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Limbo   /lˈɪmboʊ/   Listen
Limbo

noun
1.
The state of being disregarded or forgotten.  Synonym: oblivion.
2.
An imaginary place for lost or neglected things.
3.
(theology) in Roman Catholicism, the place of unbaptized but innocent or righteous souls (such as infants and virtuous individuals).



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"Limbo" Quotes from Famous Books



... rid of Leocadia, and made up his mind to lay her in the street, insensible as she was. He had set to work with that intention, when she came to herself, saying, "Where am I? Woe is me! What darkness is this? Am I in the limbo of my innocence, or the hell of my sins? Who touches me? Am I in bed? Mother! dear father! do you hear me? Alas, too well I perceive that you cannot hear me, and that I am in the hands of enemies. Well would it be for me if this darkness were to last for ever, and my eyes were never ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Catalonia, republican, fiery, democratic, and independent; on the other, Navarre, more priest-ridden than Rome herself, with every man a Carlist and every woman that which her confessor told her to be. In the south, Andalusia only asked to be left alone to go her own sunny, indifferent way to the limbo of the great nations. Which way should Aragon turn? In truth, the men of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... divine order. That all this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my "place," to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... beseech you by all those whom you have left behind you, though they are not here, by your wife, by the father who brought you up when you were a child, and by Telemachus who is the one hope of your house, do what I shall now ask you. I know that when you leave this limbo you will again hold your ship for the Aeaean island. Do not go thence leaving me unwaked and unburied behind you, or I may bring heaven's anger upon you; but burn me with whatever armour I have, build a barrow for me on the sea shore, that may tell people ...
— The Odyssey • Homer

... the afternoon—she had so much to do, being just up for the day, that she couldn't be sure—it would be all right); and somehow even before she mentioned Merrimac Avenue (they had come all the way from there) my imagination had associated her with that indefinite social limbo known to the properly-constituted Boston mind as the South End—a nebulous region which condenses here and there into a pretty face, in which the daughters are an "improvement" on the mothers and are sometimes acquainted with gentlemen more gloriously ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James

... the devious air: Then might ye see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost And fluttered into rags; then reliques, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds: All these, upwhirled aloft, Fly o'er the backside of the world far off Into a Limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after; now unpeopled, and untrod. All this dark globe the Fiend found as he passed, And long he wandered, till at last a gleam Of dawning light turned thither-ward in ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... out that I was the man who used to carry their booty away, sometimes to quiet places on the coast, and sometimes across to Holland, and the first time I dropped anchor in the Pool I should find myself seized and thrown into limbo. No, lad; I must carry out my agreement—which is that I am not to land you in England, but that I am to take you across to Holland or elsewhere—the elsewhere meaning that if you fall overboard by the way there will be no complaints as to the breach of the agreement. That is, in fact, what they ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... well as animal spirits are affected by certain well-known conditions of age and health. In spite of the 'coelum non animum mutant' of Horace, few men fail to experience how different is the range of spirits in the limbo-like atmosphere of a London winter and beneath the glories of an Italian sky or in the keen bracing atmosphere of the mountain side, and it is equally apparent how differently we judge the world when we are jaded by a long spell of excessive work or refreshed after a night of tranquil ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... the dreadfull passion 280 Was overpast, and manhood well awake, Yet musing at the straunge occasion, And doubting much his sence, he thus bespake; What voyce of damned Ghost from Limbo lake,[*] Or guilefull spright wandring in empty aire, 285 Both which fraile men do oftentimes mistake, Sends to my doubtfull eares these speaches rare, And ruefull plaints, me bidding guiltlesse ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... enough," said old Bob, "and, provided we keep their arms lashed behind their backs, and their legs in limbo, they'll not escape from where I'll ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston

... are entitled to some compensation. Why, sir, seeing that serious politicians do not propose to suppress licences for the sale of poisons without giving compensations, surely we, who have done much and suffered much, ought not to be put into limbo without some recognition of our services. I remain, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... daughter of Tiresias, among the sorcerers. See Hell Canto XX. Vellutello endeavours, rather awkwardly, to reconcile the inconsistency, by observing, that although she was placed there as a sinner, yet, as one of famous memory, she had also a place among the worthies in Limbo. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... subdued Titan rebels had been set to ornament a palace for Jove, they would have brought in some such tremendous work: or suppose that Michael descended to the Shades, and brought up this picture out of the halls of Limbo. I like a thousand and a thousand times better to think of Raphael's loving spirit. As he looked at women and children, his beautiful face must have shone like sunshine: his kind hand must have caressed the sweet figures as he formed them. If I protest ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... London, it was not with an army of white cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed him a little, not because he thought it grand or even terrible, but because it bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even hell; it was Limbo. He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned that wonderful corner of Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation stared into the very heart of her. The emptiness and loneliness overpowered her. Hardly aware of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions—consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated citizens—was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... mathematician and a good anatomist, became the orthodox view, and had an enduring influence. All imitation of the birds by man, and further, all schemes of navigating the air in a machine dynamically supported, seemed, by Borelli's argument, to have been thrust back into the limbo of vanities. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... Limbo" in S. Lorenzo at Florence, and the detestable picture of "Time, Beauty, Love, and Folly," ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... metallic alloys, the necessity of roofing larger spaces, the demand for a sedentary amusement, for music to dance to in new social gatherings—any such humble reason, besides many others, can cause one art to issue more particularly out of the limbo of the undeveloped, or out of the lumber-room of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... day I paid my respects to Master Holbrook, after a week's absence, my finger is still in limbo as you may see by the writeing. I have not paid my compliments to Madam Smith,[44] for, altho' I can drive the goos quill a bit, I cannot so well manage the needle. So I will lay my hand to the distaff, as the virtuous woman did of old—Yesterday was very bad weather, neither aunt, nor ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... apart and said to him "Know thou, O Wazir, that thou and thou only west the cause of all this that hath come to pass between me and my son by the advice thou west pleased to devise; and so what dost thou counsel me to do now?" Answered he, "O King, leave thy son in limbo for the space of fifteen days: then summon him to thy presence and bid him wed; and assuredly he shall not gainsay thee again."—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... Renwick had at last assured himself that his first theory was tenable, for Selim had confirmed it. A hundred conjectures flashed into the Englishman's mind as he trudged onward, to be one by one dismissed and relegated to the limbo of uncertainty. But assuming that Selim had told the truth, Renwick had found the trail, and would follow wherever it might lead him, to ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... at a speed of from seven to nine knots, with torpedoes ready for use in the tubes and guns of effective caliber mounted on deck. It has, indeed, been asserted that the airplane and the submarine have relegated the battleship to the limbo of desuetude: but as to that the continued control of the seas by Great Britain with her immense battle-fleet, supplemented by our tremendous engines of war, certainly argues for no such theory. What ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... locks which, to his eye, called inarticulately for the tools of his trade, his undulating monologue welled forth until Coleridge might have envied him. Helwyse heard the sound, but let the words go by to that unknown limbo whither all sounds, good or bad, have been flying ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... levelled against the Greek Church is that of being non-missionary; and the charge which is so utterly untrue, is deemed sufficient to relegate her to the limbo of the effete and worthless. The truth is, that the missionary zeal, and activity of that Church, are among the most outstanding features of her history; and when we consider the terrible odds against which she has had to contend, both ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various

... and rational enough to Englishmen, though it may be unintelligible to strangers. The upshot on the present occasion was that the Ministers remained in their places and that Mr. Monk's bill, though it had received the substantial honour of a second reading, passed away for the present into the limbo of abortive legislation. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... is punished in the five upper circles; bestiality and malice in the City of Dis, lower Hell. More particularly stated, Dante's scheme of punishment in the underworld, not considering the vestibule of Hell, where neutrals are confined, is as follows: 1, Limbo; 2, The Circle of Lust; 3, Gluttony; 4, Avarice and Prodigality; 5, Anger, Rage and Fury; 6, Unbelief and Heresy; 7, Violence; 8, Fraud; ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... right of resistance to a bad king is precisely the same, on grounds of either logic or Scripture, as advocating the right of adultery toward a bad husband. This is not even good fooling; and, its local use past and no longer buoyed by personal liking for the author, the book sinks back into the limbo of partisan polemics with many worse ones and perhaps some better ones, dragging its real excellences ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Adam's heritage, these can no more be damned than they can be saved. I can never believe that the Centaur Cheiron, who was wiser than men are, is suffering eternal torments in the belly of Leviathan. A traveller who penetrated once into Limbo, relates how he saw him seated in a grassy spot and conversing with Rhipheus, the most righteous man of all the Trojans. Others indeed affirm that Holy Paradise itself has been opened to admit Rhipheus of Troy. Any way the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... sometimes picked up as much as two pounds a-day, for weeks running; as it is, I averages from fifteen shillings to a pound. Now, as you helped me away from that land shark, who would soon have found out that I had two legs, and have put me into limbo as an impostor, I will teach you to arn your livelihood after my fashion. You shall work with me until you are fit to start alone, and then there's plenty of room in England for both of us; but mind, never tell any one what you pick up, or every mumper in the island will put on a suit of ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... hearts before its sacred flame; that halcyon land, the Ultima Thule of our fond imaginings, wherein true freedom reigns; wherein the legalized tyranny of the chartered libertines of a so-called learned profession shall be finally relegated, in common cause to the limbo of a sordid and degraded past. For these are they who seek to maintain a strangle-hold on science, who paralyze the arm of individual research and, even in this advancing age, still block the path of progress and of peace, of universal freedom and equality of intellect, to all ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... cry broke from within; and Richard, turning at the voice, beheld the blind man sitting up on his pallet with arms outstretched. "My child!—My Father! hast thou brought her to visit me in limbo?" he cried. ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of things, to point a warning, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... despair But long sighs Of pitiful wind in the fir-plantations. Poor little soul! He cannot come. Perchance on a night when trees were tost, The Changeling rode with his cavalcade Among the clouds, that were tossing too, And made the little soul afraid. They hunted him madly, the howling crew, Into the Limbo of the lost, Into the Limbo of the others Who wander crying and ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various

... mattered to Dan Fowler or not, and now he knew, and was quite satisfied with the knowledge) and the ever-present cigarette between thin, sensitive fingers. Dan clapped him on the shoulder, and shot a black look at his daughter, relegating her to an indescribable Fowler limbo, which was where she belonged, and would reside until Dan got excited and forgot how she'd betrayed him to Dr. Moss, which would take about ten or fifteen minutes all told. Jean Fowler knew her father far too well to worry about it, and ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse

... tail were long ago gone to that undiscovered limbo where all things lost, broken, vanished, and destroyed; things that lose themselves—for servants are too honest to steal; things that break themselves—for servants are too careful to break; find an ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... soul to examine or even touch it. I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the—not unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems there was some nonsense abroad in the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side. It is only because they don't readily lend themselves to the comprehension of our material nature, that we try to scoff them into the limbo of absurdity and imposture." ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... nothing to it. And the sweet Brigg dream that had dawned on the last night of the old year, dream of a rich "toff" in love with Cuckoo and winding her up to gilded circles, in which the fall of night set gay ladies bareheaded, and scattered all feathered hats to limbo, died childless and leaving no legacies. Certainly, Cuckoo was not making money on the quiet enough in one night to keep her as seven or fourteen nights would formerly have supplied. Mrs. Brigg questioned, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... and which gave me information, at once clear, precise, and attractive, concerning the streets and edifices of Palma. The round, solid head, earnest eyes, and abstracted air of the painter came forth distinct from the limbo of things overlaid but never lost, and went with me through the checkered blaze and gloom of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it, and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare say, something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo of the factitious,—especially when the thing must be done at odd times, in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... are held, in common with others of his time, in regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palaeontology is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo—so densely ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... aloud, he was only waiting to get it off his hands, and then to let fly. Evie's marriage was its last appearance in public. As soon as a tenant was found, it became a house for which he never had had much use, and had less now, and, like Howards End, faded into Limbo. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... curious arrangement is adopted with respect to the living: Persons of any public note may send their busts, while living, to the Val Halla, where they are deposited in a certain chamber, a kind of marble purgatory or limbo. When they die, a jury is to sit upon them, and if they are fortunate enough to have a verdict in their favour, they take their place amongst these marble immortals. As the process does not occur until the parties are beyond the reach ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... produced by the exposure of boiler surfaces to the open atmosphere. Such a practice can be neither supported by experience nor justified by analogy; and it is to be hoped that it may before long be consigned to the limbo of antiquated absurdities and be satisfactorily forgotten. Seeing that it cannot with any show of reason be affirmed that the boiler covering materials in present use possess the requirements necessary to recommend them; the question arises ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... pipe was by this time keeping pace with that of his new friend. "The case is as clear as mud. Here's how it is. Gascoyne is in limbo; well, we are out of limbo. Good. Then, all we've got for to do is to break into limbo and shove Gascoyne out of limbo, and help him to escape. It's all square, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... know that, either." The voice paused, and went on. "Look, I know how ridiculous this must sound. Believe me, I'm in some sort of limbo. I don't know how I got here or who I am, but I want desperately to get ...
— Warm • Robert Sheckley

... pug nose at that, my children. When it grew greasy he would chalk it deliberately. Once he made a break of two hundred and forty-five. A champion! The Cafe Cordier itself? Swept long ago into the limbo of dear immemorable dissolute things. Then there was the Cafe du Bas-Rhin on the Boul' Mich' where Marie la Democrate drank fifty-five bocks in an evening against Helene la Severe who drank fifty-three. Where are such women now, O generation of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and less self-conscious ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... studies the signs of the times, the emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the attitude of claimant to the throne of the world of thought, from the limbo of hated and, as many hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event of the nineteenth century. But the most effective weapons of the modern champions of Evolution were fabricated by Darwin; and ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley

... it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them the springs of His compassion. It is not my business to think about it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's people say: "Requiem aeternam ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... occasion to doubt of his dominant impression of Lightmark's character, these doubts were never of long duration; and he would dismiss them, barely entertained, even as a sort of disloyalty, to the limbo of stillborn fancies. And so now, with his accustomed generosity, he speedily flung himself into the breach, and did his best to drive the conversation into impersonal and presumably safer channels. He touched on the prospects ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... incidents of that story. I shall not attempt to describe the presence of a good number of horses, the throwing of lots by the servants of the court for the raiment of Christ, the release of the Holy Fathers from limbo, and all the other clever inventions which would be most excellent in a modern master and are remarkable in an ancient one. Here he occupies the entire wall and carefully makes the different scenes, one above the other, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... existence, and then to pass away. The Federalists, the National Republicans, the Antimasons, the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings have each appeared, flourished for a short time, and then passed to the limbo of factions lost to earth. This discipline of the Democracy has not been without its uses, and the country occasionally has profited from it; but now it is to be abused, through application to the service of the Great Anarch at Richmond. The Rebel power, which our fleets and armies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... laughing, as did all round him, "Thou art a cunning rogue enough, whoever thou art. Go into limbo, and behave ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... the old granny whom you stole me from," replied the boy. "Also, to have the satisfaction of puttin' you in limbo; although I did not expect to ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... conventional term, invented to facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking. His mental process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original values, and is over without reaching any concrete image. Therefore the knowledge ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell. A devil in an everlasting garment hath him; One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel; A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough; 35 A wolf, nay, worse; a fellow all in buff; A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... Saucelito, and obtained the privilege of leaving his crew on board as "prisoners" until he was ready to return to sea. Then, discharging his passengers and getting coal out of some of the ships which had arrived, he retook his crew out of limbo and carried the first regular mail back to Panama early in April. In regular order arrived the third steamer, the Panama; and, as the vessels were arriving with coal, The California was enabled to hire a crew and get off. From that time ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... come to a natural death. Somewhat more numerous are those which are overfed with praise, and die of the surfeit. Brisk reputations, indeed, are like bottled twopenny, or pop "they sparkle, are exhaled, and fly"—not to heaven, but to the Limbo. To live among books, is in this respect like living among the tombs; you have in them speaking remembrancers of mortality. ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... preface, lest we might seem cold to the very remarkable merits of "Sir Rohan's Ghost," if we treated it as a book worth finding fault with, instead of condemning it to the indifferent limbo of general eulogy. It is our deliberate judgment that no first volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this. There are passages in it where imagination and language combine in the most artistic completeness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... Catholic side of the controversy. The ugly traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth are brought into the foreground and made ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... what is called being happy," he used to say to himself. And being happy gave him the impression of a limbo; he felt as though his old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... unpleasant memories into limbo; he was like a fresh northwest wind—he revived everyone. He made Doris think of David Martin as she first knew him—and naturally Doris adored Cameron. She came near praying that Nancy might, after a fashion, pay her debts for her. But no! she would not influence Nancy—she must ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... Dusenberry and Dunn may be seen at times watching about the wharves, and again in low grog-shops—then pimping about the "Dutch beer-shops and corner-shops"—picking up, here and there, a hopeful-looking nigger, whom they drag off to limbo, or extort a bribe to let him go. Again, they act as monitors over the Dutch corner-shops, the keepers of which pay them large sums to save themselves the heavy license fine and the information docket. When they ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... stated as to prove itself. Greater emphasis has been placed upon environment as a factor in ethnic development, and what has been called "the vulgar theory of race," as accounting for progress and culture, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded dogmas. One of the most perspicuous and forceful presentations of these modern conclusions of anthropology is found in the volume above quoted, a book which owes its origin to a ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... of the High North, you who have known it; You in whose hearts its splendors have abode; Can you renounce it, can you disown it? Can you forget it, its glory and its goad? Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it? Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot; Only remain the guerdon and gain of it; Zest of the foray, and ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... testify that they were extremely affable and disposed to make their prisoners as comfortable as possible. Still, in the close, stifling weather, to be locked up within the narrow circuit of a dungeon was limbo. The pair wore their own clothes, Travers still retaining a navy-jacket with brass buttons engraved with the initials of some yacht club, and did not complain of having been subjected to indignities. While I was with them the shadow of a face darkened the window; it was a Carlist prisoner who had ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power—the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... Wilhelmina's, English Amelia's and I know not how many private hearts, and distracting with vain terrors and hopes the general soul of Europe for five-and-twenty years, fell at once into dust and vapor, and went wholly towards limbo on the storm-winds, doing nothing for or against any mortal. Friedrich Wilhelm's 80,000 well-drilled troops remained very actual with their firelocks and iron ramrods, and did a thing or two, there being a Captain over them. Friedrich Wilhelm's Directorium, well-drilled ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... logical, must come to terms with facts, or vanish into the limbo of chimeras. The power of the Hildebrandine Church was subject to serious limitations. On certain questions of importance the national hierarchies were inclined to side with the State against the Pope; and thus, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... years of tutelage seemed to him to be spoken. Nursery discipline, the restraints and prohibitions—in their respective degrees—of preparatory school, of Harchester, of Oxford; and, above all and through all, the control and admonitions of his father, the Archdeacon, fell away from him into the limbo of things done with, outworn ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... the poet Dante, those who had betrayed country, freedom, were visited by the most awful sufferings, pursued by the most vengeful fiends, and pushed to the most dire extremity of woe. Among the pale, haunted, shrieking shades flitting through that limbo of horrors, they were conspicuous in punishment. And if remorse is in reality the undying worm, the quenchless fire of that future state which recompenses for the deeds of this, surely the traitor to this good, free Government will be made to experience ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... of the Arian, any more than one thinks of those theories made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of India. Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human character, and which are common to all religions. Against these it is necessary to keep constant ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... Man is punished for original sin in the children's limbo, where there is no pain of sense as we shall state further on (II-II, Q. 69, A. 6): whereas men are punished in hell for no other than mortal sin. Therefore there will be no place where a man can be punished for venial sin with ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... of November slid day by day into the limbo of the past. The rains washed the land unceasingly. Gray veilings of mist and cloud draped the mountain slopes. As drab a shade colored Stella Fyfe's daily outlook. She was alone a great deal. Even when they were together, she and her husband, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... so?" Webb stared seriously. "That would be bad, wouldn't it—that is, if the officers ketched 'im an' had enough proof agin 'im to put 'im in limbo." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century, lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and powder that have simpered out of those plate-glass windows—the mitred bishops, the big-wigged ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... parents such infinite joy and sorrow; a sort of still-born blossom in the fields of the mind. Sometimes an idea, instead of springing forcibly into life and dying unembodied, dawns gradually, hovers in the unknown limbo of the organs where it has its birth; exhausts us by long gestation, develops, is itself fruitful, grows outwardly in all the grace of youth and the promising attributes of a long life; it can endure ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... has the aroma of nectar and ambrosia; this does not say to us, "Provision yourselves for three days." But it lisps the gentle numbers, "Go whither you will."[184] I accept it, ratify it, drink it at one draught and consign the Acharnians to limbo. Freed from the war and its ills, I shall keep ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... opposition to the accepted opinion of the Schools of his time, and for that reason he was called the torturer of children, tortor infantum. The Schoolmen, instead of sending them into the flames of hell, have assigned to them a special Limbo, where they do not suffer, and are only punished by privation of the beatific vision. The Revelations of St. Birgitta (as they are called), much esteemed in Rome, also uphold this dogma. Salmeron and Molina, and before them Ambrose Catharin and [174] others, grant ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and green cloth, he was a mountebank and an extraneous nonentity, a coloured old rag blown down the Knarborough Road into Limbo. Into Limbo. Whilst Miss Pinnegar and her father sat frowsily on for ever, eating their toast and cutting off the crust, and sipping their third cup of tea. They would never blow away—never, never. Woodhouse was there ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... should licence diurnals because he prohibits learning and books. A library of diurnals is a wardrobe of frippery; 'tis a just idea of a Limbo of the infants. I saw one once that could write with his toes, by the same token I could have wished he had worn his copies for socks; 'tis he without doubt from whom the diurnals derive their pedigree, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... but there's no help for it. Old novels go to the trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also? At all events, I have a scheme for our transition state—a plan I have long revolved in my mind—and ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... were now assailed with violent storms, and at last took refuge for two days on some uninhabited islands, which by reason of the ill weather and the hurly-burly of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, they called "Limbo." Repairing their torn sails with their shirts, they sailed for the mainland on the east, and ran into a river called Cuskarawook (perhaps the present Annomessie), where the inhabitants received them with showers of arrows, ascending the trees and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... hidebound conservative about some things—much worse than you—about free verse, for instance. I read a long editorial about it not a month ago. He really thinks anyone who defends it ought to be deported to some poetic limbo. Ben, you think my father is conservative. But there's a great scandal in his mental life. He's ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller

... wildly, and dropped the whole box of peas on the head of the unfortunate clerk. The result was such a strenuous chorus of "Amens," that the laughter of the congregation could not be restrained, and the peas were abolished and consigned to the limbo of impractical inventions. Possibly the story ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... because that is the earliest period at which a human being can have it. But the problem goes deeper than this. There is no more interesting and important group of diseases in the whole realm of pathology than those which we calmly dub "the diseases of childhood," and thereby dismiss to the limbo of unavoidable accidents and discomforts, like flies, mosquitoes, and stubbed toes, which are best treated with a shrug of the shoulders and such stoic philosophy as we can muster. They are interesting, because the moment we begin to study them intelligently we stumble upon some ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... they release from durance base, 995 Restor'd t' his fiddle and his case, And liberty, his thirsty rage With luscious vengeance to asswage: For he no sooner was at large, But TRULLA straight brought on the charge, 1000 And in the self-same limbo put The Knight and Squire where he was shut; Where leaving them in Hockley i' th' Hole, Their bangs and durance to condole, Confin'd and conjur'd into narrow 1005 Enchanted mansion to know sorrow, In the same order and array Which they ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... heat, but much more from mental perturbation. Though not a stingy or penurious man, it was still true that of all earthly things he suffered most from a financial loss. How often had he seen chance or miscalculation sweep apparently strong and valiant men into the limbo of the useless and forgotten! Since the alienation of his wife's affections by Cowperwood, he had scarcely any interest in the world outside his large financial holdings, which included profitable investments in a half-hundred companies. But they must pay, pay, pay heavily in interest—all ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... There was nothing of the lubber about poor Ben: always the first man at his duty, and ready to share his last copper with a fellow-mortal in distress, whether seaman or landsman. Well, Ben once got into a great frolic ashore, and kicked up such a bobbery that the watchman clapped him in limbo for the night; and the justice next morning gave him such a clapper-clawing with his tongue, and bore down upon him so hard with his reprimands, as I think the lawyers call it, and raked him so ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... on the key was jungle-like in density. A path had been cut through to the eastern shore. It was almost a tunnel, for the fronds of the coco palms and the branches of the red-trunked gumbo limbo, and of live oak formed an arch overhead, from which hung long, listless streamers of Spanish moss. The red rays touched the hanging tips of the moss, as if the streamers had been dipped in vermilion, and it tinted softly the palm fronds, ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... to an end in this world. For a time, death itself leaves the ache of an unsatisfied expectation, as if somehow the interrupted life must go on, and there is no change we make or suffer which is not denied by the sensation of daily habit. If Ehrhardt had really come back from the vague limbo to which he had been so inexorably relegated, he might only have restored the original situation in all its discomfort and apprehension; yet maintaining, as he did, this perfect silence and absence, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells

... of such a society, provided all professional men were rigorously excluded. As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to limbo, as the Seven Humbugs ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... that we have worked out the best possible system of education for women. But that there was opposition to giving women the same educational facilities as men was not saying that there was or ever had been a conspiracy on foot to keep her in intellectual limbo because she was a woman. The history of learning shows clearly enough that women have always shared in its rise. In the great revival of the sixteenth century they took an honorable part. "I see the robbers, hangmen, ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... present system of administration what limbo or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for "reports"; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that bureaucratic absurdity. He knew that since the invasion into public business of the Report (an administrative revolution ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... ephemeral, never heard from that central again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... and brightness of colour to a soft modified brilliancy that was very engaging. In the Georgian copies heaviness again obtained favour, and gradually the designs deteriorated, and were eventually temporarily lost in "the limbo of the past." The vogue for lace work in the reign of William and Mary influenced the stitches in the crewel embroidery, and in Queen Anne's day the variety of stitches was reminiscent of the earlier period, some of ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands

... Column of the Trinita across the Piazza between the two palaces, Bartolini Salimbeni and Buondelmonte on the left, and Palazzo Spini on the right, you come into Borgo Santi Apostoli, where, facing the Piazzetta del Limbo, is the little church de' Santi Apostoli, which, if we may believe the inscription on the facade, was founded by Charlemagne and consecrated by Turpin before Roland and Oliver. However that may be, it is, with the exception ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... heart is sad! What woes can fate still hold in store! The friend I cherished a thousand days Is smashed to pieces on the floor! Is shattered and to Limbo gone, I'll see ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... wineglass, two knives, and a saltspoon, his new invention for having one's boots fastened by electricity, which was to do for Marconigrams, expose radium as a foolish fraud, and consign clock-work to limbo. "You don't touch the buttons and the invention does the rest," ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these superstitions, and the time involved is directly proportional to the ease and rapidity with which scientific knowledge is disseminated ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks



Words linked to "Limbo" :   theology, mythical place, divinity, imaginary place, fictitious place, obscurity



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