"Impressionable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that greeted him was enough to make any man gasp, even one less young and impressionable than Sime. In all of his twenty-five years he had not seen a woman so lovely. Her complexion was the delicate coral pink of the Martian colonials—descendants of the original human settlers who had struggled with, and at last bent to their will, this harsh and inhospitable planet. She was little ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... another character and favorite, and his letter to his nurse in New York gives a good idea of how the place affects a bright, impressionable child. ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... it is not likely that he derived much benefit from these lessons. On his first meeting with the master he extemporized for him on a subject given him by Mozart. That this was a momentous occasion to the impressionable Beethoven is certain. The emotions called up by the meeting enabled him to play with such effect that when he had finished, the well-known remark was elicited from Mozart: "Pay attention to him. He will make a noise in ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... general interests and affairs of his time. He did not isolate himself from youth or love, and the young of two generations were his advocates. Born in 1810, son of the biographer of Rousseau, he was a Parisian, inheriting the sentiment and the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Impressionable, excitable, greedy of sensations, he felt around him the void left by the departed glories of the Empire, the void left by the passing away of religious faiths. One thing was new and living—poetry. Chenier's remains had appeared; Vigny, Hugo, Lamartine ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... prisoner, under sentence for something which she could not understand. She turned hither and thither in her appeal for help and understanding, and everybody turned aside as if she were an outcast. The iron of injustice began to enter her soul. She was at the impressionable age, when she felt deeply every injury done her. She thought much of Ann Barnes and Martin Christiansen, her two friends. They would have understood. They would have answered the questions, told her the truth which her mother hinted at yet failed to explain. It ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... other book, a narrative of a trip to Cuba made in 1859, and he wrote a few magazine articles. The explanation must be found in the temperament and character of the man. His "Two Years Before the Mast'' is a vivid representation of what he saw and experienced at a most impressionable age. He put his young life into it; he was not thinking of literature when he wrote it, and thus the book takes rank with those books which are bits of life rather than products of art. Afterward he was immersed in his law practice, and he was a prodigious worker. He saw with ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... and the thought was a delight to him. She was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt, much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a sustaining ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Richard Carter said, in quiet satisfaction. "I've imagined sometimes that you have a good influence on him— he's impressionable." He fell into silence, and for some time there was no further speech between them. Harriet was content to enjoy this restful interval between the hurry and crowding of Linda's house and the currents and cross-currents that she must encounter ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... ludicrous spectacle when he donned the uniform, he would march away with a light heart. He did not analyze her influence over him, but only knew that she had a peculiar fascination which it was not in his impressionable nature to resist. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... gods," or bojki, was founded about 1880 by a peasant named Sava. Highly impressionable by nature, and influenced by the activities of at least a dozen different sects that flourished in his native village (Derabovka, near Volsk), Sava ended by ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... same impression was upon her mind; only she felt it more deeply than he. Gentle, somewhat timorous, and very impressionable, she was almost overwhelmed by the terrific revelations of a nature which seemed to have no pity, or rather seemed full of malignity. Many times that day she had prayed in her heart that God would help them. Apparently detached from earth, she was ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... realize that his life, their life, was to be affected profoundly by such trivial matters as a Sunday luncheon, a remark by Tom Cairy, the savage aspect of the great city seen through April mist, and the low vitality of a nervous organism. But everything plays its part with an impressionable character in which the equilibrium is not found and fixed. As the woman stared down into the twilight, she seemed to see afar off what she had longed for, held ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... of wood for the fire, of bad roads, of illnesses. It is a hard-working, an uninteresting life, and only silent, patient cart-horses like Mary Vassilyevna could put up with it for long; the lively, nervous, impressionable people who talked about vocation and serving the idea were soon weary of it and ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... rather frightened then. But Clayton was not angry. He saw Natalie's fine hand there, and the boy's impressionable nature. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... agreeable impressions and, indeed, it received them at every turn. Phoebe Lyddon awoke a very vital train of thoughts, and when he left her, promising to come with his brother on the following day to see the miller, John Grimbal's impressionable heart was stamped with her pretty image, his ear still held the melody ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... repeated a large portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of hap-hazard examinations on the poem from half-scoffing friends, sometimes of the masculine persuasion. Each to his own; and what Shakespeare or the Latin Fathers might have done for some other impressionable girl, Mrs. Browning—forever bless her strong ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... you want or expect men and women to be good and intelligent voters at the age of 21, then something most vital must be done with them before they reach that age. From 5 to 21, that's a long road. That's the impressionable period. That's the time at which the people are prepared to become good Socialists or good opponents of Socialism. And the latter quite as readily ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... of its environment as easily as wax takes the impress of a seal. In two passages where this simile is employed,[31] the deduction from it is pressed to the furthest limit, and free-will is denied women altogether. Feminine susceptibility is pronounced to be incurable; wavering, impressionable emotion is a main constituent of woman's being; women are not responsible for the sins they commit nor the wrongs ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... pleasant distance. It excites the captain's admiration to see how perfectly lady-like, how really gracious is her manner to the aspiring widower, and yet—how serenely unencouraging. No one understood this better than Mr. Gleason himself. Finding her deeper, less impressionable than he at first supposed, he simply changed his tactics. He avoided the store, he shunned conversations on dangerous topics, he cultivated the society of Colonel Whaling, and deeply impressed that veteran ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... black with reproach upon him. Then turning to the ladies: "That shows how he misunderstands me. Just because I had a witty mother,—just because I 'm not a stolid, phlegmatic ox of a John Bull,—just because I 'm sensitive and impressionable,—he calls me flighty. But you know better, don't you? You, with all your fine feminine instincts and perceptions, you know that I 'm really as steady and as serious as the pyramids of Egypt. Even my very jokes have a moral ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... his age—the exquisite pathos of a death-scene like that of little Nell or of little Paul Dombey, in the utterance by himself of those familiar passages nothing but the manliest emotion was visible and audible from first to last. Insomuch was this the case, that the least impressionable of his hearers might readily have echoed those noble words, written years ago, out of an overflowing heart, in regard to Charles Dickens, by his great rival and his intense admirer, W. M. Thackeray: "In those admirable touches of tender humour, who ever ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... nature, one of the poetic qualities, was observed very early, and the description of him as a little boy was the description of the heart and nature of the man. "Active, eager, impressionable; quick-tempered, but as quickly appeased; kind- hearted and affectionate,—the sunlight of the house." One day when a child of ten he came home with his eyes full of tears. His elder brother was fond of a gun, and had allowed Henry to borrow his. To the little boy's great ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... Near him was Long Jim and in the boat next to them was Shif'less Sol and Tom Ross. At this moment, which they felt to be heavy with import, it was good to be together. Paul in particular, Paul, the impressionable and imaginative, looked around at the familiar figures in the clearing moonlight, and drew strength and comfort ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... came to assist the Avonlea minister in revivifying the dry bones thereof, knew this and reveled in the knowledge. It was not often that such a virgin parish could be found nowadays, with scores of impressionable, unspoiled souls on which fervid oratory could play skillfully, as a master on a mighty organ, until every note in them thrilled to life and utterance. The Rev. Geoffrey Mountain was a good man; of the earth, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... did Mary brace herself for the further ordeal, and in a steady, unmoved voice tell Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn what had happened. The faded beauty merely smiled, and lifted her eyes to the chandelier with the expression that had melted the hearts of a thousand and one impressionable subalterns. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... old high-handed arrogance were still within him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night—and it may be that to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a "kitchenette," after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... documents. They are the autobiographies of communities. The personalities of Topeka, Kansas, of Limoges, France, and of Heidelberg, Germany, rise before the impressionable student of municipal documents like the figures of personal autobiography, like Benvenuto Cellini, Marie Bashkirtsev, Benjamin Franklin, Miss Mary ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... was an unusual woman for those times and circumstances is shown in those readings to her children. Not only did she read and explain to them the beautiful stories of the Bible, implanting its truths in their impressionable natures to blossom forth later in beautiful deeds; but she read them the best literature of the ancient days as well as current literature. Into this poor New England home came the "New York Tribune" and the "National Era." The letters of ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... stumbled into some sweet prison of flowers which, having run disobedient ways in the past, had been placed here by Flora, and forever denied their native meadows and wildernesses. And this vision of fresh youth in my path, perhaps she was some guardian nymph. I was only twenty-two—a most impressionable age. Her hair was like that rare October brown, half dun, half gold; her eyes were cool and restful, like the brown pools one sees in the heart of the forests, and her lips and cheeks cozened the ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic, to take the most effective aspect of ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Brazil, and is a true water-haunter. But at the breeding season the female undergoes a curious change of integument. The skin on her back grows pulpy, soft, and jelly-like. She lays her eggs in the water: but as soon as she has laid them, her lord and master plasters them on to her impressionable back with his feet, so as to secure them from all assaults of enemies. Every egg is pressed separately into a bed of the soft skin, which soon closes over it automatically, thus burying each in a little cell or niche, where it undergoes its further development. The tadpoles pass through their ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... echoed, in a tone that might have told his companion something, only the fingers which Langholm had feared to crush had already fallen upon the keys, with the strong, tender, unerring touch of a master, and the impressionable player was swaying ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... and expanded swiftly into a determination, to contrive some intimate talk forthwith with the Duke. The young man seemed both clever and sensible, and in a way impressionable as well. Thorpe thought that he would probably have some interesting things to say, but still more he thought of him as a likely listener. It would be the easier to detach him from the company, since the occasion was one of studied informality. The Duke did not go about in society, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Men like Elmer Ford aren't fit to have charge of a child. You don't know him, but he's just an unscrupulous financier, without a thought above money. To think of a boy growing up in that tainted atmosphere—at his most impressionable age. It means death to any good there is ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... old-established topographical point; as do the Arabs and Russians, neither of whom have a word expressing our "home" or "Heimat." Here, the nearest equivalent is la famiglia. We think of a particular house or village where we were born and where we spent our impressionable days of childhood; these others regard home not as a geographical but as a social centre, liable to shift from place to place; they are at home everywhere, so long as their clan is about them. That acquisitive sense which affectionately adorns our meanest dwelling, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... dodge," answered the Doctor enthusiastically. "Let's try it on Spangles first. I somehow feel that she will be more impressionable than Old Dominick. You influence while I spread the millet seed in front of her coop." And he bent down in front of the half barrel and carefully laid a tempting evening meal, with his eye on Fuss-and-Feathers. ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... things to all men" is sometimes taken by vain, worldly people in a very different sense from that the apostle intended. Girls of Edna Sefton's caliber—impressionable, vivacious, egotistical, and capable of a thousand varying moods—will often take their cue from other people, and become grave with the grave, and gay with the gay, until they weary of their role, and of a sudden become their true selves. And yet there is nothing absolutely wrong in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Demosthenes' oratory was unable to defeat the great antagonist of his country. To Philip of Macedon failure was an inconceivable idea. Resident during three impressionable years of his youth at Thebes, he had there learned, from the example of Epaminondas, what a single man could do: and he proceeded to each of the three great tasks of his life—the welding of the rough Macedonians into one great engine of war, the unification of Greece under his ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... which should have controlled them was wanting. She squandered the wealth of her nature in obedience to social conventions; she was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her scruples degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than force of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with more brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a coquette, and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant life and gaiety, reflecting never, or too late; imprudent ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... impressionable as he was, may have been moved at this; but assuredly his resolution of not being reunited to Lady Byron was not shaken. His only reply was to show me a letter he had written some ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which has more recently received ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... they are not a safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met, Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary father and son. Up to the end this ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... outlines are so distinct that they appear close at hand. The desert atmosphere has cast a kindly spell upon them, softening their hellish perspective into lines of beauty in certain lights. It is well that this is so, for it helps to dispel an illusion of the imaginative and impressionable when first they visit San Pasqual—the illusion that they are ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... never explored the philosophies of La Rochefoucauld, had nevertheless seen that quotation in the birthday book of an acquaintance, and the saying had made a great impression upon her. She was twenty-one years of age, at which age girls are most impressionable and are little influenced by the workings of pure reason. They are prepared to take their philosophies ready-made, and not disinclined to accept from others certain rigid standards by which they measure ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... bring pleasures within the reach of people when they have no taste for them; but an increasing number of people do care for such things, and there are still more who would care for them, if only they could be introduced to them at an impressionable age. ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... villager and city worker have always been occupied in making things or parts of things out of such impressionable materials as iron, wood, clay, cloth, leather, gold, and the like, to fit, suit, and satisfy a various and increasingly complex set of human desires; or they have been dealing direct with a kaleidoscopic human mind, either ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... creatures of habit, and habits once formed are hard to break; and although the polls are only open every three or four years, if women once get into the way of going to them, they will hang around there all the rest of the time. It is in woman's impressionable nature that ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... of evil, very rarely found in women, whom their impressionable physical nature subjects to so many varying currents, could exist in a human soul, it would be found in the soul of that slave trained to concessions and fawning, rebellious but patient, and thoroughly self-controlled, like ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... that concerned the Indians and the proposed measures for the reform of the colonies was quickly satisfied by Las Casas, who furnished him with a full history of the business he had in hand. The least impressionable of men could not listen to such an advocate unmoved, and M. de la Mure, profoundly affected by what he heard, offered to help his new friend by every means he could command. He was an ally worth ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... is,' said Tim Halloran, 'but, you see, there's the period of the novitiate. Given a girl at an impressionable age, the proper convent atmosphere, and a prize of six hundred pounds for the Order, and it will go hard with the Reverend Mother if she can't work the girl up to a vocation. It takes a man a lifetime to make six hundred pounds in a country shop, but there's many a one who ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... really sent your flesh through your bones, all on edge like, to see a child fly up in the air like that. So she testified, embellishing her other physiological experience with a new horror unknown to Pathologists. Mrs. Riley, less impressionable, kept an even mind in view of the natural invulnerability of childhood and the special guardianship of Divine Omnipotence. If these two between them could not secure small boys of seven or eight from disaster, what could? The unbiassed ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... dinner-parties and fails to marry her sons to the right people. Perpetually Hatchways is wiping the eye of Holmer, and this touches the nerve of the great lady. Her sons, Wickford, the authentic but hardly reigning duke, and Lord Iveagh Suir, the queer impressionable (on whom the author has spent much pains to excellent effect), both take their troubles to Ernestine. And a young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... under his sermon, and for sometime I enjoyed a clear sense of forgiveness.' His mother's heart rejoiced at the change; but from his father, who was an habitual drunkard, he met with much opposition and persecution, and being but a boy, and possessing a very impressionable nature, John soon joined his former corrupt associates and cast off, for upwards of thirty years, even the form ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... most interesting, I think) are lost forever: in them she is reflected as she reflects French society in them. Endowed—morally and physically—with a robust health, she is expansive, loyal, confiding, impressionable, loving gayety in full abundance as much as she does the smile of the refined, as eager for the prattle of the court as for solid reading, smitten with nobiliary pride, a captive of the prejudices, superstitions and tastes of her caste (or of even her coterie), with her pen hardly tender for her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... used to fancy that you were sure to be a very great man, and to think how proud your relations would some day be of you, and how you would come back and excite a great commotion at the place where you used to be a school-boy. And it is because the world has still left some impressionable spot in your hearts, my readers, that you still have so many fond associations with "the school-boy spot we ne'er forget, though we are there forgot." They were Vealy days, though pleasant to remember, my old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... amber hair so extravagant in quantity, the long lashes which shaded deep lovely eyes, satisfied the senses no less than the supple rounded young body which was carried with such light grace. Kilmeny was not very impressionable, but in her presence the world seemed somehow shot through with a new radiance. She laid upon ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... tragedy, so wonderfully realized in its chief creation, or whether coming events do sometimes cast their shadows before, I cannot say, but I know that an hour after Rushton's departure I was still sitting alone, my brain throbbing with excitement, and so nervous and impressionable, that a sudden, vehement knocking at the street entrance caused me to spring up from my chair with a terrified start, and before I could master the impulsive emotion, the room-door was thrown furiously ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... In that passive and impressionable condition which is called hypnotic, mesmeric, somnambulic, or somniloquent, it has long been known that the subject may be absolutely controlled by the operator, or by a simple command or suggestion, or by his own imagination. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... bookcase to bookcase, and take down whatever book my fingers lighted upon. And read I did, whether I understood one word in ten or two words on a page. The words themselves fascinated me; but I took no conscious account of what I read. My mind must, however, have been very impressionable at that period, for it retained many words and whole sentences, to the meaning of which I had not the faintest clue; and afterward, when I began to talk and write, these words and sentences would flash out quite naturally, so that my friends wondered at the richness of my vocabulary. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their feet off from seventeen to twenty-one. I never heard anything about any occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations; they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... attractive. She was graceful and slender, and, though but little above five feet in height, could draw herself up to look tall. In her manner, in her comings and goings, in her 'I'll do this,' or 'I'll do that,' she combined dignity with sweetness as no other girl could do; and any impressionable stranger youths who passed by were led to yearn for a windfall of speech from her, and to see at the same time that they would not get it. In short, beneath all that was charming and simple in this young ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... fond of these theatrical announcements, which answered the purpose he designed, of attracting the sympathy of the impressionable French people. The following is a short summary of the mode in which Italy was really freed "from the Alps to the Adriatic":—Lombardy was surrendered to Sardinia 11th July, 1859; the treaty ceding Savoy and Nice to France was ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... was it that he saw now in those strange eyes that left him a bit wistful at thought of this? There was not a detail of her features, of her dress, of her speech, that he could not see now as vividly as though she were still standing before him. That was odd, too. He was not ordinarily so impressionable. It occurred to him that he would not like her to know what he was about to do. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... boys, Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His letter ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... manifestations of sexual depravity they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, and also to weakening the ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... romantic poems in the English language. I pointed to a bookcase and bade her fetch the volume. She brought it and settled down again by my chair, and, as a punishment of ignorance, and for the good of her soul, I began to read aloud. She is an impressionable young person and yet one of remarkable candour. If she had not been held by the sea-music of the poem, she would not have kept her deep, steady brown eyes fixed on me. I have no hesitation in repeating that we were getting on famously and enjoying ourselves immensely. I got ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... He is falling asleep! He is asleep! A remarkably rapid occurrence of hypnosis. The subject has evidently already reached a state of anaesthesia. He is remarkable,—an unusually impressionable subject, and might be subjected to interesting experiments!... (Sits down, rises, sits down again.) Now one might run a needle into his arm. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... time Monsieur Rodin referred to the papers before him, evidently much puzzled. It seemed that Madame had been recognized in the Bois by the impressionable Frenchman who I had believed, had been attracted ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... might be the feelings of her heart when she so sententiously told her uncle that Frank had been foolish? She was of the same age with him; as impressionable, though more powerful in hiding such impressions,—as all women should be; her heart was as warm, her blood as full of life, her innate desire for the companionship of some much-loved object as strong as his. Frank had been foolish in avowing his passion. No such folly ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... what you hear in every city in America, big or little. And it's always the poor, impressionable New Yorker who says it, the fellow who has to put up with the depressing homeliness and dowdiness of Fifth Avenue. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... hard. And I understood then how really impressionable he was. Every small fact and event of that evening stood out in his memory as if endowed with mystic significance. If he did not mention to me the colour of the pony which drew the carozella, and the aspect of the man who drove, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... some advertising physician who claims to be a "men specialist." The main speciality of these men is obtaining money from their ignorant dupes. Their advertisements would make nearly every man in the world think he were suffering from some grave disease. The young boy, at an impressionable age, is a ready victim to their lures. He is treated for a real or an imaginary disease until his money is all gone, then ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... was very impressionable and of a very affectionate turn of mind.' ('You had very queer ways of showing it, you young scamp!' said Miss Amanda.) 'And I remember, when I was about ten years old, I once asked my mother if it were wicked to ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... possible to love at all. But she had seen very little of the world, and had known very few men. Her first recollections of society were indistinct, and no one individual had made any more impression upon her than another, perhaps because she was in reality not very impressionable. But Paul was preeminently a man able to impress himself upon others when he chose. He had come to Carvel Place, had loved his cousin, and she had returned his love with a readiness which had surprised herself. It was genuine ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... about this time that the labourers began to think the young master rather more important than the old one; but for their connivance, James Rooney could never have been drawn into Fenianism. The conspiracy was just the thing to fascinate the boy's impressionable heart. The poetry, the glamour of the romantic devotion to Mother Country fed his starved idealism; the midnight drillings and the danger were elements in its attraction. James Rooney drilled with the rest, swore with them their oaths of fealty to Dark ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... fell over on the table. The fire and youth Ringfield had observed were gone and in their place were the decrepit tone and the surly animalism which one associated with the guide. Here, then, thought the young and impressionable minister, is the living result of two corroding vices; the man is a sot, but something beside the lust for liquor has helped to make him one. He has followed after sin in the shape of his neighbour's wife, and perhaps the latter's decline may be traced to the working ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Wardes made was a burst of laughter, so diabolical in its sound, that a superstitious man would have been terrified. But De Guiche was not so impressionable as that. "I think," he said, "that everything is now settled, Monsieur de Wardes; so have the goodness to take your place first, unless you would prefer ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... your head, Barker boy," said Demorest, "for here are the pack mules and packer." This was quite enough to divert the impressionable young man, who speedily finished his dressing, as a mule bearing a large pack-saddle and two enormous saddle-bags or pouches drove up before the door, led by a muleteer on a small horse. The transfer of the treasure ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... so!" was her ardent reply, accompanied by a gesture, the freedom of which suited her style and person as it would not have done those of a less impressionable woman. And, seeing that I had no intention of leaving the spot where I stood, she moved at last from where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked, pausing to look back at a turn in the path. ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... was very young and impressionable, Stanley, regardless of his own safety, punched up the fire and from his own and his comrades' kits procured such remedies as aviators carry for just such emergencies. In the dark he hunted for water but found none. From a flask of good ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... The friendly old gentleman, as he had found him from the first, became doubly and trebly so in that position which brings out whatever warmth of heart an Englishman has, and gives it to him if he has none. The impressionable and sympathetic character of Middleton answered to the kindness of his host; and by the time the meal was concluded, the two were conversing with almost as much zest and friendship as if they were similar ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fully, why Betty was expelled. Pause a minute before you speak, dear. For long years I have allowed this club to exist in the school, believing much in its good influence—in its power to ennoble and raise the impressionable character of a young girl. I have not interfered with it; on the contrary, I have been proud of it. To each girl who became a Speciality I immediately granted certain privileges, knowing well that no girl would be lightly admitted to a club with so high an aim and so ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... powerful influence upon the beliefs and opinions of the individual than the home. Our basic ideals and traditions pass from generation to generation through the continuity of the family life. During the plastic and impressionable period of infancy the child is constantly under the influence of the parents. At first fashioned largely by the parents, the beliefs and sentiments of the growing child are later modified by contact with other family members. When children go out to the school, the church or the workshop, ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... beggarly carpenter hasn't had an opportunity to put any nonsense in her head," she mused. "What a piece of luck!—that she happened to be in that car that day. Of course, the fact that he saved her life has cast a glamour of romance around him—Violet is very impressionable—and it may take time to disenchant her. I hope that nurse was vigilant and did not allow her to see much of him; however, one thing is sure, she won't get a chance to see ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... appreciate it? Can they look back and recall how it struck them? No. When I try to tell Americans over here they look at me curiously and say, "Dear me, how odd!" The way they say it leaves me to draw any one of three conclusions: either they are not impressionable, and are therefore honest in denying the feeling; or they think it vulgar to admit it; or I am the only grown person in America who never has been to ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the troops touches my responsibility, as Commander-in-Chief to the mothers and fathers and kindred of the men who came to France in the impressionable period of youth. They could not have the privilege accorded European soldiers during their periods of leave of visiting their families and renewing their home ties. Fully realizing that the standard of conduct that ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... showed him an ingenious talking-machine that had been made by Baron de Kempelin. At this time Bell was twenty-two and unknown; Wheatstone was sixty-seven and famous. And the personality of the veteran scientist made so vivid a picture upon the mind of the impressionable young Bell that the grand passion of science became henceforth the master-motif ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... Chinese, especially those of the older generation. It is touched here and there by the vital spark of Christianity, but at the centre continues to be Chinese and inseparably associated with the worship of ancestors and the reverence for those gods whose influence has been woven into the early years of impressionable life. ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... mind can impart to another of a widely different fibre, Denzil had learnt from Milton in that most impressionable period of boyhood which he had spent in the small house in Holborn, whose back rooms looked out over the verdant spaces of Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Lord Newcastle's palace had not yet begun to rise from its foundations, and where the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... enclosing shore; measurable, impressionable, definite, and overt; thinking to house that sea, shaping it, over looking it, and staying and governing its tides. Yet changed by it, crumbling before it, yielding to it: at once its guardian ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... either side of the white face recalled to Mary a picture in the library at Lady MacMillan's. It was a clever painting of the Medusa, level-eyed, with a red mouth like a wound, and dimly seen, pale glimmering features, between the lazy writhing of dark snakes. The thing had fascinated Mary in her impressionable schoolgirl days, but now she tried to huddle the idea quickly out of her head, for it seemed disloyal and even disgusting ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... crying infant, could not long bear the solitude of his broken home, and so began the years of wanderings, which lasted as long as his life, and through which he seems so largely to have lost sight of his young son at his most impressionable age, save to provide for his material wants, and to some extent, also, his education. When with him in later years he appears to have enjoyed his society, or at least the evidences which he gave of implicit, unreasoning ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... and scenes and historical associations had their influence on a bright and ardent boy in these impressionable years. He soon got to be keenly interested in the Navy, amassed a surprising amount of information about the types, engine strength and gun-power of the principal warships, and found delight in making models of cruisers and torpedo-boats. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... largely to the religious instruction that is given by the church acid Sunday-school? For instance, the teachings that the Jews crucified Jesus; that they rejected him, and can only secure salvation by belief in him, and similar matters that are calculated to excite in the impressionable mind of the child an aversion, if not a loathing, for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... dryly. "It seems to me I've heard somewhere that other young men have gone there 'almost every!' She doesn't last, apparently. Arthur's gallant, and he's impressionable—but he's fastidious, and fastidiousness is always the check on impressionableness. A girl belongs to her family, too—and this one does especially, it strikes me! Arthur's very sensible; he sees more than ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... his portmanteau. I suggested taking them to a solicitor to have them examined. The solicitor advised me strongly to contest them. I did not take the advice, but raised some money instead, and so the matter ended so far as the immediate future was concerned. The years that are most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of the hidden keg of gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians, and it will even be found to have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and almost identical in form appear and appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... where they are most readily found. I like them as I like works of art, fine scenery, and beautiful women. From an aesthetic point of view, I possess refined nerves,—too refined, perhaps, owing to my early training and a naturally impressionable temperament. This aesthetic sensitiveness gives me as many delights as torments, and renders me one great service: it preserves me from cynicism or otherwise extreme corruption, and serves me instead of moral principle. I recoil from many things, not because ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... his friends, his impressionable soul, his devotion to church, his yearning for education and enlightenment, his thrift, industry, devotion to country, fidelity to the flag shown upon hundreds of battle-fields, must be admitted and command ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... affection and devotion, to an extraordinary degree, toward those who have treated him well; while, on the other, he is equally capable of the most ferocious and implacable hatred of those who have injured him or those he loves; also, he is extraordinarily impressionable. Mama Faquita, being herself a full- blooded negress, was of course perfectly well aware of these peculiarities in the nature of her audience; and she played upon them as a skilled musician does upon a sensitively responsive instrument. She ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... trait in many of its children. But, on the other hand, it is fecund of eccentricities. Though many absorb the atmosphere of age to their great advantage, there must be other temperaments among the descendants of so unique and so impressionable a body of men as the early settlers of this region, which would succumb to the awesome and depressing influences that also lurk in the air; and these may easily pass from piquant personality into mere errant grotesqueness. Whether ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... consisted principally of assertion that man himself consisted chiefly of original sin. As evil communications corrupt good manners, I myself, being young and impressionable, began to believe that I too was an awful sinner. Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that it consisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not distinctly remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might be able to cross ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the impressionable state of my own mind at the time, made me peculiarly susceptible to external influences, and fixed minute circumstances more intensely on my memory; so that I now vividly recall the thought which then occurred to me—that I had never ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... a way of speaking of those who had gone up against him in the past and were "running yet," of shooting scrapes and deadly knife-work in which he had displayed a spirit of cold-blooded ferocity. Both the Professor and the Bank clerk were men of peace and very impressionable. Consequently, they conceived for Marks a shuddering respect, not unmixed with fear, and were ready to stand on their heads at ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of "Lohengrin" is typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of Elizabeth Barrett. A new element with its transfiguring power awaited her, and some undefined ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... morals, he lived what might have been on the whole an unprofitable and ordinary life, if he had not been able to gild it with the glamour of philosophic immoralism. Finally, because everybody else was writing, he too wrote—a play. Then follows a period of discovery of the newest movement in art. So impressionable is he that his stay of some years in Paris causes him actually to forget how to write English prose, and when he returns to London and has to earn his living at journalism he has to learn his native tongue over again. Nevertheless he has acquired a point ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... oddly for a moment. "I am very, very glad that you are such a steady, sensible, practical man. A vapid, impressionable youth, during this season of propinquity, might have been so foolish as to fall in love with me, and that ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... he were often seen walking together, and they delighted in the Temple. The Temple is escapement from the omniscient domesticity which is so natural to England; and both were impressionable to its morning animation—the young men hurrying through the courts and cloisters, the picturesqueness of a wig and gown passing up a flight of steps. It seemed that the old hall, the buttresses and towers, the queer tunnels leading from court to court, turned the edge of the commonplace ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... interesting to notice that his impressionable fancy was again taken by an attractive young Englishwoman, the daughter of a clergyman named Andrews, living at St. Omer. "Two very beautiful young ladies," he writes to Locker and to his brother; "I must take care of my heart, I assure you." "My heart is quite secured ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... you, Nan, simply because I must—she has never been, to my idea, a lady-like young woman. She has always been flippant and frivolous and boisterous; anything but a good companion for a number of impulsive, impressionable girls ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann |
