"Indistinguishable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and some women, nowadays, who can carry on a conversation in Chinese with the utmost facility, and even with grace. Some speak so well as to be practically indistinguishable from Chinamen. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... of the Revel was rather effective," continued Cornelian; "all the Shadow people reclined in the dimly-lit centre of the ballroom in an indistinguishable mass, and the human characters marched round the illuminated sides of the room to solemn processional music. Every now and then a shadow would detach itself from the mass, hail its partner by name, and glide out to join him or ...
— When William Came • Saki
... found a tang of ghostliness in the night. The crest of the ridge over which they had come through the dusk now showed silvery white; white also were some dead branches of desert growth—they looked like bones. Always through the intense silence stirred an indistinguishable breath like a shiver. Individual bushes assumed grotesque shapes; when she looked long and intently at one she began to fancy that it moved. She scoffed at herself, knowing that she was lending aid to tricking her own senses, yet her ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... the Cossack's arm and slipped away from him; then pausing at a little distance, in the deep shadow of an archway opposite the station, she knelt down upon the pavement, and taking some small object, which was indistinguishable in the darkness, from the bosom of her frock she clasped her hands together and looked upwards through the gloom at the black walls of the great building. The Cossack looked at her in a sort of half-stupid, half-awed surprise, ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... the vegetation of the coal period, was that order of plants known as the Calamites. The generic distinctions between fossil and living ferns were so slight in many cases as to be almost indistinguishable. This resemblance between the ancient and the modern is not found so apparent in other plants. The Calamites of the coal-measures bore indeed a very striking resemblance, and were closely related, to our modern horse-tails, as the equiseta are popularly called; but in some respects ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... was examining the picture with sparkling eyes. They got into conversation, and the stranger said almost in atone of solemnity, "It is indeed a singular mystery, how a picture often arises in the mind of an artist, the figures of which, previously indistinguishable, incorporate mist driving about in empty space, first seem to shape themselves into vitality in his mind, and there seem to find their home. Suddenly the picture connects itself with the past, or ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... force of a bomb explosion is largely in an upward direction, those in the immediate vicinity of a dropping bomb are advised to assume a recumbent position, in which they will enjoy the added advantage of being indistinguishable ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... dreary little entrance passage in which they stood, wainscoted solidly from floor to ceiling with wood that looked damp and black from age; the ceiling itself was indistinguishable in the twilight; the floor seemed composed of packed earth, three or four doors showed in the woodwork; that opposite to the one by which they had entered stood slightly ajar, and a smoky light shone from ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... hard, and the wind quivers through the closed canvas, and makes one feel at sea. All the talk of the camp outside is fused into a cheerful and indistinguishable murmur, pierced through at every moment by the wail of the hovering plover. Sometimes a face, black or white, peers through the entrance with some message. Since the light readily penetrates, though the rain cannot, the tent conveys a feeling ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... page and melted into something indistinguishable for a full minute or two afterward? Were there not looks, and looks, and looks? Or had she some misleading trick of vision in those days? Justin's dark, handsome profile rose before her: the level brows and fine lashes; the well-cut nose and lovable mouth—the Peabody mouth and chin, somewhat ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... in her mood of that night—happiness and sadness so close as at times to be indistinguishable—the whole of it making for a sense of the ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... taken—the protection of a British traffic—linked the War of 1812 with the conditions of colonial dependence of the United States, which was a matter of recent memory to men of both countries still in the vigor of life. The American found again exerted over his national commerce a control indistinguishable in practice from that of colonial days; from what port his ships should sail, whither they might go, what cargoes they might carry, under what rules be governed in their own ports, were dictated to him as absolutely, if not in as extensive detail, as before the War of Independence. The British Government ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the rurality of the Bocking side is indistinguishable from the urbanity of the Braintree side; it is just a little muddier. But there are dietetic differences. If you will present a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that is popular with the Braintree townsfolk, you discover one of these differences. ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable from the sensitive. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... and half-heard cry rose out of the obscurity. An indistinguishable object plunged past the schooner's stern, there was a crash to leeward as she rolled, and a man standing up in the boat clutched her rail. He was swung out of it as she rolled back again, but he crawled on to the rail with a rope in one hand, and after jamming it fast round something sprang ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... instantly divined that he was only an outpost or confederate, stationed to give the alarm. The same precaution had prevented each hearing the other, and the lesser height of the vacquero had rendered him indistinguishable as he preceded Clarence among the grain. As the young man made no doubt that the real trespasser was nearer the casa, along the line of willows, he wheeled to intercept him without alarming his sentry. Unfortunately, his horse answered the rope bridle clumsily, and splashed ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... we writers were sitting in the Tatars' restaurant. I mentioned that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir Semyonitch's grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it was necessary to collect a few roubles ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone. The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, and all his progeny, in other particulars indistinguishable from that familiar bird, bear the black marks distinctive of the ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... very little of love. Their desire runs too deep for mere speech. It is a desire made up of as much spiritual as carnal fire. It is fierce but steady in ecstacy and agony, indistinguishable the one from the other. Rezanov, man of the great world, it purifies. Concha it strengthens and makes indomitable. They will abide delay. They will endure in faith and hope—the faith and hope both dimmed by the vague and unshakable intuition or premonition ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... background, said something indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if you ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... this wholesale slaughter, the individual and his feelings are utterly lost. Only the army has a tale to tell. With events on such a scale, the hopes and fears, the strength and weakness, of man are alike indistinguishable. Amid the din and dust little but destruction can be discerned. But on the frontier, in the clear light of morning, when the mountain side is dotted with smoke puffs, and every ridge sparkles with bright sword blades, the spectator may observe ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... had, and left the room. The lamps were still unlit. The fire-light shone on the chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy had warmed the teapot and was in the act of pouring the water in to heat the cups when her husband, looking up from his chair across the hearth, made ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... Hindustanis and the Bengalis is complete; their languages are as near akin and as mutually unintelligible as English and German, yet in religion, in their notions on Government, in very much of their way of life, they are indistinguishable to the European. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... especially those of fortune, were generally known" to comprise a uniform for the maid-servant, she might succeed in closing the market of domestic service to the flaunting abigail whose audacious finery renders her to the outward eye indistinguishable ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... and vindictive ardour as one for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and where the mass of population, if not actually Russian, was almost indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with the Czar's dominions, and with the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... seemed to illumine it. As the little stream of pennies dripped into the tremulous, wrinkled old hand, it suddenly flashed into a smile. Then a stream of strange words issued from the old man's lips. They tripped over each other and made weird, indistinguishable combinations of sound, but the boys translated them by the light of that smile. How pleased the old fellow was! How he ...
— Three Young Knights • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... and emotion and the qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regulated declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes the "Golden Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable from the dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by the fire, and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of the beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people understand song. Modern singing would spoil them ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... been collecting edible birds' nests for a Celebes trader. Rajah Allang pretended to be the only trader in his country, and the penalty for the breach of the monopoly was death; but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery. His cruelty and rapacity had no other bounds than his cowardice, and he was afraid of the organised power of the Celebes men, only—till Jim came—he was not afraid enough to keep quiet. He struck at them through his subjects, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices—very low. Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered, and all that they now ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... separating, and from that moment did not take his eyes off the door until he heard the first sounds of its opening. As, however, it was always hard for Gibbie to stand still, and especially hard on a midnight so cold that his feet threatened to grow indistinguishable from the slabs of the pavement, he was driven, in order not to lose sight of it, to practise the art, already cultivated by him to a crab-like perfection, of running first backwards, then forwards with scarcely superior speed. But it was not long ere the much expected sound ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... went on, the progress and possibilities of the republics of Hispanic America came to be appreciated more and more by the world at large. Gradually people began to realize that the countries south of the United States were not merely an indistinguishable block on the map, to be referred to vaguely as "Central and South America" or as "Latin America." The reading public at least knew that these countries were quite different from one another, both ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... and naught else, for the glittering profile of the falls, visible now only aslant, the dark, cool recess beyond, that menacing motionless figure at the vanishing-point of the perspective, all blended together in an indistinguishable whirl as his senses reeled. He barely retained consciousness enough to throw up both his hands in token of complete submission. And then for a moment he knew no more. He was still leaning motionless against the wall ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... guavas we shook the ripe yellow treasures, scooping out the inside, all juicy and crimson, to make drinking cups of the rind; and there were trees that had surrendered their own lives to a conquering army of vigorous parasites which had clothed their skeletons with an unapproachable and indistinguishable beauty, and over trees and parasites the tender tendrils of great mauve morning glories trailed and wreathed themselves, and the strong, strangling stems of the ie wound themselves round the tall ohias, which supported their quaint yucca-like ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... old age of our civilisation the exactitude of the boundary which the Thames establishes is apparent in various survivals. Islands now joined to the one bank and indistinguishable from the rest of the shore are still annexed to the farther shore. Such a patch is to be found at Streatley, geographically in Berkshire, legally in Oxford; there is another opposite Staines, which Middlesex claims ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... the people of these craft met. "The smelting pot of the races," Stevenson called it; and this was always the city of his soul. There were black Gilbert Islanders, almost indistinguishable from negroes; lighter Kanakas from Hawaii or Samoa; Lascars in turbans; thickset Russian sailors, wild Chinese with unbraided hair; Italian fishermen in tam o' shanters, loud shirts and blue sashes; Greeks, Alaska Indians, little bay Spanish-Americans, together with men of all the European ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... of food filled the hall, mounted to the roof. The atmosphere was that of a bath, and the wines were heady. Already discussions had arisen. A mountaineer and a Galilean skiffsman had been dragged away, the one senseless, the other with features indistinguishable and masked in blood. It was a great festival, and the tetrarch was entertaining, as only he could, his friends, his enemies, ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... company on the flank, and formed parallel with the lake, along the shores of which we were to make our way, with the wounded men on litters between. Finally the word was passed along the lines to move forward. The night had meanwhile settled down to one of Stygean blackness. Objects a foot away were indistinguishable, and we had to feel rather than see our way. I fully realized the difficulties and dangers of our situation, but my anxiety was for the nineteen wounded men on the litters. I told Col. Bellinger that we must remain together and behind the litter bearers, that I would rather leave my body ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... apparently been placed at the very bottom of the baggage. The consequence was, that when it came to be opened, its several ingredients were found to have got loose, and fused together in a most hopeless way. Jam, and pickles, and Liebig's extract, and moist sugar were indistinguishable. The only thing seemed to be to attack the concoction en masse, without needless delay, and to that end Ranger had summoned the assistance of his friends and neighbours. Fisher major was unable to attribute ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... away into an indistinguishable murmur, the murmur into silence. Was it because of a fresh lull in the conversation about us? I hardly think so, for though the talk was presently resumed, she remained silent, not even giving the least sign of wishing ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... supplicatio was decreed, which was attended not only by the urban population, but by crowds from the country, and for three days the decemviri superintended a lectisternium on a grand scale, such as had never been seen in Rome before, in which twelve deities in pairs, Roman and Greek indistinguishable from each other, were seen reclining on cushions. If Wissowa interprets this rightly,[678] as I think he does, it marks a turning-point in the religious history of Rome. The old distinction between di indigetes and di novensiles now vanishes for ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... home-like. He had not even strength to remember that the old watch was last wound the day he began to lie here. The pulse of his brain beat so feebly that faces which came and went, nurse's, doctor's, orderly's, were indistinguishable, just one indifferent face; and the words spoken about him meant all the same thing, and that almost nothing. Those things he used to do, though far and faint, were more distinct—walking past the foot of the old steps at Harrow 'bill'—'Here, sir! Here, sir!'—wrapping ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... beasts were rolling, tumbling, and struggling in the open space below. With every lurch of the Ark they were swept across the floor in an indistinguishable mass. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... acceptable commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in the background—doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable world—telling something in indistinguishable German—I know ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Plan experiments to verify this point. What we call the "taste" of many things is due chiefly to odor. Therefore in experiments with taste, the nostrils should be stopped up with cotton. It will be found, for example, that quinine and coffee are indistinguishable if their odors be eliminated by stopping the nose. The student should compare the taste of many substances put into the mouth with the nostrils open with the taste of the same substances with ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... arose beneath the carriage. The horses, which had been flying before, excited by the noise, put down their heads and tore blindly forward. The vehicle rocked and swayed, and the avenue and its occupants swept by in an indistinguishable blur. ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... surrender to exhaustion. The rhythmic beat of the quickstep leaped off into great distances; the champing and snorting of horses in the dressing-tent died away as if by magic; the subdued voices of the men and women who waited their turn to bound into the merry ring faded into indistinguishable whispers; the crack of the ring master's whip and the responsive yelp of the clown trailed off into silence. His head fell back, his body relaxed, and he slipped off into ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... turned and looked out on the garden, full of luxuriant blossom, the colours of which were gradually merging into indistinguishable masses under the darkening grey of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... best! But you scarcely quote your father as among the average, do you?—The people whom you'll meet on Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye on the Church, the other ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a cheque for a thousand guineas. This alone guarantees for all intelligent readers a palpitating interest in every line of it. Among the thousands of MSS. which reached us—many of them coming in carts early in the morning, and moving in a dense phalanx, indistinguishable from the Covent Garden Market waggons; others pouring down our coal-chute during the working hours of the day; and others again being slipped surreptitiously into our letter-box by pale, timid girls, scarcely more than children, after nightfall (in fact many of them came in their night-gowns),—this ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... conceptions unknown to the ancients,[2206] both being of profound import and of infinite reach. Through them, like a bud separated from its stem and taking root apart, the individual has separated himself from the primitive body, clan, family, caste or city in which he has lived indistinguishable and lost in the crowd; he has ceased to be an organ and appendage; he has become a personality.—The first of these concepts is of Christian origin the second of feudal origin; both, following each other and conjoined, measure the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... or nurse lepers ... or she may become a famous courtesan.... I do not mean it cruelly. But, in the mystic, the spiritual, the intellectual and the physical seem to be interchangeable, and become gradually indistinguishable." ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... changed and dulled from the vivid devotee of old, who had coloured up all over his pale face at the sight of a Bow rose-bowl. He coloured indeed now, when Lord Evelyn said "Like it?"—coloured and murmured indistinguishable comments into his collar. He coloured most when Lord Evelyn said, as he frequently did, "Your brother's find. A delicious little man in some sotto-portico or other—quite ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... enjoyments that were gone forever. A creature of antique healthfulness had vanished from the earth; and, in his stead, there was only one other morbid and remorseful man, among millions that were cast in the same indistinguishable mould. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the trees and the bracken. Then all at once, like the puzzle in a picture, I saw her plainly. She was standing perfectly motionless, her head lowered, and in such a peculiar clump of bushes and ferns that she was all but indistinguishable. It was wonderful, the perfection with which her instinct had led ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... things did not last, for the trail became to her indistinguishable the moment the swamp was passed, and at last, during a very dark wet day, she lost herself as well as the trail. At evening of the same day she climbed into a tree. Opening out her bundle of dried meat, she began to eat and bemoan her fate. Tears were in her eyes, ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... dark, but it came to me that here were no trees, no verdure of any kind. Its floor was strewn with boulders, fantastically shaped, almost indistinguishable in the fast ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Law—three very bad things. Oo, how the rain falls! The mist is quite low on the hill. The birds are twittering to each other about the indifferent season. O, here's a gem for you. An old godly woman predicted the end of the world, because the seasons were becoming indistinguishable; my cousin Dora objected that last winter had been pretty well marked. "Yes, my dear," replied the soothsayeress; "but I think you'll find the summer will be rather co-amplicated."—Ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gave a forlorn and indistinguishable look to everything. A spark of ruddy light glowed deep in the valley. The rocking outlines of the hills were lost in rushing darkness. At his back sounded the pathetic clatter of a dead spruce against its living neighbor, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... final decision in doubtful matters. In a very considerable number of instances a close examination of the photographs has suggested the presence of faint lines of color on glyphs or figures, which was entirely indistinguishable in both of the printed editions, and which was yet in every case confirmed, although sometimes with difficulty, by the examination ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... wheels at each recoil and heaved the heavy gun back to its place. There were no commands; in that awful environment of whooping shot, exploding shells, shrieking fragments of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none could have been heard. Officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked together—each while he lasted—governed by the eye. When the gun was sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed and fired. The colonel observed something new to his military experience—something horrible and unnatural: the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... of thistles that grew by the red roadside and rustle their purple bloom; then on the cliff, just touching the blue sea with the slightest ripple, and losing themselves where sky and ocean met in indistinguishable azure fold. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... were in the middle of the house, and around them swept the great curve of boxes at which Undine had so often looked up in the remote Stentorian days. Then all had been one indistinguishable glitter, now the scene was full of familiar details: the house was thronged with people she knew, and every box seemed to contain a parcel of her past. At first she had shrunk from recognition; but gradually, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... time, and before they reached the sinking cloud bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that were gathering about the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensable for pure foolishness). What surprises await one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's being well able to transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... so many Faces, they came and went so constantly, like bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia most of them seemed indistinguishable one from another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded with staring eyes and slitted by apertures which automatically and alternately gaped to receive gobbets of food and goblets of drink and closed to gulp them down. A man needed ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... words that the copy of Tacitus which Bracciolini received in October 1427 from his friend Niccoli so very badly written in Lombard letters as to be for the most part indistinguishable, could not have been for his own reading, nor for his making a copy of it as he was in the habit of doing with the ancient classics, but from his saying that it could not be correctly read by a transcriber, it must have been ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... have been darker than the darkest part of the trunks, and both on the ground and building would have been defined and conspicuous; while the trunks themselves would have been faint, confused, and indistinguishable, in their illumined parts, from the grass or distance. So in Poussin's Phocion, the shadow of the stick on the stone in the right-hand corner, is shaded off and lost, while you see the stick plain all the way. In nature's sunlight it would have been ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... will find in the accompanying dispatch case. It is of the regular form, as issued by this Chancellery, and is sealed with the Chancellery seal, or with a very exact counterfeit of it. However, it has been signed, as Chancellor of Prussia, with a signature indistinguishable from that of the Baron Stein, who is the present Prussian Minister of Agriculture. Baron Stein was shown the signature, with the rest of the letter covered, and without hesitation acknowledged it for his own writing. However, when the letter was uncovered and shown ...
— He Walked Around the Horses • Henry Beam Piper
... conditional or unconditional. In brief, if the Infinite and Absolute are wholly incomprehensible, they are not distinguishable; but if they are distinguishable, they are not wholly incomprehensible. If they are indistinguishable, they are to us identical; and identity precludes contradiction. But if they are distinguishable, distinction is made by difference, which involves positive cognition; hence one, at least, must be conceivable. It follows, therefore, by ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... two characteristics of philosophical propositions by saying that philosophy is the science of the possible. But this statement unexplained is liable to be misleading, since it may be thought that the possible is something other than the general, whereas in fact the two are indistinguishable. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... by the table and his embrace of the claret. Clear ideas of satisfaction had left him and resolved to a boiling geysir of indistinguishable transports. He bubbled, and waggled, and nodded amicably to nothing, and successfully, though not without effort, preserved his uppermost member from the seductions of the nymph, Gravitation, who was on the look-out for his whole ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fish in a clear pond crowd to the hand that offers them food. Their eyes sparkled with celestial joy; and the more they thought of their joy, the brighter they grew; till one of them who addressed the poet became indistinguishable for excess of splendour. It was the soul of the Emperor Justinian. Justinian told him the whole story of the Roman empire up to his time; and then gave an account of one of his associates in bliss, Romeo, who had been minister to Raymond Beranger, Count of Provence. Four daughters had ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... ruinous butt; you whoreson indistinguishable cur] Patroclos reproaches Thersites with deformity, with having one ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... coaxed him to sit down, but the most he would concede was to drop his voice as he continued: "You know, gentlemen, and they know, that any true man would as soon be slapped in the face and spit upon as to be laughed at.... No, I—" His words became indistinguishable. ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... quickly untying it, she sprung into the little skiff, and seizing the oars, with a vigorous stroke the little shell shot rapidly out into the shimmering water, Daisy never once pausing in her mad, impetuous flight until the dim line of the shore was almost indistinguishable from the blue arching dome of the horizon. "There," she cried, flushed and excited, leaning on the oars; "no one could possibly think of searching ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... below the tea-house was still open, and the invariable graphophone was grinding out some indistinguishable tune. When the two passed up the dark stairway an attendant slipped out of the public room, walked to the foot of the stairs, and observed the two mounting figures. When the sailor opened the door to as miserable a room as the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... uses an alphabet which fits it very badly. Many letters have to do duty for the expression of several sounds, and sometimes several of them have nearly or quite the same sound. For example, there are a number of distinct sounds of a, i, and o while g is sometimes indistinguishable from j and c from k. This is not always a matter of modification of sounds by the sounds of other letters combined with them. One has to learn how to pronounce cough, dough, enough, and plough, the ough having four distinct sounds in these four words. Each one of these sounds, by ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... where she "really" was. By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn't cry out, her eyes swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through the square opening beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... closely approached a quarry appears a cliff. Stone got out in squares, or cut down straight, leaves an artificial wall; these rocks cannot be made to look artificial, and if painted a quarry would be certainly quite indistinguishable from a natural precipice. Entering a little town (Dulverton) the road is jammed tight between cottages: so narrow is the lane that foot passengers huddle up in doorways to avoid the touch of the wheels, and the windows of the houses are protected by ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... reach the rarefied atmosphere of those peaks where there exists an exquisitive difference between Frege and Peano, or between Sassetta's earlier and later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of appeal, and when they are starving and afraid, indistinguishable from any other starving and frightened person. No wonder that the magazines with the large circulations prefer the face of a pretty girl to any other trade mark, a face, pretty enough to be alluring, but innocent enough to be acceptable. For the "psychic level" ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... went out with his hammer in the interest of his science. He struck a rock; and there in the seam lay the form of a fern—every leaf, every fibre, the most delicate traceries of the leaves. It was the fern which ages since grew and dropped into the indistinguishable mass of vegetation. It perished; but its memorial was preserved, and to-day ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... almost indistinguishable trap-door, nearly covered with straw, in front of one of the houses. "There!" she says. Henriette presses the newcomer to accompany her. "Sorry, I haven't a minute!" negatives the other, hastening off in spite of Henriette's efforts to ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... he smiled on it with a smile of infinite tenderness. "Before I begin on this subject I want to warn you once more that if any man as much as stamps upon the floor, or moves about except on tip-toe this substance will explode and will lay London from here to Charing Cross in one mass of indistinguishable ruins. I have spent ten years of my life in completing this invention. And these pills, worth a million a box, will cure all ills to which the flesh ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... forward by sapping. In some places obstacles have been constructed by both sides so close together that some wag suggested that each side provide working parties to perform this fatigue duty alternately, inasmuch as the work of the enemy is now almost indistinguishable from ours, and serves the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... she cannot develop the right to govern, nor can she develop government as a fact, to say nothing of its right, for government, whether we speak of it as fact or as authority, is distinct from that which is governed; but natural developments are nature, and indistinguishable from her. The governor and the governed, the restrainer and the restrained, can never as such be identical. Self-government, taken strictly, is a contradiction in terms. When an individual is said to govern himself, he is never understood to govern himself in the sense in which he is governed. ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... driveway a touring-car approached, and though it limped on a flat tire, it approached at reckless speed. The two men in the front seat were white with dust; their faces, masked by automobile glasses, were indistinguishable. As though preparing for an immediate exit, the car swung in a circle until its nose pointed down the driveway up which it had just come. Raising his silk mask the one beside the driver shouted at Judge Van ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... admitted; and the study of marbles will demonstrate this truth, that the calcareous relics of organised bodies are changed, in the consolidating operations of the globe, in every degree, from the smallest alteration to the greatest, when they become indistinguishable any farther to ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... hand, others far away as the Sunset Strip and Hollywoodland. These smaller bodies were vigorously attacked as soon as discovered but of course they had in every case made progress too great to be countered, for they were at first naturally indistinguishable from ordinary devilgrass and by the time their true character was determined so rapid was their growth they were already beyond all ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... comes slowly on, merging reed and pasture and gliding stream in one indistinguishable shade; the trees stand out black against the sunset, thickening to an emerald green. A star comes out over the dark hill, the lights begin to peep out in the windows of the clustering town as we draw nearer. As we glide beneath the dark ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... copestone of the stone parapet, his back against a stone pilaster; his attitude not comfortable, but rigid, and his silence not comfortable, either, but heavy. However, to the eyes of his mother and his aunt, who occupied wicker chairs at a little distance, he was almost indistinguishable except for the stiff white shield of his ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... he did not look back. He followed Johnny to the mouth of the cleft and stood there looking after him with a long face until Johnny disappeared into a slight depression, loped out again and presently became, to the aviator's eyes, an indistinguishable, wavering object against the sky line. Whereupon Bland gazed no more, but went thoughtfully back to ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... its directors are connected and joined in interest. The ground of unrest and uneasiness, in short, on the part of the public at large, is the growing knowledge that many large undertakings are interlaced with one another, are indistinguishable from ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... as if her prayer was to be answered while still on her lips. Before the vehicle had got so far away as to be indistinguishable from other vehicles she saw it stop. It stopped and turned. She held her breath. Slowly, very slowly, it began to creep up the gentle slope again. She supposed it must be the treacherous ground that ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... for whose purpose fifty thousand men lay dead or wounded on that fatal hill, in that dreadful valley. Happy the fate of those who were dead—horrible the condition of those who were wounded. English, Prussians, Germans, Bavarians, Hollanders, French, trampled together in indistinguishable masses. Horses, guns, weapons, equipment—everything in hopeless confusion. Every horror, every anguish, every agony was there—incense burned about the altar ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... deserted cabins, habitations built by the gold-diggers of other days. Carefully he followed the all but indistinguishable sled tracks ahead of him until they swerved abruptly in toward the bank. Here he paused, pulled a mitten, and, moistening a finger, held it up to test the wind. What movement there was to the air seemed to satisfy him, for, step by step, he mounted ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... instead of bustling around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt sat creakily back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun. He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure cheeks. A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled him. While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams. He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... in 2Chronicles xxxiii. 19. Within this sphere, wherein all Judaism moves, Chronicles also has had its rise. Thus whether one says Chromcles or Midrash of the Book of Kings is on the whole a matter of perfect indifference; they are children of the same mother, and indistinguishable in spirit and language, while on the other hand the portions which have been retained verbatim from the canonical Book of Kings at once betray themselves in ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... when first they distinctly appear on the scene of history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to be the most ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... coursing past, their guards, now halted upon its bank, have drawn their horses' heads together, and carry on a conversation. It seems in a strange tongue; but of this the captives cannot be sure, for it is in low tone—almost a whisper—the words indistinguishable amid the rush of the river's current. If heard, it is not likely they would understand. The two men are Indians, and will talk in the Indian tongue. For this same reason they need have no fear of freely conversing with one another, since the savages ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... not give them what they asked for; and then, above all, Mumbo Jumbo, the grand fetish master, who lived somewhere in the woods, and who used to come out every now and then with his fetish companions; a monstrous figure, all wound round with leaves and branches, so as to be quite indistinguishable, and, seating himself on the high seat in the villages, receive homage from the people, and also gifts and offerings, the most valuable of which were pretty damsels, and then betake himself back again, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... this place may be popularly stated thus: According to the scholastic philosophy every natural body has two components—the one its "matter" (materia prima), the other its "substantial form" (forma substantialis). Of these the matter is everywhere the same, the matter of one body being indistinguishable from the matter of any other body. That which differentiates any one natural body from all others is its substantial form, which inheres in the matter of that body, as the human soul inheres in the matter of the frame of man, and is the source of all the activities and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... have I fought, And for the native liberty of faith Have bled and suffered bonds. Of this be certain: Time, as he courses onward, still unrolls The volume of concealment. In the future, As in the optician's glassy cylinder, The indistinguishable blots and colours Of the dim past collect and shape themselves, Upstarting in their own completed image To scare or to reward. I sought the guilty, And what I sought I found: but ere the spear Flew from my hand, there rose an angel form Betwixt me and my aim. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... themselves? Can murders and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And could paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by which the goodness was perceived? Outward goods and evils seem practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in getting moral judgments made about them. But then the moral judgments seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments for their production. This is subjectivism. Every one must ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... cartridges gone. Twenty-one left. They rush in this manner—at first the circle, rapid beyond expression, one figure succeeding the other so swiftly that the dizzied vision loses count and instead of seven of them there appear to be seventy. Then suddenly, on some indistinguishable signal, they contract this circle, and through the jets of powder-smoke Idaho and I see them whirling past our rifle-sights not one hundred yards away. Then their fire suddenly slackens, the smoke drifts by, and we see them in the distance again, moving about ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... single barbette-tower freighter, number indistinguishable, up-ended, and fore-tank pierced after collision, passed 300-ft. level Q P. as Dec. 15th. Watched to water ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... ordinary comprehension, [Greek: ho-s philosophias ousaes megistaes monsikaes]. Both poetry and philosophy deal in abstractions, only in both the abstractions must be true, i.e. must be true general statements of ideas found in nature; when this is the case poetry and philosophy are indistinguishable, except by mere external and conventional features. Under which heading are we to class, for example, Plato's Republic? Or the Upanishads? or the book of Job? They are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who have even partially understood them will feel ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight |
