"Absorbing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the subject has its capabilities of interest. Nature has her uses for the lover, and she gives him an excellent part to play in the drama of life. But is this tantamount to saying that his interest is perennial and all-absorbing, and that his role on the stage is the only one that is significant ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... have made himself Emperor of Rome. Though the native element in Gaul had not died out of mind, at any rate its opposition to the Roman had become forgotten. It had become little more than a picturesque and interesting contrast to the all-absorbing Roman element. A hundred and thirty years later it had ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... noble device, for the mere name of Chancery, and the high repute of the fees therein, and low repute of the lawyers, and the comfortable knowledge that the woolsack itself is the golden fleece, absorbing gold for ever, if the standard be but pure; consideration of these things staved off at once the lords of the manors, and all the little farmers, and even those whom most I feared; videlicet, the parsons. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... marches, we arrived at Camp Apache. We were now at our journey's end, after two months' continuous travelling, and I felt reasonably sure of shelter and a fireside for the winter at least. I knew that my husband's promotion was expected, but the immediate present was filled with an interest so absorbing, that a consideration of the future was out of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... of equality. When Cooper came back to the United States in 1833, after an absence of six years in Europe, he found that he had returned to a new country, where "everybody was everywhere," and nobody was anywhere, and where the chase for the dollar seemed to have grown more absorbing ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... may be judged from various standpoints when examining the pelt as tannage proceeds. On the one hand, the surface of the but slightly porous pelt is altered so as to present a more porous appearance, which is now rendered more capable of absorbing liquids. On the other hand, a similar alteration takes place within the pelt, to the extent to which the tanning matter has penetrated it. How far the penetration has proceeded is easily determined by utilising the different adsorption of coal-tar dyes by untanned and tanned pelt (see p. ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... the most serious results of the use of alcohol and other poisons. The white corpuscles of the blood have been called our "standing army," because they are natural germ-destroyers. One class of the white cells has the power of motion, and another class has the power of absorbing outside matter, such as disease-germs. One destroys the germs and the other moves them through the blood and carries them off with the waste products of ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... the lower limbs, and of dropsy of the belly, are frequently caused by diseased growths of the liver, P, obstructing the inferior vena cava, R, and vena portae, rather than by what we are taught to be the "want of balance between secreting and absorbing surfaces." The like occurrence may obstruct the gall-ducts, and occasion jaundice. Over-distention of any of those organs situated beneath the right hypochondrium, will obstruct neighbouring organs and vessels. Mechanical obstruction is doubtless so frequent a source of derangement, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... containing several of the old favorites in the field of historical fiction, replete with powerful romances of love and diplomacy that excel in thrilling and absorbing interest. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... everybody from doing the things he or she wishes, it comes as a relief. In this particular case not only was the death a relief, but also the estate of the dead man provided all the chief mourners with instant and absorbing occupation. If he had left a will, the acrimony of the heirs would have been caused by dissatisfaction with his way of distributing the property. Leaving no will, he plunged the three heirs—or, rather, the five heirs, for the husband of Martha and the wife of the son were most important factors—he ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... intercourse, than by our personal interviews. I am convinced it wrought more powerfully upon our imaginations. In the mean time I continued my daily attendance at college, though my studies were utterly neglected, one single object absorbing all my thoughts ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... the president, who, as well as the other members of the court, had listened with the most profound and absorbing interest to the singular disclosure of him whom they still only knew as Frank Halloway, "this language cannot be permitted; you must confine ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... that the great actor dies while the play goes thundering on through the ages on the stage and in everyman's library. This very point, indeed, is made by Mr. Lewes. But this, alas, is the reverse of the truth. We have competent and immensely absorbing records of the lives and art of David Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Ristori, Clairon, Rachel, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, and other prominent players, while most of the plays in which they appeared are not only no longer actable, but also ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... protrudes from the seed of the common onion as a cotyledon,* breaks through the ground in the form of an arch, in the same manner as the hypocotyl or epicotyl of a dicotyledonous plant. Long after the arch has risen above the surface the apex remains within the seed-coats, evidently absorbing the still abundant contents. The summit or crown of the arch, when it first protrudes from the seed and is still buried beneath the ground, is simply rounded; but before it reaches the surface it is developed into a conical protuberance of a white colour (owing ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... is Boileau, though I cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally associated with a recumbent ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... has been too ill and too reserved. I have attempted nothing but daily saying a short prayer for him in his hearing, hoping he would remark on it. But you know the pain is still very absorbing at times, and it leaves him exhausted; and besides, I fancy he has a good deal of tropical languor about him, and does not notice much. Nothing but Lance has roused ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... philosophical tales popular in the last century, gives the essence of much of the Rambler in a different form, and to these may be added the essay upon Soame Jenyns, which deals with the same absorbing question of human happiness. The political pamphlets, and the Journey to the Hebrides, have a certain historical interest; but are otherwise readable only in particular passages. Much of his criticism is pretty nearly obsolete; but the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... by a definite act, and then you must let it stay put and remain settled in the ground until the little roots have time to fix themselves and begin to draw the sustenance from the soil. There are two stages, the definite planting and then the habitual absorbing of moisture and nourishment from the ground. The root fibers must rest until they reach out their spongy pores and drink in the nutriment of the earth. After the habit is established, then by a certain uniform law, the plant draws ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... poetry, and of philosophy too, suddenly remarked: "Now this girl completely puzzles me. In arithmetic, one and one make two. In love one and one ought to make one but they make two just the same. Have you ever felt that? That need of absorbing a woman in yourself or disappearing in her? I am not speaking of the animal embrace, but of that moral and mental eagerness to be but one with a being, to open to her all one's heart and soul, and to fathom her thoughts to ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... very few objects to which the term picturesque may properly be applied, existing in the States; and, linked as it is with the recollections of its gallant founders, I confess it laid strong hold of my imagination, absorbing my eyes and interest as long as I could keep ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... of the tropics a game which the people are said to watch with absorbing interest. It is this: A scorpion is caught. With cruel eagerness the boys and girls of the street assemble and place the reptile on a board, surrounded with a rim of tow saturated with some inflammable spirit. ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... he seemed to watch the hand that moved over the paper with an absorbing interest. The instant it rested ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... task that could have been laid on my shoulders fell to my lot five years later, when the mysterious attraction by which I had been drawn towards her as a boy had grown into the most absorbing affection—a love ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... not tarry over the painful, touching scene oft-told, and felt sooner or later in every home. Like snow disappearing under the sunshine, the life of Madeleine was fast melting away. At length, as if she knew when the absorbing heat would melt the last crystal of the vital principle, she summoned her family around her to wish them that last thrilling farewell which is never erased from the tablet of memory. In the farewell of the emigrant, torn by cruel fate from country and friends, hope smiles in his tears; the fortune ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... length repose in the silence, if not in the darkness of night. In this busy and evanescent scene, other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided sympathies and regrets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the list of the mighty departed,—a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes of our countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed, that of the defunct "child and champion of Jacobinism," while it is associated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... without attracting any comment, and at Florence, under similar circumstances, would certainly have been omitted. We shall say nothing of the piety of the masses, and of their firm belief in the indulgences of an Alexander VI. But the State itself, after absorbing the Church to a degree unknown elsewhere, had in truth a certain ecclesiastical element in its composition, and the Doge, the symbol of the State, appeared in twelve great processions ('andate') in a half-clerical character. They ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... time the countenance of Mr. Samuel Weller had exhibited an expression of the most overwhelming and absorbing astonishment that the imagination can portray. After looking from Job to Jingle, and from Jingle to Job in profound silence, he softly ejaculated the words, 'Well, I AM damn'd!' which he repeated at least a score of times; after which exertion, he appeared wholly ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... bodies as those from a piece of red-hot iron. Nor is the heating power of electricity in the smallest degree diminished by its being conducted through any number of freezing mixtures which are rapidly absorbing heat ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... it had succeeded, would have resulted in my death! I should consider myself amply revenged if I could make you suffer for a single day all the torments that I endured for long months. For this was not all! You had not even the excuse, if excuse it be, of a powerful, all-absorbing passion. Convinced of your treachery, I resolved to ascertain everything, and I discovered that in my absence you had become a mother. Why didn't I kill you? How did I have the courage to remain silent and conceal what I knew? Ah! it was because, by watching you, I hoped to discover ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... considerable, but not beyond the effect of some lopping of property, which would have been little felt, when our friend —— gave me the coup de grace. Ever since that I have been paying twelve hundred dollars a year interest on his debt, which, with my own, was absorbing so much of my annual income, as that the maintenance of my family was making deep and rapid inroads on my capital, and had already done it. Still, sales at a fair price would leave me competently provided. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... manifested their dispositions to get rid of the limitations imposed by the constitution; limitations on the faith of which the states acceded to that instrument. They were proceeding rapidly in their plan of absorbing all power, invading the rights of the states, and converting the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... remarkable problem was absorbing the attention of the Catholic Church. Once more, for a moment, the eyes of all Christendom were fixed upon Rome. The temporal Power of the Pope had now almost vanished; but, as his worldly dominions steadily diminished, the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... forsaking their work in the fields and the gardens, and apparently intent upon some object of absorbing interest; but she feared to leave the house, for she had promised Henry that she would not do so, lest the former pacific conduct of the vampyre should have been but a new snare, for the purpose of drawing her so far from her home as to lead her into some ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... projects for disposing of the funds had been presented by individuals, in memorials, concerning which the report states that they generally contemplated the establishment of a school, college, or university, proposing expenditures absorbing the whole in the erection of buildings, and leaving little or nothing for the improvement of future ages. "In most of these projects," says Mr. Adams, "there might be perceived purposes of personal accommodation and emolument to the projectors, more adapted to the ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... lived so long in a country village that he had never chanced to read any of those absorbing romances in which one boy, of tender years, proves himself a match for a dozen Indians, more or less, and, therefore, he was very much amazed at Henry Taylor's avowal that he was going out West ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... breeding-machines, and their husbands support them in that attitude. With regard to domestic help, even were this, or nursing schools, or both, provided by the State, the responsibility for her children's well-being would be still all-absorbing, at least during the first four years of each one's growth. Students of child psychology are insistent that the pre-school period is the most important in the life of the individual and requires the most skilful attention. Natural affection ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... Jim, when he came home that summer, also began to introduce her to his young men friends in the neighbourhood, so that very soon Beth had quite a little court about her on the pier when the band played. She liked the boys, and the young men she found an absorbing study; but not one of them touched her heart. Her acquaintance with Alfred had made her fastidious. He had had sense enough to respect her, and his companionship had given her a fine foretaste of the love that is ennobling, the love that makes for high ideals ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of Mr. Sabin, one of Mr. Oppenheim's most fascinating characters, to free his wife from an entanglement with the Order of the Yellow Crayon, give the author one of his most complicated and absorbing plots. A number of the characters of "Mysterious Mr. Sabin" figure in ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in its earliest introduction to public use, and interesting himself in its construction, he was the first to see that the ultimate triumph of the telegraph, both as a grand system of public utility, and of secure investment, would be by some absorbing process, which would prevent the embarrassments of ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... so absorbing as to make them oblivious of the fact that another visitor had been admitted to the hall. Hearing voices in the drawing-room, Mr. Strahan entered, and now stood just behind Mr. Lanniere, with an expression ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the size of a liquid rheostat for absorbing a given amount of energy cannot be estimated, the dimensions may be calculated approximately ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... inherent color in any object we look at, but that it is in the light itself which falls upon and is reflected from the object. Each object, having a particular reflecting surface of its own, throws back light at its own angle, absorbing some rays and dispersing others, while it preserves its own. In this sense it may be said that the rose has no color,—its hues are only borrowed. If the idea should be carried out, it would certainly destroy much of the poetry of color. Thus, in praising the modest blush which crimsons the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... least, are travelling the same path with your own—if this be animal magnetism, or one of its phenomena, then do I swear by Mesmer, whatever it be, delusion or otherwise, it has given me the brightest moments of my life—these are the real "winged dreams" of pleasures which outlive others of more absorbing and actual interest at the time. After all, for how many of our happiest feelings are we indebted to the weakness of our nature. The man that is wise at nineteen, "Je l'en fais mon compliment," but I assuredly do not envy him; and now, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... destroyed themselves by over-eating and indigestion. They held, in fact, that the chief work of piety consisted in setting free particles of the Divine Light, imprisoned in matter by the wiles of the God of Darkness. They being the Pure, they purified matter by absorbing it into their bodies. The faithful brought them stores of fruit and vegetables, served them with real feasts, so that by eating these things they might liberate a little of the Divine Substance. Of course, they abstained ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... is Balzac. In reading him for pleasure, as you read Dickens and Thackeray, you are absorbing an exact and fruitful knowledge of French society of the Restoration and of Louis Philippe. Moreover you are still pursuing your study of human character under one of the acute critics of the nineteenth century. Balzac has always ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... encumbering folds of the green afghan and trailed her other draperies swiftly to the window, whose familiar view she seemed to find intensely absorbing. ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... remedy for that is in our own hands. There are scarcely any limits to be put to a man's capacity of determining for himself what shall be the object of his thought, his interest, his affection, or his pursuits. You can withdraw your desires and contemplations from the intrusive and absorbing present. You can coerce yourselves to concentrate more thought than you do, more interest, affection, and effort than you have ever done, upon the things that are unseen. You can turn your gaze thither. You cannot directly and immediately ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... that my training was broad, and not confined to those composers whose works appealed most to me. The result is that I now appreciate the works of all the composers for the piano. Beethoven I found very absorbing. I learned the Appassionata Sonata in one week's time, and longed for more. My teacher, however, insisted upon my going slowly, and mastering all the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... action of the feeding root tubes; and unless it is available it might, as far as the present benefiting of your garden is concerned, just as well not be there at all. Plants take up their food through innumerable and microscopic feeding rootlets, which possess the power of absorbing moisture, and furnishing it, distributed by the plant juices, or sap, to stem, branch, leaf, flower and fruit. There is one startling fact which may help to fix these things in your memory: it takes from 300 to 500 pounds of water to furnish ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... nature," and his own development signally illustrates the truth of the remark. From his earliest youth, he tells us, he had "a passion for investigating natural things"; and towards middle life his interest in physical science became so absorbing as for many years to stifle his creative faculty. But in the retrospect of his life as a whole he had no doubt as to the supreme bent of his genius. The "laurel crown of the poet" was the goal of his youthful ambition, and the last bequest ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... if you will. You will do as you will to do. But, at the end—a charred stick, a bad taste in your mouth, a sharp tugging at your heart. And the story's told. The last chapter's ended. The book is shut. But they whose one absorbing ambition it is to turn others to righteousness may not shine much here in earth's skies. And they may a bit, and it recks precious little either way. But they shall shine as the stars, as bright and ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... somewhat later age, though while still a child, she cherished an ideal passion for a person very much older than herself, this passion absorbing her thoughts for a period of two years, during which, however, there was no progress made in physical sensation. It was when she was nearly thirteen years of age, soon after the appearance of menstruation, and under the influence of this ideal passion, that she first learned ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... thunders of Antietam were reverberating through that mountainous region, distinctly heard in all their many echoes, and of course the all-absorbing topic. At 3 P. M. orders came to move a short distance beyond Frederick. The division was rapidly formed, and the men marched joyously along through the streets of Frederick, already crowded with our own and Rebel ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... thae robberies, Mary. Baith as a burgher and a Crown offeecial, I tak' the maist absorbing ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... question of self-education became an absorbing thought with Edward Bok. He had mastered a schoolboy's English, but six years of public-school education was hardly a basis on which to build the work of a lifetime. He saw each day in his duties as office boy some of the foremost men of the time. It was the period of William ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... almost as absorbing," he declared, "as the other matter which just now lies even nearer ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... them in its unspoiled loveliness, was to that hour and place like the illuminated capital in the old missal; a ray of colour which unlocked the dark mystery of the text. When one can see the loveliness of a wild flower, and feel the absorbing charm of its sentiment, one is not far ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... poetry was not an absorbing passion at this time in his mind. His eyes were fixed on the best pictures with silent intense delight. He had a deep and just perception of what was beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he did not pay much regard, or perhaps quite do justice, to the masters of the 17th century. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... all these happenings were being watched with the most absorbing interest from the top of the Thetis's deck-house, it must not be supposed that the watching was conducted in an obtrusive or ostentatious manner; very far from it. The occupants of that "coign of vantage", to whom Milsom was now added, were, so far as the ordinary observer was ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... said Toady, as they sat on the shady side of the house discussing the all-absorbing topic. "Ma said she never should get us another after Spotty kicked her when she struck it ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... calmed when she gazed at him. He, too, looked different in the carelessness of the seclusion; his hair tangled, revealing the preoccupation, the fixed, absorbing idea, which made him neglect the neatness ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Society is to be permeated by religion, there must be reservoirs of religion like those great storage places up among the hills which feed the pipes by which water is carried to every home in the city. We shall need a special class of students of GOD, men and women whose primary and absorbing interest it is to work out the spiritual life in all its purity and integrity."[2] It is indeed the idlest of criticism that condemns such people ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... had been guilty of no folly, committed none while under the eye of Madam de Warrens. She was my conductor, and ever led me right; my attachment for her became my only passion, and what proves it was not a giddy one, my heart and understanding were in unison. It is true that a single sentiment, absorbing all my faculties, put me out of a capacity of learning even music: but this was not my fault, since to the strongest inclination, I added the utmost assiduity. I was attentive and thoughtful; what ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... and, not having anything else to occupy me just then, I became speedily beset with the idea that the luminary just above my head was only awaiting a favorable opportunity to tumble down upon it. The thought became unpleasantly absorbing; and, not having sufficient energy to get up and change my seat, I looked ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... channel was near the right bank, but, except a large shallow pool, it was dry. As we advanced the country showed effects of long-continued drought, and though the creek contained some large shallow pools, the channel was dry between, the dry soil absorbing the whole of the water which was running in the channel above; at 11.50 camped at what appeared to be the termination of the pools of water, as the channel was again lost in a perfectly level flat. Great numbers ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. The habit of parasitism clearly acts upon animal organization in this way. Let the parasitic life once be secured, and away go legs, jaws, eyes, and ears; the active, highly-gifted crab, insect or annelid may become a mere sac, absorbing ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of the house, and passing over the bridge that connected together the two cliffs of which the islet was composed, reached the limit of the islet. At the edge of the precipice was a seat, and there she sat down. For some time she rested motionless, absorbing the beauty and the silence of the night. She was looking towards Ischia. She wished to look that way, to forget all about Naples, the great city ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Here the reader will make the acquaintance of Eleanor Savell, a clever but exceedingly wilful girl, whose advent in Oakdale High School brings about a series of happenings that make the story one of absorbing interest. The doings of a rival sorority, organized by Eleanor, the contest for dramatic honors between Eleanor and Anne Pierson and the mischievous plot against the latter originated by the former and frustrated by Grace Harlowe, are among the features ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... exceedingly strong one at that, of a certain dealer display which had attracted great crowds on both sidewalk and street before the dealer's window. The crowd had been drawn by the display of a number of different washing machines grouped around a central machine which was absorbing the "limelight." It had a swinging wringer and the wringer was revolving at so rapid a rate it became plain that any woman who stepped in the way of that particular type of wringer was doomed to a severe blow if not a fall. The idea of the dealer in using such a display was ...
— The Consumer Viewpoint • Mildred Maddocks
... time had come when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. It was impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century shows us that the freedom ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... waves, and felt himself strangely drawn to them. Whether leaden and menacing under the drift of rain and the brooding of gray clouds, or green-glinting under the sheen of too rare sunshine, he loved them and found them always absorbing. The sky, too, was worth watching, especially when white fleeces chased each other across a patch of blue, or wonderful colors, pallid yet intense, shot up into it at dawn from behind a far-off ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... be that," Cicily declared, firmly; "this spirit who is the goddess of modern business, whom I feel absorbing you day by day, taking from me more and ever more of your thoughts, of your heart, of your soul, changing you in every vital way, and doing it in spite of all that I can do, though I fight against her with all my strength! Oh, it's terrible, the ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... sister's grief for her mother becomes more and more calmed, her love for M. de la Feste begins to reassume its former absorbing command of her. She thinks of him incessantly, and writes whole treatises to him by way of letters. Her blank disappointment at his announcement of his inability to pay us a visit quite so soon as he had promised, was quite tragic. I, too, am disappointed, for I wanted to see and estimate him. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... however, a few days after Jack's arrival, and a few days before the Pottses' departure, that an interest came to her of such an absorbing nature that it wrapped her mind away from the chill or scorching sense of her own wrongs. It was with the Pottses that the plan originated, and though the Pottses were proving more trying than they had ever been, they caught some of the radiance of their ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... curious change. His speed slackened, his head sank a little towards his breast, and the lamplight shone now and again upon a face grown strangely tranquil. His thought was so absorbing that when it became necessary to verify the name of a street, he looked at it for a time before he read it; when he came to a crossing, he seemed to have to reassure himself by two or three taps, such as a blind man gives, upon ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and the contest so lately carried on,—as well as the combatants engaged in it,—was instantaneously forgotten; while the thoughts, and eager glances, of every individual on the raft were now directed towards that all-absorbing speck,—still gleaming but obscurely against the reddish background ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... her chair, absorbing the scene with her apparently sleepy eyes; while Mrs. Sheridan bustled about, talking unceasingly, as she spread a clean table cloth and prepared ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... imagination if we had not to reckon with this ever-present censure of laughter, this fear of finding ourselves, our city, our section, out of touch with the prevalent tone and temper of the country as a whole. It is one of the forfeits we are bound to pay when we play the great absorbing ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... organise, reeled back in confusion from Virginia, set himself to learn the art of war. He collected, says his biographer, a great library of military books; and, if it were not pathetic, it would be almost ludicrous, to read of the great President, in the midst of his absorbing labours and his ever-growing anxieties, poring night after night, when his capital was asleep, over the pages of Jomini and Clausewitz. And what was the result? In 1864, when Grant was appointed to the command of the Union armies, he said: "I neither ask nor desire to ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Monte-Cristo" stands at the head of all exciting and absorbing novels. It is the sequel to "The Wife of Monte-Cristo," and the end of the continuation of Alexander Dumas' phenomenal romance of "The Count of Monte-Cristo." Like its renowned predecessors, it absolutely swarms ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... than of overtaxing the intellectual powers; and it is doubtless true that while very few of the girls and women in the upper classes overwork, a very large number suffer in health from the absence of interesting and absorbing employment. In Germany and America the circumstances are different—in the former, girls have more domestic occupations, and in the latter we have to guard, not so much against the depressing influence of idleness, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... portrait, but also one of the most peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself—a Narcissus attitude—curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... feeling of incessant longing. It reveals its presence constantly; sometimes in an undefinable feeling of profound desire, satisfied with no earthly object, yet but vaguely directed to the eternal or divine; sometimes in a profound and absorbing religiosity. This longing exists in an inchoate state; it is a love yet to be developed. From this mystic root springs much that is intellectually great, even the love of scientific certainty. Philosophy may, indeed, almost be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the mountain-tops are cover'd o'er, Then the green fields, and then the sandy shore; Bent with the weight, the nodding woods are seen, And one bright waste hides all the works of men: The circling seas, alone absorbing all, Drink the dissolving fleeces as they fall: So from each side increased the stony rain, And the white ruin ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... I?" retorted Hippy, then returned to his absorbing occupation and shortly afterwards passed his plate ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... mysterious letters prompted and impelled his, the Gray Seal's, acts! She—nameless, fascinating in her brilliant resourcefulness, amazing in her power, a woman whose life was bound up with his and yet held apart from him in the most inexplicable, absorbing way; a woman he had never seen, save for her gloved arm in the limousine that night, who at one unexpected moment projected a dazzling, impersonal existence across his path, and the next, leaving him battling for his ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the time of a thousand heartbeats neither the Spokesmen or the Gens made answer to Sarka, and all the world fell utterly silent, absorbing this unbelievable thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... lonesome defile between the downs to his smouldering kiln, and the ancient ramparts above it; and there, after his first hours of natural discomposure, he quietly waited for overtures from the possibly repentant Margery. But no overtures arrived, and then he meditated anew on the absorbing problem of her skittishness, and how to set about another campaign for her conquest, notwithstanding his late disastrous failure. Why had he failed? To what was her strange conduct owing? That was the thing which ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... Audrey, absently, "have you, granny?" She was not deeply interested, and at that moment one of her schoolfellows went by with a new hat on, a light blue one, with a white 'bottle-brush' bobbing about on it, and she found that much more absorbing. "How is mother?" she asked, when the 'bottle-brush' ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... his former self, while the melancholy of his countenance had in it something wild and even fierce. As at their first meeting, his language was dry and reserved, and he seemed rather impatient of conversation, as though it interfered with the indulgence of some secret and all absorbing reflection, while, to Henry's affectionate questioning of his adventures since they first parted, he replied in the vague unsatisfactory manner of one who seeks to shun the subject altogether. At ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... more than partners. Later, no one could remember who first suggested the founding of a secret order, or society, as a measure of exclusiveness and to keep the shack sacred to members only; but it was an idea that presently began to be more absorbing and satisfactory than even the shack itself. The outward manifestations of it might have been observed in the increased solemnity and preoccupation of the Caucasian members and in a few ceremonial observances ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... ma'am." She had touched Mr. Sleighter's favourite theme. Indeed, the absorbing passion of his life, next to the picking up of good salvage bargains, was his home in the Foothill country of ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... it is some new arrangement of ornamental electricity. It is, however, nothing of the kind; it is simply a clear pebble, common enough on the shores of tropical countries, which has the property of absorbing a small portion of the electricity in a human body, sufficient to make it shine with prismatic and powerful lustre—a property which has only as yet been discovered by Heliobas, who asserts that the same capability exists in many other apparently lustreless stones which have been untried, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... souls. Both knew that each had only been looking for the other, and at that moment there seemed to fall a silence upon both hearts, even in the midst of the babel of voices, and all their surroundings to vanish and be swept away by the force of their own absorbing thought. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... of a family of young children,—an office which leaves no privacy and no leisure. Her bed was always shared with some little one; her territories were exposed to the constant inroads of little pattering feet; and all the various sicknesses and ailments of delicate childhood made absorbing drafts upon her time. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... of a restraint which probably saved us from ruin. In truth, our hearts were too deeply engaged to give fair play to our heads. Many of us were very young, and all of us under a paroxysm of excitement which scarcely left us morally responsible for our conduct. So all-absorbing was the passion, that our own affairs had no longer any flavor for us. We gave to France all that we were permitted to give, our hearts, our prayers, and all the sympathies of our nature. Our eyes, our ears were turned, ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... this time in Lucerne. All morning I stocked up on good Schweizerkaese and better Gruyere. For lunch I had cheese salad. All around me the farmers were rolling two-hundred-pound Emmentalers, bigger than oxcart wheels. I sat in a little cafe, absorbing cheese and cheese lore in equal quantities. I learned that a prize cheese must be chock-full of equal-sized eyes, the gas holes produced during fermentation. They must glisten like polished bar glass. The cheese itself must be of a light, lemonish yellow. Its flavor must be ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... society. Education at the period to which I refer was then beginning to take hold of the public mind, as an essential to the well-doing of the people. This subject in later years, as is known, has become an absorbing question. Our remarks had been evoked by the neat appearance of the children of the Moorfields Schools, who had just passed near where we stood, as they entered the church. One of us remarked in reference to the Tower close by, that it was the dower of the Lady Blanche, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... cases, and the political trickery resorted to by royal favorites, affording a better insight into the statecraft of that day than can be had even by an exhaustive study of history. It is a powerful romance of love and diplomacy, and in point of thrilling and absorbing interest has ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... where to chew the nut, much wrangling goes on; and such men as survive in battle claim that their particular method is proved to be the correct one, while such as succumb are cited in proof of the error of their process of absorbing the juices of the juby-juby nut. The survivors include, of course, representatives of various schools of thought, and a battle against a common enemy rarely goes by without being immediately followed by a conflict among the surviving Kakekikokuans in order ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... could do to fill the vacant place; and her husband's fondness had accepted the effort as adding another charm to the lovely creature who had opened a new life to him. But where is the woman who can intimately associate herself with the hard brain-work of a man devoted to an absorbing intellectual pursuit? She can love him, admire him, serve him, believe in him beyond all other men—but (in spite of exceptions which only prove the rule) she is out of her place when she enters the study while the pen is in his hand. More than once, when he was at work, Romayne closed the page ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... morning and evening, when the padlocked well was opened, what delight to watch the women drawing water, or even to help tug at the chain that turned the axle. And on the bridge that led from the Old Ghetto to the New, where the canal, though the view was brief, disappeared round two corners, how absorbing to stand and speculate on what might be coming round either corner, and which would yield a vision first! Perhaps there would come along a sandolo rowed by a man standing at the back, his two oars crossed gracefully; perhaps a floating raft with barefooted boys ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... forces just beneath them, and he would not look down. But he did look back, and saw the broad band of the Potomac, and beyond it the white dome of the Capitol and the roof of Washington. But his gaze turned again to the South, where his absorbing interest lay, and once more he viewed the quiet country, rolling away until it touched the horizon rim. The afternoon was growing late, and great terraces of red and gold were heaping above one another in the sky ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... as to expose larger surface. Could you test Welwitschia with permanganate of potassium: if, like my pegs, the lower surface would be coloured brown like radicle, and upper surface left white like hypocotyl. If such an idea as yours, of an absorbing organ, had ever crossed my mind, I would have tried many hypocotyls in weak citrate of ammonia, to see if it penetrated on line of junction more easily than elsewhere. I daresay the projection in Abronia and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... together in a union of equal privileges and powers, which has since gone by the name of the Government of the United States of North America. This is the great republic to which I just now alluded, that is gradually absorbing the minor Southern States into its—union, and threatens at no very distant date to spread the English language and the English race over the ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... volumes—dictated by Mr. (not Mrs.) Harris to the publisher in ninety-four hours; and several extempore sermons, possessing the remarkably lucid property of being "full, unforced, out-gushing, unstinted, and absorbing". The candidate for examination in pure belief, will then pass on to the spirit-photography department; this, again, will be found in so- favoured America, under the superintendence of Medium Mumler, a photographer of Boston: who was "astonished" (though, on Mr. Howitt's showing, he surely ought ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... hands of the Protestants, immediately changed the character of the dispute into a religious contest, and, as by magic, all Europe wheeled into line on the one side or the other, Every other question was lost sight of, in the all-absorbing one, Shall the duchy fall into the hands of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the brows of his hostess. No struggle there, on the part of the children, "to share the good man's knee;" but protruded eyes, round as spectacles, and almost as large, fixed alternately upon his flushed face and that absorbing epigastrium which is making their miserable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... same indifference toward affairs in the provinces that we show in this country, unless their investments were in danger. They were wrapped up in their own concerns, and politics in Rome were so absorbing in 53 B.C. that people in the city probably paid little attention to the doings of a quaestor in the far-away province of Asia. But, as the time for Curio's return approached, men recalled the striking role which he played in politics ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... rubbed, and felt, and smelt; and then they declared unanimously that Walter's back had been guilty of absorbing all kinds of ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... endeavour to detect this weakness, and adapt their game to it, is very curious and entertaining. The effect is greatly heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of gesture; two men playing for half a farthing with an intensity as all-absorbing as if the stake ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... absorbing story of the continuous adventures of a motor car in the hands of Nat Trevor and his friends. It does seemingly impossible "stunts," and yet everything happens "in the ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... were bound to be blocked by the episcopal veto. And before the next General Synod the Church was to pass through such tragic occurrences that the question at issue could no longer command the same primary and absorbing interest. ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... "The Blue and the Gray Series," a title that is sufficiently indicative of the nature and spirit of the series, of which the first volume is now presented, while the name of Oliver Optic is sufficient warrant of the absorbing style of narrative. "Taken by the Enemy," the first book of the series, is as bright and entertaining as any work that Mr. Adams has yet put forth, and will be as eagerly perused as any that has borne his name. It would not be fair to the prospective ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... continued the Baron, "I'd engage to take this city as it is, and the office of Pope, and run the whole Roman Catholic Church, till it knocked out all opposition by the simple and natural process of absorbing all opponents. We want a republic here in Rome. We want freedom, Sir. Where is the Church making its greatest triumphs to-day? In the States, Sir. If the Catholic Church made itself free and liberal and go-ahead; if it kept up with the times; if it ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... several pictures which he has seen, and adds with accustomed simplicity that he feels encouraged to believe that when he has seen "Some More" of each, and had a larger experience, he will eventually "begin to take an absorbing interest in them"—the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
