"Cryptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... killing a cat than by choking it with cream," was his cryptic remark. "What would you say if I told you that in an hour's time we, will have every drop of water out of the yacht, and that following that we will have her afloat ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... gazed at her in mild surprise. Doubtless he would have asked the meaning of this cryptic utterance; but at this moment the two seamen from the Milo issued forth from the gateway up the road; and, descending a few paces, turned to call back farewell to Mrs. Treacher, who, having escorted them so far, ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... booklet from the desk and opened it before her. She saw the cryptic characters for the first time. And she saw them with his glowing eyes. In their mysterious strokes and curves and dots she saw romance, and the key of the future; she saw the philosopher's stone. She saw ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the permeable membrane of a repair cell. The cell is an electrolyte and therefore division of the cell in course of preparation for multiplication might perhaps depend upon an electric impulse so delicately in balance that Nature for some cryptic reason might prefer not to allow the necessary balance to go toward cell division in grafts consisting of green growth of the year in perennials. Perhaps I might defeat natural processes by leaving a leaf or part ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... filled poor Lizabetha's mind with chaotic confusion. What on earth did it all mean? The most disturbing feature was the hedgehog. What was the symbolic signification of a hedgehog? What did they understand by it? What underlay it? Was it a cryptic message? ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Miss Theodosia's cryptic little smile lingered on her lips and in the clear windows of her eyes, as she gazed past the voluble wife of Andrew, through her vines, at the little House of Children next door. She imagined she heard Stefana ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... in half that time if you lived in Tinkletown," was Anderson's cryptic return. "You ought to see Ed Higgins. He's our champeen. His specialty is ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... crowd at Lord's, and the brilliant writers of the New Age. And these phenomena are a part of England; but I tell you that they are all only the froth on the surface of Bettesworth the labourer. If you regard this as a cryptic saying, read the two books, and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Impressionists, with their scientific equipment, their astonishing technique, and their intellectualism, mark the end of one era, do they not rumour the coming of another? Certainly to-day there is stress in the cryptic laboratory of Time. A great thing is dead; but, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... "Why cryptic after your really admirable frankness? But there's always a point beyond which women never will go when confessing their souls. . . . I suppose you think you're as hard as nails. Do you really imagine that you will ever ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... breath. The conspirators had as yet no intimation of his intentions: Governor Claiborne was torn by suspicion of this would-be savior, for at the very time he was reading Wilkinson's gasconade he received a cryptic letter from Andrew Jackson which ran, "keep a watchful eye on our General and beware of an attack as well from your own country as Spain!" If Claiborne could not trust "our ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths certain pantheistic symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the gods were dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought their curiosity to the problem of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it a depraved version of the Jewish sacred writings, and found the ark on every mountain-top ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a secret code, But who would guess at guile in that? Unless he used the cryptic mode He couldn't be a diplomat; He wished (we thought) to be discreet, Telling his friends how frail and fair is The exotic feminine you meet In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... contiguous, contingent, contortion, contravene, contumacious, contumacy, contumelious, convergent, conversant, convivial, correlate, corrigible, corroborate, corrosive, cosmic, covenant, crass, credence, crescent, criterion, critique, crucial, crucible, cryptic, crystalline, culmination, culpable, cumulative, cupidity, cursive, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... conflict find him leaving the actual handling of the troops to Hunter-Weston as I am bound to do. Old Oyama cooled his brain during the battle of the Shaho by shooting pigeons sitting on Chinese chimneys. King Richard before Bosworth saw ghosts. My own dark hours pass more easily as I make my cryptic jottings in pedlar's French. The detachment of the writer comes over me; calms down the tumult of the mind and paves a path towards the refuge of sleep. No order is to be issued until I get reports and requests. I can't think now of anything ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer. Presently, with a stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of the supernatural or of the mind's illusions, but no less dreadful to her because of that. In some cryptic way it was associated with the direful experience through which she had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... such a fool of a guy as to let other guys fool him, of course. Sounds a little cryptic, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... Peter, frankly. "I'll see you in New York—if not sooner." With which cryptic observation he clattered down ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... check is always honored," was his cryptic assertion. "I merely say," he added more calmly, "that if we are to board her, and I don't make any protest over that at all, it seems to me only fair that her father ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... the Drama." This cryptic passage refers, I imagine, to a translation by John Black, afterwards the editor of the Morning Chronicle, of August Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 2 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... back to High Street to take his bus his mind was divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not only found Treffinger's greatest picture, but that, in James, he had discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter's personality—a clue which, if tactfully followed, might ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... little mystified by Merkle's cryptic message, for she could imagine no possible way in which she or the writer himself could be connected discreditably with Jarvis Hammon's affair. She gained some light, however, when that evening she read the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... alone among his levers, wheels, switches, buttons, cranks, gauges, lights, bells, buzzers, horns, ticker-tapes, creeping scrolls, barking loudspeakers and cryptic dials. Dewforth saw him sharply silhouetted against a long window through which bluish-gray light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His head was drawn into his shoulders, ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose, fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the one soft touch in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make up the doctor's life ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... changing ever since they were written. Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed; the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date," to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as that of his original audience, and probably no ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... whom we had applied Our shopman's test of age and worth, Was elemental when he died, As he was ancient at his birth: The saddest among kings of earth, Bowed with a galling crown, this man Met rancor with a cryptic ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... Guido looked cryptic. "That is for father Folco to settle," he said. "And father Folco is a man that loves his fellow-men, but would have his children obey him even to the death, like a Roman father ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Cathedral: the Poggio, the so-called Joshua in the south aisle, which has been said to be a portrait of Gianozzo Manetti; and the St. John the Evangelist in the eastern part of the nave. The Poggio certainly belongs to the series: it would be delightful if the cryptic writing on the borders of the garment were to prove it to be the Job. The St. John Evangelist is an earlier work than the Poggio; it was begun when Donatello was twenty-two years old, and, as Lord Balcarres says, "it challenges comparison with one worthy rival, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... his wife's eyes. They were opened very wide. Her mouth had opened a little, too. She understood vaguely that he was using a kind of shorthand really. These cryptic sentences expressed in emotional stenography mere odds and ends that later would drop into their proper places, translated into the sequence of acts that are the scaffolding of a definite story. This she firmly ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Cliffe leads northwards to South Malling; here is a conventicle named "Jireh" erected by J. Jenkyns, W.A. These cryptic initials mean "Welsh ambassador." In the cemetery behind is the tomb of William Huntingdon, the evangelist, whose ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... same limestone plain add something to the mystery that overhangs all the rest. The first, at Lennan in Monaghan, is marked with a curious cryptic design, suggesting a clue, yet yielding none. There is a like script on the cromlech at Castlederg in Tyrone, if indeed the markings were ever the record of some thought to be remembered, and not mere ornament. The chambered cromlech ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... hand," which is supposed to paralyse our military efforts, are divided in opinion as to whether this cryptic member is most actively employed by Lord HALDANE, Sir WILLIAM ROBERTSON or Sir EYRE CROWE, Assistant-Secretary to the Foreign Office. They will probably regard Lord ROBERT CECIL'S statement that some seven years ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... no chance, of course, that Baker would ever be able to talk with Sam again. That one fortuitous encounter would have to do for a lifetime. But Sam's great cryptic statement was slowly beginning to make sense: When you cease to be fearful ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... think there was no one present except the Colonel to appreciate the cryptic humor of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... these orbs were dotted lines and arrow-heads of the oldest form pointing in all directions, while all the intervening spaces were filled up with woven characters half-way in appearance between Runes and Cryptic-Sanskrit. Round the borders these characters ran into a wild maze, a perfect jungle of an alphabet through which none but a wizard could have forced a way in ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... that, at the same rate of loss, the German casualties would amount to 12,250,000, which is almost unthinkable. Its very destructiveness should tend to shorten the duration of this terrible war. As Mr. Asquith said at the opening of Parliament, in a curiously cryptic and significant passage: "The war may last long. I doubt myself if it will last as long as many people originally predicted." God grant that ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 15, Nov. 18, 1914 • Various
... his coat and vest, he turned to the leather bundle that he had placed on a table, untied the thongs, and carefully opened it out to its full length—and again that curious, cryptic smile tinged his lips. Rolled the opposite away from that in which it had been tied up, the leather strip made a wide belt that went on somewhat after the fashion of a life preserver, the thongs being used for shoulder ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the second a style of the softest grace—each manner enlivened the common subject.[1] Yet in two respects elucidation was vitally necessary. Just as in Japan, the lover might express his longings by cryptic references to Nature, the Indian artist employed poetic symbols to charge his subjects with romantic ardour. Flowers were never merely flowers nor clouds clouds. The symbols of Indian poetry—the lotus swaying in a stream, the flowering creeper embracing ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was she mastered by some vaster, profounder superstition, a fetish-worship of which the Alpha and the Omega was the cryptic SAMUEL? ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... a train of thought to Renford, who made the following cryptic observation. "Have ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... after his arrest the French police received additional evidence against him in the form of a cryptic telegram addressed to the Chateau, an infamous and easily deciphered message which, no doubt, had been sent with the distinct purpose of strengthening the amazing charge against him. He protested entire ignorance of the sender and of the meaning of the message, but his ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a thrill in ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... showing relief. "Perhaps, then, it was the way the light fell on your face." He peered closely at his client. Mr. Britt's color was coming back. Orne's cryptic speeches and his haste to collect had warmed the banker's wrath. "It'll be ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... which was his contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... cryptic remark!" said Kingsley laughing, yet a little chagrined. "What you probably wish to convey is that it says one thing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a tavern score of his discoveries behind a door, in cryptic chalk strokes. He does this, says Mr. Walters, because, being Helena, he would betray himself if he wrote in a female hand. But nobody would WRITE secrets on a door! He adds "a moderate stroke," after meeting the hag, though, says Mr. Walters, "Edwin Drood would have learned nothing ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... Hansch takes to indicate Kepler's birthplace. Disdaining to use any but mathematical symbols for so great a mathematician, he writes that he was born on the 21st of December, 1571, in longitude 29 deg. 7', latitude 48 deg. 54'! It may be worth mentioning, that on this cryptic spot stood the little town of Weil in the Duchy of Wuertemberg. His birth was cast at a time when his parents were reduced to great poverty, and he received very little early schooling. He was, however, sent to Tuebingen, and here he pursued the scholastic studies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... It was a cryptic speech. In another it might have signified a spitefulness unthinkable in Sylvia Armytage; therefore it puzzled him very deeply. He stood silent, wondering what precisely she might mean, and thus in silence they continued for a spell. Then slowly she ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... dainty dish to set before a king?" cried Anna, her eyes flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwen for confirmation. He sat down with the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... that is created by and appeals to peculiar faculties, something rare and personal, something not to be had simply by taking thought and pains, something as utterly unlike honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the cryptic mutterings of boozy mountebanks: subject, however, to this assumption, his theories are severely practical. They have to do solely with the art of painting; they are born of his own experience; and he makes visible use ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... can only announce the project as a stimulus to unemployed aspirants, and as a hint to fortunate collectors, to prepare for an exhibition of their cryptic treasures.—On a future occasion I shall describe the plan of construction which seems more eligible—shall briefly notice the scattered materials which it may be expedient to consult, whether in public depositories, or in private hands—and shall make an appeal to ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... considerations we see that the ultimate foundation of every form of matter is spirit, and hence that a universal intelligence subsists throughout Nature inherent in every one of its manifestations. But this cryptic intelligence does not belong to the particular form excepting in the measure in which it is physically fitted for its concentration into self-recognizing individuality: it lies hidden in that primordial substance of ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... not quite understanding the portent of this cryptic saying. He handed the two keys which Dr. Bauerstein ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... I marveled at these cryptic utterances. They shadowed a modern Black Art, of which I had had no conception—a recrudescence in other language of the age-old dualism of good and evil. It was a ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Cryptic words which, suddenly, for Beautrelet, shone bright with clearness! Was this not an exact statement of the reasons that determined Francis I. to create a town on this spot and was not the fate of the Havre-de-Grace linked with the very ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... economies. Among others, there is that absurd eagerness to save the striking of a second match, which occasions so many burned fingers, and such picturesque language. And again, there is the desire to compress a telegraphic message into the minimum sixpennyworth, and so send an ambiguous and cryptic sentence, when sevenpence would have made it as clear as light. We all tend to be stylists in ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... be a mordant. Muenz discusses it (op. cit., vol. 2, p. 14) and concludes that with the addition of mastic, this could be a kind of stop-out varnish. We are not likely to come closer to an answer for this cryptic inscription. ...
— Rembrandt's Etching Technique: An Example • Peter Morse
... romanticist, frank lover of the flesh, lofty idealist, impressionist and judge, philosopher, dramatist, essayist, master of the comic and above all, Poet. Eloquence, finesse, strength and sweetness, the limpid and the cryptic, are his in turn: he puts on when he will, like a defensive armor, a style to frighten all but the elect. And they who persist and discover the secret, swear that it is more than worth the pains. Perhaps the lesson of it all is that a first-class writer, creative and distinctive, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... clerk presently controlled his mirth sufficiently to permit unctuous enunciation of the following cryptic exclamation: ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... gorblimey!" said Hardy, "Ain't that queer?—that's jes' wot I wos a-thinkin' . . . Well, Gawd 'elp Sorjint Slavin now!" With which cryptic utterance he resumed his ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... replied Dr. Bird with a cryptic smile. "My advice to you, Carnes, is to keep away from the local authorities as much as possible. I want to be present when Winston and Trier are questioned and I may possibly wish to ask a few questions ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... colleague in amazement, and was about to ask for some elucidation of this cryptic reply, when he held up his finger ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... useful at times to all animals, is absolutely essential to some; and it is wonderful in what different ways it is attained. In cases of "cryptic resemblance to surroundings" the shape, colouration, or markings are such as to conceal an animal by rendering it difficult to distinguish from its immediate environment. In most cases the effect is PROTECTIVE; but in snakes, spiders, mantids, and other preying animals ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... patriarch of the Gnosis has selected the former." It is possibly showing gratitude for small mercies, because our friend has saved his reason, but is blood-guilty in the matter of common sense. Meanwhile, the widowed Gnosis illuminates its Ichabod in the cryptic quartiers of Paris, Lyons, and ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... cryptic signal she flashed slipped unseen from Maria Angelina's vision. Johnny Byrd was nice, but it was a gay, cheery, everyday sort of niceness, she thought, with none of the quicksilver charm of the young man at the dinner ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... from the carriages and droschkies in the main highway; and the branching Neva-arms are crowded with skiffs and diminutive steamers bound for pleasure-gardens where gypsies sing and Tyrolese yodel and jugglers toss their knives and balls, and private rooms may be had for gambling and other cryptic diversions. Although with shortened days and cool evenings the tide suddenly took a reflux and the Nevskoi became a suggestion of Broadway, (which, of all individual streets, it most nearly resembles,) we found an indescribable charm in the solitude ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... first stages of one of her expeditions into another's territory, Jimmie's first letter arrived. It was mailed at Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement: "There is no girl on the boat. She is a widow, but lots of fun." And it changed the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a determined attack upon its fortresses. And so Gilbert Stevenson, millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious of their approval or disapproval of her remarks. In ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... bear both Hunters of the heart, The Golden Archer and the Scarlet too? Then bitter anomalies annul her choir Of puissant and subtle instincts, rended through By gorgeous dualisms of vain-desire. For Love outrages Art's clear disciplines, And Art lures Love to guilt of cryptic treason: The spirit of imagination pines, Captive in webs of exquisite unreason. Alas for this translated soul of hers, The rose's, that must ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... seemed cryptic to Philip, but when he heard her say it two or three times to different persons, and found that it aroused hearty agreement, he came to the conclusion that it was only obscure to his own intelligence. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... to read at leisure and to examine in detail a play which, when presented upon the boards, sweeps the auditor along in a whirlwind of emotion.... The triumph of nature, with its impulse, its health, its essential sanity and rightness, over the cryptic formulas of convention and Puritanism, marks the meaning of the play.... Yet because it is a great drama, it may mean that to one and quite another thing to another, but meaning this, or meaning that, it must make, inevitably, an indelible impression upon any ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... her gloves. They had been cleaned and the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... forth this cryptic information, Holmes arose, brushed off his trousers, and added that we'd better be getting back to the castle, or the Earl would be sending out a general alarm for us. And that's all I could ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... would not turn away his sinful eyes in shame and pity?). The highly satisfied young man in the very rented-appearing evening clothes (photographed, it is apparent, in the day time). The blank-looking person who for some cryptic reason is enamoured of the studious, literary pose, and appears, in effect like a frontispiece portrait, glancing up from a writing table (an obviously artificial cigar between the fingers of one hand, apparently made of carbon, and, presumably, the property of the photographer). ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... held the big refractor, and it was a matter of only a few seconds and some cryptic instructions from Sykes until the eye-piece showed the image of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... of the following morning Duperre and Rayne were closeted together, while afterwards I drove Duperre into York, where from the telegraph office in the railway station he sent several cryptic messages abroad, of course posing to the telegraph clerk as a passing railway passenger. Rayne never sent important telegrams from the village post-office at Overstow, or even from Thirsk. They were all dispatched from places where, even if inquiry were made, ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... of his tepid-minded, painlessly married tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the empire of the passions would ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... turn. Swiftly he shifted the argument. He, the cleric, considered Jubei of small account. He would prove to him what a fool he was by the interpretation of a mere thirty-one syllables of poetry. This should be the test of intelligence. The Knight's Way (Budo[u]) had its inner and cryptic meaning expressed in verse. So had the Way of the Buddha (Butsudo[u]). Of this latter Jubei knew nothing; and he doubted if he knew anything of the former. At least let him display some sample of his wit. Jubei leaped at ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Beyond the sunlight and the storm, Appears that lightning-laden form, That toothful smile, that cryptic face. ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... It was a cryptic sign in lead pencil, and apparently she had drawn her hand over it to remove it, but had not been altogether successful. Examining it closely, I saw that the sign, as originally scrawled upon the smooth stone, was like two crescents placed back to back, while both above and below rough circles ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... in the large, low drawing-room, singing with Sophia, or dreaming and speculating with her on all sorts of mysteries, were, in their way, equally charmful. He liked to walk slowly up and down, and to talk to her softly of things obscure, cryptic, cabalistic. The plashing rain, the moaning wind, made just the monotonous accompaniment that seemed fitting; and the lovely girl, listening, with needle half-drawn, and sensitive, sensuous face lifted to his own, made a situation in which he knew ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... met Crerar—at lunch in a small eastern club—he impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more interesting ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... do not join the oldest order in the world—the Brotherhood of Man—is because its constitution and by-laws are neither secret nor cryptic. Everybody knows what they are, and everybody knows what they mean. "Love thy neighbour as thyself," "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... and stared before him—his thoughts were on Val. "He's got to look after his mother," he said, "he's got no time for drilling and that, with that father of his." This cryptic saying produced ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... other diversities of methods vulgar and received: as that of resolution or analysis, of constitution or systasis, of concealment or cryptic, &c., which I do allow well of, though I have stood upon those which are least handled and observed. All which I have remembered to this purpose, because I would erect and constitute one general inquiry (which seems to me deficient) ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... mother had roamed at will. Again and again, solemnly, she went over the four lines. They were radiance and light to the world, haunted with phantoms of pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden among those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only grasp it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely confident. She would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy brother, the cruelty of Charley Long, the justness of the bookkeeper's beating, the day-long, month-long, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... sir," cried the lieutenant, "you were sent here in charge of him for some cryptic idea of the captain, and you tell me he's gone? You don't mean to tell me that you've ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like our ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... said to him, 'We'll be in Krugersdorp to-morrow, sorr, and I'll be able to get yiz some claning matherials,' to which his weary master replied, 'I don't care a damn whether I'm clean or whether I'm dirty.' In answer his man made the following cryptic remark: ''Tis no use talking like that, sorr. Lord Roberts says the war is over, and we'll ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... allusions to Mirliton and to the Bishop frequently mystified Madame Novikoff's guests. For he loved to talk in cypher. Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf his brother Eliot's journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquialisms, inexplicable to ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... windows they saw a full company of Siberian Rifles surround the building with fixed bayonets. The general entered the room and sat at his table, they remained standing. Looking at, and through, each one separately, he delivered this cryptic speech: "Gentlemen, I have brought you here to tell you that out on the railway between you and your enemies lie the remains of our brave army! They have little clothes, but plenty of wood, so their fires may prevent their bodies from being frozen, but ten days from now there will ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... not yet recovered from his surprise, followed his aged guide to a distant part of the forest. Then the hermit bade him farewell and left him to ponder on the cryptic saying: "Here thy destiny will ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... behalf of the more cryptic, symbolic, hectic, toxic works of the ultra-modern French school, which have been so brilliantly illuminated by their protagonists that thousands of women in the larger cities recognize a master's voice whenever one of his themes is played ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages. I thought: Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours—the nitrogenic—why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root and runner—but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested. His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow, then on to mine. And as he stood ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... planting of an oasis of life on the barren world had been a gigantic undertaking, but there were numerous indications that the McAllen Tube was only one of the array of improbable devices the association had at its disposal for such tasks. A few cryptic paragraphs expressed the writer's satisfaction with the undetailed methods by which the Base's localized ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... were for Jefferson Creede! Deep and devious as was his knowledge of men in the rough, the ways of a woman in love were as cryptic to him as the poems of Browning. The first day that Miss Kitty rode forth to be a cowboy it was the rodeo boss, indulgent, but aware of the tenderfoot's ability to make trouble, who soberly assigned his fair disciple ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... two camera-cases Coburn was sure that he had the cryptic device that was responsible for the failure of a cold-war raid. He wouldn't have dared drive away from Dillon leaving these devices behind. If they were what he thought, they'd be absolute proof of the truth of his story, and they should furnish clues to the sort of science the Invaders possessed. ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the one ultimate source of human and Divine wisdom. The exalted character of Vedantic philosophy has been as widely recognized among European students as the subtle beauty of many of the Upanishads, in which the cryptic teachings of the Vedas have been developed along different and often conflicting lines of thought to suit the eclecticism of the Hindu mind. But the Arya-Samaj has not been content to assert the ethical perfection of the Vedas. In its zeal to proclaim the immanent ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... performed certain cryptic actions. He unraveled threads from his shirt and put them aside. There would be a vision-lens in the ceiling of his cell, and somebody would certainly notice what he did. He made a light. He put the threads in his mouth, set fire to his mattress, and laid down calmly upon it. ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... for an answer. Then she wired the personal again. Still there was no reply and no hint of reply. Had they captured him? Or was he so closely pursued that he did not dare to reply even in the cryptic manner ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... had been convinced, not only that the mother and daughter were living, but that there had been some recent communication between them and Melrose. Various trifling incidents and cryptic sayings of the old man, not now so much on his guard as formerly, had led Faversham to this conclusion. He realized that he himself had been haunted of late by the constant expectation ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... took good care to light on my head," responded Alcestis; a cryptic remark which so puzzled Old Kennebec that he mused over it ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... but one is generally unwise to stamp on his ruling passion if it takes him along an intellectual road. These cryptic stones are my life. I want to get the secret of them or find at least a little of it. What are these lonely rings? Where are we standing now? In a place of worship, where men prayed to the thunder and the sun and stars? Or a council chamber? ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... homewards, her mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling. She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been the same; she expected nothing else of him, or of fathers generally. She knew that he lived most of his time in the little room looking out on ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... examined to see its exact place upon the clearly-defined line, afterwards noting it in his book in cryptic figures, and then carefully switching off again, ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... to last the cryptic writing and symbolism of that wondrous tomb of that wondrous woman is full of guiding light; and the key of the many mysteries lies in that most wondrous Jewel which she held in her dead hand over the dead heart, which she hoped and believed would beat again ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... AM lost," replied the girl, and Annie, failing to see anything cryptic in the words, laughed gaily at ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... arranged that I should be paid off the next morning. As I was going out of his cabin he added suddenly, in a peculiar wistful tone, that he hoped I would find what I was so anxious to go and look for. A soft, cryptic utterance which seemed to reach deeper than any diamond-hard tool could have done. I do believe he ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... cryptic utterance Damaris, at the time, could—to quote her own phrase—"make no sense!"—Nor could she make sense of it, now, when counting her blessings, she rested, in happy idleness, upon the faded scarlet cushions ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet |
