"Fibre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shelters him from both sun and rain; many wear also a small oblong mat plaited of rattan-strips hanging behind from a cord passed round the waist, and serving as a seat when the wearer sits down. At home the man wears nothing more than the waist-cloth, save some narrow plaited bands of palm fibre below the knee, and, in most cases, some adornment in the ears or about the neck and on the arms.[31] The man's hair is allowed to grow long on the crown of the scalp, and to hang freely over the back ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... became a matter of gossip at bars, in stables, and especially about the desks of real-estate offices. Had it been a matter of armed internecine strife, the Elkins faction would have mustered an overwhelming majority; for Jim's bluff democratic ways, and his apparent identity of fibre with the mass of the people, would have made him a popular idol, had he been a thousand times ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... which he had passed to-day had cut deep into the spiritual fibre of his being. If Joseph Winthrop had been given the alternative of speaking his secret or giving up his life, he would have offered the few years that might be his, without question or halting. For he was a man of simple, single mind. He never quibbled or thought ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... punghulo brought presents of sarongs run with gold thread, and not larger than a handkerchief, for Busuk to wear about her waist. They also brought gifts of rice in baskets of cunningly woven cocoanut fibre; of bananas, a hundred on a bunch; of durians, that filled the bungalow with so strong an odor that Busuk drew up her wrinkled, tiny face into a quaint frown; and of cocoanuts in their great ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... for he owed him much, little as he dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman of his time was more entirely Scotch than Walter Scott: the good and the not so good, which all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him.' Nothing more true; and the words would be as strikingly appropriate if for Walter Scott we substitute Thomas Carlyle. And to this source of sympathy we might add others. Who in this generation could rival Scott's talent for the picturesque, unless it be ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... to marry Peggy. It was almost a preordained thing. A rupture of the engagement was unthinkable. Her undeviating loyalty bound him by every fibre of gratitude and honour. But it was essential that Peggy should know whom and what she was marrying. The Doggie trailing in her wake no longer existed. If she were prepared to follow the new Doggie, well and good. If not, there would be ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... knew Kearney in every fold and fibre of his nature, Kearney had not the very vaguest conception of him with whom he sat every day at meals, and communed through almost every hour of his life. He treated Joe, indeed, with a sort of proud ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... rotting tree trunks, so that "at the distance of almost every stone's cast," they had to leave the boats "and haul them over either sands or rocks, and at other times over trees." Sharp, who was of tougher fibre, merely says that they "paddled all Day down the Falls and Currents of the River, and at Night took up our Quarters upon a Green Bank by the Riverside, where we had Wild Fowl and Plantanes for Supper: But our Beds were made upon ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... long moment fixedly into her darker ones, while the two took mental stock of each other. He realized the utter futility of any further argument, while she felt instinctively the cool, dominating strength of the man. Neither was composed of that poor fibre which bends. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... of me, and entered into every fibre of my brain through the avenues prepared for it by the treacherous anodyne; so that, enervated and intoxicated, I yielded passively, after a brief struggle, to the power of the ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... and anaesthetics he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been particularly ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... least take precautions; for instance, do not day-dream about your friend,—brooding over the thought of her weakens your fibre ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... wandering many days over dry, and stony, and desert places, where the lip thirsted for the stream, is it not delicious to sit at the brink of a wild, impetuous torrent, to gaze on its white foam and breaking waves, till you can almost feel their gush in every nerve and fibre, and can bathe your very soul in them. And while you slowly smoke your pipe of purest tobacco, the sands of the desert, and their burning sun, rise again before you, when you prayed for even the shadow of a cloud on your way. The banks are in some parts covered with ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Arran by his foster mother, to pay his duty to his aunts, and ask their blessing, eighteen years before. The Miss Mac Taafs, in their sixty-first year, (for they were twins,) might have sunk with safety ten or twelve years of their age. Their minds and persons were composed of that fibre which constitutes nature's veriest huckaback. Impressions fell lightly on both; and years and feelings alike left them unworn and uninjured.—The O'Briens, and the O'Flahertys, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... with thunder, had all disappeared; and these little delicate lines of cloud lay purposeless and at rest on the blue. Nature had done her work for the year; she had grown the grass and ripened the grain, and manufactured the wonderful juices in the tissues of the fruit, and laid a new growth of woody fibre round the heart of the trees. She was resting now, as it were, content with her work. And so seemed Lois to be doing, at the moment Mrs. Barclay entered the garden. It was unusual to find her so. I suppose the witching beauty of the day beguiled her. But it was of another beauty ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... said. "I need not ask you never to doubt my love. That would be absurd from me to you. I love you as I did not know it was possible for a man to love a woman. I love you in such a way that every fibre of my being will hunger for you night and day—through all the years to come. But—well, it would always have come hard to me to stand in another man's shoes, and take what had been his. I did not feel this when I thought I was following ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... old and new." You know for evermore that it exists: that the real thing within yourself belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time invited and enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to feel and know in every fibre of your being the mystical need of "union with Reality"; and to realise that the natural scene which you have accepted so trustfully cannot provide the correspondences toward which you ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... wuz wrapped in four different winders—first in fine cloth, then a robe of turkey feathers wove with Yucca fibre, then a mattin', and then ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... work, and as her mother beheld Cecil's raptured glance and the incarnadine glow it called up, she guessed all that would follow in one rapid prevision, accompanied by a sharp pang for her son in Japan. It was not in her maternal heart not to hope almost against her will that some fibre had been touched by Bobus that would be irresponsive to others, but duty and loyalty alike forbade the slightest attempt to revive the thought of the poor absentee, and she must steel herself to see things take their course, and own ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the General's superhuman calm. He was indeed so quiet about it, and so uniformly polite, that his fiery associate was simply obliged to cool off. He was of too genuinely fine fibre to bear a grudge or to make a hard situation harder, and he consented to compromise, saying truly that at such times it was "necessary not to Stickle ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... into a fibrous and tough state." The objection has indeed been taken to the process of passing the iron through rollers, that the cinder is not so effectually got rid of as by passing it under a tilt hammer, and that much of it is squeezed into the bar and remains there, interrupting its fibre and impairing ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... activity, that is to say movement, and, consequently, the function of an organ is material by the same right as the organ. When a muscle contracts, this contraction, which is the proper function of the muscular fibre, consists in a condensation of the muscular protoplasm, and this condensation is a material fact. When a gland enters into activity, a certain quantity of liquid flows into the channels of the gland, and this liquid is caused by a physical and chemical modification ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... a whole is the dumping ground and Eldorado combined of the harder extruded elements of Europe, the same law of selection holds good there as well. With every degree of West longitude the fibre of the American grows harder. The Dustman Destiny sifting his cinders has his biggest mesh over the Pacific States. If charity and sympathy be to seek in the East, it is at a greater discount on the Slope. The only ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... of hate and envy, to contemplate courtship and love in others. From the rudest shape to the most refined, that master-passion in the existence, at least of woman,—reminding her of her own brief episode of human tenderness and devotion,—opened every wound and wrung every fibre of a heart that, while crime had indurated it to most emotions, memory still left morbidly sensitive to one. But if tortured by the sight of love in those who had had no connection with her fate, who stood apart from her lurid ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... how things formerly impossible to her had been rendered possible by the subtle deterioration of the moral nature, when a woman of lofty mind at the beginning loves and is united to a man of lower nature and coarser fibre than herself. Only a few months before, Iris would have swept aside these sophistrics with swift and resolute ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he wrote: "Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, BUT ARE FOR EVER ON THE SIDE ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... convincing and logical; and yet, even while Stephen responded to the Governor's personal touch, some obstinate fibre of race or inflexible bent of judgment, refused to surrender. Vetch was probably sincere—it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt—but on the surface at least he was parading a spectacular pose. The role of the Friend of the People has seldom been ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... in Thornton's bedded the wicker basket with rustling fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... hammocks, while the women were treated less cavalierly; they slept with their children on the ground under the hammocks around the little family triangle. As a rule they had woven mats made of grass-fibre and coloured with the juices of the urucu plant and the genipapa, but in many instances they had skins of jaguars, and, which was more frequent, the furs of the three-toed sloths. These were placed around the family fire, directly under ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... to be the larger of the two. The pectorals were comparatively small. The adipose tissue appeared to be wholly confined to the subcutaneous region. The muscles were of a deep brown colour, full of blood, with a short, dark, and well-flavoured fibre: when cooked, they had a strong resemblance in flavour and taste to the ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... disturbing and unusual; ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft; senility was diluting his fibre, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... which a young man of good natural intelligence would come away more instructed, charmed, and stimulated, or, to express the matter as definitely as possible, with his mind more stretched. Good natural intelligence, a certain fineness of fibre, and some amount of scholarly education, have to be presupposed, indeed, in all readers of De Quincey. But, even for the fittest readers, a month's complete and continuous course of De Quincey would be too much. Better have him on the ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... approached her. His freedom from a terrible bond must have been recent, since his manner towards herself had changed only that summer, within the month in fact. The reserve of years had been prompted by hard conditions. In honor he could not woo. Ah, in him ran the fibre of the hero, no matter what might have been his mistakes! He had resisted every natural temptation to show his love. Once more they were brother and sister, children of the dear father whose last moments they ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... of its existence, how close and intimate in appearance is this union with the body! Sensation extends to every part of it, every fibre is instinct with life, and the direction of the will is absolute and immediate over every muscle and joint, as if the whole fabric and its tenant were one homogeneous system. The will tires not of its supremacy, and is not wearied with the number of volitions required of it to keep every joint ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... statue' that delights the world. The dress—a short kilt of calabash fibre—rather set off than concealed their charms, and though destitute of petticoat they were wholly unconscious of indecorum. These beautiful domestic animals graciously smiled when in my best Kenyamwezi I did my devoir to the sex; and the present of a little tobacco always secured ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... pedagogue and his dunce may exercise their wits correctly enough, in the way of grammatical analysis, on some splendid argument, or burst of eloquence, or thrilling descant, or poetic rapture, to the strain and soul of which not a fibre in their nature would yield a vibration."—New-York Observer, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... into water, and leave it there to soak for a few days, after which they strip off the outer part, leaving the smooth inner bark, which they dry, and finally cut into the required lengths, to which they add the attachment strings made of native fibre. ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... out of sheer decency, made her a good-humored, jocular answer, and said to me, "It takes a woman to know what to buy for house-keepin,"; which poor piece of hypocrisy endeared him to me more than ever. The puncher was not of the fibre to succeed in keeping appearances, but he deserved success, which the angels consider to be enough. I wondered if disenchantment had set in, or if this were only the preliminary stage of surprise and wounding, and I felt that but one test could show, namely, a coming face to face of Mr. and ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... uneventful days in the country: "Such is life, and I believe I have got hold of a good end of it." Another point of resemblance: the American dreamer is like his English brother in his extreme sensitiveness—he cannot bear to inflict or experience pain. "I lack the heroic fibre," he is wont to say. FitzGerald acknowledged this also, and, commenting on his own over-sensitiveness and tendency to melancholy, said, "It is well if the sensibility that makes us fearful of ourselves is diverted to become ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... we can so use our materials that every strain will come in the direction of the fibre of some portion of the wood work, we can make inch boards answer a better purpose than foot square beams, and this application of materials is one reason of the ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... Alaric he sent an earnest warning against engaging in war with Clovis: "You are surrounded by an innumerable multitude of subjects, and you are proud of the remembrance of the defeat of Attila, but war is a terribly dangerous game, and you know not how the long peace may have softened the warlike fibre of your people". He besought Gundobad to join with him in preserving peace between the combatants, to each of whom he had offered his arbitration. "It behoves us old, men to moderate the wrath of the royal youths, who should reverence our age, though they are still in the flower of their hot ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... you," cried Eudocia; "you must go or you must die." But sad, O, sad the sundering of two hearts who long and weep; Rent the oak's tough, knitted fibre by the lightning from on high; But the hearts will cling the closer that apart they strive ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... 'The Raven,' and the various processes by which this grand shadow attained its final harmonious and terrible proportions. This may be a noble sacrifice to the principles of Art, intended as a warning to rash novices against the sin of slovenliness in composition; but the poem must be of solid fibre to resist this disenchanting test. The unveiling of hidden mysteries, the disclosure of trap doors, ropes, and pulleys, may assist in the general dissemination of knowledge; but in behalf of those ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Living God. A hesitating admission that there is a God is not sufficient; Man must love with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind, and with all his strength,—and to love he must believe. Belief in God must be a conviction that controls every nerve and fibre of his being and dominates every impulse and energy ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... a certain dissipation of activity; but here all was concentrated. The whole nature of the creature was strung to one issue only, to that point when she could fling headlong into activity—an activity in which every fibre and faculty would be used. A comparison of the fairy-kind with human beings is never successful, because into our images of human beings we always import self-consciousness. They know what they are doing. Fairies do not. But wait a moment; there is a reason. Human ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... study every position in which those flowers might appear to better advantage and increase her beauty! How often did she open the box that contained it to kiss it, to look at it, scarcely daring to touch it for fear of spoiling a leaf, of disarranging a fibre! ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... unguarded moment; but we should remember that the poem is dedicated to the city of London. The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite; and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... been of the same fibre as the little Buttons, he would have felt, thought and acted as they, and this history would never have been written. He would have grown up to man's estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... as we sat down, having first lit a lamp of the sort used by the Kukuanas, of which the wick is made from the fibre of a species of palm leaf, and the oil from clarified hippopotamus fat, "well, I feel uncommonly inclined to ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... never forget to-night, Eldred," she whispered, "even if we live to be cross prosaic old people together. You may go to the other end of the world, now, and stay there as long as you like! I am sure of you; and I feel in every fibre of me that we are going to ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... out of what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... improvement in cotton-seed—selection and care. Select from the best quality, producing the largest yield, and maturing early; pick it before much rain has fallen on it after ripening; dry it thoroughly before ginning, and dry it very thoroughly after it is clear of the fibre, before putting it in bulk. Cotton-seed, without extra care in drying, has moisture enough to make it heat in bulk, by which its germinating power is greatly impaired. It is this, and the effects of fall rains, that causes seed to trouble planters so seriously by not coming up: this makes it difficult ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... taught how to live than to be constantly warned to get ready to die. As Brother Thomas said, we are now passing through a crucial period of our history and what we need is life—more abundant life in every fibre of our souls; life which will manifest itself in moral earnestness, vigor of purpose, strength ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... arms. The very joy of living—in killing, alas!—always flung him true to the centre. But once there, he was like a calm and busy workman, and had as little self consciousness of the thing—of the gallantry and the heroism—as the prosiest blacksmith. He had grown into a man of dangerous fibre, but he was less aware of ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... inorganic matter are composed organic bodies, both vegetable and animal; such must be the rule in Jupiter and in Sirius, as it is here. We, therefore, are all but certain that herbaceous and ligneous fibre, that flesh and blood, are the constituents of the organic beings of all those spheres which are as yet seats of life. Gravitation we see to be an all-pervading principle: therefore there must be a relation between the spheres and their respective organic occupants, by virtue of which ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... maintained or struggled after. The relief was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint inclination to be amused. It was to be a play evidently like any other play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals. It is doubtful whether this idea was critically present to any one but Stephen Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered them, and leaned back in their chairs with ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature, visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... that they are so distinct and separately evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with them, but proves their distinct origin. The other elements of our life, various though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness and consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the essential strands of the stuff itself: but these ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... which no few encounters with them could explain, and he conceives the tariff to be a law which discommodes a lady who has been purchasing gloves in Paris. He thinks smuggling the great evil of the present tariff system; it is such a temptation, so insidious a break-down of moral fibre. His views ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... the Constitution, which has shown such pliant tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years' proslavery pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again gently to its original rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human government," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their natural term, and those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of returning to the principles on which they were originally founded." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stung to the quick by Lucien's disgrace, David had worked on at his problem. He had been trying to find a single process to replace the various operations of pounding and maceration to which all flax or cotton or rags, any vegetable fibre, in fact, must be subjected; and as he went to Petit-Claud's office, he abstractedly chewed a bit of nettle stalk that had been steeping in water. On his way home, tolerably satisfied with his interview, he felt a little pellet ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... winding and bloody paths in which it has marched, it has brought France the fair consummation of its present power and wealth and renown. [Cheers.] We rejoice in its multiform manufactures, which weave the woollen or silken fibre into every form and tissue of fabric; in the delicate, dainty skill which keeps the time of all creation with its watchwork and clockwork; which ornaments beauty with its jewelry, and furnishes science with ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Vendome, there could be much to say. Courbet was, as a painter, a powerful individuality; of more force, however, as a painter of the superficial envelope than of the deeper qualities which nature makes pictorial at the bidding of one of finer fibre. His claim to be considered modern can be contested, inasmuch as it was only in subject that his work was novel. In manner of painting he was of a time long past, of a school of greater masters than he showed himself to be. With this reserve, however, as a vigorous painter, both of the figure and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... soul bowed by the stormy thunder of Beethoven, or lifted to Heaven by the ethereal melody of Mendelssohn, is a musician, though he never composed a bar. The man who recognises and feels the grandeur of the organ music of 'Paradise Lost' has some fibre of a poet in him, though he be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... iris, daffodils, crocuses, scillas, and snowdrops, can be grown in pots or deep earthenware saucers that have been filled with cocoanut fibre. This can be bought at any florist's. A little shell, shingle, or sand, can be mixed with the fibre, and a piece of charcoal should be put at the bottom of the pot to keep it sweet. The bulbs need ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend. But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily's nearness: it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet stir with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand of her hair swept Gerty's cheek with its fragrance. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... of the carriers. Farinha consists of grains of similar size and appearance to the tapioca of our shops; both are products of the same root, tapioca being the pure starch, and farinha the starch mixed with woody fibre, the latter ingredient giving it a yellowish colour. It was amusing to see some of the dwarfs, the smallest members of their family, staggering along, completely hidden under their load. The baskets, which were on a high table, were entirely ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... out with an eye trained to accurate measurements in the laboratory. It was his practice to do well everything that he had to do. Otherwise you lost tone—you weakened your own fibre so that when the big thing came along you slumped. But he could not forget Francey Wilmot's nearness. It did not surprise him any more. But it charged him with unrest, and he and his unrest frightened him. He knew how ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... quality, which not only gratified the eye, but went further, and seemed to touch a vital chord in the beholder, jarring throughout his being with a sweet distribution of effect, and causing heart and voice to vibrate. It made Bressant conscious in every fibre that he was man and she woman. Whence came the influence he could not tell, and meanwhile it gained ever stronger and deeper hold upon him. Was it from the eyes, a-sparkle with the essence of youth and health? or from the mouth, with its red warmth ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... things. In a word, we can know thoughts or universals, but not things or particular existences. "When existence is in question it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a composite of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of its being." Each object keeps its own real being to itself. Its inmost secret, its reality, is something that cannot appear in knowledge. We can only know its manifestations; but these manifestations are not its reality, nor connected with it. These belong to the sphere ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... 'an enormous mass of minute centres of action. . . . Every element has its own special action, and even though it derive its stimulus to activity from other parts, yet alone effects the actual performance of duties. . . . Every single epithelial and muscular fibre-cell leads a sort of parasitical existence in relation to the rest of the body. . . . Every single bone corpuscle really possesses conditions of nutrition peculiar to itself.' Each element, as Sir J. Paget remarks, lives its appointed time, and then dies, and is replaced ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... far beyond which the native lines had now been driven, had been turned into a hospital for the wounded Tagalogs left by their comrades on the field. Beneath a broad thatched shed behind the church lay the bodies of the dead, stiff and still under the coverings of cocoanut-fibre cloth thrown hastily over them. The light of a full tropic moon threw the shadow of the roof over them like a soft, brown velvet pall. They were to be buried between day-break and sunrise, that the men who buried them might escape ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... island. These, in return, cracked native skulls. The whole island was in a state of perpetual commotion. Still, its general condition improved, its farms grew prosperous, and a joint-stock company had built a mill for converting cocoanut fibre into horse-cloths, which yielded large profits. The memory of past events might well have been buried; but the clerics, in the interest of the old woman, fanned the embers, and the infamous bidding for popularity ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... beware of the first seeds of hate! Pluck them from you, as you would your hand from the fire. Otherwise they will spring up so quickly that they will wind themselves, like poisonous weeds, round every fibre of your being, blighting and strangling all the better impulses of your nature, killing, above all, the choicest blossom that comes to us from the Divine garden—the blossom of love. Where hate flourishes, love cannot be. There is no room for the two. Never since the world began have they ever flourished ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... Willoughby puts me one or two searching interrogations on a point of interest to him, his house and name. Very well, and good night to that, and I wish Miss Dale had been ten years younger, or had passed the ten with no heartrisings and sinkings wearing to the tissues of the frame and the moral fibre to boot. She'll have a fairish health, with a little occasional doctoring; taking her rank and wealth in right earnest, and shying her pen back to Mother Goose. She'll do. And, by the way, I think it's to the credit of my sagacity that I fetched Mr. Dale here fully ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sinks in me while I hear him speak, And every slackened fibre drops its hold, Like nature letting down the springs of life; So much the name of father awes me still— [Aside. Send off the crowd; for you, now I have conquered, I can ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... I'm afraid of the grip of this world upon me. I have followed the careers of so many men, one after another. They come into it, and it lays hold of them, and before they know it, they become corrupt. What I have seen here in the Metropolis has filled me with dismay, almost with terror. Every fibre of me cries out against it; and I mean to fight it—to fight it all my life. And so I do not care to make terms with it socially. When I have seen a man doing what I believe to be a dreadful wrong, I cannot go to his ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... and prolonged their glory, running behind a thin, dead screen of scalloped clouds, piercing the tropic sky with summer blue, and ripping out the lost horizon like a long black fibre from pulp. The two friends watched in silence, when Rudolph rose, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... mystery that hung upon my late transactions. Abhorred and intolerable certainty succeeded to the doubts which had haunted my mind. It struck me with the rapidity of lightning. I felt a sudden torpor and sickness that pervaded every fibre of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... in Cotton culture are of very great promise. Commencing in latitude 39 deg. 30 min. (see Mattoon on the Branch, and Assumption the Main Line), the Company owns thousands of acres well adapted to the perfection of this fibre. A settler having a family of young children, can turn their youthful labor to a most profitable account in the growth and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... fellow, with work to do, but delicate, and dependent for his strength upon the regular administration of sustaining nourishment. Well, Friday comes, and there he is, for twenty-four hours by the clock, obliged to keep up, as best he may, on fish and vegetables and suchlike kickshaws, when every fibre of his frame is crying out for meat, red meat. And now"—he pushed back his chair—"and now, dear heart, be brave. Steel yourself to meet adversity. A sorrow stoically borne is already half a sorrow vanquished. I must absent thee from thy felicity a while—-I must be stepping." He rose, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... smiled sadly at the impulsive Irishman's remark. He could see that he had moved every fibre of his feeling heart and warm nature and that he was following every incident of his terrible story of atrocities and sufferings ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... bravery, endurance, and resourcefulness that test every fibre of the seaman's versatile composition; and a communication to the outer world of the tremendous struggles he is called upon to bear would be calculated to stagger the lay imagination. It would take a spacious library to ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... preaching came to an end, and then there was that soul-sickening hush, that exanimate silence, of which the noise of rustling clothes and scraping feet formed a part, as the people rose in the hall, where chairs had been put for them, leaving me and Norrey alone with Marion. Every fibre of my frame recognized the moment of parting, and protested. A tremendous wave of will swept through me and from me, a resistless demand for her presence, and it had power upon her. I heard her speak, and say, as distinctly as I repeat the ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... us an expounder for a still more remote-looking object than the Ilissus,—the Celtic languages and literature. And yet why should I call it remote? if, as I have been labouring to show, in the spiritual frame of us English ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of tracing it, lives and works. ALIENS IN SPEECH, IN RELIGION, IN BLOOD! said Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... Cyd, exploding the word as though he had been a member of Monsieur Crapeau's class in French elementary sounds, and with a start which seemed to shake every fibre in his ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... child held out his little arms, and kicked and crowed to be taken, and when his mother had intrusted him to Evadne, he clasped her tight round the neck, and nibbled her cheek with his warm, moist mouth, sending a delicious thrill through every fibre of her body, a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the Merse, Ettrick Forest, and Teviotdale; the Debateable Land, Liddesdale, and Annan Water became the native countries of the songs of raid and battle. The 'Red Harlaw'—which has had its own homespun bard, although of a different note and fibre from the minstrels of the Border—may be said to have ended the struggle for the mastery between Highlands and Lowlands. From thence onward through the age of ballad-making, there were spreaghs and feuds enow upon and within the Highland Line. But, until the time when Jacobitism came to ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... given sympathy to some, chaff to others; nevertheless, his relations with them had been curiously direct and simple. Quite unconsciously to himself, his mother's code had become ingrained in the very fibre of his being. And now he was ready to stand or fall by his judgment that Ethel Dent, Cooee as he called her in his secret heart, was as good and loyal as a woman could be. The future seemed to him so obvious that he made no effort to forecast it. He ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... animals, when considered as a whole, is always on the alert; at almost every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command all approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a signal to all his companions. To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... great sail made of matting of fibre, strained in the breeze that drove them nearer to the haven where they would be. Already they could see the gleam of the Rakahanga beach with the rim of silver where the waves broke into foam. Then the breeze dropped. The fibre-sail flapped ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... of all, the fact of its having been, can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy, because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable things can pass before us without gathering about it other images of some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no thought ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... gave himself up to intemperance. Alcohol had permeated his body, carrying its deadly poison into every nerve, and fibre, and tissue of his entire organism. He exposed himself to the sun's rays on a very hot day, and he fell dead from sunstroke. The WRATH of the sun destroyed his life. God made the sun to rise on the morning of that day; and God filled the sun with its heat; ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... go off; only the click of the trigger could be heard. Half fainting, his hand dropped to his side. Every fibre within him quivered, his head swam, his lips were parched, and his hand trembled so much that when he laid down the revolver it rattled ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Coast Murring tribe may be regarded as typical, the drama of resurrection from the dead was exhibited in a graphic form to the novices at initiation. The ceremony has been described for us by an eye-witness. A man, disguised with stringy bark fibre, lay down in a grave and was lightly covered up with sticks and earth. In his hand he held a small bush, which appeared to be growing in the soil, and other bushes were stuck in the ground to heighten the effect. Then the novices were brought and placed beside the grave. Next, a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... force and sweetness of her feeling were caused by the fact that she had a companion in her contemplation. This was strange. An intense desire for loneliness had driven her out of Europe to this desert place, and a companion, who was an utter stranger, emphasised the significance, gave fibre to the beauty, intensity to the mystery of that which she looked on. It was as if the meaning of the African evening were suddenly doubled. She thought of a dice-thrower who throws one die and turns up six, then throws ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... conditions in those days, and how serious even in our own times, when travel is easy, are the discomforts of the women and children of a regiment on the march—we may well pity these unresting followers of the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and she came moreover of a campaigning stock. Her father was a "noted suttler" of the name of Nuttle, and her first husband—for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married her—had been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served some years' apprenticeship to the military life before these ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... the press worked slowly and silently like a good-natured domestic animal. A newly-built shed with its white walls looked dazzling in the sunshine, and all round about the long black rows of compressed peat were to be seen. The blocks were hard and heavy, with little fibre and much coal. They easily beat all competition and had a good reputation as ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... great trial of the flesh she had been through, likewise pleasant after her long abstinences. She grew happy in the tide of new blood flowing in her veins, and might easily have abandoned herself in the seduction of these carnal influences. But her moral nature was of tough fibre, and made mute revolt. Such constant mealing did not seem natural, and the obtuse brain of this lowly servant-girl was perplexed. Her self-respect was wounded; she hated her position in this house, ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... they went together, even on Sunday outings across the bay amongst people who did not know him, eyes were continually drawn to them. He matched her girl's beauty with his boy's beauty, her grace with his strength, her delicacy of line and fibre with the harsher vigor and muscle of the male. Frank-faced, fresh-colored, almost ingenuous in expression, eyes blue and wide apart, he drew and held the gaze of more than one woman far above him in the ...
— The Game • Jack London
... national drink of the Mexicans, is made from the sap of the agave. The fibre of the agave, known as sisal hemp, is used in the manufacture of rope, twine, mats, brushes, etc. Other parts of the plant ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... achieved, the list of failures would far outnumber that of successes. Many of those who have rendered priceless blessings to their own and after generations by the production of wonderful machines or methods from the fine fibre of their brains, were plundered and buffeted, even in the midst of their grand successes, to such a degree that it requires a lofty comprehension to determine whether their lives were triumphs or defeats. Sometimes the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... a variation. It has, however, always been regarded as a thing apart, owing to a general instinctive repugnance to admit that a phenomenon, whose extrinsications are so extensive and penetrate every fibre of social life, derives, in fact, from the same causes as socially insignificant forms like rickets, sterility, etc. But this repugnance is really only a sensory illusion, like many others ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... also led to her associating habitually with companions beneath her socially. She was a thoroughly good girl. A vulgar allusion would have shocked her, an impertinence she would have quickly resented; yet she seemed of a coarser fibre than the rest of the family, the reason for which, seeing that both girls had equal advantages and opportunities, only an expert psychologist could explain. She had gone through school mechanically as an unpleasant task to be gotten over ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... in association with whom, saving that she has been for years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained formalities ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... The moral fibre of nations is not always measured by their size or power. Belgium is small and weak, but her answer bears witness to her love of justice and to her respect of the right. She would rather die with honor than ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... master, she superbly vanished. Balder had disliked the scene throughout, yet his love was greater than before. An awe of the woman whose innate force could command a nature like this priest's seemed to give his passion for her a more vigorous fibre. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... offered to construct a large double canoe, three or four professional canoe-builders being among them. They were far more ingenious than the civilised Englishmen. Their tools they made out of stones, and flints, and shells; the fibre of trees served them instead of nails; their sails were made out of dried grass. It was a work, however, of great labour; night and day they toiled at it. At length, aided by the Englishmen, it was completed. They had preserved and stored all the ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... by the critics, and also by the public,[173] may be said to have destroyed Borrow's moral fibre. Henceforth, it was a soured and disappointed man who went forth to meet the world. We hear much in the gossip of contemporaries of Borrow's eccentricities, it may be of his rudeness and gruffness, in the last years ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... make us pass our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions. At the same time, that in this languid in active state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
