"Isolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... woods the Kid stopped, peering in among the shadows with mingled curiosity and awe. The bright patches of sunlight on the brown forest floor and on the scattered underbrush allured him. Presently, standing out in conspicuous isolation, a great crimson toadstool caught his eye. He wanted the beautiful thing intensely, to play with. But he was afraid. Leaning his face against the old fence, he gazed through desirously. But the silence made him more and more afraid. If only the squirrel would come back and play ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... How does the public at large, how does "the man in the street," look upon the deaf? Are the deaf viewed merely as so many people deprived of the sense of hearing, in whom also the power of speech is often wanting? Or is there superimposed upon this a feeling, owing perhaps to the supposed isolation of the deaf, that they are in other ways a peculiar class ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... uninteresting, nor had she lost any of her zeal for the unfortunate race she had striven to uplift; but her heart was sick of the terrible isolation that her position forced upon her. She had never once thought of making companions, in the ordinary sense, of those for whom she labored. They had been so entirely foreign to her early life that, while she labored ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the light that entered this vast sylvan hall came from the sides; nothing permeated from above; nothing radiated from below; the height of the crest on which the wood was placed gave it this lateral illumination, but gave it also the profound isolation of some temple raised by long-forgotten hands. In spite of the height of these clear shafts, they seemed dwarfed by the expanse of the wood, and in the farthest perspective the base of ferns and the capital of foliage ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... on the west;—dike of eighty miles long, and in some eastern parts of almost eighty broad; so elaborate is Daun's detaching quality, in cases of moment. "The King's broken Army on one side of us," calculates Daun; "Prince Henri's on the other; incommunicative they; reduced to isolation, powerless either or both of them against such odds. They shall wait there, please Heaven, till Saxony be quite finished. Zweibruck, and our Detachments and Maguires, let them finish Saxony, while Soltikof keeps the King busy. Saxony finished, how will either ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... holiday freedom with which Lydgate hovered about the flower of Middlemarch, could not continue indefinitely. It was not more possible to find social isolation in that town than elsewhere, and two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from "the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on." Whatever Miss Vincy did must be remarked, and she was perhaps the more conspicuous ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... generally conform to the usages which the current feeling of our peers has taught us to respect; their will having so mastered our original nature, that, do what we may, we can never again separate ourselves and dwell in the isolation of our own single personality. And even though we succeeded in this, and made a clean sweep of every mental influence which had ever been brought to bear upon us, and though at the same time we were alone in some desert where there was neither beast ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... quarters, not alone on the coast, but along the great river arteries and in the remoter districts, carrying new ideas and introducing new associations among a primitive people which had pursued for centuries a national policy of isolation. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which have retarded progress in Australia and kept the aboriginal population at the lowest level of savagery appear to be mainly two; namely, first, the geographical isolation and comparatively small area of the continent, and, second, the barren and indeed desert nature of a great part of its surface; for the combined effect of these causes has been, by excluding foreign competitors and seriously restricting the number of competitors at home, to abate ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... being. She forced herself to remember that the sap of life would flow again, that love would come back to her when the hand of death released her from its cruel grip; as yet she could only be sensible of her isolation, her forlorn oneness. It needs a long time before the heart can companion only with memories. About its own centre it wraps such warm folds of kindred life. Tear these away, how the poor ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... limitless fields of space. As Katherine, earlier in the evening, had taken up the momentarily rejected burden of her motherhood, so Julius now, with a movement of supreme self-surrender, took up the momentarily rejected burden of the isolation of the religious life. Self-wounded by self-love, he had sought comfort in the creature rather than the creator. And the creature turned and rebuked him. It was just. Now Julius gave himself back, bowed himself again under the dominion ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... seems even more wonderful—the most gigantic obelisks, without the aid of any other kind of mechanism or of any more occult power. The same hands could, as Diodorus suggests, remove all trace of the debris of construction and leave the pyramids and obelisks standing in weird isolation, as if sprung into ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... globe, owing principally to our isolation, is the old Gipsy character losing itself among the street-gutter rabble as in our own; notwithstanding this mixture of blood and races, the diabolical Indian elements are easily recognisable in their wigwams. Then, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the open places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Crome, by his isolation at Norwich, escaped this tendency. The Norwich painters, however, were, to a certain degree, an accident. In the London of their time, the almost total cessation of intercourse with continental Europe, due to the war with France, had not prevented the academical standard ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... intimation of the future farther extension of His salvation. That which He Himself did for this extension, in those particular cases where the faith of non-Israelites obtruded itself upon Him, must, in its isolation, be viewed as an embodiment of that intimation,—as a prophecy by deeds. He says in Matt. xv. 24: "I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel;" but if, nevertheless. He purposely makes His abode in the territory of Tyre and Sidon; if there He hears the prayer of the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... in the centre of the town. It was an immense place, lofty and gilt, upholstered in red plush, full of electric lights and so thoroughly warmed that even the marble tables felt tepid to the touch. The waiter who brought me my cup of coffee bore, by comparison with my utter isolation, the dear aspect of an intimate friend. There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write slowly a letter addressed to Glasgow, of which the gist would be: There is no cargo, and no prospect of any coming ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... even partially justified. He was restrained only by the fear of perpetual blindness, which came over him in a sort of cold wave at each reaction. Time, too, added to his fear of discovery; but he could not but think that his self-sought isolation must be a challenge to the curiosity of each and all who knew of it. And with all these disturbing causes came the main one, which never lessened but always grew: that whatever might happen Stephen would be further from him than ever. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... solution of the Negro problem for this country, and still it hangs over us the darkest cloud that obscures the bright vision of peace and good will to all men. And as the biologists say, "He stands out in his dark isolation a perpetual challenge to the dogma of the unity of the races." We understand him as a slave. In that capacity he filled every expectation that could be required of him, always reflecting the character of his master. If the master was very religious, so was he. If the master was a drunkard ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... loved, almost lost the sense of the unreality of past and present that made her feel quite detached and apart from the life she was leading, from the events in which she was taking part, from the persons most intimately associated with her. Now that sense of isolation, of the mere spectator or the traveler gazing from the windows of the hurrying train—that sense returned. But she fought against the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... out the hymn; saw Mr. Strachey on his chair in the middle of the floor, perpetually nimming with his left leg. And, as she pictured the familiar scene to herself, she shivered with a sudden sense of isolation: behind each well-known ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... isolation as world spectator, the modern philosopher was bound to reach two completely opposite views regarding the objective value of human thought. One of these was given expression in Descartes' famous words: ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves. But she could not rid herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson to teach her. Twice they went in to Prentice. With these exceptions, she saw no one but her husband ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... the Channel against the invader. Pitt's gold had called into existence a third coalition (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz (December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed to the map of Europe with the words ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service: these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation; and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a little bit unkindly. Anything would ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting. Considered merely as works of art, these products of the Greek imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. They suggest inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and independence, of something rounded and finished in itself. The secret of those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek Temple, which leaves nothing to ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... prattle: this creature who was without moral judgment that could condemn him, whose little loving ignorant soul made a world apart, where he might feel in freedom from suspicions and exacting demands, had a new attraction for him now. She seemed a refuge from the threatened isolation that would come with disgrace. He glanced cautiously round, to assure himself that Monna Ghita was not near, and then, slipping quietly to her side, kneeled on one knee, and said, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... time and moods and varying scenes for its normal development, so that it is difficult to treat it properly within the limits of the short story; and then only when some particular phase or scene admits of isolation. Then, too, many short stories are merely accounts of strange adventures, wonderful discoveries or inventions, and queer occurrences of all sorts—themes which amuse us from their mere oddity; or they are verbal photographs of life, ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... colonies with a nebulous view to economy and occupation, to perish of the readjustment. The case of such persons, when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local understanding that they have made a mistake. They may be entitled to respect, but nothing can save them from the isolation of their difference and their misapprehension. It was like that with the house. The house was admired—without enthusiasm—but it was not copied. It was felt to be outside the general need, misjudged, adventitious; and it wore its superiority ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... lost the election. To them Lincoln was not only a democrat who believed in the equality of men before the law; he was also a "black Republican," the head of a sectional party whose platform bespoke sectional interests and the isolation ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... whole life as he was for his escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had passed on the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great wedge-tailed eagle, of the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... turbulence of Europe during the Teutonic migrations was so great and so long continued, that on a superficial view one might be excused for regarding the good work of Rome as largely undone. And in the feudal isolation of effort and apparent incapacity for combined action which characterized the different parts of Europe after the downfall of the Carolingian empire, it might well have seemed that political society had reverted towards a primitive type of structure. In truth, however, ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... in with full vigor the controversy over the new territory which Calhoun had foreseen. Calhoun had been left in a sort of isolation by his defection from the administration upon the war, but he did not break with President Polk; for the reason, says Von Holst, that he wanted to save his influence to oppose the tendency to a war with England. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... even—the recollection of his desolate home, still, silent, and cold, whatever the weather, whatever fire might be lighted in chimney or furnace—saddened him as if he now understood his bachelor's isolation for ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... an hour merely; or even for a day. A long absence was signified by the manner in which he pronounced the word "Adieu." All these circumstances recurred to his mind, with feelings of deep affection for Athos, with that horror of isolation and solitude which invariably besets the minds of those who love; and all these combined rendered poor Grimaud very melancholy, and particularly uneasy. Without being able to account to himself for what he did ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... traditional Jewish costume made way in certain sections of Jewry for the European form of dress, it was not in obedience to police measures, but in spite of them. Compulsory assimilation was as little successful now as had been compulsory isolation in the Middle Ages. The medieval rulers had imposed upon the Jews a distinct form of garment and a "yellow badge" to keep them apart from the Christians. Nicholas I. employed forcible means to make the Jews by their style ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... not always a fairyland, I am told. Once it was much like other lands, except it was shut in by a dreadful desert of sandy wastes that lay all around it, thus preventing its people from all contact with the rest of the world. Seeing this isolation, the fairy band of Queen Lurline, passing over Oz while on a journey, enchanted the country and so made it a Fairyland. And Queen Lurline left one of her fairies to rule this enchanted Land of Oz, and then passed on and forgot ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... detested cousin. They wed, and she becomes the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. An accident, slight perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours; but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is described in lines of a beauty that ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... agent, had almost given up hope of bringing off a deal. In the end it was Mrs. Hepworth who, taking the matter into her own hands, fixed upon the house in Laleham Gardens. Young Hepworth found fault with it on the ground of its isolation. He himself was often away for days at a time, travelling on business, and was afraid she would be nervous. He had been very persistent on this point; but in whispered conversations she had persuaded him out of his objection. It was one of those pretty, fussy ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... glory of her youth and her loveliness, with that wilful curl round her chiselled lips and the delicate brows drawn together in a frown of child-like obstinacy. How beautiful she was and how strangely pathetic had been her isolation in the midst of so ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a musket set on the floor stock downward, but primed for ready use. Adjoining this room was the kitchen with its fireplace for cooking, its array of pots and dishes, its cupboards, shelves, and other furnishings. All of these latter the habitant and his sons made for themselves. The economic isolation of the parish made its people versatile after their own crude fashion. The habitant was a handy man, getting pretty good results from the use of rough material and tools. Even at the present day his descendants retain much of this facility. At the opposite end of the house was a bedroom. Upstairs ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... come some sense of unity, the thought of combination for good, of unaffectedness about what we believe to be true and pure, of facing the world together and not toying with it in isolation. All this should be held ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I see I have made another of the mistakes which have blasted my existence. I must have time to think out what I shall do. One thing is very evident—you have rebelled against my rule, Aleck, and are struggling to get away to think and act, sir, for yourself. I have done my best for you, but in my isolation I have doubtless been blind and narrow. It is the natural result of our solitary life here—the young spirit seeking ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... may be said generally that it is favoured by similarity between the sensations;[20] by a comparative feebleness of one of the feelings; by the fact of habitual concomitance, the two sensations occurring rarely, if ever, in isolation; and by the presence of a mental disposition to view them as answering to one external object. These considerations help us to explain the coalescence of the retinal impressions and its limits, the fusion of partial tones, and ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... was its tendency to encourage isolation. For many years the rule was enforced at Fulneck that none but Moravians should be allowed to live in that sacred spot; and the laws were so strict that the wonder is that Britons submitted at all. For example, there was actually a rule that no member should spend a night outside the settlement ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... of language and the strata of the earth, lays down this absolute dogma: "No language can, by any possibility, be inflectional without having passed through the agglutinative and isolating stratum. No language can be agglutinative without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation."—'On the Stratification of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Her mother married Bush Milton, the carriage painter of Winesburg, and she herself became a member of the Winesburg Methodist Church. Alice joined the church because she had become frightened by the loneliness of her position in life. Her mother's second marriage had emphasized her isolation. "I am becoming old and queer. If Ned comes he will not want me. In the city where he is living men are perpetually young. There is so much going on that they do not have time to grow old," she told herself with a grim little smile, and went ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... country. England defended her own coasts and colonies by stationing her fleets off the French ports, to fight the French fleet if it came out. The United States in the Civil War stationed her fleets off the Southern ports, not because she feared for her own, but to break down the Confederacy by isolation from the rest of the world, and ultimately by attacking the ports. The methods were the same; but the purpose in one case was defensive, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... again. So the two decided to live together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply. Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was always the devoted lover as well as the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... many a leaden sarcasm at those who despise his credulity. He speaks of those sages as men whose brain is a glass table, incapable of receiving the electric spark, and who will not believe, because, in their mental isolation, they are ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Nietzsche's. "Canst thou give thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judge, and avenger of thy law? Fearful is it to be alone with the judge and the avenger of thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the icy breath of isolation." ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... of these was to Mr. Amy, a highly respected merchant of Boston, who had previously informed me by letter of the best route to the States, and I immediately despatched a note to him, but he was absent at his country-house, and I was left to analyse the feeling of isolation inseparable from being alone in a crowd. Having received the key of my room, I took my supper in an immense hall, calculated for dining 400 persons. I next went into the ladies' parlour, and felt rather out of place among ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... and State toleration of prostitution. At the same time, the repression of all street-soliciting was advocated, as well as control of restaurants, hotels or other places with reference to their use for promoting prostitution. The Committee further favored the detention and, where necessary, the isolation of all persons known to be, or suspected of being infected, and advocated the adoption of the report system in regard to early preventive treatment. The importance of early marriage was urged. Other measures recommended were the custodial ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... its savage rocks and moorlands, its sheepwalk solitudes, its isolation and distance from all the advantages of civil and intellectual life, to London and the living solitude of its unnumberable inhabitants, its activities, polity, and world-wide ramifications of commerce, learning, science, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... very exciting, is it not?" She glanced over her shoulder up the ill-lighted street. Rows of shade trees cast long inky blots between the corner illuminations; the houses on either side sat well back in their yards, increasing the sense of isolation. "It is quite a ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... years later Fulvius Flaccus commenced operations amongst the Gauls and Ligurians beyond the Alps,[554] which were to find their completion seventy-five years later in the conquests of Caesar. But neither of these enterprises can be intelligently considered in isolation; their significance lies in the necessity of their renewal, and even the proximate results to which they led would carry us far beyond the limits of the period which we are considering. The events completely enclosed within these limits are of subordinate importance. They are a war in Sardinia ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... The sense of isolation, of exclusion from it all, was very painful; and Winifred did not know that this very knowledge of exclusion, and its grief, were harbingers of eternally better things. She stood with the others as they sang the closing hymn, and her own silence was unobserved, as she did not always join ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... that he did not leave his cell this week, being himself in penitence; and with this he took Gerard's head delicately in both hands, and kissed him on the brow, and almost before the cell door had closed on him, was back to his pious offices. Gerard went away chilled to the heart by the isolation of the monastic life, and saddened too. "Alas!" he thought, "here is a kind face I must never look to see again on earth; a kind voice gone from mine ear and my heart for ever. There is nothing but meeting and parting in this sorrowful world. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... "O God-like isolation which art mine, I can but count thee perfect gain, What time I watch the darkening droves of swine That range ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... affected Dominic Iglesias deeply, begetting in him an almost hopeless sense of isolation. The vapid talk at dinner, poor little Mrs. Porcher's misplaced advances—the fact of which it appeared to him equally idle to deny and fatuous to admit—the dreary scene with his unhappy fellow-lodger, the good deed done which ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... woman, liberty to the slave, compassion for the miserable, self-respect, to the man of toil, exultation to the martyr, patience to the poor, and glorious hopes to all; so that in rudeness, in poverty, in discomfort, in slavery, in isolation, in obloquy, peace and happiness were born, and a new race, with noble elements of character, arose in the majesty of renovated strength to achieve still grander victories, and confer higher blessings ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the last day or two had been nightmares of loneliness. He threw caution to the winds and walked hour after hour, only to find that the street crowds, people who had left a home or were going to one, depressed him and emphasized his isolation. He had deliberately put away from him the anchor that had been Elizabeth and had followed a treacherous memory, and now he was adrift. He told himself that he did not want much. Only peace, work and a place. But he had ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wooden ellipse with a roof but no windows; such it appeared and such it proved to be. A mystery to Sweetwater's eyes, and like all mysteries, interesting. For what purpose had it been built and why this isolation? It was too flimsy for a reservoir and too expensive for the wild freak ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... consanguinity; and relations must do all they can to avoid meeting. To sit in the same room, to meet on the same road, is undesirable. To converse is but just allowable, and then all who choose must hear what is said. So thorough, however, has been the isolation in many cases, that persons of different sexes have lived as near neighbours for many years without having conversed with each other; and such communication as there has been, has taken place through the medium of a third person. No gift will ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... isolation in a social sense Anstice did not believe; but that she must feel very lonely at times, find the days very long and empty, he felt pretty well assured. She was not an accomplished woman in the usual sense of the word. He never found her playing the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... passed away. The evening was typical of others which followed it at irregular intervals through the winter. And during the intenser months of the season frequent falls of snow lengthened, even more than other difficulties had done, the periods of isolation between the pair. Swithin adhered with all the more strictness to the letter of his promise not to intrude into the house, from his sense of her powerlessness to compel him to keep out should he choose to rebel. A student of the greatest forces in nature, he had, like many others of his ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... long isolation Nott's resources had been seriously depleted, and he had ordered up from Scinde a brigade, escorting much needed treasure, ammunition, and medicines. Brigadier England was entrusted with the command of this force, whose assemblage at Quetta ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... house of rest that they had chosen. It was a noble object-lesson of the spiritual life; and though the symbols used to express it may have become valueless, the truth that they taught remains yet, that if a man or woman seeks the highest good, there must be for such an isolation of the soul from the ordinary course of life and thought in the world around us; we must afford ourselves facilities for ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... the name had escaped him. "Are you in earnest? Can you mean it? I wish I could believe that you did not. But there is a deadly reality about you now which makes me fear that you will keep your word. That you should spend your life in this isolation, that you—you—" ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... blandness and urbanity of a great lady. The instincts of vanity were flattered by the pride that the poor Abbe took in his pupil, the pride of an author who sees himself in his work, and for her misfortune she met no one with whom she could measure herself. Isolation is one of the greatest drawbacks of a country life. We lose the habit of putting ourselves to any inconvenience for the sake of others when there is no one for whom to make the trifling sacrifices of personal effort ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... position in which she was to have been placed; and though she had abandoned the situation without a doubt as soon as she had learned her mistake as to the man's character, still she felt the fall, and inwardly grieved over it. She had not known herself at first,—how grievous would be her isolation when she found herself alone. Such was the case with her now, so that she fretted and made herself ill. By degrees she confined herself more and more to the house, till her mother seeing it, interfered. She became sick, captious, and querulous. ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... not, however, seem to have affected the position of the Irish Church at home, nor yet to have diminished the number of its foreign converts. Safe in its isolation, it continued to go on in its own way with little regard to the rest of Christendom, although in respect to the points chiefly in dispute it after a while submitted to the Roman decision. Armagh was the principal spiritual centre, but there were other places, now tiny villages, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... quarantining, is a most important method of combating contagious diseases. By removing the sick from the well many outbreaks of disease are quickly checked. Isolation of individual patients, and sometimes of infected neighborhoods, is absolutely necessary; and while this works a hardship to the few, it is frequently the only safeguard of the many. The community, on the other hand, should make ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... pelts had accumulated and supplies had run low, they visited the cabin of an obscure trader. Otherwise they were cut off from the world and rejoiced in their isolation. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... The isolation in which they lived drew them naturally together. The 'circle,' something between an informal club and a debating society, became the form in which these cravings of mind or heart could be satisfied. These people met and talked; that was all ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... regions in this country have suffered the disadvantages of isolation, the people have dwelt far distant from one another and from markets, they have had little to stimulate them intellectually or socially. Strong and peculiar individuals and families were often developed ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... become important pleasures. You cannot grapple with uncials, cursives, and the like in a domestic environment. The preparation of facsimiles, transcripts, and palaeographical observations, reports of excavations and catalogues, demands isolation and complete immunity from the trivialities of ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... thing they said. Numerous motives conspire to make the priest concoct fictions and exert his power to gain credence for them. He must have an alluringly colored elysium to reward his obedient disciples. When his teachings are rejected and his authority mocked, his class isolation and incensed pride find a natural satisfaction in threatening the reprobate aliens that a rain of fire will one day wash them down the smoking gulfs of sulphur. The Maronites, a sect of Catholic Christians in Syria, purchase ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... concealed her anger, if she felt any, caused the matter to be completely forgotten as soon as Zoroaster left Shushan, and events had, since then, succeeded each other too rapidly to give the courtiers leisure for gossiping about old scandals. The isolation in which Gomata had lived during the seven months while he maintained the popular impression that he was not Gomata-Smerdis, but Smerdis the brother of Cambyses, had broken up the court; and the strong, manly character of Darius had checked the license of the nobles suddenly, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... the thing he meant to say was already in his mind. But this silence, this isolation, the withdrawal from that contagious crowd, this audience of gaping, glaring machines, had not been in his anticipation. All his supports seemed withdrawn together; he seemed to have dropped into this suddenly, suddenly to have discovered himself. In a moment he was changed. He found that he now ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... present wife, who I feel convinced is not a party to his base transactions, and who believes him an injured saint. Perhaps, too, he hoped to gain something against me from these gossips, or knowing that I was unaccustomed to poverty and isolation, believed that I might break through these self-imposed barriers and resort to crime. But he should know me better. It is no relief from misery to plunge into infamy, but only hurls the wretched victim into darker woes. I know that ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the corsair had been engaged when he received his mortal wound had for its object the complete isolation of St. Elmo from Il Borgo; his dispositions were completed and his orders given to the engineer just ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... starry vault and the wide expanse of the heavens belong to a picture of the universe, in which the magnitude of masses, the number of congregated suns and faintly glimmering nebulae, although they excite our wonder and astonishment, manifest themselves to us in apparent isolation, and as utterly devoid of all evidence of their being the scenes of organic life. Thus, even in the earliest physical views of mankind, heaven and earth have been separated and opposed to one another as an upper and lower portion of space. If, then, a picture of nature were to correspond ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at the head of the glen towered ever nearer and nearer, until it seemed as if it must be impossible to drive a hundred yards farther. Seen in the broad light of a summer afternoon it was wonderfully beautiful; but it was a wild and lonesome spot, and, given cloud or rain, its very grandeur and isolation would increase the sense ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... six weeks' siege the Fruit Company's doctor told Channing he was cured, and that he might walk abroad. In this first walk he found that, during his illness, Port Antonio had reverted to her original condition of complete isolation from the world, the press- boats had left her wharves, the correspondents had departed from the veranda of her only hotel, the war was over, and the Peace Commissioners had sailed for Paris. Channing expressed his great gratitude to the people ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... showing signs of damage; but why a choice group of young birds in their nest, with parents—birds in change of plumage, surrounded by accessories which perhaps have cost hundreds of hours to execute—should be exposed to all the evils imaginable when isolation is so much more practicable and practical, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... an occupant and Robert wondered if their presence would frighten away the wild animals, so many of which had hibernated there so often. Yet he had a belief that the bears would come. His present mode of life and his isolation from the world gave him a feeling almost of kinship with them, and in some strange way, and through some medium unknown to him, they might reciprocate. He and Tayoga had killed several bears, it was true, but far from ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... remainder of the time is devoted to recreation, music, lectures, and those general activities that best develop the highest spiritualities with the individual. For the Martians realize that life on the material plane is but temporary the isolation of the individual Divine Spark from the Infinite whole to the end that the personality may become for all Eternity self-conscious and in harmony with God, which means the inheritance of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... his head bowed in pious meditation upon the sufferings of his Redeemer, whose figure bound upon the Cross lies before him. The skull at his feet and the dreary landscape surrounding him indicate his hermit-life of isolation and penance. The Saint is dressed in the coarse brown habit of a mendicant friar, and his face is luminous with that gentleness that distinguished his character after his conversion; for it is recorded of him that he would step aside rather than ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... one and the prices small the films were faded and torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes. They looked strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... which case it is equivalent to "survival of the fittest"; (2) for the effect or change produced by this preservation, as when you say, "To sum up the circumstances favourable or unfavourable to natural selection," and, again, "Isolation, also, is an important element in the process of natural selection": here it is not merely "survival of the fittest," but change produced by survival of the fittest, that is meant. On looking over your fourth chapter, I find that these alterations of terms can ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Roberts, when we had the measles epidemic, rubbing her chest with a stiff hairbrush and complaining of headache so that when nurse looked at her she sent her off to the Isolation House—to ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... where Fort Ricasoli stood in later times, and another was mounted on the side of Mount Sceberras to sweep the landing place beneath the fort. Both batteries cost many Turkish lives, but their construction and the extension of the investing trenches to the Grand Harbour meant the complete isolation of St. Elmo. The Turks sustained their greatest loss when Dragut, while superintending the works, received a wound from which a week ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... say, spiritual and material (a life only possible to the modern clergy), they seek refuge in seclusion and leave that outer life to those whom it satisfies and suits. As to the selfishness of such isolation, that is a matter no alien mind can quite determine, for the greatest Example of the religious life was strangely indifferent to human ties, nor ever displayed the weakness of human affection for ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... by none of the isolation and squalor which so often attend the confirmed celibate. His home life was a model of order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a bishopric, its hospitality, though select, profuse and untiring. An elder sister ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... portrait of himself. As she did so there was carried to her memory, and imprinted on it, the picture of a wistful and lonely man, his countenance touched, for all its open Irish smile, with some wordless sorrow, some pensive isolation of soul, lean and gaunt with some undefined hunger, a little furtive and covert with some ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... couldn't go back, to isolation and dull routine! I told John I might go abroad. Why not? I might see the great capitals, and in the splendour of palaces find a fitting frame for my beauty. There may be salve for heartache in the smile of princes. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the lovers lay without life. Rachel had turned her head from the glare. Through veiling fingers Dorn remained staring at the veneer of isolation about them. Waves of heat crept like ghost fires across the nakedness of the scene. He thought of the sun as a pilgrim walking over the barren floor of an empty cathedral. Over him the motionless smoke-bellied clouds hung gleaming in the dead fanfare of the sky. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... nearest fixed star, it would require one hundred million years in the accomplishment of its journey thither. And yet the Sun is one of a group of stars which occupy a region of the heavens adjacent to the Milky Way and surrounded by that zone; nor is his isolation greater than that of those stars which are his companions, and who, notwithstanding their profound distance, influence his movements by their gravitational attraction, and in combination with the other stars of the firmament ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... perpetually and to feel that we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down on the height which once seemed to touch the stars—and, if we cut ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary, and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to force or find the path through the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... suffering from a scarcity of food which threatened to become a famine, constantly made worse by the hindrances put in the way of her commerce. The difficulties of the home government increased those of the diplomatic and military isolation which she underwent in Europe. At the moment of the conclusion of the Treaty of Union, Pitt had entered upon engagements with the Irish Catholics which he felt himself bound to fulfil. The conscientious but shortsighted and narrow-minded George III. opposed every act of toleration ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... of the Rufus Smith had departed from the island, and our relations with humanity were severed. The thought of our isolation awed and fascinated me as I sat meditatively upon a keg of nails watching the miracle of the tropic dawn. The men were hard at work with bales and boxes, except Mr. Tubbs, who gave advice. It must have been valuable advice, for he assured ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... first assault upon him he was still wrecking the ship at the entrance to that lagoon, but now he watched the big sister go down for the third time while he placidly rescued a stoker to share his romantic isolation. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... are conspicuous in political geography because they are the natural boundary between many nations and languages, as the Pyrenees between France and Spain, the Alps between Austria and Italy, and the Himalayas between Tibet and India. Mountains sometimes guard nations from attack by the isolation they give, and therefore promote national unity. Thus the Swiss are among the few peoples in Europe who have maintained the integrity of their state. Commercially, mountains are of great importance as a source of water, which they store ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the isolation in which her mother keeps her is a hygienic measure, dear Pepe, and the only one that has been successfully employed with the various members of my family. Consider that the person whose presence and voice would make the strongest impression on Rosarillo's delicate ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Baron's anticipations as to the joys in store for him on reading The Wrecker, by Messrs. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON and LLOYD OSBOURNE. The Baron hit on a plan, he must isolate himself as if he were a telephone-wire. "Good," quoth he, "Isolation is the sincerest flattery,—towards authors." The friend in need, not in the sense of being out at elbows, appeared at the right moment, as did the Slave of the Lamp to Aladdin. "Come to my house in the mountains," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... lay the grey city wrapped in its veil of smoke, the tall spire of the old church rising in picturesque isolation above the line of the surrounding buildings. It seemed at that moment to stand as a symbol of the life of the Mother Country, a life fenced in by convention, by forms and ceremonies sanctified to every Englishman by centuries of association; forms at which he ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of the Press, called here the Yellow Press, bears to a great extent the responsibility for the hostile feeling between the two nations.... It is plain enough that official England is quietly pursuing a policy opposed to Germany and aimed at her isolation, and that King Edward has not hesitated to use his personal influence in the service of this scheme. But it is certainly exceedingly dangerous to poison public opinion in the open manner adopted ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate symbols: the fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary arch in an ancient city of the vanished homo of thousands. Thus, by its necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the last relic of civilized life. The old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... theatre-doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction. "This is life at last," he may tell himself; "this is the real thing. The bladders on which I was set swimming are now empty; my own weight depends upon the ocean; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... waning; against the golden western sky the old manor house loomed in solemn majesty, the fields and forests emphasizing its isolation in the darkening hour of sunset, as a coach, with jaded horses, passed through the avenue of trees and approached the broad portico. A great string of trailing vine had been torn from the walls by the wind and now waved mournfully to and fro with no hand to adjust it. In the rear ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... any argument, feeling the futility of words in her distraught condition. In the darkened tent he brooded over his difficulties while his eyes strayed with jealous yearning to the slim form in the gaudy kimono. Instead of isolation in a canvas chair, he might so easily have shared her pillows while comforting her lovingly in his arms! but for the time being he was out of favour ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... this white isolation the low country glowed in a sun that made golden the far buttes and sparkled on the clay-red waters of the Little Colorado. Four thousand feet below the hills cattle drifted ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... for centuries, shut them off from the outside world so that they lost step with the onward march of civilization. A forgotten people until yesterday, unlettered, content to wrest a meager living from the grudging soil, they built for themselves a nation within a nation. By their very isolation, they have preserved much of the best that is America. They have held safe and unchanged the simple beauty of the song of their fathers, the unsullied speech, the simple ideals and traditions, staunch religious faith, love of freedom, courage ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... the ocean; in the roll of crisp pasturage that in unbroken swells covered the long backbone of the cape; in the few giant old trees, and, more than all, in its character of freedom, loneliness, and isolation, there was a savage charm and dignity that the thrift and cultivation, the usefulness and comfort of civilisation's beauty can ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... with the country and knowing the isolation of this sequestered cove, had driven through the wood road, left the car behind the dunes, and skulking through the woods, had successfully carried out a daring robbery. Perhaps he had been lingering concealed about the gardens all day or even many days. Who could tell? ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... express purpose of negotiating a treaty that would end the "suspense as to their future destiny."[651] From the treaty of cession that Coffin drafted, he having taken a miserably unfair advantage of Osage isolation and destitution, the Osages turned away in disgust.[652] In November, some of their leading men journeyed up to Leroy to invite the dissatisfied Opoeth-le-yo-ho-la to winter with them.[653] Coffin seized the occasion to ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... of age to a daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, the young prince had continued until his accession to the throne in his life of domestic retirement, study, and isolation. Europe was slumbering in a disgraceful peace. War, that exercise of princes, could not thus form him by contact with men and the custom of command. Fields of battle, which are the theatre of great actors of his stamp, had not brought him under the observation of his people. No prestige, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... word had come from Lieutenant Worthington. His sister had written him as soon as Amy was taken ill, and had twice telegraphed since, but no answer had been received, and this strange silence added to the sense of lonely isolation and distance from home and help which those who encounter illness in a ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... the modern world this massive isolation of cultures could not continue. The East and the West were bound to meet and religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. Western Christianity has for more than a hundred years now been sending its missionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to send their missionaries ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... found indications that the day of isolation for this people is rapidly passing away. Yankee inquisitiveness has discovered that these mountains are full of the best coal and iron—Northern capital has already begun to strip them of their rich forests of black walnut, oak and pine. ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... by which one is able to form a just and true judgement on most of the duties and affairs of human life? Hence he extracted these gems from the huge pile of trifles in which they lay mixed. Perhaps they please less in isolation than when one runs across them as he reads, and for this reason such anthologizing should be contemned. But it would be precious to refuse a great accession of profit because of a ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... speciality. (2) He holds that any grouping of the sciences in a succession gives a radically wrong idea of their genesis and their interdependence; no true filiation exists; no science develops itself in isolation; no one is independent, either logically or historically. M. Littre, by far the most eminent of the scientific followers of Comte, concedes a certain force to Mr. Spencer's objections, and makes certain secondary modifications in the hierarchy in consequence, while still cherishing his faith in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... whose isolation grew defined in the mind of "the baby new to earth and sky," was an incident of 1825, when he was twenty-three months old. His maternal grandfather had shot a hawk, breaking its wing, and bringing it to the house alive. The boy baby standing in the doorway, all the family being in the yard, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... a family life, founded upon such principles, are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of perspective, let it be boldly admitted, an absence of humanity. And there was a curious mixture of humbleness and arrogance; entire resignation to the will of God and not less entire disdain of the judgement and opinion of man. My ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... not account for all of Chicago's phenomenal growth, nor do the distance from the world's centres of population and industry, the comparative isolation, and the evil effects of railway domination account wholly for San Francisco's slow growth toward the end of the century. For, following the several spasms of development incident to the ages of gold, of grain, and of fruit, and the advent of the railway incubus, California ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... separate kingdoms, which had now become simply shires or counties, retained a certain degree of control over the government. This prevented the royal power from becoming the unchecked will of an arbitrary ruler. Finally, it may be said that the isolation of England had much to do with the development of the strong ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... opportunities of ascertaining its social condition, dwelt pointedly on the moral and intellectual apathy that prevailed outside a few places like York or other centres of intelligence; but they forgot to make allowance for the difficulties that surrounded these settlers. The isolation of their lives had naturally the effect of making even the better class narrow-minded, selfish, and at last careless of anything like refinement. Men who lived for years without the means of frequent communication with their fellow-men, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... made me set a premium on humour. I found that he, like myself, was a new-comer. His predecessor had left at short notice during the holidays, and he had secured the vacancy at about the same time that I was securing mine. We agreed that it was a pretty place. White, I gathered, regarded its isolation as a merit. He was not fond of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse |
