"Unfixed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... give if I was a square man, and how happy I could be with such a woman as my wife. I did not tell her my business, for fear she would think less of me. I could not endure the deception, so after three days of happiness I tore myself away, feeling as if I was "unfixed for life." In a short time she visited relatives in New Orleans, and sent me an invitation to call; but as I was acquainted with her friends, the same old dread came upon me, so I declined, with the excuse that I was ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... indifference in the mass of men to religion itself, the enormous increase of the royal power in consequence of the humiliation of the nobility and the clergy—the transference of the papal authority to the crown,—the unfixed state of Elizabeth's own opinions, whose inclinations were as popish as her interests were protestant—the controversial extravagance and practical imbecility of her successor—will help to explain the former period; and the persecutions that had given a life ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... besides, it was explained that his destination in India was unfixed. On going home it had been a kind of promise that one of the twin brothers should have an appointment in the civil service, the other should enter the bank of Kendal and Kendal, and the survivor was unconsciously suspended between ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... among these notes you will find a history of the city of Kor as she told it to me, which I have omitted here. Still, many of these remarkable events did more or less fade from my mind, as the image does from an unfixed photograph, till only their outlines remained, faint ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... whole of the dye-stuff from the bath; what excess is left combines with the mordant when the latter is added, forming an insoluble colour lake, which falls down to the bottom of the dye-vat and is wasted, or it may go upon the wool in (p. 075) a loose, unfixed form, and cause it to rub badly and come off in milling. Then it is rather difficult to dye to shade, much of the result depending on conditions over which the dyer has little control. Working as he does with dye-stuffs of unknown colouring power, which may vary from time to time with every fresh ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade, and grow old at last, and ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... possibly escape them: For the fate the most fastidious, For the impulse the most powerful. Even the planets most malicious Only make free will incline, But can force not human wishes. And thus 'twist these different causes Vacillating and unfixed, I a remedy have thought of Which will with new wonder fill you. I to-morrow morning purpose, Without letting it be hinted That he is my son, and therefore Your true King, at once to fix him As King ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... much it meant to him, how much he meant by the few words. Almost childish, she wanted proof, and statement, even over-statement, for everything seemed still uncertain, unfixed to her. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity, properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and, like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two hours while the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... became, how it was to be distinguished from sorcery—these are questions that we have tried to answer very briefly. We have dealt in a cursory way with a series of cases extending from Anglo-Saxon days down to the fifteenth century in order to show how unfixed was the matter of jurisdiction. We have sought also to explain how Continental opinion was introduced into England through Jewel and other Marian exiles, to show what independent forces were operating in England, and to exhibit the growing influence of the charmers and their relation to the development ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Adorned, without; unfinished left, within. Hence, by no judgment you your loves direct; Talk much, ne'er think, and still the wrong affect. So much self-love in your composure's mixed, That love to others still remains unfixed: Greatness, and noise, and shew, are your delight; Yet wise men love you, in their own despite: And finding in their native wit no ease, Are forced to put ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... survivors lay exhausted the attackers charged over them, cheering. In the melee that followed there was no room to shoot or wield the rifle. Some of the French fought with unfixed bayonets, like the stabbing swords of the Roman legions. Others had knives or clubs. All were battle-frenzied, as ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... mouthful of air" defies the centuries; it keeps its shape and its quivering substance. Strongest of all such lives are perhaps those where "the mouthful of air" is left by the singer mere air, and no more, unfixed on paper or parchment; when the song goes from mouth to mouth, altering its contours it may be, but unchanged in essence, though coloured by its immediate surroundings as a flower fits itself to each soil. Such was the song that I had the chance to write down, from lips to which it came through ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform^; versatile. unstaid^, inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wherefore this advice? young, unespoused, Charoba want persuasions! and a queen!" "O Dalica!" the shuddering maid exclaimed, "Could I encounter that fierce, frightful man? Could I speak? no, nor sigh!" "And canst thou reign?" Cried Dalica; "yield empire or comply." Unfixed though seeming fixed, her eyes downcast, The wonted buzz and bustle of the court From far through sculptured galleries met her ear; Then lifting up her head, the evening sun Poured a fresh splendour on her burnished ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... consuming zeal that I stood transfixed with wonder and awe. He was alone, and I came suddenly upon him at a sharp bend of the road. He threw his legs about him with such regardless glee, that for a moment I was afraid one of them would get unfixed and come spinning through the air to hit me. I watched him like one fascinated for fully ten minutes. When at length he saw me, the glory flowed suddenly off his legs; he subsided into a country bumpkin, and beat a hasty retreat indoors. "If Greek dances were as artistic ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... for every beholder, rather than him who brings back a photograph of the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying granite story for all. There is one glory of the Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the Poet with his variable quantities of fancy. The fixed fact may be unfixed next year, like an almanac, but the hasty sketch of the true artist is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... reach the trench in safety, and next morning the rations are issued at "stand-to." "Stand-to" is the name given to the sunrise hour, and again that hour at night when every man stands to the parapet in full equipment and with fixed bayonet. After morning stand-to bayonets are unfixed, for if the sunlight should glint upon the polished steel our position might be ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... Catherine was in the habit of judging for herself, and unfixed as were her general notions of what men ought to be, she could not entirely repress a doubt, while she bore with the effusions of his endless conceit, of his being altogether completely agreeable. It was a bold surmise, for he was Isabella's brother; ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Don Giovanni, seated at his table, eats, drinks, indulges in badinage with his servant, and listens to the music of his private band. The musicians play melodies from popular operas of the period in which Mozart wrote—not Spanish melodies of the unfixed time in which the veritable Don Juan ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the coarser and more material religion of the many, and accompanying it, through the course of its history, as its ethereal, less palpable, life-giving soul, and, as always happens, seeking the quiet, and not too anxious to make itself felt by others. With some unfixed, though real, place in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase of the worship of Dionysus had its special development in the Orphic literature and mysteries. Obscure as are those followers of the mystical ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... among us by the French name of bayonet. The bayonet seems not to have been then so formidable an instrument of destruction as it has since become; for it was inserted in the muzzle of the gun; and in action much time was lost while the soldier unfixed his bayonet in order to fire, and fixed it again in order to charge. The dragoon, when ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... awkward for Elizabeth, since she could not give any explanation of her proceedings which would clear her in the eyes of her employers. Nicholas Clere, like many other people of prejudiced minds and fixed opinions, had a mind totally unfixed in the one matter of religion. His religion was whatever he found it to his worldly advantage to be. During King Edward's reign, it was polite and fashionable to be a Protestant; now, under Queen Mary, the only way to make a man's fortune ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... disturbances. And a man may with more reason look for constant fair weather in the midst of winter than for perpetual exemption from afflictions in his body. For what else hath given the poets occasion to term us ephemeral creatures, uncertain and unfixed, and to liken our lives to leaves that both spring and fall in the lapse of a summer, but the unhappy, calamitous, and sickly condition of the body, whose very utmost good we are warned to dread and prevent? For an exquisite habit, Hippocrates saith, is slippery ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... cries of surrender or to the beseeching plaints of the wounded," said a French soldier, describing one of these scenes. "We had no use for prisoners and on both sides there was no quarter given in this Argonne wood. Better than fixed bayonets was an unfixed bayonet grasped as a dagger. Better than any bayonet was a bit of iron or a broken gun-stock, or a sharp knife. In that hand-to-hand fighting there was no shooting but only the struggling of interlaced bodies, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... could he do of good? He preached and preached, but nothing came of it. Would not the land of the starry west suit better such a heart and such a mind as his? But he wouldn't stir while his fate was as yet unfixed in reference to Polly Neefit. Strikes were dear to him, and oratory, and the noisy applauses of the Cheshire Cheese; but nothing was so dear to him as Polly Neefit. He went about the world with a great burden lying on his chest, and that burden was his love for Polly Neefit. In ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... all this has changed. In the words of a well-known modern English historian, 'The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, has sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, is seen to be but a small atom in the awful easiness of the universe.'[4] The whole position, indeed, is reversed. The skies once seemed to pay the earth homage, and to serve it with light and shelter. Now they do nothing, so far as the imagination ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the force which gives unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Little by little, it works out the substance of the Hegelian formula: "Whatever is, is according to reason: whatever ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the bent which, was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by its humor, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of smiling at its own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... first in so soft a whisper that for a long time he had not known it was his heart he heard. When something within uttered and re-uttered the place's name, he would silently explain to himself: "It is because I am from home. It is this unfixed camp-life, this life without my father, without Bonaventure, that does it. This is not love, of course; I know that: for, in the first place, I was in love once, when I was fourteen, and it was not at all like this; ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Merlin's calculation, Was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars; His mind with all their attributes was mixed, And, like those planets, wandering and unfixed. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... regard as the grand regulator of the blood's flow; and it is admirably situated for measuring out a regular portion of blood at every contraction. John Bell, believing in the Harveian theory, said, "It is awful to think of the unfixed position of the heart;" and Dr. Arnott declared that "the heart, the heart alone, is the ragged anomaly in the laws of fitness in mechanics." The heart was now seen to have a right position; for it should swing loose that its moorings be not endangered; and, as whatever ...
— Theory of Circulation by Respiration - Synopsis of its Principles and History • Emma Willard
... They perceive that they are nothing but branches, wrenched from the great African banyan, not yet planted in genial soil, and affording neither shelter nor food to the beasts of the forest or the fowls of the air—their roots unfixed in the earth, and their tender shoots withering as they hang pendent from ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... face of the earth. He read an article on mass production, showing how a celebrated American produced a thousand or a hundred thousand cars a day—he wasn't certain which—and how the car, in various parts, passed along an endless table, between lines of expectant workmen, each of whom fixed a nut or unfixed a nut, so that, when the machine finally reached its journey's end, it left the table under ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... public import, You know I never sought, would never seek To win a word from you; but feeling now Your grief is private, it belongs to me To lighten or divide it. Since the day When foolish Steno's ribaldry detected 220 Unfixed your quiet, you are greatly changed, And I would soothe you ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken, before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those, who cannot read, catch sounds imperfectly, and utter them negligently. When this wild and barbarous jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavoured to express, as he could, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... is impossible to found morality on notions that are so unfixed and so contrary to all our natural ideas of virtue. By virtue, we ought to understand the habitual dispositions to do whatever will procure us the happiness of ourselves and our species. By virtue, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... man out on the rack. They did not stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere—because their minds were fixed on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... so powerful as Mr. Gladstone's could dream that, at that age of the world, men would suffer one of the most far-reaching of all our social problems, whatever be the right or wrong social solution, to be in the slightest degree affected by a Greek word or two of utterly disputable and unfixed significance. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... untrue to her was that she was too pure for his debauched fancy. Thus reasoned Drumley with that mingling of truth and error characteristic of those who speculate about matters of which they have small and unfixed experience. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... editor of the paper and died in harness, and was said most truly. Punch was more congenial to him, and no doubt more generous, than Fraser. There was still something of the literary Bohemian about him, but not as it had been before. He was still unfixed, looking out for some higher career, not altogether satisfied to be no more than one of an anonymous band of brothers, even though the brothers were the brothers of Punch. We can only imagine what were his thoughts as to himself and that other man, who was then known ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope |
