"Impossibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quickly, 'please don't think me impossibly rude if I turn you out. Some—some people are coming to ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... and little intrigues, and bonfires, and College rows. I want to live here, and walk on the Downs and write my book. I don't want to be stuffy, as Jack said. But it will be all right, when I have taken the plunge; and after I have been back a week, this will all fade into a sort of impossibly pleasant dream." ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night, hadn't it?—when Paula ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the Rhone unites them—and that this latter name nearly resembles Tarragona, a place which in other French romances is actually called Terrascoigne. The shipwreck which in the story takes place, impossibly, at Beaucaire, may have originally happened, quite naturally, at Tarragona. Even the nonsense- name, Torelore, might easily have had its rise in Torello. Again, though it has been shown that all modern reports of the Couvade as existing ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... him off. She was probably still mad about yesterday. She had been sitting at the counter at the Club Rexall, drinking a soda and reading a movie magazine with a big picture of an impossibly pretty face on the cover—the kind you never see just walking down the street. He had taken the next stool and ordered ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... Goldsmith's dialogue lies in entire naturalness. The author of "The School for Scandal" creates for his comedies an atmosphere of superheated wit and intellectualism, which, whilst inevitably pleasing, is beyond probability. Certain novelists vaunt and revel in the creation of impossibly vivacious wits. Nature has a finer grace; its faithful reflection is purer art. Those true to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst the novelists Goldsmith and Jane Austen have ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... very rapid. I certainly was in no hurry to have it over, when I had so disagreeable a prospect before me as a trial, and not impossibly an execution. I was treated with less harshness than the rest of the prisoners—perhaps on account of my youth—perhaps because some believed me innocent. I fain hoped ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... how to talk nowadays, with perhaps just one good, big, absurd mistake thrown in,—thus, by the grace of humor keeping banality from becoming absolutely fatal. Madame Romedek was rather amusing. She tried to be the lady—which, as she doesn't know how, and only succeeds in being impossibly stupid, must have bored the men on each side of her tremendously. That's where foolish women of that sort spoil their own game. If they would make the best of the bargain, and be frankly a common cocotte gone ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it. The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse, like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... music, he had a moment's consciousness of a skull leering at him and harsh laughter clattering in echoes along the shore; then his boat struck and filled, and the dark flood curtained off the sky. Wagner has made familiar the legend of the Rhine daughters, singing impossibly under the river as they swim about the reef of gold,—the treasure stolen by the gnome, Alberich, who in that act brought envy, strife, greed, and injustice into the world, and accomplished the destruction ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... improvised a method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't have done the job without ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... The astonishingly unsophisticated and impossibly innocent shopgirl who—in the story—just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young man who heroically "marries the girl"; the adventures of the debonaire actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure gold, and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the great man wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington. "Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to 'break ground' by talking to himself day ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... that Leo made the Song of the Bull who had been a God and forgotten the fact, and he sang it in such a manner that half the young men in the world conceived that they too might be Gods without knowing it. A half of that half grew impossibly conceited, and died early. A half of the remainder strove to be Gods and failed, but the other half accomplished four times more work than they would have done under any ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... make it seem inevitable, to force it step by step on its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few flowers—they shall not be peonies, I promise you—on the roadside. And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now, you needn't be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to the mill. ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... in this one particular. She couldn't understand how he could endure, much less care for, this ugly, withered, yellow, untidy woman. However, it made her own position somewhat easier. If he were really aware how impossibly vulgar she was, and took it seriously to heart, Elsie wasn't sure if even thus early she should be able to leave him to bear such misery alone. His unconscious loneliness was appealing enough; conscious unhappiness might have proved more than she ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... was almost, as Felix knew—though perhaps it wasn't for her to say so—the centre of that movement; but there were ways of doing things, and one did so deprecate women like this Kirsteen—what an impossibly Celtic name!—putting her finger into any pie that really was of national importance. Nothing could come of anything done that sort of way. If Felix had any influence with Tod it would be a mercy to use it in getting those poor young creatures ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... once; the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm. Whichever it was, the disaster happened so fast that practically no warning at all was given. And out in ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... been wanted for instant use in the recovery of some person apparently drowned, the single gentleman made Kit's mother swallow a bumper of it at such a high temperature that the tears ran down her face, and then hustled her off to the chaise again, where—not impossibly from the effects of this agreeable sedative—she soon became insensible to his restlessness, and fell fast asleep. Nor were the happy effects of this prescription of a transitory nature, as, notwithstanding that the distance was greater, and the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... pursued as if she hadn't heard me. "They're most of them more in want of money even than we. Therefore 'greatness' is out of the question—we really recognised that at an early stage. Your nephew's exactly the sort of young man we've always built upon—if he wasn't, so impossibly, your nephew. From head to foot he was made on purpose. Dear Linda was her mother's own daughter when she recognised him on the spot! One's enough of a prince to-day when one's the right American: such a wonderful price is set ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... even hint to him that the joy was worth less than the peril. He would have been angry in his heart, and something in him stronger than himself would have forced him to increase the risks. I knew him! ... Ah! but when we went gently, life seemed to be ideal for me, impossibly perfect! It seemed to contain all that I could ever ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... exasperating, a thing only to be explained by tapping one's forehead. Every now and then he still heard of her, living down there, spending her days out in the woods and fields, and sometimes even her nights, they said, and steadily growing poorer and thinner and more eccentric; becoming, in short, impossibly difficult, as only Englishwomen can. People would speak of her as "such a dear," and talk of her charm, but always with that shrug which is hard to bear when applied to one's relations. What she did with the productions of her brush he never inquired, too disillusioned by that experience. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... at once so exquisite and so surprising. It is like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined, and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of a piece with all He taught; so much so ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... intellectual development. One might question what common grounds for social intercourse there would be between an American farmer's wife with either grammar-school or high-school education and some European peasant's wife, illiterate, impossibly shy, ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... but significant changes, the result of their co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short, although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations, when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with both pleasure ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... too much of himself, too little of his cause: but he is absorbed in the pursuit of truth as an abstract inquiry, he is led away by the headstrong and over-mastering activity of his own mind. He is borne along, almost involuntarily, and not impossibly against his better judgment, by the throng and restlessness of his ideas as by a crowd of people in motion. His perceptions are literal, tenacious, epileptic—his understanding voracious of facts, and equally communicative of them—and ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... fever in Florence, and I was rushing away for fear of the infection, when our stupid little train ran off the rails near Pistoria and smashed itself up. Fortunately we were within half a mile of a village, so we weren't quite bereft. The village was impossibly like a toy village, and the accommodation what one would expect in a Noah's Ark, but it was all absolutely picturesque. I put up at the little inn with my maid and Ko Ko—Ko Ko was such a sweet dog—a white poodle. I was tremendously keen on poodles that year." She stopped ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... bargain with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment that the job-holder ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... hypnotics to the question concerning their identity, "I am the image in your eyes," is undoubtedly elicited by the fact that their extraordinarily acute and, perhaps, magnifying vision, perceives the image of themselves in the eyes of the operator with abnormal distinctness, and, not impossibly, of a size quite incompatible with the dimensions of the pupil. To Unorna the answer meant something more. It suggested the actual presence of the person she was influencing, in her own brain, and whenever she was undertaking anything especially difficult, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... And in the second place you got me out of a villainous bad temper and turned an ugly goblin into a very happy butterfly. I'm downright ashamed of myself for being so horrid about Rose de Vigne. She isn't at all a bad sort though she is so impossibly beautiful. Your brother is going to dance with her now. See! There ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... for the wedding by a course of training extending for over a month or more prior to the actual event. It should be your aim to work yourself into such a condition that you can go for three nights without sleep, talk for hours to the most impossibly stupid of young women, and consume an unending amount of alcohol. You are then prepared for the bachelor dinner, the bridal dinner, the bridesmaids, the wedding, ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... almost impossibly disgusting and truculent. 'He found his fellow-servant, who owed him a hundred pence'—some three pounds, ten shillings—and with the hands that a minute before had been wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him; and with the voice that had been plaintively pleading for mercy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the return journey was disastrous. Short rations soon began to tell, for they had taken longer than they had calculated, and no food was to be found by the way. Gray was the first to fail and to die. Heavy rains made the ground impossibly heavy, and the camels sank to the ground exhausted. Finally they had to be killed and eaten. Then the horses went. At long last the three weary men and two utterly worn-out camels dragged themselves to Cooper's Creek, hoping ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... from the Deacon process cannot be treated in this manner, as chambers of impossibly large dimensions would be required. Originally the absorption of the Deacon chlorine took place in a set of chambers, constructed of large slabs of stone, containing a great many horizontal shelves superposed over one another. About sixteen such chambers were combined in such manner that the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rejoined Ross gloomily. "We cannot give an alarm. If we could control the valves for half a minute, I'd sink this blessed craft with all on board, myself included, for good and all. But it is no use talking of the impossibly heroic." ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... the fortunes of the Battalion through the varied scenes of its experience. I should like to talk of happy mornings 'round the line' with Colonel or Adjutant, or cheery lunches with good comrades in impossibly damp and filthy dug-outs, of midnight assemblies before, and early-morning greetings after, successful raids, and of how we inspected Boche prisoners, machine-guns and ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... with a keen faculty of observation, which he has had many opportunities of exercising, and never varying from a code of honor and principle which is really nice and rigid in its way. There is a sort of philosophy developing itself in him which will not impossibly cause him to settle down in this or some other equally singular course of life. He seems almost to have made up his mind never to be married, which I wonder at; for he has strong affections, and is fond ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with the mountain rising sharply behind, which made Hiram's kingdom, could not grow enough for his people's wants. His country was 'nourished' by Palestine, long centuries after this time (Acts xii. 20), and the same was the case in Solomon's period. In verse 11, the quantity of oil is impossibly small as compared with that of wheat. 2 Chronicles reads 'twenty thousand' instead of 'twenty,' and the Septuagint inserts 'thousand' in verse 11, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived. It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the theory of translation, in that it ignores the discrepancies between precept and practice, and the influence which practice has exerted upon theory; on the other hand, however, it confines a subject, otherwise impossibly large, within measurable limits. The chief emphasis has been laid upon the sixteenth century, the period of the most enthusiastic experimentation, when, though it was still possible for the translator to rest in the comfortable medieval conception of his art, the New ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... was clamped, I observed, by an arrangement in the floor just in front of the door. If I could get rid of that catch it would be easy to free myself, for to a man of my strength the weight would not be impossibly heavy. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... younger brother all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God's world ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... he promised. "It isn't a thing, but a duty, a privilege, a responsibility. He shall stay here, where he is. He really won't crowd us too impossibly, and that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... anyone had told us a month ago that we should be staying in a big house with two quite good-looking young men as fellow-guests, and carte blanche to enjoy ourselves as much as we pleased, we would have thought it too impossibly good to be true; but now that it has come true, we shall be idiots if we don't make the most of it. I hope Uncle Bernard keeps to his idea of making us each master of the ceremonies in turn. Won't I make the money fly when it comes to my turn! Picnics and luncheons by day, dances and theatricals ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in our opinion—appear inclined to hurry toward such a course, and we should like to see the experiment first tried of active mediation on its part between Spain and Cuba. A meeting of leading representatives of both parties of the island under a distinguished jurist at Washington might not impossibly assist the solution of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... the amphitheatre at the distant Great Smoky Mountains shimmering in the hazy September sunlight—so ineffably beautiful, so delicately blue, that they might have seemed the ideal scenery of some impossibly lovely ideal world. Perhaps she was wondering what the unconscious Becky Stiles, far away in those dark woods about Pine Lick, had secured in this life besides her freckled face. Was this the sylvan deity of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... page was one easily recognizable, for it was one upon whose margin he himself had drawn, in a moment of intense irritation with the argument advanced thereon, a rough outline of a donkey's head with impossibly long and obstinate ears. ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... of an observant turn of mind, who is accustomed to the sight of English maids and matrons, can deny that making-up, as at present practiced, partakes of the amateurish element. Impossible reds and whites grow still more impossibly red and white from week to week under the unskilled hands of the wearer of "false colors," who does not like to ask for advice on so delicate a subject, for, even were she willing to confess to the practice, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... antiquated system, sir,"—Dubberley rather prides himself on preserving the courtly fashions of address of a bygone age,—"an impossibly long time. The average speed of a canal-boat at the present day under the ministrations of that overburdened and inadequate quadruped, the—er—horse, is three miles per hour. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... impossibly foolish!" cried the excited, desperate Maggie. "You might tell me so—and discourage me—and I simply must go ahead! I feel rather like—like a juggler who's trying for the first time to keep a lot of new ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... heard that much, my dear fellow! But the thing is so impossibly absurd! A man of property like Evgenie to give IOU's to a money-lender, and to be worried about them! It is ridiculous. Besides, he cannot possibly be on such intimate terms with Nastasia Philipovna ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Bacon, and he no doubt valued and studied with attention, the writings of that great man. The working up of the splendid dialogue between Iago and Othello, may not impossibly have been suggested by this sentence of Lord Bacon: "Breaking off in the midst of what one was about to say, (as if he took himself up) breeds a greater appetite in him with whom you confer, to know more." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... that slanting lateral way was four or five miles long, allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge of our strength and violence had reached ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... success might have been considerable—of success, temporary and short-lived indeed, but still sufficient to inflict a terrible injury upon this country—to bathe her soil in blood—to give her capital to the flames—and not impossibly to shake some of her institutions. The enemy himself was, in all likelihood, unprepared to make the attempt, until England had had time to make adequate preparation for its encounter. It was otherwise ordered of God's providence, than that the last bulwark of liberty ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... everybody. Having made a tolerable synthesis and purification of their own natures, they require every other nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined. What they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; and the consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified and inconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogether unrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, may fall into the aristocrat's fallacy; they may forget the infinite animal and vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, and short-winded, but ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... these allusions to it, be recalled to mind not inappropriately. One—where Cobbs "wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where them two babies could have made an impossible marriage, and have lived impossibly happy ever afterwards." The other—where, with genial sarcasm, Boots propounds this brace of opinions by way of general summing up—"Firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as innocent as them two children. Secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of going with them sometimes and pointing the moral—the technical one—of showing her the things he liked, the things he disapproved. She repeated her declaration that she recognised the fallacy of her mother's view of heroines impossibly virtuous and of the importance of her looking out for such tremendously proper people. "One must let her talk, but of course it creates a prejudice," she said with her eyes on Mr. and Mrs. Lovick, who had got up, terminating their ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... started forward as though to leap, then settled back. Plainly it longed to spring. Equally plainly it was afraid of the being that so impossibly was revealed to its nostrils but not to its eyes. Meanwhile, one tearing sweep of blunt claws or sharp fangs—and a fatal rent would ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... over all the same affectation everywhere, in every detail. Even the woman's melancholy voice, still to be heard behind the paper partition, was evidently the proper way for them to sing—these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes among impossibly large flowers. Long before I arrived there, I had perfectly pictured Japan to myself. Nevertheless, in the reality it almost seems to be smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no doubt by reason ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I had to. There was a haunting familiarity about the impossibly beautiful features. I had seen the face—somewhere—sometime. In dreams? No; I realized suddenly what was the source of that familiarity. This was no living woman, but a synthesis. Her nose was the tiny, impudent one of Whimsy White at her loveliest moment; her lips ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... nutshell the miracle of art and the imagination. You get this queer irascible musician quite impossibly and unfortunately in love with a wealthy patroness, and then out of his brain comes THIS, a tapestry of glorious music, setting out love to lovers, lovers who love in spite of all that is wise ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... I have been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in the house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, but exaggerate it, for it ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the way out to the airport, the bright, impossibly cleanly shaven C.I.A. man said, "You've never been behind the Iron Curtain ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... apparition was so sudden, and, above all, the cool ignoring of his presence was so disconcerting. Moreover, through that half-sinister light, his long muzzle upstretched towards the moon, and raised as he was a little above the level on which Kane was standing, the wolf looked unnaturally and impossibly tall. Kane had never heard of a wolf acting in this cool, self-possessed, arrogantly confident fashion, and his mind reverted obstinately to the outworn superstitions of his habitants friends. But, after all, it was this ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... relieved, and need not have been dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have seen an Oxford agricultural laborer's wife looking cheerful on ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... already hopelessly entangled, wheeled in astonishment at the almost viciously satirical suggestion, refusing even while her face flamed to believe that she had caught correctly the impossibly cynical, unbelievably unkind insinuation of this girl who was her closest friend. But Miriam's eyes silenced the demand for an explanation, which had risen with an hitherto unknown coldness to her lips. Instead ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... added to the drawing, for in Russia the processes at work elsewhere have gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to see dimly, in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened. The struggle to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, of Russia, and, not impossibly, of Europe. For each country that develops to the end in this direction is a country lost to the economic comity of Europe. And, as one country follows another over the brink, so will the remaining countries be faced by conditions ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... was a good young fellow, better than many, and when he went on to think of himself, he saw, in his vision of his own future, nothing worse than an almost impossibly pretty girl as his bride, one with whom he was to take a specially long and agreeable wedding tour; and some time after that he supposed himself to see two or three jolly little boys rolling about on the grass, the Melcombes of the future, and with them and ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... quite impossibly lovely in a frock of the cheapest kind of material, "run up" by the local dressmaker, and very evidently with no other thought "at the back of her mind" than of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... hold of a ship with a general cargo, was merely being stored with the raw materials which were to be distributed over her whole life, and turned by degrees to many purposes, useful, beautiful—not impossibly detestable. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... laugh of youth which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... conclusion is a little too like part of Poe's most celebrated tale, but nobody has bellowed "Plagiarist!" Some people may not look over a fence: Mr. Stevenson, if he liked, might steal a horse,—the animal in this case is only a skeleton. A very sober student might add that the hero is impossibly clever; but, then, the hero is a boy, and this is a boy's book. For the rest, the characters live. Only genius could have invented John Silver, that terribly smooth-spoken mariner. Nothing but genius could have drawn that simple yokel on the island, with his craving for cheese ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... spite of the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She was saying to herself in secret: "CAN we again, in this form, migrate there? Can I, for myself, undertake it? face all the intenser keeping-up and stretching-out, indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the country, as we've established and accepted them, would stand for?" She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt—so much she was subsequently to remember; but remembering then too that her companion, though perceptibly perhaps as if not to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. This impersonality ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... sister. Clementina was the eldest and was already looked upon as an old maid. She was intensely devout, and that was always troublesome, for it meant that she would insist upon going to church at impossibly early hours, and must have fish-dinners on Fridays. But it would certainly be conferring a favour on the Princess to take Sabina off her hands at such a time. The devout Clementina could take care of herself. With her face, ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... and burned afterward. But who would reject a block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving home hard. So hard that I almost jumped when ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... frock-coat, brown boots, and straw hat; and a stranded Burmese cuts no end of a figure in under-vest, steward's jacket, yellow trousers and squash hat. All carry a knife or a krees, and all are quite pleasant people, who will accept your Salaam and your cigarette. Rules and regulations for impossibly good conduct hang on the walls in Hindustani, Japanese, Swahili, Urdu, and Malayan. All food is prepared and cooked by themselves, and the slaughter of an animal for the table must be witnessed and prayed upon by those of their own faith. Out in the compound is a skittle-alley, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... you here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on this 99th National ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... (no theory wholly accounts for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the reader against a number of short stories in a magazine. But it may be that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'. On the other hand, the identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... alone would break down anyone's strength. Everybody knows that you are purged and starved to the edge of death. That's what two years' hard labour means. It's not the labour that's hard. It's the conditions of life that make it impossibly hard: they break you down body and soul. And if you resist, they drive you crazy.... But, please! don't say I said anything; you've promised, you know you have: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... My rising oven is always close to the same temperature; when baking I soon learn to adjust the oven temperature and baking time to produce the kind of crust and doneness I desire. Precisionist, yes. I must bake every batch identically if I want the breads to be uniformly good. But not impossibly rigorous because once I learn my materials and oven, I've got it down ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... the baby's being naked of articles of identification.) It is, alas! undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of one's cousin's fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much of the infant's mother, may not impossibly have been the original likeness of some baby ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... him seeped within, into his hope and courage and resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed. The whole world resembled Nantbrook—a place of universal condemnation, forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had honestly ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... profession, while a neat little glass-case, on a level with the eye of the passing pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his skill in mechanical dentistry, and afforded instruction and amusement to the boys of the neighbourhood, who criticised the glistening white teeth and impossibly red gums, displayed behind the plate-glass, with a like vigour and freedom of language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession confine itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case. A shabby-genteel young man pervaded the neighbourhood for some days after the surgeon-dentist's advent, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... himself forward as a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... This is impossibly absurd! As Colonel Elliot writes, "I pointed out in my book" (The Trustworthiness of Border Ballads) "that the allegation that Buccleuch had refused to strike a blow at a party of English raiders, who had insolently ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... persecution, to send the account of it to Asia by the hands of Irenaeus, and he must be supposed to have returned and to have settled down in Lyons before he wrote his voluminous works; A.D. 180 is, therefore, an almost impossibly early date, but it is, at any rate, the very earliest that can be pretended for the testimony now to be examined. The works against heresies were probably written, the first three about A.D. 190, and the remainder about A.D. 198. Irenaeus is the first Christian ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... you're not playing quite fairly. You see "reticence" cannot suggest "audacity." The First Player's word not impossibly might. Could it be that you were still thinking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... of values—by the motives that inform it and the ends that determine it—to condemn thereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon which is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a mosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossibly impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued together by platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety. It is certainly an obvious but greatly neglected truth that simplicity and candor in public speaking, largeness of mental movement, what Phillips Brooks called ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... together with both the will and the ability to act as necessary. Theoretically, he could have forcefully taken possession of the body and mind of any suitable subject, but the mere thought of such a violation was impossibly abhorrent. Respect for the right of the individual to self-will was so deeply ingrained as to make the deliberate unseating of another's reason virtually impossible. On the other hand, free-willed cooeperation and understanding were equally out of reach; to enter the conscious mind of these beings ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... and arrogant, it loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... it is impossible to fix the time very precisely, death may have very well taken place several hours before Mrs. Drabdump's first attempt to wake deceased. Of course, it may have taken place between the first and second calls, as he may merely have been sound asleep at first; it may also not impossibly have taken place considerably earlier than the first call, for all the physical data seem to prove. Nevertheless, on the whole, I think we shall be least likely to err if we assume the time of death to be half-past six. Gentlemen, let us ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... employed in decorating its externals. The pomp and pageantry of the drama are Egyptian and ancient; the play's natural and artificial environment is Egyptian and ancient; two bits of its music are Oriental, possibly Egyptian, and not impossibly ancient. But in everything else "Aida" is an Italian opera. The story plays in ancient Egypt, and its inventor was an archaeologist deeply versed in Egyptian antiquities, but I have yet to hear that Mariette Bey, who wrote the scenario of the drama, ever ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up suddenly; look at the sea,—and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down, turn sky-blue,—a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one were looking into an ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a plaintive ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... touch on these religious opinions (before mentioned) but briefly, is because of my own strong impression since I have been writing this memoir, that in that next chapter of existence upon which Newman has now entered, he may not impossibly be nearer the Light, the religious truth, which here he so earnestly sought, but mistakenly; and in his regret for his own phases of religious unfaith, now cast aside, may not wish them to be recapitulated anew. There is a certain pathetic ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... was off in the wonder-aisles of dreamland—a dreamland full of circuses, of impossibly funny and friendly clowns, of street parade glories, of marvellous animals and thrilling ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... left before nine, and at that hour (an impossibly dissipated one for the brick house) the family retired for the night. As Rebecca carried Mrs. Burch's candle upstairs and found herself thus alone with her for a minute, she said shyly, "Will you please tell Mr. Burch that I'm not a member of the church? I didn't know what to do when ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ..." the therapist began. Then he grinned weakly and stopped. On the golf course, Stanton was impossibly good. It had taken him a little while to get the knack of it, but as soon as he got control of his club and knew the reactions of the ball, his score started plummeting. Now it was so low as to be almost ridiculous. One long ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... aware of what it was while he watched the party boat head out to sea a few minutes later, smiled at what seemed an impossibly fanciful concoction of his unconscious, and started towards the pier's parking lot. But when he had reached his car, climbed in, turned on the ignition, and lit a cigarette, the notion was still with ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... immense possibilities for producers and writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spectators, now with the improvement in the stories of serial pictures has come an increase in the spectators who follow them up, and a consequent introduction ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny—the cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really preferred ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... impossibly absurd; and unless there is some flaw in our argument, the fault must lie in the premisses; we ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... of the outdoors. For twelve months he had served at the front, part of the time with the forces in the Argonne. He had ridden stampedes and fought through blizzards. He had tamed the worst outlaw horses the West could produce. But he had never been so shock-shaken as he was now. A fact impossibly but dreadfully true confronted him. Wild Rose had been alone with his uncle in these rooms, had listened with breathless horror while Kirby climbed the stairs, had been trapped by his arrival, and had ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... information of Peter's thoughts in that hour? This verse sounds like first-hand knowledge. Not impossibly John Mark may have been his informant, for we know that both were in Rome together at a later period. In any case, it is clear that, through whatever channels this piece of minute knowledge reached Luke, it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... would not have done or suffered for the approaching figure. All along the road from Richmond his imagination had conjured up a score of fantastic instances, in each of which he had rescued, or died for, or had in some impossibly romantic and magnificent fashion been the benefactor of the man who was drawing near to the river and camp-fire. As superbly generous as any other youth, he was, at present, in his progress through life, in the land of shrines. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... for me. I shall be impossibly difficult myself if I meet Mr. Carruthers again, as he has no mother to play these ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the lectures at the institutions—at least at some of them—were directly addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none. ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... the slanted ceiling.... Almost as they had blended together that first day when she was twelve. Yet not the same, she corrected her thoughts, frowning. Sometimes, as today, the design seemed faded and changed. The gay little bridges and the flowered, impossibly blue trees seemed to change and ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... conviction of his bad life took fast hold of his conscience, he trembled, and was astonished. (Acts 9:6) And although we read not of any particular circumstance of his behaviour under his conviction outwardly, yet it is almost impossibly but he must have some, and those of the most solid sort. For there is such a sympathy betwixt the soul and the body, that the one cannot be in distress or comfort, but the other must partake of, and also signify the same. If it be comfort, then 'tis shewn; If comfort ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... impossibly strange sentence. Brion had never realized before how much of the content of speech was made up of emotion. If the man had given it a positive emphasis, perhaps said it with enthusiasm, it would have ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... "foenerator Alpheus," who delighted to reap where he had not sown, and too often (I fear) allowed himself in practices which not impossibly have long since been found to qualify him for distant climates and "Botanic" regions,—even he, though I might truly describe him as a mere highwayman, whenever he happened to be aware that I had received a friendly loan, yet, like other highwaymen ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... agitated interest in all which might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great proconsul, her employer—the theme of which, purged of lyrical redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that "your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... possible, the formation of all-black antiaircraft artillery battalions would have been precluded by the need of this highly technical branch for so many kinds of trained specialists. Not only would separate training facilities for the few Negroes in the peacetime corps be impossibly expensive and inefficient, but not enough black recruits were eligible for such training. A wartime comparison of the General Classification Test and Mechanical Aptitude Test scores of the men in the 52d Defense Battalion with those of men in ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... rampant in his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... under-secretaries, whom he should request to continue at their posts for the purpose. As, however, a disposition was evinced on the part of the late Cabinet not to afford him any facilities, he began to think that this might not impossibly extend to the subordinates, and he said that at all events he would have two people ready to put into the Treasury to transact the business there. I told him if he was in any difficulty he might make ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... through my soul tonight, You in your gown, impossibly white— I marvel greatly that it fail To glow and pale With iridescent light— How can it hang in silent nun-like folds? Think of the flaming mystery ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... literature, he purchased some new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and Andre Biely's St. Petersburg, but the first of these he found pretentious, the second dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure. He did not confess to himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language that was at fault. He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries, and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois, Douboginsky, Lanceray, and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... promised to be very varied. She gathered them together in the village shop to talk it over. She asked them if they thought ten shillings a day and food would be enough. She asked it hesitatingly, afraid lest she were making them an impossibly frugal offer. She was relieved at the cry of assent; but it was followed after a moment by murmurs from the married women, when they had had time to reflect, that it was unfair to pay the raw young ones at the same rate as themselves. Priscilla however turned a deaf ear to their murmurings. ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... children were dumfounded by this extraordinary, impossibly monstrous thing—a boy who had not a papa; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt rising in them the hitherto inexplicable pity of their mothers for La Blanchotte. As for Simon, he had propped ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... accepted! I was glad she was sitting sidewise to him and couldn't see. Some women like to make other women unhappy, but I think it is best for you to keep them blissfully unconscious until you get what you want. Anyway, I like that girl all over and I can't see that her neck is so absolutely impossibly flowery. However, I think she might have been a little more considerate about discussing Alfred's London triumph over the Italian mission. As a punishment I let Tom put his arm around my waist as we stood watching them drive off and then was sorry for the left gray horse that shied and came ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his facts, by-the-by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, to take the unprofitable labour off my hands. As a final disposition ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have gone to her—that was what he had said. In spite of her conduct that midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer's Kopje, he would have come again to her! How, indeed, he must have loved her; or how magnanimous, how impossibly magnanimous, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... San Miniato, suppressing a smile. "Have I been such an impossibly bad man that the very mention of my past must shock a young girl—whom I love?" In the last words he found an opportunity to practise the expression of a little passion, and took advantage of it, well knowing that it would be useful in the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... were to have gone early this morning to Arrima, a village in the mountains, situated among groves of bamboos, where there are mineral springs and a hot-water bath, in which people bathe in the old style. But the weather was impossibly bad for our intended expedition, with showers of snow and sleet. We waited till half-past eleven, and then landed and talked of going to Osaka again by train; but finally decided that even this was not practicable, and that we had better stay ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... business was neatly arranged for his doing. Certainly it appeared as if the hand of intelligent destiny must have been in it somewhere. No mere blind luck could have driven him half a mile into the country to the one spot in all Hunston—impossibly unlikely as it was—where he could become acquainted with Uncle Elbert's daughter without the formality ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... came downstairs sooner than she ought. She could not get rid of her distrust of Ellen, the conviction that once her sister was left to herself she would be up to all sorts of mischief. Ellen had behaved impossibly once and therefore, according to Joanna, there was no guarantee that she would not go on behaving impossibly to the end of time. So she came down to play the dragon to Tip Ernley as she had played the dragon to the young lieutenants of the summer. There was not much ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... crests, seem to be the end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... I made out of their kaleidoscopic chatter; beautifully inaccurate, impossibly romantic picture, in which big muscley men had fights with yawping painted savages that always got gloriously licked, in the approved story-book manner! I could shut my eyes and see it all very plainly, away off there half-way to the moon. And I used to wonder how my father could be such a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... sense. There were exceptions—we who were the friends of Joan of Arc, also Joan of Arc herself, that poor girl shut up there in that frowning stretch of mighty walls and towers: brooding in darkness, so close to the flooding downpour of sunshine yet so impossibly far away from it; so longing for any little glimpse of it, yet so implacably denied it by those wolves in the black gowns who were plotting her death and the blackening of ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... from Wharf Street and the confluent streets flowed on up Paradise Street, and gradually only the maimed and the aged, or the impossibly youthful, were left behind, to hear of the wonders afterwards at secondhand, a secondhand likely to add rather than detract from what actually took place. Even the Colonnade was empty and silent. Shiraz had gone with the crowd to see what might be seen, and Leh Shin's assistant, furtive ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... melancholy voice, still to be heard behind the paper partition, was so evidently the way they should sing, these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes in the midst of impossibly large flowers. Long before I came to it, I had perfectly pictured this Japan to myself. Nevertheless in the reality it almost seems to be smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no doubt by reason of that great pall of black clouds hanging ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... general battles with tigers; in fact, there was no species of wild animal throughout the deserts and sandy Zaarras of Africa, the infinite steppes of Asia, or the lawny recesses and dim forests of then sylvan Europe, [Footnote: And not impossibly of America; for it must be remembered that, when we speak of this quarter of the earth as yet undiscovered, we mean—to ourselves of the western climates; since as respects the eastern quarters of Asia, doubtless America was known there familiarly enough; and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Supposed to be a copy by Sir Peter Lely from the original, which was painted about 1636, and destroyed in the fire at Whitehall in 1697. Not impossibly, however, the original painting itself, given by the king to the Prince Palatine. In the Dresden Gallery. Size: 4 ft. by 3 ft. 2 in. Cust, ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor ...
— Progress and History • Various
... But she trusted him, and because of this he resolutely throttled the recurring desires. She was right. He had scorned what she had termed as woman's instinct. She had read him with a degree of accuracy. In the eyes of God he was a good man, a dependable man; but he was not impossibly good. He was human enough to want her, human enough to appreciate the danger in which she stood of him. He was determined not to fail her. When she went back to her own world she would carry an unsullied memory of him. But, before God, he ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... him the best part of his music. You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it that gives him this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a story. The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and bigotry of Spenser's dealings with ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... parsonic parson, yet kept enough of the distinctive flavour to excite a passionate anti-clerical behind me into clamorously derisive laughter; a very good piece of work. Miss O'MALLEY acted a difficult, almost an impossibly difficult, part with a fine distinction. Mr. BASIL RATHBONE'S Major and Mr. BLAKISTON'S Doctor were excellent. I am sorry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... it? Who is responsible for it? If we hit it, whom will we hit? Let the government find out. If the time the government is now spending in making impossibly minute laws for impossibly minute men, were spent in finding out what size men were, and who they were and then giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... minute, overcome, while a procession of ideas crowded after each other through the flaxen head. It was her birthday; grandpa couldn't get the boat under the tablecloth. This beautiful dog—this impossibly beautiful dog, was a surprise present. He was for her, to love and to play with; to see his tricks every day, to teach him to know her and to run to her when she called. If she was given the choice of the Whole world on this sweet birthday morning, it seemed to her nothing could ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... advice might be mistaken, it was absolutely impossible that it could be anything else but honest and sincere. It was not for them to see into the future, nor yet to solve those impossibly intricate problems of human passion, of human strength and weakness, which, in defiance of all laws human and divine, break through the traditions of ages, make a mockery of all commonplace laws, and finally ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... But not all height is holiness, Nor every sweetness good; And grace will sometimes lurk where who could guess? The Critic of his kind, Dealing to each his share, With easy humour, hard to bear, May not impossibly have in him shrined, As in a gossamer globe or thickly padded pod, Some small seed dear to God. Haply yon wretch, so famous for his falls, Got them beneath the Devil-defended walls Of some high Virtue he had vow'd to win; And that which you and I Call his besetting ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... long and joyously at the thought. Her colors were mixed; she was copying a water-colored sketch of an impossibly Turneresque atmosphere. The sketch was nearly finished, and she had only to put in some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable pencils. She prepared herself daintily for the work, looking ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... protest, if only in the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow and unreal an abuse of law-texts—documents of the highest importance in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not impossibly fatal ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... with passionate rapture out of a shielded port. There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years. The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar City. It reached a steep ascent. It climbed. ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York in ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... frustratedly as he worked over the radio. Watkins gnawed at his mustache. Somers glanced out a porthole and looked hurriedly away, for the stars, their destination, were impossibly distant. ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... millions here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom moves his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this country to get himself preferment in England on account of the Empire, so it may be suspected that he has used England—not impossibly—to reclaim in this country whatever credit he lost some time before he ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... from him, however, as the age of the pterodactyl. How often was it necessary to repeat this? On a long voyage, such as he had all but resolved to take, one might perchance form acquaintances. He had heard of such things; not impossibly, a social circle might open to him at Buenos Ayres. But here in England his poor origin, his lack of means would for ever bar him from the intimacy of ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Japan affords the best suggestion of the large and primitive salamanders of the Coal-forest, while the Caecilia—snake-like Amphibia with scaly skins, which live underground in South America—may not impossibly be degenerate ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... I had him for a fellow-passenger on board a steamboat. I had also a statistical colonel with me, outside the coach from Cincinnati to Columbus. A New England poet buzzed about me on the Ohio, like a gigantic bee. A mesmeric doctor, of an impossibly great age, gave me pamphlets at Louisville. I have suffered ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... have shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully unaware of the heart aches she would endure within, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence of ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... him, dragging him back to a small room where he dug up an impossibly precious bottle of brandy. "Drink it all, cobber. So one of your Security badges had the wrong man attached to it, and word got back. Couldn't be helped. You just ran into the sacred law of Marsport—the one they teach kids. Be bad, and the dome'll collapse. ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... their abundant imagination, scorning to be tied down by models, dashing in anything charming or outre which they happened to think of at the moment, and jumbling together an extravagant whole too good to be true. But there were only a few miles of it left after Delft: and we hadn't reveled in impossibly delicious farm-yards and supernaturally bowery gardens half long enough, when we ran into the outskirts of The Hague—"S. Gravenhage," as I love ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... than ever, but they have taken a fancy to Ellaline Lethbridge, and I am playing it for all it's worth. It comes in handy at the moment, and I have no conscientious scruples against using millionaires for pawns. They have an impossibly luxurious motorcar. Sir Lionel thinks it vulgar, but they are pleased with it, as it's still a new toy. I have been making a nice little plan for them, which concerns Ellaline. None of them know it yet, but they will soon, and if it had been invented to please Dick (which it ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... about 1524, but that is an impossibly early date, as even in far less remote places such classical columns were not used till at least ten years later. Yet the cloister must probably have been built some time before 1550. An upper unarched cloister, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... otherwise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and competent, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
