"Impossibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came off, chained in pairs, and were marched, still singing, to a shed prepared for them, we could not keep back the tears. The overseer, a great strong man, cracking his "blacksnake" from time to time, to enforce authority, excited our strong indignation. All this is an impossibility now, thank God, but then it was a cruel, dreadful reality. Like cattle, they were penned for the night, and were to be kept there for a day or two, till another boat should take them to New Orleans to be sold for the cane brake and the cotton ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... scarcely, if at all, attainable with a Balloon of the usual description however powerfully invested with the means of motion; as any one will readily perceive who has ever noticed or experienced the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of guiding a tub afloat in the water, compared with the condition of a boat or other similarly constructed body, in the same element. The efficacy of this provision and its necessity will appear more forcibly when we observe that whenever the Balloon in the machine ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... refrangible. No doubt if this had been the case, a perfect telescope could have been produced by properly shaping the object glass. But when Newton had demonstrated that light was by no means so simple as had been supposed, it became obvious that a satisfactory refracting telescope was an impossibility when only a single object lens was employed, however carefully that lens might have been wrought. Such an objective might, no doubt, be made to conduct any one group of rays of a particular shade to the same focus, but the rays of other ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... o'clock in the evening, he came staggering down the wharf, rolled himself into the stern seats of the boat, and ordered us to shove off and pull towards the sloop. We represented to him that the night was dark and cloudy, and it would be next to an impossibility to find the sloop in the broad bay at that hour; that the attempt would be attended with risk, and consequently it would be wiser to wait until morning before we ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is fastening on us as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering eyes—senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that word Dis-Ease; the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our English Industry ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the impression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that the colonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States, and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no less clearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralized government of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened the claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... unoffending when he refused; so indulgent and kind to those dependent on him; so generous, so faithful to his friends, so forgiving to his foes. This was his character under one phase: even his adherents sometimes blamed his easiness of temper; the impossibility in his nature to cherish the remembrance of a wrong, or even to be roused by an insult. But, whilst such were the amiable traits of his character, history has its lists of accusations against him for corruption ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... received that morning might slacken the preparations of the voyage, which their impatience and interest, persuaded them was not advanced with expedition; and so they held much discourse with the duke of the impossibility that his intelligence could be true, and that it was contrived by the artifice and dexterity of their enemies, in order to abate the warmth and zeal that was used for their relief, the arrival of which relief, those enemies had much reason to apprehend; and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... or gardens situated near crowded thoroughfares, is that the plants there grown are almost invariably smothered with dust: under such circumstances successful gardening becomes simply a matter of impossibility, as hardly any plants will thrive, or even live, under such conditions. A proper site is, therefore, a ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and its exact significance. The dream hidden so closely in her heart: that there might yet be a reconciliation—the dream finally killed when she perceived that Ironsyde had fallen in love with Estelle Waldron—was no dream in her son's mind. What she knew was impossible, till now represented no impossibility to him. He actually declared it as a thing which, in his moral outlook, ought to be. Only so could the past be retrieved, or the future made endurable. But to that matter they did not immediately come. She dined at the farmer's table with Abel ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... children, weary of daily contact with irritable, unreliable and unassimilable aliens, sold or leased their farms in order to escape into a white neighborhood. I presume, Mr. Parker, that nobody can realize the impossibility of withstanding this yellow flood except those who have been overwhelmed by it. We humanitarians of a later day gaze with gentle sympathy upon the spectacle of a noble and primeval race like the Iroquois tribe of Indians dying before the advance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, but ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... the cheerful physician, "Miss Angel (her own name is an impossibility, and does not belong to her) has really borne the operation wonderfully. Marvellously!" he repeated. "The constitution, you see, was originally good. There was a foundation to work upon; that means everything, in ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... behalf. Not a single bishop proceeded with his libel action against Lalage. Nor was I forced to buy any of them off by building even a small cathedral. I attribute our escape from their vengeance entirely to the Provost. His clear statement of the impossibility of obtaining damages by any legal process must have ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... to meet the daily unavoidable returning requisites of domestic life in all their varied ramifications, and relieve a famishing family from the jaws of penury and privation. By thus delivering me from an impending impossibility most prejudicial to my purse resources, you will confer on your humble servant a boon which will be always vivid on the tablet of my breast, never to be effaced until the period that I am sojurning on the stage of this sublunary world's theatre." The petition goes on to explain that all the unhappy ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... illusory conclusions of the reason, and of the value of induction; but he does not conceal from himself the fact that observation is merely the first step in the process of cognition, leaving the chief role for the understanding. This, supplementing the defect of experience—the impossibility of observing all cases—by its a priori concept of law and with its inferences overstepping the bounds of experience, first makes induction possible, brings the facts established into connection (their combination ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to Albert's great joy; for the wily knight had foreseen the great difficulty, or rather impossibility, of prevailing upon Brian de Bois-Guilbert to take such an oath before the assembly, and had invented this excuse to escape the necessity of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... 'An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of! mania! mania!' he muttered. 'You are aware, sir, that you have been doing your worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What does it mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... world! I am not set against her. Nothing in the world but her own emptiness and impossibility of being anything like ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... church as well as by the heretical parties, but, since the church had such a hold upon society, those who sought to reform the monasteries by returning to old beliefs and ancient customs were much more in favor than those who left the church and opposed her from the outside. The impossibility of substantial, internal reform had not yet come to be generally recognized. As time passed the conviction that it was of no use to attempt reforms from the inside gained ground; then the separatists multiplied, and the shedding of blood commenced. The world had to learn anew that it was futile to ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... her deck to our own? One had only to note the wild rush of the surges, their height, and the fierceness with which they broke as they swept down upon our own ship, and the headlong reeling and plunging of her as she met their assault, to realise the absolute impossibility of lowering a boat from her without involving the frail craft and her crew in instant destruction; and how otherwise were those poor, half-drowned wretches to be got at and saved. Something might perhaps be done by means of a hawser, if its end could by any means ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... their quotation of seventy-five francs. Mr. Elmer Roberts of the Associated Press and Mr. Hart O. Berg sat at our table. Both thought that the war would be much longer than at first expected and would depend upon how long Germany could exist, owing to the impossibility of obtaining food from abroad. "Eight months," said ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... your people must consider yourselves prisoners pending the arrival of the dispatches that I must send to the British Government. Yours, sir, was a daring and extremely hazardous plot, designed in extravagance and I may say in ignorance of the impossibility of its execution. The prisoner was too closely guarded and watched, and, as you have seen, it was quite impossible for your vessel to approach this island without being seized. I gather that you have been a naval officer in the service ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... proud domes and floating debts, the rank jimson weed nodded in the wind and the pumpkin pie of to-day still slumbered in the bosom of the future. What glorious facts have, under the benign influence of fostering centuries, been born of apparent impossibility. What giant certainties have grown through these years from the seeds of doubt and discouragement and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Grace Melbury, though he was by no means sure that she was so far committed to him. That the Idea had for once completely fulfilled itself in the objective substance—which he had hitherto deemed an impossibility—he was enchanted enough to fancy must be the case at last. It was not Grace who had passed, however, but several of the ordinary village girls in a group—some steadily walking, some in a mood of wild gayety. He quietly asked his landlady, who was also in the garden, what these girls were intending, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... students. When employed on this work he felt how far in arrear of the other branches of zoology was that which respects the class of fish, and saw how much difficulty had accumulated in it, as well from our ignorance of the anatomy of these animals, and the impossibility of determining with precision the laws of their comparative organization, as from the want of large collections, and perhaps also from the too artificial spirit which had hitherto prevailed in ichthyology. He employed his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... is very strong and general throughout the whole of this vast country, and it is only necessary to sound the tocsin to bring to its maintenance a phalanx equal to uphold its standard against the assaults of any enemies. The impossibility of the Northwestern States consenting that the mouth of the Mississippi should be held by a foreign power, is in itself a guarantee of the long existence of the present political ties. Then, the increasing ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... o'clock Weiss, abandoned by the retiring troops, had been a self-made prisoner there. His return to Sedan had become an impossibility, for the Bavarians, immediately upon the withdrawal of the French, had swarmed down from the park of Montivilliers and occupied the road. He was alone and defenseless, save for his musket and what few cartridges were left him, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Charles," said Mr. Lorry, glancing at the House again, "you are to remember, that getting things out of Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine, every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he passed the Barriers. At another ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... still there; but the crowning figure had disappeared—the young goddess was gone. For she, of all that throng, had an idea in her head, and, after screaming it to every man within reach, only to discover the impossibility of making herself understood in that Babel, she was struggling to make her way toward the second warehouse, through the swaying jam of people. It was a difficult task, as the farther in she managed to go, the denser became the press and the more tightly she found the people ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... being, transformed into a dress-circle. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., made his entree in a steam launch, and all the effects were highly realistic. The only hitch in the otherwise immensely successful representation was the impossibility of securing a moon for the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility. If he is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know. I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wrested victory from every peril, in that blackness of utter darkness, he preserved the serene lucidity of his mind. He looked the stubborn facts calmly in the face, and when no military resource remained, when he recognised the impossibility of making another march or fighting another battle, he bowed his head in submission to that Power which makes and unmakes nations. The surrender of the fragments of the Army of Northern Virginia closed the imperishable ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... seemed to have moved the entire country in a singular manner. There remained in every one's mind a disquietude, a vague fear, a sensation of mysterious terror, springing not merely from the impossibility of discovering any trace of the assassin, but also and above all from that strange finding of the wooden shoes in front of La Roque's door the day after the crime. The certainty that the murderer had assisted at the investigation, that he was still, doubtless, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... no need to be alarmed, pretty Mollie," said the man, still speaking French. "I have given the coachman orders to rattle along through the streets. We can talk here at our leisure, and as long as we please. You must perceive the utter impossibility of conversation at a street corner and ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... soil fertility and in the production of food. To understand this evolution it must be recognized that mineral fertilizers so extensively employed in modern western agriculture, like the extensive use of mineral coal, had been a physical impossibility to all people alike until within very recent years. With this fact must be associated the very long unbroken life of these nations and the vast numbers their farmers have been compelled ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... he began to turn over in his mind the possibilities of the situation. How long would the creature be likely to hold him thus prisoner? Would it release him when at length it realised the impossibility of penetrating his armour? And, if so, how long was it likely to be ere the release came? Failing to make a meal of him, the thing would undoubtedly be obliged to go forth, sooner or later, to seek for ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... dividing the stone into plates, there is always a certain appearance of meanness and niggardliness in the procedure. It is necessary that the builder should justify himself from this suspicion; and prove that it is not in mere economy or poverty, but in the real impossibility of doing otherwise, that he has sheeted his walls so thinly with the precious film. Now the shaft is exactly the portion of the edifice in which it is fittest to recover his honor in this respect. For if blocks of jasper or porphyry be inserted in the walls, the spectator ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Impossibility.—One great difference between a wise man and a fool is, the former only wishes for what he may possibly obtain; the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... about traveling into either future or past, which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible—a practical impossibility in the one case and an absolute one ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... boys, the secret did not give us any rest, and we were always discussing and plotting as to how we could discover it. We made at least a hundred various plans, but all failed. It was an impossibility to get into the tower, because of a heavy iron-barred oaken door. The windows were too high to be reached. We had to satisfy ourselves with throwing a well-aimed stone, which hit the room through the window. Such an achievement was somewhat of a success, for oftentimes we drove out an alarmed ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... causes some to abandon the ascent. Dr. Cheever has, in his Hill Difficulty, very happily described the energy that is needful to enable the pilgrim to make the ascent. He forcibly proves the utter impossibility of making the ascent by ceremonial observances, or while encumbered with worldly cares or pride in trinkets of gold and costly array. He reminds us of the solemn advice of Peter, 'be ye built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifice acceptable to God by Jesus ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... out of Virginia. We held then and we hold still, that our generals that day were sagacious and brave, and we think history may take their word for it that any effective pursuit, looking to the crossing of the Potomac, was a military impossibility. It is true that Stonewall Jackson, as history reminds us, was heard to exclaim while the surgeon was dressing his hand, 'Give me ten thousand fresh troops, and I will be in Washington to-morrow!' But there were not the ten thousand troops ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... And that they do become so, their appearance amply shows. The neglect to which the great mass of working-men's children are condemned leaves ineradicable traces and brings the enfeeblement of the whole race of workers with it. Add to this, the unsuitable clothing of this class, the impossibility of precautions against colds, the necessity of toiling so long as health permits, want made more dire when sickness appears, and the only too common lack of all medical assistance; and we have a rough idea of the sanitary condition of the English ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... hours, as if by enchantment—the rapid coming of the solemn night—the shadow of death always upon them, and yet so dim and faint, that objects the meanest and most trivial started from the gloom beyond, and forced themselves upon the view—the impossibility of holding the mind, even if they had been so disposed, to penitence and preparation, or of keeping it to any point while one hideous fascination tempted it away—these things were common to them all, and varied only in their ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... made to act as above, because the attack on the manganese ore requires a certain minimum concentration of the acid. Formerly, instead of free hydrochloric acid a mixture of common salt and sulphuric acid was sometimes employed, but this is never done on a manufacturing scale now. Owing to the impossibility of employing any metal in contact with the acid, the "chlorine stills,'' where the above reaction is carried out, must be made of acid-proof stones or "chemical'' stoneware. This process is very costly, as much of the acid and all of the manganese is wasted. Moreover ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... round a great boulder, and they were almost home! There it lay before them, a little below, an irregular, low, grey stone cottage, fitting itself to the ground as if fitting the ground to it had been an impossibility. It was not on a ravine; the slope went down, down, till it swept off into the stubble fields and cleared land below. There was the sound of a great waterfall in the distance; close by the house a little branch stream went bounding ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... once. What I was seen to take from the drawer, Bat, was the little silver box holding those papers; I rushed from the house meaning to go to my lawyer. And I was a half dozen blocks away when I came out of the state I was in, realized the hour and the impossibility of the whole situation, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... credited with having asserted that a steam voyage across the Atlantic was "a physical impossibility," but in the work from which I took the liberty of copying his words he denies the charge, and says that what he did affirm was, that long sea voyages could not at that time be maintained with that regularity and certainty which are indispensable to commercial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... Rachel left for Antwerp this evening, to meet her mother and sister, and I returned to my room, lonesome enough. Sunday I lunched with Mrs. Lucas and Mrs. McLaren. I had calls from three factory-women, who told a sad story of the impossibility of getting even a dollar ahead by the most ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... sheep upon the mountain, and the sheep upon the western farm, and the cattle on the upper barrows, scarcely one in ten was saved; do what we would for them, and this was not through any neglect (now that our wits were sharpened), but from the pure impossibility of finding them at all. That great snow never ceased a moment for three days and nights; and then when all the earth was filled, and the topmost hedges were unseen, and the trees broke down with weight (wherever the wind had not lightened them), a brilliant sun broke forth and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... in the story to call forth such commendation from the cold-blooded English statesman? The book revealed, in a way fitted to carry conviction to every unprejudiced reader, the impossibility of uniting slavery with freedom under the same Government. Either all must be free or the mass subject to the few—or there is actual war. This principle is finely brought out in the predicament of the Quaker confronted by a fugitive with wife and child who ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... ruthless, while most of the native- born were either openly or secretly in sympathy with the revolution in the Orient. But Esteban dealt diplomatically with both factions and went on raising slaves and sugar to his own great profit. Owing to the impossibility of importing negroes, the market steadily improved, and Esteban reaped a handsome profit from those he had on hand, especially when his crop of young girls matured. His sugar-plantations prospered, too, and Pancho ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... a faint idea of the excessive issue to state that the only difficulty was the impossibility of examination by the President and Cashier, and of their jointly signing the notes, which was made obligatory by the regulations; hence they asked power from Congress to grant this right to the Presidents ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... h. The impossibility of distinguishing between mind and body. Neither in thought nor in experience can we separate them. They seem to act together; yet we feel that we are sometimes under the dominion of the one, sometimes ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... slept in bell-tents, fourteen men in each, packed tight as herrings in a barrel, our feet festooning the base of the central pole, our heads against the lower rim of the canvas covering. Movement was almost an impossibility; a leg drawn tight in a cramp disturbed the whole fabric of slumbering humanity; the man who turned round came in for a shower of maledictions. In short, fourteen men lying down in a bell-tent cannot agree for very long, and a bell-tent is not a ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... apparent impossibility of getting anything out of Dr. Quackenboss, except civility, and to the real difficulty of disappointing such very earnest good will, Fleda and Hugh did what older persons would not have done alighted and walked up ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Turks had disillusioned us as to the impossibility of crossing the waterless desert, and had actually crossed it with a considerable armed and organized force. They announced that what they had effected had been nothing more than a reconnaissance. In any case, ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... other pleasures, for which his age and his already enfeebled body were no longer suited. His health gave way. He felt it soon. The tardy return to favour which he had enjoyed made him regret life more. He perished slowly, regretting to have been brought to death's door by disgrace, and the impossibility of being restored by the unexpected opening of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... significance was attached to this fact through the very insignificance and "impossibility" of that individual;—a lanky, red-haired youth, incapacitated for manual labor through lameness,—a clerk in a general store at the Cross Roads! He had never been the recipient of Judge Piper's hospitality; he had never visited the house even with parcels; apparently his only interviews ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... the Western-educated classes as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility? Great events, moreover, had been happening quite recently which tended to shake the Indians' belief in the irresistible superiority of Western civilisation even in its material aspects. The disaster inflicted upon an Italian army at Adowa in 1894 ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... IS AN IMPOSSIBILITY; and nothing is more precise than the declaration of the medical men. They affirm that your wife could not have ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the night and the impossibility of escape filled Bob with the most gloomy and distressing thoughts, which at first quite Overcame him. But at length other thoughts came, which were of a less distressing character. His mind once more reverted to the idea that he was held for ransom, and that for the present, at least, ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... of the differences of dialect in our early documents only dates from 1885, owing to the previous impossibility of obtaining access to these oldest texts. Before that date, it so happened that nearly all the manuscripts that had been printed or examined were in one and the same dialect, viz. the Southern (or Wessex). The language employed in these was (somewhat unhappily) named "Anglo-Saxon"; ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... inflexibility always possessed the air of the most perfect calmness of self-possession. "Can not may be a more civil phrase than will not, but the expressions are synonymous where there is no moral impossibility. But I am not a friend to doing business hastily; we will talk this matter ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... you to make both ends meet with the cut of ten per cent. I will make it five instead of ten per cent., although I shall actually lose by so doing unless business improves. I will, however, try it as long as possible. If the hard times continue, and it becomes a sheer impossibility for me to employ you on these terms without abandoning the plant altogether, I will approach you again, and trust that you will support me in any measures I am forced to take. And, on the contrary, should business improve, I promise ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... no purpose that the most eminent Compounders sent from London letter after letter filled with judicious counsel and earnest supplication. It was to no purpose that they demonstrated in the plainest manner the impossibility of establishing Popish ascendancy in a country where at least forty-nine fiftieths of the population and much more than forty-nine fiftieths of the wealth and the intelligence were Protestant. It was to no purpose that they informed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this freak of fortune was felt to be all the more cruel on account of the impossibility of resenting it openly; but the delighted grandfather cared nothing for what the John Pontifexes might feel or not feel; he had wanted a grandson and he had got a grandson, and this should be enough for everybody; and, now that Mrs Theobald had taken to good ways, she might ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... distribution, there are one or two things of interest to the general reader. One of these was the fate of the Golden House, as it was called. Mrs. Mavick had hurried back to her town house, determined to save it at all hazard. The impossibility of this was, however, soon apparent even to her intrepid spirit. She would either sacrifice all else to save it, or—dark thoughts of ending it in a conflagration entered her mind. This was only her first temper. But to keep the house without a vast fortune to sustain ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at least, manners and ideas are different from those of the upper-middle-class, or the middle-middle-class, to whichever it may be that our craft belongs. People will recollect Thackeray's remarks concerning the impossibility of getting to know the real domestic life of your French friends; whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the essential unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and even untitled county families of the land. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... faculty of will, when we do not extend it beyond the objects we clearly know. And even although this truth could not be established by reasoning, the minds of all have been so impressed by nature as spontaneously to assent to whatever is clearly perceived, and to experience an impossibility to ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... ground his own colours, prepared his daily measure of wet plaster, and executed the whole series of frescoes with his own hand. Condivi and Vasari imply, indeed, that this was the case; but, beside the physical impossibility, the fact remains that certain portions are obviously executed by inferior masters. Vasari's anecdotes, moreover, contradict his own assertion regarding Michelangelo's singlehanded labour. He speaks about the caution which the master exercised to guard himself against any treason ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... inexperienced person to conceive of the effect of even a light wind upon so small an object as a rifle-ball, when shot from the gun. The difficulty arises from the impossibility of taking in the idea of such rapid flight, or of the resistance produced by it, by comparison with anything within the limits of our experience. We may attain a conception of it, however, by trying to move a stick through the water. Moving it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... compel him, like a wild animal, to come and surrender himself into the hands of those who had his children. He felt most confidence in Nasica, and inquired for him, but as he was not present, after lamenting his fate, and reflecting on the impossibility of acting otherwise, he ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... acquainted with the difficulties under which his countrymen labored, and the impossibility of their facing, in the field, such a powerful army as formed the siege of Pavia, placed his only hopes of safety in his own vigilance and valor. The efforts of both were extraordinary, and in proportion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... fight down fear and forget everything except that the ball must be hit. To some, this seems not a difficult matter, to many it comes only after the most determined effort and schooling of the nerves, while to a few it seems to be an utter impossibility. The instinct of self-preservation is such a controlling power with them that unconsciously they draw away from the ball, and, try as they will, they cannot stand up to the plate. The player who cannot overcome this feeling will never ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... than a horse, and such a machine as you mention could outspeed that horse. But, of course, such an engine is an utter impossibility." ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... it would have been an impossibility for them to wring from their mother her consent to let them try their luck in the city, for since their father's death, they had become her moral support. They felt ashamed to be loafing idly about the reservation until school opened again and have ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... must reap in sorrow and not in joy. There is no exception to the rule. A bramble bush can no more bear grapes, than a selfish and evil life can produce happiness. The one is a natural, and the other a spiritual, impossibility. ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... phenomena, are strikingly confirmatory of revelation; nothing strikes me more than that. Hume's argument against miracles (a strong argument) disappears before it, and Strauss's conclusions from a priori assertion of impossibility fall ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... a long silence prevailed in this ice-house; the gloomy tale of the burning of the ship, the loss of their precious brig, appeared so vividly before the minds of the castaways; they found themselves before an impossibility, and that was a return to England. They did not dare to look at one another, for fear of seeing on each other's faces blank despair. There was nothing to be heard save the hasty breathing ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... is by much the best medicine; it has quite cured my face and left me no pain but the impossibility of being in two places at once, which is no small sorrow, since one of them would be near you. But the boys [Lord Drumlanrig and Lord Charles Douglas] are too lean to travel as yet. Compassion being ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... his own power of attraction—or Barine's love—for with each passing week the cheerful serenity of her disposition gained fresh steadfastness and charm. He, too, had the same experience; it was long since he had felt so vigorous, untrammelled, and free from care. His sole regret was the impossibility of sharing the political life of the city at this critical period; and at times he felt some little anxiety concerning the fate and management of his property, though, even if his estates were confiscated, he would still retain a competence ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been brought to consent to the necessary changes. Mr. Pelham has had as much difficulty to regulate the disposition of places. Numbers of lists of the hungry have been given in by their centurions of those, several Tories have refused to accept the proffered posts some, from an impossibility of being rechosen for their Jacobite counties. But upon the whole, it appears that their leaders have had very little influence with them; for not above four or five are come into place. The rest will stick to Opposition. Here is a list of the changes, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... with singular soothing power upon the heart which had come to a knowledge of its own weakness in these last tedious months; and as Nettie sat up-stairs with all the remorseful thoughts of nature in her softened heart, the impossibility of impressing her own emotions upon those around her struck her with a deeper sense of impatience, disappointment, and disgust than ever before. When she went softly into the darkened room where Susan lay in her gloomy bed, divided between wailings ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... I thought she did not mean to answer, but knowing doubtless from experience the impossibility of deceiving him, she answered with a cheerful assent, dropping her hand as she did so from before ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... together by Matthew and by the other evangelists. For example, Schott says, that the description of Christ's coming begins (Matt. 24:29) immediately after 'the tribulation,' &c., and that all before that belongs to the destruction of Jerusalem. But apart from the impossibility of regarding the 29th verse as the beginning of something entirely new, there are also in the passages which follow distinct references to the present generation (verse 34), and in the first part as ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... express how readily and gaily. He went into Mr. Barkis's room like light and air, brightening and refreshing it as if he were healthy weather. There was no noise, no effort, no consciousness, in anything he did; but in everything an indescribable lightness, a seeming impossibility of doing anything else, or doing anything better, which was so graceful, so natural, and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... and her sister followed him. The wood was very thick, and grew more so as they advanced, but there was not much underbrush, and progress was not difficult. Several times a wild thought of flight came to Mrs. Willoughby, but was at once dispelled by a helpless sense of its utter impossibility. How could she persuade the impracticable Minnie, who seemed so free from all concern? or, if she could persuade her, how could she accomplish her desire? She would at once be pursued and surrounded, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... the Rajah, and with the authority of his own government. 2. The aggravation of this act of the Amlah, by our present detention under the Dewan's authority. 3. The chance of collision, and the disastrous consequences of a war, for which they had no preparation of any kind. 4. The impossibility of the supreme government paying any attention to their letters so long as we were ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... guard against the wily woman who had lowered herself to this conspiracy; he would destroy the empire she had conquered over her son-in-law! Feeble natures, once warned, turn obstinate, and are never won again. At the first discussion of the contract she had reckoned on Paul's weakness, and on the impossibility he would feel of breaking off a marriage so far advanced. But now, she herself was far more tightly bound. Three months earlier Paul had no real obstacles to prevent the rupture; now, all Bordeaux knew that the notaries had smoothed the difficulties; the banns ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... progress was not to be undone. But the short truces, renewed from time to time, which he had as yet secured were insufficient for this purpose, for so long as war might break out in the coming year the king hands were tied. The impossibility of renouncing the claim to the French crown indeed made a formal peace impossible, but its ends might be secured by a lengthened truce, and it was with a view to this that Richard in 1396 wedded Isabella, the daughter of Charles the Sixth of France. The ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... as every reader of intelligence is competent to put an individual construction upon each, suited to circumstances; while the very wide inferences and applications which can be extracted from many of them, render the adapting of a brief and satisfactory note, in many cases, an impossibility. As it is, however, little merit is claimed for them; and if they are found to be of no aid in facilitating an interpretation, they will, at least, tend to relieve the monotonous or catalogue effect, so to speak, which is ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... said hands had been very busy. Now what lay before her was another thing. She could not consult her mother, and there was nobody else to consult; she must even make up her mind as to the line of duty the best way she might; and however the difficulty and even the impossibility of doing without anybody stared her in the face, it was constantly met by the greater impossibility of taking what she could not pay for. Dolly made up her mind on the negative view of the case; what she could being not clear, only what she could ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... taken some, she had no mind for more, plainly conceived it would be a breach of manners to set down the cup unfinished, and ordered her wedded retainer to dispose of what was left. 'I have swallowed all I can, I cannot swallow more, it is a physical impossibility,' he seemed to say; and his stern officer reiterated her commands with secret imperative signals. Luckless dog! but in mere humanity we came to the rescue and ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been forced to clasp his arms around the neck of his frantic steed at the time, smiled at the impossibility of such a ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... accomplished that impossibility, to judge by the work you are at present engaged in. You must have changed your opinions since you ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... with appropriate gestures, intended to imitate the walk of the hero of the piece and his various features. The people in front turned their heads to look at the performance and take in the words. Not to laugh was almost an impossibility, but the dominie succeeded in doing the impossible, and frowned heavily. He felt that his unworthy friend was bringing disgrace upon the causes of poetry and pedestrianism. When her laughter subsided, Miss Halbert said: "There is one thing ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... face a bit, (and dispense with both), and have done. I'm not like the inmates in that mansion, who have, during the last few years, added so many items of expenditure, that it's, of course, a matter of impossibility for them to avoid loosening their purse strings. But they haven't, on the other hand, made any addition to their funds and landed property. During the course of the past year or two, they've had to make up many deficits. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... expressed a decided opinion that the model, when shown to him in wax, could not possibly be cast in bronze, Cellini was immediately stimulated by the predicted impossibility, not only to attempt, but to do it. He first made the clay model, baked it, and covered it with wax, which he shaped into the perfect form of a statue. Then coating the wax with a sort of earth, he baked the second covering, during ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... child would enjoy it. Marjorie's books and writing desk were on the table also, for she had studied mental philosophy and chemistry after she had copied her composition and written a long letter to her mother. Short letters were as truly an impossibility to Marjorie as short addresses are to some public speeches; still Marjorie always stopped when she found she had nothing to say. To her mother, school and Miss Prudence and Prue's sayings and doings ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... the heels of one of the crack goers of the city, amidst clouds of dust through which the rushing of other vehicles might be dimly made out, and startled by the wild cries used by the rival drivers, at once to encourage their horses and prove the impossibility of scaring them into breaking up, I thought it one of the most exciting things I had ever met; and on getting down at Cato's, involuntarily found myself ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... up between the two parties is one of the most amazing features of the conflict. For every page the Queen's secretaries wrote, John Knox was ready with ten to demonstrate her errors, her falsehood, the impossibility that any good could come from an idolater such as she. Other persons take part in the great wrangle, but he is clearly the scribe and moving spirit. He writes to her in his own person, in that of the Lord James, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... hands are about shoulder high and the club shaft is perpendicular, because it is at this time that the club begins to pull, and if it were not let out in the manner explained, the result would certainly be a half shot or very little more than that, for a full and perfect swing would be an impossibility. This relaxation of the palm also serves to give more freedom to the wrist at the top of the swing just when ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... and adulators, Dr. Toby also had his clan of sub-authors, delineated for us by a master hand in the pages of Humphry Clinker. To make Fielding the centre-piece of a group reflecting the literature of his day would be an artistic impossibility. It would be perfectly easy in the case of Smollett, who was descried by critics from afar as a Colossus bestriding the summit of the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... rests untroubled in its mother's arms, and, without misgiving, sucks from her breast the milk so wonderfully provided for it, does the best and wisest thing conceivable. In obeying its instincts, it obeys the great good Author of its being, and lives. If—to suppose what is happily an impossibility—if the child should discard its instincts, and refuse to trust its mother, till it had logical proof of her trustworthiness; and, distrusting its natural cravings, should refuse to take the nutriment provided for it, till it could ascertain by chemical analysis and physiological ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... this, was dumbfounded. She had rested her defence of her mother and sister on the impossibility of any such visit being admitted. According to her lights the coming of Colonel Osborne, after all that had been said, would be like the coming of Lucifer himself. The Colonel was, to her imagination, a horrible ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... impossibility of a poor insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was not so much from his wish to have ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... or hatred of the world. Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... understanding there had suddenly appeared a tiny crack. She felt the reasonableness as well as the tenderness with which Hugo spoke; she wanted nothing in the world but to do what he wanted. And yet it seemed somehow a physical impossibility for her now to say that she would unsettle and postpone it all,—something, say, as if Hugo had asked her to step back into last year or the year before. And she tried to make him understand this, saying—what seemed a ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of the "funded thought'' is indubitably not easy. But its objective possibility with witness and accused is at least a fact. It is excluded only where it is most obviously necessary— in the case of the jury, and the impossibility in this case turns the institution of trial by jury into a Utopian dream. The presiding officer of a jury court is in the best instances acquainted with a few of the jurymen, but never so far as to have been entrusted with their "funded thought.'' Now and then, when a juryman asks a question, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... any expectation of finding that which he sought. It was bleak and barren, and precipitous in places, where the hills seemed to rise directly from the lake's edge. Nothing moved there, and a single glance told him that the land trail on that side was an impossibility. ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... thing's worrying me," Cabot told him, writing a receipt and exchanging it for Rand's check. "I've been trying to ignore it, but I simply can't. Do you really think Lane Fleming was murdered by somebody who wanted to see this merger consummated and who knew that that was an impossibility as long as ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... carry away the filth from the bedrooms, and it took two women an entire week all but one day, scrubbing all day long until their shoulders ached, to scrub the place clean. But they got it clean. They were the kind of women that did not give up even when a thing seemed an impossibility. This was the sort of thing they were up against continually. They could have no meetings that week because they had to scrub and make the place fit ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... been indicated in an earlier chapter. In so far as it comes into conflict with the law of conspicuous waste, the instinct of workmanship expresses itself not so much in insistence on substantial usefulness as in an abiding sense of the odiousness and aesthetic impossibility of what is obviously futile. Being of the nature of an instinctive affection, its guidance touches chiefly and immediately the obvious and apparent violations of its requirements. It is only less promptly and with less constraining force that it reaches ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... loved to connect with the person of a Sultan. A Mameluke Sultan is commonly meant; if any name is mentioned, it is the name of Saladin. Even the Osmanli Turks, whose destructive tendencies were no secret, gave the Italians only half a fright, and a peaceable accord with them was looked upon as no impossibility. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... congregate together, and every supposable degree of communication must of necessity be constantly taking place amongst them, to distinguish a spreading epidemic from a contagious disease when it first breaks out, must obviously be a matter of impossibility; and upon this point the contagionists and their antagonists may rail for ever,—the one will see nothing but contagion, whether in the dead or the living body, and the other will refer every fresh case to atmospheric or terrestrial ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... therefore, to establish a perpetual Intercourse of Benefits amongst Mankind, their Maker would not fail to give them this generous Prepossession of Benevolence, if, as I have said, it were possible. And from whence can we go about to argue its Impossibility? Is it inconsistent with Self-Love? Are their Motions contrary? No more than the diurnal Rotation of the Earth is opposed to its Annual; or its Motion round its own Center, which may be improved as an Illustration of Self-Love, to that which whirls it about the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... that to Paul and Silas, concerning Bythinia; and, if we could, it would not warrant our sitting still and neglecting all the other parts of the world; for Paul and Silas, when forbidden to preach to those heathens, went elsewhere, and preached to others. Neither can we alledge a natural impossibility in the case. It has been said that we ought not to force our way, but to wait for the openings, and leadings of Providence; but it might with equal propriety be answered in this case, neither ought we to neglect embracing those openings in providence which daily present themselves to us. What ...
— An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens • William Carey
... 'Impossibility? You can only see the Uncreate in the Create—the Infinite in the Finite—the absolute good in that which is like the good. Does Tregarva pretend to more? He sees God in His own thoughts and consciousnesses, and in the events of the world around him, imaged in the mirror ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... injuries. In a moment I was on my feet again, and again I was impelled to climb,—only, however, again to come to grief. This time the demon, or whatever it was, that had entered into me, seeming to appreciate the impossibility of getting me to the top of that verandah, directed me to try another way. I mounted the steps leading to the front door, got on to the low parapet which was at one side, thence on to the sill of the adjacent window,—had I slipped then ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the whole Declaration lay in the words alors et dans ce cas. If they be emphasized, they destroy the force of the document; for a union of all the monarchs was an impossibility, it being well known that England would not, and Sardinia, and Naples (probably also Spain) could not, take up arms. In fact, on that very evening Leopold wrote to Kaunitz that he had not in the least committed himself.—"Alors et dans ce cas is with me the law and the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... FRANK,—The enclosed is a copy of the letter which I send by this post to Mr. Brookes. And I make no disguise of the fact that it was written with the full intention of rendering your marriage an impossibility. It will no doubt appear to you a harsh and cruel letter; it will no doubt grieve you, madden you—in your rage you may call me a brute. The epithet will be unjust; but knowing very well indeed what love ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... she asked, turning up her face to show the impossibility of his gazing on it and holding such a ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... I at the seeming impossibility of getting "tone" on plaster, that I determined to try paper for the last cast or model; to this end I took lessons at a theatre in the art of "making (paper) faces," with the result that I now employ paper whenever ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... Others are spurred by vanity, like Madame de la Baudraye, who remained almost respectable in spite of her elopement with Lousteau. Some, again, are led astray by the love of fine clothes, and some by the impossibility of keeping a house going on obviously too narrow means. The stinginess of the State—or of Parliament—leads to many disasters ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... or the complete kind. Irregularity in the performance of the functions of the apparatus to which the fractured bone belongs is a necessary consequence of the existing lesion, and this is lameness. If the broken bone belongs to one of the extremities, the impossibility of the performance of its natural function in sustaining the weight of the body and contributing to the act of locomotion is usually complete, though the degree of disability will vary according to the kind of fracture and the bone which is injured. For example, a fracture ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... authority, cannot but acknowledge the indispensable obligation. But we need only look back to the Scripture proofs which have been lately adduced, to be convinced that the religious affections are therein inculcated on us, as a matter of high and serious obligation. Hence we may be assured that the impossibility stated by our Opponent does ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... word about the robbers you killed? That awful meeting again with my real daughter, in which I perforce must believe, is of itself enough to fever the very coldest feelings into madness; and need one marvel then at your talking of having encountered another impossibility, at your story about finding the dead Pietro come to life among the mountains, and not knowing him again, and about those almost farcical tricks of jugglery that were played you, all which you have related to us with the very same assurance? No, my good ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... address from a man who, whatever might be demanded of him in the fulfillment of his office, he believed could not be otherwise than his friend because, from the confidence reposed in him both by Bruce and himself, he must be fully aware of the impossibility of these allegations being true. But Wallace's astonishment was only for a moment; he now saw with an eye that pierced through the souls of the whole assembly, and, with collected firmness, he replied; "My witnesses are in the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... steadily increasing efficiency, and it is highly probable that they will be repeated on a much larger scale before the war is over. Quite possibly, too, the Germans are developing an accessory force of large aeroplanes to co-operate in such an attack. The long coasts of Britain, the impossibility of their being fully equipped throughout their extent, except at a prohibitive cost of men and material, to resist air invaders, exposes the whole length of the island to considerable risk and annoyance from such ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... answered her, gayly, "it is an impossibility that I should ever marry one." And then there was a lull in the laughter and the snatches of song and conversation on the other side of the room; and while I was still gazing after my bracelet and into the chimney-place, where ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... would be kept waiting for her. The delays, however, were not all due to the old lady's irregular habits. Very often Letty would come up stairs with the information that the "bread ain't riz;" and as a Virginia breakfast without hot bread would be an impossibility, the meal would be postponed until the bread did conclude to rise, or until some substitute, such as ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... system, your contemporaries were certainly correct. They were in its very basis, and must needs become more and more maleficent as the business fabric grew in size and complexity. One of these causes was the lack of any common control of the different industries, and the consequent impossibility of their orderly and coordinate development. It inevitably resulted from this lack that they were continually getting out of step with one another and out of relation with ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... a note-book in the pocket in the other side, but the carriage in which I was driven about rushed on so over the rough ground and "corduroy roads" and hills and chasms, that I found it a matter of utter impossibility to get the pencil and the book out together, and, therefore, the facts I give about the "Exposition" may want verification, for my worthy guide kept firing them into me with the rapidity of a Maxim or ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of this work was "The Sandy Foundation Shaken—or those ...Doctrines of one God subsisting in three distinct and separate persons; the impossibility of God's pardoning persons by an imputative refuted from the authority of scripture testimonies and right ...
— The Tryal of William Penn and William Mead • various
... remuneration. The danger was imminent; what could her ladyship do? The man must be disposed of, even at the sacrifice of truth; her ladyship gave the required promise (intending never to keep it,) you performed the service, and very properly, I own, come to receive your reward. Of course, you perceive the impossibility of a compliance with your wishes. No intrigue can exist between the patrician and the plebeian—you are low-born, she of the noblest blood of the kingdom. Are you so blind, man, that you cannot see—or ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson |
