"Sightless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... behind the spinster, Henry stood in deep thought, then pouring out a glass of cognac he hastily drank it. Setting down the glass, he tiptoed over to the elevator, but one look at the still figure crouching with head thrown back and sightless eyes turned to the ceiling sent him back into the center of the hall. Drawing out his handkerchief, he mopped ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... no sound of approach: the closet-door folded back, and in glided, open-eyed, but sightless pale as death, and clad in white, ghostly-pure and saint-like, the Lady Alice. I shuddered from head to foot at what I had done. She was more terrible to me in that moment than any pale-eyed ghost could have ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... fair wide gallery where is the mocking faun, with his inhuman savour of fellowship with the earth which is divine, and the sightless Homer. The goddess had not the arrogance of the huntress who loved Endymion, nor the majesty of the cold mistress of the skies. She was in the likeness of a young girl, and with collected gesture fastened her cloak. There was nothing divine in her save a sweet strange ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... travellers at every stage of their journey. From village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost under the horses' feet; hoary grandsires and grandames caught glimpses of their approach, and hobbled to intercept them at some point of vantage; blind men stared them out of countenance with their sightless orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless arms, their broken backs, their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity Providence had assigned them ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moment light seemed to come back to those sightless eyes, and with a purr, as if it understood, the great cat leaped lightly on to the table and sat before De Mouchy, whilst the latter put one finger on the tablets, and ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... the cross this one was chosen to the great office."[4] Thus my Lady, nor yet moved she her look from its fixed attention after than before these words of hers. As is he who gazes and endeavors to see the sun eclipsed a little, who through seeing becomes sightless, so did I become in respect to that last fire, till it was said, "Why dost thou dazzle thyself in order to see a thing which has no place here?[5] On earth my body is earth; and it will be there with the others until our number corresponds with ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... my days sightless, Mary, I knew I could not come to you again; but Heaven has willed it otherwise. It has been a long, long waiting, hopeless till within the last month, and it was only within the past few days that the doctor told me that all was safe, and I might ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... a sudden impulse from the wall against which she had leaned: she threw herself at the feet of Stratonice; she embraced her knees, and looking up at her with those sightless but touching eyes: ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... world! Within the atmosphere of her quick sensibilities, she felt the presence of those whose cup was full of affliction. She put her fingers, with their throbbing sympathies, upon the lean bloodless faces of the famishing children in Ireland, and her sightless eyes filled with the tears that the blind may shed for griefs they cannot see. And then she plied the needle and those fingers, and quickened their industry by placing them anon upon the slow sickly pulse ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... And first his people's gods, About the toad, out of their sterile time, Under his hand thrilled and were recreate. The bull, the pard, the camel and the ram, Tiger and owl and bat—all were the signs Visibly made body on the stone Of sightless thought adventuring the host That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved By secret labour in the flowing wood Of rain and air and wind and continent sun ... His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone, A swift destruction for ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... last there was a long, deep sigh, but still he did not open his eyes. Consciousness returned only very slowly, and when Mr. Hunter had called him by name time and again and begged him to speak, he sighed even more deeply than before, the lids slowly drew back, and the almost sightless eyes looked feebly around. Then, with sudden flash of memory, the poor captain strove to rise. "My babies!" he moaned; ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... from the bear, or from any other creature which walks the earth, and even at that supreme moment a shudder of horror passed over me as I observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great paws swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my broken lantern crashed to the earth, and I ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dragged through the door, Cara stood rigidly upright, white in the intensity of voiceless outrage, until the gigantic brute with one sightless eye and a greasy tarboosh reached out his grimy hand and seized her. Then she sickened at the profaning shock of his touch, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... could not look into them and read there the deadly pain and faintness that were rapidly robbing them of their lustre, but that could not shake their faith in his friend and master. No wonder mine grew sightless as his own through swimming tears. I who had killed him could not face ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... killing his son as he clasped them. Misfortune still followed upon misfortune. The earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the four generations sprung from Cain—Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, and Methushael. Lamech, sightless as he was, could not go home; he had to remain by the side of Cain's corpse and his son's. Toward evening, his wives, seeking him, found him there. When they heard what he had done, they wanted to separate from him, all the more as they knew that whoever ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... and noiselessly down the street, which was now very dark. The village houses seemed rather awful with their dark windows like sightless eyes. When they reached Annie's house Alice gave her a ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... followed her; she still leading him by the hand, like a child. Like a child, or rather like a blind man, he sat down in the chair which she placed for him. His eyes did not move from her face; but they looked almost like sightless eyes. Hetty stood before him, with her hands clasped tight. Neither spoke. At last Dr. Eben ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... old and blind, telling his beads in the corner of the cloister garden, sighed. Father Tomasso, who had brought him from his confessional in the great church to the bench where day after day he kept his sightless vigil over the pond of the goldfish, turned back at the sound, then, seeing the peace of Father Denfili's face, thought he must have fancied the sigh. For sadness came alien to the little garden ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... suppose my heavenly Father reveals more to me than He does to others, 'cause He, in His wisdom, has taken so much from me. He has left me here a poor old woman, deaf, blind, and lame. I can't see the faces of my friends through these poor sightless eyes, nor the beauties of the fields and sky, nor the blossoms and fruit of the trees, nor the flowers in the garden; neither can I hear the sweet music of the birds, nor even the prattle of the dear little children who come and kiss me, and ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... other?" uttered Jorgenson's voice at their backs. He also was turned that way with his strange sightless gaze fixed beyond them ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the mountains the chill knowledge of death wailed through the window, and over the heads of the crowd. All the figures were upright now in the little room. Then those outside saw Laura Sloly lean over and close the sightless eyes. This done, she came to the door and opened it, and motioned for the Healer to leave. He hesitated, hearing the harsh murmur from the outskirts of the crowd. Once again she motioned, and he came. With a face deadly pale she surveyed the people before her silently for a moment, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... touched and bound all the worlds together in its wonderful circle of life. One root it sent deep down into the sightless depths of Hel, where the dead lived; another it fastened firmly in Joetunheim, the dreary home of the giants; and with the third it grasped Midgard, the dwelling place of men. Serpents and all kinds of worms gnawed continually ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Carrados's sightless eyes had the one quality of concealing emotion supremely. "Oh," he commented softly, "always; and it was quite a saying, was it? And why was it always ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... bound in fetters of steel. In all his after life he was not to forget the picture of that hideous figure, sitting there in the tomb-like grey. The face was bloated and soft and flabby, beardless and putty-like; the lips thick and colourless; the eyes wide, sightless and glassy. The black hair was matted and plastered close to the skull, as if it had just come from the water. The clothes that covered the corpse were wet, slimy and reeking with the odour of stagnant water. Huge, stiff, puffy hands extended over ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... ceased, the bull raised his gory, sightless head, and with a horrid roar ran headlong across the arena. With great leaps and bounds he came, straight toward the arena wall directly beneath where we sat, and then accident carried him, in one of his mighty springs, completely over the barrier into the midst of the slaves ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Elwood, was of a diminutive size, with commonplace features, and a severe, forbidding countenance, made so, perhaps, by intense application to business, together with the unfavorable effect caused by a blemished and sightless eye. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... choked with cowering fugitives. Alone was left Laocoon with his sons, For death's doom and the Goddess chained their feet. Then, even as from destruction shrank the lads, Those deadly fangs had seized and ravined up The twain, outstretching to their sightless sire Agonized hands: no power to help had he. Trojans far off looked on from every side Weeping, all dazed. And, having now fulfilled Upon the Trojans Pallas' awful hest, Those monsters vanished 'neath the earth; and still Stands their memorial, where into ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... tender bones Are dashed against the jagged stones: Sightless and mangled there they lie, Poor babes! untimely ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... a moment when Jesus was near to hear the sound of his voice. If Bartimeus failed that moment he would be blind forever. I can see him quickly turning his sightless eyes in the direction of the Savior. He cried unto him and it was his earnestness that saved him. We must make haste while ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... looking up the street, and that although his eyes are so covered with a mist that he can see nothing. The sacred writer does not say that Eli sat on the seat by the wayside seeing what went on, but only straining his sightless eyeballs up the street. If we turn back to the first chapter, we shall see that this was a habit with Eli. When he was many years younger, some thirty years before, when Hannah came up to Shiloh to entreat the Lord to have mercy on her and take ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... eyes such as his had become must needs be sightless the latter went on picking his way carefully over rough bits of going; when he had reached a condition where he no longer heard the word or two which, now and then, Steve addressed to him, he still flattened his body and crouched at the ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... temple laid His desperate hands, and in its overthrow Destroyed himself, and with him those who made A cruel mockery of his sightless woe; The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all, Expired, and thousands perished in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and nearly upset the buggy, until brought up with a jerk by the powerful arms of his driver. The shaft-band had broken and the buggy had run upon the horse's rump, and the shafts stuck up almost at right angles over his back. The roan stood trembling with the half turned, inquisitive muzzle of the sightless horse—a paralysis of fear all over his face. But when Bud came forward and touched his face and stroked it, the fear vanished, and the old roan bobbed his tail up and down and wiggled his head reassuringly ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... came to this ideal community one John Buckhurst, a stranger, quiet, suave, deadly pale, a finely moulded man, with delicately fashioned hands and feet, and two eyes so colorless that in some lights they appeared to be almost sightless. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... thine eyes 2 Sightless? O full of misery, As thou look'st full of years! But not, if I prevail, Shalt thou bring down this curse. Thou art trespassing. Yet keep thy foot From stumbling in that verdant, voiceless dell, Where running water ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Cross of Life, and in her left which was advanced, a long, lotus-headed sceptre, while her painted eyes stared fixedly at the darkness. Crouched upon the ground, at the feet of the statue, scribe fashion, sat my great-uncle Tanofir, a very aged man with sightless eyes and long hands, so thin that one might see through them against the lamp-flame. His head was shaven, his beard was long and white; white too was his robe. In front of him was a low altar, on which stood a shallow silver vessel filled with pure ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... of his visit, he would have referred to it. We learn that Milton arrived in Italy in the spring of 1638. In 1637, the affection which, in the preceding year, deprived Galileo of the use of his right eye, attacked the left also, which began to grow dim, and in the course of a few months became sightless; so that, although Milton has not alluded to this calamity, Galileo had become totally blind at the time of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... wounded pulp hit stone at every step. His clothes were tatter'd and his rent skin showed, Harrowed with thorns. His face was pale as putty, Thrown far back; clots of drooping spittle foamed On his moustache, and his hair hung in tails, Mired with sweat; and sightless in their sockets His eyeballs turned up white, as dull as pebbles. Evenly and doggedly he trotted, And as he went he moaned. Then out of sight Round a corner he swerved, and out ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... seated, as of old, In her accustom'd place, A midnight in her sightless eyes, And morn upon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Grim, sardonic, and cynical to the last, she died quietly, gladly closing her eyes which had so long been sightless. She was sixty-five years old, and had lived alone since ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... the place of highest power, with full right to exercise that power at will. And when the crucified Jesus went up that Olivet day, before the astonished eyes of the disciples, into the sightless blue, on the cloud, He was received in the upper world by the Father. And He was lifted up into the place of highest honour and greatest power. He sat down at the ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... fight. It is not right. The young men should not fight." Then putting his hand in his pocket he drew out a little silver cross that had been given him some years before when he had been confirmed, and holding it up as if his sightless eyes could see it he said, "That's good. That means that men should not ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... the woodland loud and long, The distance takes a lovelier hue, And drown'd in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... talk easy generalities about the intuition of children! As a matter of fact, the little ones are not above judging quite as superficially and falsely as their elders. The child looked at her protector's sightless eye, then turned away and sidled over to McWha with one hand coaxingly outstretched. McWha's mouth twisted sourly. Without appearing to see the tiny hand, he deftly evaded it. Stooping over the dead man, he picked him ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and sometimes seemed to try to wrench itself away, though for the most part it followed submissively. A neophyte might have fancied that the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint changes of expression on a sightless face; but Gaffer was no neophyte ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Theodofred, when burning brass Plunged its fierce fang into the founts of light, And Witiza's the guilt! when, bent with age, He knew the voice again, and told the name, Of those whose proffered fortunes had been laid Before his throne, while happiness was there, And strained the sightless nerve tow'rd where they stood At the forced memory of the very oaths He heard renewed from each, but heard afar, For they were loud, and ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... a glimpse of him at his shaving, the lather still on his cheek, and they had waved their hands at each other. Instinctively Trina looked up at the flat behind her; looked up at the bay window where her husband's "Dental Parlors" had been. It was all dark; the windows had the blind, sightless appearance imparted by vacant, untenanted rooms. A rusty iron rod projected mournfully from ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the platform, and it was as much as Angus could do to hold him back. Poor Sholto; he was a faithful beast, and they were taking his beloved mistress away from him. Myra sat back in the carriage, and furtively wiped away a tear from her poor sightless eyes. ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... the blind man, scared by his threats, started to walk away in the slow, halting way of the sightless, and attracted Great Night Moth's attention. He picked up his new gun and while all were petrified with fear of being the target, he shot the blind man so that his body fell into the oven in which the pig had been baked. The people could only laugh loudly, if not heartily, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... alone, wanting their proper might, All motionless and silent seem to moan The unseemly negligence of nature's hand, That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine, O mistress of the passions; artist fine! Who dost our souls against our sense command, Plucking the horror from a sightless face, Lending to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... pupil of her brown eye was so widely expanded that the iris looked black, while the aperture of the gray one was contracted to the size of a pin's head, so that the effect was almost that of a white and sightless ball. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... back against Dea Flavia's arm; her eyes, now veiled by the film of death gazed, sightless, up at ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that movement probably checked him, for he reared, and before his feet touched the ground again I was close to him; with a frantic effort I caught his bridle, and swept his head round. Mariamne fell, voiceless, sightless, and breathless, into my arms. The spot where she was saved was within a single bound of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... steps; a good-looking girl, wearing high heels and bangles, unloaded a barrow-load of household goods into a van the Maire had provided, and hastened home with the barrow to fill it again; a sweet-faced old dame, sightless, bent with rheumatism, pathetic in her helpless resignation, sat on a wicker-chair outside her doorway, waiting for a farm cart to take her away: by her side, a wide-eyed solemn-faced little girl, dressed in her Sunday best, and ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... a giant worm, jerked spasmodically and turned sightless eyes toward the watching Earth-folk. Then, as if drawn by some magnet, invisible in the distance, the black wings began to beat the air, and the creature moved off in a straight line toward ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to the silence and seclusion of her room, and there could not longer hold back the bursting of her wrath. She went stone-blind in the fury of a passion that had never before showed its power. Lying upon her bed, sightless, voiceless, she was a writhing, living flame. And she tossed there while her fury burned and burned, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... asked for braille books, turning his sightless face toward her as he studied, trying to concentrate through the pain ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... boasted American citizenship amounts to? Go tell it, sir, to the father whose son was starved at Andersonville; or the widow whose husband was slain at Mission Ridge; or the little boy who leads his sightless father through the streets of your city, made blind by the winds and the sand of the Southern coast; or the thousand other mangled heroes to be seen on every side, that this Government, in defense of which the son and the husband fell, the father lost his eyes, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... made no reply, but bowed his head. At the end of some moments, from his sightless eyes there ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... except that such were better obtainable in Paris. Antoine looked down upon this wreck of his son that lay before him, and the wreck, not appreciating that he was a surgical triumph, kept sobbing, kept weeping out of his sightless eyes, kept jerking his four stumps in supplication, kept begging ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... picture. The one fatal point at which the resemblance ceased, was in the eyes. The divinely-beautiful eyes of Raphael's Virgin were lost in the living likeness of her that confronted me now. There was no deformity; there was nothing to recoil from, in my blind Lucilla. The poor, dim, sightless eyes had a faded, changeless, inexpressive look—and that was all. Above them, below them, round them, to the very edges of her eyelids, there was beauty, movement, life. In them—death! A more charming ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... on the wave Where all my hopes had found a sudden grave. Love makes us blind and selfish: otherwise I had seen Helen's secret in her eyes; So used I was to reading every look In her sweet face, as I would read a book. But now, made sightless by love's blinding rays, I had gone on unseeing, to the end Where Pain dispelled the mist of golden haze That walled me in, and lo! I found my friend Who journeyed with me—at my very side, Had been sore wounded to the heart, while I Both ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... thorns nor briars, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noted their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole Valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... him on the sidewalk, so he took up his position beyond the curbstone. The light from the large arc-lamp overhead, exposed the old man's thin white hair, withered face and threadbare clothes. His sightless eyes were turned toward the passing throng, and his head was slightly bent in an expectant attitude. But the hand that drew the wheezy bow across the strings of the violin often faltered, and the broken music, instead of attracting, repelled the crowds. The player was tired and longed for ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... morning Yulia went herself to Pyatnitsky Street. She found old Fyodor Stepanovitch in the same big drawing-room in which the service had been held on her first arrival. Wearing slippers, and without a cravat, he was sitting motionless in his arm-chair, blinking with his sightless eyes. ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... had just probed the ulcer on the hip, and said the bone was carious 193:6 for several inches. He even showed me the probe, which had on it the evidence of this condition of the bone. The doctor went out. Mr. Clark lay with his eyes fixed and 193:9 sightless. The dew of death was on his brow. I went to his bedside. In a few moments his face changed; its death-pallor gave place to a natural hue. The eyelids 193:12 closed gently and the breathing became natural; he was asleep. In about ten minutes he opened ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... perhaps have had the courage to claim as a human being; a very tall creature, with bent shoulders, and head seeming to grow straight out of its chest; thick, grizzled hair hiding almost every vestige of feature, with the exception of one dreadful red eye, its fellow being dead and sightless. He had laid on the counter, with palms downward as if concealing something, two huge hairy paws. Mrs. Sprowl seemed familiar with the appearance of this monster; she addressed him rather bad-temperedly, but otherwise much as she would have spoken ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... furniture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown, his snowy beard falling over his breast—the star of his famous Order still idly shining on it. He was not only sightless: he became utterly deaf. All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, all the pleasures of this world of God, were taken from him. Some slight lucid moments he had; in one of which, the queen, desiring to see him, entered the room, and found him singing a hymn, and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was seen every day to flame in the heavens without ever losing its brilliance or becoming weaker. When he hides himself "the world rests in darkness, like those dead who lie in their rock-tombs, with their heads swathed, their nostrils stuffed up, their eyes sightless, and whose whole property might be stolen from them, even that which they have under their head, without their knowing it; the lion issues from his lair, the serpent roams ready to bite, it is as obscure as in a dark room, the earth is silent whilst he who creates everything ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to the sighing of the wind, in the dark funeral sheoaks and cypresses, like the far-off sea upon a sandy shore. Here, too, came oftener than elsewhere a flock of lories, making the dark low trees gay with flying living blossoms. And here she would lie with her feet towards the east, her sightless eyes towards that dreary ocean which ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... led by a lad to the organ, which, as leader, he played. One day, while conducting his oratorio of "Samson," the old man turned pale and trembled with emotion, as the bass sung the blind giant's lament: "Total eclipse! no sun, no moon!" As the audience saw the sightless eyes turned towards them, they were affected ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... tremblingly plead, "Lead, kindly light." "Lead, kindly light." The words are whispered by the old, whose tired feet are unable to move, whose palsied hands are helpless, whose head is bowed by the weight of years, whose eyes are sightless, from whose trembling lips are scarcely heard the ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... all sorts of positions, these dead men. Some have their heads pillowed peacefully upon their arms as if in sleep. Others have their hard faces half buried in the sand. Others still lie prone upon their backs with bits of seaweed in their hair and their sightless eyes staring in ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... one the spectators departed. At last only myself and the brown-faced young man remained. He sat on a stump, staring with sightless eyes into vacancy. I did not ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... tearful, with unkempt grey beard; he remembered how one day after drinking a glass too much at dinner, and spilling the gravy over his napkin, he began to relate his conquests, growing red in the face, and winking with his sightless eyes; he remember Varvara Pavlovna,—and involuntarily shuddered, as a man shudders from a sudden internal pain, and shook his head. Then his! thoughts came to a stop ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... Dallas alone kept watch for wayfarers. Not until night fell, and the cloud-masked moon disappeared behind the western bluffs, were small blankets pinned into place across the windows, and the peering shock head made sightless. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... different from those of others, they would be inconceivable except to those who had similar sensations and feelings. If the mental consciousness of the deaf-blind person were absolutely dissimilar to that of his fellows, he would have no means of imagining what they think. Since the mind of the sightless is essentially the same as that of the seeing in that it admits of no lack, it must supply some sort of equivalent for missing physical sensations. It must perceive a likeness between things outward and things inward, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... He from thick Films shall purge the visual Ray, v. 5, 6.] And on the sightless Eye-ball pour the Day. 'Tis he th' obstructed Paths of Sound shall clear, And bid new Musick charm th' unfolding Ear, The Dumb shall sing, the Lame his Crutch forego, And leap exulting like the bounding Roe; [No Sigh, no Murmur the wide World shall ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... dying she knows full well, and how she longs for one loving glance, for one word of affection, to carry with her in the lonely years to come. But no look of recognition comes to the sightless eyes and no word escapes the lips save that never ceasing cry of "Richard, Richard, Richard." A white-capped nurse flits softly about, but Jane pays no heed to her. The doctor enters and hold whispered consultation with the nurse. Jane does not even glance at him. She ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—white, in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our bulwarks. Then the face disappeared ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... in vain thy muse appears To breathe her ardours in our souls; In vain to sightless eyes, and deaden'd ears, Thy lightning gleams, and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the tinkle of a sheep bell came softly in from the meadows, and now and then the hoot of the owl round the church tower made the watchers start. To watch that calm and earnest face was their great help in that hour of alarm; those sightless eyes, and broad, upraised spiritual brow seemed so replete with steadfast trust and peace, that the very sight was soothing and supporting to the young husband and wife, and when the long strokes of twelve resounded from the church tower, Mr. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who, living many years With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun, Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune To visible Nature's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... To my doors a blind man rambled, Gormas was his name, who said, "God who sends me here commands thee In His name to give me sight;" I, obedient to the mandate, Made at once the sign of the cross On his sightless eyes, that started Into life and light once more From their state of utter darkness. At another time when heaven, Muffled in the thickest, blackest Clouds, made war upon the world, Hurling at it lightning lances Of white snow, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... gazed darkly into the steely, sightless eyes of the traitor. Death's awful calm had set the expression; but the man's whole life was there, its better part sadly shining forth among the ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... which the sightless eyeballs of the singer had been turned up towards the rafters of the cottage—a sign surely that the germ of light, "the sunny seed," as Henry Vaughan calls it, must be in him, else why should he lift his eyes when he thought upward?—Malcolm read a chapter of the Bible, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Immediately in front of the car a crowd had gathered around two performing bears and a showman. One of the animals, thin, emaciated, and the mere wreck of his native strength, attracted my attention. I endeavored to attract his. He turned a pair of bleared, sightless eyes in my direction; but there was no sign of recognition. I leaned from the car-window, and called softly, "Baby!" But he did not heed. I closed the window. The car was just moving on, when he suddenly turned, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... were helped by a good dame, one of the oldest inhabitants, Granny Wilson, who lived in a nice tidy cottage, with an orphan grandchild. Though their charity was generally distributed by Miss Jane's hand, Miss Mary was the greatest favourite. The sweet expression of her sightless countenance, and her gentle voice, won all hearts. Though Miss Mary never ventured outside their gate without her sister, she was wont to wander about the grounds by herself. The flower-garden was under her especial care. She was said to know, indeed, every flower which ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... liest before high heaven! It is not pity's voice impels thee now! Why was I doomed to look into his eyes! To mark his noble features! With that glance, Thy crime, thy woe commenced. Unhappy one! A sightless instrument thy God demands, Blindly thou must accomplish his behest! When thou didst see, God's shield abandoned thee, And the dire snares ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... myself of the truth, and my hand touched cold, clammy flesh. The shock of discovery sent me reeling backward so suddenly that I slipped and fell. It was a man—a dead man! In imagination I could see the wide-open, sightless eyes, staring toward me through the dark. Trembling with the unreasonable terror of unstrung nerves, I yet managed to regain my feet. It was not the dead body, so much as the black gloom, which robbed me of manhood. I could not see where to go, how to escape. At whatever ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... the access and passage of remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night! And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heav'n peep through the blanket of the ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... effect of darkness on danger. "Let Ajax perish in the face of day." Who has not shuddered over the description of that Arkansas duel, fought by two naked combatants, with pistol and bowie-knife, in a dark room? One thrills to think of those first few moments of breathless, sightless, hopeless, hushed expectation, —then the confused encounter, the slippery floor, the invisible, ghastly terrors of that horrible chamber. Many a man would shrink from that, who would march coolly up to the cannon's mouth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... of some new feeling crossed the Prophet's face, as his glance rested on the old man who slowly approached with feeble steps, bent back, and anxious, sightless eyes. But, as quickly as it had come, the expression passed, and he stepped forward for ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... his wife's shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... earning her own livelihood had fallen away, crumbled to ashes; after all her preparations, not a pupil had offered herself; and, instead of being sorry that this wish of many years could not be realised, she had reason to be glad. Her poor father, nearly sightless, depended upon her cares in his blind helplessness; but this was a sacred pious charge, the duties of which she was blessed in fulfilling. The black gloom hung over what had once been the brightest hope of the family—over Branwell, and the mystery in which his ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... romantic scenery visible from the car windows. Mr. Carroll made him take the seat nearest the window, that he might have a better view, and from time to time Herbert described what he saw to his sightless fellow- traveler. ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... destruction of souls. May we see a relation of the Korrigan and Keridwen in Tridwan, or St Triduana, of Restalrig, near Edinburgh, who presided over a certain well there, and at whose well-shrine offerings were made by sightless pilgrims ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Presently it could also be seen that the south end of the roof was bending of its own weight. It bent first just a little—then more. Then for a long moment it hung motionless, or with but the faintest quiver of vibration. Then, out of the sightless cavern came the screeching sound of metal scraping upon metal—a wild sound, like the torture of some inarticulate thing; a dull, grinding noise followed, and at last, out of the steaming furnace which the lower part of the train shed was now become, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... cold in the light of the moon, some of them with limbs disposed as though they merely slumbered, while the contorted bodies of others showed that they had passed away in the throes of mortal agony; some with eyes decently closed, others with their sightless eyeballs upturned until only the whites were visible: while from the lips of the wounded there issued one low, continuous moan of: "Water—water! For the love of God, water!" It was a pitiable sight beyond all human power of description, and as Jack looked ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... clung. To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master—rolling acres, great trees, lost ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Carlyle took Milburn, the blind preacher, out on to Chelsea embankment and showed the sightless man where Franklin plunged into the Thames and swam to Blackfriars Bridge. "He might have stayed here," said Thomas Carlyle, "and become a swimming-teacher, but God had other work for him!" Franklin had many ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... longer see to read; and thus his eager appetite for knowledge and information of all kinds was severely balked. He continued to preach. I have heard that he was led up into the pulpit, and that his sermons were never so effective as when he stood there, a grey sightless old man, his blind eyes looking out straight before him, while the words that came from his lips had all the vigour and force of his best days. Another fact has been mentioned to me, curious as showing the accurateness of his sensation of time. His sermons had always lasted exactly half an ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... white-walled room, empty of all but a streak of sunshine smeared along the dustless floor, lay a form covered by a sheet. With a huge steady hand the Inspector took the hem and turned it back. A sightless face gazed up at them, and on either side of that sightless defiant face the three Forsytes gazed down; in each one of them the secret emotions, fears, and pity of his own nature rose and fell like the rising, falling waves of life, whose wish those white walls barred out now for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your Blind Bard, (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were apparent, and Visions Celestial,) how Adam discourses to Eve of the Bright Visitors who hovered round ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... going up to the cage, he addressed the aged bird in familiar Spanish. The effect was electric: the poor blind captive seemed as if suddenly awakened to a new existence; he fluttered his wings in ecstasy—opened his eyes, fixed them, dim and sightless as they were, intently on the stranger; then answered him in the same speech—not an accent of which he had ever heard for twenty years. His joy was excessive—but it was very short; for in the midst of his screams and antics, poor Poll ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... fall some drops of natural pity over hapless infirmity, mingling strains with the nightingale's, 'most musical, most melancholy.' The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly hand he presses. The Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them are of a more quaint and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... roof, all six, breathless, sightless, their faces turned to the winter sky. The tumult on the street came up as a faint echo; the spray of a score of engines pumping below fell upon them, froze, and covered them with ice. The very roar ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis |
