"Distorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... result we drift each hour further from the truth. Modern intellectuality has formed itself into a scornful aristocracy whose members, esteeming themselves the élite, withdraw from the vulgar public, and live in a world of their own, looking (like the Lady of Shalott) into a mirror at distorted images of nature and declaring that ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... she did not come into full possession of her faculties all at once. The conditions of her life had tended rather to retard than to develop the best that was in her, and the wonder was that her vision had not been permanently distorted, so that she could see nothing but evil in all things—see it, too, till her eyes were accustomed and her soul corrupted, so that she not only ceased to resent it, but finally accepted it as the inevitable order to which it ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... horizon. Does refraction account for all this? To this day I cannot without vexation remember the childish astonishment that prevented me from observing the really interesting features of the spectacle and kept my eyes fixed with a foolish distension on a lot of distorted mules, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... dwell on the conduct with which our Lord is dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lips repeat without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny of antagonists reported by Himself. We owe our knowledge of its currency to this saying. Like other words of His enemies, this saying is a distorted refraction of His glory. The facts it embodies are facts; the conclusions it draws are false. If Jesus had not come eating and drinking, He could not have been called gluttonous and a wine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans and sinners to Him in a conspicuous manner and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... smear of paint for the blushes of health: it is not only equally transient, and equally liable to detection; but, as paint leaves the countenance yet more withered and ghastly, the passions burst out with more violence after restraint, the features become more distorted, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... latitudes, where heated air must be used for nearly three-quarters of the year, the neglect of ventilation is fast causing the health and beauty of our women to disappear. The pallid cheek, or the hectic flush, the angular form and distorted spine, the debilitated appearance of a large portion of our females, which to a stranger, would seem to indicate that they were just recovering from a long illness, all these indications of the lamentable absence of physical health, to say nothing of the anxious, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... in the Hebrew records has only reached us in a seemingly condensed and distorted condition. Israel, strengthened by the exploits of Omri, must have offered him a strenuous resistance, but we know nothing of the causes, nor of the opening scenes of the drama. When the curtain is lifted, the preliminary conflict is over, and the Israelites, closely besieged in Samaria, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... ascertain the state of the weather and the aspect of the skies, as well as the condition of the island. There lounged the fearful group on the grass; the fisherman still hung over the water, seemingly intent on his sport; and the distorted countenance of Jennie glared from out the hut in horrible contortions. But the weather had changed; the wind blew fresh from the southward, and though the air was bland, it was filled ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... we were not more than two miles south of the place we had quitted. Our hope of proceeding without much interruption was thus disappointed: the gloominess of the weather, and the constant showers that fell, so impeded our view and distorted its objects, that what appeared plain and practicable at a distance of two or three miles, when approached was found impassable. I think it probable, however, that our most serious obstructions will be the thickness of the timber, rotten trees, and creeping plants; the soil is so rich ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... water and level beach, were brought into startling relief against the background of night, as the burning vessel neared them; then sank into shadow as it passed onward. Overhead, the playing tongues of fire reddened the smoke that hung dense over the water, and made it assume distorted and fantastic shapes, which moved and writhed in the wavering light, and to the Indians seemed spectres of the dead, hovering over the canoe, reaching out their arms to receive the soul ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... not free himself of the ridiculous, distorted and oft-recurring notion that his grandfather was watching him from beyond the grave, nor were all his scientific convictions sufficient to dispel the fear that men live after death and govern the destinies ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... deliberate cruelty to another, and on account of it suffered great mental and emotional distress afterward, it would be no remarkable thing if the mental images of the injuries inflicted on his victim are reproduced in himself. In idiocy we have apparently merely a distorted brain so that the consciousness cannot function through it. Might not that distortion of the physical brain easily be the result of violent reaction from cruelties in a past life? The consciousness that can be guilty of cruelty is seeing things crooked—out of proportion. Otherwise ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... mounted on plinths of the burnished metal, and carved out of a sort of light blue chalcedony, which, joined with their masterly execution, gave them the appearance of life. I was surprised at the strange attitudes which the sculptors had chosen to represent, all more or less distorted, although the human proportions were admirable. Some appeared as if they had been placed on their legs when asleep, others laughing or crying, nay, one or two were represented in the act of vomiting. Amongst the whole I ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere. But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Bertrand her husband's executioner, and he in her the cause of his crime, possibly of his speedy punishment. Bertrand's looks were disordered, his cheeks hollow, his eyes encircled with black rings, his mouth horribly distorted; his arm and forefinger extended towards his accomplice, he seemed to behold a frightful vision rising before him. The same cord he had used when he strangled Andre, he now saw round the queen's neck, so tight that it made its way into her flesh: an invisible force, a Satanic ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... pre-existing illustrations of the sacred narratives. They appear to have been copied, with a devout adherence to colour, costume, and detail, from designs which from time immemorial have represented the same subjects; and emaciated ascetics, distorted devotees, beatified simpletons, and malefactors in torment are depicted with a painful fidelity, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... true that to obey conscience is, in a sense, to do right, to be moral, no matter how distorted conscience may be. Conscientiousness is in itself a virtue. To this point we shall later return. We need only say here that conscientiousness is not enough. Life is not so simple a matter as that. We need judgment, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... fed by violent speeches and by a still more violent vernacular press. All these discontents "Non-co-operation" has set itself to link up to a common purpose by inflaming racial hatred, stirred as never since the Mutiny by the story, bad enough in itself and unscrupulously distorted and exaggerated, of the events in the Punjab which has been for two years the trump card of the Extremists, with an additional appeal to the religious fanaticism of the Mahomedans in the alleged wrong done to their faith by the Turkish peace terms. Consciously and ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the means, the skill, and the instruments of European destruction. Toleration, in that instance, would have been self-murder, and many other examples might be alleged, in which their necessary measures of self-defence have been exaggerated into cruelty, and their most indispensable precautions distorted into persecution. Yet shall we not pretend that they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or entirely free from all the errors of their age. Their zeal might sometimes be too ardent, but it was always sincere. At this day, religious indulgence is one of our clearest duties, because ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... Equally futile was the effort of Manasseh ben Israel to reconcile it with itself. The Baraitha of Rabbi Ishmael that when two texts are discrepant a third text must be found to reconcile them is but a temptation to that distorted dialectic known as Pilpul. The only true "Conciliador" is history, the only real reconciler human nature. An allegorizing rationalism like Rambam's leads nowhere—or rather everywhere. The same method ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... narrative. Our theoretical historians write from some particular and preconceived result; unlike Livy, and De Thou, and Machiavel, who describe events in their natural order, these cluster them together by the fanciful threads of some political or moral theory, by which facts are distorted, displaced, and sometimes altogether omitted! One single original document has sometimes shaken into dust their Palladian edifice of history. At the moment Hume was sending some sheets of his history to press, Murdin's State Papers appeared. And we are highly ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... stood there, a head above the crowd, he seemed unconscious alike of Tignonville and the point that all but pricked his breast. Swart and grim-visaged, his harsh features distorted by the glare which shone upon him, he looked beyond the Huguenot to the sea of tossing arms and raging faces that surged about the saddles of the horsemen. It was to ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... a Boy's Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things. He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angels ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... up Mrs. De Peyster's veil, and closely scanned her features; which, to be just to the officer, were so distorted that they bore little semblance to the Mrs. De Peyster of ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... has demonstrated that they are expressions of one and the same law; and the great difference between the educated and the uneducated man is this—the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an infinite collection of unconnected facts—a broken, distorted, and fragmentary system, which his mind can by no means reduce to order. The educated man, in proportion to his education, sees the number of laws diminished—beholds in the manifold appearances of Nature the expression ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... course he ducked, and the fist flew harmlessly past, pivoting the man who had driven it. Martin hooked with his left, landing on the pivoting man with the weight of his body behind the blow. The man went to the ground sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a mad rush. Martin saw his passion-distorted face and wondered what could be the cause of the fellow's anger. But while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the weight of his body behind the blow. The man went over backward and fell in a crumpled heap. Jimmy and others of the gang were ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the breast of O Sana San. Running back to the field, she gathered a handful of wild flowers and returned to the soldier. The tears no longer fell, but his lips quivered and his face was distorted with pain. She looked about her in dismay. The coolies were down by the river, drinking from their hands and calling to one another; the only person to whom she could appeal was the foreigner with the red cross ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... girl, one black, one brown. They lay in the street about as numerous as gunners who fall round their carriage, at intervals of five to ten feet, the majority—as was the case also in Norway, and on the ships—in poses of distraction, with spread arms, or wildly distorted limbs, like men who, the instant before death, called upon the rocks and hills ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the door, and my parched lips syllabled the name of Alice. He read the question I would have asked, in my agonized and distorted countenance. "She lives," he said, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of his cause, and the providence of the omnipotent Protector, he was ready to defy all the arts, and theories, and malice of man. His weapon was truth. For truth he fought, and for truth he was ready to die. The sophistries of the schools he despised; they had distorted and mystified the truth. And he knew them well, for he had been trained in the severest dialectics of his time, and, though he despised them, he knew how to use them. The simple word of God, directed to the reason and conscience of men, seemed alone ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained.' Mark that, Watson. Now, then, listen to this. 'They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they that all the efforts of the British official have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ground, was now entirely deserted. Night had thrown its pall over the horrors of this Calvary of Prussian glory: the howling storm alone sang a requiem to the unfortunate soldiers, who, with open wounds and features distorted with pain, lay in endless rows on ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... Popinot, rousing himself from the sensation which the terrible word produced upon him, rushed down the staircase and into the street, but Birotteau was out of sight. Cesarine's lover heard that dreadful charge ringing in his ears, and saw the distorted face of the poor distracted Cesar constantly before him; Popinot was to live henceforth, like Hamlet, with a spectre ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs. Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of unimaginable regret and foreboding! It cuts the night. It cuts its way into his heart. He feels his senses failing him, yet he must glance once more at the window and see with his last conscious look—But what is this! a change has taken place in the picture and he beholds, not the distorted form of his father sinking back in shame and terror before this visible image of his secret sin, but that of another weak, old man falling to the floor behind his back! Abram! the attentive, seemingly harmless, guardian of the household! Abram! who had never spoken a word or given a ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... ancients, as it proved by many comic masks having in the place of the mouth a circular opening of considerable width, through which the mouth and the adjoining features were allowed to appear; and which, with their distorted movements, must have produced a highly ludicrous effect, from the contrast in the fixed distortion of the rest of the countenance.] and notwithstanding the smallness of the theatre, I did not find that they ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... to make us atrabiliar! Here we see words in their weaknesses and their meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rushed a girl with a fear-distorted face holding in her arms a baby that to my eyes looked as if it ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... help but compose under a kind of imaginative wizardry of exultation, even when the immediate subject is grim or grotesque. In many of these brief, tense poems the reader confronts a mask, as it were, with appalling and distorted lineaments; but behind it the poet smiles, perhaps sardonically, but smiles nevertheless. In the real countenance there are no tears or grievances, but a quizzical, humorous expression which shows, when one ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... state of inaction by the dead calm which prevailed. The sea resembled a sheet of clear glass. Not a cloud broke the softness of the sky, in which the sun glowed hotter and hotter as it rose towards the zenith. The sails of the schooner hung idly from the yards; her reflected image was distorted, but scarcely broken, by the long, gentle swell; her crew, with the exception of the watch, were asleep either on deck or down below; and so deep was the universal silence, that, as the vessel rose and fell with a slow, quiet motion, the pattering of ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... welfare of the country, by Senators who desired to force amendments upon me against my better judgment and compel me to decide the question whether I will take any bill at all or a bill which had been distorted by their views and objects. Sir, the Senate 'lags superfluous on the stage' today with the American people, because in an age of progress, advance, and aggressive reform, we sit here day after day and week after week, while copies of the census ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... join his regiment in France. In writing an account of other people's lives it is difficult to know what to put in and what to leave out. If you bring in your own predilections or prejudices or speculations concerning them, you must convey a distorted impression. You lie about them unconsciously. A fact is a fact, and, if it is important, ought to be recorded. But when you are not sure whether it is a fact or not, what are ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... the mesmeric ether is dependent upon no such necessity. Density and tenacity, opacity and transparency, homogeneous or heterogeneous bodies, are all equally penetrable. And what is more strange, the mesmeric ether conveys correct, and not distorted impressions. The same perception of form which is conveyed through air, is convoyed through the cover of a book, through the bones of the skull, or the muscles of the stomach. And, still more extraordinary, this impression is identical as to the mental idea it conveys ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... contains as much of interest, and as good an example of manly virtues, as will be found in the life of many a hero more renowned; and, on the other, that his story has been so partially known, and so distorted, it becomes indeed the duty of a gentleman, when that gentleman was his nearest friend, to put forth that story truly, and so give the lie for ever to the detractors of a brave ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... a deafening cataract of applause. The faces, that had grown fiercer and fiercer with approval as his tirade grew more and more uncompromising, were now distorted with grins of anticipation or cloven with delighted cries. At the moment when he announced himself as ready to stand for the post of Thursday, a roar of excitement and assent broke forth, and became uncontrollable, and at the same ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... portrait of Rochefort; Rochefort is the favoured one of this lady, it seems. Were I he, I should persuade her to dress a little more decently. Three black men, in brigands' hats, their limbs dragging, and their faces distorted, approach the bed, singing like the robbers in Fra Diavolo: "Ad.... vance ... ad ... vance ... with ... pru ... dence ...!" The first, Monsieur Thiers, carries a heavy club and a dark lantern; Jules Favre, the second, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... a day when Mohammed, drunk with hashish, saw Hakem, Mr. Feathercock's valet, returning from market with a large bunch of fresh greens. He rose majestically, though with features distorted by the drug, and followed the boy ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... and, aping the Government of the day, and catering to the national taste and vanity, it was a kind of tawdry caricature of the sublime; of which the pictures of David and Girodet, and almost the entire collection now at the Luxembourg Palace, will give pretty fair examples. Swollen, distorted, unnatural, the painting was something like the politics of those days; with force in it, nevertheless, and something of grandeur, that will exist in spite of taste, and is born of energetic will. A man, disposed to write ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her, half-way. She was coming along in the dull glow of the dying fire, the pickaxe over her shoulder. She looked different to him; perhaps his eyes were distorted, perhaps the fire-glow making leaping shadows caused the difference; but she walked heavily, wearily, without the thrilling, young spring of swift movements that made her such an exhilaration to him. He wanted to run across the clearing, lift ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... a great gap in my life, and the outer things began to call on me. My ideas respecting them were dim and distorted enough, as I afterwards found, but their call was all the more insistent for that. Lying flat on Tintageu, chin on fist, I would watch the white-sailed ships pushing eagerly to that wonderful outer world ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... that the priest was bringing God down into a wafer! They had really heard God speaking to them through the sacrament; and this never could have done them harm. But when they tried to express what they felt, they exaggerated and distorted the simple symbol of the Infinite Presence, identified it with the spiritual reality, and set up a Christian idol, a civilized fetish, which has done incalculable harm to men. The spiritual truth became an intellectual lie, and in every ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... cry of pain broke from Nell's lips, and wildly she tore away the gripping fingers. Her face was distorted with pain, and her right hand pressed ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... they leap within the human circle. Their painted faces are distorted with the effort of their wild exertions; their befeathered heads are rendered still more hideous by the lurid blending of conflicting lights. Thirty creatures, hardly recognizable as human beings, dance to the accompaniment of a strange ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... very easy throughout all these questionings to see how eager Cauchon and the other judges were to find some acknowledgment from the lips of Joan of Arc, upon which they could found a charge of heresy against her. Her visions were distorted by them into a proof of infernal agency; even the harmless superstitions of her village home did not escape being turned into idolatrous and infernal ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... detective studied his countenance. It was a good one, but just now so distorted by suffering that only such as were familiar with his every look could read his character from his present expression. Would a more direct question rouse him? Possibly. At all events, Mr. Gryce decided to ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Death aroused me from my stupor. I got him to a dry spot and found some dry leaves and branches with which I started a fire. Jerome was beyond recognising me. He lay by the fire, drawing long, wheezing breaths, and his face was horribly distorted, like that of a man in a violent fit. He babbled incessantly to himself and occasionally stared at me and broke out into shrill, dreadful laughter, ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... tales, translations of part of the "Odyssey," essays (by the Gentleman who left his Lodgings), and then to memoirs and histories again. Mr. Croker said of his "Don Carlos": "It is not easy to find any poetry, or even oratory, of the present day delivered with such cold and heavy diction, such distorted tropes and disjointed limbs of similes worn ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... it was a timid little something by way of compensation. Nina forgot for the moment that within the next few days an unlucky sword-thrust might suddenly determine Lionel's interest in lemonade, as in all other earthly things; these trivial matters grew large in this distorted land of waking dreams; nay, she began to think that if she were to leave England altogether, and go away back to Naples, and perhaps accept an engagement in opera at Malta, then matters would be as before at the New Theatre; ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated in my mind. Part of his black hair had been shorn away, and one eye was nearly closed; pain so distorted, and the cruel sabre-cut so marred that portion of his face, that, when I saw it, I felt as if a fine medal had been suddenly reversed, showing me a far more striking type of human suffering and wrong than ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... first proved that the other part of its life is spent on the leaves of certain Rosace, and his discovery has been repeatedly confirmed. I have myself observed the following confirmation of this. The stems of the junipers so common in the neighborhood of Silverdale (near Morecambe Bay) used to be distorted with Gymnosporangium, and covered with the teleutospores of this fungus every spring: in July all the hawthorn hedges in the neighborhood had their leaves covered with the cidium form (formerly called Roestelia), ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... which were gigantic busts made of wicker-work, curiously covered with small feathers. Their eyes were made of large pearl oysters, with a black nut fixed in the centre of each; double rows of dogs' teeth ornamented their mouths, and their features were strangely distorted. The King and his friends were hospitably received. Presents were made, and expressions of good-will ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... celebration is always October 31st, the crucial moment 12 o'clock. To be sure, the original observance of All Hallows Eve has been considerably distorted during the course of years but the fun it affords the young folks in its present manner of keeping cannot be gainsaid and needs no changing. Halloween is the night when a magic spell enthrals the earth. Witches, bogies, brownies ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... clenched, his small, distorted eyes twinkling viciously through the apertures of the wind-mask, his harsh, black eyebrows lowering under the narrow, contracted forehead, drove the expedition to its work relentlessly. Not Muck Tu, the ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... external completeness was first given to them by their embodiment in some permanent record. One set of usages has occasionally been violently overthrown and superseded by another; here and there a primitive code, pretending to a supernatural origin, has been greatly extended, and distorted into the most surprising forms, by the perversity of sacerdotal commentators; but, except in a small section of the world, there has been nothing like the gradual amelioration of a legal system. There has been material civilisation, but, instead of the civilisation expanding ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... the only parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if libels they were. It is at least certain that, from ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... and worse. Go to your room, and don't make your appearance again until you can come with a face more composed, and features not all swollen and distorted ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... last time, happily ignorant of the martyr's crown it had escaped. Calvert had the news from Madame de Montmorin when he went to pay his respects to her on the evening of the 3d of June, and in imagination he saw, over and over again, the lovely face of the Queen distorted with unavailing grief. ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... education shall follow in the steps that must have been taken by the ideas themselves in the course of their formation. But whenever any of these steps are skipped or left out, the instruction is defective, and the ideas obtained are false; and finally, a distorted view of the world arises, peculiar to the individual himself—a view such as almost everyone entertains for some time, and most men for as long as they live. No one can look into his own mind without seeing that it was only after reaching a very mature age, and in some cases when he ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the step and drew up the rags that hung upon the limb. Above the distorted shoe, caked with the dust of a hundred leagues, they saw the link and the iron band. The clothes of the tramp were wreaked to piebald tatters by sun and rain and wear. A mat of brown, tangled hair and beard ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... catacombs are purely classical. If the early Christians felt anything new they could not express it. But before the second century was out Coptic craftsmen had begun to weave into dead Roman designs something vital. The academic patterns are queerly distorted and flattened out into forms of a certain significance, as we can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile room at South Kensington. Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles are more like works of art than anything that had been produced in the Roman Empire for more ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... fact of her life distorted, perverted, reversed. As a child she had loved the fairies, she had spoken a pitying word for them when they were banished from their home, she had played under their tree and around their fountain—hence she was a comrade ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Purpose.—This Epistle grew out of a desire on the part of Paul to see Rome (Acts 19:21; Rom. 1:11; 15:24-28). As this would be his first visit it was no more than a courteous act that he should write to the church of this intention. Again as the Christians in Rome might have heard false and distorted reports of the gospel which he preached, Paul takes care to clearly and logically set forth the principles and doctrines which he was teaching. This letter then becomes very important as the summing up of the experience and teaching of many years of service in ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... fewer, and losing nothing of force or precision by that choice. He had what was not less than a passion for brevity. "What," he was asked, "makes a journalist?" and he replied: "A nose for news." But with him the news had to be sifted, verified, and reduced to an essence, not inflated, distorted and garnished with all the verbal spoils of the reporter's last ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... pain, by the generosity of their mind. And as for death, if it will be for their glory, they esteem it better than living always; and indeed our war with the Romans gave abundant evidence what great souls they had in their trials, wherein, although they were tortured and distorted, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through all kinds of instruments of torment, that they might be forced either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, yet could they not be made to ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... rode down a rough track into open country he rocked in the saddle and would have fallen but for the high peak and big stirrups. The hillside was blurred; distorted objects that he thought were rocks and cactus lurched about in the elusive moonlight, and the sweat ran down his face as he fought against the drug. He knew it would conquer him, but he was going on as long ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not that they are bold, by any means—too novel, too startling or too dangerous in their consequences, but that in their attainment too many premises have been distorted, and too many analogical inferences left altogether out of sight. I mean to say that the intention of the Deity as regards sexual differences—an intention which can be distinctly comprehended only by throwing the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... cruel laugh, Maverick withdrew, and a few moments later was shuffling along in the direction of the mines intent upon the work of destruction assigned to him, his face distorted with mingled fear and rage, his usually dull eyes gleaming with the fires ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... words and watching her beautiful face distorted out of all loveliness, secretly congratulated himself upon the fact that he was not her prospective bridegroom. He wondered how Sir Frank, who was a mild, good-tempered man himself, could dare to make such ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Internally all is conducted otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... each other steadily. A withering smile of scorn and bitterness distorted his Apollo-like features, and he pushed her from him, saying, in the deep, concentrated tone ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... improper to annex here Mrs. Piozzi's account of this transaction, in her own words, as a specimen of the extreme inaccuracy with which all her anecdotes of Dr. Johnson are related, or rather discoloured and distorted:—'I have forgotten the year, but it could scarcely, I think, be later than 1765 or 1766 that he was called abruptly from our house after dinner, and returning in about three hours, said he had been with an enraged authour, whose landlady pressed him for payment within doors, while ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... an Apostle would probably have deemed it hopeless to attempt to persuade his disciples, immediately and directly, of the sin of war, is to be found in the fact of their feeble and distorted perception of truth and duty. We, whose advantage it is to have lived all our days in the light of the gospel, and whose ancestors, from time immemorial, had the like precious advantage, can hardly conceive how very feeble and distorted ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... held in the meshes of a horrid nightmare, and he gazed as through a mist of impossibility into the lineaments of the well-known, sober face now transformed as from within into the aspect of a devil. That face, now ashy white, was distorted into a diabolical grin. The teeth glistened in the lamplight. The brows, twisted into a tense and convulsed frown, were drawn down into black shadows, through which the eyes burned a baleful green like the eyes of a wild animal driven to bay. Again he spoke in ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... around me, distorted unnaturally, in a life and death struggle, with bloodshot eyes, with foaming, gnashing mouths. They attack and kill one another and try to mangle each other. I leap to my feet. I race out into the night ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... beetles, and ants, and monsters like to nothing in heaven or earth, or under the earth. Take one specimen of all. There is "the lord of the world," Juggernath. "When you think of the monster block of the idol, with its frightfully grim and distorted visage, so justly styled the Moloch of the East, sitting enthroned amid thousands of massive sculptures, the representative emblems of that cruelty and vice which constitute the very essence of his worship; when ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Number Seven and his whims. If you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder at ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he grasped his bow, and the tremendous length to which he drew it; and, climax of all, his sudden manner of placing both bow and instrument under his arm, while he threw his hands behind him, elevated his head, his features almost distorted with a smile of ecstasy, and his very hair instinct with life, at the conclusion of an unparalleled fantasia! And there he stood, immovable and triumphant, while the theatre rang again with peals on peals of applause, and shouts of the wildest enthusiasm! ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... assures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted feet to a man. It is even improper to speak of a woman's foot, and in decent pictures this part is always concealed under ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... stranger to the extreme delights of courage—for courage is a delight to the very soul after it takes possession. The trouble is, you've been thinking too much; you've been picturing foreign things in a foreign land, and your vision is distorted. Go to it, lad, and you'll be the same game rooster your daddy was ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... culture passed on to the north—known as Assyria—became the Babylonian Assyrian syllabary,[32] was enlarged and modified in the course of time, the Semitic equivalents for many of the signs being distorted or abbreviated to form the basis of new "phonetic" values that were thus of "Semitic" origin; but, on the whole, the "non-Semitic" character of the signs used as syllables in the phonetic method of writing Semitic words was preserved; and, furthermore, down to the latest days of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... friend's instinct was to hold off from this till she should see what the ground would bear; she would take no step nearer unless INTELLIGIBLY to meet her, and, awkward though it might be to hover there only pale and distorted, with mere imbecilities of vagueness, there was a quality of bald help in the fact of not as yet guessing what such an ominous start could lead to. She caught, however, after a second's thought, at the Princess's allusion ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... adonis, and a cloak of black cloth, with a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant: his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and distorted with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes, and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which, in all probability, he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! he bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... chuckled young Somers, his face distorted with glee. "Some one catch me! I'm choking! Great Scott, what wouldn't I have given to see that? Hal, the quiet, the dignified? Oh, dear! Oh, dear. Hal pounces on the fellow, to arrest him, and Hal is the one who gets pinched Woo-oo! I can see Hal's face right now I'll wager an ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... drawn out at evening into the main street of the town, that was uncreated and ugly, and yet surcharged with this same potent atmosphere of intense, dark callousness. There were always miners about. They moved with their strange, distorted dignity, a certain beauty, and unnatural stillness in their bearing, a look of abstraction and half resignation in their pale, often gaunt faces. They belonged to another world, they had a strange glamour, their voices were full of an intolerable deep resonance, like a machine's burring, a music ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... from shop signs, such as that of the Golden Fleece, which, though serving the same purpose of aiding or enlightening the unlearned, were more pictorial in character. Dr. Barrington, in his "Lectures on Heraldry," defines merchants' marks as "various fanciful forms, distorted representations of initials of names," which, he says, were "placed upon articles of merchandise, because armorial ensigns could not have ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... two and two together concerning them again and again until I'm uncertain whether I've got the proper answer or have got everything distorted by long brooding over them. I want to know what the conclusion would be to a mind ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and ablest Shint[o]ist to deduce or construct a system of theology, or of ethics, or of anthropology from the mass of tradition so full of gaps and discord as that found in the Kojiki, and none has done it. Nor do the inaccurate, distorted, and often almost wholly factitious translations, so-called, of French and other writers, who make versions which hit the taste of their occidental readers far better than they express the truth, yield the desired information. Like the end strands of a new ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Military Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America, 2 vols. (1818). It is irritating reading for an American because of an enmity so bitter that facts are willfully distorted and glaring inaccuracies are accepted as truth. As a naval historian James undertook to explain away the American victories in single-ship actions, a difficult task in which he acquitted himself with poor grace. Theodore Roosevelt is at his best when he chastises ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... within me that wishes to follow them, does indeed follow over a great space and leaves my body behind. As I hang far over the rail of the bridge I see my face in the water and become absorbed in its distorted reflections. I amuse myself exaggerating them by various grimaces, swelling out and drawing in my fat cheeks. I dare the image to battle with my little fists; it accepts the challenge and returns blow ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... distorted truth, or rather very often originates from a different standpoint being taken of the same thing. Thus a man may say that another man is a good fellow but borrows money too often; another may say of the same man he is a good fellow but talks too much; a third that he is a good fellow but would ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... little connection with the use of the wings or tail, as the lengthened hair on a dog with the amount of exercise which the breed has habitually taken. The feet of pigeons, except in the long-beaked races, are reduced in size. With fowls the crest of the sternum is less prominent, and is often distorted or monstrous; the wing-bones have become lighter relatively to the leg-bones, and are apparently a little shorter in comparison with those of the parent-form, the Gallus bankiva. With ducks, the crest of the sternum is affected in the same manner as in the foregoing cases: ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... With a distorted face, he stared into the water, saw the reflection of his face and spit at it. In deep tiredness, he took his arm away from the trunk of the tree and turned a bit, in order to let himself fall straight down, in order to finally drown. With his eyes ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... eaters of food from the salt water. Many of the young men and women were handsome in feature below the forehead, having fine eyes, aquiline noses and good mouths, but, in conformity with a long-standing custom, all had flat heads, which gave them a distorted and hideous appearance, particularly some of the women, who went to the extreme of fashion and flattened the head to the rear in a sharp horizontal ridge by confining it between two boards, one running back from the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... silent. To Min's face had returned something of its girlhood's innocence. The hard, unlovely lines were all smoothed out. The little cripple crept timidly up to Telford, with the silky head of the dog pressed against his cheek. Telford gathered the distorted little body to his side and looked earnestly into the small face—Min's face, purified and spiritualized. He would have it near him always. He bent and reverently kissed the cold face, the closed eyelids and the blood-stained brow of the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in an unpropitious hour; other things were occupying the public; the world was not at leisure to heed him, and the book did not penetrate into the great circle of readers. But a savage critic has seized on it, and mangled, distorted, deformed it, confounding together defect and beauty in one mocking ridicule; and the beauties have not yet found an exponent, nor the defects a defender; and the publisher shakes his head, points to groaning shelves, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too, with their art; it is not, like that of our modern romanticists, an impotent yearning for vaguely-imagined millenniums. On the contrary, it is an ideal interpretation of their own activity, a mirror focussing into feature and form the very same fact which they saw distorted and blurred in the troubled stream of time. The Good, in the Greek world, was simply the essence and soul of the Real; and the Socrates of Xenophon who frankly identified justice with the laws, was only expressing, and hardly ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Only Thersites, with unmeasur'd words, Of which he had good store, to rate the chiefs, Not over-seemly, but wherewith he thought To move the crowd to laughter, brawl'd aloud. The ugliest man was he who came to Troy: With squinting eyes, and one distorted foot, His shoulders round, and buried in his breast His narrow head, with scanty growth of hair. Against Achilles and Ulysses most His hate was turn'd; on them his venom pour'd; Anon, at Agamemnon's self he launch'd His loud-tongued ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... into the garden, and there in one of the more secluded walks he caught sight of Valeria. She was sitting on a seat, her head drooping on to her bosom and her hands folded upon her knees; while behind her, peeping out of the dark green of a cypress, a marble satyr, with a distorted malignant grin on his face, was putting his pouting lips to a Pan's pipe. Valeria was visibly relieved at her husband's appearance, and to his agitated questions she replied that she had a slight headache, but that it was of no consequence, and she was ready ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... abscess seems to swell, such is only the natural progress of cure, and should not be regarded as increase of the trouble. Where the swelling shews undoubted signs of diseased matter below the surface, it may be opened as above directed. We know of limbs that have been long distorted, and under rubbing and fomenting they are becoming gradually all they ought to be. No one need fear that by such treatment they will grow worse. See Armpit Swelling; Bone, Diseased; Knee; Limbs, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... reader will find the sequence of events which have inevitably led up to this crisis: an account of transactions hitherto obscured and distorted by every species of misrepresentation and every known ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... caverns of Hayti have been visited and described by Decourtilz, Voyage d'un Naturaliste. Some of them contain carvings representing serpents, frogs, deformed human figures in distorted postures, etc.] ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... forbid them to read the Bible, the great classics of literature, and the daily papers—to keep them from the theatre, and from the study of nature—in fact to bring them up in a world which does not exist. For in all the ways I have suggested do boys and girls now collect garbled, half-true, and distorted notions about sexual life. And even if it were possible to carry out the policy it would still not be desirable. Marriage is not the simple and easy thing which the policy would imply. Mother Nature does not teach young couples all that they need to know. Often ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... substances puts them in a condition of strain which causes them to exert a pressure (called elastic force) that tends to restore them to their former condition. Energy stored by this means becomes active as the distorted or compressed substance returns to its former ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... the Countess. Evan was skinned alive. Fly, wretched young man! Summon your pride, and fly! Fly, noble youth, for whom storms specially travel to tell you that your mistress makes faces in the looking-glass! Fly where human lips and noses are not scornfully distorted, and get thee a new skin, and grow and attain to thy natural height in a more genial sphere! You, ladies and gentlemen, who may have had a matter to conceal, and find that it is oozing out: you, whose skeleton is seen stalking beside you, you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... likely to get at the truth; I, who am in England and can see and hear all their motives for acting as they have done; or mama, who gets her information from the Federal papers, second-hand, with numerous additions and improvements made to answer party purposes, distorted and misrepresented? ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... spectacle like this communicated to my unpractised senses. I was nearly as panic-struck and powerless as Welbeck himself. I gazed, without power of speech, at one time, at Welbeck; then I fixed terrified eyes on the distorted features of the dead. At length, Welbeck, recovering from his reverie, looked up, as if to see who it was that had entered. No surprise, no alarm, was betrayed by him on seeing me. He manifested no desire or intention ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... which is comprehended by all, and as we declare our enmity to the distorted picture-books, books of amusement, and to the mischievous character of "Compendiums," so we must also oppose the popular publications which style themselves Science made Easy, &c., in order to attract more purchasers by this alluring title. Kant in his Logic calls the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... "how distorted we all are by civilisation! I fell in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with, we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... gives a distorted or incomplete picture of life. In Volpone everything is subsidiary to the humor of avarice, which receives unnatural emphasis. In The Alchemist there is little to relieve the picture of credibility and hypocrisy, while The ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... fell, for the face of his friend was distorted beyond recognition. The words his lips had framed to speak died upon his tongue, as with a furious heave Gard shook him off, entered the cab and slammed the door. Denning stood for a moment surprised into inaction, then, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... on her wrists till she sobbed with pain, and bent his dark face, distorted with demoniac rage, close to ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... immediately resumed. Each patient who caught sight of the bright light that streamed in through the open doors, was busy with many eager questions on his perturbed mind. Yet no one spoke a word but watched in suspense that was almost pain, the fiery glow that spread around, until horror distorted many ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... effect produced by this last defect is a convergence of perpendiculars, as for instance; two towers of any building, would be represented as leaning towards each other; and in a portrait the features would seem contracted, distorted and mingled together, so as to throw the picture out of drawing and make it look more like a caricature than a likeness. If the lens be not achromatic, a chromatic aberration takes place, which produces an indistinct, ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... don't pretend to agree with his views, but as regards us, he's about right. I was never able to see ourselves as some others see us until we came here. And I have come to the conclusion that our views of life are about as distorted as the cracked reflection of myself in the mirror yonder. We have unconsciously lived a life antagonistic to nature and consequently find ourselves ridiculous in our simplest endeavors to be natural. Of course," she added, "they would appear the same if ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... turn, she was now looking at him, and was struck by the extraordinary change which had come over him since the day when he had first appeared to her, so sombre in his long cassock, with his face emaciated, livid, almost distorted by anguish. It was like a resurrection, for now his countenance was bright, his lofty brow had all the serenity of hope, while his eyes and lips once more showed some of the confident tenderness which sprang from his everlasting thirst for love, self-bestowal and life. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the Muse, when eagerly bent on adornment, Follow'd a swift-running streamlet, the quietest nook by it seeking. Quickly and noisily flowing, the changeful surface distorted Ever her moving form; the goddess departed in anger. Yet the stream call'd mockingly after her, saying: "What, truly! Wilt thou not view, then, the truth, in my mirror so clearly depicted?" But she already was far away, on the brink of the ocean, In her figure rejoicing, and ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... sound died away in the wide echoless spaces. Then cautiously, slowly, she made Sunbeam feel his way across the snow. The moon was still riding among heavy clouds, but now and then it shone forth and flooded with light the broad white field, casting a sharp-cut, distorted shadow of horse and rider upon ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... there before them. Paul, despite his promise of secrecy, had not been able to refrain from confiding to one or two bosom friends, in strict confidence, his version of the fracas on the tow-path. Of course the story became frightfully distorted in its progress from mouth to mouth, but it flew like wildfire through Saint Dominic's ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... here as everywhere, that one may go too far; and it is entirely conceivable that both soloist and conductor might go to such extremes in their display of emotion that the music would be entirely distorted, losing what is after all its main raison d'etre, viz., the element of beauty. But there seems at present to be no especial danger that such an event will occur; the tendency seems rather to be toward overemphasizing intellectualism in music, and toward turning our art into a science.[10] ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... brings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do not expect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautiful and dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You will see this some time. You have begun to see it now. You realize that this man was in no way what you thought him. You had idealized him, had almost crowned him. Now you can't help trying to invest Mr. Whitehouse with the same unnamable, invisible ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... varieties of pecans and in nearly all those crosses there was to me quite an evident difference in the nuts. For instance those gathered off certain parts of a pecan tree of certain varieties, Schley or Curtis or Frotscher, would be typical nuts, but those hybrids or crosses that I produced were distorted, more or less misshapen and seemed to have peculiarities; so that when we came to look over the colony we were in doubt whether they were hand pollinated hybrids or had been pollinated before we got the blossoms covered. Many of them evidenced a great number of distortions, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association |
