"Make sense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... young friend; I have a reason just at this moment why I would fain have a trusty friend beside me. What! thou canst not make sense of the jargon! Well, it is jargon; in that thou art right, honest Tom. Men talk in a fashion which fools might gibe at. But 'tis the fashion, the fashion, and what would you? Be i' the fashion—or perish! That ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Colonel Dower's reaction to the tests he saw," Thorn said. "Somebody—I think it was George Gamow, but I'm not certain—once said that just having a theory isn't enough; the theory has to make sense. ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... air: on that throne I had to sit to all eternity, because I had said I was a poet and was not! I was a fellow that had stolen the poet-book of the universe, torn leaves from it, and pieced the words together so that only one could make sense of them—and she would not do it! This vanished—and I was lying under a heap of dead on a battle-field. All above me had died doing their duty, and I lay at the bottom of the heap and could not die, because I had fought, not for the right, but ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... is known about it, for there are many contemporary accounts. Its comprehension is of vast interest to history. The Catholic may well ask: "How it is I cannot understand the story as told by these Protestant writers? Why does it not make sense?" ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... descendants alike? We will begin with Noah himself first. The Bible says of Noah, that he was perfect in his generation. We will not stop to criticise the Hebrew translated "generation," for any English scholar on reading the verse in which it occurs, will see at once, that to make sense, it should have been genealogy. Then Noah was perfect in his genealogy—he was a preacher of righteousness—he was the husband of one wife, who was also perfect in her genealogy; by this one wife, he had three sons, all born about one hundred years ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... tell you something certain of the fate of Admiral Byng: no history was ever so extraordinary, or produced such variety of surprising turns. In my last I told you that his sentence was referred to the twelve judges. They have made law of that of which no man else could make sense. The Admiralty immediately signed the warrant for his execution on the last of February—that is, three signed: Admiral Forbes positively refused, and would have resigned sooner. The Speaker would have had Byng expelled the House, but his tigers were pitiful. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... fortiter arcum. Wakefield on Lucr. III. 1013 puts a stop at auratum, and goes on with Luna innixans. Taber strangely explains luna as arcu ipso lunato, Dav. says we ought not to expect the passage to make sense, as it is the utterance of a maniac. For my part, I do not see why the poet should not regard luna and ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in each second word." Francis Talbot, somewhat proud of his proficiency, and perfectly certain of the trustworthiness of his cousin Richard, went on puzzling out the ciphered letters, making Richard set each letter down as he picked it out, and trying whether they would make sense in French or English. Both understood French, having learned it in their page days, and kept it up by intercourse with the French suite. Francis, however, had to try two or three methods, which, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... while he telegraphs," said Nita with finality. "We can't understudy a monkey. Josephine Boyd, come here and go through your long speech. I want to be sure that you get it right. It didn't make sense the way you said ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... the cabin wall, tried to make sense out of a confused jumble of thoughts and impressions and memories that flooded in one wave to his mind. His few hours of blindness had seemingly sharpened his other senses: and there was a quality of the half-breed's voice that was distinctly familiar. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... wandering, and he was himself again, his mind functioning more and more clearly. With returning strength of brain came curiosity. Where was he? How did he chance to be lying here, his head in some sobbing woman's lap? It didn't make sense! ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... than to the deeper truth that history is an evolution. Anthropology, then, should not disdain what might be termed the method of the historical novel. To study the plot without studying the characters will never make sense of the drama ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... upon a brass band, the tones of which were rendering all the bilious people within hearing almost unable to support existence. There was one irascible old gentleman, (a lawyer), under whose window it was braying, who sat at his desk with a finger in each ear trying to make sense out of a legal document. This was a difficult task at any time, for the legal document was compounded chiefly of nonsense, with the smallest possible modicum of sense scattered through it. In the circumstances the thing was impossible, ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... envelope from Security into tiny shreds, too small for Mother Corey to make sense of, and went out to mail the letter, feeling the few bills in his pocket. As usual, less ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs;—I don't know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn't make very good sense: if it doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German: "Quand le cheval est sellé il faut le monter;" in French there is a proverb: "Quand le vin est tiré il faut le boire." Well, a translator who would translate quand le cheval, etc., by quand le ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... due respect to the old US Army, that just doesn't make sense! Normally, it would take thousands of years for a slain-god religion to develop, and then only in a special situation, from the field-fertility ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... now!" Kirby spoke so closely to his ear that the words were a roaring in his head. But they did not make sense. Drew tried to wrench loose of that hold, the pain in his half-healed arm answering. Then there was a period he could not account for at all, and suddenly the sun was fading and it was evening. Somebody pushed a canteen into his hand, then lifted both hand ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... now!" she interrupted, and then, turning towards the Martian, who had been listening intently as though he was trying to make sense out of what they had been saying, she went on speaking slowly and ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... often say that he better liked M'r Hobbes's taking his Notions[2], then any of the other, because he understood what he wrote; which the others not understanding my Lord would many times have a hard taske to make sense of what ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... that all this is a strained construction; but what construction can be substituted that will make sense of these allusions? How can the stones of the field be in league with man? How does the ordinary summer rain falling on the earth set up the low and destroy the wealthy? And what has all this to ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... used to tell him she'd a' be'n hung for a witch if she'd lived in them old Salem days. He always used to be tellin' what everything was the sign of, when we was first married, till I laughed him out of it. It made me kind of notional. There's too much now we can't make sense of without addin' to it out ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... is a noun. Animal, bird, creature, paper, pen, apple, fold, house, modesty, virtue, danger, are all nouns. In order that you may easily distinguish this part of speech from others, I will give you a sign, which will be useful to you when you cannot tell it by the sense. Any word that will make sense with the before it, is a noun. Try the following words by this sign, and see if they are nouns: tree, mountain, soul, mind, conscience, understanding. The tree, the mountain, the soul, and so on. You perceive, that they ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... in, the amusement of acting charades—a divertisement much in vogue in social circles, and if cleverly done, productive of much mirth. To the uninitiated, a brief description of an acted charade may not be unacceptable. A word of two or more syllables is selected, each part of which must make sense by itself—as, for instance, the word inspector, which would be decomposed, thus; inn spectre. The company of performers would then extemporize a scene at a public house, leaving the spectators to guess at the first syllable, inn. The second scene would represent the terror ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... manuscript is much confused at this point, reading y assi el Real instead of y assi al Per—the idea of the copyist evidently being "Accordingly the royal [Council] concedes one ship annually to Nueva Espaa," etc., which does not make sense with what follows. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... slowly, and Hanlon, probing, could sense that his mind was full of question marks. "I'm not that important. If it had been the emperor"—Hanlon caught an impression of loyalty and love for that dignitary—"or even the Minister"—here he caught a feeling of doubt and some dislike—"it might make sense. Just as I cannot figure out why I should have been sent here for this purpose. It's almost ..." he was silent, and Hanlon's probes ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... learn to use it. What ordinarily passes for use is in fact abuse. Wherein? Let us say that you turn to your lexicon for the meaning of a word. Of the various definitions given, you disregard all save the one which enables the word to make sense in its present context, or which fits your preconception of what the word should stand for. Having engaged in this solemn mummery, you mentally record the fact that you have been squandering your time, and enter into a compact with yourself that no more will you so do. At best you have tided ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... scorched earth Lord heard the sound of their voices. For a fleeting second the words seemed to make sense—a clear, unmistakable welcome to the ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... usually, but I was nervous that night, and, perhaps, too deeply interested in the outcome to do myself justice. I could think of no word with a for one of its three letters which would make sense when added on to It is, Is it, I ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Merrill's path of argument causes me to stumble. I readily admit that Aldus, in editing a portion of text that no man had put into print before him, fell back on conjecture when his authority seemed not to make sense. But Merrill's lists need revision. He has included with Aldus's "willful deviations" from the true text of P certain readings that almost surely were misprints (218, 12; 220, 3), some that may well be (as 217, 28; 221, 12), one case in which Aldus has retained an ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... the persons abused are—the King, the Queen, his late Majesty, both Houses of Parliament, the Privy Council, the Bench of Bishops, the Established Church, the present Ministry, &c. To make sense of some passages, they must be construed into ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope |
