"Abysmal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walk on a bit. I wouldn't leave terra firma now for anything." He handed his aunt in, and then Bertie. He exacted from Bertie a perfectly superfluous shake of the hand, bowed over that hand with a sudden access of gravity, and lost himself in an abysmal reverie before he had ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... task is done! Now I have filled thy soul with song and sun. Forth! Now thou soarest on triumphant wings,— Forth! Now thy Svanhild is the swan that sings! [Takes off the ring and presses a kiss upon it. To the abysmal ooze of ocean bed Descend, my dream!—I ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... you its plot. Summarised, it tells the life of a young woman, Maggie Cardinal, whom one may briefly call the bemused victim of religions—and relations. You never knew any well-intentioned heroine who had such abysmal luck with both. Her clergyman father, a bad hat, who spared us his acquaintance by expiring on the first page; her semi-moribund aunts in their detestable London home; the circle of the Inner Saints, with their intrigues that centred in the ugly little meeting-house; ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... stooped to bribing his assistant because he was afraid to deal with him in a more summary manner. Amherst's leap of anger at the offer was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He had no time to search for a reason; he could only rally himself to meet the unintelligible with a composure as abysmal as Truscomb's; and his voice still rang with the wonder of the incident as he retailed ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... in. But the voice that was to speak for us—that voice was mute. We had served his purpose in helping him to win his seat, and we found ourselves invariably forgotten or ignored. The Conservatives have never shown the abysmal hypocrisy of the Liberals. We can get on with our open enemies; it's these cowards' ('Boo!' and groans)—'these cowards, I say—who, in order to sneak into a place in the House, pretend to sympathize with this reform—who use us, and then betray us; it's ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... day that had witnessed her departure from her dear Maryland, while the white girl, dry eyed and outwardly calm, was torn by inward fears and forebodings. She feared not more for herself than for the three men whom she knew to be wandering in the abysmal depths of the savage jungle, from which she now heard issuing the almost incessant shrieks and roars, barkings and growlings of its terrifying and fearsome denizens as ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... maneuver was not a total failure, although it did result in a crumpled mud guard and a runaway. Milk-wagon horses in Dallas, it appeared, were not schooled to the sight of spinning motor cars, and the phenomenon filled at least one with abysmal horror. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... individual Englishmen, such as Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. No, we must go far beyond that. We must hate the very essence of everything English. We must hate the very soul of England. An abysmal gulf yawns between the two nations which can never, and must never, be bridged over. We need borrow Kultur from no nation on earth, for we ourselves have developed the highest Kultur ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... clerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth—of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, were hideous like being ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... impressive but in cantatory manner of ringing. The bourdon must have cost a fortune. When it is made to speak, the effect is startling: all the city vibrates to a weird sound difficult to describe,—an abysmal, quivering moan, producing unfamiliar harmonies as the voices of the smaller bells are seized and interblended by it. ...One will not easily forget the ringing of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... bottom), a bottomless depth; hence any deep place. From the late popular abyssimus (superlative of Lon Latin abyssus) through the French abisme (i.e. abime) is derived the poetic form abysm, pronounced as late as 1616 to rhyme with time. The adjective "abyssal'' or "abysmal'' has been used by zoologists to describe deep regions of the sea; hence abysmal zone, abysmal flora and fauna, abysmal accumulations, the deposit on the abysmal bed of the ocean. In heraldry, the abyss is the middle of an escutcheon. In the Greek version ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... adapted himself to the narrow world of an invalid's room and its few interests. With the wealth he had fortunately inherited he brought to his side leading specialists who might possibly help him, and went through alternate ecstatic hopes and abysmal fears as the great men came and departed. Very quietly, too, he helped others less fortunate, financially, than himself. The nurses and physicians in the hospital where he lay learned to like and admire him, and other patients, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... civilization, after all, according to the morning Courier-Herald, despite that Democratic paper's colorful prophecies last autumn in the vein of Jeremiah. To the contrary, Major-General McArthur was testifying before the Senate as to the abysmal unfitness of the Filipinos for self-government; the Women's Clubs were holding a convention in Los Angeles; there had been terrible hailstorms this year to induce the annual ruining of the peach-crop, and the submarine Fulton had exploded; the California Limited had been derailed ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the outlines of surrounding peaks; then long, bright streams, piercing the gloomy depths of the valleys, chasing gigantic shadows, like spirits of light contending with the legions of darkness; and, at length, the whole immense sea of mountains brought into majestic view, with their unnumbered abysmal valleys covered with forests of every intermingled variety ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Agathe, and the little Bridaus. When the debts amounted to ten thousand francs, she increased her stakes, trusting that her favorite trey, which had not turned up in nine years, would come at last, and fill to overflowing the abysmal deficit. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... distant from the shore on which we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... rags; unexpectedly, like an Enceladus, living-buried, from under his Trinacria? They that would make grass be eaten do now eat grass, in this manner? After long dumb-groaning generations, has the turn suddenly become thine?—To such abysmal overturns, and frightful instantaneous inversions of the centre-of-gravity, are human Solecisms all liable, if they but knew it; the more liable, the falser ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... place it always is; and Elsley saw it at an awful time, as the glare unveiled below him a sea of rock-waves, all sharp on edge, pointing toward him on every side: or rather one wave-crest of a sea; for twenty yards beyond, all sloped away into the abysmal dark. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... whatever happens his way. All things are then loaded with ominous powers the strength of which is directly proportionate to the hope or fear that enthralls him. If the universe were lawless, the irony of man's fate would forever be what it was when he lived in abysmal ignorance: when in bitterest need of sane guidance, he would be most prone to trust to the feeblest and most irrational of aids. On the other hand, if things are determined by necessity, nothing happening either miraculously ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... its abysmal throat wider and wider, never to close more. A Fourth Estate of able editors springs up, increases and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... interesting whenever anyone evinced a desire to learn anything of his native land. The officers were wont to question the voyageurs, and Dan played upon their ignorance of the western half of their Empire, which was deep enough to begin with, and made it abysmal. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... her of him; and never pleasurably. This I am forced to say, or you cannot understand my story. Would to God I could tell another tale! Would to God I had such memories as other men have of a father's clasp, a mother's kiss—but no! my grief, already profound, might have become abysmal. Perhaps it is best as it is; only, I might have been a different child, and made for myself a different ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... this alone, the lunatic is outside public law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The criminal admits the facts, and therefore permits us to appeal to the facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really understand that agreement is in his own interests. We can say to him, "Do not ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... bent, when all your hopes seem riding round in hearses—a scowling brow won't help you worth a cent. Look pleasant, please, when days are dark and dismal and all the world seems in a hopeless fix; the clouds won't go because your grief's abysmal, the sun won't shine the sooner for your kicks. Look pleasant, please, when Grip—King of diseases, has filled your system with his microbes vile; I know it's hard, but still, between your sneezes, you may be able to produce a smile. Look pleasant, please, whatever trouble ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... her; these attributes of hers were what he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal absences ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... philosophy we are not clear whether there is a thing that knows. We know we are conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought. Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... from the Middle Ages, from the medieval faith as ardent as it was at heart despairing, and not without its inward and abysmal incertitudes, and we have entered upon the age of rationalism, likewise not without its incertitudes. Faith in reason is exposed to the same rational indefensibility as all other faith. And we may ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... his mouth with her hand. She preferred his tawny eyes with their black brows and lashes. His eyes watched her as a cat watches a bird, but without the white gleam of ferocity. In his eyes was a deep, deep sun-warmth, something fathomless, deepening black and abysmal, but somehow sweet ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... written in the skies!" mused De Galgenstein, "ye shine as ye did in the olden days! WE change, but YE speak ever the same language. Gazing in your abysmal depths, the feeble ratioci—" ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blindness of chance. Steps in man and controls and directs them. For the first time in the history of life conscious intelligence forms and transforms life. These yearnings and desires, promptings of the "abysmal fecundity," have in man evolved into what is called "love." They arise in instinct and sensation and culminate in sentiment and emotion. They master man, and the intellect of man, as they master the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Bureau of Forestry before it had had charge of the nation's estates. He possessed a methodical mind, a rather intolerant disposition, thick glasses, a very cold and precise manner, extreme personal neatness, and abysmal ignorance of the West. He disapproved of California John's rather slipshod dress, to start with; his ingrained reticence shrank from Davidson's informal cordiality; his orderly mind recoiled with ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... we went, for an interminable length of time—till at length we reached the abysmal level where the sun never shone and the eyes of man ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... not the Moors left behind any traces of their blood, they left behind, at least, traces of their learning; for the university of Montpellier claimed to have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian physicians of the Middle Age, on Avicenna and Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived their parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, who, when the Moors were expelled from Spain in the eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... another limb a few feet below. Here he found a hand-hold, quickly righted himself, and as quickly clambered upward to be revenged upon Tarzan, but the ape-man was otherwise engaged and did not wish to be interrupted. He was explaining again to Taug the depths of the latter's abysmal ignorance, and pointing out how much greater and mightier was Tarzan of the Apes than Taug or any ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and there with isles in the bright flood. The dark champaign that flanked its shores was of an unusual verdure. Mystery and peril brooded on those distant ravines, the vapours of their far-descending cataracts. In such abysmal fastnesses as these the Hyrcan tiger might hide his surly generations. This was an air for the sun-disdaining eagle, a country of transcendent brightness, its flowers strangely pure and perfect, its waters more limpid, its grazing herds, its birds, its cedar trees, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... to as "Nature," may it not be that it is this very element, this strange wisdom of the abysmal "Mothers," which humanity thinks of as struggling to utter ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... in the dark?" Thorpe questioned. "Or...." He visioned dimly some denizen of the vast depths, living beyond the limits of the sun's penetration, far in the abysmal darkness where its only light must be self-made. But his mind failed in the attempt to picture what manner of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... snatch the bolster from under the sleeping head; noted the gleam of hellish satisfaction in its eyes as it pressed the bolster down; and watched the murdered creature's contortions grow fainter, and fainter, until they finally ceased. The eyes then left the room; and from afar off, away below, in the abysmal cellars of the house, came the sound of digging—faint, very faint, but unquestionably digging. This terminated the grim, phantasmal drama for that night at least, and Letty, chilled to the bone, but thoroughly alert, escaped to her room. She spent her few remaining ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... origin must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones—a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... every rank that suffers in this onward sweep of power. Royalty and Rags, throughout these pages, find many mourners over the sacrifices each has made to reconcile the eternal conflict between poverty and pomp. In the abysmal void between the disappearing star and the aspiring glowworm men tramp upon, there seems to be sufficient latitude for the play of gratitude or grief. A Napoleon exiled by the French or a Ney shot down by Frenchmen is unthinkable today. In like manner, when the revolutionary ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... Church)—neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One Eternal, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... pundit who has flung in the face of peaceful geologists this octavo camouflet of his scientific lucubrations professes to have scoured the surface and ravaged the bottom (in a suit of patent sub-marine Scriptural armor) of a no less abysmal subject than the cryptology of Genesis,—to have undermined with his sapping intellect and blown up with his explosive wisdom the walled secrets of time and eternity, carrying away with him in the shape of plunder a whole cargo of the plans and purposes of the Omnipotent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... fringe, but still an ordinarily intelligent member—and I was not aware of the underground factors and forces which had caused this thunderbolt out of the blue, as it were. Needless to say, the country was in a state of more abysmal ignorance still, and it is questionable whether outside of Munster, owing to a scandalous Press boycott of Mr O'Brien's speeches for many years afterwards, the masses of the people ever had an understanding of the motives which impelled him ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... George's great speech? I'm all with him. No matter what the cost and how many of us have to give our lives, this War must be so finished that war may be forever at an end. If the devils who plan wars could only see the abysmal result of their handiwork! Give them one day in the trenches under shell-fire when their lives aren't worth a five minutes' purchase—or one day carrying back the wounded through this tortured country, or one day in a Red Cross train. No one can imagine the damnable waste and ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... professor's wife continued immovably grave during this brief summary of an educational system. She inquired, "How old is Arnold now?" learned that he was seventeen, remembered that, oh yes, he was a year older than Sylvia, and allowed the subject to drop into one of the abysmal silences for which she alone had the courage. Her husband's sister was as little proof against it as her husband. As it continued, Mrs. Marshall-Smith went through the manoeuvers which in a less perfectly bred person ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... gloss of gayety Dr. Nesbit might put upon his opinion of Grant Adams and his work in the world, it was evident that the Doctor's opinion of that work was not high. But it was comparatively high; for Harvey's opinion of Grant Adams and his work was abysmal in its depth. He was running his life on a different motor from the motor which moved Harvey; the town was moving after a centripetal force—every one was for himself, and the devil was entitled to the hindermost. Grant Adams was centrifugal; ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... above was below, below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body: depth was swallowed up in height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, suddenly as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose—that systems more mysterious, that worlds more billowy,—other heights, and other depths,—were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed, and stopped, shuddered and wept. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... posterity, so I threw the brick upon which the letter was engraved into a neighboring fish-pond, and resolved to get rid of His Majesty by strategy. For three nights I pondered over my plan of operations, and then the great method came to me like the dawning of the sun after a night of abysmal darkness. I went to the royal tent and discovered His Majesty hard at work chiseling out an article on "How I Brought Down My First Proterosaurus" on a slab of granite he had brought with him. As I approached he ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... and abysmal solemnity: 'I don't know, Willis. Don't you see that it must have been—that I must ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... water coming down from the mountains, was always icy cold and the current swift, deep, and treacherous. The whole bottom of the canon was often submerged, and in attempting to follow its course along the channel of the stream, both horse and rider were liable to plunge at any time into some abysmal whirlpool. Besides the excitement which the Three Crossings and an Indian country furnished, Cody's trail ran through a region that was often frequented by desperadoes. Furthermore, he had to ford the North Platte at a point where the stream was half a mile in width ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more—though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... the abysmal distances!—attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus—and thus—and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?—the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... eternal; nature exists for no reason; and, indeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a good that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good notwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being obeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good is not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are those who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising their sinful natural propensities, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... surprise for months. In place of the visitors he now received letters, as many as if he had been a cabinet minister. It was the same old story, only less affecting, because generally deficient in style, and faulty as to spelling, and no longer illustrated by tearful, vigorously mopped eyes, abysmal sighs, and hands wrung till they cracked. For a time Wilhelm went to every address given in these letters, in order to see and hear for himself, but after awhile his powers of discrimination were sharpened, and he learned to distinguish ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... really see." He waved the Venusian out the door and turned to Kielland with burden of ten months' frustration in his voice. "They're stupid," he said slowly. "They are so incredibly stupid I could go screaming into the swamp every time I see one of them coming. Their stupidity is positively abysmal." ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... afraid to fall asleep. For hours he remained stretched on his bed, now a prey to feverish and agitated wakefulness, now in the grip of oppressive dreams in which he tumbled down flights of stairs and felt himself sinking, powerless, into abysmal depths. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... him that all the cabs and the buses and the little black figures were being hurried by some power straight, fast, along Piccadilly to be pitched, at the end of it, pell-mell, helter-skelter into some dark abysmal pit, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... swept in—and for an instant there seemed hope. But only that little breath of respite and there came a cry like myriads of lost souls. They were falling, falling, down through fire, with fire above, below, around, everywhere. Down, down,—an abysmal eternity of fire, till his seared soul writhed from his tortured body, and stood aside ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... mainly, perhaps, because it was one enormous crown of nearly naked granite. The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look which granite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of the fore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly confronted by abysmal geologic time,—the eternities past and the eternities to come. The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appalling cracks and fissures, the rent boulders, the smitten granite floors, gave one a new sense of the power ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... the leaping star, The cauldrons of the sea in storm, Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm, And trodden where abysmal ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... The clouds still borrowed the light from below, and the solemn, leafless woods on one side were outlined distinctly against the reflection in the sky. The flare showed, too, the abrupt precipice on the other side, the abysmal gloom of the valley, the austere summit-line of the mountain beyond, and gave the dark mysteries of the night a sombre revelation, as in visible blackness it filled ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... states, then the irrevocableness of time would seem to mean that an actual state of all nature can never return. I admit it seems unlikely that there should ever be such a recurrence down to the smallest particular. But extreme unlikeliness is not the point. Our ignorance is so abysmal that our judgments of likeliness and unlikeliness of future events hardly count. The real point is that the exact recurrence of a state of nature seems merely unlikely, while the recurrence of an instant of time violates our whole concept of time-order. The instants of time which ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... the nourishment of the world wished for nothing, and the world had enough:—they did nothing, and all things were transformed:—their stillness was abysmal, and ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... was once the case upon our Pacific coast; at another time, if the land should rise, the shore line might coincide with the real border of the continent. By the real border of the continent we mean the line along which the earth slopes down steeply to the abysmal depths of ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... the girl and again the gun crept slowly upward. The quarter-breed had heard the words. With a mighty effort he filled his lungs and from between the blue-grey lips sang a wild, shrill scream of abysmal soul-terror. Chloe Elliston's heart went sick at the cry, which rang in her ears as the very epitome of mortal agony. She felt her knees grow weak and she glanced at the Louchoux girl, who knelt close, still staring into the upturned face, the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... mistake; but before I realized that it was a mistake I was out in the undertow sixty yards from shore, going down for the third time, with a low gurgling cry. He did not put out to save me, either; he left me to sink in the heaving and abysmal sea of my own fathomless ignorance. He just stood there and let me drown. It was a cruel thing, for which ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a circular quagmire of festering black mud about a hundred yards across. Near at hand they could see the mud heaving, very slowly, as though abysmal forms of life were tunneling along just under the surface. They glanced toward the center of the bog, which was occupied by one of the smooth black pools, and cried aloud at ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... in the immense majority of cases, so much less stringent and so much less important, they had so faint a disapproval for sins which we condemn, and so weak an indignation against vices which we abhor, that in their early years we can hardly suppose them to have often fathomed those "abysmal deeps of personality," the recognition of which is a necessary element ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... a lion, and, from languishing prostration in hope and vital energy, that constant sequel of lying down before him, publishes the secret frailty of human nature—reveals its deep-seated Pariah falsehood to itself—records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... dost not wisely, Bard. A double voice is Truth's, to use at will: One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill, Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard, Wherein She strives to look as near a lie As can comport with her divinity; The other tender-soft as seem The embraces of a dead Love in a dream. These thoughts, which you have sung ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... through the swamps and briars After dons and tonsured friars; Dying in the forests dismal, Till the shrill of silver clarion Brought the buzzards to the carrion Round the smoke of lonely fires In a continent abysmal. ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... undeniably pleasant; pleasanter still was the feeling that someone really needed her, that the happiness of the man at her side depended on her yes or no. She abandoned herself to the feeling, forgetting the abysmal interval of his caress, or at least saying to herself that in time she would forget it, that really there was nothing to make a fuss about in being kissed by anyone she liked as ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... went straight to his sister's at Norwood. His dejection was abysmal. Says Miss Stisted, "Strong, brave man though he was, the shock of his sudden recall told upon him cruelly. Not even during his last years, when his health had all but given way, was he so depressed. Sleep being impossible, he used to ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... were terrors in the dark valley which lay between! Sharp crags and treeless wastes, tortuous paths and abysmal depths, with never a rest for the wayfarer who struggled blindly on. She was not yet so secure upon the height that she could contemplate ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... was the goal toward which this mass of flesh was striving so frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging itself ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the Religious Musings, inquired what might be the cost of the new publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." What ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... spellbound as we approached this awful chasm, and as if we were being impelled by some invisible force towards the edge of the precipice. It fairly made us shudder as on hands and knees we peered down on the abysmal depths below. It was a horrible sensation, and one that sometimes haunted us in our dreams for years afterwards, and we felt greatly relieved when we found that we could safely crawl away and regain an upright posture. We could ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... accursed! What a world of irony was in this single fact for me! Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very time with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of the social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly unfathomable by their very authors—at this very time. I say, I was trying with all my might to make of myself "a potent active social force." It even seemed to me that I had partially accomplished my object; anyhow, at this ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... candidly. "Your company's worth all it costs, Narcisse. Excuse me; I always forget your last name—and your first is so appropriate." It was worth all it cost, though Richling could ill afford the purchase. The young Latin's sweet, abysmal ignorance, his infantile amiability, his artless ambition, and heathenish innocence started the natural gladness of Richling's blood to effervescing anew every time they met, and, through the sheer impossibility of confiding any of his troubles ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... for matches by this time, and seemed disappointed that none was to be found in his pockets. I don't know why he should seem to recede from me, for he didn't move an inch from where he stood with that defensively mocking smile on his face. But abysmal gulfs of space seemed to blow in like sea-mists between him and me, desolating and lonely stretches of emptiness which could never again be spanned by the tiny bridges of hope. I felt alone, terribly ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... profound, intricate, inexplicable, unfathomable, incomprehensible, recondite, abstruse; abysmal; sagacious, cunning, astute, shrewd; dark, intense; grave, grum, full-toned, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... midnight burned Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned, Not in that order they were wont to keep— Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep, In awful diapason heard afar, But shoutingly adrift 'twixt star and star. Reeling a planet's orbit left or right As laughter took them in the abysmal Night; Or, by the point of some remembered jest, Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed, Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... day was lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily's imperative bidding, had actually returned in time for a late dinner on the yacht. The repast had been the most difficult moment of the day. Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences which so commonly followed on what his wife called his "attacks" that it was easy, before the servants, to refer it to this cause; but Bertha herself seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to make use of this obvious means of protection. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... boats planked together two and two. At Pirna are plenty of boats; and by oar and track-rope, the River itself might be a road for them? Boats or pontoons to Konigstein, by water or land, they must be got. Eight miles of abysmal roads, our horses all extenuated? Impossible to cart these pontoons!" said Rutowski to himself.—Pity he had not tried it. He had a week to do those eight bad miles in; and 2,000 lean horses, picking grass or brown leaves, while their riders threshed. "We will drag our ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... the Indian the path is forever down—down into the shadowed vale, down into the abysmal canon, balustraded with sombre, cold gray rocks holding in the far recesses secret streams that make their way beneath the mountain to the cloven rock on the sunlit slope. Thither then they rode, solemn but steadfast. ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... not the leading virtue of Socialists; in fact, Jimmie made a boast of scorning it—if people asked his opinion, he "gave it to 'em straight". So now he caused this white angel to understand that he regarded the effete aristocracies of the old world with abysmal contempt; he meant to put them out of business right off the bat. In vain the white angel pleaded that some of them might be useful people, or at any rate well-meaning: Jimmie pronounced them a bunch of parasites and grafters; the thing to do was to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... There were to be bugle-calls throughout the city, and the message they gave would mean "lights out!" in every part of Paris. For several nights there were rehearsals of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way with little shouts of laughter as ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... though not the most cheerful room I have ever seen, still, for a man's house, is not so bad—books all around from floor to ceiling, with the overflow in piles on floor and table and mantelpiece; half a dozen abysmal leather chairs and a rug or so, with another black marble mantelpiece, but this time containing a crackling wood fire. By way of bric-a-brac, he has a stuffed pelican and a crane with a frog in its mouth, also a raccoon sitting on a log, and a varnished tarpon. ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... ineffectual efforts to draw Dane into conversation; but at each remark the young man started violently, as if suddenly recalled to his surroundings. Finally Sir James desisted, and the meal concluded in abysmal silence. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... Beldonald really never did. Mrs. Munden was in fact wonderful; for when I had given her quickly "Why she's a Holbein, you know, absolutely," she took it up, after a first fine vacancy, with an immediate abysmal "Oh is she?" that, as a piece of social gymnastics, did her the greatest honour; and she was in fact the first in London to spread the tidings. For a face—about it was magnificent. But she was also the first, ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... trumpets. For here is a world with the accumulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the purlieus of hell because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very power in which it glories. Here is a world which must build its civilization on spiritual bases or else collapse into abysmal ruin and which cannot achieve the task though all the motives of self-preservation cry out to have it done, because men lack the very elements of faith and character which it is the business of ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... commove Europe and bespatter it with blood, but that would not hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the abysmal ooze of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and whimpers, in agonies of reluctance, his story came; his words were rendered almost incomprehensible by his abysmal fright. When he had purged himself of his secret Dave promptly unbound him; then leaving him more than half dead, he went to the telephone which connected the pumping station with Las Palmas ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... subsequent messages, that this "great shaft" is one of an enormous system of artificial shafts that run, each from what is called a lunar "crater," downwards for very nearly a hundred miles towards the central portion of our satellite. These shafts communicate by transverse tunnels, they throw out abysmal caverns and expand into great globular places; the whole of the moon's substance for a hundred miles inward, indeed, is a mere sponge of rock. "Partly," says Cavor, "this sponginess is natural, but very largely it is due to the enormous industry of the Selenites in the past. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... were unusually abysmal. He stood with his back to the door of his theater as though shielding it from Philistine assaults upon the drama's ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... the cell in which they had been placed. At last there was a perfectly appreciable sound. It was a fumbling, as of some one in the darkness, making hasty efforts to get a key in a lock. Carter, now bent on discovery, made a rush into the abysmal darkness. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... at his glass from out abysmal pain; With tears his eyes were bitten in beneath his bulbous brain. "Who is the sodden wretch?" I said. They ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... certainly not spurring on my men associates by the display of any brilliant gifts. Naturally, I missed a great deal of class fellowship and class support, and throughout my entire course I rarely entered my class-room without the abysmal conviction that I was not really wanted there. But some of the men were goodhumoredly cordial, and several of them are among my friends to-day. Between myself and my family there still existed the breach I had created when I began ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... rate, that I designate THEM as Poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages: into which I really believe even my poor wife—for it's universal!—has never succeeded in peeping. It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured—and ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... road. Through the window of the low, one-story building he could see the lobby call-board, with the little colored studs all dark. He smiled in unpleasant satisfaction—no one was left in the building. It was routine, just like everything else in this god-forsaken hole. Utter, abysmal, trancelike routine. The girl was a little later than usual, probably because of the ship coming in tomorrow. Reports to get ready, supply requisitions, ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... hours as recreational. There is no idle talk or play. The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how the little things had any impulse to laugh in such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently the Puritan boys and girls were entirely normal and even wholesomely mischievous—as proved by the constantly required services ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... between Tukuran and the Point, seeking water not too deep for cable laying, though in places the sea swallowed up our sounding wire for twelve hundred fathoms. Think of it—a mile and a quarter! And once the iron marker came up on a sun-baked deck icy-cold from its abysmal plunge. ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... and strictly speaking, that 'first' only declares the priority of the divine love towards us over ours towards Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say—first of all, ere Creation and Time, away back in the abysmal depths of an everlasting and changeless heart, changeless in the sense that its love was eternal, but not changeless in the sense that love could have no place within it—first of all things was God's love; last to be discovered because most ancient of all. The foundation is disclosed last when ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... of realisation. From below rose the reiterated boom of the baulked waves, each thud against the base of the great crag seeming to shake her whole being, while, whichever way she looked, menacing headlands towered stark and pitiless above the sea. She felt like a fly on the wall of some abysmal depth—only without the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... future capacity as acrobat or bareback rider, as he was pleased to express it. His door was not open to such scum! Well, I'll fight it down! Only I'm sorry for my poor, dear mother.—You can't imagine with what abysmal hatred a man of his kind considers the theatre and everything connected with it. The heaviest curse is not strong enough to express his feelings. An actor is, to his mind, a priori, the worst, most ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann |
