"Astonish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... barricades were assembling points for heroism. The improbable was simple there. These men did not astonish each other. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... She waited the fitting moment, with splendour to astonish, and with grandeur to subdue her lover. To tell the sad truth, she was no longer sure that it would be well to encourage him on the old footing; was she not standing on tiptoe, her skirts in her hand, on the brink of the brook that parted serfdom from gentility, on the point of stepping ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... possibilities baffling even the imagination. The waters which surround it, as we have seen, abound with a variety of fishes, whose bright colors, emulating the tints of precious stones and the prismatic hues of the rainbow, astonish and delight the eye of the stranger. Stately and peculiar trees enliven the picturesque landscape. Throughout the woods and groves flit a variety of birds, whose dazzling colors defy the palette of the artist. Here the loquacious parrot utters his harsh natural notes; ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... know what I think about myself? I think that I shall astonish the world with one of those grand passions which make history worth reading. The girl who gets me ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... even more exciting to astonish us with," laughed Gipsy. "I wish we could have climbed ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... ever see land again. For thirty-six hours we had kept her nose to it, and if the Mary Sinclair had not been as good a seaboat as ever left the Clyde, we could not have gone through. And yet here we were at the end of it with the loss only of our gig and of part of the starboard bulwark. It did not astonish us, however, when the smother had cleared away, to find that others had been less lucky, and that this mutilated brig staggering about upon a blue sea and under a cloudless sky, had been left, like a blinded man after a lightning flash, ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strongest lenses find nothing? I have some doubts as to whether ants are really shut out of many flowers by hairs pointing downwards in a fringe and similar contrivances. The ant has a singularly powerful pair of mandibles: put one between your shirt and skin and try; the nip you will get will astonish you. With these they can shear off the legs or even the head of another ant in battle. I cannot see, therefore, why, if they wished, they could not nip off this fringe of hairs, or even sever the stem of the plant. Evidently they do not wish, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... directions that the scientific achievements to astonish our children will probably be achieved. Progress never appears to be uniform in human affairs. There are intricate correlations between department and department. One field must mark time until another can come up to it with results sufficiently ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... chap remains On sentry-go, to chase monotony He exercises of his brains, That is, assuming that he's got any. Though never nurtured in the lap Of luxury, yet I admonish you, I am an intellectual chap, And think of things that would astonish you. I often think it's comical How Nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... inanimate objects, which are supposed by primitive man to be dangerous or taboo, we are met by a fact which will astonish anthropologists, and which I cannot satisfactorily explain. Blood is everywhere in the savage world regarded with suspicion and anxiety; there is something mysterious about it as containing (so they thought) the life, and its colour and smell are also uncanny; horses cannot endure it, and there ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... sciences. We lived for seven or eight centuries like savages, and to complete our barbarism, were inundated with a race of men termed monks, who brutified, in Europe, that human species which you had conquered and enlightened. But what will most astonish you is, that in the latter ages of ignorance amongst these very monks, these very enemies to civilization, nature nurtured some useful men. Some invented the art of assisting the feeble sight of age; and others, by pounding together ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... they feel themselves better than George?" asked Fanny. "They don't astonish the world with good looks, or refinement of manners or mind. Their fathers are rich I know, and they have nothing to do but dress, and study etiquette. They can hardly stoop to what they call common people. But I don't envy them at all. They were always disliked at school, and were always at ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... queen of awful night, Dread tyrant say! Why parting throes this lab'ring frame distend, Why dire convulsions rend, And teeming horrors wreck th' astonish'd sight? Why shrinks the trembling soul, Why with amazement full Pines at thy rule, and sickens at thy sway? Why low'r the thunder of thy brow, Why livid angers glow, Mistaken phantom, say? Far hence exert thy awful reign, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... but sought to please by simplicity alone. In this way, through the desire of the operatic composers to avail themselves as far as possible of the technical resources of composition acquired by the learned musicians of the contrapuntal schools, and to please their hearers and to astonish them in various ways, all the different forces in music began to exercise themselves and come to expression in opera; but as yet nothing of the sort had made any great progress in ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... if you say so, she and her father. Jimmy Brunell's more than anxious to see you; he wants to make a clean breast of the whole affair—tell all he knows about the case; and I think what he's got to say will astonish you and finish the whole thing—crack that nut you were talking to me about this afternoon, provide the link in the chain, the crevice in the crime ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... said Max, "what advantages you will enjoy over the rest of us, when we get to Eiulo's island, as Johnny is confident we are destined to do, one of these days. You shall then astonish the simple inhabitants, with Pitt's reply to Walpole, or 'Now is the winter of our discontent,' and gain advancement in the state, by your oratorical gifts. Who knows but you may rise to be prime-minister, or chief Rauti, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,—"Ara nudus; sere nudus, "—which as Silas Foster remarked, when I translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... foot and lashed upon a board with one end sharpened for the convenience of the mother. Whenever she grows weary one end of the board is stuck into the ground and the children often are left for a considerable time. The appearance is singular, and would astonish those that had never seen the Indians' manner of treating their children. Indian children are white when born, their eyes very black. Their hair long, straight and black. Their features full and well-shaped with large, Roman ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... accompanied by a very kind letter from you, and a beautiful shawl, which will be most useful to me, particularly as a favourite one of mine is growing very old. I wish you could come here, for many reasons, but also to be an eye-witness of my extreme prudence in eating, which would astonish you. The poor sea-gulls are, however, not so happy as you imagine, for they have great enemies in the country-people here, who ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... the varieties of color. I wonder that I have so long been insensible to this charm in the skies, the tints of the different stars are so delicate in their variety. ... What a pity that some of our manufacturers shouldn't be able to steal the secret of dyestuffs from the stars, and astonish the feminine taste by new brilliancy in fashion. [Footnote: ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... their lovers—a complete, even somewhat squeamish, indifference, before every evening dim hopes came to life and stirred within their souls; it was unknown who would choose them, whether something unusual, funny and alluring might not happen, whether a guest would not astonish with his generosity, whether there would not be some miracle which would overturn the whole life...In these presentiments and hopes was something akin to those emotions which the accustomed gamester experiences ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... only restored to me my mother, but has raised me from the lowest rung in the ladder to the very highest, and given me the sweetest, and most—. But enough. Come and see for yourself. Her name is Nellie. But I have more to astonish you with. Not only do I take Nellie back with me to my home in the new world, but I take my mother also, and Natty Grove, and old Nell herself! How we got her to understand what we want her to do, could not be told in less than four hundred pages of small type. Nat did it, by means ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... life—which is not very likely—it will be that I may meet that scoundrel, Napoleon Bonaparte, on dry land. I hear that he is eager to encounter me on the waves, himself commanding a line-of-battle ship. I should send him to the devil in a quarter of an hour. And ashore I could astonish him, I think, a little, if I had a good army to back me up. Remember what I did at Bastia, in the land that produced this monster, and where I was called the Brigadier; and again, upon the coast of Italy, I showed ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... that come from the fellowship with the children are a new and a real experience—this is what counts. You will have opportunities of sewing seeds in their minds that will grow into a harvest that will astonish you. Children in the right mood—and they are in the right mood when they are happy, and they are happy out in the open with an interesting companion—are alert, and responsive, and eager to be told "things," and this mood can be put to marvelous ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... ground. As we ascended, we passed under enormous monastic porticos, also in granite of rude and primitive style. In truth, these steps and these temple porticos are the only imposing works that this people has created, and they astonish, for ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Catarack we pass, more beeger dan de Soo, She's nearly t'orty mile for sure, it would astonish you, Dat's place t'ree Irishman get drown, wan day we have beeg storm, I s'pose de Queen is feel lak cry, ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... life in the hulks than from that of my own father. Then this Indian Colonel had taken my fancy, and it had made him sick to see the womanish—he could call it no better, the weak-womanish—way in which I worshipped him. If I were a daughter instead of a son, my caprices would distress and astonish him less. He could have sent me to my mother, and my mother might have sent me to my needle. In a son, from whom he looked for manly feeling and good English common-sense, it was painful in the extreme. Vanity, the love of my own way, and want of candour—(my father took a pinch of snuff ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been gathered, prepared, and is dispensed ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... road to world mastery. Wellington at twenty-eight had not yet found himself. But now on his trip to India he was on the threshold of his career. His deeds there and on other fields were to astonish the world. Did they also astonish ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... cried Lord Connemara, seizing the opportunity with well-affected surprise. 'You really astonish me. He was a Croatian, I believe, or an Illyrian—I forget which—and he studied at Rome under Giulio Romano. Wonderful draughtsman in the nude, and fine colourist; took hints from Raphael and Michael Angelo.' So much he had picked up from Menotti and Cicolari, and, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Daisy Holroyd, 'there's a thing in that ocean that would astonish you if you saw it. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... had thrown down his basket, and had run off towards Mosul as fast as his legs could carry him." The marvellous fidelity and power with which this, and the colossal human-headed bull are executed, must astonish the most uninstructed observer. For an account of the marvellous labour at the cost of which these colossal Assyrian works were conveyed from Asia Minor to the British Museum, we must refer the reader to Mr. Layard's excellent condensed account of his researches, published by ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... to astonish you greatly. I am the Marquis de Favieres. I do not know you, but I come to you to ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... astonish me with your painstaking work; is it a coquetry? It does not seem labored. What I find difficult is to choose out of the thousand combinations of scenic action which can vary infinitely, the clear and striking situation which is not brutal ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... style as a puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emancipation has come somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet, and it is quite likely that when he sounds them he may astonish the world rather considerably. Now, if we may interpret the last poem in his book, he is turning towards ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this country bad not too much, everything very good. But suppose I not tell something little bad, then you say I tell all flattery—therefore I tell most bad thing. I not like such crowd in evening party every night. In cold weather not very good, now hot weather, much too bad. I very much astonish every day now much hot than before, evening parties much crowd than before. Pretty beautiful ladies come sweat, that not very good. I always afraid some old lady in crowd come dead, that not very good, and spoil my happiness. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... which serve the creatures whom He has come to help. Ah, how different He is, this Mighty One, from you and me! When we are talking to some one who knows a little less than ourselves, we talk out all we know to show our knowledge, expanding ourselves as much as we can so as to astonish and make marvel the one to whom we speak; that is because we are so small that we fear our greatness will not be recognised unless we make ourselves as large as we can to astonish, if possible to terrify; but when He comes who is really great, who is mightier than anything which He ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... I'll astonish Professor Tapper with you when I get home," he said; "you are worthy to be ranked with the fur-bearing South Polar pollywog. I will feed you till your feathers shine and you are the envied of all birds. I am the most fortunate ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... dangerous convulsion in her own bowels. The son of the chevalier de St. George, fired with ambition, and animated with the hope of ascending the throne of his ancestors, resolved to make an effort for that purpose, which, though it might not be crowned with success, should at least astonish all Christendom. The Jacobites in England and Scotland had promised, that if he would land in Britain at the head of a regular army, they would supply him with provisions, carriages, and horses, and a great number of them declared they would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... nothing to relate myself," replied the old detective, without even drawing his pipe from his lips, "I am too stupid, that is perfectly understood. But Monsieur Lecoq will tell you something that will astonish you." ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... doubting. It is probable that I shall make an admirable old maid. Wisdom has its disadvantages. I might be very happy with Arthur, were I not so wise." She smiled again at the reflection in the mirror. "Now, let us go and astonish the natives." ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... none uninjured;—could the multitudes of such beings, which in the United States alone, (though admitted to be the paradise of the world,) have gone down to infamy through licentiousness, be presented to our view, at once, how would it strike us with horror! Their very numbers would astonish us, but how much more their appearance! I am supposing them to appear as they went to the graves, in their bloated and disfigured faces, their emaciated and tottering frames, bending at thirty years of age under the appearance of three or four score; diseased externally ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... hide him from the murderous King Herod, the parents of Jesus could not allow their son to go out, and he, no doubt, spent all his time in studying the sacred Scriptures, so that his knowledge was sufficiently beyond what would naturally have been expected of a boy of his age to greatly astonish the elders of Israel. He had in his thirteenth year attained an age when, according to Jewish law, the boy becomes an adult, has the right to marry, and incurs obligations for the discharge of the religious duties ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... boat! You astonish me. I thought escape from the Belle Helene was the one wish of your heart ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... on foot and shaken off the ennui which had oppressed her in the morning, Josephine Harris left the house where she had paid so remarkable a first visit, and returned to her own, to astonish her mother with the knowledge of an intended prank somewhat more reckless and outrageous than any upon which she had ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... acceleration. Its development was a part of the mental changes that came to him in the wild excitements of the last four years of his ascent. Towards the climax he was a furious spender; he shopped with large unexpected purchases, he shopped like a mind seeking expression, he shopped to astonish and dismay; shopped crescendo, shopped fortissimo, con molto espressione until the magnificent smash of Crest Hill eroded his shopping for ever. Always it was he who shopped. My aunt did not shine ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... and scanty, his nose sharp and narrow. He is a junior partner in the firm of Bannister & Son, and it is his unalterable conviction that, if his father would only give him a chance, he could show Wall Street some high finance that would astonish it. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... seemed to astonish him," said Sam. "Did you hear him ask about the combination on the safe? He must have been wondering whether we suspected his uncle ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... occasionally found himself indirectly soliciting the advice of this gentle, clear-eyed and clear-headed young person, more especially as regarded the difficulties surrounding Sheila; and sometimes a chance remark of hers, uttered in a timid or careless or even mocking fashion, would astonish him by the rapid light it threw on these dark troubles. On this evening—the last evening they were spending in London—it was his own affairs which he proposed to mention to Mrs. Lorraine, and he had no more hesitation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... astonish the eyes of children from the outside world, but it was by no means all that Twinkle and Chubbins beheld in that first curious look at Sugar-Loaf City. For the city was inhabited by many people—men, women and children—who walked along the streets just as briskly ...
— Twinkle and Chubbins - Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland • L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
... apartment, since its size permitted to each his own segregated and peculiar employment. A large screen fenced off from interruption my father's erudite settlement; and quite out of sight, behind that impermeable barrier, he was now calmly winding up that eloquent peroration which will astonish the world whenever, by Heaven's special mercy, the printer's devils have done with "The History of Human Error." In another nook my uncle had ensconced himself, stirring his coffee (in the cup my mother had presented to him so many years ago, and which ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one or more of his slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did this to alarm their fears, and strike terror into those who escaped. His plan was to whip for the smallest offences, to prevent the commission of large ones. Mr. Hopkins could always find some excuse for whipping a slave. It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which a ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... and were executed upon a scale of such grandeur! In future ages, when the science of war shall have changed, how few traces will exist of the labours of Vauban and Coehorn, while this wonderful people's remains will even then continue to interest and astonish posterity! Their fortifications, their aqueducts, their theatres, their fountains, all their public works, bear the grave, solid, and majestic character of their language; while our modern labours, like our modern tongues, seem but constructed out of their ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and if they were not interfered with, and their national customs invaded with road-making, petty-sessions, grand-jury laws, and a stray commission now and then, they are capable of great things, and would astonish the world. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... She meant to astonish her hearers and keep them quiet, and she knew what to sing to gain her end, and how to sing it. Those who have not forgotten the story of her beginnings will remember that she was a thorough musician as well as a great singer, and was one of those very few primadonnas who are able to ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.[48] Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules,[49] the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... does not count you are very greatly mistaken. We not infrequently see men who have been engaged in one occupation with only very moderate success suddenly leap into fame in an entirely different line. Men who have struggled to be great artists or illustrators like du Maurier astonish the world with a previously concealed literary ability. It is foolish not to recognize the part that talent must play in the careers of artists. Sometimes hard work and patient persistence will stimulate the mind and soul, and reveal talents that were never supposed to exist, but if ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... alternately shocked and inspired; there is a perpetual conflict between our understanding and our feelings. Yet the latter on the whole come off victorious. The Robbers is a tragedy that will long find readers to astonish, and, with all its faults, to move. It stands, in our imagination, like some ancient rugged pile of a barbarous age; irregular, fantastic, useless; but grand in its height and massiveness and black frowning strength. It will long remain a singular monument of the early ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... soul; others were positively delighted at the fact that he was a murderer. It appeared too that he had had a very good education and was indeed a man of considerable culture. No great acquirements were needed, of course, to astonish us. But he could judge also of very interesting everyday affairs, and, what was of the utmost value, he judged of them with remarkable good sense. I must mention as a peculiar fact that almost from the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... eagerly for his wife, to inform her of his adventure, but was told she was not returned from market. He waited impatiently for her return, when he sprang up to meet her, crying, "Wife, I have done something to-day that will astonish you. I have performed a marvellous exploit!" "Patience!" says his wife. "Perhaps I have done something myself to match it. But hear my story, and then talk of cleverness, if you please." The ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... "You astonish me," interrupted Miss Cass, "though I must say very agreeably. You were the last person from whom I thought of obtaining any countenance. I did not come to you until armed with the consent of almost all the parties interested, because from ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... astonish me: why, she seemed almost fond of her husband; the tears came in her eyes when she spoke ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... It may astonish the reader to know that the funambulist or rope-dancer was very expert with the Greeks, as also was the acrobat between knives and swords. Animals were also taught to dance on ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... amused to see the different modes of treating that favourite subject myself.' He is to be allowed L240 a year, but he is determined not to be straitened, nor to encourage the least narrowness, but to draw on his father when necessary. Wilkes had gone to France, but had let him have some franks 'to astonish a few North Britons.' Parting for a time with Temple, whose family was now in straitened circumstances, he assures him that their friendship should be 'an exalted comfort' to him in his distress, and concludes characteristically enough ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... incomes made by chamber-barristers, and of the sums realized by counsel in departments of the profession that do not invite the attention of the general public, would astonish those uninformed persons who estimate the success of a barrister by the frequency with which his name appears in the newspaper reports of trials and suits. The talkers of the bar enjoy more eclat than the barristers ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... that of the Doctor's, I should say that these rabbits flew in PAIRS. Red-nosed, winged rabbits! I had never heard or read of the species; and I naturally grew enthusiastic in the chase, hoping to bring home a choice specimen to astonish our English naturalists. With some difficulty we managed to catch one or two, which had run into their holes instead of flying away. They bit and scratched like tiger-cats, and screamed like parrots; indeed, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... 'You astonish me, Sir,' said Mr. Leo Hunter. 'It created an immense sensation. It was signed with an "L" and eight stars, and appeared originally in a lady's magazine. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... less complexity,—truths which are often found to be in accordance with the spiritual instinct called intuition, which children possess more fully than grown persons. The wisdom of our children would often astonish us, if we would only forbear the attempt to make them knowing, and submissively accept instruction from them. Through all the imperfection of their inherited infirmity, we shall ever and anon be conscious of the radiance of a beautiful, unconscious intelligence, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... were filled with passers-by, who were talking, and she heard conversations which did not astonish her, as if she had known the people, for through her dreamy intoxication, she still heard her mother's friends laughing ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... isn't what you think. It isn't what you think." Mr. Franklin looked more apoplectic than ever. "If it comes to that I could astonish you. But it's no use. I myself can hardly . . . You couldn't understand. I hope you won't try to make mischief. There was a time, young fellow, when I would have dared any man—any man, you hear?—to make mischief between me and Captain ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... guilty man, whose life he held in his hands, was enough to astonish him. He had expected a stormy discussion and prayers and tears. He had before him a man convicted of the most heinous of crimes, and the man ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... The favorable side of his character is, that he is good-tempered and good-natured; by no means cruel; and, in a certain way, generous, though rapacious to a high degree. His rapacity, indeed, is carried to such an excess as to astonish a European, and is evinced in a thousand mean ways. The presents I made him were unquestionably handsome; but he was not content without begging from me the share I had reserved for the other Pangerans; and afterward, through Mr. Williamson, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... on his raw wound. Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was to be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came up to him, with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... attending church, which seemed to surprise him a good deal, especially as his absence was attributed by Meldon to shame and a consciousness of guilt, feelings from which Simpkins had never in his life suffered. Then—and this seemed to astonish him still more—he was warmly invited to go for a ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... of the Tagus and the Tiber and the Seine and the Mississippi—and they will all be the river near his home. Then let him travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is from these islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense of novelty and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more majestic, seen from the enormous forest heights above its lower course, than what, perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it will be ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... soon," said the doctor, looking at the corpse before him; "but that ought not to astonish you; Monsieur and Madame de Saint-Meran died as soon. People die very suddenly in ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners," declared Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the stone. "It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity. Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him all of the accumulative ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... heroism, a life which he had employed in iniquity. Without remembering this interval, during which ample time for preparation had been afforded, the hardihood which could sport with the most solemn of all subjects, would shock rather than astonish. In consideration of the conduct of many of our state prisoners on the scaffold, we must recollect how familiarized they had previously become with death, in those gloomy chambers whence they could see many a fellow sufferer issue, to shed his blood on the same scaffold ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... artificial court, where no one is what they seem to be; where everyone considers it his duty to say complimentary things; where everyone seems to be gay and happy, but everyone is as much slaves as if they wore chains. I break out sometimes, and astonish them." ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... would allow France some breathing time. The King was sixty years of age, and had, in his own opinion, acquired all sorts of glory. But scarcely were we at peace, without having had time to taste it, than the pride of the King made him wish to astonish all Europe by the display of a power that it believed prostrated. And truly he did astonish Europe. But at what a cost! The famous camp of Compiegne—for 'tis to that I allude—was one of the most magnificent ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sure of it. When Beauregard opens his batteries upon Sumter, you will see an uprising that will astonish the world. I am sorry to part with you, but you may go. You would no doubt get a letter from your father in a few days any way, so I don't suppose it ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... September 13, the correspondent of a press agency dispatched a telegram to London with the intimation that the great battle at Tel-el-Kebir was practically over. It may possibly astonish not a few of our readers (says a writer in the Echo), to learn that this message reached the metropolis between 7 and 8 o'clock on the same morning; and, in fact, had an unbroken telegraphic wire extended from Kassassin to London, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... to her. Molly was by nature so kind that her first feeling was one of pity for the young man as she hated to hurt his feelings; but she was sure that he did not love her in the least and that her refusal of him would astonish him but not give him a ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... of mystical abysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist or master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a new convention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it may astonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find no thoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the roots of his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... instructive, but useful chiefly as a means to aid in the true artistic reproduction of nature. When the, hospitals are invaded by the novelist, he should learn something from the physician as well as from the patients. Science delineates in monochrome. She never uses high tints and strontian lights to astonish lookers-on. Such scenes as Flaubert and Zola describe would be reproduced in their essential characters, but not dressed up in picturesque phrases. That is the first stumbling-block in the way of the reader of such realistic stories ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sheep have pigs' heads; where foxes fly about from tree to tree; where the swans are black; where rats make nests; where the bower-bird opens her reception-rooms to receive visits from her feathered friends; where the birds astonish the imagination by the variety of their notes and their aptness; where one bird serves for a clock, and another makes a sound like a postilion cracking of a whip, and a third imitates a knife-grinder, and a fourth the motion of a pendulum; where one laughs when the sun rises, and another cries when ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... exercise the influence of her gold in all the Cabinets of Europe. Peace must be broken; since it was evident that England was determined to break it. Why not anticipate her? Why allow her to have all the advantages of the first step? We must astonish Europe! We must thwart the policy of the Continent! We must strike a great and unexpected blow. Thus reasoned the First Consul, and every one may judge whether his actions ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... "Well! you astonish me, I freely admit," gasped the baronet. "This is the first time I ever heard of a ship being sunk by filling her with air. And then the cool way in which you talk of our 'sinking to the bottom like a stone!' I undertook this enterprise because I wanted to experience a new ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... crush it with such force that it would be a long time before it could raise its head again. Before it was over he hoped to drag in prominent members of the Duma (or the Duma itself) and other revolutionary leaders, and make an end of them. This plan need not astonish us, for this method, in one form or another, had been made use of by the autocracy time and again. Protopopov overreached himself, his scheme miscarried, the soldiers about the capital went back on ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... Robbers", a drama, the very name of which I had never before heard of:—A Winter midnight—the wind high—and "The Robbers" for the first time!—The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt. Schiller introduces no supernatural beings; yet his human beings agitate and astonish more than all the goblin rout—even of Shakespeare.' See for another account of the midnight reading of 'The Robbers', Letter to Southey, November [6], 1794, Letters of S. T. C., 1895, i. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... after-effects of supernaturalism. Like children escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than that there should be a great many people and that they should be all alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and later ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... you have just taken me; let my heart get steady, if it will, in its great happiness. Let me have some good runs in the woods, some good rows on the ponds, some hard gallops. Let me get tired, and I'll astonish ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... courage enough for anything, and she'll astonish you before the evening's over," prophesied Mac with unabated confidence, for he knew something ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... well understand, my lad. Now you shall come and tell your mother. I have news for you, dame, that will in no small degree astonish you," he said, as, followed by the two lads, he returned to the room where she was sitting. "In the first place, young Master Ormskirk has proved himself a better man than I ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... father's retreat from the room, under pretence of some important despatches to be sent off. She found herself alone with the object of her dislike—and only waited for a beginning to the conversation, that she might astonish his weak mind with the severity of her invectives. In fact, she had determined, according to the vulgar phrase, to tell him a bit of her mind—and a very small bit of it, she was well aware, would be sufficient to satisfy Count Ericson of the condition of all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... French sailors during the war. "Intentionally disregarding subtle evolutions," said the delegate Jean Bon Saint Andree, "perhaps our sailors will think it more appropriate and effective to resort to the boarding tactics in which the French were always victorious, and thus astonish the world by new prodigies of valor." "If they had added to their courage a little training," said the same commissioner after the battle, "the day might ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... But unless you have already heard my story from your Sister, I have much to relate that will astonish you. Follow me, therefore, to my Hotel ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and sent a small army of servants on before her to take possession of it—men and women of divers nations, who contrived to make their mistress notorious by their vagaries before she arrived to astonish the city by her own eccentricities. One day brought two pair of carriage horses, and a pair of Arabs for riding; the next, a train of carriages; a week after came the lady herself; and all Rome—English and American Rome ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... you do astonish me," faintly ejaculated the flushed widow, her comely face crimson to the roots of ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... exerted a pernicious influence on many since, is, we fear, undeniable. He had been taught, by the lives of the "wits," to consider aberration, eccentricity, and "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence of his poetry ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "You astonish me," said Mr. Findlay. "Do you mean to say that your family has never made any attempt ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... Travis,' said Edgar, seeing his blank look, 'we'll give you the honour of giving us a spread. You go on and order it at —'s, and I'll walk this fellow there. Curry soup that will astonish him, and warm the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... decks three times in order to astonish those confined below by the noise and bustle it made, Neptune introduced his young bride to the captain, and informed him he was in mourning for his last wife, pointing to his skin. "What occasioned her death?" inquired the captain. "She," replied the sea-god, "died of a violent ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... had time to search my soul. Oh, I am not the Alma Marston who has been spoiled and indulged—a fool leaping here and there with every impulse—watching a girl in my set do a silly thing and then doing a sillier thing in order to astonish her. That has been our life in the city. I never knew what it meant to be a mere human being, near death. You know you saved me from ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... miscellaneous one, made up of tableaux, songs, dialogues and recitations. Some of these reflected great credit upon the pupils and their teachers. I say some of them, because some parts were rendered so excellently as to astonish one who did not expect anything very good from negro scholars. One beautiful scene was, "Winding the May Pole," by twelve little girls dressed in white. Another striking piece was, "What Alcohol ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 7. July 1888 • Various
... perceive that thou didst observe them. The murdered man whom they flung into the water is Francisco Borgia, Duke of Candia; his murderer is his brother, and what thou seest now is only the prelude to actions which will astonish hell itself ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... nothing very wonderful if the story should be on the whole true, and these worthies were in the habit of dressing themselves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth. There are plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing 'bogy' in the history of savages, even of our ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... astonish, ze Indian Hurong. For ze sort of work special-ment, as like scouting on a stomach. Qu-vick, ver' qu-vick, and ver' quiet. By dark places of danger. One sees zat nozzing at all af-frightens zose Hurong. Also ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... You astonish me with the account of your books; and I should have been still more astonished if you had told me you had read a third (shall I say a tenth part?) of them. My reading powers were never very good, and now they are much diminished, especially ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... lend un a flick, if he should refuse me." "Fear not," cries Mrs Western; "the match is too advantageous to be refused." "I don't know that," answered the squire: "Allworthy is a queer b—ch, and money hath no effect o'un." "Brother," said the lady, "your politics astonish me. Are you really to be imposed on by professions? Do you think Mr Allworthy hath more contempt for money than other men because he professes more? Such credulity would better become one of us weak women, than that wise sex which heaven hath ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... at me about that projected grand entrance-hall of hers, which was to be knocked clean through the chimney, from one end of the house to the other, and astonish all guests by its generous amplitude. "But, wife," said I, "the chimney—consider the chimney: if you demolish the foundation, what is to support the superstructure?" "Oh, that will rest on the ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... absolute submission, as a redoubtable warrior endowed with a supernatural strength of soul. To the sound of warlike music, the Cossacks ascended the rivers. They disembarked clad in their finest raiment in order to astonish the inhabitants by their riches. Having thus assured the domination of Russia from Berezoff to Tobol, Iermak, satisfied and tranquil, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... a strange thing and one which might astonish you, but I feel an indescribable horror at the sight of yonder man. Have you ever seen a snake rise up on ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... don't talk so loud, or the cabby will hear you! Of course we're not ruined; but it would never astonish me any day if we came a howler. The pater goes too fast, and—— But we're all right now; and, for goodness' sake, don't say a word to mother; it would upset her dreadfully. It's only for her ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin |
