"Elusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flushed delicately with the soft pink of the lichen flowers that bloom in the rare days of early summer. Her eyes played with a light as elusive, as quick as the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... they are stated in larger units, as for instance diameters of the earth's orbit, the unit itself that should facilitate the grasping of the result, and which really is more manageable numerically, becomes itself elusive of the mental grasp: it comes in as an interpreter; and (as in some other cases) the interpreter is hardest to be understood of the two. If, finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent of the dreadful magnitudes, time combining itself with motion, as in the flight ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... unhappy and rebellious crew. But now the spell of adventure was upon us. Our savage guides moved silently and surely, and the forest was so mysterious and strange that I found its allurement all but irresistible. The slow, silent stream, on which now and then lights as faint and elusive as wisps of cloud played fitfully, reflected from I knew not where, had a fascination that I am sure the others felt as strongly as I. So we followed in silence and watched all that the dense blackness of the ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... said the stranger respectfully. "A misbegotten goat-track enticed this person from his appointed line by the elusive semblance of an avoided li. Is there, within your enlightened knowledge, the house of one Shen Yi, who makes a feast to-day, positioned about this inauspicious region? It is further described as fronting on a summer-seat domed ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... in delightful traditions in regard to the birth of music. The untutored philosophers of primitive humanity and the learned philosophers of ancient civilizations alike strove to solve the sweet, elusive mystery surrounding the art. Through the myths and legends based on their speculations runs a suggestion ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... was slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to Clyde's wish for a photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of confused wonder. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Her beauty attracted and her amiability retained the devotion of men, the friendship of women. Nature had lavished upon her those rare, delicate, elusive qualities which go to make up that top flower of evolution, the woman of fascination, a creature indefinable, like poetry. In New York, city and State, she was a reigning belle, caressed by society; she had been named the social queen of South Carolina, under ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... to show that the colyumist is likely to begin his job with the conception that it is to be a perpetual uproar of mirth and high spirits. This lasts about a week. He then learns, in secret, to take it rather seriously. He has to deal with the most elusive and grotesque material he knows—his own mind; and the unhappy creature, everlastingly probing himself in the hope of discovering what is so rare in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a ferment of bitterness. The ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... excellent for skirmishing, harassing, terrifying, by their extraordinary shouts and their unbridled gallop. They were not able to hold out against a regular disciplined cavalry provided with bits and substantial arms. They were but a swarm of flies that always harasses and kills at the least mistake; elusive and perfect for a long pursuit and the massacre of the vanquished to whom the Numidians gave neither rest nor truce. They were like Arab cavalry, badly armed for the combat, but sufficiently armed for butchering, as results show. The ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... loyally strove to help her make the best of things in her own way. It was like a woman, he reflected, to follow her mood to the last extreme, and, being a man, he was not displeased. The change in her manner was too elusive for him to analyze. There was no real concession of her reserve—no sacrifice of the feminine privilege of prompt and complete withdrawal. If he had struck a false note, he knew that she would have turned frigid in an instant. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... elbows on the table, and her hands up against her ears. Her eyes shone, as they rested intent upon the two penciled bits. The link between them suggested itself quickly and faintly; she was grasping at an elusive something with all the fine little quivering brain-tentacles that lay hold ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... manner not to be understood. Always on and on and on the Trail was destined to lead them until they died, and then the maker of it,—not Jingoss, not the Weasel, the defaulter, the man of flesh and blood and nerves and thoughts and the capacities for suffering,—but a being elusive as the aurora, an embodiment of that dread country, a servant of the unfriendly North, would ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Gale's coming from this conference that he encountered Nell. Since the interrupted siesta episode she had been more than ordinarily elusive, and about all he had received from her was a tantalizing smile from a distance. He got the impression now, however, that she had awaited him. When he drew close to her he was certain of it, and he ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... backward on his straw. For a long time he groped with stiffening fingers for the elusive gold, which seemed to avoid him. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... first published. Nothing, however, could be more remote from Garcilasso's nebulous half-pagan melancholy; we are no less distant from the pseudonymous nymphs of Cetina and Francisco de la Torre: the elegant Amaryllis of the one, the elusive Filis of the other, though destined to be re-incarnated by a tribe of later poets, find no place in these stately numbers. Luis de Leon does not emulate Alcazar's epigrammatic wit, nor Herrera's Petrarchan sweetness, nor Ercilla's tumultuous rhetoric. He has an individuality ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... is something in nature more agile and dismayingly elusive than a romping young collie. But that "something" is not a mortal man. As the thief sprang, Lad sprang in unison with him; darting to the left and a yard or so backward. He came to an expectant standstill once more; his tail wildly vibrating, his entire furry body tingling ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... was willing to help the children along the path of manual dexterity and eager to have them see and love the beautiful. Under her guidance they gathered and pressed weeds and grasses and the airy, elusive milkweed down, caught butterflies, and assembled the whole under glass, thus ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... deal, but she did not answer at once. She wanted to be very sure of saying the right word; and it is only when we try to grapple with another's intimate need that we find ourselves baffled by the elusive, intangible spirits of those with whom we share sunlight and food and the bewildering gift of speech. Honor was wondering now whether, by a supreme concentration of will, she could possibly infuse some measure of the soldier ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... arranged his affairs and took financial responsibility from his shoulders, his publishers, and perhaps half a dozen intimate friends, he was scarcely recognised in his true character. Indeed, his whereabouts were seldom known save to his agent and his only brother, so elusive was he and so careful to establish a ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... tread, let me recommend those wearied with social bustle and the empty amenities of present-day existence to pass a few weeks in the comparative solitude of several pleasant companions "under the stars" in North-Western Rhodesia, where they can still catch a glimpse of the elusive zebras, with coats shining in the sun like burnished steel, and hear the persistent call of the honey-bird. At night the roar of lions may now and then cause them to turn in their sleep, and in their dreams they ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... the various problems of "The Wind Bloweth"—problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity, and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... generally holds more easily that elusive quality of romance for which the intelligent mind so often hungers than a town that has long ago discarded its old tower-studded girdle. And among the half-dozen or more English towns still possessed of ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... and everything else so placed that they would not be wet by the dew, which is very heavy in the Saguenay region. Then, like true sons of Nimrod, they once more sought the limpid waters of the little lake in quest of the ever elusive and ever interesting trout. They all had good luck, which guaranteed them a hearty breakfast. As Bob and Pud came back to the camp they found Jack out on a log casting. The woods were back of him and almost directly above him, but in some uncanny ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... most interesting and most rare cross-bred result of the elusive something, be it soul, imagination, or ecstasy which had turned a woman ancestress, created for the great honour of bearing children, into the nun, whose maternal instincts had feigned find solace ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... This communication put an entirely new complexion on affairs. Far from wishing to confront Charley, Evan now desired at any cost to avoid him. If he could only succeed in following Charley to the "club-house" and in trapping the elusive chief himself, what a triumph! His heart beat fast at the ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... has preserved the sprightly wit and grace of the original, in which all the shades of character, frequently delicate and elusive, are brought out by refined ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... faint noises. On a hot day the city is as appealing as a half-cooled cinder patch. Poor devils in factories, poor devils in stores, in offices. One must sigh thinking of them. Life is even vaster than the lake in which these fishermen fish. And happiness is mathematically elusive as the fish for which the fishermen wait. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... naturalist, now waxed enthusiastic in the collection of specimens. She was running one day in pursuit of a gorgeous dragon-fly through the little wood that skirted the playing-fields, and, with her eyes fixed on her elusive quarry, she almost tumbled over Chrissie, who was sitting by the side ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... had first attracted me, was as yet wholly immature. But in the face itself there were signs of a coming change. Wherein it might lie I could not tell, but it was there, an intangible and wholly elusive thing. I think that a certain fear of it and what it might mean oppressed me with the sense of coming trouble. I was more fully conscious then than ever before of the moral responsibility ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of one kept too long from sleep lying down at last to rest. She would have been content to wait, until after a long dreamful contemplation of the news, for detail and description of the voyage and adventure of the most elusive craft in the world, only that, once off, Osborn plunged on as if he would have her know all as ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... these years? She could not touch or see her own grief; but Lady Elliston's grief pierced through her. She leaned towards her and softly touched her shoulder, her arm, her hand; she held the hand in hers. The sight of this loss of strength and dignity was an actual pain; her own pain was something elusive and unsubstantial; it wandered like a ghost vainly ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... each instant more plainly through the tumult of his emotions was what Jan had come to know as the picture in his brain. Shadowy and indistinct at first, in pale, elusive lines of mental fabric, he saw the picture growing; and in its growth he saw first the soft, sweet outlines of a woman's face, and then great luring eyes, dark like his own—and before these eyes, which gazed upon him with overwhelming love, all else faded away from before Jan Thoreau. The ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... said Campo-Basso, with a sympathetic desire to make trouble, if possible, "that His Majesty delays an answer while he frames one that shall be elusive, yet conciliatory. King Louis, Your Grace knows, thinks many times before each word ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... minute afterwards that he was awake again, staring into the dim-lit dug-out with every sense alert. He was conscious first of a faint elusive scent—a scent which was new to him. His mind wandered to the scents he knew—Chaminade, Mysterieuse, Trefle Incarnat—but this was different. Delicate, sensuous, with the slightest suggestion of jasmine about it, it seemed ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... southern sunlight of the town. The brown sails of the fishing-boats waved in translucid green; and the white field of the sheer cliff, and all the roofs, gables, spires, balconies, and the green of the verandahs were exquisitely indicated and elusive in the bright air; and the beach was loud with acrobats and comic minstrels, and nurse-maids lay on the pebbles reading novels, children with their clothes tied tightly about them were ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the elusive mental dews that might awaken something definite concerning her hazy impression of the man beside her, she spoke pleasantly, conventionally, touching idly any topic that might have a bearing; and, under a self-possession ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... that of overlordship, the subtleties were still more elusive. That the negroes, many of whom were the sons and daughters of the Major's former slaves, should pass the old-time "Mawstuh" on the pike with uncovered heads and respectful heel-scrapings, was a matter of course. Thomas Jefferson was white, free, and ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... this court takes effort. The pictures and the sculpture of the alcoves and the half-dome tell their own story. Here is no elusive mysticism, no obscure symbolism to be dug out with the help of guidebooks, like a hard lesson. The treasures of the Seasons are on the surface, glowing in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... brief dialogue between the visitor and the two girls, who must have come in from the garden. Then the front door banged heavily. He was gone. The vast and arid tedium of her life closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void peopled only by ominous dim elusive shapes of disaster. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... been written regarding him than any other character in history—one excepted. Nevertheless, he still remains the most elusive, the most unsatisfying genius that the world has ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... summit of the rock was still shooting, though intermittently. It seemed to the rider that the man's target must be elusive or concealed, for the shooter's actions showed that he was irritated. The other man, too, was still shooting. The rider noted that he, too, seemed to be meeting with failure, for as the rider drew nearer ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... ahead a ripple of beetle bodies slipped over the bank of the river cut. The aliens were working their way into cover, fitting into the dapple shadows with a skill which argued a long practice in such elusive maneuvers. Did they plan to try to fight off a cruiser attack? That was pure madness. Or, Shann wondered, did they intend to have the Terrans met by one of their own major ships somewhere well above the ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... business with fish, not to be entered upon lightly or without due consideration. Yet these made a veritable romp of it. And in the crystal clear air overhead, swept clean of all city soot, soared a marsh hawk or two and an osprey. There was more than clarity to this atmosphere. It had an elusive, mirage-creating quality that made the osprey look startlingly large as he soared near. It was enough to make one remember the roc that Sindbad saw and get under cover. But he took an alewive instead of me. All along the island in the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... of the excretory centres to the sexual focus in discussing this important factor of modesty, because, in analyzing so complex and elusive an emotion as modesty it is desirable to keep as near as possible to the essential and fundamental facts on which it is based. It is scarcely necessary to point out that, in ordinary civilized society, these fundamental facts are not usually present at the surface of consciousness and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite, the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character: the terse despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Martin Conrad, grown to be a man, a tall, powerful, manly man, but with the same face still—an elusive ghost of the boy's face I used to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... removal from the future of his life, in reality another and larger trouble was looming close ahead. A second landscape had begun to beckon not like his poor little frost-killed field, not of the earth at all, but lifted unattainable into the air, faint, clear, elusive—the marriage of another woman. And how different she! He felt sure that no winter's rasure would ever reach that land; no instability, no feebleness of nature awaited him there; the loveliness of its summer, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... has been of much value in hastening the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through straggling ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... possesses something that for lack of a better word is termed "personality;" something elusive and evasive, that cannot easily be defined or explained, but nevertheless remains the essential quality that distinguishes its possessor from every other human being. But while all may have the potentiality ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... went up to his room he looked around him in pleased surprise. It was only a small room, but it was well-aired, and had that elusive, indescribable air of comfort which some rooms have, and others, without apparent reason, have not. The stovepipe from the kitchen range ran through it, giving it ample warmth. His room at Mrs. Steadman's had been of about the temperature of a well. It was with a decided feeling of satisfaction ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... large blue eyes, cold as the waters of the Tiber and like unto them mysterious and elusive, were ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... average geisha may be inane in her patter and have little more than conventional grace and charm, I have been waited on by girls who added real mental celerity, wit and a power of skilful mimicry to that elusive and seductive quality that accounts for the impregnable position of their class. At one dinner impersonations in both the comic and the tragic vein were given by a girl of unmistakable genius. Frequently a plain, elderly geisha will display unsuspected ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect. Indeed, I have been more affected by some of the short work of his son Julian, though I can quite understand the high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the delicate charm of his style. There is Bulwer Lytton ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tongue affords Such railing eloquence, and war of words. Studious thy country's worthies to defame, Thy erring voice displays thy mother's shame. Elusive of the bridal day, she gives Fond hopes to all, and all with hopes deceives. Did not the sun, through heaven's wide azure roll'd, For three long years the royal fraud behold? While she, laborious in delusion, spread The spacious loom, and mix'd the various thread: ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... magnificent wood, unchoked by undergrowth. Here the trees stood up in great, regular rows, ordered by nature, and the brilliant moonlight clothed every one of them in a veil of silver. On such a bright night in summer the wilderness always had for him an elusive though powerful beauty, but he felt its danger. Among the mighty trunks, with no concealing thickets, he could be seen easily, if prowling savages were near, and, as he made his circles, he always hastened through ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to confound the man servant, Robert Brown, once in the badger form, and once in the form of a white rabbit which "turned round before him several times." Robert was also the witness of an even more peculiar performance by the elusive ghost. "Being grinding corn in the garrets, and happening to stop a little, the handle of the mill was turn [sic] round with great swiftness." It is interesting to note that Robert subsequently declared that "nothing vexed him but that the mill was empty. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... misunderstandings. The Italian saying, "traduttore, tradittore," is the expression of a fact too seldom recognized, especially by those whose business it is to interpret, so to speak, one people to another. Language is as mysterious and elusive a thing as aught connected with humanity, as love, for example, or music; and it may be asserted with some degree of confidence that among every people there are ideas current, and in all departments—in ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... I agree. But are you sure that no notion of a potential or ideal knower has anything to do with forming this strangely elusive idea of the truth of the ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... expert. Bell permitted him to ramble on about historic rings in general. But all the same he could see that Van Sneck was far from easy in his mind. Now and then a sudden gleam came into his eyes: memory played for the fragment of a second on a certain elusive chord and ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... stories and clever mimicry, and rushed to her side whenever she summoned him to build card-castles or to join in a romp—until what was "play to the child" began to prove a serious matter to the man of the world. He found that, while he was building castles or chasing the elusive fairy blindfolded, she had stolen his heart away; but when he ventured to tell his love to her she boxed his ears, and told him to run away and not be so ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. Thus he hoped to find in the historic recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was conscious. Few single careers could satisfy this longing, being only incomplete parts of the elusive whole of the history of the world; one was a quarter, as it were, the other a half of the proof; imagination did the rest and completed them. From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... frankly of herself, and that she did. She told him of her youth and training, her ambitions, her disappointments. Quite unconsciously her cynicism crept to the fore, until in word and tone she had almost scoffed at many things that Alwyn held true and dear. The touch was too light, the meaning too elusive, for Alwyn to grasp always the point of attack; but somehow he got the distant impression that Miss Wynn had little faith in Truth and Goodness and Love. Vaguely shocked he grew so silent that she ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... seemed to become diluted, as it were, with the advancing light that we could almost see sliding along the surface of the water, until suddenly, as though emerging from an invisible mist, a ghostly object appeared, grey and elusive, against the background of darkness, and with one voice we all ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... full value, we should need to be able—as Blake was—to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very faculty of "fourfold vision" which gives to these books their ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very effort to study them. Hence, for the majority even of imaginative people, who possess at the utmost "double vision," they are difficult and often wearisome to read. They are so, because the ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the hearer as strange and elusive. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... much as he liked, catch it he would and catch it he must. But he must acquire greater skill before he would be able to render something so delicate and elusive. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... has traveled abroad, has admired and perhaps coveted the gardens of England, France, and Italy. Their charm is undeniable, and thought to be too elusive for reproduction on American soil without the aid of landscape gardeners and a ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... position of grotesque fright, the fear-sweat streaming down his face, Frederik Grimm peered about him through the flickering gloom. The place seemed peopled with elusive Shapes. His teeth clicked together as his loosened jaw was nerve-racked. He ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it is the difference between the rarest of all energies ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... another lad, is writing an essay on "A Day in Church," in competition for a university scholarship. He gets on finely until he pauses for lack of a word. For nearly an hour he searches for this elusive thing, until suddenly he is told that the allotted time is up, and he has lost! Barrie ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... salary of the eldest son, the head of the family? Those words, "head of the family," plunged him immediately into one of those internal combats in which interest and conscience struggled for the mastery—the one brutal, substantial, attacking vigorously with straight thrusts, the other elusive, breaking away by subtle disengagements—while the worthy Jansoulet, unconscious cause of the conflict, walked with long strides close by his young friend, inhaling the fresh air with delight at the end ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... his ears. He would return to the sage every day, but what if he were not able to remember, if it were all to end in words with nothing behind the words? The sage said that in a little while the discourses would not seem so elusive and evanescent. At present they seemed to Joseph like the mist on the edge of a stream, and he strove against the belief that a philosopher is like a man who sets out ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... new side to the problem of the morning came to him. These sounds—he realized now how he loved them. Verily they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive, indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant so much to him—could ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the Highland character, perhaps also a sense of the difficulty of the task, led him to take up at forty-one the study of Gaelic; in which he made some shadow of progress, but not much: the fastnesses of that elusive speech retaining to the last their independence. At the house of his friend Mrs. Blackburn, who plays the part of a Highland lady as to the manner born, he learned the delightful custom of kitchen dances, which became the rule ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Five Lakes, Basque and other foreign shepherds may be found tending their flocks, and prospectors, with queer little pack-burros, who climb the mountains seeking the elusive gold, as they did in the days ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... searching his very diligently, as though in quest of something elusive; and he gazed serenely back, the most unsuspicious of smiles ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the Adventure, I have, from the earliest days of my childhood, had a feeling, amounting sometimes to conviction, that sometime in the past I dwelt in just such another land as this; a sound, an odour, has brought to me vague, elusive memories of a country of vast forests, great, shining rivers, stupendous mountains, and island-dotted lakes crowned with vast buildings constructed in a style of architecture such as these eyes of mine have never beheld in England. ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... lasting, like a painting, a statue, a book," she said; "but it isn't. Why these things haunt me every day, but I can recollect nothing; I have to come back to the piano. It is elusive." ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... with tigerlike suddenness. One kick sent the tomahawk spinning, another landed the Shawnee again on the ground. Blind with rage, Silvertip leaped up, and without a weapon rushed at his antagonist; but the Indian was not a boxer, and he failed to get his hands on Joe. Shifty and elusive, the lad dodged around the struggling savage. One, two, three hard blows staggered Silvertip, and a fourth, delivered with the force of Joe's powerful arm, caught the Indian when he was off his balance, and felled him, battered and bloody, on the grass. The surrounding ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... Soviet rule that engineered two artificial famines (1921-22 and 1932-33) in which over 8 million died. In World War II, German and Soviet armies were responsible for some 7 to 8 million more deaths. Although independence was achieved in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, true freedom remains elusive, as many of the former Soviet elite remain entrenched, stalling efforts at economic reform, privatization, and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... met in quick embrace, and the desolation of the watcher was complete as he heard her speak lovingly to the officer who had at last come back into her life. She spoke in French and—was it because of the language used or of the unusual excitement?—her voice took on a strange elusive quality utterly unlike the richness of the tones Mark loved so well, yet remained vibrant, haunting in its sibilant lightness. Never again would he hear it so. He longed to go, but there was no present way of escape, so he steeled ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... man, and familiarity with artificial sounds, over there, have affected the bird voices, is a question. Certain it is that their birds are much more domestic than ours, and certain it is that all purely wild sounds are plaintive and elusive. Even of the bark of the fox, the cry of the panther, the voice of the coon, or the call and clang of wild geese and ducks, or the war-cry of savage tribes, is this true; but not true in the same sense of domesticated ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... loading his pipe, and lighted it, staring off into the thicker spruce forest into which Scottie and his wife had fled. The entire force was on the lookout for Scottie Deane. For more than a year he had been as elusive as the little white ermine of the woods. He had outwitted the best men in the service, and his name was known to every man of the Royal Mounted from Calgary to Herschel Island. There was a price on his head, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... singularly elusive thing, and I doubt if anyone alive can explain it; but its elusiveness gives it something of its charm; and, moreover, the illustrations which are necessary to an inquiry into its nature, its scope and meaning, are apt to be amusing without ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... not over-run Tom," said Ruth to her chum. "No knowing what by-path he might have tried in search of the elusive gasoline." ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... on the other hand, her strong common sense urged her to decide nothing until Windebank came back. Windebank she was sure of, whereas she was not so confident of Perigal; but she was forced to admit that the elusive and more subtle personality of the latter appealed more to her imagination than the other's stability. Presently, she left her lodgings and walked slowly towards the canal, which was in a contrary direction to that ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Robert was filled with fierce anger that the man should show such brazen effrontery, and impulsively he pursued. Profiting by his experience with the spy, he now had a pistol in his pocket, and clutching the butt of it he hurried after the elusive shadow. ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would and did, they burnt within him with an ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... papers; beginning to be astir with the boom of bees, and the fluttering journeys of those busy householders, the robins. The high, soft grass made the most comfortable of school benches; an upturned box served excellently for a desk; and here Kirk struggled with the elusive, unseen shapes of A. B. C.—and conquered them! His first completed manuscript was a letter to his mother, and Phil, looking at it, thought all the toil worth while. The letter had taken long, but Felicia had ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... long been supreme in the Philippines. Every function of government had been performed by its officers and men, if performed at all. Our troops had been combating an elusive and cruel enemy. If they were human it is to be presumed that they still harbored animosities, born of these conditions, toward the people with whom they had so recently been fighting. Had the work of pacification been then turned over to them it ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... it was not more than two o'clock before Wallie began to wonder what they would have for supper. They were not making fast time, for his horse stumbled badly and the pack-horses, both old and stiff, travelled slowly, so at three o'clock the elusive mountains seemed as far away as when ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... or vine-clad stump, a bird, a taloned monster, a rock carved by the fire-queen, a human form, a puff of vapor—and now it has given place to vacancy. It was a goddess, perhaps of the hula. In the solitude of the wilderness one meets a youthful being of pleasing address, of godlike wit, of elusive beauty; the charm of her countenance unspoken authority, her gesture command. She seems one with nature, yet commanding it. Food placed before her remains untasted; the oven, imu,[22] in which the fascinated host has heaped his abundance, preparing for a feast, when opened is found ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... guess; but if—to say it once more—the action of matter on matter, the "how" of chemical combinations, eludes us, shall we complain because the action of mind on mind, spirit on spirit, is no {216} less elusive? The final test—whether, e.g., a mother's prayer that her absent son may be preserved from the snare of some great temptation, is able to work a change in his mind—is, as we said above, the test of experience; and unless we are dogmatically ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... and passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... had not told upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at least in so far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief, who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive effect of maturity, not without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was impressed that it would be very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam more than well—with ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... its beak. But all along the borders of the woods and in the bushy parts of the fields there was a new song that I was puzzled in tracing to the author. It was most noticeable in the morning and at twilight, but was at all times singularly secret and elusive. I at last discovered that it was the white-throated sparrow, a common bird all through this region. Its song is very delicate and plaintive,—a thin, wavering, tremulous whistle, which disappoints one, however, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... September, in the year of 1870, the newly emancipated had awakened to the perception of the commercial advantages of freedom, and had begun to lay snares to catch the fleet and elusive dollar. Those controversialists who say that the Negro's only idea of freedom was to live without work are either wrong, malicious, or they did not know Little Africa when the boom was on; when every little African, fresh from ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... that fair form now scattered in earth with which I was enclosed. And if this greatest of charms so forsook thee at my death, what mortal thing should thereafter have led thee to desire it? Verily at the first hour of disappointment over elusive things, thou shouldst have flown up after me who was no longer of them. Thou shouldst not have allowed thy wings to be weighed down to get more wounds, either by a little maid or by any other so short ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... because he is studying history. History requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your "education" is no further advanced than the cat's; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farthing's value for your waste of time. Yes, I think he had to get up at halfpast 11 P.M. in order to be sure to be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dragged away by the prosaic Englishman. This feeling of his childhood recurred to him now with irresistible force. The throb of the motor of human life was pulsating in his ears; but added to it was something more, something elusive, intangible, but all-powerful. The moment he had arrived within the city limits he had felt the first trace of its presence. As he approached the centre of congestion it had deepened, had become more and more ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... both dialects. I was in Southern Russia attending to our wells for twenty years. In fact, long before our wells came into being, and I can honestly say that, though I am not by any means an unintelligent man, I know just as little about the Russian to-day as I did when I went there. He's the most elusive creature. You think you know him two days after you have met him. Two days later you find that you have changed all your opinions about him; and by the end of the first year, if you have kept a careful note of your observations and impressions in a diary, you will ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... return, though in lesser degree, of the rising and falling of waves. This latter sensation became less and less, though the feeling of traveling downward continued. Prester Kleig knew that he was going down into the sea again, down into it deeply.... Then that odor once more, and the elusive memory. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... be called a political poem, from its elusive reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I thought the wearer of the 'blue cloak and birds' feathers,' must be a fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some one ask the Craoibhin ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... retorted, straightening up from a spirited chase of the last elusive chocolate, red of face and fierce of eye. "Some time I'll come to the end of my patience, and then, Mollie ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... to end for many days in succession had passed over, leaving behind them just a few dark clouds, drifting in broken masses across a sky of deepest blue, and throwing deep shadows here and there across the moor—ever-varying elusive shadows which only accentuated the brilliancy of the sunshine where it fell upon the warm colours of the ling, which was just coming into blossom, for the blooming time of the bell ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... the lieutenant had not had them under arrest. The mustangers were well known in this district and could prove their reason for being where they were found. And Kitchell had raided one of their corrals last season, so they had no possible tie with the elusive outlaw. Probably by now the Trinfans had returned to their hunt for ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... dragging the lake when he got back. He stood on the bank and heard Gerald's voice. The water was still booming in the night, the moon was fair, the hills beyond were elusive. The lake was sinking. There came the raw smell of the ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... an unknown papyrus, of the detective with a clue, surged in me. Indeed, I was not sure whether I was engaged in private inquiry or in research; so recent, so remote was the mystery. After two days' labour, I marshalled the elusive words. This is ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... husband gave him no advantage that he dared to press. He accepted the secret interviews she granted, and learned at last the part he had to play. On that promissory note which she had given him at the altar she paid the instalment of a few elusive kisses, and he discovered to his dismay that he must do some great thing to make himself worthy of her, before the note should be paid in full. It was she who had seen the possibilities of his connection with a union and of his interest in politics, and had ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... will realise that this is a question with an elusive climax. It is like going up a mountain. Each successive peak appears in turn the summit, and yet there is always another pinnacle beyond. We have now settled that the Members are to be allotted to single-member constituencies based on the old magisterial districts according ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Maryland, accompanied by his guns, his four dogs, and two or three choice men of fashion—young bloods of the time—men with whom we shall become better acquainted as these chronicles go on—there to search for the toothsome and elusive canvas-back for which ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a foe who vastly overmatches them in strength, but can prolong a semi-passive resistance long after all decisive battles have been fought. See, too, how the strong invader can only conquer his elusive antagonists by learning their methods, studying the country, and matching them in mobility and cunning. The parallel must not be pressed too far; but that this sort of warfare will have its counterpart on the sea is a truth which ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... after that, and chewed straws. She pulled off her shoes to rest her stockingless feet, and put her head on Godfrey's damp side. For she had resolved to postpone the catching of Sassy till evening, when the elusive pullet would be sleepily seated on a two-by-four in the empty cow-stall that now served ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... homogeneous to the heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character and is swift and secular. If Flaubert in Sentimental Education originated a novel structure in fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his edifice, in its contrapuntal ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the desert, none worse and many better. Troop days were all right; squadron days were not bad; regimental days were tolerable at times; but brigade and divisional manoeuvres were inventions of the devil. On these latter occasions elusive white flags, the skeleton enemy, appeared and disappeared. Scouts reported them here, then there. The mounted men advanced in open order, all except the front line smothered in a fog of dust. Infantry toiled and sweated after them. The maligned staff viewed from afar the battle ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... but little, but the questions he asked gave me glimpses of his mind that sometimes startled me. He was polite, modest but elusive, nevertheless, I like him, and shall see more of him." Far sighted as Selwyn was, he did not know the full extent of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... again at work, threatening a gang of Jamaica coolies. But no longer he swore at them with his former wholeheartedness. His mind was occupied with other things. Now, between him and his work, came thoughts of the tunnel that for half a century had lain hidden from the sight of man; and of Inez, elusive, beautiful, distracting, now galloping recklessly toward him down a sunlit road, now a motionless statue standing on a white cliff, with the waves of the Caribbean bending and ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... and the dam was completed, he gradually gathered around him an ardent little group of seeker after that most elusive of all things—"Truth". ...
— Regeneration • Charles Dye
... his eyes again into the North. Its myriad stars, white and unshivering, the elusive play of the mysterious lights hovering over the pole, and the black edge of the wilderness beyond the river were holding a greater and greater fascination for him. Since morning, when he had looked on that wilderness ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... told you at beginning, I have had a great deal of experience with these elusive 'facts,' and it chances that a practised though non-professional psychic with whom I have held many baffling sittings, is in the city. I may be able to induce ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... There is a sort of elusive element in life, you see. Nature has no goal, yet leads us along the pathway by shows, enchantments and promises. She pays us in checks which she never cashes. She holds out a glittering prize, persuades us that it is worth any ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... was almost day. The east glowed opalescent. All about him Annixter saw the land inundated with light. But there was a change. Overnight something had occurred. In his perturbation the change seemed to him, at first, elusive, almost fanciful, unreal. But now as the light spread, he looked again at the gigantic scroll of ranch lands unrolled before him from edge to edge of the horizon. The change was not fanciful. The change was real. The earth was no ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... individuality in each of these fascinating little tales; something elusive and subtle in every one, something quaint or surprising, which catches the fancy and gives a sense of satisfaction like that felt when one discovers a rare flower in an unexpected place. I predict that "The Odd Number" will ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the lack of something in this community—a vague, an indefinable, an elusive something, and yet a lack. But after considerable thought we made out what it was—tramps. Let them go there, right now, in a body. It is utterly virgin soil. Passage is cheap. Every true patriot in America will help buy tickets. Whole armies of these excellent beings can be spared from our ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
