"Understandable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "An understandable ambition," said Cochrane. He frowned, waiting to talk to Bell, who was taking an infernally long time to focus a camera out of ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... flourished on the less, had its best treatment in the spread of the Christian religion. Surely, a wonderful witness of its divine origin, lies in the fact that it applies to the elevation and happiness of all the world's races—is understandable to all. Farther, native schools made advances upon sheer ignorance, as hospitals did in respect to witchcraft; and it was possible, in some measure, to eradicate native indolence by affording youths a training in a trade, or grown men work on ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... woman had left the cab, half-way up Trafalgar Road, with a delicious pink-and-white smile of adieu. And Hilda had thought how different all this was from Brighton, and how much better and more homely and understandable. And now she was in the garden of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... compared with sustaining surface, if expressed in understandable terms, would be equal to sixty pounds for every ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... the sun refused to get up one morning, or, having got up, declined to go to bed again. It would not surprise ME. The amazing thing is that Nature goes on doing the same things in the same way year after year; any sudden little irrelevance on her part would be quite understandable. When the wise men tell us so confidently that there will be an eclipse of the sun in 1921, invisible at Greenwich, do they have no qualms of doubt as the day draws near? Do they glance up from their whitebait at the appointed hour, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... MacPhairson—but he was so intensely Scotch that in every ship he had sailed in men called him Scotty. He had a face like a harvest-moon, with a sorrowful expression of the eyes, a frame like a gladiator's, a brogue modified from its original consistency to an understandable dialect, and the soul of a Scotchman—which means that he was possessed by two dominant and conflicting passions, love of God and love of Mammon. Add to these attributes a masterful knowledge of seamanship and an acquaintance with navigation, and you have a rough sketch ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... of subtle courtesy, he makes the destination of his historical studies. If the purpose of noble history be to make us understand men and, consequently, measures, then is Shakespeare still the greatest English historian. Richard III never becomes so understandable as in the drama; and Henry IV is a figure clearly seen, as if he stood in the sunlight before our eyes, so that any one conversant with these history-plays is fortified against all stress in solid knowledge and profound insight into turbulent eras of Anglo-Saxon ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and shook his head. A heavy hand with the truth, that Irishman; and about as understandable in these splendid, tender days of his idiocy and bliss, as March wind, comets or star-dust. His passion for truth was literally a passion, relentless and exact. He worked harder. His steadiness, as Jan said, was grim and conscious and a thing of terror to anything in his path. He wrestled ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of palingenetic from cenogenetic—a criterion which descriptive morphology was unable to find.[484] The introduction of a functional moment into the concept of heredity was a methodological advance of the first importance, for it linked up in an understandable way the problems of embryology, and indirectly of all morphology, with the problem of hereditary transmission, and gave form and substance to the conception of the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... by This Demand?—A crusade against all sex-association that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but is surely not the counsel of perfection in sex-control intended by those making this demand. What is meant seems rather that we should take ground against any legal distinction between the status of children born within and those born outside of legal marriage. What would ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... describe, utterly without the passionate fitfulness of the orthodox lover's rapture, but as if for a long time I had been waiting for some quality to make me complete, and had quietly waked to find it there, and the world understandable—life's riddle read. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... Mystic Teachings regarding the Divine Incarnation of the Spirit in the mortal body of Jesus—a subject of the greatest importance to all who are troubled with this difficult point. We hope to be able to shed the Mystic light of Truth upon this corner which so many have found dark, non-understandable, and contrary to reason, natural law and science. The Mystic Teachings are the great ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of at the Williams's shop. It was at the Exeter Place rooms that this first wonderful message came to Watson's ears. From this period on the telephone took rapid strides forward. By the summer of 1876, it had been improved until a simple sentence was understandable if carefully repeated ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... endeavoured to convey by means of natural incidents and conversations between the characters portrayed, the most recent and reliable scientific information respecting the moon and Mars; together with other astronomical information: stating it in an interesting form, and in concise, clear, and understandable language. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... that it is always wise to engage a weaker force that is temporarily separated from its main body. It is readily understandable, for instance, that it would be ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... the actual instruction is taken into a further dimension where it is described as "this direction on the part of the chief executive for the destruction of 'irrelevant documents'". And one serious complaint made by the applicants about the Royal Commission Report is that what could be an understandable direction for the retention of one copy on a master file of all relevant documents has become an unacceptable instruction that irrelevant documents (related to the Antarctic flights nonetheless) should be destroyed. We ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... steward, was very kind, and raised my pay from time to time at his pleasure. I suppose I was willing, correct, and faithful. I improved my knowledge by reading books on astronomy. I got, amongst others, 'The Mechanism of the Heavens,' by Denison Olmstead, an American; a very understandable book. Learning English, which was a foreign language to me, led me to learn other languages. I took pleasure in finding out the roots or radixes of words, and from time to time I added foreign dictionaries to my little library. But I took most ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... at the Commissioner's suggestion. It had been a lengthy job, requiring a couple of hours, but it was a complete one. Which was understandable, since it was the First Lady herself, Trigger gathered gradually from the noise, who had put Mantelish under the influence, back in his own garden on Maccadon, and within two weeks after his first return from ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... uniformitarianism, the author of Gulliver Decypher'd defends Swift's understandable bias for the established Anglican Church as a vested interest, which in the Travels is expressed through the giant king's strictures against civil liberty for religious dissenters (II, vi). He recommends this passage as a proper explanation of the principle restricting the civil liberty ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... religion; perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been in ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... he shouted with laughter. The boys broke down, too, and in a moment the entire patronage of the coffee shop was staring at the three idiots who roared with unrestrained laughter in public. Such behavior in Americans was to be deplored, perhaps, but understandable. But a licensed dragoman ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and understand GRAHAME.]—Mr. Grahame is both a very readable and understandable author. He has reason to be proud of his poem called the SABBATH: for it is one of the sweetest and one of the purest of modern times. His scene however is laid in the country, and not in the metropolis. The very ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... contemporaries that "the world does not change." But I hope that you will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature into the obedient servants of man ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Government department; and that in order to diminish the litigation under the gold law, and to make that fearful and wonderful agglomeration of erratic, experimental, crude, involved, contradictory and truly incomprehensible enactments at all understandable, the Chamber had to codify it at its own expense and on its own initiative, illustrate both the indispensable character of the organization, and the ignorance and ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... and by the use of words and terms which may be understood by anyone. Our only fear is that its very simplicity may cause some to pass it by as unworthy of attention, while they pass on their way searching for something "deep," mysterious and non-understandable. However, the Western mind is eminently practical, and we know that it is only a question of a short time before it will recognize ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... stood before the woman whom they called Catalina. She broke into speech. It was cacique to cacique. She was from Boriquen—she would return in a canoe if she were free! Better drown than live with the utterly un-understandable—only that they ate and drank and laid hold of women whether these would or would not, and were understandable that far! Gods! At first she thought them gods; now she doubted. They were magicians. If she were free—if she were free—if she were free! Home—Boriquen! If not that, at least ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... "Quite understandable," the stranger murmured sympathetically. "But in my case it is different. You see—I am responsible ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... attentive, solicitous treatment, bathing, exercises in the open air—precisely not gymnastics, but voluntary exercises, each to his own taste—could have always put off the coming of this climacteric period or soften and make it understandable. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... I don't suppose we shall be disturbed before daylight, for the enemy got more than they expected, so I may just as well sit and rest. I can watch over him just the same, and—" Serge's next utterance was not understandable if treated as words, but perfectly plain if considered as a snore, for he had sunk sideways till his head rested on the hard edge of the car, while at regular intervals he gave vent to a series of deep gruff tones which sounded ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... practically means the time of the first Protectors. He really did for rites and history what he had blamed Tsz-ch'an for doing with the law: he popularized it. He also attempted with persistent study to master the Changes, to which incomprehensible work he added features of his own—very little more understandable than the original texts. As to the Odes, 3000 in number, he used the pruning knife much more vigorously, and nine-tenths of them were rejected as unsuitable for the purposes of good didactic lessons or conservative precedents. If we substitute, as we are entitled to do, ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... other matters of untruth. That, for instance, of the ermine collar embroidered with emeralds. If an understandable reason be required for this, it would be to draw attention away from the green lights which were seen in the room, and especially in the well-hole. Any unprejudiced person would accept the green lights to ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... reforming legal procedure and of pruning down the existing laws, both State and National, cutting out the obsolete and useless ones and rewriting those recommended to be retained, in plain and direct language free from useless legal verbiage and understandable to ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... and Hamilton's turn came later. The age has passed for such friendships; but at that time, when young men were nurtured on great ideas, when they were sacrificing themselves in a sacred cause, and had seen next to nothing of the frivolities of life, they were understandable enough. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... a natural process, intelligently comprehended. It is neither mysterious nor hard. It is one of the preliminary, understandable ways to make success not only sure, but easy ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... sure about that, either. Perhaps elsewhere and under more suitable circumstances I may be able to put my thought into words, precise and understandable. It will take time, but that I shall do so some day ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... one name to another. Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more understandable. ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... more and more difficult. And the conditions of labor improved when men ceased to talk of a 'Providential Order,' of 'God's Decree,' and dismissed the evangelical narcotic served out by the Church, and began to realize that social conditions were the products of understandable and modifiable natural forces." (C. Cohen: "Christianity, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... find out," he replied in a voice that was really mournful, so difficult and non-understandable was the subject to him. "Before I started to work for this office there wasn't a day that I didn't meet and speak friendly with Elihu. He used to have a good many deeds and papers to sign, and he never failed to call me in when I was passing. When I started to work for this office I noticed ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... nature derived by science from the present condition of the world seem to rule them out.5 In the light of the concept of the world's 'ageing' which we have tried to develop here, not only do the relevant reports become plausible, but it also becomes understandable why, if such events have taken place in the past, they fail to do so in our ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... of words understandable only to those expressing them, and to those for whom they were expressed, but any one might have guessed that the boys in the Peter Pan were asking the girls in the Petrel to let them "meet" the wild bird of ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... "Quite understandable, I should say," declared the professor. "Unable to cope with Von Ullrich themselves, they think perhaps we ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... a naive view?" Mr. Bennet asked, smiling. "As it happens, my associates and I are not undertakers. We took on the disguise in order to present an understandable motive if our plan to capture you had misfired. In that event, others would have believed exactly—and only—what you thought: that our purpose was ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped leaves and blew them to ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... to fill many pages with western adventure having no special bearing upon the central topic. While I have diverged occasionally from the thread of the narrative, my purpose has been merely to give where possible more background to the story, that the account as a whole might be more understandable in its relation to the general facts ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... people have been invited during the raids. "Surely," writes one of our correspondents, "it is a scandal that, at this time in the world's history, some cellars should be totally destitute of wine. That there should be no coal in the coal-cellars is understandable enough; but to ask the timid public into empty wine cellars is a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... you do? I mean, what do they hire you for?" asked Donahue with understandable confusion ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... her to explain. Non-understandable as her words had been, they had given him time to look about and see upon what a perilous ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... high is the thermometer of favour) safely indulge in a little judicious self-depreciation, saying that if he has erred it has not been from want of zeal but from want of experience in dealing with the kind of material he has been set to govern. All this is very human, natural, and understandable; product of that warm emotional atmosphere, bedewed with tears, in which the Admiral finds himself; and it is not long before the King and Queen, also moved to it by the emotional temperature, are expressing their unbroken and unbounded confidence in him ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... "That's understandable," Loudons said, "after what their ancestors went through in the Last War. But this crowd, here! The descendants of an old United States Army infantry platoon, with a fully developed religion centered on a slain and resurrected god—Normally, it would take thousands of years for a ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... comes unbroken as that M, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, as those takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid for them ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... English translation in simple definitions. Bold type is usually rendered as ALL CAPS in PG e-texts, but since the meaning of German words can depend on their capitalization (e.g. 'arm' and 'Arm' mean different things) I have added commas instead to make the vocabulary more easily understandable. Short vowels are marked with [s], long vowels with [l]. '-"' is my rendering for a change of a vowel to an umlaut in ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... gift of contentedness. It colored all her thoughts, created pleasant places for her in what, to Elsie, seemed a desolate life; it made Millville not only a bearable but even a happy place to live in. Millville understood Patience and loved her; Elsie, being less understandable, was ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... all of us is the first great mystery of life; it stands in the way of every perception, every virtue. There is no making ourselves feel enough astonishment at it. That the occupations or pastimes of life should have no motive, is understandable; but—That life itself should have no motive—that we neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor to guard against its being for ever taken away from us—here is a mystery indeed. For just suppose I were able to call at this moment to any one ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... here. They burst like lightning out of a clear sky. I would have done just that thing for Ruby.... Mad, you say? ... Why, man, she's not hopeless! There was something deep behind that impulse. Strange—not understandable! I'm at the mercy of every hour I spend here. Benton has got into my blood. And I see how Benton is a product of this great advance of progress—of civilization—the U. P. R. We're only atoms in a force no ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... everlasting? The worst sin that was ever sinned does not deserve everlasting punishment, and I have never yet met the Christian who would really and truly be willing to see a fellow-creature undergo it. There is no understandable sense in which justice could demand such a terrible sentence, even if it involved no more than everlasting unhappiness; how much more unthinkable it becomes if the punishment is to be everlasting, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the house is surrounded with water. What weapon would he choose? You would say the most silent in the world. Then he could hope when the deed was done to slip quickly from the window, to wade the moat, and to get away at his leisure. That's understandable. But is it understandable that he should go out of his way to bring with him the most noisy weapon he could select, knowing well that it will fetch every human being in the house to the spot as quick ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that the outrages of the German troops in Belgium became understandable to me when I studied a Scots school where suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the national soul. Intellectualism and materialism were the Prussian ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... family insult one another. The secret is, that insiders understand the limitations of the criticism, which outsiders are apt to take in bulk. No race in the world possesses a richer anecdotal lore than the Jews—such pawky, even blasphemous humor, not understandable of the heathen, and to a suspicious mind Pinchas's overflowing cornucopia of such would have suggested a prior period of Continental wandering from town to town, like the Minnesingers of the middle ages, repaying the hospitality of his Jewish entertainers with a budget of good stories and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... matter plainly, sir," he said, "in what I call an understandable, straightforward way. I'm a poor man—I've been a poor man all my life—and I've never seed a chance before of getting away from it. ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... think it out for ourselves. If we are open to a simple, even primitive, conception of God, we may still repudiate the creeds and doctrines, but we are likely to become more tolerant of those who find them true and good. We shall be likely in time to find the religion of Christ understandable and acceptable—warm and quick with life. The man who ungrudgingly opens his heart to the God of nature will be religious in the simplest possible sense. He may worry because of the things he cannot altogether understand, and because he falls so far short of the implied ideal. But ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... "An understandable mistake, since it's such a common name," said Dark, sitting down opposite her. He turned pale-blue eyes, remote and filled with light, on the waiter, and added: "She'll have another drink, and bring ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply. "She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... communication facilities were extremely limited, a generally self-sufficient and naturally self-reliant community developed as a matter of survival. The characteristics which this frontier nurtured, and the non-English—even anti-English—composition of its population make understandable the sentiment in this region for independence from Great Britain. This, of course, is supremely demonstrated in the separate declaration of independence drawn, according to the report, by the settlers of the ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... so easily as it explains an insect alighting on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear, bright, healthy eyes—which is biologically understandable—they couldn't like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... second half of the drama, thus symbolising life's continuous repetition of itself, Kierkegaard's Gentagelse. The first part of The Road to Damascus is the one most frequently produced on the stage. This is understandable, having regard to its firm structure and the consistency of its faith in a Providence directing the fortunes and misfortunes of man, whether the individual rages in revolt or ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... afflicted with the spiritual blindness of his class. Quite genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign country or even to a class other than his own. His own kind he treated as complete and understandable human creatures. All others were merely objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former category, he was as pleasant to us as possible—that is, he was pleasant to us in his way, but had not insight enough to ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... English Gladstonians have a far more virulent dislike for the Liberal Unionists than for the rankest Tories. They say to the Protestants, 'We know why you uphold Unionism'—that is, as they believe, landlordism—'for the landlords are English and Protestant; your position is understandable.' But to the Catholic they say, 'You are not only an enemy, but a renegade, a traitor, and a deserter.' And whatever that man's position may be, the people can make things uncomfortable ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... his influence over M'tela was quite assured, Winkleman's arrival would probably turn the scale. She had not prevented Kingozi's arriving before the Bavarian; but she might hold the Englishman comparatively powerless. That was understandable. Kingozi felt he might even love her the more for this evidence of a faithful spirit. But the last few days! It must have become evident to her that her cause was lost; that M'tela's friendship had been gained for the English. If she had ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... Providence are, however, not unfrequently so interwoven with human events as that average intelligence may be able to understand portions of them, though much of mystery must always remain. And in no one particular do these understandable portions find a clearer illustration than in those interventions which assign individual men to given pursuits and responsibilities in life. Truly, "There is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... Nell; all right. It's a perfectly understandable way of looking at it, if it is rather far-fetched. But good-by to the hard-earned thousands. You won't have a smitch ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... O'Connor said, "will be quite understandable." His face left no doubt that he didn't like the necessity of understanding anything that was going to keep him and the eight teleports apart for even thirty seconds longer, now ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... desire to make the subject easily understandable and at the same time entertaining, and to appeal less to the memory of my readers than to their common sense and intelligence. I hope in that way not to have strayed too far from the ideal I had in mind when writing this book, namely, to ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... show her gratitude; if what he asked could bring any alleviation to his life, if her presence could bring any sort of comfort to his loneliness, was not even that more than she had ever dared to hope? That he should turn to her was understandable. He had men friends in plenty, but women he openly and undisguisedly avoided. He had grown used to her presence at the Towers, a marriage such as he proposed would call for no great alteration in the daily routine to which he had become accustomed. If by doing this ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... have the aliis I was born under thought for me. Ever, when I was hungry, I came to them for food, as I come to your kitchen now. Many people eat in your kitchen, and the days of feasts when you slay fat steers for all of us are understandable. It is why I come to you this day, an old man whose labour of strength is not worth a shilling a week, and ask of you twelve dollars to buy a jackass and a second-hand saddle and bridle. It is why twice ten fool men of us, under these monkey-pods ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... This was not understandable to Gretchen; but the locket pleased her eye. Her highness, observing her interest, slipped the trinket from her neck and laid ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... a much more understandable personage, but no less admirable, as a companion and protector. In the two years and five months of island life he had grown nearly three inches. He was as strong as a boy of twelve, and could scull the boat almost as ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of thousands of our citizens who feel the understandable satisfaction of those who have taken part in democracy and seen their hopes fulfilled. But my thoughts have been turning the past few days to those who would be watching at home to an older fellow who will throw a salute by himself when the flag goes by, and the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... needles drove into his brain. There was a moment of fleeting visions; strange places he viewed, and strange creatures parading in a fantasmagoria of delirium before his aching eyes. Voices, harsh and guttural, spoke in his drumming ears; voices that were dimly understandable, though uttered in the tongue spoken by Antazzo and the Zara. Then came sudden ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... an adequate grasp of her three toughest subjects. Slowly she began to make headway, she saw light in mathematical problems that had before been meaningless formulae, chemistry was less of a hopeless tangle, and Vergil's lines construed into understandable sentences instead of utter nonsense. It was only gradual progress, however. She had much ground to cover before she caught up the Form. She was plodding, but not a brilliant all-round scholar like Garnet. The fact was that Winona was only clever in one direction: in the realm of imagination ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... divided, would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article. The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Quoin, who still persisted, on every occasion, that there was a stowaway aboard. As for the Second Mate, I have very little doubt now, but that he was beginning to realise there was something deeper and less understandable than he had at first dreamed of. Yet, all the same, I know he had to keep his guesses and half-formed opinions pretty well to himself; for the Old Man and the First Mate chaffed him unmercifully about his "bogy." This, I got from Tammy, who had heard them both ragging ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead—of the western Allies, at any rate—have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the past century has been the means of teaching to millions of people a great number of facts which had perhaps otherwise been lost to them. How many are there who have had brought home to them in an understandable manner by stage-plays the costumes, habits, manners, and customs of countries and ages other than their own; what insight have they thus obtained into facts and vicissitudes of life—of passions and sorrows and ambitions outside the narrow scope of their own lives, and which ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... magazine in the late '70s had a contribution by the then British Consul, Mr. Palgreave, on "Malay Life in the Philippines," that makes more understandable the reputation of the islands, which before the opening of the Suez were a health resort for Japan, the China coast and India. It also shows a fairness to the people uncommon in the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... bent on making every statement perfectly clear and understandable. There was no intimation that she was so communicative because she thought she was obliged to talk. On the contrary, she welcomed the chance to give him ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... women—who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt, inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... near perfection and was bearing his final wound, it still seemed to him as if those childlike people were his brothers, their vanities, desires for possession, and ridiculous aspects were no longer ridiculous to him, became understandable, became lovable, even became worthy of veneration to him. The blind love of a mother for her child, the stupid, blind pride of a conceited father for his only son, the blind, wild desire of a young, vain woman for jewelry and admiring glances from ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... limits of our being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' {93} world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it in a more ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... is a timeless and changeless self descended from the mysterious All which lies back of all things and under high compulsion to seek again, in some vast turning of the wheel of Being, that from which we sprang. Theosophy becomes more understandable in its practical reaction upon life, for this many veiled self is deeply involved in forces and states to which it is not really akin, and since it suffers greatly in being so involved the end of existence is, in discipline ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... exhibited to the eminent scientists of the Institute, one rushed wrathfully down the aisle and seizing by the collar the man who manipulated the instrument, cried out, "Wretch, we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist!" So it is readily understandable that after being referred to the Institute, Fulton and his project disappeared for a ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot |
