations. Now constructive imagination is the queen of those mental functions which meet in what we loosely term "thought"; and imagination is ever most active where, on the outer fringe of the mind's routine work, our inarticulate questionings radiate into the unknown. When the genius has his vision, almost invariably, among the ruder peoples, it is accepted by himself and his society as something supernormal and sacred, whether its fruit be an act of leadership or an edict, a practical invention or a work of art, a story ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... of some of the miners, and an inarticulate cry of pity and of anger; but a couple of the strangers emptied their six-shooters over the heads of the crowd, and they broke and scattered, some of them rushing wildly back to their ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady—and serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... genuine female traducer is an awful scourge, especially if she be political. No male can equal her in refined aggressive cunning. She can circulate a filthy libel by writing a virtuous letter, and never a flaw will appear to trip her into responsibility for it. And her sardonic smile is an inarticulate revelation of all she wishes to convey. It is more than a mere oration. It emits the impression ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... not his own strength. Further, I would have you consider that the hireling Sophist only gives back to the world their own opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or anger him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts. Good is what pleases him, evil what he dislikes; truth and beauty are determined only by the taste of the brute. Such is the Sophist's wisdom, and such is the condition of those who make public ...
— The Republic • Plato
... eyes was there something not of the child—something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child's soul, and transmuted themselves into the ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... paralysed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to speak, but only an inarticulate gurgle resulted. All eyed ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... and immortal, repeating itself in ever ascending stages of rapture. The flesh was but a passing instrument of temporal expression, a gross medium through which the spirit could speak only in poor, inarticulate phrases of its magnificent recognition of an eternal bond. ... Oh! I was soon high in the air again, riding my new Pegasus through the loftiest altitudes of lonely exaltation. I was a conqueror while I had the world to myself. But when at last I heard the rustle of a woman's dress ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... it is the other party to the bill!" said Mr. Tatham. "I say, sir; stop I say." But Garbetts, with a face as blank as Macbeth's when Banquo's ghost appears upon him, gasped some inarticulate words, and fled out ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was accustomed to it, and, although she was so tiny, she was of a robust constitution. Some of the townspeople declared that she did all this only from pride, but that is hardly credible. She could hardly speak, and only from time to time uttered an inarticulate grunt. How could ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to bring with it to Reginald a realizing sense of all that the new order of things would mean. He relapsed into thoughtfulness, in the midst of which he half sprang from his seat with an inarticulate exclamation. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... example Jones also fired rapidly on the other side of the tepee. The same inarticulate, silently rustling wrestle succeeded ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... Dick? what is it, Dick?' she kept repeating mechanically, with inarticulate moanings between. She had forgotten her enmity against her brother and spoke to him as in the old days. He, too, was ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east, from the Colorado ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... almost heavenly, awaking in them a nostalgia for the world beyond and for holiness. But the darkness falls, they must go back to their homes; they shake off their reverie; and it often happens that to the very end of life this is their only glimpse of the Divine; a few sighs, a few thrills, a few inarticulate murmurs—this sums up all our efforts to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Toni put her possessions on a train, took her child, whom the deserted father followed with an inarticulate moan, and travelled to Koenigsberg where she rented a small flat in order to await in quiet the reunion with ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... related by Miss Barton, an Australian teacher. Among her pupils was a little girl who had not yet developed articulate speech, and only gave utterance to inarticulate sounds; her parents had had her examined by a doctor to find out if she were normal; the doctor declared the child to be perfectly normal, and considered that though she had not as yet developed speech, she would do so in time. This child became interested in ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... made a small inarticulate sound of dissent. "Sex is a duel. Don't you know"—an infinitesimal hesitation marked the conscious forcing of a barrier: cynically frank as she was on most points, Mrs. Bendish had always left her sister's married life alone:—"that—that's what's wrong with Bernard? Oh! Laura! Simpleton ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... sort of inarticulate exclamation, which seemed to imply that he had no words to express the emotion which the music awakened in his mind, and walked ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... my power to help him," murmured Phillip in inarticulate tones as he took up a newspaper that lay on the small table near. It was a late English paper and bore the address of Mr. Verne ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... at seeing her showed itself first in a few happy tears; and then in soft caresses and inarticulate sounds of love. Once or twice she began, 'It is such a pleasure,' and there she stopped short. But the eloquence of these five words sank deep into Cynthia's heart. She had returned just at the right time, when Molly wanted the gentle fillip of the society ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with difficulty from the first, broke out upon this into an inarticulate noise, and raised one hand with an appearance of real dismay, as if he were about to interfere and contradict. But she checked him at once, looking up at him with a swift glance and an angry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was satisfied with it, although it was the poorest room that had ever sheltered her. She had her baby—that was the grand point; and he rolled upon the beds, and crowed and chattered, in his half inarticulate way, with as much delight as if the shabby chamber had been ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated. For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of civilization, its minister of flaming fire! No one should abate a jot from the high hope excited then. No imagination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... many of these savages together. Their lances seemed as numerous as stalks of grass. Their hoarse voices made a vast, inarticulate sound like the murmur of ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... negress entered the room the woman lifted her head, and with an inarticulate cry threw herself into her servant's arms; there was a moment of wild sobbing, and then, as I was about to set a guard at the door and withdraw, the negress uttered a shrill cry, caught the slender form in her stout arms and laid her upon the bed, and I saw ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... of the wardrobe swinging and the sacred big drawer at the bottom of that division only half shut, and Mrs. Maldon in a peignoir lying near it on the floor, making queer inhuman noises, not moans, but a kind of anxious, inarticulate entreaty, and shaking her head constantly to the left—never to the right. Mrs. Maldon had recognized Rachel, and had seemed to implore with agonized intensity her powerful assistance in some nameless and hopeless tragic dilemma. The sight—especially ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... but little of any language except his mother-tongue, his accent undeniably betraying him whenever he did attempt to express himself, thought silence would be his best course, so shaking his head he pointed to his tongue and gave forth some inarticulate sounds, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... inarticulate joy burst from Dan, and then: "You've found it! You have it!" and the master ran swiftly after the dog. He followed the latter only for a short distance down the slope and then stood still and whistled. He had to repeat the call before the ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... melancholy-looking man with a long jaw and eyes so deep-set that the observer took them on faith, and a nose which alone would have been sufficient to identify him. Beyond the first request to "step up," he vouchsafed no word and, save for an inarticulate gurgle to his horse, seemed lost in an ageless calm. His gaze was fixed upon some indefinite portion of the horse's back and he drove leaning forward in an attitude of complete bodily and mental relaxation. If ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... some inarticulate disavowals. She felt it presumption to let her name be coupled with Miss Martindale's, and there was a sense of something dangerous and wrong in ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hesitation were increased. 'I am sorry, madam,' said I, 'if I have been indiscreet.' She answered, in a feeble and inarticulate manner, 'he stands in the same relationship to the ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... An inarticulate murmur of devotion stirred the crowd as he stood for a moment quite silent before them, too overcome by emotion to trust himself to speech. When he spoke, his voice was calm, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... but out of poor, sceptical encyclopedias. This was the length the man carried it. Meritorious to get so far. His compact, prompt, every way articulate character, is in itself perhaps small compared with our great chaotic inarticulate Cromwell's. Instead of 'dumb prophet struggling to speak,' we have a portentious mixture of the Quack! Hume's notion of the Fanatic-Hypocrite, with such truth as it has, will apply much better to Napoleon than it did to Cromwell, to Mahomet or the like, where indeed, taken strictly, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various |
