"Formless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meant nothing to Florrie, nothing to Galloway, and a very great deal to Virginia Page. For it was essentially protective; it served to emphasize in her own mind a fear which until now had been a mere formless mist, a fear for her frivolous little friend. Galloway's whole being was so expressive of conscious power, Florrie's of vacillating impulsiveness, that it required no considerable burden laid upon the imagination ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... title whatever. It alone can be styled "this" or "that" (tode or touto); they rise no higher than "of such kind" or "of what kind or quality" (toiouton or opoionoun ti).[593] It is not earth, or air, or fire, or water, but "an invisible species and formless universal receiver, which, in the most obscure way, receives the immanence of the intelligible."[594] And in relation to the other two principles (i.e., ideas and objects of sense), "it is the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... slept. I had gone thus but a few yards, my gaze now on the difficult path before me, now upon the sea, when, chancing to look towards the bluff I have mentioned, I stopped to stare amazed, for in this little distance, this formless headland, seen from this angle, had suddenly taken a new shape and there before me, plain and manifest, was the rough semblance of a lion's head; and I knew that betwixt it and the high cliff whereon I stood must be Adam's excellent secure haven. This sudden discovery filled me with such an ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... formless half seen thing, hardly to be distinguished in color from the vegetation, was no water-cat. There was a thin, ragged cry. Then the creature ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... without any attention to the selection, is so great a literary evil, that it has excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... fitful beauty, Every moment fraught with change, Every break and mystic chasm Opening up a Heaven-range: Now the eastern peaks are kindling Glow as though the Morning's heart Throbbed against them, while the formless Clouds to phantom ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sound, and looking for it, saw in the opposite direction a formless object, as much darker than the gray of the void as the flame was brighter, and it too was growing larger, and coming. And it seemed to him that this light and darkness were the good and evil of his life, and he watched, to see which would reach him first, but felt no ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... mountains" [Liszt's Mountain Symphony] to the impressive understanding of the ears in the valley (if not indeed under the water and worse still), strengthens me in my higher endeavors,—and you, dear friend, will have to bear some of the responsibility if I go on writing more such "confused," "formless," and, for the every-day critic, quite ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... of wanderings, And this poor bosom's weight. What pang is here, Which all my pressing cannot ease away? Poor heart! poor heart! Oh, I have travelled far, And in the forest's brooding place, or where Night-shrouded surges beat on lonely shores, Have sickened with my deep, dread, formless fears; But, never have I felt what now I feel! Great Spirit, hear me! ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... In the begetting of man, the mother supplies the formless matter of the body; and the latter receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father. And though this power cannot create the rational soul, yet it disposes the matter of the body to receive ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... his impressions, and this precisely because they are not his, but stand outside of his will. To further this, to get the direct action of the artist's instinct, clear of the meddling and patching of forethought and afterthought, is no doubt the aim of the seemingly careless, formless handling now in vogue,—the dash which Harding says makes all the difference between what is good and what is intolerable in water-colors,—and the palette-knife-and-finger procedure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... sermons on the being and nature of God," said the minister, now sitting erect and looking at his brother. "I have spoken of Him as a Father, our Father, and all the time He has been out in time and space, formless, homeless, unthinkable. He has never appealed to heart or brain. Will God ever be more to me than a force in and through all nature? Shall we ever see His face? Shall we ever feel the cares of His hand and hear His voice, not in a figurative ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... unequal when you come to put them in their proper attitude. Here, then, rests the shell of the poor hawk, ready to receive from your skill and judgment the size, the shape, the features and expression it had, ere death and your dissecting hand brought it to its present still and formless state. The cold hand of death stamps deep its mark upon the prostrate victim. When the heart ceases to beat, and the blood no longer courses through the veins, the features collapse, and the whole ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... blended into a close, dark and dead spot, faceless, formless, motionless. Foma went away from the rail and began ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless shadow. She wished— ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... work had cost him many an anxious, given him many a pleasant, hour. For seven years it had continued in a state of irregular, and oft-suspended progress; sometimes 'lying endless and formless' before him; sometimes on the point of being given up altogether. The multitude of ideas, which he wished to incorporate in the structure of the piece, retarded him; and the difficulty of contenting his taste, respecting the manner of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... whole strain of his character. What we find everywhere, with an abundant use of the name of God, is the conception of a formless Infinite whether in time or space; of a high inscrutable Necessity, which it is the chief wisdom and virtue to submit to, which is the mysterious impersonal base of all Existence,—shows itself in the laws of every separate being's nature; and for man in the shape of duty. On the other hand, I ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... in silence! Oh, shame, and weakness and passion of hot blood; and women's eyes, and cruel, bitter tongues; and jealousy, maddening jealousy, hideous, formless, vague, reaching he knew ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... its brow and named it Death, in the name of the Mighty God; and the evening stars looked down on me, rocking Alice in my soul, and singing lamentful lullabies to her, sleeping, till such time as Lethean vapors curled through the horizon of my mind, and hid its formless shadows ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... of arms! as welcome as to one That would be rid of such an enemy. But that's no welcome. Understand more clear, What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion; But in this extant moment, faith and troth, Strain'd purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bids thee with most divine integrity, From heart of ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... at Arthur's court, which they made over, probably, from scattering tales of Welsh and Breton mythology. To declare that most romantic heroes had been knights of Arthur's circle now became almost a matter of course. Prose romances also appeared, vast formless compilations, which gathered up into themselves story after story, according to the fancy of each successive editor. Greatest of the additions to the substance of the cycle was the story of the Holy Grail, originally an altogether independent legend. Important changes necessarily ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... way to parades and informal meetings at which imported Chinese labor and the rich "nobs," the supposed dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language. The agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader appeared in Dennis Kearney, a native of Cork County, Ireland. For fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled in San Francisco ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such "household arts" as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... undefined; perfect in form, yet limitless in depth; blue and persistent, yet ever evading capture by human heart in human eye; this sphere of fashioned boundlessness, of definite shapelessness, called up in her heart the formless children of upheavedness—grandeur, namely, and awe; hope, namely, and desire: all rushed together toward the dawn of the unspeakable One, who, dwelling in that heaven, is above all heavens; mighty and unchangeable, yet childlike; inexorable, yet tender as never was mother; ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... the truth—it was over with for the present; away off there in the haze obscuring the river bank those indistinct black smudges were fleeing savages, their voices wailing through the night. Just in front, formless, huddled where they had fallen, were the bodies of dead and dying, smitten ponies and half-naked men. He drew a deep breath through clinched teeth, endeavoring to ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... arbitrary forms, from among representatives of Soviets, dumas, zemstvos, professional trade unions and co-operative societies. Still, the main task was to secure a sufficiently conservative composition of the Conference, to dissolve the Soviets once for all in the formless mass of democracy, and, on the new organizational basis, to gain a firm ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... in all her finery, lay across the foot of a bed, a formless heap. Kennedy turned her over. It was Marie, motionless, but still breathing faintly. In an armchair, with his hands hanging limply down almost to the floor, his head sagging forward on his ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... made by Mr. Bertram Dobell, to whom the public are indebted for so many important literary 'finds.' In a parcel of pamphlets he came upon a number of loose printed leaves entitled 'A Prospect of Society'. They obviously belonged to 'The Traveller'; but seemed to be its 'formless unarranged material,' and contained many variations from the text of the first edition. Mr. Dobell's impression was that 'the author's manuscript, written on loose leaves, had fallen into confusion, and was then printed without any attempt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of Abbe Johns rose before her mind. She refrained from judgment in his case. His case, for intangible reasons, seemed separate and different. But fear, as of formless bugaboos in the dark, burned in her heart at the idea of his influence perhaps being able, creepily, stealthily, to ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... start of fright. A colossal and formless something was rushing across the field of his vision. It was a tree-shadow flung by the moon, from whose face the clouds had been brushed away. Reassured, he whimpered softly; then he suppressed the whimper for fear that it ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... other which assumes a divine intention and which might, to a certain extent, explain the hesitations and anguish of the prophetic warnings, at the cost, however, of other puzzles, a thousand times as hard to solve, which nothing authorizes us to substitute for the actual puzzle, formless and infinite, presented to our ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... trolleys, the footsteps of a scattered handful of belated pedestrians, the infrequent windy roar of trains on the Third Avenue L, empty clapping of horses' hoofs on the asphalt ... the yowl of a sentimental tomcat ... a dull and distant grumble, vague, formless, like a long, unending roll of thunder down the horizon ... the swish and sough of waters breaking away from the flanks of the Autocratic ... and then, finally, like a tocsin, the sonorous, musical chiming of the grandfather's clock ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... glad thankfulness, so now, with the night wind blowing about him, and all London lying, dark and motionless, below him, he felt the first stirring of his power. This was his to work with, this was his to praise and glorify and make beautiful—now crude and formless—a seed dark and without form or colour—one day to make one more flower in that garden that God has given his servants ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... seemed to be happening, though Larry had a sense that unknown forces were gathering on distant isothermal lines and bad weather was bearing down upon him. During these days, trying to ignore that formless trouble, he gave himself with a most rigid determination to his new routine—the routine which he counted on to help him into the way of ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... known, the master knew nothing at all about music, and the same was true of those around him. It is a matter of conjecture how the master and his followers happened to mistake some absurd and formless motif for one of Beethoven's sublime inspirations. Victor Hugo adapted the beautiful verses of Stella to this halting motif. It was published as an appendix in the Chatiments, with a remark about the union ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... unquestionably to possess a great capacity for suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers. It ran riot now. The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to wander aimlessly: an elevated train thundered ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bulk of Azuria appeared in the sky. Clouds turned green. The sun was formless and purple in the vibrations of wrath that were emanating from Azuria. The whitish, or yellowish, or brownish peoples of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, and Bohemia fled to hilltops and built forts. In a real existence, hilltops, or easiest accessibility ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... markets, wages, hours, and all the gaunt and haggard economics of the labour question, added to the statesman's load. Pauperism was appalling. In a word, the need for social regeneration both material and moral was in the spirit of the time. Here were the hopes, vague, blind, unmeasured, formless, that had inspired the wild clamour for the bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill. The whig patricians carried away the prizes of great office, though the work had been done by men of a very different ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and saw, and gazed in silence. Her nature was full of poetic possibilities; and now a formless thought foreshadowed itself in a feeling she did not understand: why should such a sight as this make her feel sad? The vital connection between joy and effort had begun from afar to reveal itself with ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... against the night shine, and with a single sweep of his antlers tore the webbing from me, who lay prone and breathless in the mud, and, thinking it was his enemy, hurled the limp bundle on the beach, and then, having pounded it with his cloven feet into formless shreds, bellowed again victoriously and went off into the ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... safer on or near the seaboard. So thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a time when nothing notable crossed ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... with a desire to lessen the pain of the world. All her egotism, her self-assertion, her formless ambitions had got up, or down, to that,—to comfort the comfortless, to keep evil away from little children, to let those who were in any sort of a prison go free. Yet she knew very well that all of this would lack its ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... which seemed, however, but a natural evolution in his present mental and spiritual exaltation. It was as if the page were a blank sheet and he were wielding an invisible pen. Although, before he took up the letter, he had had no idea of its contents beyond a formless, general intuition, as soon as he began to read he was clearly aware of every coming word and sentence and sentiment in it. So strong was the impression, that once he involuntarily dropped the note and, picking up a pen, began hastily ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and therefore has no parts, and therefore is not a whole, which is a sum of parts, and therefore has neither beginning, middle, nor end, and is therefore unlimited, and therefore formless, being neither round nor straight, for neither round nor straight can be defined without assuming that they have parts; and therefore is not in place, whether in another which would encircle and touch the one at many points; or in itself, because that which is self-containing ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist if ever there was one. I turn to his Land of the Dollar and I find New York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote him fairly: ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of Him who taught even a woman at the well-curb at Sychar. It is in the air. It is in the earth, the trees, the flowers. It comes to consciousness in man. His Ri is the Tao of Lao Tsze, the Way, Reason, Law. It is formless, invisible. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... public and win personal sympathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying data—chapter and verse—in support of the assertions I have made. They do it abundantly; the stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, and smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a considerable number of these narratives, and had made many notes of things heard and seen—data and memoranda which I designed to use in the already projected book which is now in your hands. Such ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Dirty Fingers' brain. One would not have suspected the workings of that brain by a look at Dirty Fingers on the porch of his Good Old Queen Bess. He was a great soft lump of a man, a giant of flabbiness. Sitting in his smooth-worn, wooden armchair, he was almost formless. His head was huge, his hair uncut and scraggy, his face smooth as a baby's, fat as a cherub's, and as expressionless as an apple. His folded arms always rested on a huge stomach, whose conspicuousness was increased by an enormous watch-chain made from beaten nuggets of Klondike gold, and ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... make out what manner of creature it was which gripped the satchel's handle and whose eyes pulsed back greenish flares into the torch's dim glow. But it was an animal of some kind;—distorted and formless in the wavering finger of blunted light; but still ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... range of his vision,—laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,—whose outlines escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished, here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail, vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top, like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... not walk; that awful crew Might speak or laugh as you pass by. Might touch or paw With a formless claw Or leer from a sodden eye, Might whisper awful things they knew, Or wring ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... incomprehensible forces were locked within that formless mass? By what manner of race as yet unborn had its elements been brought together—no, no—would they be brought together? How assume a comfortable mental attitude toward this creation whose present existence so long ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant. But she had a certain fugitive sense of guilt, also. Formless as her dreams had been, vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner when it turned out to be only a cold, and he could take a few minutes to be himself. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a ripple passed across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a deep night—and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... did, he knew, exist. When he had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... beginning of his first volume he states "that we can descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. We will recognize this gradation as the great work of nature; and we will observe it not only as regards size and form, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... strong man of affairs; yes, for not having revealed to him the mysteries of railroad practice from the beginning. But frankness was not an ingredient of the Honourable Hilary's nature, and Austen was not the kind of man who would accept a hint and a wink. Hilary Vane had formless forebodings, and found himself for once in his life powerless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had belonged to many—to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came—by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... On arriving at King's House, we found the main building still standing, but so damaged that it might collapse at any moment, and therefore uninhabitable. The handsome ballroom, which formed a separate wing, was nothing but a pile of rubbish, a formless mass of bricks and plaster. The dining-room, making the corresponding wing, was built entirely of wood, and had consequently escaped injury. This dining-room was a very lofty hall, paved with marble and entirely ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... hurriedly, and shook her head. A vague and formless trouble had laid its cold touch upon her heart; it was as though she saw a cloud coming up, but it was no larger than a man's hand, and she knew not what it should portend, nor that it would grow into a ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... winds from God God's message on them fell. Old bonds of sin, Snapt by the vastness of the growing soul, Burst of themselves; and in the heart late bound Virtue had room to breathe. As when that Voice Primeval o'er the formless chaos rolled, And, straight, confusions ceased, the greater orb Ruling the day, the lesser, night; even so, Born of that Bethlehem Mystery, order lived: Divine commandments fixed a firmament Betwixt man's lower instincts and his mind: From unsuspected summits of his spirit The morning ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... things—with the evening's movies and the week-end's dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... increasingly clear to the American people that dangers within are less to be feared than dangers from without. If, therefore, a solution of this problem of idle men and idle capital is the price of preserving our liberty, no formless selfish fears can ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Cochran Haughton, is a truly delightful bit of reminiscent description which deserves more than one reading. "A Little Girl's Three Wishes", by Mrs. R. M. Moody, is entertaining in quality and correct in metre. It is a relief to behold amidst the formless cacophony of modern poetry such a regular, old-fashioned specimen of the octosyllabic couplet. "Two Little Waterwheels", by Dora M. Hepner, is an exquisite idyllic sketch. In the second paragraph we read of a channel "damned" up by a projecting ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... never before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of discouragement and helpless defeat. While the light of the candles glided over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the formless clay, a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... branches of a tree, a bird chirruped dubiously, as though to assure himself even against his better judgment that the rain was only a threat. The woods which bordered the meadows were blurred into a foreboding, formless black, like a fringe of mourning, and the distant hills stood sentinels at ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... coming from his own big, hurried, formless, speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that vast yellow mist of people, that vast ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... one side stand a king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded by nobles with rapiers drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are wicked, all of whom are good-looking. Against these there is a formless mob of human beings, wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all blindly follow ruffians who are also rhetoricians; some of whom die repentant and others unrepentant towards the end of the fourth act. The leaders of this boiling mass of all men ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... adjacent Kensington Gardens, to which he unconsciously extended his rambles, were entirely lost upon the abstracted wanderer. Grand old trees, romantic walks, delicious flowers, had no existence for him; the whole world was one great, hueless, formless void, in which he beheld nothing but the spectral image mirrored in ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... nothing. Then Lisle pointed again, impatiently, and he made out something between a gray trunk and a thicket. Sportsman as he was, he had not the bush-man's eye, and he would never have supposed that formless object to be a deer. It moved, however; a prong of horn appeared; and waiting for nothing further ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed, hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its difficulties ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic, Bradley's ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... with consternation to discover that it was nothing more nor less than a mass of jumbled sentences, conveying no idea to the mind—a story which had seemed to me in the writing to be coherent had returned to me as a mere bit of incoherence— formless, without ideas—a bit of raving. It was then that I went to you and told you, as you remember, that I was worn out, and needed a month of absolute rest, which you granted. I left my work wholly, and went into the wilderness, where I could be entirely free from everything suggesting ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... watching the sunrise. As yet the river lay indistinct, a broad wan-coloured band of light stretching away across the darkness. The outwork on the slope beneath her was a formless shadow astir with smaller shadows equally formless. She heard the tread of feet on the wooden platform, the clink of side-arms and accoutrements, the soft thud of ramrods, the voice of old Bedard, peevish ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he supposes a single centre of attraction set up; and, by strict deductions from admitted dynamical principles, shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... done when blood ran warm in his veins. At other times he would be only a sough in the night wind. A feeling of dread, an undefinable something that froze the marrow and made the blood run cold. And yet, again, he would come as a fluttering, homeless soul, whimpering and formless, with a moaning cry for Justice—Justice—Judgment on him who had by black treachery hurried him unprepared to his end. The folk of Redesdale bore it until they could bear it no longer. The blood of many a Hall was ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura of its ancient occupants, careless ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... dumb, not daring to move or breathe, roused from the deep sleep of youth and health by this nameless, formless terror. Maren, while she strives to hold the door at which Louis rattles again and again, calls to her in anguish, "Anethe, Anethe! Get out of the window! run! hide!" The poor girl, almost paralyzed with fear, tries to obey, puts ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... reflections, his love in spiritualising external emblems, as, for example, in the reflections on the quincunx, and the almost sensuous delight in the contemplation of a mystery, show the same bent. The fully-developed mystic loses sight of the world and its practical duties in the rapture of formless meditations; facts become shadows, and emotions the only realities. But the presence of a mystical element is the mark of all lofty imaginations. The greatest poet is he who feels most deeply and habitually that our 'little lives are ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... satanic tragedies that have been between lovers before now. They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... face of the lover when the Voice and the Vision enfold him. The race is consecrated to the worship of idea, and the lover who lays his all on the altar of romance (which is idea) is at one with the race. The arms of the unloved girl close about the formless air and more real than her loneliness and her sorrow is the imagined embrace, the awaited warm, close pressure of the hands, the fancied gaze. What does it mean? What secret was there for Leonardo in Mona Lisa's smile, what for him in the motion of waters? You cannot ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... not come, but the sensitive plate that was his mind registered an impression. Something new and strange appeared upon its surface, and he felt that it was a hostile figure. At last it detached itself from the general dusk, darker and almost formless, and resolved itself into a head, that is a part of a head, from the eyes up. The eyes, set a little near together, were staring intently at the camp, trying to separate it into details, and Will, unseen himself, ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... the firs. The fire—whether it had been the barn or the house—had burned itself out. Whatever had happened, it was over. As she stood shuddering, unable to think, not daring to think, her eyes rested upon the bear, huge and formless in the gloom, staring at her, not ten feet away. She answered the stare fixedly, no longer aware of fearing him. Then she saw him turn his head suddenly, as if he had heard something. And the next moment he had faded away swiftly ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... mechanical relations to other matter, is really a very complex and a very wonderful thing; not at all likely to be "self-caused." Water is made up, we know, of oxygen and hydrogen—two elementary colourless, formless gases. Now we can easily divide the one drop into two, and, without any great difficulty, the two into four, and (perhaps with the aid of a magnifying glass) the four into eight, and so on, as long as the minute particle still retains the nature of water. In short, we speak of the smallest subdivision ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... stupendous sequence, age on age, Thro' storm and peace, thro' shine and gloom, thro' warm And pregnant periods of teeming birth, And seething realms of thunderous overthrow,— In the obscure and formless dawn of life, In gradual march from simple to complex, From lower to higher forms, and last to Man Through faint prophetic fashions,—stands declared The God of order and unchanging purpose. Creation, which He covers, Him contains, Even to the least up-groping atom. His The impulse and ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... bairns hae gien him," said Janet to herself, but continued to gaze at him, in questioning doubt of her own solution. She could not recall having ever heard of a Sir in the family; but ghosts of things forgotten kept rising formless and thin in the sky of her memory: had she never heard of a Sir Somebody Galbraith somewhere? And still she stared at the child, trying to grasp what she could not even see. By this time Gibbie was standing quite still, staring at her in return: he could not ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... English ones) Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a sort of gallery of pictures, blooming with vivid color. It is the south transept that contains the formless image - a clumsy stone woman lying on her back - which purports to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... now drew a long breath, threw up her shoulders, and half turned as if to reenter the church. The hesitating private, beholding the new angle of her face thus revealed to him, darted swiftly forward with a cry that was formless but eloquent. The nurse stayed motionless, but with eyes widened upon the approaching figure. The advancing private had risen wearily, and his first steps toward the church had been tired, dragging steps, but for the later distance he became agile and swift, running as ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the formless regret has been connected with any illusions as to the mysterious quality of the dinner that I have thus foregone. I have been well enough aware that the only actual opportunity thus evaded has been most probably that of an unusually bad dinner, exorbitantly paid ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... iron." Without pushing these fragmentary utterances too far, we may well conclude that whether Thales spoke of the soul of the universe and its divine indwelling powers, or gods, or of water as the origin of things, he was only vaguely symbolising in different ways an idea as yet formless and void, like the primeval chaos, but nevertheless, {7} like it, containing within it a promise and a ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Why, the only long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that lie ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... some formless, incomprehensible thing seemed about to happen. During these days of solitude—and this, too, even before Matilda had gone—a queer new something had begun to stir within her, almost as though threatening ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... when at last they met, it was no more with that abandon of simple pleasure with which he had been wont to receive her when she came knocking at the door of his study, bearing clear question or formless perplexity; and his restraint would of itself have been enough to make Letty, whose heart was now beating in a very thicket of nerves, at once feel it impossible to carry out her intent—impossible to confess to him any more than to his mother; while Godfrey, on his part, perceiving her manifest ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... creating Voice! Minister of God's spirit, who wast sent To wait upon Him first, what time He went Moving about 'mid the tumultuous noise Of each unpiloted element Upon the face of the void formless deep! Thou who didst come unbodied and alone, Ere yet the sun was set his rule to keep, Or ever the moon shone, Or e'er the wandering star-flocks forth were driven! Thou garment of the Invisible, whose ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Other birds sing almost inaudibly at times, especially in the autumnal season. Even the brown thrasher, whose ordinary performance, is so full-voiced, not to say boisterous, will sometimes soliloquize, or seem to soliloquize, in the faintest of undertones. The formless autumnal warble of the song sparrow is familiar to every one. And in this connection I remember, and am not likely ever to forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the most bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the bushes ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... companies of players (who usually got the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various. They played moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays like the Troublesome Reign of King John, on which Shakespeare worked for his King John; but above and before all they were each a company of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for which he was admired. The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair |
