"Abnormally" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Prime Minister of Great Britain in this supreme crisis in English history, a remarkable man, of an abnormally quick mind, pretty nearly a great man, but now a spent force, at once nimble and weary. History may call him Great. If it do, he will owe this judgment to the war, with the conduct of which his name will be ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the theatre together, he had had no further chance of speaking to her. If they met in the street, she gave him, as Madeleine had foretold of her, a nod and a smile; and from this coolness, he had drawn the foolish inference that she wished to avoid him. Abnormally sensitive, he shrank out of her way. But now, the mad sympathy that had permeated him on the night she had made him her confidant grew up in him again; it swelled out into something monstrous—a gigantic pity that rebounded on himself. For he ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... nearer the market-place the progress became yet slower, for the crowd seemed suddenly and abnormally swelled. There was a great shouting of voices, too, in front, and the smell of burning came distinctly on the breeze. The man riding beside Robin turned his head and called out; and in answer one of the others ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... snow and this altitude, and being shut in from all the world that make everything so tense. On these far-off, ice-bound plains, life is abnormally vivid. We are all keyed up too ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... him, of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did not breed cowardice or baseness. Joan knew the burning in her breast—that thing ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... was extraordinarily watchful and alert. Often and often during his professional life his bare existence had depended on the faculty for scenting danger from behind the curtain of sleep; and his senses in this direction were so abnormally developed as to verge at times on the uncanny. Cat-like is a poor-word to describe ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... proficiency in the classics that she could not only write Latin but think in Latin. She took a great delight in reading, and, of course, read omnivorously, with a special preference for history, poetry, and politics. Her inquisitive and abnormally active mind early began its inquiries into the mysteries of religious faith, but as these were not conducted in a patient or reverent spirit, it is no wonder, perhaps, that they proved unsatisfactory. She got hold of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... would have no need to do so. He, and not the beefy brute or the intellectual paragon, would be Superman. The Christ, it often seems to me, keeps his hold on the world, and will keep it, not because he was God-man or man-God, not because he was born normally or abnormally, not because he redeemed mankind or didn't, not because he provided a refuge for souls on their beam-ends, but because, of all the great historic and legendary figures, he is the one who convinces us that he was never afraid. In him, as we picture him, courage and pluck were the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... York market are not often less attractive than those in London, so that American floating capital is not generally employed in the English market, but it does occasionally come about that rates become abnormally low here and that bankers send away their balances to be loaned out at other points. During long periods of low money, indeed, it often happens that large lending institutions here send away a considerable part of their deposits, to be steadily employed for loaning out and discounting bills ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... relief, her tortured conscience seemed only to renew its voices, and spring upon her all the more fiercely on the next occasion. The effect, of all these indecisive conflicts upon Mercy's character had not been good. They had left her morally bruised, and therefore abnormally sensitive to the least touch. She was in danger of becoming either a fanatic for truth, or indifferent to it. Paradoxcal as it may seem, she was in almost as much danger of the one as of the other. But always, when our hurts are fast healing without help, the help ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... impression of remoteness that almost amounted to the uncanny. The fact that she affected brilliant colors and clothed both herself and brother in garments of a wellnigh fantastic make, added to this impression, and gave perhaps some excuse to those persons who regarded her as being as abnormally constituted as her brother, finding it impossible, I suppose, to reconcile waywardness with industry, and a taste for the rich and beautiful with a poverty so respectable, it scarcely made itself known for the reality it was. A blonde gypsy some called her, a dangerous ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... cheekbones, and his keen eyes turned on Quair. The latter lighted a cigarette, expelled the smoke in two thin streams from his abnormally narrow nostrils. ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... with a sudden emotional perception of the fact that he was being taken care of in an abnormally ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unconscious of any reporting agencies outside the field of his abnormally focused attention. Normal conditions of pain or pleasure cease for the time to become real. Attention has been forced entirely out of normal channels and given a new direction. Then we discover, strangely enough, that though those messages of the afferent nerves cease to ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... outside Creator and Judge, and his desire is aimed at escape from this wrath through "election" and God's grace. But he is a Puritan endowed with a psychopathic temperament sensitive to the point of disease and gifted with an abnormally high visualising power. Hence his resemblance to the mystics, which is a resemblance of psychical temperament and not of ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... proved; they afford a kind of pleasure which those who are so happy as to possess them rarely speak of unless they are abnormally singular, and even then only in the privacy of intimate intercourse, where everything is buried. But the antipathies that arise from the inversion of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when developed by famous men. Thus, Bayle had hysterics when ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... more wildly uneven, although sound, than I had ever before seen teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy—of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... except by eternal vigilance, both for the public who have to be taught some things over every day, and for library workers who have to learn to be good natured but unyielding, obliging but arbitrary, eternally patient but abnormally quick. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... his wits abnormally sharpened, he set to work to devise how to meet his brother, and even as he was meditating how to trick him, his heart was full of affection for his little Vidal. Poor Vidal! How he must have suffered ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... into which, after a brief interval of open ground, the path turned. I became cautious and alarmed, and hid in some dense bush as the men making the noise approached. I saw it was some ju-ju affair. They had a sort of box which they carried on poles, and their dresses were peculiar, and abnormally ample over the upper part of their body. They were prancing about in an ecstatic way round the box, which had one end open, beating their drums and shouting. They were fairly close to me, but fortunately turned their attention to another bit of undergrowth, or that ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... It seemed to me that they must have been far away; they were very small. Abnormally small. I blinked. Horror surged over me. Their figures were dwindling as they stood there! Polter was saying something to the man at the microscope. Other men were nearby, watching. All normal, save Polter and Babs. A moment passed. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... abnormally developed in my lowest nature. I grew bolder, and from being able to return shy glances at first, was soon able to meet more daring ones, until the waltz became to me and whomsoever danced with me, one lingering, sweet and purely sensual pleasure, where heart beat against heart, hand was held in ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... the inn door at Moffat to wait the coming of the coach—their one excitement—agreed that "MacGeorge would gang on if the de'il himsel' stude across the road." MacGeorge was guard of the mail-coach, a fine, determined man, an old soldier, one imbued with abnormally strong sense of duty. Once before, for some quite unavoidable delay, the Post-Office authorities had "quarrelled" him (as he expressed it), and this undeserved blame rankled in the old soldier's heart. It should not be said of him a second time that he had failed to get his mails through on ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... methods of feeding horses are commonly practised. It is a very common practice to feed horses accustomed to hard work the same ration when idle for a few days as when working. The blood of horses cared for in this way may become abnormally rich in albuminoids. The suddenness of the attack, occurring shortly after the animal is given exercise, indicates auto-poisoning. This may be due to the blood in the portal vessels and the liver capillaries, charged with ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... picnics, which Smollett would have liked to repeat every summer under the arches of the Pont du Gard—the monument of antiquity which of all, excepting only the Maison Carree at Nimes, most excited his enthusiastic admiration, all contributed to put him into an abnormally cheerful and convalescent humour. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the cushions before him, who salaamed as he came forward. The features were finely chiselled, the forehead white and high, the lips sensuous, the eyes fanatical, the look concentrated yet abstracted. He took a seat among the cushions, and, after a moment, said to Achmet, in a voice abnormally deep and powerful: "Diaz—there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... peculiarity about those marks, Groener. The little finger of the hand that made them is abnormally, extraordinarily long. Experts say that in a hundred thousand hands you will not find one with so long a little finger, perhaps not one in a million. It happens that you have such a hand and such a little ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... favourable condition for watching small signs. He knows that while we fixate a point with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also usually unaware how easily he helps by suggestive movements ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Usually keenly sensitive, abnormally alive to impressions and atmosphere, she shrank from ever intruding herself or her opinions where they were not welcome; but now all personal consciousness was dead. She was wholly unaware that she had ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... however, such studies do make clear. First, the supposition that "the increases in ability due to a given amount of progress toward maturity are closely alike for all children save the so-called 'abnormally-precocious' or 'retarded' is false. The same fraction of the total inner development, from zero to adult ability, will produce very unequal results in different children. Inner growth acts differently ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... show that while the railways of the United States are designated as monopolies, they are not so in fact. Accused of disregarding the interests of the community, I will show that they are abnormally sensitive to their obligations in this direction. While legislatures claim the right to fix rates, I shall show that the abnormal conditions under which the railway system has grown up and its chaotic nature render the exercise of such ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... to the lake and unmoored her boat. Her conscience was abnormally active this morning, and she reflected that she too was going to a tryst of which the world must know nothing. True, it was kept on the open lake and was as full of daylight as it was of impeccability, but it was not for the world to discover, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Tom on the bar overhead with a long pething-pole, like an abnormally long and heavy alpenstock, in his hand; he selects the beast to be killed, stands over it in breathless . . . silence, adjusts his point over the centre of the vertebra, and with one plunge sends the cruel point with unerring ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... Her brain was now abnormally clear, supernaturally active. It worked with an eager deference, as if striving to atone for the periods when it failed her. The little clock struck ten. It was early—she had a long day before her, a beautiful spring day; for she noticed now the tender green of ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... This abnormally susceptible youth had remarkable experiences, all within his own soul, during his sojourn, of a few days only, on the present occasion, under Madame de Warens's hospitable roof. These experiences, the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... jettisoned cargo of the whole aforetime Egyptian Soudan, with much besides drawn from Abyssinia and Central Africa. Truly, the Khalifa must have been a strange man, with a fine acquisitive instinct abnormally cultivated. ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this; every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one's crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... above the other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three state-rooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary state-room. It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... however, in the main pursued, and Mckinlay describes the country crossed as first-class pastoral land. As it was then the dry season of the year, immediately preceding the rains, it proves what an abnormally severe season must have been encountered by Sturt when that explorer was turned back on his last trip in much the same latitude. On the 27th of February, the wet season of the tropics set in; but fortunately the party found a refuge among some stony hills and sand-ridges, in the neighbourhood ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... more frequently on the pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet Minister—of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the Cabinet—and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;—all these ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... argument that cheap labor is not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... passing people when suddenly I became aware of a man standing out there gazing in at me. I think I have never had so startling a realization. It was a man in white doeskin trousers and blue blazer jacket, with a jaunty linen cap on his head. An abnormally tall, muscular man. And his smooth-shaven, black-browed face with the reflection from the restaurant window lights upon it, reminded me of the apparition we had seen ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... Sunday morning sermon, those words, usually reserved to another and somewhat greater advent—"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." Good Mr. Caryll was innocent of the remotest intention of profanity. But his outlook was circumscribed, his desire to please abnormally large, and his sense of relative values slight. While that Lady Calmady should give birth to a son and heir was, after all, a matter of no small ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... form some idea of the nature of their living owner. They have been subjected to so searching a scrutiny and discussion since they were found in Java in 1891 and 1892 that there is now a general agreement as to their nature. At first some of the experts thought that they were the remains of an abnormally low man, and others that they belonged to an abnormally high ape. The majority held from the start that they belonged to a member of a race almost midway between the highest family of apes and the lowest known tribe of men, and therefore fully merited the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... judged, in part, by the mouth; but the Japs may be wholly judged by the leg. It did distress me to ride after a pair of legs whose calves were abnormally large, whose varicose veins were swollen almost to bursting. As a rule, the men trot along with very little effort and, seemingly, have a very good time. They cheerfully play the part of both horseman and horse, of ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... couldn't do better than to get him down," I suggested; "he's most abnormally keen at ferreting out a mystery that promises any news—if any one can learn the truth about ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... the early outpourings of nomadic peoples from Arabia, a country which is favourable for the production of a larger population than it is able to maintain permanently, especially when its natural resources are restricted by a succession of abnormally dry years. In tracing the Akkadians from Arabia, however, we are confronted at the outset with the difficulty that its prehistoric, and many of its present-day, inhabitants are not of the characteristic Semitic ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... Mr. Chang Riley was always dynamo, Mr. Eng Nye was always motor; for while Mr. Chang Riley had a high—in fact, an abnormally high and fine moral sense, he had no machinery to work it with; whereas, Mr. Eng Nye, who hadn't any moral sense at all, and hasn't yet, was equipped with all the necessary plant for putting a noble deed through, if he could only get the inspiration ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... inventor, whose iron endurance and stern will have enabled him to wear down all his associates by work sustained through arduous days and sleepless nights, was not at all strong as a child, and was of fragile appearance. He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some years, and even when he did attend for a short time the results were not encouraging—his mother being ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... more than a thousand pounds and doubtless cost the Germans at least a thousand dollars, yet all the damage it had done was to destroy a tumble-down and uninhabited cottage, which proves that, save against permanent fortifications, there is a point where the usefulness of these abnormally large guns ceases. While we were discussing this specimen of Bertha Krupp's handicraft, the door opened and General Gouraud entered the room. Seldom have I seen a more striking figure: a tall, slender, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... one other possible result of the enforcement of wage standardization which requires brief notice, because it was displayed prominently during the war. The demand during the war for certain essentials of warfare was abnormally great, and the result was a steady bidding up of wages for the supply of labor which could assist in the production of these essentials. This led to a constant shifting about of the wage earners from plant to plant. This movement not only hindered the effective organization of production, ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... noble fight. He was no beginner. The atmosphere, abnormally high and thick in the gravitational potential of this world whipped and burned about the ship, but to the very last it looked as though he might bring ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only soul who remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter, who leaned idly against the wall of the salon and ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... distinctly detect and recognise the crepitations in relation to each individual. They increased or decreased in every phase of health, thought, or excitement, and were extinct the moment death had mastered its victim. About twenty years later, experiments were made with a man in Paris, who had an abnormally acute sense of sound (Nature's compensation for want of sight, as he had been born blind). In a very short time this man could detect the slightest change or irregularity in these crepitations, and through the changes was able to tell with wonderful accuracy about ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... observation—the alert creature was oft disturbed by my coming and going. One morning it remained motionless on the verge of its retreat. It seemed to be on guard, and as a companionable feeling had been aroused, I was careful as I passed not to unduly affright it. The statuesque position being abnormally retained, I stooped down, to find the crab dead, with the froth still on the complicated lips, while beside it was a huge wolf spider, "tremendous still in death," with head crushed to pulp. One may theorise that the spider invaded the crab's burrow and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... into our own and warm it to enthusiasm." Schumann's special vice was the constant smoking of very strong cigars; nor does he appear to have devoted to gastronomic matters the attention necessary to nourish such an abnormally active brain as his. At one time he lived on potatoes alone for several weeks; at another he saved on his meals to get money for French lessons; and although he took enough interest in a good menu to copy it in a letter, he repeatedly laments the time which is uselessly wasted ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... than it is to the English, which stands for the ideal of girlhood. It is, rather, the young girl as Goncourt has rendered her in "Cherie," a creature of awakening, half-unconscious sensations, already at work somewhat abnormally in an anaemic frame, with an intelligence left to feed mainly on itself. And Yvette herself, with her bright hair, the sleepy gold fire of her eyes, her slimness, her gracious awkwardness, her air of delusive innocence, is the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Sprains.—The seriousness of sprains is very generally underestimated, and as a consequence many persons go through life with ankles that are abnormally weak, and even painful in bad weather, and in which there is a tendency to swell and become exceedingly troublesome after a slight wrench. In all true sprains there is more or less actual tearing of the ligaments that bind the ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... in weight, this would give the false appearance of the wings having increased in relative weight. Now a reduction of this nature has certainly occurred with the Burmese Jumper, in which the legs are abnormally short, and in the two Hamburghs and Silk fowl, the legs, though not short, are formed of remarkably thin and light bones. I make these statements, not judging by mere eyesight, but after having calculated the weights of the leg-bones relatively to those of G. bankiva, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... he said, rather a precocious little boy—he learnt to talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and "old-fashioned," as people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was two, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weight. The pirarara was an extraordinary-looking fish. It had a long head covered entirely with a hard, bony, granular substance, which could only be cracked by a severe blow with an axe. The eyes were prominent and placed quite close to abnormally long antennae or feelers. The back of the pirarara was bluish black, the centre of the body longitudinally was yellowish, whereas the under part was white. The tail was of a bright vermilion, and the black ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... there, figuratively speaking, "coined" money. They were able frequently to run a steamer, well known in Chinese waters (in which I have travelled myself), between Manila and Hong-Kong carrying refugees, who were willing to pay abnormally high rates of passage. In ordinary times fares ranged from P50 saloon accommodation to P8 a deck passage. On one trip, for instance, this steamer, with the cabins filled at P125 each, carried 1,200 deck passengers (no ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... instinct is right or wrong, sensible or sensual, it is a fact well known to all, that it is a great disappointment to a husband and father to see his child brought up on a bottle. Men love full breasts, because it promotes maternity. If, however, the breasts are abnormally large, it indicates maternal deficiency the same as any ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... brimming over with zeal, armed herself with an abnormally large scythe, and set to work on ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... and our two bronze boys are trying to make a path to the road. We are all so abnormally well and with the nurse and Carlton's friend Dr. Harmen, constitute a lively household though I liked the sweetness of our oneness better. These are happy times and they watch and guard me as ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... altogether a world of soft, clear, sunny green, unbroken except by here and there a small copper beech with its bronze leaves become translucent in the hot light. It is true that the browsing sheep were abnormally black; and the yellow-billed starlings had perhaps less sheen on their feathers than they would have had in the country; nevertheless, for a park in the midst of a great city this place was very quiet and beautiful and sylvan; ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... earnestly, "I never knew but one man who saw when his wife needed coaling, and attended to her wants. When he died (for the gods loved him), it was found that his shoulder-blades were abnormally large—at least so the doctors said, but I knew all the time that his ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... in. Lady Ogram glanced over her letters, and bade Constance reply to two or three of them. She gave, also, many instructions as to matters which had been occupying her lately; her mind was abnormally active and lucid; at times her speech became so rapid that ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... causing them then to repel the projectile, which must have added to its velocity. He seems to have overcome the practical difficulty that in order to obtain service velocities with service projectiles an enormous number of windings and a tremendously long barrel are necessary as well as an abnormally heavy current beyond the safe carrying capacity of the solenoid which would raise the temperature to a point that would ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... planning to jump down and run for it," Athenais replied, "you're a fool. You'll not get far with a motor car pursuing you and sergents de ville abnormally on the qui vive because the crime wave that followed demobilisation as yet shows no ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the Wady Makna. Presently we sighted the Jebel el-Maru', the strangest spectacle. The apex of the gloomy porphyritic trap is a long spine of the tenderest azure-white, filmy as the finials of Milan Cathedral, and apparently melting into thin air. Its crest seems abnormally tall and distant; and below it a huge grey vein, horizontal and wavy, cuts and pierces the peaklet of red rock; and is cut and pierced, in its turn, by two perpendicular dykes of porphyritic trap, one flanking the right and the left shoulders of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything, for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme. While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... national well-being depends. How great an influence upon the history of Great Britain has been exerted by this geographical isolation is sufficiently understood. In her case the natural tendency has been increased abnormally by the limited territorial extent of the British Islands, which has forced the energies of their inhabitants to seek fields for action outside their own borders; but the figures quoted by Sir George Clarke sufficiently show that the same tendency, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... regained consciousness, the man upon the bed opened his eyes and looked, first at Travers, then at Priscilla. Again his gaze shifted, gaining strength and meaning. From the far place where he had fared for days his mind, lighted by reason, was abnormally clear and almost painfully reinforced by memory. Then he laughed—laughed a long, shuddering laugh that drew the thin lips back from the white, fang-like teeth. Before the sound was finished the light ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... conqueror. His statues, though not representing him as a type of manly beauty, yet give him refined, intelligent features, but a comparison with the mummy shows that the artists have idealised their model. The forehead is abnormally low, the eyes deeply sunk, the jaw heavy, the lips thick, and the cheek-bones extremely prominent; the whole recalling the physiognomy of Thutmosis II., though with a greater show of energy. Thutmosis ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she had very sensitive nerves." Elizabeth, Hawthorne's sister, was strong-minded but abnormally retired, jealous of her brother, and not much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea; and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden, apparently as recluse as the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... meanwhile bewailing the young girl's extreme imprudence. Madge entreated for quiet and rest, and at last was left alone. Hour after hour she lay with wide, fixed gaze. Her mind and imagination did not partake of her physical weakness, and now they were abnormally active. As the bewilderment from the shock of her abrupt awakening passed, the truth hourly grew clearer. From the time she had first come under her sister's roof Graydon Muir had begun to make himself essential to her. His uniform kindness ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Peruvian. It exemplifies the influence of small quantities of rain on guano deposits in impoverishing them in their nitrogen. In much of the Ichaboe guano imported into this country a large amount of feathers is found. It also contains an abnormally large ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... though she, too, had sacrificed what Mary herself had sacrificed. The swinging of the gloves ceased, and Katharine, after ten minutes, began to make movements preliminary to departure. At the sight of this, Mary was aware—she was abnormally aware of things to-night—of another very strong desire; Katharine was not to be allowed to go, to disappear into the free, happy world of irresponsible individuals. She must be made ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... himself and quite beneath his breath, and of course not meant to reach me. But one of the curious concomitants of my state was that all my senses, and especially my hearing, had become most abnormally acute. A whisper far away was now to me like a loud remark ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... a Thomas seedling, named Cornell by its originator at Ithaca, New York, bore one nut for us in 1946. The boys at Cornell like it because it fills even in an abnormally cool season of the Finger Lakes region when natives fail. You can't decide an issue with one nut, but our specimen was as large and full of high-flavored, white meat as the Thomas, and as thin-shelled as the Stabler. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, in so far as the conditions of her life were favourable. Such congenial ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... curiously wild exhilaration; a quickening of the pulse; an abnormally rapid breathing. I stooped to touch Drake; sparks leaped from my outstretched fingers, great green sparks that crackled as they impacted upon him. He gave them no heed; but stared with fascinated ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... moral sensitiveness, he was nevertheless a person of violent impulses and had early fallen into profanity and laxity of conduct, which he later described with great exaggeration as a condition of abandoned wickedness. But from childhood his abnormally active dramatic imagination had tormented him with dreams and fears of devils and hell-fire, and now he entered on a long and agonizing struggle between his religious instinct and his obstinate self-will. He has told the whole story in his spiritual autobiography, 'Grace Abounding to the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... trouble the reader with all that was said at every stile. No doubt very much of what has been told was repeated again and again so that the walk round the park was abnormally long. At last, however, they reached the house, and as they entered the hall, Mary whispered to him, "Who is to tell ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... have successfully seized the grieved and startled buffalo by the tail, but they are not here to testify to the circumstances. They are dead, abnormally ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... it does not go far enough, either. I am speaking of more than mere mercantile honesty; I am speaking of political sincerity, of intellectual sincerity. Never attempt to fool anybody. We live at such a rate of speed, our perceptions have become so abnormally sensitive and acute, that it is next to impossible to deceive any one; and he who attempts it is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... are a most unsatisfactory person," she went on, not heeding my annoyance. "Most abnormally modest people are. If I were to stick you with this hat-pin, for instance, you would accept the matter as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... strong consciousness of such intention when he observed to the shocked Miss Selina, as Mr. Bill Snoddy, the stoutest citizen of the county, waddled abnormally up the aisle: "The Almighty must be gittin" a heap of fun ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... soil would kindle the sparks of interest in German literature that she supposed every well-taught child possessed, into the roaring flame of enthusiasm. She could not believe that Letty had no sparks. One of her children being so abnormally clever, it must be sheer obstinacy on the part of the other that prevented it from acquiring the knowledge offered daily in such unstinted quantities. She had no illusions in regard to Letty's person, and felt that as she would never be pretty it was of importance that she should at ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... great fact of his love home to him with an overpowering certainty of joy was the girl's eager caresses and endearing gestures. Howard had always curiously shrunk from physical contact with his fellows; he had an almost childishly observant eye, and his senses were abnormally alert; little bodily defects and uglinesses had been a horror to him; and the way in which Maud would seek his embrace, clasp his hand, lay her cheek to his, as if nestling home, gave him an enraptured sense of delight ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was thoroughly enjoying the peaceful silence of the camp. "That man is an exaggerated schoolmaster, with all the faults of the species abnormally developed. If I once open out on him, he will learn more truth about himself in ten minutes than he ever heard in his life before. What an unbearable prig he has grown to be." Thus ran Yates' thoughts as he swung in his hammock, looking up at the ceiling ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... projected site we found it was necessary to make rather an abnormally high parapet to stand the gun on. No sandbags to spare, of course, so the question was, "What shall ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... on the whole matter with lightness. She talked easily and casually, giving local colour to what she said. She described the abnormally rapid growth of the places her sister had known in her teens, the new buildings, new theatres, new shops, new people, the later mode of living, much of it learned from England, through the unceasing ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Wiltshire reports such a case in a woman who had a most prominent sacrum; the laceration was transverse and quite extensive, but the woman made a good recovery. Schauta pictures an exostosis on the promontory of the sacrum. Blenkinsop cites an instance in which the labor was neither protracted nor abnormally severe, yet the rupture of the vagina took place with the escape of the child into the abdomen of the mother, and was from thence extracted by Cesarean section. A peculiarity of this case was the easy expulsion from the uterus, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... traffic was torture to his abnormally acute ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly against the heavy gravity that made all his ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... every sense abnormally keyed to service. A clump of wild blackberries grew on the rim of the bluff. From this smoke billowed. Bullets began to zip past Bob. He legged it for the ridge, blind to everything but ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... beyond her years. It was something different from the usual precocity, because the range of her information was limited enough, and there was sufficient simplicity in her discourse to eliminate that feeling of anxiety and pain which we always experience in the presence of abnormally developed children. Zulma made her tell all about her grandfather, and thus learned curious details concerning a character which she intensely admired, notwithstanding the mystery which was set like a seal upon it—a mystery which Blanche's unconscious revelations rendered only deeper ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... interest in the fortunes of old friends. Of course," added the perennially incoherent Milly, "if it bores you we sha'n't expect you." The quick color came to Paul's careworn cheek. He telegraphed assent, and at sunset that afternoon stepped off the train at a little private woodland station—so abnormally rustic and picturesque in its brown-bark walls covered with scarlet Virginia creepers that it looked ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Cause. Epilepsy is usually classed as a functional disorder; that is, the brain cells are physically normal, but, for some unknown reason, they act abnormally at certain times. This term is a very loose one, and there is reason to believe that the basis of epilepsy is some obscure disease of the brain which has not ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... phrase in which the words are associated abnormally. The car does not sleep. It is a specially constructed car in which the ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... ill; you are eating nothing." "No, not at all, only very uncomfortable"—and then I explained the situation to him—that my dress was so tight I could neither move nor eat. He was most indignant—"How could women be so foolish—why did we want to have abnormally small waists and be slaves to our dressmakers?—men didn't like made-up figures." "Oh, yes, they do; all men admire a slight, graceful figure." "Yes, when it is natural, but no man understands nor cares ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... unreasonable. It was a place of madness. He recalled the words of the navvy on the London dock, "Everything is unreasonable at sea." Certainly that was true of the vast stewing labyrinth of the Sargasso. He had lived abnormally so long that it seemed strange to him now to think that there were comfortable, well-ordered places on the face of the earth. Just as one cannot imagine snow and ice in the depth of summer, so Madden could not imagine the simple comforts ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the effect of his French upon her. She forced into her face a look of pious admiration, and he at once departed. Hermione opened the book rather furtively. She had the unpleasant sensation of doing a surreptitious action, and she was an almost abnormally straightforward woman by nature. The book was large, and contained an immense number of inscriptions and signatures in handwritings that varied as strangely as do the characters of men. She turned the leaves ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... door with one hand, and the frame with the other, swinging back and forth on the threshold, with abnormally large iron shoes flying up and down in the wet green foreground, and the whole North Sea towering over me in the middle distance—oh, but a ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... has been written by a man in his eightieth year. So much freshness, wit and originality seem to be the privilege of youth alone. But the wonder has been achieved, and Verdi has won a complete success with an opera,—which runs in altogether different lines from his old-ones, another wonder of an abnormally ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust |
