"Fascination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had hair of tawny gold; there was a delicate fine down on her cheek, with a silver gleam upon it which I loved to catch, putting myself so that I could see the outlines of her face lit up by the daylight, and feel the fascination of those dreamy emerald eyes, which sent a flash of fire through me whenever they fell upon my face. I used to pretend to roll on the grass before her in our games, only to try to reach her little feet, and admire them on a closer view. The soft whiteness of her skin, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... year and a half, of which El Idilio de un Enfermo ("The Idyll of an Invalid"), a short novel of 1884, portrays the earlier portion. His wife died early in 1885, leaving him with an infant son to be, as he says, "my allusion and my fascination." His subsequent career has been laborious and systematic. He has published one novel almost every year. In 1885 it was Jose, a shorter tale of sea-faring life on the stormy coast of the author's native province. About the same time appeared a collection ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... spite of the monotony of the Great Plain, it is strange to note the fascination it has had for many of the most renowned explorers. Sturt, after being reduced to semi-blindness, found himself compelled to struggle with the desert once more. Eyre, left alone in the wilderness, after his awful experience at the head of the Great Bight, still longed to venture again, and ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... his luminous masculine and searching logic, the vast extent and variety of his research, the large stores of his affluent knowledge, marshalled and arranged with consummate skill and judgment, together with the fascination of his purely unaffected, earnest manner, the magic power of his unstudied action, and the thrilling intonations of his deep rich voice, rendered him, in his best days, "before public assemblies, almost irresistible." He managed his strength to such ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... query. The possibility of that young astronomer becoming a renowned scientist by her aid was a thought which gave her secret pleasure. The course of rendering him instant material help began to have a great fascination for her; it was a new and unexpected channel for her cribbed and confined emotions. With experiences so much wider than his, Lady Constantine saw that the chances were perhaps a million to one against Swithin St. ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... prepared with the thought of helping young botanists and teachers. Unless the reader has followed in detail, by actual experience, some of the modes of plant dispersion, he can have little idea of the fascination it affords, or the rich rewards ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... "pity him who was so beautiful and is dead."[15] In the same spirit is the fruitless appeal so often made over the haste of Death; /mais que te nuysoit elle en vie, mort?/ Was he not thine, even had he died an old man? says the mourner over Attalus.[16] A subject whose strange fascination drew artist after artist to repeat it, and covered the dreariness of death as with a glimmer of white blossoms, was Death the Bridegroom, the maiden taken away from life just as it was about to be made complete. Again and again the motive is treated with delicate ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... honor, accepted seriously, but gladly. To Botticelli, on the other hand, it brings a profound melancholy. This is so marked that at first sight almost every one is repelled by Botticelli, and yields only after long familiarity to the mysterious fascination of the sad-eyed Madonna, who holds her babe almost listlessly, as her head droops with the weight of her sorrow. Her expression is the same whatever her attitude, when she presses her babe to her bosom as the Mater Amabilis (in the Borghese Gallery at Rome, in the Dresden ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire them: every tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or whether you saw them. They are homes, and sealed to you as such, but they are the shell of the real life of the country; and they have somehow a charm and a fascination that no public building or show-place can have. Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something of one such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein, beneath the fortress, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Hames I went, in spite of Zerlina's appeal, with treasures deep down in my box for Betty, Hugh, and Sara. Sara is of all babes in the world the most fascinating, say sisters-in-law other than Diana what they will. As a tribute to this fascination, the largest white rabbit, woolly to a degree undreamed of—at least I hoped so—in Sara's world, was carefully packed in my box, wrapped cunningly in tissue-paper, and guarded on all sides by clothing of a soft description. ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... combinations kaleidoscope fashion. Through the opera-glasses figures of men, women, and horses detached themselves, becoming quaintly distinct, neat as toys, an assemblage of elegant highly finished marionnettes. There was a fascination in watching the movement of these brilliant, clear-cut silent little things upon that amazingly verdant carpet of grass. But it was a fascination which, for Poppy, had by now worn somewhat thin. The interest proved too far away, too impersonal. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... promised much. I thought it advisable, however, to create a little diversion, something that would drive away a possible suspicion that this was a "plant." It was perfectly obvious to all that the Prince was becoming fascinated. Also, he was losing his head, for he was showing his fascination in a rather rude manner. His staring began to attract ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... arrival of Miss Podsnap, and talked small-talk with Mrs Lammle. In facetious homage to the smallness of his talk, and the jerky nature of his manners, Fledgeby's familiars had agreed to confer upon him (behind his back) the honorary title of Fascination Fledgeby. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... should keep on surpassing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruelest murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever visited that church in remembrance of the fact that his people came from the same parish; if he saw the mortal relic which held me in such fascination that I could scarcely leave the place even when the glass box had been locked back to its cupboard, and if the spirits of the dead sometimes haunt their dust, there must have been a reciprocal intelligence between the dead and ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... with all that wild delight which could be felt by a fish, after panting out of its element awhile, when flung into its own world of waters by some friendly hand. Such a hand to me is Mrs. C.'s. It is impossible to give a just idea of the strange fascination she diffuses around her. My mind seems to be larger, stronger, and more brilliant in her company than anywhere else. Every fountain of ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the category of 'Mock Pearls,' cannot immediately be made available for the ordinary student, or become absorbed into the popular histories of the day. We can ill spare from our list the names of those writers, who, from Livy to Lord Macaulay, have added a fascination to the study of history; though in their works most beautiful Mock Pearls abound. But the student should be warned against implicit reliance ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... wasn't it? Why, Gods Lake post was old Dugald Murchison's post! Hedin remembered Murchison well. It was only last year he had spent a week as the guest of his old friend McNabb, and nearly every evening at dinner Hedin had sat at meat with them, and listened in fascination to the talk of the far outlands. He remembered the shrewd gray eyes of Murchison—eyes that bespoke wisdom, ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... Professor of Greek at Cambridge, devoted his whole energy to the task, and ended his days in abject poverty, disgusted with the scanty rewards his great industry and scholarship had attained. A more humble translator, a chemist of Reading, published an English version of the Iliad. The fascination of the work drew him away from his business, and caused his ruin. A clergyman died a few years ago who had devoted many years to a learned Biblical Commentary; it was the work of his life, and contained the results of much original research. After his death his effects were sold, and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... story of a very distinguished member of the London Fire Brigade—the dog Chance. It proves that the fascinations of fires (and who that has witnessed a fire cannot own this fascination?) extends even to the brute creation. In old Egypt, Herodotus tells us, the cats used on the occasion of a conflagration to rush forth from their burning homes, and then madly attempt to return again; and the Egyptians, who worshipped the animals, had to form a ring round to prevent their ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the fascination and went to the window and pulled aside one of the curtains, she had a feeling of relief. The cool, grey beginnings of dawn were in the sky, and every detail of the square was visible. Without exception all the windows were wide open and filled with ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... such slight compositions might not suit the severer genius of our friend Mr Oldbuck. Yet Horace Walpole wrote a goblin tale which has thrilled through many a bosom; and George Ellis could transfer all the playful fascination of a humour, as delightful as it was uncommon, into his Abridgement of the Ancient Metrical Romances. So that, however I may have occasion to rue my present audacity, I have at least the most ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the family; but the cool confidence born of a sort of inward certainty, which is a premonition of success, if it is not the power that compels it, was wanting; and it was as if her own doubts when she set the snares released the creatures from the fascination that should have lured them, so that she caught but little. The weather, too, was very severe; every one in the house, including Beth, was more or less ill from colds and coughs, and Aunt Victoria suffered especially; but none of them complained, not even to themselves; they just endured. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... thought of London was again a temptation. He was quickly satisfied with green gardens and sea-breezes; the pavements of Piccadilly and Regent Street were more attractive. And for Roland, the last wish or the last plan held the quality of fascination. When he turned his back upon Burrell Court, Elizabeth faded from his thoughts and affections; it was Denasia who then drew him through every side of his vivid imagination ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... nose, well-cut, yet fully outlined lips, and strong, finely moulded jaw and chin, all spoke the old Roman vigor and energy, while the flexible delicacy of all the muscles of his face and figure gave an inexpressible fascination to his appearance. Every emotion and changing thought seemed to flutter and tremble over his countenance as the shadow of leaves over sunny water. His eye had a wonderful dilating power, and when he was excited seemed to shower sparks; and his voice possessed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... be with an effort that Gifford released himself from the fascination that held his gaze to the tragedy. "It is an absolute mystery," he replied, moving to where ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... brightly about her, while she waved slowly a fan of white ostrich plumes. Among all these fresh young girls, she could easily hold her own, not because of her beauty, but because of that deeper fascination which she shed like a light or a perfume. She had the something more than beauty which these girls lacked and could never acquire—a legendary enchantment, the air of romance. Was this the result, he wondered now, of what she had missed in life rather than of what she ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Gambetta must continue to exercise over young advocates and journalists the same kind of fascination as that of Napoleon I. does over young officers; and, indeed, the fact that Bonaparte and Gambetta were both of Italian origin, and came to sudden and great power while they were very young, was often quoted to draw ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... written—pages replete with dangers and hardships, loneliness and privations, sacrifice and service, all sweetened with friendships not found in heartless, hurrying cities, lightened with loyalty and love, and tinted with glamour and romance. And over it all lies a fascination a stranger without the gates ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... fascination. And now he reached for the tremendous glass sitting on the table in front of him. But his fingers didn't quite make it. Somehow, the glass was heavy and slippery, and it eluded him, rolled over on its side, ...
— Poppa Needs Shorts • Leigh Richmond
... drew their descent from Belbani, son of Adasi. The cause and incidents of the revolution which raised Sargon to the throne are unknown, but we may surmise that the policy adopted with regard to Karduniash was a factor in the case. Tiglath-pileser had hardly entered Babylon before the fascination of the city, the charm of its associations, and the sacred character of the legends which hallowed it, seized upon his imagination; he returned to it twice in the space of two years to "take the hands of Bel," and Shalmaneser V. much preferred it to Calah or Nineveh as a place of residence. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of beauty," which has attracted the spoiler of all ages to the Italian peninsula, has ever exerted, and still exerts, a magnetic force on every cultivated mind. Manifold are the sources of this fascination now. The scholar and the artist, the antiquarian and the historian, the architect and the lover of natural scenery, alike find here the amplest gratification of their tastes. This is so still; but in the sixteenth century the Italian cities were ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... nature scientifically, he pictured it aesthetically. In his types there is much sweetness of soul, charm of disposition, dignity of mien, even grandeur and majesty of presence. His people we would like to know better. They are full of life, intelligence, sympathy; they have fascination of manner, winsomeness of mood, grace of bearing. We see this in his best-known work—the Mona Lisa of the Louvre. It has much allurement of personal presence, with a depth and abundance ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... to Tamara that each one was endowed with natural fascination. They made no "frais" for her. There were no compliments or gushing welcomes. They were just casual and delightful and made her feel at home and ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... to convey the idea that he was austere or incapable of passion for anyone else. For that was not so. Although, to give the bandit his due, he had remained quite exemplary, when one considers his natural charm as well as the fascination which his adventurous life had for his country-women. Unfortunately, however, in one of his weak moments, he had foolishly permitted himself to become entangled with a Mexican woman—Nina Micheltorena, by name—whose ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... lands, as the result of religious controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a perennial charm and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses—in the world, yet not of the world—which appeals to aesthetic and moral elements in our minds in equal degree. From their lovely churches and chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... with the fascination of horror, for now tiny tongues of flame were licking about. Blue tongues, licking the air, vanishing into ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... standing near. In the near neighbourhood are the Men Scryfa (the inscribed stone), the Men-an-tol (the holed stone), the Nine Maidens, the Lanyon Quoit,[A] the huts of Bosporthennis, the Mulfra Quoit—all being monoliths, or other survivals of wonderful interest, with the strange fascination of their mystery. Cairns, barrows, sepulchral monuments, we can understand, for death and burial are ever with us; but what was the meaning of these circles and standing-stones—who built them, and for what purpose? They are interpreted astronomically ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... up the Sound viewing the luxuriant cool green beech-woods of Denmark, and the pretty fishing villages lying in the foreground. Villas with charming gardens—their tiny rickety landing-stages, bathing sheds, and tethered boats, adding fascination to the homely scene—seem to welcome us to this land of fairy tales and the home of ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... the thing signified. And still more naturally is our admiration drawn from the artist's self-utterance, to the self which he endeavours to utter, and we are brought into sympathy with his thought and feeling. Much of the fascination exercised over us by art, which precisely as art is rude and imperfect in many ways, is to be ascribed to this source. Though here we must remember that the soul is often more truly and artistically betrayed by the simple lispings ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes, he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being that was his father—the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes, heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard sprang soft and rank, and against which ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... was as though some devilish psychological contrivance had suddenly hooked their two consciousnesses to the same thought. Both saw the same picture—the sand, the rocks, the blazing sun and a dead man lying with a knife in his back.... And Beth continued staring as though in a kind of horrible fascination. And when her lips moved she spoke as though impelled by a force ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... on both errands. Some strange fascination seemed to hold Sergeant Cuff to the bed. Some strange curiosity seemed to keep the rest of them waiting, to see what the Sergeant would ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... what comfort to administer to the affliction of his companion, was somewhat relieved by the change in his mood, though his more grave and sensitive nature was a little startled at its suddenness. But, as we have before seen, Montreal's spirit (and this made perhaps its fascination) was as a varying and changeful sky; the gayest sunshine, and the fiercest storm swept over it in rapid alternation; and elements of singular might and grandeur, which, properly directed and concentrated, would ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... courage, and, making her way past the church, entered the market-place. Her eyes were fixed on the ground, as though to avoid beholding the scene of her humiliation; but the market-cross and the stocks, now that she was within a few yards of them, exerted a strange fascination over her. Do what she might, she could not refrain from gazing upon them once more, and as she did so a cry of horror escaped her. In front of the cross hung the lifeless figure of a man. About his neck was a halter, the other end of which was securely ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... their lives as dearly as possible. Their leader fell pierced by a hundred bullets, and the king, who had known him from boyhood, passed his hand across his eyes as if to shut out the awful sight. But the fascination of the battle forced him to look again, and the next ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... the little narrow lane into the heart of the Law. Its votaries were hurrying back from the Courts, streaming up from their Chambers for tea, or escaping desperately to Lord's or the Park—young votaries, unbound as yet by the fascination of fame or fees. And each, as he passed, looked at Barbara, with his fingers itching to remove his hat, and a feeling that this was She. After a day spent amongst precedents and practice, after six hours at least ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... called an ideal beauty, there was a fascination about this winsome little maid which few could resist. She had all her brother's impulsiveness, all his enthusiasm, and, it may be safely asserted, all his abiding faith in the sacred and unimpeachable character of cadet friendships. If she possessed ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... quarters had a certain fascination. You stepped out of the anteroom and found yourself on a raised concrete platform at the back of which washed the sea. Very extensive harbour works, half completed, ran farther out in a great semicircle across a wide space ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... dexterously led his acquaintance to infer that he would prove as much better than his professions, as other people are often found to be worse than theirs. Where he wished to please, it was scarcely possible to escape the fascination of his manner; nor did he neglect any mode of courting popularity. He knew that a good table is necessary to attract even men of wit; and he made it a point to have the very best cook, and the very best wines. He paid his cook, and his cook was the only person he did pay, in ready ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools.... And so it was with natures less akin to Greece than the Roman. St. Paul, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... charging through thick and thin, has had a fascination for me as long as I can remember. The true aurochs and this, the European Bison, ceased to exist in the British Isles, except in the Zoological Gardens; but the latter is still found wild in Lithuania, ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... wild flowers, especially verbenas, so prettily called margaritas in this country; and beyond everything the rainbow spanning the vast gloomy heavens, with its green and violet arch, when the storm-cloud passes eastward over the wet sun-flushed earth. All these things have a singular fascination for my soul. But beauty when it presents itself in the human form is even more than these things. There is in it a magnetic power drawing my heart; a something that is not love, for how can a married man have a feeling ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... winding road, the flashing stream, the bordering coppice, the view from the crest, the twinkling lights at nightfall from the sheltering inn. Traceable in a long line of our most cherished writers, from Chaucer and Lithgow and Nash, Defoe and Fielding, and Hazlitt and Holcroft, the fascination of the road that these writers have tried to communicate, has never perhaps been expressed with a nicer discernment than in the Confessions of Rousseau, that inveterate pedestrian who walked Europe to the rhythm of ideas as epoch-making as any that have ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... in love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)—handsome as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. Let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... combines his description of these odd creatures with stories of his own adventures in pursuit of them in many parts of the world. These are told with much spirit, and add greatly to the fascination of the book."—WORCESTER SPY. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... are soon verified, however, for the waves and wind continue to rise until the steamer is mightily buffeted. Still John remains on deck. There is a fascination for him in the scene that words cannot express. When he has had enough he will find his state-room and sleep, for surely he needs it after being awake a good deal of the preceding ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... hand, he was coming up the brick walk that led to the veranda. His eyes were fixed upon Julia with an intensity that seemed to affect his breathing; there was a hushedness about him. And Florence, in fascination, watched Julia's expression and posture take on those little changes that always seemed demanded of her by the approach of a young or youngish man, or a nicely dressed old one. By almost imperceptible processes the commonplace moment ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... yet," answered Mrs. Whitney. "They'll be on next week, but only for a little while. They both like it better in the East. All their friends are there and there's so much more to do." Mrs. Whitney sighed; before her rose the fascination of all there was to "do" in the East—the pleasures ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... rubies and a large brilliant was set in the end of the cap. Mrs. Rushmore could not help looking at it, and in her prim way she wondered how any man who was not an adventurer or a sort of glorified commercial traveller could carry such a thing. There was an unpleasant fascination in the mere look of it, and she watched ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... showed, he had plighted his troth, and to whom he was eventually married in the name of Wilson (a copy of the marriage certificate was in the drawer), had been a typical Spaniard of singular beauty and fascination, though of no ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... instinct which was surely part-secret of his fascination. He had caught the full attention of the crowd, and ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... know," he proceeded, his eyes sparkling with that light which is so often the beacon of death—"you do not know the fatal fascination by which a mind, set to the sorrows of a melancholy temperament, is charmed out of its strength. But no matter how dark may be my dreams—there is one light for ever upon them—one image ever, ever before me—one figure of grace and beauty—oh, how could ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... would have begun to gather the fruit of his ambition. He had started already to climb the ladder, and he would raise Stella with him, Stella and that other being upon whom he sometimes suffered his thoughts to dwell with a semi-humorous contemplation as—his son. A fantastic fascination hung about the thought. He could not yet visualize himself as a father. It was easier far to picture Stella as a mother. But yet, like a magnet drawing him, the vision seemed to beckon. He walked the desert with a lighter step, and Tommy swore ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... growls of attack and the sounds of ravenous gluttony. With every hair bristling, Satan rose and sprang from the woods—and stopped with a fierce tingling of the nerves that brought him horror and fascination. One of the white shapes lay still before him. There was a great steaming red splotch on the snow, and a strange odor in the air that made him dizzy; but only for a moment. Another white shape rushed ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... doubt, of the "dam scullion") Manasseh, who had cooked the dinner, also served it; noiselessly, wearing white gloves because his master abominated the sight of a black hand at meals. These gloves had a fascination for Dicky. They attracted his eyes as might the intervolved play of two large white moths in the penumbra beyond the candle-light, between his father's back and the dark sideboard; but he fought against the attraction because he knew that ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the country was new and supplied our simple wants; we had milk and honey, and, though the fig tree was absent, along the river grew endless quantities of mustang grapes. At that time the San Antonio valley was principally a cattle country, and as the boys of our family grew old enough the fascination of a horse and saddle was too strong to be resisted. My two older brothers went first, but my father and mother made strenuous efforts to keep me at home, and did so until I was sixteen. I suppose it is natural for ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... intrigues to which he was exposed.[1] His timidity verged on monomania. Like Alfonso II. of Naples, he was tortured with the ghosts of starved or strangled victims; like Ezzelino, he felt the mysterious fascination of astrology; like Filippo Maria Visconti, he trembled at the sound of thunder, and set one band of body-guards to watch another next his person. He dared not hope for a quiet end. No one believed in the natural death of a prince: princes must ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... as it was on a midsummer day, the whole business had a great fascination for me, and I would not have left it ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... Lancelot looked on in dull apathy, but as the fire rekindled and the little flames leapt up and made Mary Ann's flushed face the one spot of colour and warmth in the cold, dark room, Lancelot's torpidity vanished suddenly. The sensuous fascination seized him afresh, and ere he was aware of it he was lifting the pretty face ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... all the weird fascination that belongs to the Danish country and the Oriental race contained in ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... have the pleasure of saying that I have just finished reading with very great interest your new book. ('A Short History of Natural Science.') The idea seems to me a capital one, and as far as I can judge very well carried out. There is much fascination in taking a bird's eye view of all the grand leading steps in the progress of science. At first I regretted that you had not kept each science more separate; but I dare say you found it impossible. I have ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... before been affected in the same way by any painting. The emotions it caused were strange and indefinite. They were something like what I have heard ascribed to the eyes of the basilisk; or like that mysterious influence in reptiles termed fascination. I passed my hand over my eyes several times, as if seeking instinctively to brush away this allusion—in vain—they instantly reverted to the picture, and its chilling, creeping influence over my flesh ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... root of a clump of laurel. There had been no change, a fact which gave him a certain comfort, he could not have said why. He did not at once remove his eyes; that which we do not wish to see has a strange fascination, sometimes irresistible. Of the woman who covers her eyes with her hands and looks between the fingers let it be said that the wits have dealt with her not ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the mere brute force through which Hardy had dominated her intellect hitherto, had become refined by some extraordinary process, and was exerting a moral influence over her. In order to assert herself against the intolerable fascination she rose hastily and crossed the room to where her piano ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Which few will heed on folly's brink, So rarely deigns the world to think. Yet, ere I go, child of my heart— One faithful offering I'll impart To thee—thy parents' sole delight: To me—an angel, pure as light. Sent on this earth to cheer and bless, Like sunbeam in a wilderness, With fascination's form and face, And all the charms that please and grace. A guileless heart, a lovely mind, A temper ardent, yet refined, And in the early dawn of youth, Taught to ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... had not reached. It was not that she had grown beautiful—when he sought for physical changes he found only that her cheek was rounder, her bosom fuller; but if she still lacked the ruddy attraction of mere flesh-and-blood loveliness, she had gained the deeper fascination which is the outward accompaniment of a fervent spirit. Her eyes, her voice, her gestures were all attuned to the inner harmony which he recognised also in the smile with which she met his words; and the charm that she irradiated was that rarest of all physical gifts, the power of the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... opened the door of the city room the odour of the printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets. When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the temperament of a savant and a ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... "I'm an ass. There's a wonderful fascination in the contrast between the dash of scarlet and the pallor of that clear, lovely skin ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the sea in a boat guided by a child. Duryodhana is gambling with the son of Pandu, and thou art in raptures that he is winning. And it is such success that begeteth war, which endeth in the destruction of men. This fascination (of gambling) that thou has well-devised only leadeth to dire results. Thus hast thou simply brought on by these counsels great affliction to thy heart. And this thy quarrel with Yudhishthira, who is so closely related to thee, even if thou hadst not foreseen it, is still approved by thee. Listen, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... no objection and showed no displeasure. Alice and she now busied themselves with getting the cups and saucers out of the cupboard, and setting the table; but all that evening, through whatever was doing, Ellen's eyes sought the stranger as if by fascination. She watched him whenever she could without being noticed. At first she was in doubt what to think of him; she was quite sure from that one look into his eyes that he was a person to be feared; there was no doubt of that, as to the rest ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... the Seine in boats. And with all that, so full is the heart of man, and yet more that of the child, of contradiction, that we followed the current and made tricolour cockades, my sisters and I, and all of us! There is no doubt the fascination of the tricolour flag had a good deal to do with the rapidity with which ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... account of a woman's whimsies. Then what a pretty fix he would have got himself into, just by a foolhardy freak! But there was a strain of Norse blood in Hunt, and in spite of occasional touches of ague, the risk of the scheme had in itself a certain fascination for him. And yet he could n't help wishing he had carried out a dozen desperate devices for disgusting her with him, which at the time had seemed to him too gross to be ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste? And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this thirst of the gazelle, as an emblem of the treacherous and bewildering fascination of the fleeting shadows of this lower life (ihaloka;) the beauty that is hollow, the Bubble of the World. And thus, Disappointment is of the essence of Existence: disappointment, which can only come about, when ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... Her beauty attracted and her amiability retained the devotion of men, the friendship of women. Nature had lavished upon her those rare, delicate, elusive qualities which go to make up that top flower of evolution, the woman of fascination, a creature indefinable, like poetry. In New York, city and State, she was a reigning belle, caressed by society; she had been named the social queen of South Carolina, under the title of la Sainte Madam Alston. To Theodosia, his only child, whose education he directed, whose opinions he had ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray garden, from which I ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the little girl's hands, the glance of the soft brown eyes, and the tone of her voice seemed to recall every word and glance of Rex, and hold a strange fascination ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... that followed. The thunder was almost incessant, while the lightning played in blue forks and flashes round a couple of stringy barks growing by the side of the road a little farther on, darting in and out like live things at play, until Nealie forgot half of her fear in the fascination of watching them. ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... the past months when he reviewed his position towards Ellenor. Since the meeting in the Haunted House, he had seen her not a few times, and he had rivetted round her a chain which linked her closely to himself. He had exerted the masterful fascination which was his to bring her completely under his power. Love is a stronger motive than even hate. He made Ellenor love him that he might be sure she would keep secret his dealings with smugglers. He ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... stood patiently by. Rosebud was tempted. She wanted to see the Reservation again with that strange longing which all people of impulse have for revisiting the scenes of old associations. Always she was possessed by that curious fascination for the Indian country which was something stronger than mere association, something that had to do with the long illness she had passed through ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... first sight. Inexplicable, save as an instance of that fascination which the strong sometimes exercise ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... with which the men finally set fire to the house at my order was enhanced by this previous abstemiousness; but there is a fearful fascination in the use of fire, which every child knows in the abstract, and which I found to hold true in the practice. On our way down river we had opportunity to ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to and fro in the grip of those monstrous arms. The boat beneath Thorpe's feet was tossing in the waves that told of the titanic struggle. He had meant to look south for some sign of the oncoming destroyer, but in fearful fascination he stared spellbound where the masts of the trim yacht swept downward into the waves, where the green of her star-board lantern glowed faintly for an instant, then vanished, to leave only the darkness ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... that many persons who have an uncertain, incalculable temper flatter themselves that it enhances their fascination; but perhaps they are under the prior mistake of exaggerating the charm which they suppose to be thus strengthened; in any case they will do well not to trust in the attractions of caprice and moodiness ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... skywards, and pigeons sometimes strutted among the crowd that hovered about the countless shops under the encircling colonnade—pawnshops, old-clo' shops, butcher-shops, wherein black-bearded men with yellow turbans bargained in Hebrew! What a fascination in the tall, many-windowed houses, with their peeling plastered fronts and patches of bald red brick, their green and brown shutters, their rusty balconies, their splashes of many-colored washing! In the morning and evening, when the padlocked ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the circumstances in which I—ah—myself, I may say, am situated, there is no more delightful occupation. The work is interesting. There is the constant fascination of seeing these fresh young lives develop—and of helping them to develop—under one's eyes; in any case, I may say, there is the exceptional interest of being in a position to mould the growing minds of lads who will some day take their place ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... even remotely guess it as yet, but he was far closer to the truth than he pretended. The girl knew she should leave him and go about her work. Her role was to appear as inconspicuous as possible, but she could not resist the fascination of trying to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... you another thing,' the younger man pleaded. 'You remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don't you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion has any GRACE in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a part ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... by what fascination could your spirit be drawn away from passages like this, to guess and dream over the rhapsodies of the Apocalypse? For rhapsody, according to your interpretation, the Poem undeniably is;—though, rightly expounded, it is a well knit and highly poetical evolution ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar instead of a drink. He did not particularly like the smoking of it, but there was a certain devil-may-care recklessness in going down the street with a lighted cigar in his teeth, which had all the more fascination for him because of its manifest danger. He felt at these times that he was going the pace, and that it is well our women do not know of all the wickedness there is in this world. He did not fear that any neighbor might tell his wife, for there were depths to which no person could convince Mrs. Bartlett ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... taking no notice of Fanny's remark, "that sort of charm which she possesses, that sort of fascination—call it what you will—may be at once her ruin or her salvation. If we Specialities are unkind to her now, if we don't show her all due compassion and tenderness, she may grow hard. We are certainly bound by every honorable rule not ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... venereal sense in religions. The hermaphrodite gods. The virgin mother. Mohammed was the first to proclaim a deity above sex. The conversion of sexual and religious emotion exemplified from insane delusions. The element of fascination. The love of God. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... abruptly as he caught a view of her face—shaded his eyes with his hands as if to gaze more intently—and at length burst into an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. At that instant Alice turned, and her gaze met that of the stranger. The fascination of the basilisk can scarcely more stun and paralyse its victim than the look of this stranger charmed, with the appalling glamoury of horror, the eye and soul of Alice Darvil. Her face became suddenly locked and rigid, her lips as white as marble, her eyes almost started from their ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... granted that books on flying by fliers have at present a peculiar fascination, the fact still remains that what I will call The Library of Aviation has usually been remarkably fortunate in its contributors. Cavalry of the Air (SIMPKIN, MARSHALL) is the last flying work which it has been my good fortune to read, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... moor, for the sight of some person approaching. In her confusion and alarm, she accidentally left the door ajar, when the corpse suddenly started up, and sat in the bed, frowning and grinning at her frightfully. She sat alone, crying bitterly, unable to avoid the fascination of the dead man's eye, and too much terrified to break the sullen silence, till a catholic priest, passing over the wild, entered the cottage. He first set the door quite open, then put his little finger in his mouth, and said the paternoster backwards; when the horrid look of the corpse ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... of the hills, as grasped on a sunny day, repays all the toil and trouble of the ascent; and looking round, one begins to realize the fascination of mountain-climbing. On one side extend the plains of France, washed by the greenish-blue waves of the Bay of Biscay, and studded as with pearls by the coast-towns of Fontarabia, St. Jean de Luz, Biarritz, Bayonne, and so on northwards till the vision fails. On the other ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... sketch, with a new element introduced. But the present experimental fragment, to which it has been decided to give the title of "The Ancestral Footstep," possesses a freshness and spontaneity recalling the peculiar fascination of those chalk or pencil outlines with which great masters in the graphic art have been wont to arrest their fleeting glimpses of a ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination. ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... doing outpost-duty on an island, however large, the main-land has all the fascination of forbidden fruit, and on a scale bounded only by the horizon. Emerson says that every house looks ideal until we enter it,—and it is certainly so, if it be just the other side of the hostile lines. Every grove in that blue distance appears enchanted ground, and yonder ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... French himself came to town, as Heine saw him do in 1810, we can easily understand how the enthusiasm of the boy surrounded the person of Napoleon, and the idea that he was supposed to represent, with a glamor that never lost its fascination for the man. To Heine, Napoleon was the incarnation of the French Revolution, the glorious new-comer who took by storm the intrenched strongholds of hereditary privilege, the dauntless leader in whose army every common soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his knapsack. If later ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... partner, the chief packer, forage master, and an occasional rancher or prospector; the other, a big one, and often a riotous, for the soldiery, scouts, packers and riffraff of the frontier, and for this establishment Bennett's dago had an indescribable fascination. Here he had met and differed with Munoz, the two coming to a knife duel, promptly suppressed by the gun butts of the guard. None the less was Munoz called into requisition as interpreter, for between peril, exhaustion and defective English the "dago" ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... Meantime, with a dreadful fascination, she watched the doom settling like a storm about her husband Thore. She only saw it; he himself, now that he was better, was unconscious of anything impending. He talked hopefully of what he should do when Thorwald came home with news of Wineland, having forgotten ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett |
