"Inarticulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two words is interesting. The Greek word [Greek: barbaros], whence Eng. barbarian (Sanskrit barbara, Latin balbus), means "a stammerer," or one who talks gibberish, i. e. in a language we do not understand. Aristophanes (Aves, 199) very prettily applies the epithet to the inarticulate singing of birds. The names Welsh, Walloon, Wallachian, and Belooch, given to these peoples by their neighbours, have precisely the same meaning (Kuhn's Zeitschrift, ii. 252); and in like ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... deliberation. "The truth is, he reported nothing. He was one of those inarticulate fellows who travel everywhere, and can give no better account of their travels than just a catalogue of names. He chanced to let fall that he had visited Sampaolo, and I thus learned that such a place existed. I can't tell why, but the fact struck me, and ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... inarticulate noises, removed his own furs, which he threw down on to the old worn-out sofa, and drew a Windsor chair up to the fire. After a while his mother returned, and sat down in her rocking-chair, and began to shiver again under the shawl and the antimacassar. The ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... believed that I was about to surprise the thoughts of the sleeping Cybele, and that the mother of the gods, betrayed by her dreams, would let fall some of her secrets. But I have never yet made out more than sounds which faded away in the murmur of night, of words inarticulate as ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... him with the gag, and snatching up the mouthpiece of the gas machine). You'll be more helpless presently. (He presses the mouthpiece over Crampton's mouth and nose, leaning over his chest so as to hold his head and shoulders well down on the chair. Crampton makes an inarticulate sound in the mouthpiece and tries to lay hands on Valentine, whom he supposes to be in front of him. After a moment his arms wave aimlessly, then subside and drop. He is quite insensible. Valentine, with an exclamation ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... very strange and unlikely means in order to relieve the poor child. He first laid him on his back, then kneeling down between his legs, and bending himself, he pressed the child's belly as much as he could with his head and hands, crying out continually, but with inarticulate sounds. From time to time he raised himself, and seeming to hold the disease in his joined hands, opened them at once into the air, blowing, as if he drove away some evil spirit. During those rites, an old woman in tears howled with great violence in the child's ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... aunt Pullet exclaimed, after preluding by an inarticulate scream; "keep her at the door, Sally! Don't bring her off the oilcloth, whatever ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... inarticulate yell of warning. No words were needed to translate that warning to the keeper, who was sobered completely as he flashed round and saw what was happening. With a sharp command he rushed to drive the pumas back and close the gate. But one was already ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... An inarticulate sound came from Mr. Rhys's lips, between indignation and impatience; the strongest expression of either that Eleanor had ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... talk to my poor girl on these sad subjects." Then, with an unruffled manner and minute precision, she gave orders respecting her interment, which she desired might be performed with all possible simplicity. "Let me," said she, with an impressive though almost inarticulate voice, "be buried in Old Windsor churchyard." For the selection of that spot she gave a particular reason. She also mentioned an undertaker, whose name she recollected having seen on his door, and whom she appointed from his vicinity to the probable place ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... She uttered an inarticulate cry, the poignant terror of which shook Gale's nerve, and swayed as if she would faint. Thorne caught her, and in husky voice ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... bursts of the best form of Parliamentary eloquence. But the obstructionist wants, as a rule, strength of character rather than of oratory—as witness the extraordinary work in obstruction done by the late Mr. Biggar, who, by nature, was one of the most inarticulate of men. It was because Biggar had nerves of steel—a courage that did not know the meaning of fear, and that remained calm in the midst of a cyclone of repugnance, hatred, and menace. Mr. Bartley, then, has the character for the obstructive, and he rose blithely ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... moment when his right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come, there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... blowing up from the valley, a loud, long-drawn shriek of fear or distress, uttered by a woman. We looked at each other, Joseph and I, and then without a word set off running down the hill, in the direction of the cry. Again it came, "A moi-a moi!" We could hear the words, now, and then a wild, inarticulate scream. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... dusk, with everything falling and fading, and turning to decay around her, he might be gladly putting away his law-books after a day of satisfactory toil, and freshening himself up, as he had told her he often did, by a run in the Temple Gardens, taking in the while the grand inarticulate mighty roar of tens of thousands of busy men, nigh at hand, but not seen, and catching ever, at his quick turns, glimpses of the lights of the city coming up out of the depths of the river. He had often spoken to ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... at the rugged face of the keep, Beltane beheld thin wisps of smoke that curled from every arrow-slit, slow-wreathing spirals growing ever denser ere they vanished in the clammy mists of dawn, while from within a muffled clamour rose—low and inarticulate yet full of terror. Then Beltane strode down the zig-zag stair and came forthright upon Roger, pale and anxious, who yet ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... shan't forget ourselves again. There will be bands, of course, and bunting, and we shall read the directions in the papers, and buy expensive tickets and get to our seats early. But we shall be respectable and inarticulate this time, like the present exhibition at the Royal Academy. Besides, we have no nice things to shout when the pageants go by, like "Vive la Victoire!" or "Viva la Pace!" and even if we had we should all wait for somebody else ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... and when the prisoner, gray with terror, bent and tottering, was led forth, he was surrounded by a silent but determined crowd, who, thrusting the sheriffs aside, seized and drove him before them, and had already slipped the noose about his neck, when an inarticulate shout caused the crowd to sway,—a horseman dashed into their midst and proclaimed that both boys were alive. Their disappearance had been explained on that morning by a letter forwarded by hand, which ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... is a natural cause, Most natural of all that move the world, The one that first assails a mother's ears When loud a lusty infant learns to cry, An inarticulate insistent prayer But serving that first need ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking': in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose existence has hardly been indicated by our present ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set himself laboriously and patiently to train his other ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... lyric of the Middle Ages, that of the German Minnesingers, shows the effect of this Latin practice side by side, or rather inextricably mingled, with the effects of the preciser French and Provencal verse-scheme, and the still looser but equally musical, though half-inarticulate, suggestions of indigenous song. That English prosody—the prosody of Shakespeare and Coleridge, of Shelley and Keats—owes its origin to a similar admixture the present writer at least has no doubt at all, while even those who deny this can hardly deny the positive literary achievement of the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Bogle retired, not before it was time, within the sheltering portals of the estaminet, where not less than seven inarticulate but ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor we do not want,"[2] such words struck even Southern ears like "a thunder clap in a calm day."[3] And yet it needed but a few years to show that South Carolina had merely been the first to put into words the inarticulate thought of a large minority, if not a majority, of the inhabitants ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... were not unsupported by experience. I suppose too many of us would have thought it so; there are flunkeys in all ranks, and to spare. Perhaps the true absurdity was the way in which I sat, demented, inarticulate, staring at Lillian, and only caring for any word which seemed to augur a chance of seeing her again; instead of saying, as I felt, that I had no wish whatever to rise above my station; no intention whatever of being sent ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the water's edge and gazed across defiantly at the little boys, who were clustered together at the far end of the pond. They were not her match at sarcasm and so were forced to answer with inarticulate jeers. For a few seconds no more words were exchanged. Then one of ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... trampling and breaking through all obstacles of briar or bush. Willie was moping in her absence—hanging listlessly on the farm-yard gate to watch for her. When he saw her, he set up one of his strange, inarticulate cries, of which she was now learning the meaning, and came towards her with his loose, galloping run, head and limbs all shaking and wagging with pleasant excitement. Suddenly she turned from him, and burst ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... But at that moment her sentence changed to an inarticulate sound, and she doubled up in bed as if caught in ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Cambridge days, a distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this held no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea only proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire, though inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew the thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some measure of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a personal hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it, Memory, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... were approaching the booking-office, when Ezra glanced round and saw his rival standing behind him. He gave a bitter curse, and whispered something to his half-drunken companion. The latter turned, and with an inarticulate cry, like a wild beast, rushed at the young man and seized him by the throat with his ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... know it moving through its mystic stations within our very bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young life striking out blade after blade, already living and wonderful, though as yet unsuspected of other eyes; to know the underground inarticulate spring, sweeter far than spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all seems barren winter in the upper air; to hear already the pathetic pleadings of the young life, and to send back soothing answer along the hidden channels of tender tremulous affinities; ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... that a name is either a true name or not a name at all. He is unable to conceive of degrees of imitation; a word is either the perfect expression of a thing, or a mere inarticulate sound (a fallacy which is still prevalent among theorizers about the origin of language). He is at once a philosopher and a sophist; for while wanting to rest language on an immutable basis, he would deny the possibility ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... that little fierce, inarticulate sound of his before he spoke. "I hope you're satisfied. I hope I've done enough ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... carried my candle. In this way he would escort me to my bedroom, wait until I had undressed, jump up on the bed, put his paws round my neck, rub his nose against mine, lick me with his tiny red tongue, rough as a file, and utter little inarticulate cries by way of expressing unmistakably the pleasure he felt at seeing me again. When he had sufficiently caressed me and it was time to sleep he used to perch upon the backboard of his bed and slept there like a bird roosting ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... It was a mass—a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very distant surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy with the warm, ammoniacal odour of the thousands ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... imitate the natural inarticulate voices of men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of conveying great ideas; unless it be the well-known voice of some creature, on which we are used to look with contempt. The angry tones of wild beasts are equally capable of causing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remained for the blind Samson was to listen, with bowed head, to the renewed burst of Philistine hissings, howlings, and execrations, against him, before they would let him retire. It came from all quarters; but at least two persons stepped out from the crowd to convert the mere inarticulate uproar into distinct invective ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... mad with the horror of a fate so much more terrible than any I had anticipated, I strove to utter a cry; but my tongue refused its office, and nothing but an inarticulate murmur rose from my lips. It was not piercing enough to clear the edge of the vat, and my soul sunk with despair as I heard its fruitless gurgle and realized by the sound of departing steps, and the faint and ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... presently the old majordomo entered the compound. Farrel spoke sternly to him in Spanish, and, with a shrug of indifference, Pablo unlocked the door of the settlement-room and the Japanese cook bounded out. He was inarticulate with frenzy, and disappeared through the gate of the compound with an alacrity comparable only to that ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... social and public life, it appears that personality is the basis upon which all social institutions, movements, and conditions, in short all the phenomena of social life, rest. The people of our time are no more, as in the Golden Age, inarticulate masses. They are a totality of more or less active personalities connected by common interests, in part by racial origin, and by a certain similarity of fundamental psychic traits. A people is a kind of collective ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... was tearing the bowels of the deep up in his rage and fear; we were struggling frantically to get our sail down; and at any moment that wretched iron through our upper strake might tear a plank out of us. Our chief, foaming at the mouth with rage and excitement, was screeching inarticulate blasphemy at the other mate, who, not knowing what was the matter, was yelling back all his copious vocabulary of abuse. I felt very glad the whale was between us, or there would surely have been murder done. At last, out drops the iron, leaving a jagged hole you could put your arm through. Wasn't ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... then heard, but which I could not hear—of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor, overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to reassure ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady—and serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was totally unprepared for the undammed flood of confidence which had burst from the lips of the habitually taciturn Carrick. The tattered rags of the fellow's humble past were spread before him in all their pathetic squalor. He saw, as though a living thing, the barren, inarticulate childhood. He heard, under compulsion, the tale of youth's indefinable longings, with the meagre story of a love which lacked not its own shabby tragedy. The delicacy of a gentleman, who had intruded where he had no right, ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... in America on a man being introduced bears here a real significance, "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Blank." The English equivalent is "How-d-do?" and, although inarticulate, there is frequently a silent suggestion of the phrase, "Bored to meet you," "Awfully bored to meet you." In the South they are glad to meet and welcome the stranger at their gates, and he must be hard to please if he does not have a good ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... its soiled knickerbocker suit, the sunny hair all uncared for, the gay plaid tie draggled and limp, rushed into my arms with a crazy, inarticulate cry. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... The inarticulate sadness of the place brought a momentary feeling of depression to Lynde, who was not usually given to moods except of the lighter sort. He touched Mary sharply with the spurs and ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fists, the lips drew back, showing blackened and decayed teeth. Bristling like an aroused beast, his forehead wrinkling, his nostrils twitching, he made an inarticulate, growling, brute-like noise in his throat. His head twisted sideways. Of a sudden the sweat burst out upon his face, and he began to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... were increased. 'I am sorry, madam,' said I, 'if I have been indiscreet.' She answered, in a feeble and inarticulate manner, 'he stands in the same relationship to the ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the table. He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming. It was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling, and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing. In the middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Tour d'Azyr's, as if searching there for a meaning that eluded him. Quite suddenly he understood the vile affront. The blood leapt to his face, fire blazed in his gentle eyes. A convulsive quiver shook him. Then, with an inarticulate cry, he leaned forward, and with his open hand struck M. le Marquis full and hard upon his ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... boughs upon her blanched face? But her beauty merely frightened her the more in her terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her face under a great tree, and wept and wept for very ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... for New York or Chicago; it was not correct for Washington. There the American showed himself, four times in five, as a quiet, peaceful, shy figure, rather in the mould of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money. That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... by the unexpected transition from despair to hope. He stammered out a few inarticulate words of gratitude to Hocker and Jeffries and ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... to bring with it to Reginald a realizing sense of all that the new order of things would mean. He relapsed into thoughtfulness, in the midst of which he half sprang from his seat with an inarticulate exclamation. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... not speak. For a second she hesitated, inarticulate. Then she leaned over and set ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... judged solely by their fitness to serve as means to that end, have made him an energetic apostle of reform, and intolerant of old and passively accepted abuses. His insistence upon the principle of impartiality in the distribution of happiness has made him a champion of the inarticulate and the oppressed. Whatever one may think of his abstract principles, the general character of the specific measures he has advocated must meet with the approval of enlightened moralists of ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... as the hour-glass. Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:— So this winged hour is dropped to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,—pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... directly at him and tried to speak. Her first attempt was inarticulate, her second was a whisper, "Didn't you ever—think ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... days or friends with a rumpty-iddity-iddity, or letting it be known that they would die for England's glory with their tooral ooral, etc. Even the vices of that society (which 'sometimes, I fear, rendered the narrative portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as the chorus) were displayed with a more human softening than the same vices in the saloon bars of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... cries were stifled by the pressure of the rope, and then he made a desperate effort to gain his feet. In this he succeeded, and stood upright causing the noose for a moment to slacken. He profited by the temporary relief to attempt another ineffectual prayer for pity. A gasping, inarticulate noise in his throat was the sole result; for the muleteer continued his vigorous pulls at the cord, and in an instant the unhappy gipsy felt himself lifted completely off the ground. He made one more violent strain to touch the earth with the point of his foot; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... lips, That scalding throat, those nostrils full of ire, Thy palate, proper instrument of speech, Like to the winged chanters of the wood, Uttering nought else but idle sifflements,[173] Tunes without sense, words inarticulate, Had ne'er been able t' have abus'd me thus. Words are thy ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... and you soothe his mind, reverend father, soothe him. Next: Vassily Nikitin." And they lead the trembling youth away. And it does not strike anyone —the guards, or Vassily Nikitin, whom they are bringing in, or any of the spectators of this scene—that these inarticulate words of the young man, at once suppressed by the authorities, contain the truth, and that the loud, solemnly uttered sentences of the calm, self-confident official and the priest are ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... of her short life, to have been moved by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was not for this that Jeanne d'Arc ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning, and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... 'added up' Constance yet. She considered that her sister was in some respects utterly provincial—what they used to call in the Five Towns a 'body.' Somewhat too diffident, not assertive enough, not erect enough; with curious provincial pronunciations, accents, gestures, mannerisms, and inarticulate ejaculations; with a curious narrowness of outlook! But at the same time Constance was very shrewd, and she was often proving by some bit of a remark that she knew what was what, despite her provinciality. In judgments upon human nature they undoubtedly ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... momentary silence as she stood with her eyes fixed almost wildly on his set face. But a sudden shock against the bolted door and an inarticulate outcry startled them. With an instinctive movement, Guest threw his ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... could bear all," she cried; "but what will become of my children? Of this child," pointing to the fainting Ann, "whose constitution is already undermined by care and grief—where will she go?"—Mary's heart ceased to beat while she asked the question—She attempted to speak; but the inarticulate sounds died away. Before she had recovered herself, her father called himself to enquire for her; and desired her instantly ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... people, and which is perhaps characteristic of all nations who are pre-eminent in action, in colonization and empire-building. This disbelief partly explains why we have revealed such strange impotence in fighting our spiritual battles. Our Churches have remained silent and inarticulate. Our statesmen have seldom risen above sentimental platitudes. No trumpet voice has vindicated our ideas to the world. Our writers, with a few notable exceptions, such as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and Mr. Wells, have seldom risen above trite truisms. This war has not even produced ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... balanced judgment of life, to smithereens. More cliches. The world was rotten to the core and the human race so filthy the wonder was that any writer would handle it with tongs. But they plunged to their necks. The public, whose urges, inhibitions, complexes, were in a state of ferment, but inarticulate, found their release in these novels and stories and wallowed in them. The more insulting, the more ruthless, the more one-sided the disclosure of their irremediable faults and meannesses, the more voluptuous the pleasure. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... The Greenbush. He heard the agitated ringing of a bell-wether; then the soft huddling rush of a flock of sheep somewhere in the distance. A sheep dog barked sharply; a hound bayed in answer till the hills north of The Gore gave back a multiple echo; but the Rothel kept its secrets, and with inarticulate murmuring made haste to deposit them in the ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... foolish way women have a most comfortable and effective way, nevertheless and baby evidently felt that things were changing for the better when warm lips touched her cheeks, a soft hand smoothed her tumbled hair, and a womanly face bent over her with the inarticulate cooings and purrings mothers make. The frightened eyes went up to this gentle countenance and rested there as if reassured; the little claw crept to the girl's neck, and poor baby nestled to her with a long sigh and a plaintive murmur of "Marmar, marmar" that certainly would ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... put yourselves into position," said the stage manager, making corrections or suggestions as he went on; now somebody spoke too loud, and now somebody was too inarticulate, now an arm was held too forward, and now a leg dragged too much. Excessively diverting, also, the dummy show. In one scene of the play, a village schoolmaster is holding a class of little boys and girls. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... father and mother were Grace's first thought. What if something dreadful had happened to either of them! The bare idea of a telegram thrilled Grace with apprehension. Her fingers trembled as she signed the messenger's book and tore open the envelope. One glance at the telegram and with an inarticulate cry Grace darted up the stairs and down the hall to her room. Stopping only long enough to seize her hat, she made for the stairs, the telegram clutched tightly in her hand. "Oh, if Anne or Miriam were only here," she breathed, as she paused for an instant at Mrs. Elwood's gate to look up and down ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... places where they stood in their unbroken pride, and though it seems a hardship that they should not have been left lying in the kindly earth or on it instead of being pulled up and set on end, it must be owned that they are scarcely overworked in their present postures. More touching are those inarticulate heaps, cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there together and waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must always be remembered that when they were coherent they were only beautiful parts of a whole that ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... inarticulate cry, and turned sharply round. His hands went up to his head. Then he veered suddenly, and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... purveyors of potentially dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth Amendment saddled upon ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... She began to run, and again she said over and over her little inarticulate prayer. She knew the Spencer house. More than once she had walked past it, on Sunday afternoons, for the sheer pleasure of seeing Graham's home. Well, all that was over now. Everything ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... me a black little creature, suddenly stricken still—for a moment standing rigid—and then again suddenly becoming active with an impotent gesture, becoming audible with an inarticulate cry, with two little shadows mocking my dismay, and about this figure you must conceive a great wide space of moonlit grass, rimmed by the looming suggestion of distant trees—trees very low and faint and dim, and over it all the domed serenity of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the enormous targe of Hudson Bay, Glimmering all night In the cold arctic light; On the other hand The crowded southern land With all the welter of the lives of men. But here is peace, and again That Something comes by flashes Deeper than peace,—a spell Golden and inappellable That gives the inarticulate part Of our strange being one moment of release That seems more native than the touch of time, And we must answer in chime; Though yet no man may tell The secret of that ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... let the brush slip from under her arms, so that it fell to the floor with a racket, stooped with an affectation of clumsiness which seemed impossible to the lithe figure, while mumbling something inarticulate in an apparent paroxysm of embarrassment,—which quickly became a genuine inability to speak ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... man of iron, shuffled and cut, dealt and played as if he were in his cafe. From below we heard the inarticulate murmurings of the two mates, half smothered by the handkerchiefs which gagged them. Outside the timbers creaked and the sails hummed under the brisk breeze which was sweeping us upon our way. Amid the splash of the waves and the whistle of the wind we heard the wild cheers and shoutings of ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cowering in the corner of the sofa, lifted her grey face. The clumsy lips tried to move, but no sound came forth except an inarticulate murmur. Mrs. Carmichael shrugged her shoulders as one does at an ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... did not make any reply. She had risen, and was walking hastily up and down, murmuring low, inarticulate words and heaving deep, convulsive sighs. Kaunitz followed her with the eye of a cool physician, who watches the crisis of a brain-fever. He looked down, however, as the empress, stopping, raised her dark, glowing eyes to his. When he met ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... necessary, how terribly he was fallen away from his constitutional habit. He wore a beard of at least ten days' growth, which served to accentuate the cavitous hollowness of his face. His eyes seemed starting from their sockets as he lay upon his back uttering inarticulate sounds and plucking with skinny fingers at ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generally speaking, when spanked I deserved it. But always there were two punishable things against which—being disciplined—my youthful spirit revolted with a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice. One was for violation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong—the code, I mean, not the violation—without knowing exactly why it was wrong; and the other, repeated times without number, was when I had been caught reading nickul libruries, ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... made an inarticulate exclamation and went into her room. Belle, following her to her door, saw her tear off her shoes and stockings, and change her gown ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... inarticulate, then seemed to choke back further utterance, and kept silence for a minute. When he spoke it was ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... present Prime Minister of England, as the young political free-lance fighting furiously for unpopular causes, fighting sometimes from sheer love of battle. I have seen him in that same period in moods of persuasion and appeal pleading the cause of the inarticulate masses of the poor with an intensity which has thrilled a placid British audience to the verge of tears. Since then I have seen him under the venomous attacks of aristocrats and plutocrats in Parliament when his eyes have sparkled as he has turned on them and hissed out ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the terrible wrath of the knight when he heard the Princess thus slandered. His indignation and fury knew no bounds. He began to stammer and stutter, inarticulate with rage, until Sancho was scared out of his wits, afraid of being cut open by his raving master's sword. He was just about to turn his back on his master and disappear till the storm had passed, when Dorothea came to his rescue. She suggested that Sancho's strange behavior could only ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Keble, glimmering through the bare trees. There was not a sound near, except the occasional drip of slow-collecting dews from the branches of the old elms. Afar, too, many would have said there was not a sound; but there was, and Ian's ear was attuned to catch it. The immense inarticulate whisper of night came to him. It came to him from the deserted parks, from the distant Cherwell flowing through its willow-roots and osier-islands, from the flat meadow-country beyond, stretching away to the coppices of the low boundary hills. It was a voice ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... say, or I'll soak de two of youse; see if I don't. Ah, won't youse—" The words became inarticulate howls which the prayers and assurances of the two ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... her lost lover, she could have wept for joy. The sight of him, indeed, rendered her inarticulate, and, before she had found her voice, came Shyness to tie up her tongue. This is important, because her sudden inability ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... scream, and reached heavily for a glass of water. Mrs. Cheever said something inarticulate in the outburst of masculine exclamation. Only Maude Lille's calm ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... zigzagging back and forth over the network of fallen twigs and leaves. It was too hot to talk—it was too hot to sleep or think. And by and by the ox-wagons came up, and the oxen brought the flies. For a time then the only sounds were the slow crunching of the feeding horses and an occasional inarticulate snarl from some one or other who foolishly tried to brush the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... 1. Lemaneae.—Frond filamentous, inarticulate, cartilaginous, leathery, hollow, furnished at irregular distances with whorls or warts, or necklace shaped. Fructification: tufted, simple or branched, necklace shaped filaments attached to the inner surface of the tubular ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... direction. And this is such a chance! We can't have mamma lying around on sofas without any roses in her cheeks, can we?" He put this last to the children, who, being yet at the age when they talked in "Early English," as their father called it, made a clamorous but inarticulate reply. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie |
