"Unimaginable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been drawn about the earth were now torn aside for ever, and men looked inquiringly into the unfathomable depths beyond. Descartes (1596-1650) revived the old Greek idea of a gradual evolution of the heavens and the earth from a primitive chaos of particles, taught that the stars stood out at unimaginable distances in the ocean of ether, and imagined the ether as stirring in gigantic whirlpools, which bore cosmic bodies in their orbits as the eddy in the river causes the cork ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... took a heart-rending adieu; and Troilus, suffering unimaginable anguish, "withoute more, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... to correct the misprints which affect the sense, and to write you the history of it; what is necessary you should know before you see it. That article I suppose to be by Heraud—about two thirds—and the rest, or a little less, by that Mr. Powell—whose unimaginable, impudent vulgar stupidity you get some inkling of in the 'Story from Boccaccio'—of which the words quoted were his, I am sure—as sure as that he knows not whether Boccaccio lived before or after Shakspeare, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... and each throwing back, in her own way, the mystic influences derived from the sky of Alexandria, affected him as the exciting perfume exhaled by two rare plants nourished in a hot-house. It is unimaginable what lofty, exquisite, and mysterious sentiments they exchange. Their naked souls and minds, with all their workings, are visible in these ingenuous and crowded letters, as in a glass hive we can study the industry of bees. Saint-Beuve affirms, that ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... looked at it I felt the horror of nightmare seize me, for it bore a striking resemblance to Ombos. A dreadful exuberance and vitality seemed to shine through the thing, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the deep cavernous eyes; it leered ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and by the upper world which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... afford. Anything which would drag my thoughts from that sick room, and the anticipated stir of that lovely form into conscious life and suffering. Her eyes—I could see her eyes wakening upon the world again, after her long wandering in the unknown and unimaginable intricacies of ungoverned thought and delirious suggestion. Eyes of violet colour and infinite expression; eyes which would make a man's joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her short but strenuous life, with fiery ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... reached our first balanced budget, I asked that we meet our responsibility to the next generation by maintaining our fiscal discipline. Because we refused to stray from that path, we are doing something that would have seemed unimaginable seven years ago: We are actually paying down the national debt. If we stay on this path, we can pay down the debt entirely in 13 years and make America debt-free for the first time since Andrew Jackson was ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... flashed upon him. It was some child, passing on an unimaginable errand through the deep woods, frightened by ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... singing a certain weird and exalted part which in ancient days used to be called counter, and which wailed and gyrated in unimaginable heights of the scale, much as you may hear a shrill, fine-voiced wind over a chimney-top; but altogether, the deep and earnest gravity with which the three filled up the pauses in the storm with their quaint minor ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her and going through tragedy, which was probably what it would come to, as of the terrible force so skillfully hidden in that white and delicate body, of a powerful personality fortified by an unimaginable past. She gave the impression of a woman who had been at grips with life and conquered it, from first to last. Formidable creature! An extraordinary achievement if true. But was it? Women, no matter how beautiful, wealthy, highly placed and powerfully organized, got the worst of it one way ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... stood staring at us, with feet planted firmly on the gravel, hands in pockets and an expression of unwinking candour in their young eyes. It was absurd, of course, that we three grown-ups should have been so embarrassed by a couple of urchins, but we were. The cool nerve of it, the unimaginable audacity of it, took our breath away. It was almost as though they were saying, "Well, and what are you doing here, hey?" There was something almost indelicate in their merciless ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... near to listen. It was now the social hour for campers. By the camp-fire more reminiscences followed; and the two guides chimed in it with moose stories, bear stories, panther stories, wild tales of every imaginable and unimaginable kind of adventure, until the lads thought no mythology which they had ever learned could rival ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... a kind of melancholy satisfaction in being minute. His head of hair would have done honor to a Brutus;—nothing could be more richly flowing, or possess a brighter gloss. It was of a jetty black;—which was also the color, or more properly the no color of his unimaginable whiskers. You perceive I cannot speak of these latter without enthusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun. At all events, they encircled, and at times ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wood-wind music, made by musicians out of sight, low and sweet, suggesting unimaginable mysteries, and one by one through the curtains opposite there came in silently seven women on bare feet that hardly touched the carpet; and all the stories about nautch girls, all the travelers' tales of how Eastern women ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... it was fast running and there was no delay, no stopping between dawn and dusk. Standing all day at the sweeps Rasba cleared the shore in sharp bends, avoided the obstacles in mid stream, and outran the wave crests and the racing drift, entering the Big Sandy and emerging into the unimaginable breadths of ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... of Christ's words in their relation to Himself. It is, however, with their relation to ourselves that we are primarily concerned now. Of the wholly unimaginable circumstances of that day when the Son of Man shall come in His glory and all the nations be gathered before Him I shall not attempt to speak. As Dean Church has well said,[57] no vision framed with the materials of our present experience could ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... the plantation was more in English taste than I ever elsewhere saw in Italy; some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was indeed of unimaginable beauty. The blue extent of waters, the almost landlocked bay, the near castle of Lerici shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, over which there was only a winding rugged ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... angles, is a striking feature in the view. As we sat on stone seats by stone tables in what might be called its shadow, under the cloudless heaven, with the pure Orientalism of the Tartar city spread out at our feet, that unimaginable Orientalism which takes one captive at once, and, like the first sight of a palm or a banana, satisfies a longing of which one had not previously been conscious, a mundane disappointment was severely felt. We had been, as the Americans say, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... dialect? It trails lengths of red silk. Such red! The pigment is twirled and heaped with quaint device, until it seems to be beautiful embroidery rather than painting; and the straw-coloured hair, and the blond light on the face, and the unimaginable coquetting ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... could not guess either use or reason: as for example the bowls polished like mirrors that reflected your face comically deformed; paintings of Epinol, covered with faces more lively than reality; needle cases and mysterious boxes that contained unimaginable things. ...
— Our Children - Scenes from the Country and the Town • Anatole France
... reader, the Child himself has answered; but for Ben-Hur there were only the words of Balthasar, "On the earth, yet not of it—not for men, but for their souls—a dominion, nevertheless, of unimaginable glory." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... have not done so already, yourself, Monsieur Gounsovski? Why wait to speak about it to me? It is unimaginable." ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Mr. Upton, with unimaginable irony. "I'd like to take him by the hand—and those infernal Knaggses by the scruff of their dirty necks—and that old ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... conducting his classes. It was almost four, in fact, before I got there, so I pulled up beside the school-gate and sat waiting for the children to come out. And as I sat there in the car-seat, under a sky of unimaginable blue, with the prairie wind whipping my face, I couldn't help studying that bald little temple of learning which stood out so clear-cut in the sharp northern sunlight. It was a plain little frame ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... are meeting in London next week. She really has been good to me beyond all words. Her patience and kindness have been unimaginable. ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and ranks Of all the hosts and hierarchs of heaven, Moved by one universal impulse, urged Their steeds of swiftness up the arch of light, From sphere to sphere increasing as they came, Till world on world was emptied of its race. Upward, with unimaginable speed, The myriads, congregating zenith-ward, Reached the far confines of the utmost sphere, The home of Truth, the dwelling-place of Love, Striking celestial symphonies divine From the resounding sea of melody, That heaved in swells of soft, mellifluous sound, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Britons,) that most unrighteous edict, TAXATION without REPRESENTATION! and then, because in the spirit of our gallant fathers, we bravely opposed him, he broke up the very fountains of his malice, and let loose upon us every indescribable, unimaginable curse of CIVIL WAR; when British armies, with their Hessian, and Indian, and tory allies, overran my afflicted country, swallowing up its fruits and filling every part with consternation; when no thing was to be seen ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... uncertainty, setting his heel upon all reflection, avoiding every issue. To-night he could escape those accusing thoughts no longer; to-night he was more than ever bitter with himself. What folly was this which had sprung up in his life—folly colossal, unimaginable, as unexpected as though it had fallen a thunderbolt from the skies! What had happened to change ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Beauty. Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty; I say that much and I have said all that I ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... peace. I have sought in vain for sleep and rest; my lids refused to close, and my blood was for ever in a tumult. I awoke to a new life as one who dies in hope might wake in Hell. I will not sully your imagination by recounting my combats, my self-anger and my despair. Let a veil be drawn over the unimaginable sensations of a guilty father; the secrets of so agonized a heart may not be made vulgar. All was uproar, crime, remorse and hate, yet still the tenderest love; and what first awoke me to the firm resolve of conquering my passion and of restoring her father to my child was the sight ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... after a dreadful inquisitive silence, "I can see no signs of an aura, either blue or otherwise; but if you actually did try to steal another woman's child with your thoughts you have been guilty of an unimaginable meanness, and you should go down on your knees ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... life as expressed in the higher of human beings, is, or will be too vast, too multiform and too glorious for any definition which we could understand? Is it because in the end it will involve for some, if not for all, majesty on unfathomed majesty, and glory upon unimaginable glory such as at present far outpass the limits of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... boot, in a commonplace, cast-iron fashion. It was a chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister powers. Cycling round the boulevards of a sunny morning, you rejoice ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... in men, to observe by, v.37, etc. Our own Principle of action often hid from ourselves, v.41. Some few Characters plain, but in general confounded, dissembled, or inconsistent, v.51. The same man utterly different in different places and seasons, v.71. Unimaginable weaknesses in the greatest, v.70, etc. Nothing constant and certain but God and Nature, v.95. No judging of the Motives from the actions; the same actions proceeding from contrary Motives, and the same Motives influencing ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... first corner, he had an uneasy feeling that a thing—a formless, unimaginable thing—was dogging him. He had thought of going down to his club-room; but he now shrank from entering, with this thing near him, the lighted rooms where his set were busy with cards and billiards, over their liquors and cigars, ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... thing was not judged satisfactory, he removed it and brought another. Many did not like this mode of service; they would be helped to buy; unequal to the task of making up their minds, they welcomed any aid toward it; and therefore preferred Mr. Turnbull, who gave them every imaginable and unimaginable assistance, groveling before them like a man whose many gods came to him one after the other to be worshiped; while Mr. Marston, the moment the thing he presented was on the counter, shot straight up like a poplar in a sudden calm, his visage bearing witness that his thought was already ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... oftenest, in an almost awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; for she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep, vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not risen high enough yet to deserve or ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... blooms stood up nearly to the height of his shoulders. They were superb in their gracious form, and suggested nothing so much as a mask of innocence and purity concealing a heart of unimaginable evil. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... him. Packed away in his wallet lay geological hammer, azimuth compass, clinometer, miniature microscope,—why should he drag all that lumber about with him? What to him were the bygone millions of ages, the hoary records of unimaginable time? One touch of a girl's hand, one syllable of musical speech,—was it not that whereof his life ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... mother's loving eyes were not to be deceived. So with infinite fuss, and terms of endearment, she insisted upon accompanying her offspring to his room, where the dignified housekeeper was summoned, and his every imaginable and unimaginable want arranged to ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... river, swell'd The deepening music!—Silence came again! And where I gazed, a shrine of cloudy fire Flamed redly awful; round it Thunder walk'd, And from it Lightning look'd out most sublime! Here throned in unimaginable bliss And glory, sits The One Eternal Power, Creator, Lord, and Life of All: Again, Stillness ethereal reign'd, and forth appear'd Elysian creatures robed in fleecy light, Together flocking from celestial haunts, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... unimaginable event been grappled with in its verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the boat of the condemned; ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... not quite able to tear his mind and thoughts from this completely unimaginable mass of plunder. Then intelligence came into his eyes—as much as could appear there. He grinned ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... array of names of distinguished engineers, shipbuilders, and seamen, who declared that the plan was feasible in every particular, that it is hard to think they could all have been mistaken in thus supporting the leading engineer of the day. It may easily be supposed that every other imaginable and unimaginable objection was raised, but to one and all Eads gave an answer that ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... can see, the given world is there only for the sake of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... this class do they appertain that slight everything in comparison of hunting and protest they take an unimaginable pleasure to hear the yell of the horns and the yelps of the hounds, and I believe could pick somewhat extraordinary out of their very excrement. And then what pleasure they take to see a buck or the like unlaced? Let ordinary fellows cut up an ox or a wether, 'twere a ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... men-at-arms, the mere greedy, rapacious, and insubordinate became their temper. Well knowing the greatness of the peril, and that the very best of his captains had scarcely the will, if they had the power, to restrain the license that soon became barbarity unimaginable, he spoke sadly overnight of his dread of the day of surrender, when it might prove impossible to prevent deeds that would be not merely a blot on his scutcheon, but a shame to human nature; looking back to the exultation with which ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fritters of everything imaginable, and sometimes unimaginable. Mary was told one day by a German neighbor how she prepared ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... prejudice, analysed it. From head to foot the man wore the wrong clothes in the wrong manner,—boots of a vivid shade of brown, thick socks without garters, an obviously ready-made suit of grey flannel, a hopeless tie, an unimaginable collar. Even his ready flow of speech suggested the gifts of the tubthumpers his indomitable persistence, a lack of sensibility. He knew his facts, knew all the stock arguments, was brimful of statistics, was argumentative, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flowers, but had decided flowers might remind poor Mart of funerals. Martie remembered the counterpane on the bed and the limp madras curtains at the windows. She put her gloves in a bureau drawer lined with folded newspaper, and hung her wraps in the square closet that was, for some unimaginable reason, a step ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... would be our sentiments? For the second-rate actor we should have not a moment's sneaking kindness or pity. On the other hand, should we not experience an everlasting thrill of pride and gladness in the thought that he who had been the mightiest of our philosophers had been also, by some unimaginable grace of heaven, the mightiest of our poets? Our pleasure in the plays and sonnets would be, of course, not one whit greater than it is now. But the pleasure of hero-worship for their author would be more than reduplicated. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... he kissed her. He kissed her again and again, with light kisses brushing her face for its sweetness, with quick, hard kisses that hurt, with slow, deep kisses that stayed where they fell; kisses remembered and unremembered, longed for, imagined and unimaginable. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... bumps, and from Langy to Villiers there was hardly a corner but what showed signs of the invaders' passage. Over these green and fertile fields whose crops had proudly waved their heads about the lovely Marne, were strewn straw and empty bottles in unimaginable quantities. Thousands of blackened or charred spots dotting the countryside, told of campfires and hasty bivouacs, and as we silently plodded on towards Charny, the growing evidences of recent ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... beneath the overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is so silent, still, and weird in this white world, that one marvels when the spirit of winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will make his unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of diamonds on an alder bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of dust. It may be also that the air is full of floating crystals, like ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... if he had indeed written the admirable narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... our ears, as we approached, a certain wailing melody, thin, quavering, distant, weird. As it rose upon the hot afternoon air it seemed absolutely strange, unimaginable, impossible. The spine of ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... once a great uproar rose through the village. Shouting, whooping, screeching and all sorts of unimaginable noises rent the air. The sound of hurrying feet was heard, and it was evident that something of an extraordinary character was going on. Jack looked inquiringly at the squaw, but, though she must have known the explanation, she failed for obvious reasons ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... came before," he went on, quickly and miserably. "First a sense of something that was not mere darkness, infinitely distant, but swooping down upon me at an unimaginable speed, broadening more quickly than the sense could follow—and then it was daylight all about me, and I was in the world, seeing, hearing, and—yes, and speaking, speaking, Carrick. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, "I wish they'd keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out—that he might even ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... a hundred fairy hues, but just before him they were clear as a flawless mirror. The fields around him glistened with dews, and a little wandering wind, blowing lightly from some bourne in the hills, strayed down over the slopes, bringing with it an unimaginable odour and freshness, and fluttered over the pond, leaving a little path of dancing silver ripples across the mirror-glory of the water. Birds were singing in the beech woods over on Orchard Knob Farm, answering to each other from shore to shore, until the very air ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... triangular shape like an El Greco madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin. Her breasts hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the family was the chain on which lives were ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... their disposal. The camp was formed near the town, on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard time of it that evening; the strictness ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... meaning, or do they only in their glare disclose the horrible tale of its aberrations? Does that voice no longer "discourse excellent music?" Horrible, most horrible! I veil my eyes in terror of the change, and gushing tears bear witness to my sympathy for this unimaginable ruin. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... some talk about this time of nominating the mute gentleman for a deputy. Lucien as yet had not lifted the veil which hid such an unimaginable character; indeed, he had scarcely frequented the house long enough. M. de Bargeton, spread at full length in his great chair, appeared to see and understand all that was going on; his silence added to his dignity, and his figure inspired ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... daintiest bowl imaginable, adorned with flights of storks, is the most wildly impossible soup made of seaweed. After which there are little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and fruits in vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all unexpected and unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing much, with that perpetual, irritating laugh which is peculiar to Japan—they make me eat, according to their fashion, with dainty chop-sticks, fingered with ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... suffereth not our feet to slide, rescuing me from perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... shall be brought about with foresight and with the exercise of the utmost care in minimizing the sacrifices which we are called on to make. Naturalists may fairly ask men to remember that each of these species which we are forced to destroy represents the toil and pains of unimaginable ages, and that when these creatures are swept away they can never be recovered. Whatever new species may come, by processes of evolution from the life which remains after we have done our will with the wilderness, we shall never see again the ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Mrs. Fairfax! Nobody had conjectured that she and Mrs. Leighton were the same person. It was unimaginable that a dressmaker should have had near ancestors in the peerage. It was more than a year and a half since she left the town. Mrs. Carter was able to say that not a single letter had been addressed to her, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... is intellectual, fanciful, and remote. It is not a human thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring hungrily at a bloater, to think, not of the obvious feelings of the woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater. Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarians' fancy ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... raised against them, the utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other,—these are strangest of all—unimaginable unless they had ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... commanded Warrington. "Get under cover and watch. Stay here until you're relieved, unless something particularly worth reporting happens; in that case, hurry and report. For instance"—he hesitated, trying to imagine something out of the unimaginable—"suppose the risaldar-major were to come out, then give him the message and come home with him. But—oh, suppose the place takes fire, or there's a riot, or you hear a fight going on ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... occasion a slight increase in the need of nutriment, and in so far must be a detriment, although its detrimental effect would not be worth speaking of except in relation to "Darwinism," according to which, "selection" has acted through unimaginable ages, {50} and has ever tended to suppress any useless development by the struggle ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... thoughts ran through Tommy's head. A madman dabbling in science might do incredible things, horrible things, and then demand assistance to undo an unimaginable murder.... ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... these he was firmly bound; he knew not, as it were, what these thoughts were; he did not wish to stir them up, but he felt them continually. At times they would come to him all of a sudden, oppress him more and more, and begin to crush him with their unimaginable weight, as though the vault of a rocky cavern were slowly and terribly descending ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous coverlet of vapors, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying,—on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... of heads, motionless now as a cornfield in a still evening, one glimpse of the river—the river, he remembered even at this instant, that came down from Hathersage and Padley and his old home. But there was no open vision, such as he had half hoped to see, no unimaginable glories looming slowly through the veils in which God hides Himself on earth, no radiant face smiling into his own—only this arena of watching human faces turned up to his, waiting for his last sermon.... He thought he saw faces that he knew, though he ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it well or not was of slight consequence. She had already made her failure in wishing to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. There is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader. I can note merely that it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... seemed to him that he had paced the tiny chamber a thousand times. He heard movements, voices in the next room; now and then his wife's moan and the elder woman's soothing accents. Then a silence which seemed century long, a silence fraught with unimaginable terror. It was broken by a new sound, high pitched, feeble, but distinct; the cry of a child. Helplessly Adrian subsided into a chair beside Nathan Spear. "Do you hear that?" he asked, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the crimson and rosy flush of sunset on the nearer rocks; at our feet we see well-watered dales and luxuriant meadows, whilst on the higher ground, here as in the valley of the Allier, we have proofs of the astounding, the unimaginable patience ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... they grow up very quiet, very sedate, looking on the world about them with very clear eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to see how much they know and understand of the world about them. It is to them no great mystery, full of unimaginable good and evil, but a world that they are learning to understand, and where good and evil are never unmixed. Men are to them neither angels nor devils, but just men, and so the world does not hold for them the disappointments, the disillusionings, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... flaunting splendours and vain shows and fleeting possessions of this present, His face will dawn on you yonder. We can say but little of what is meant by such a hope as that. But only this we can say, that there will be, as yet unimaginable, new wealths of revelation of the Father, and to match them, as yet unimaginable new inlets of apprehension and perception upon our parts, so that the sweetest, clearest, closest, most satisfying vision of God that has ever dawned on sad souls here, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the uproar evidenced a large number of men jammed together in that blackness beneath. What they would do next was answered by a blaze of light, revealing the silhouette of a man, engaged in touching flame to a torch of hemp. It flung forth a dull yellow glare, and revealed a scene of unimaginable horror. Our assailants were massed half way back, so blended together I could not judge their number, many between us and the light with faces darkened by shadow. Between us, even ten feet from the stairs, the ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling passion with which ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... have I heard a lion roar wrathfully. The sound is harsh and shattering, and is pitched in a higher key than that of the growl. To me the growl was far more awe-inspiring than the roar; it carried a suggestion of stealth combined with latent ferocity and unimaginable force in reserve. The adjective "thunderous" does not fit the roar at all; the latter suggests, more than anything else, the tones of a mighty, cavernous brass trumpet. Most terrifying, however, is the suspicion that a lion is silently padding round your ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... superstitious they were, most of them. They had been brought up on ghosts and witches and evil spirits, and, fearless as they might be of things mortal and natural, all that bordered on the unknown and uncanny held for them unimaginable terrors. The dead man might serve a useful purpose after all; and the grim ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... white and blue and red and green and gold and silver. Shelves ran round the room, and on them were gold cups and silver dishes, and platters and goblets set with gems, ornaments of gold and silver, tiaras of diamonds, necklaces of rubies, strings of emeralds and pearls, all set out in unimaginable splendour against a background of faded blue velvet. It was like the Crown jewels that you see when your kind uncle takes you to the Tower, only there seemed to be far more jewels than you or anyone else has ever seen together at ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... towards the east, so that the trail was like an open gate into the great space of earth and sky. The sky, from the eastern horizon to the zenith—and that was all that Dave Patton had eyes for—was filled with a celestial rabble of rose-pink vapours, thin aerial wisps of almost unimaginable colour. Except the horizon! The horizon, just where the magic portals of the trail revealed it, was an unfathomable radiance of intense, transparent, orange-crimson flame, so thrilling in its strangeness that Dave seemed to feel his spirit striving to draw it in as his ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end, to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving track. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and shatters ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fit of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible cost of her good name. And Nan's word ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... student in the earliest days of the University had a bucolic simplicity almost unimaginable to the undergraduate of these days, it was not without its sterner side. The Rev. Theodoric R. Palmer of the class of '47, who entered the University in 1843, thus emphasizes the contrast between those times ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... through a political plan that has no parallel. He allowed the spiritual tendencies of the century to gain influence, and then contrived to confine them within the narrowest limits. He would be neither Protestant nor Catholic, and yet again both; an unimaginable thing, if it had only concerned these opinions: but he retained his hold on the nation because his plan of separating the country from the Papal hierarchic system, without taking a step further than was absolutely necessary, suited ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... gods he breathed a prayer; then, strove To calm himself, and lose in sleep awhile His useless terrors. But he could not sleep: His body burned with feverish heat; his chains Clanked loud, although he moved not; deep in earth Groaned unimaginable thunders; sounds, Fearful and ominous, arose and died, Like the sad mornings of November's wind, In the blank midnight. Deepest horror chilled His blood that burned before; cold, clammy sweats Came o'er him; then anon, a fiery thrill Shot through ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... That is to say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more than intellectual puzzles: they so occupy the mind in the mere effort of comprehension that little ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... success, it could not but be an additional success for their leader. The revolution, of which he stood recognized the unquestioned head, was now beyond all danger of royal aggression, except by his own treacherous agency. In a campaign of unimaginable brevity, he had not only vindicated the first place as an orator in a senate now omnipotent, and become out of it the most potent demagogue of his time, but as un homme d'etat, surrounded by a brilliant staff of the most ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... passage I meant, and it shows that Whitman, at any rate, did not share Wilson's feeling that the immortality of the soul is unimaginable." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... burst forth, attuned my mind afresh after the discords of the night. Methought that all I looked on said to me, and that all I heard in the sea and in the air said to me, 'Be comforted, mortal, that thy life is so short. Our preparation for what is to follow has endured, and shall endure, for unimaginable ages.' ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... debts My clothes you can give to my faithful servant, Francois; for the last year I have paid him no wages Now my testament is made—no, stop, I had forgotten the most important item. Should the inconceivable, the unimaginable happen, should this Dutch village—devil slay me, I make it the duty of the French officers here to revenge me on the haughty daughter of my adversary, and on all these dull and prudish beauties. They must carry out what I intended yesterday. I have drawn ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... It was with a sense of entering alone upon the scene that I finally thrust wide the door and crossed the threshold of this redoubtable room where, but two short weeks before, a fresh victim had been added to the list of those who had by some unheard-of, unimaginable means found their death ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... bitter way. They take no limit of possibility into their doubts and fears. They do not think of character or nature. Now, in a moment the scales fell from Lucy's eyes. Was her husband a man to treat her with such unimaginable insult? Was the Contessa, with all her triumphant designs, her mendacities, her mendicities, her thirst for pleasure, such a woman? Whoever said it, could this ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... open place in the cool of evening. A grey-blue sky above, with the faintest glitter of first stars! I was alone. The past was a mystery; my future unexplored, full of the unimaginable; the ultimate future of course ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... furnished forth the table of Pirithous. The plates skimmed about like quoits, and all the board became a wreck of glass and china. Above the clamor and the fighting could be heard Carew's strident voice demanding his beaker, pouring unimaginable anathemas against any one who should do it damage, and threatening to unmuzzle and bring in his bear. The servants, not unused to such mad tumults, gathered in a mass at the doorway, and awaited ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten not into mere creaming foam but into masses of accumulated yeast which hang ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the choice Of all tasts else to please thir appetite, Though wandring. He with his consorted Eve 50 The storie heard attentive, and was fill'd With admiration, and deep Muse to heare Of things so high and strange, things to thir thought So unimaginable as hate in Heav'n, And Warr so neer the Peace of God in bliss With such confusion: but the evil soon Driv'n back redounded as a flood on those From whom it sprung, impossible to mix With Blessedness. Whence Adam soon repeal'd The doubts that in his heart arose: and now 60 ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the English as assured victors; both alike with a perfect conviction that the latter were certain to win against any but overwhelming odds. Such a fight as that of the Revenge, with the nationalities of the combatants reversed, was unimaginable. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... girl, my whole heart!" he said in the vague tender knowledge that he offered her a garden, where she had but to walk, and smile, to bring about her unimaginable blooms. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... oil-tanks, painted red, disfigure the shore. Each tank holds 4,000 tons of oil, 30,000 tons per month being the usual export. Kerosene taints the air, but is considered to be innocuous, and to drive away the curse of mosquitos. The unimaginable and ferocious heat makes every step a terror, during a snail's progress up a wooded road. Sun-hat and white umbrella scarcely mitigate the scorching rays on this perilous promenade, but there is only a day at disposal, and it cannot be wasted. Towards noon a breeze springs up, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... lay far below. A cataract fell in a single sheet into the pool; the pool boiled and bubbled at the base of the fall, but through the greater part of its extent, lay calm, deep, and black, as if the cataract had plunged through it to an unimaginable depth, without disturbing its eternal repose. At the opposite extremity of the pool, the rocks almost met at their summits, the trees of the opposite banks intermingled their leaves, and another cataract plunged from the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... naturalised Italian, Dibdin, Shield, Hook, and many others, many of whose songs are still popular, though the works of which they once formed part have long been forgotten. The ballad operas of these composers were of unimaginable naivete and depended entirely upon their simple tunefulness for such favour as they won. Sir Henry Bishop (1786-1855) raised the artistic standard of this form of art considerably. There is real musical interest in some of his concerted pieces, and many of his ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... you die, my sweet lambs, when all that is asked of you is that you should set aside that which will carry you to everlasting Gehenna, and accept the law of Allah as written by His prophet, which will assuredly bring you unimaginable joys, as is promised in the Book of the Camel? For what says the chosen one?"—and he broke away into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument. "Besides, is it not clear that God is with us, since from the beginning, when we had but sticks ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,— particular ideas. The whole thing is a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response. The words—(if ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... into any terms of comparison, unless there had by possibility been heard that mysterious and ineffable sigh which Milton ascribes to the planet when man accomplished his mysterious rebellion. The idea of such a sigh, of a whisper circling through the planet, of the light growing thick with the unimaginable charge, and the purple eclipse of Death throwing a penumbra; that may, but nothing else ever can, equal the unutterable sublimity of that buzz—that rumour, that susurrus passing from mouth to mouth—nobody knew whence coming or whither tending, and about a being of whom nobody could tell what ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... that universal breaking forth of Bedlams, now fallen so extinct, no reader can imagine. Bedlams totally extinct to everybody; but which were then very real, and raged wide as the world, high as the stars, to a hideous degree among the then sons of men;—unimaginable now ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... solely upon the limited power available in its accumulators. It was the product of a really mighty brain, a brain re-enforced by the many perverted but powerful intellects which Roger had won over to his cause. It was powered by the incalculable force of cosmic radiation, powered to drive its unimaginable mass through space, against any possible attractions, for an indefinite number of years. It was armed and equipped to meet any emergency which Roger's coldly analytical mind had been able ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... it certain that a few more days would put an end of my unlucky life in that sad place and in that miserable manner. Nevertheless, as well as I was able, I comforted my soul by calling to mind how much more painful it would have been, on passing from this life, to have suffered that unimaginable horror of the hangman's knife. Now, being as I was, I should depart with the anodyne of sleepiness, which robbed death of half its former terrors. Little by little I felt my vital forces waning, until at last my vigorous temperament had become adapted to that ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... of man's activities infinitely more wonderful, and infinitely more comprehensible than is the conception that his activities may be accounted for by the existence of an unknown, unimaginable, and intangible force called ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... dingy back-staircases and down a lot of very dingy passages. The Law Courts are like all our public buildings. The parts where the public is allowed to go are fairly respectable, if not beautiful, but the purlieus and the basements and the upper floors are scenes of unimaginable dinginess and decay. The Law Courts' purlieus are worse than the Houses of Parliament's purlieus, and it seems to me that even more disgraceful things are done in them. It only shows you the danger ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... is neither all sunshine nor all shadow, checkered certainly, but leading to a final abode of unimaginable bliss; and, with the Bible to guide her, the orphan walked fearlessly on, discharging her duties, and looking unto God and his Christ to aid her. She sat on the steps of the sepulcher, watching the last rays of the setting sun gild the monumental shafts that pointed ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said before, we might make a eugenist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of a healthy and well-developed baby appearing ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and flicker and play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysterious artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends; by a secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her hair is blown back by the wind, her features speak of a rapture of delight; she breathes fire in the midst of the fire. She ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... his captives with a courteous speech,—only a few lines; but, during their reading, through what a lifetime of fear, of pain, of unimaginable horrors passed Zelma! Stage-fright, that waking nightmare of debutantes, clutched her at once, petrifying, while it tortured her. The house seemed to surge around her, the stage to rock under her feet. She fancied she heard low, elfish laughter behind the scenes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... continue wildered and wandering in the disorders of his life. "Which the Lord avert," continued Xavier; "and may it please him to hear the prayers which day and night I shall pour out for your conversion. I wish it with an unimaginable ardour, and assure you, that wheresoever I shall be, the most pleasing news which can be told me, shall be to hear that the king of Bungo is become a Christian, and that he lives according to the maxims ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... wallow at will, to hide his giant bulk from his enemies if there should be found any formidable enough to make hiding advisable. Swarms of savage insects, to be sure, were giving him a hot reception—mosquitoes of unimaginable size, and enormous stinging flies which sought to deposit their eggs in his smooth hide, but with his giraffe-like neck he could bite himself where he would, and the lithe lash of his tail could flick off tormentors from any corner of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... time, Ranny, with his obsession of bereavement and calamity, was unaware of the peace, the exquisite, the unimaginable peace that had ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... and gemmed crowns and orders, ropes of pearls, rubies and diamonds (which still glorify the tiaras of the pope and emperors)—all these were sold for a few sous or were trampled in the snow by the ignorant shepherds and cowherds of the Alps. After such an unimaginable tragedy, Duke Charles, like a beaten child, weeping with rage and sick with despair, at last roused himself to send with the consent of the Duchess Yolande a deputation to treat with the Confederates; and this deputation ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... their faces mostly reflecting the terror that was in their souls; for none might ever foretell the moods of their queen. Inscrutable as night, her eyes were like pools of violet shadow wherein lurked promise or threat of unimaginable things; every line of her face and form was a line of a riddle that could prove in the solution either magnificent generosity, fearless justice, or implacable vengeance: like the lightning, Dolores struck where ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... girl... And there were second thoughts to twist your guts and make you wonder if all your savage drives were foolish. But there was a duty to be equal to your era—helping to give dangerously crowded humanity on Earth more room, dispersal, a chance for race survival, if some unimaginable violence ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... hostilities, and the fact that these bodies are put together only on mobilization, together with the reduction in the period of service which has been very generally accepted, tend to depreciate the average value of the troops, whilst at the same time the 'masses' have risen to unimaginable dimensions. This 'folie des nombres,' against which certain French Authorities have warned us, is a ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... Mass., which, is justly celebrated for the beauty of its sunsets. There the banks of white cloud, lying along the west, glowed with an inner radiance, that led the eye and the mind back into the very depths of heaven. Here, on the other hand, an unimaginable wealth of color was poured out on the very face of the sky. The whole western heaven, to the zenith, was one mingled melting mass of gorgeous dyes, rendered the more magnificent by the heavy lead-colored rain clouds which occupied all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... laughing at him? Was Helen treating him as an individual of no importance? It was unimaginable that his breakfast should be late. If anybody thought that he was going to—No! he must not give way to righteous resentment. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... the invasion, had seen and felt his country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued. He well called his book Toute la Flandre, for all Flanders is there. Old Flanders,—Artevelde and Charles Temeraire—whose soul was a forest of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the unity of authorship of the Iliad was successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... woman was depicted. The word of Christ and the message of Mohammed alike were respected and upheld, but priest and imam conspired to denounce him. Rebirth in the flesh he offered as a substitute for heaven and hell. Love and reunion were synonymous. Not for ages unimaginable could man hope to gain that final state which is variously known as Heaven, Paradise and Nirvana; only by the doing of such evil as rarely lies within human compass could he be judged worthy of that extinction which is Hell. No soul could sink thus low whilst another mourned it; and was there ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... cut and uncut, with shavings, and the knife and saw that had made them. Old newspapers, and school books, and a slate, and two kites, with no end of tail, were lying over every part of the room that happened to be convenient; also an ink bottle and pens; with chalk and resin and a medley of unimaginable things beside, that only boys can collect together and find delight in. If Nettie sighed as all this hurly-burly met her eye, it was only an internal sigh. She set about patiently bringing things to order. First made the bed, which it ...
— The Carpenter's Daughter • Anna Bartlett Warner |
