"Dumbness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the innumerable, gray stones and monstrous rocks which try to speak to us like creatures once eloquent and possessing the knowledge of wondrous changes, and the key to problems that everlastingly distress the human mind, but on which the curse of dumbness has lain ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... classes of bodily infirmities represented as cured at the date of that blessed 'Then.' Blindness and deafness are defects in perception, and stand for incapacities affecting the powers of knowledge. Lameness affects powers of motion, and stands for incapacity of activity. Dumbness prevents speech, and stands for incapacity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... There was a tremendous oppression upon her, such as one feels sometimes in a nightmare dream. She longed to speak out, to clear herself in Maurice's eyes, and yet she could not frame a single intelligible sentence. It was as though she were afflicted with dumbness. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird or any living thing was visible; the midnight sun, by this time muffled in a transparent mist, shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality: an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England, there is always perceptible an under-tone of ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... other nature yours than of a child Whose dumbness finds a voice mighty to call, In wordless pity, to the souls of all, Whose lives I turn to profit, and whose mute And constant friendship links the man ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... sweet! when I do look on thee, In whom all joys so well agree, Sweet, think not I am at ease, For because my chief part singeth; This song from death's sorrow springeth: As to swan in last disease: For no dumbness, nor death, bringeth Stay to true love's melody: Heart and ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... with me upon a silent hill, When the last flush of the dissolving day Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere Unconscious of my listening, uttered there The comprehensions of a soul true poised With elemental beauty, giving tongue Unto the dumbness of the blissful air. So have I seen him, too, within his home, When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze Seemed scanning issues from the money list; But comments came not, till my curious eye Led out ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... nearer to what it was first, than that tale will be after swinish mouths have chewed upon it a day. It is the curse of the old gods upon the heathen. And I fling my curse back at them, for the chains they have hung upon my free hands and the beast-dumbness with which they have ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... trace of George Sarratt; her illness, pneumonia, the result of a slight chill affecting a general physical state depressed by grief and sleeplessness; her long and tedious convalescence; and that pitiful dumbness and inertia from which she had only just begun to emerge. Hester was thinking too of the nurses, the doctors, the lodgings at Torquay, the motor, the endless flowers and books!—all provided, practically, by Farrell, aided and abetted by Bridget's readiness—a ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thy dumbness me deceive, I know before the fitting man all Nature yields, Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice—and thou O sun, As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic, I understand them, I know those flames, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the speaker a hug and a kiss that were warm enough to satisfy the loneliest heart. Before she had released him, Ernest had hold of his hand and was trying to make up by the vigor of his hand shake for the embarrassing dumbness which had ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... sat down, four on the bed; and Milt's inner ear heard a mute snicker from the Gilsons and Saxton. He tried to talk. He couldn't. Bill looked at him and, perceiving the dumbness, ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... grew upon him with every passing moment. How lovely she was! What dear little ways and gestures she had—ways and gestures as artless and unstudied as they were effective. And how strangely little her dumbness seemed to matter after all! She wrote so quickly and easily, her eyes and smile gave such expression to her mobile face, ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... at the dumbness, the paralysis that had fallen upon her. Grace, confidence, the power of movement even, seemed gone from her. A fever of shame ran through her being. Horrible doubts assailed her. She sat down awkwardly and helplessly on one of the little stools by her table and covered ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... to bear this in mind, and again the ride continued in dogged dumbness, until it was ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... and shoulder, the secretary left the room at once. There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness of the night. The great cloud covering half the sky hung right against one, like an enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of violence. As the feet of the two men touched the ground, a rumble came from behind it, preceded by ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... relapsed again into troubled dumbness, and all Newman could do was to fold his arms and wait. But at last she appeared to have set her memories in order. "It was when the late marquis was an old man and his eldest son had been two years married. It was when the time came on for marrying Mademoiselle Claire; that's ...
— The American • Henry James
... party took advantage of his dumbness—which, as she had not unnaturally mistaken him for the butler, she took for a silent and respectful query as to her business and wishes—to open ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... land there was but little wind. There was an inexplicable dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... an avenging Fate. With a sensation of relief, Patty's eyes wandered from the haggard face to a calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a single perfect blossom. While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla lily as if it were her one connection with reality. All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... that room stricken into dumbness by the shock of this sudden calamity. Time passed. The awful news flashed through the house. The servants heard it, and came silent and awe-struck to the room; but when they saw the white face, and the mourner ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... my sake. On flow the centuries without a break. Uprise the mountains, ages without let. The mosses suck the rock's breast, rarely wet. Years more than past, the young earth yet will take. But in the dumbness of the rolling time, No veil of silence will encompass me— Thou wilt not once forget, and let me be: I easier think that thou, as I my rhyme, Wouldst rise, and with a tenderness sublime Unfold a world, that I, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... lay (I never for one moment ceased to be conscious) heavy as stone on a writing-table in some spot quite accidental in my new sense of locality; the tongue that would have spoken of it seemed to slumber in my mouth. And I knew that both dumbness and stillness were proper. Their opposites would have convicted me (the flat and earthly comparison must be allowed) of intrusion into some Place of beauty and serenity for which the soilure ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... him that the trampling roar grew louder every second, drowning into dumbness the crashing and grinding of the ice; and the volleying mist-clouds seemed to race up-stream to meet him. Then, with a sickening jump and turn of his heart, a hope came and shook him out of his stoicism. He saw that his ice-cake was sailing straight ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dumb children. In the same county there are other cases of three, four, and even six in a family, yet there has been no relationship between the parents. In addition to the born deaf, measles, bronchitis, typhus, scarletina, and other diseases are the causes of deafness, and consequently dumbness. ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... and had been conveyed into a dumbness of mystery, that fell upon her turmoil of spirit like a blow. What struck her as especially strange and unnatural was the fact that the men with whom she was sitting in the dim court of this lonely house had not looked at her, did not appear to know that she ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... know: that is what I want to find out. The mission I have for you, Dave, is to watch Mulgrum. In a word, I have my doubts in regard to his deafness and his dumbness." ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... sorrows have ye sung, And tragic stories, chronicled in stone,— Sad Philomel restored her ravish'd tongue, And transform'd Niobe in dumbness shown; Sweet Sappho on her love forever calls, And Hero ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot. She tolerates me, however, on account ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... I make a broken delivery of the business; but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seem'd almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing could not say if the importance ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... a start, and realising what she had done, struggled to explain; but the moment she became herself again, an agony of dumbness came upon her, and she left ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... passion. Whatever in music is measured and designed belongs therefore to Apollo and the Muses; whatever is impulsive and passionate, to Athena; hence her constant strength a voice or cry (as when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously opposed to the dumbness of Demeter. The Apolline lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument producing sound, as its measurer and divider by length or tension of string into given notes; and I believe it is, in a double connection with its office as a measurer of ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... tongue of the break with God has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There is a queer backward movement ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness. As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... other accomplishments, had a faculty for dumbness and said nothing; but a smile which approached a grin formed on his face as he stood eyeing quizzically first one and then the other. Finally, picking up the empty glasses, he left ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the Red Parlour, the Chinese room, the Library. They recalled her childish visits to the house with her grandmother, and a score of recollections, touching or absurd, rushed into her mind—but not to her lips. Dumbness had fallen on her;—nothing seemed worth saying, and she hurried through. She was conscious only of a rich confused impression of old seemliness and mellowed beauty,—steeped in fragrant and famous memories, English history, English poetry, English art, breathing ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a smiling dismissal. Disconcerted, wholly ill at ease, the four went obediently to the library, deserted now that the cotillion was beginning. The two men struggled valiantly with the conversation, but the twins sat stricken to shamed dumbness: no topic could thrive in the face of their mute rigidity. Silences stalked the failing efforts. Mr. White's eyes clung to the clock while his throat dilated with secret yawns; Mr. Morton twisted restlessly and finally let a nervous sigh escape. Dora ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... that rose for him from within. Charlotte herself spoke again at last—"You may want to know what I get by it. But that's my own affair." He really didn't want to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn't; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... universal instinct. It is mockery to the dying. It is an outrage upon the mourners. The Elizabethan masters were far truer to the fact; so is the modern skeptic who shrinks at "the black and horrible grave." Men never speak of delicious blindness, of delicious dumbness, of delicious deafness, of delicious paralysis; and death is all these disasters in one, all these disasters without hope. No, no, the morgue is the last place that lends itself to decoration. Death is the crowning evil, the absolute bankruptcy, the final defeat, the endless exile. Let us ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... themselves together, and his eyes grew hot, bursting. His lips moved as in speaking, though with never a sound. It was the dumbness—the choking dumbness of that emotion which made it so terrible. Such silence could not last—he seemed to feel it could not—and so moved backward out of hearing. There he stood for a little while, leaning against the wall, his hand ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... yokeman, who is fleeing with yielding oars, encurving 'midst whirling waters. If I turn from the beach there is no roof in this tenantless island, no way sheweth a passage, circled by waves of the sea; no way of flight, no hope; all denotes dumbness, desolation, and death. Natheless mine eyes shall not be dimmed in death, nor my senses secede from my spent frame, until I have besought from the gods a meet mulct for my betrayal, and implored the faith of the celestials with my latest breath. Wherefore ye requiters of men's ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... peril. I felt that they suspected me, that they more than half guessed the nature of my errand at Cocheforet, and that they were not minded to be bound by Mademoiselle's orders. In particular, I augured the worst from Clon's appearance. His lean malevolent face and sunken eyes, his very dumbness chilled me. Mercy had ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... to in turn arise and announce what district in the State we represented, and report on its condition. I was embarrassed, but kept my eye on the ceiling or on the floor. I presume my dumbness excused me. The closing hymn was No. 701, on page 417, ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, with the 'slow, wise smile' that breaks over his face like day over the sky, said, 'Hawthorne rides well his ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... a general gathering of types. Nobles mixed with the poorest, meanest and most criminal classes, and mingled with their common sorrow. For the most part a dumbness, a silence prevailed. The shock of the national disaster had bereft the people of ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... a dwarf, but a gallant knight. At that moment his memory came back to him, and he knew he was Conal, one of the Knights of the Red Branch, and he remembered now that the spell of dumbness and deformity had been cast upon him by the Witch of the ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... A sudden dumbness seized Tommy. His head slowly lowered and he did not answer. Around the deck-house from the port-side hurried McTosh, his arm embracing a bundle of papers, his brow beady with the honest toil of speed wrung out of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one of her ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the prism's obstruction shows aright The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jewelled bow from blankest white; So may a glory from defect arise: Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek, Only by Dumbness adequately speak As favored mouth could ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... our friend Tex does not seem to be stricken with dumbness," Endicott smiled as the words of the buffalo skinner's song broke forth anew. "Do you know I have taken a decided ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... with its doctrines, but, like one of those queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is always being driven to personify these ultimate powers; to personify them, or it, as something that takes infernal satisfaction in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging them ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... retired a shade,—the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch." But no such charge can be laid at the door of "Rab and his Friends." The very dumbness of Rab, his mute yearning to help, his brave and loyal ministries in the hospital, doubly affecting because wordless and impotent, lend an appeal to this sketch that few sketches of men and women can ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... scene at Chaillot. I will, moreover, grant that we may draw the following inference,—that even men of genius are liable to cross humours; but I must at the same time add that the example is not dangerous, dumbness not being an efficacious method of making one's self valued, or of distinguishing ourselves ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Then, oh God, may children perish, like beasts, in their mothers' womb. Then lame their Polish feet and their hands, oh God! Let them be crippled and blind their eyes. Smite them with dumbness and ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... despite the general tendency of mountain worshippers to attempt to paint—in colours strong and language divine—the effect on their minds, there are exceptional instances of noble and self-imposed dumbness. Not the dumbness which is practising the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... as soon as choking rage enabled him to speak. "Silence, I say! ere I strike thee into eternal dumbness. What I have said, I've said. Dost hear me? To-morrow, at the Circus, I will name thy husband, and then and there thou shalt accept him, whoever he may be. I have a reason for wishing this—a reason of State far beyond the comprehension of a mere fool. To-morrow thou shalt accept the man of my ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... fell. He had opened his lips, but he stood there and uttered nought. He sounded the well of his courage, and it was dry. He groped in his treasury of words, and it was vacant. A devil of dumbness had him by the throat; the devil of terror babbled in his ears; and suddenly, without a word uttered, with no conscious purpose formed in his will, John whipped about, tumbled over the roadside wall, and began running for his life across ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... becoming acquainted with, and above all, which it was quite unnatural for him to repeat in his present position. He says, "Five friends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidient; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing; who since possesses chambermaids ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Ann Putnam were spoke to by the Court; but neither of them could make any answer, by reason of dumbness or other fits.) ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... searching of the heart. This sincerity the South lacks. Her single talent will always be forensic, because she is a lawyer with a cause to defend. And such is the curse that arises from lynchings and venery and extortions and dehumanizings,—sterility; a dumbness ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... every one uncomfortable, not knowing who might be the next victim stung. True, there was but one person to sting, for Miss Grey never said ill-natured things; but then she said ill-advised and mal-apropos things, and she had such an air of frightened dumbness, such a sad, deprecatory look, that she was sometimes quite as trying as Miss Gascoigne, who spoke out. And oh, how she did speak! Christian, who had never known many women, and had never lived constantly with any, now for the first ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... jectigation of his fingers and other gesticulations as yet customary amongst the speakers of that country, what senators in her descent from the top of the hill she had met with going up thither. For you are to conceive that he, knowing no more of her deafness than dumbness, was ignorant of both. She in the meantime, who neither heard nor understood so much as one word of what he had said, straight imagined, by all that she could apprehend in the lovely gesture of his manual signs, that what he then required ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... be interesting to know how the use of the word "dumb" ever became applied to animals, for in reality there are very few dumb animals. Doubtless the word was originally employed to express a larger idea than that of dumbness, and implied the lack of power in animals to communicate successfully with man by sound or language. The real trouble lies with man, who is unable to understand the language spoken or ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Common minds, always impressed by noisy demonstrations, that is to say, by cries and tears, are unable to understand a mute sorrow. Dumbness to them means indifference. She was therefore astonished at the calmness with which Amelie received the message she was charged to deliver. She did not see in the dimness of the twilight that Amelie's ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the perspective into which we throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH; and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... recognition of danger in the very charm of her attitude, or a twang of digestion, that caused a sudden dumbness to fall on James. He did not remember ever having been quite alone with Irene before. And, as he looked at her, an odd feeling crept over him, as though he had come across something strange ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ours. It runs in our veins. Why should Man—a being who can live forever in a day, who is born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the immeasurable—express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to be—even what we are—who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... George the Third silver candlestick steadily to control any clattering of its extinguisher, he moved on rather like a thief who was also a trained ballerina, holding his breath and pressing his lips together in a supreme agony of dumbness. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... she, and not Nature, was to teach the child his mother tongue. One can readily imagine what would happen. The teacher would probably have a theory that no child should begin to talk till he was two or even two and a half years old; and if so, the child would be kept in a state of enforced dumbness till he reached that age. In any case, he would be strictly forbidden to speak till his teacher gave him formal permission to do so. Half-an-hour in the morning, and half-an-hour in the afternoon would ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... account as much as possible, all things were concluded to their mutual satisfaction, and in about a fortnight's time they set forward for Wales, where Dickory, notwithstanding his dumbness, behaved himself with so much diligence and affability, that he not only gained the love of the family where he lived, but of ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... in the affair, and never for a moment did he dream of making the slightest remonstrance; still, the unwisdom of a young girl wandering about in the woods at night after trapped foxes was a patent fact which disturbed the mind of this guardian unto dumbness. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below—the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the dumbness. ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... back his fist as if to strike me, and I wonder that I did not run from the cabin and jump ashore, but I stood my ground, more from stupor and what we Dutch call dumbness than anything else. Ace let his fist fall and looked me over with more respect. He was a slender boy, hard as a whip-lash, wiry and dark. He was no taller than I, and not so heavy; but he had come to have brass and confidence from ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. And so up the hill, homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, they would have been something ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... joy, of childish excitement came upon Sheila when she had recognized her visitor. She flitted about the room, she laughed, she talked half-wildly—it had been such a long silence—in broken, ejaculatory sentences. It was Dickie's dumbness, as he leaned against the door, looking at her, that sobered her at last. She came close to him again and saw that he was shivering and that streams of water were running from his clothes ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... had spoken to her mother in his name. Annette always avoided Jean of Kerdual, if it was possible to do so, and would never let his shadow fall upon her. She felt that the solemn, world-old stone was in some way hostile to her, and attributed her dumbness to its influence. ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... uttered prior to the infliction of dumbness were words of doubt and unbelief, words in which he had called for a sign as proof of authority of one who came from the presence of the Almighty; the words with which he broke his long silence were words of praise unto God in whom ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... part in the torchlight procession that same evening with the twenty-seven members of her family whom she had brought with her to Lourdes. Then there was a woman afflicted with nervous aphonia, who after months of absolute dumbness had just recovered her voice at the moment when the Blessed Sacrament went by at the head of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... They had done and countenanced things which now seemed impossible even to themselves. How could they have condemned the Reverend George Burroughs on the ground that he had exhibited remarkable physical strength, and that the witnesses against him had pretended dumbness? "Why is the devil so loth to have testimony borne against you?" Judge Stoughton had asked; and Cotton Mather had said "Enough!" But was it enough, indeed? If a witness simply by holding his peace can hang a minister of blameless ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... was no longer an utter dumbness and death over the scene. Forth from the sands, as from the bowels of the reluctant earth, there crept, one by one, loathly and reptile shapes; obscene sounds rang in her ears—now in a hideous mockery, now in a yet more sickening solicitation. Shapes of terror thickened and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... answer. 'Remember the night on the Ridge?' He had a lump in his throat and an ache at his heart from never letting himself remember it. By that strange perversity, which we all know in ourselves, he couldn't talk. The hundred and one things he had wanted to ask, died on his lips in a dumbness of gladness. Of course, you, dear reader, on the return of a husband or wife (prospective or present), on the sudden appearance of friend or kith have never been similarly affected. You didn't forget the questions you had meant to ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... safety at one of the entrances to Cecil Place, he proceeded to the Gull's Nest. His first inquiries were concerning the boy who had contrived to steal a passage on board the Fire-fly from France to England, and who had pretended dumbness. How the youth got on board his vessel, Dalton could not imagine; although, when the discovery was made, his feigning the infirmity we have mentioned succeeded so well, that the Buccaneer absolutely believed he could neither hear nor speak, and sympathised with him accordingly. The indignation ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... mute. The daring anger within her was turned into the rage of dumbness. What reasons for her belief could she give? All the reasons that seemed so strong and living within her—she saw them suffocated and shrivelled up under her husband's breath. There was no proof to give, but her own impression, which would seem to him her own folly. She turned her head ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... narrowed for spying, and overhanging upper stories supported on close-set, projecting sticks of mellow brown which meant great age. Minarets sprang up in mute protest against the infidel, appealing to the sky. All that was left of old Algiers tried to boast, in forced dumbness, of past glories, of every charm the beautiful, fierce city of pirates must have possessed before the French came to push it slowly but with deadly sureness back from the sea. Now, silent and proud in the tragedy of failure, it stood masked behind pretentious French houses, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... but this did not solve the problem; there were twelve other recalcitrants on deck who might not be so easily jujutsued into weakness and dumbness. ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... I asked in a trembling voice, afraid that having delivered herself once, she might lapse into dumbness. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... as to say, That is well, or, I like this. We have often asked, Madam, do you want anything? Is there anything you wish for? Do but ask and command us: but we have never been able to draw a word from her. We cannot tell whether her silence proceeds from pride, sorrow, stupidity, or dumbness; and this is all we ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... man in the black frock-coat passed on. And I came to understand when the purple beggar had spoken, that the dark citizen had trafficked perhaps with Ind, that in his heart were strange and dumb ambitions; that his dumbness was founded by solemn rite on the roots of ancient tradition; that it might be overcome one day by a cheer in the street or by some one singing a song, and that when this shopman spoke there might come clefts in the world and people ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share. It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog, unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying kindness. At such times it was Jenny who left her place at the table and popped a morsel of food into Pa's mouth; but it was Emmy who best understood the bitterness of his soul. It was Emmy, therefore, who would snap at ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton |
