"Soporific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great walnut bed which had been his mother's, and read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp. He read the Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific effect on him. But it was ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... up!" he cried; but there was a want of energy in his words, and five minutes after his efforts had grown feeble in the extreme. In another, he too had succumbed, not to a dangerous soporific vapour, but to the weariness produced by long exertion, and slept as soundly as his companion, and as if there was nothing whatever ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... certain ancient baboon once observed in the Primates cage at the Bronz Zoo; the harried, anxious little clerk with his paradoxically grandiloquent intonation; the comedy assistant district attorney with his wheezy voice emanating from a Falstaffian body, who suffered from a soporific malady and was accustomed to open a case and then let it take care of itself while he slumbered audibly beneath the dais; even Ephraim Tutt, the gaunt, benignly whimsical-looking attorney, in his rusty-black frock coat and loose-hanging tie; his rotund partner, whose ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... New England theocracy was a social structure resting on a book, that corner-stone was the Bay Psalm-Book and the walls above it were built of sermons. These sermons seem to us technical, sapless, and jejune, "as soporific as a bed of poppies," but they show the intelligence, energy, and assiduity of the writers just as plainly as they show the gloomy theology and sad earnestness of the time. And though no one now reads them, we profoundly respect them, for they have been conned ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... fine collection of poems for mothers and friends to use at the twilight hour. They are not of the soporific kind especially. They are wholesome reading when most wide-awake and of such a soothing and delicious flavor that they are welcome when the lights ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... use. The strongest soporific in the world wouldn't give me sleep this night. I tell you, Sime, I have a fear ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... in the Parisian world and among artists, whose generous patroness she was, has been found dead in the studio of the ceramic painter, Jacques Dollon. The young painter, rendered completely helpless by a soporific, lay stretched out beside her when the crime was discovered. We say 'crime' designedly, because, when the preliminary medical examination was completed, it was clear that the death of the Baroness de Vibray was due to ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... any means whereby I can grasp your jokes without being bored to weariness? They're more soporific than bromide. Anyhow, it's time ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... you feel the need! ... Not the old religion of abnegation, the impossible myths that come to us out of the pessimistic East, created for a relief, a soporific, a means of evasion,—I do not mean that as religion. But another faith, which abides in each one of us, if we look for it. We rise with it in the morning. It is a faith in life apart from our own personal fate.... Because ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Mustapha went to bring his soporific, and having given it to the black slave, and shown him how much it was necessary to take for a dose, he went to Thiuli, and, telling him he must procure some medicinal herbs from the sea, hastened through the gate. On the shore, which was not far ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... a generation somewhat obscured, it must be confessed, by the Shining Sword and the Almighty Dollar, by the lengthening shadow of Imperialism and the soporific haze of Historic Rights and the Survival of the Fittest—it is to these principles, these "glittering generalities," that the minds of men are turning again in this day of desolation as a refuge from the cult of efficiency and from faith in "that which ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... me to sleep every night, especially with that song of Marlena; it is soporific as the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... (i.e., 1/8 grain for a child of six years) or a full physiologic dose of sodium bromide. The apprehension is thus somewhat allayed and the excessive cough-reflex quieted. The morphine should be given not less than an hour and a half before bronchoscopy to allow time for the onset of the soporific and antispasmodic effects which are the desiderata, not the analgesic effects. Dosage is more dependent on temperament than on age or body weight. Atropine is advantageously added to morphine in bronchoscopy for foreign bodies, not only for the usual reasons but for its effect as ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... journal—including the story of abduction referred to by Lady Rachel. This gave him the very idea which his lodger had already relied on for carrying Cristel away by the river (under the influence, of course, of a soporific drug), while her father was keeping watch on the road. The secreting of the oars with this purpose in view, had failed as a measure of security. The miller's knowledge of the stream, and his daughter's ready courage, had suggested the idea of letting the boat drift, with Cristel ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... afternoon sunshine, to the soft, rather soporific cooing of some caged doves, that live in the back-ground out of sight behind a screen of lemon trees in huge red jars, such as Morgiana must have been familiar with. Beyond the terrace wall we note the carefully tended vines, precious plants, for their grapes produce the delicate ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... having to turn over the leaves. Because you're bound to see where, and not turn two at once, or it don't follow on." Aunt M'riar and Uncle Mo confirmed this view from their own experience. It was agreed further that small type—Parliamentary debates and the like—was more soporific than large, besides spinning out the length and deferring the relaxation of turning over, when in book-form. Short accidents, and not too prolix criminal proceedings were on the whole the most palatable ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... powers of endurance were greater than he had supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than the flirtations—though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety—of German housemaids ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... in the 18th century was reflected in the middle-class appeal of Addison and Steel, Lillo's London Merchant, and Richardson's almost feminine plea for virtue rewarded. A physician, Blackmore had turned to poetry for relaxation and composed his soporific epics, by his own admission, in the coffee-houses and in his coach while visiting patients. In the preface, to Prince Arthur (1695) the City Bard took occasion to flay the Wits of the day for their immorality, an attack ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... Mr. St. John," Mrs. Sillenger began in her quiet diffident way, "continue so prejudiced on this subject. How you could help on the moral progress of the world, if only you would forget the sweet soporific 'poetry of the pulpit," as Mrs. Malcomson calls it, and learn to think of us women, not as angels or beasts of burden—the two extremes between which you wander—but as ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... she still bore to her husband, and he resolved on sacrificing the life of the unfortunate man whose connubial rights seemed to stand in his way. Full of impatience for the consummation of the diabolical project when once he had determined on its execution, and having given to his victim a strong soporific, which threw him into a heavy sleep, he proceeds to urge on the faithless wife to the act of stabbing her unconscious husband. This tragedy she performed with one of the unhappy man's own instruments of trade, under the guidance of the friar, who first ascertained ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... mixed one of the soporific drugs of which they know the secret in my drink, for I did not wake up till very late the next day. I was rather feverish, and had a violent headache. It was some time before the memory of the terrible scene in which I had taken part on the previous night came back to me. After ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... into tears. I could see the poor girl was in a highly nervous condition, so I did my best to calm her by describing how I had once done the long hole in four. My friends tell me that there is no finer soporific, and it seemed as though they may be right, for presently, just as I had reached the point where I laid my approach-putt dead from a distance of fifteen feet, she became quieter. She dried her eyes, yawned once or twice, and looked at ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our "copy" with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of hemlock digg'd i' the dark," and of "slips of yew sliver'd in the moon's eclipse," a practice which was long kept up. The plants, too, which formed the witches' pharmacopoeia, were generally selected either from their legendary associations or by reason of their poisonous and soporific qualities. Thus, two of those most frequently used as ingredients in the mystic cauldron were the vervain and the rue, these plants having been specially credited with supernatural virtues. The former probably derived its notoriety ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... to find a ruler for Afghanistan, and settle affairs with all speed. This was also desirable in view of the probability of a general election in the United Kingdom in the early part of the year 1880, the Ministry wishing to have ready an Afghan settlement to act as a soporific drug on the ravening Cerberus of democracy at home. Unhappily, the outbreak of the Zulu War on January 11, 1880, speedily followed by the disaster of Isandlana, redoubled the complaints in the United Kingdom, with the result that matters ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of the sport when there were neither admiring squaws or approving old chiefs to look on. The chiefs in this case, of course, had consumed the greater portion of the whiskey and were now sleeping off its soporific effects, and the youngsters could only remain where they were, keep watch and ward against surprise, and make no move in any direction until their elders should be themselves again, unless the sudden coming of enemies should compel them to rouse their ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... and went to the piano, removing the dust from the keys with his handkerchief. "How will you have it? Sentimental and soporific? Or ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair |
