"Ambient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... deep. These are in the form of great holes or pits. The more distant suburbs present beautiful forests of palms, producing a fine reviving effect upon an eye like mine, long saddened by the ungrateful aspect of a dreary desert. The atmosphere and ambient air is less pleasing to view, presenting always a light dirty red hue, as if encharged with the fine sand rising from the surface. The soil of the Fezzan oases is indeed mostly arenose, and the dates are nearly all impregnated with fine particles of sand, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... in ambient sunsets, when gilded oceans, ghostly ships, and the dull, dark city vanish for the night. Of course, such things never happen except in books, but the practise of writing about them is a fine drill, in that it enables the writer to get a grasp ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Crockett's "classic in homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents any active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples, struggles ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... bill, the short chocolate-colored wings are extended to the utmost, and he keeps them in a steady flapping motion, at the same time raising up the delicate long feathers over the back, which are spread in a chaste and elegant manner, floating like films in the ambient air. In this position the bird would remain for a short time, seemingly proud of its heavenly beauty. I never yet beheld a soil on its feathers. After expanding the wings it would bring them together so as to conceal the head, then bending gracefully ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... on the walls—a gay impudent Detaille Lancer whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Bodies with extended Wings, which spread about 50 Yards in Breadth, compos'd of Feathers so nicely put together, that no Air could pass; and as the Bodies were made of Lunar Earth which would bear the Fire, the Cavities were fill'd with an Ambient Flame, which fed on a certain Spirit deposited in a proper quantity, to last out the Voyage; and this Fire so order'd as to move about such Springs and Wheels as kept the Wings in a most exact and regular Motion, always ascendant; thus the Person being placed in ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... rings for gymnastic exercises, conversation and reading rooms, localities for theatrical representations, swimming stations, localities for scientific disquisitions, moral and religious teachings. The most splendid art works adorned the ambient." ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... consecrated to the science of law, was destined to exercise upon the evolution of the Order the same influence as Paris; the Brothers Minor could no more hold aloof from it than they could keep aloof from the ambient air. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... descent, as it must do passing through fuliginous clouds of smoak and soot, over and about great cities, and other vulcanos, continually vomiting out their acrimonious, and sometimes pestiferous fervor, infecting the ambient air, as it perpetually does about London, and for many adjacent miles, as I ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Lettice, without question or contest. If he had but considered before, acted with ordinary sense ... the girl had been in love with him; he might have had it all. He gazed cautiously, but with no determined plan of action, out over the street—it lay deserted in the ambient sunlight. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... reft of fear.— Though well they shun our changeful moods, Taught by our rifle in the woods. Yet we may tell of mercy shown, Power unabused, the birdling flown,— When caught by thistly gossamer— Set free to wing the ambient air. Cautious we watch the gliding snake, 'Neath sheltering stone, or tangled brake, And list the chipmunk's merry trill Proclaim his wondrous climbing skill. The bird; the beast; the insect; all In turn our various tastes enthrall; The fish; the rock; the tree; the flower; ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... shalt pursue; And heaven's richest blessings shine Ever on both thee and thine. Round thy path may fairest flowers, As in amaranthine bowers, Bloom and blossom bright and fair, Load with sweets the ambient air! Be thy path with roses strewn, All thy hours to care unknown; Sorrow cloud thy pathway never, Happiness be ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... fascinating work, which I had read over five times, and which now, with my riper judgment, I admire on the whole as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first visit (of any duration) to England; for you will not have forgotten the commotion—I may even say the scandal—produced by Mark Ambient's masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic war-cry. People had endeavored to sail nearer to "truth" in the cut of their ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... fire Spoke to their foes of vengeance dire, But they were enslaved by beauty's power, And knelt at her shrine in that moonlit bower. Sweet words were breathed in Ada's ear By many a noble cavalier; Maidens with fairy steps were there, Who seemed to float on the ambient air, But none in the mazy dance could move Like Ada, the queen of this bower of love! The moon in her silvery beauty shines On this joyous throng through the lofty pines; Lamps gleaming forth from every tree, All was splendour and revelry; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... threw the rifle up and fired instantaneously. He had been musketry instructor in his time and held views upon quick firing. The smoke rose lazily in the ambient air, and he saw a figure all fluttering rags and flying turban running down the slope away from him. At the same moment there was a crashing volley, followed by two straggling reports. The figure stopped, seemed to hesitate, and then ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... machinery, rather—are the principal sources of our heat. Clothing is useful in keeping us warm, only by retaining, for some time, a portion of the heat of our bodies, which would otherwise escape so rapidly into the ambient cooler air, as to leave us with a sensation of chilliness. It should, therefore, be adapted to the season. That clothing which conducts the heat from the body in the slowest manner, or, in other words, impedes most its progress, is best adapted to severe cold weather; provided, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... tenderest weft of Tuscan air, Came laughing like Etrurian spring the third, With green Valdelsa's hill-flowers in her hair Deep-drenched with May-dews, in her voice the bird Whose voice hath night and morning in it; fair As the ambient gold of wall-flowers that engird The walls engirdling with a circling stair My sweet San Gimignano: nor a word Fell from her flowerlike mouth Not sweet with all the south; As though the dust shrined in Certaldo stirred ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... while we were thus talking. I retired to the farther end of the room, and threw up a window for a little air, being half-poisoned by the effluvia arising from so many contaminated carcases; which gave me no imperfect idea of the stench of gaols, which, corrupting the ambient air, gives what is ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... too, if you do to both the figures as the words of our question require; that is, if you put them both in the water; for to be in the water implies to be placed in the water, and by Aristotle's own definition of place, to be placed imports to be environed by the surface of the ambient body; but when my antagonists show the floating board of ebony, they put it not into the water, but upon the water; where, being detained by a certain impediment (of which more anon), it is surrounded, partly with water, partly with air, which is contrary to our agreement, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fruit. But Lamprias said, that our natural heat, the principal instrument of nutrition, in the midst of summer is scattered and becomes rare and weak, but when autumn comes it unites again and gathers strength, being shut in by the ambient cold and contraction of the pores, and I for my part said: In summer we are more thirsty and use more moisture than in other seasons; and therefore Nature, observing the same method in all her operations, at this change of seasons ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... coprolitic sands—sands stretching into the bosom of the earth, sands woven of windy reaches hemming the sun.... We lay with the grains of corn in Egyptian granaries, and saw them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies or whirling motes in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold crag we launched with wings of fire-breathing pestilence and fell fathoms under sea to war with lizard-fish and narwhal. For us the supreme surrender, the joy of the expected.... ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... come of them. Woman was married; she had the ring on her finger! He could at his option look on her in the miniature, he could think of her as being in the city where she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out of space; she was nowhere in the ambient air. Secretly she was a feeling that lay half slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the secret, choosing to be poor rather than call her forth. He was in truth digesting with difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... burnt up, that nobody cares to come at it; and if the water be drawn up before sun-rising, and after that exposed to the air, it becomes exceeding cold, and becomes of a nature quite contrary to the ambient air; as in winter again it becomes warm; and if you go into it, it appears very gentle. The ambient air is here also of so good a temperature, that the people of the country are clothed in linen-only, even when snow covers the rest of Judea. This place ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... treatment of French-Canadian life, as far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasures for me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure down cold, but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more than that of him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well as social, sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book, which is historical of the present rather ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... temperature range of the missile components. The missile had been launched from Central Asia, at night, in January. There was no reason to suppose that the warhead had been temperature-controlled during the pre-launch countdown. Thus it probably was at the ambient temperature of the launch site. If it had been fired in the open, that might be as low as minus 70 deg. F. Had it been fired from a shelter, that might be as high as 70 deg. F. To leave a safety margin, he decided to reject only those ...
— Pushbutton War • Joseph P. Martino
... mysteriousness of her indolence, went out into the night of the Placid Gulf like a fresh and intoxicating fragrance spreading out in the shadows, impregnating the air. The incorruptible Nostromo breathed her ambient seduction in the tumultuous heaving of his breast. Before leaving the harbour he had thrown off the store clothing of Captain Fidanza, for greater ease in the long pull out to the islands. He stood before her ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... beat their foreheads, and prayed that the Lord might strengthen the courage of the others. An unutterably pure and lofty joy filled my soul, and I felt, as if we were out of the body floating on ambient clouds. Softly and calmly we refused to sacrifice, thanked the imperial official, who warned us kindly, and in the same hour and place we fell into the hands of the torturers. She gazed only up to heaven, and I only at her, but in the midst of the most frightful torments I saw before me the Saviour ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... The ethereal host Again impatient crowd the crystal coast. The father now, within his spacious hands, Encompassed all the mingled mass of seas and lands; And, having heaved aloft the ponderous sphere, He launched the world to float in ambient air." ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... a little wild, Sir,' returned Polly, checking the baby, who was making convulsive efforts with his arms and legs to launch himself on Biler, through the ambient air, 'and has gone with wrong companions: but I hope he has seen the misery of that, Sir, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... his mother's indignation, could not prevent his eyes from following the tail of his dog, as it sailed through the ambient air surrounding the half-way houses, and was glad to observe it landed among some cabbage-leaves thrown into the road, without attracting notice. Satisfied that he should regain his treasure when he quitted the house, he now turned round to deprecate his mother's wrath, who had not yet completed ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... as doth the ocean wave; Ye violets will nourish still the flower that April gave; Upon your ambient tides will be man's sternest shadow cast; Your waters ever will roll on when man ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... land whose features are un-furrowed by human hands, still bearing the marks of the Almighty mould, as upon the morning of creation; a region whose every object wears the impress of God's image. His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers: a region redolent of romance, rich in ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... nuns with their sandals, smugglers with their rope soles, they go through these soft, dark spots without making more noise than phantoms, and their little cortege, slow and strange, descends toward the wagon in a funereal silence. Silence also around them, everywhere in the grand, ambient black, in the depth of the mountains and the woods. And, in the sky without stars, sleep the big clouds, heavy with all the water that the soil awaits and which will fall to-morrow to make the woods still more leafy, the grass still higher; the big clouds above their heads cover all the splendor ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... a sad farewell To glowing scenes of boyhood. Ye rocks, and rills and forests primeval List to my sighing soul, trembling on the tongue To vent its echoes in ambient air. No more shall wild eyed deer, Fretful hares, hawks and hounds Entrance mine ear and vision, Or frantically depart when Stealthy footsteps disturb the lark, Ere Phoebus' golden light Illuminates the dawn. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... allowed to muse gently for several hours, inaccessible to the ambient air, and on the even and persevering heat of charcoal in the furnace or stove. After having lulled itself in its own exudations, and the dissolution of its auxiliaries, it may appear at table with a powerful claim ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... extremely characteristic type, with a subtle psychology, carefully worked out; her honesty and goodness form an indispensable contrast to the ambient horrors. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... that only this afternoon I saw all of those gawky girls working in the fields, their legs the colour of tan bark, with sandals that looked like canal-boats, skirts made of hemp,—just regular kids. And you transform them tonight into gleaming cloudlets to float upon the ambient atmosphere—" ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... of locust-like insects that beat disgustingly against his eyes and mouth. "Fagh!" Waving his arms before his face he jumped up and backwards, away from the bugs. As he did so, a dark shapeless thing plopped from the trees onto the spot where he had been lying stretched out. Then, like an ambient fungus, it slithered off into the ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... and the breath of night; the world was ripe with soft repose, whose dreams were hope and happiness; and the heaven spread some gentle stars, to show mankind the way to it. Then a noble perfume strewed the ambient air with stronger presence, as the farmer, in his shirt sleeves, came, with a clay pipe, and grumbled, "Wherever is our Mary ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... coctor's viduate dame, Opin'st thou this gigantick frame, Procumbing at thy shrine: Shall, catenated by thy charms, A captive in thy ambient ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... for food returns with pristine vigour; the viands, be they ever so homely, never tasted before so deliciously sweet; and a draught of water from the spring has the flavour of ambrosial nectar: the convalescent treads the ground as though he were on the ambient air; and the earth to him for a while is Paradise: the very act of living ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... and lifted his head. Ah, a drear and ghastly face it was, turned up to the gorgeous sunset, the gentle ambient air, the happy, fleeting shadows of ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... who ne'er felt the pressure of distress, Ne'er felt returning pleasure's keen excess. Time who Affliction bore on rapid wing, My panting heart to happiness may bring; I, on my native hills, may yet inhale The purer influence of the ambient gale. ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... also instinctively group themselves together in order to form the body, the life, and the thought of the international world. Just as social life, far from disparaging the essential attributes of the sacred human person, constitutes the ambient medium necessary to the life, the development, and the attainment of the inalienable destiny of man, so this great commonwealth of nations, whose permanent establishment in America is the earnest desire of the Congress at Rio de Janeiro, should have as ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... August,—the hottest, dryest ever known along the lake, yet the dismal fog-horn tooted day after day and night after night when not so much as a single tear could have been wrung from the ambient air. It was all on account of the smoke-clouds that obscured the sun and shut out the horizon weeks at a time, for the whole Northwest was one blaze of forest fires, and Wells grew crabbed and ill tempered at ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... larger and lovelier in the light— And the sun rose behind the cliffs to eastward, and the sky became lemon-yellow (A graciously coloured veil twixt the earth and all mystery beyond), And the wavelets sparkled and darted like ten thousand fishes at play in the ambient dawn,— It seemed that the sky and the sea and the earth gathered themselves together, And became one vast kind eye, looking into the stern of the boat, At ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... a dew." Such monstrous heat! dear me! she never knew. Adown her innocent and beauteous face, The big, round, pearly drops each other chase; Thence trickling to those hills, erst white as snow, That now like AEtna's mighty mountains glow, They hang like dewdrops on the full blown rose, And to the ambient air their sweets disclose. Fever'd with pleasure, thus she drags along; Nor dares her antler'd husband say 'tis wrong. The blooming offspring of this blissful pair, In all their parents' attic pleasures share. Sophy the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Square—nor to the old New Town—nor to the new New Town—nor to the Calton Hill. I went to the Canongate, and to the very portion of the Canongate in which I had formerly been immured, like the errant knight, prisoner in some enchanted castle, where spells have made the ambient air impervious to the unhappy captive, although the organs of sight encountered no obstacle ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... recovered her memory for most things, but the facts of her former life were still a blank to her. She had begun to work for her First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness, vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the contrary, conspicuously hers. Once ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... characterized their letters. They raved about the freedom of the West; they went into fresh raptures over the view, and almost deranged their respiratory organs in their praises of the air. They breathed in deep breaths of the ambient atmosphere, chewed it up with loud smacks of enjoyment, and then blew it out, snorting like whales. Evelyn, who was not without a sense of humor, would have enjoyed it all, and laughed at them, even if she could not laugh with them, if she could ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... Brother Abel offer at the same Time a Lamb of his Flock, for he, you know, delights in Cattle, and covers the Mountains with his Herds? over him, all the while he was sacrificing, a bright Emanation shone chearing and enlivening; a Pledge of Favour, and light ambient Flames play'd hovering in the lower Air, as if attending his Sacrifice; and when ready prepar'd, immediately descended and burnt up the Flesh, a Sweet odoriferous Savour ascending to him, who thus testified his Acceptance; whereas, over my Head a black Cloud, misty, and distilling Vapour, ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... On whose huge base, like isles amid sky driven, A vast protuberance props the cope of heaven; Earth's loftiest turrets there contend for height, And all our Andes fill the bounded sight. From south to north what long blue swells arise, Built thro the clouds, and lost in ambient skies! Approaching slow they heave expanding bounds, The yielding concave bends sublimer rounds; Whose wearied stars, high curving to the west, Pause on the summits for a moment's rest; Recumbent there they renovate their force, And roll ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... sitting in the deep shade of some lofty ceiba, one may watch with curious eyes the myriads of many-hued, broad-winged butterflies, mingling orange, crimson, and steel-blue in dazzling combinations, as they flit through the ambient atmosphere with a background of shining, evergreen foliage, the hum of insects and the carol of birds forming a soft lullaby inviting sleep. Naturalists tell us that no less than three hundred distinct species of butterflies are found in Cuba, ranging in size ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... observation in the remote. It brings the remote near to us, but such a complicated journey as it must first have had to make! Remote in time (in differing degrees), remote in place, remote in feeling, in habit, and in their ambient air, are the images that spring from his pencil, and yet all so vividly, so minutely, so consistently seen! Where does he see them, where does he find them, how does he catch them, and in what language does he delightfully converse ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... my ambient curiosity about what a telepathed grinding of the teeth in frustrated anger would transmit as. And when it managed to occur to an unemployed thought-center of my brain that the lines of battle were soft and sweetly curved indeed, Joseph Barcelona couldn't stand it any more. He just gave a mental ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith
... Eye so superficially surveyes These things, as not to mind from whence they grow Deep under ground, materials dark and crude, Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht With Heav'ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth 480 So beauteous, op'ning to the ambient light. These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep Shall yeild us, pregnant with infernal flame, Which into hallow Engins long and round Thick-rammd, at th' other bore with touch of fire Dilated and infuriate shall send forth From far with thundring ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... fastened. By coming thus in arms against her Gian Maria sought to win her for his wife; yet all that he had accomplished was to place her in the arms of the one man whom she had learnt to love by virtue of this very siege. The mellow warmth of the night, the ambient perfume of the fields were well-sorted to her mood, and the faint breeze that breathed caressingly upon her cheek seemed to re-echo the melodies her heart was giving forth. In that hour those old grey walls ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... earnestly and lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to meet him. No eye but God's beholds them as they rise. There, in the upper atmosphere, they are condensed to mist, and gather into clouds, and float and swim around in the ambient air. They sail with its currents, and hover over the ocean, and roll in huge masses round the stony shoulders of great mountains. Condensed still more by change of temperature, they drop upon the thirsty earth ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... be done; but he determined not even to consider the situation until he had seen his aunt. A hopeful mood, for which no cause existed, somehow possessed him upon this day. For no reason and spun of nothing in the least tangible, there grew around him an ambient intuition that he was going to get out of this fix with the help of Jenny Ironsyde. The impression created a wave of generosity to Sabina. He felt a large magnanimity. He was prepared to do everything right and reasonable. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the evil harvest and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15). I will collect afterwards and complete what I have already written respecting the Pegasean and Gorgonian legends, noting here only what is necessary to explain the central myth of Athena herself, who represents the ambient air, which included all cloud, and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, and wrath of heaven. Let me now try to give you, however briefly, some distinct idea of the several agencies ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... valley lies the conquered rout Of man's poor trivial turmoil, lost and drowned Under the mist, in gleaming rivers rolled, Where oozy marsh contends with frothing main. And rounding all, springs one full, ambient arch, One great good limpid world—so still, so still! For no sound echoes from its crystal curve Save four clear notes, the song of that lone bird Who, brave but trembling, tries his morning hymn, And has no ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various |
