"Inarticulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quake of emotion travelled through the woman's body, and she gave utterance to a harsh inarticulate sound. She came confusedly forwards, groping with hands outstretched. Balder, though not wont to fail in courtesy to the sorriest hag, could scarce forbear recoiling; especially because he fancied that an expression of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... House with the Green Shutters, has not even tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment. Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3] a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright. In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently suited ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... a name is either a true name or not a name at all. He is unable to conceive of degrees of imitation; a word is either the perfect expression of a thing, or a mere inarticulate sound (a fallacy which is still prevalent among theorizers about the origin of language). He is at once a philosopher and a sophist; for while wanting to rest language on an immutable basis, he would deny the possibility of falsehood. He is inclined to derive all truth from language, and in ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... inarticulate cry escaped her, and she sank back an instant in the corner of the seat; but the chatter of the nurses, and the whimpering wail of one dissatisfied baby mercifully drowned the sound. The car, the trees on the Street, the belfry of a church seemed spinning in some witch's dance, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... inarticulate attempts to prevent The PORTER from laying the case before THE CONDUCTOR, and then stands guiltily smiling, overwhelmed with the ...
— The Sleeping Car - A Farce • William D. Howells
... his adversary, but his grasp was like iron; and in spite of appearances, great Fritz proved but a weak and nerveless body, and greatly surprised at this unexpected attack, he could only open his large mouth and utter some inarticulate sounds. Gilbert had already dragged him to the top of the staircase. Then Fritz, recovering from his first flurry, tried to struggle, but he lost his footing, stumbled, and fell headlong down the staircase to the bottom. Gilbert came near following him in his descent, but fortunately saved ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... woman could not control herself longer, but gave way to her sobs, and her voice fairly broke, so that she was inarticulate, as she laid her cheek against her daughter's on ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... companions, silently, growing beside our door, have now told us the tale of their life-tremulousness and their death spasm, in script that is as inarticulate as they. May it not be said that this their story has a pathos of its own, beyond any that the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... yer ugly face, did yer?" yelled a familiar voice. "No good squealin'—I got yer! I'd bust you up if I could!" (a sound of furious blows and inarticulate chattering) "but it ain't 'umanly possible to ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... lieutenant's English. A few days before she had laughed at what seemed to be a funny story, and had later learned that it was an announcement of the death of the lieutenant's grandmother. To-day she confined her answers to inarticulate murmurs which might be interpreted as either assents or negations ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... on the page. In her eyes another light than the firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat a little inarticulate sound twanged. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... hold her tongue, and according to those who have been voluntarily bridled—nobody can remember a scold in Walton—it answers its purpose admirably. When the bit is in and the bridle properly padlocked the most vixenish can only utter inarticulate murmurs. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... sung Coleridge's praises should be named Hazlitt, who knew him in 1798, and has enshrined him in the first of his charming papers, entitled "Winterslow Essays." Hazlitt admits his feebleness of purpose, but speaks of his genius, shining upon his own (then) dumb, inarticulate nature, as the sun "upon the puddles of the road." Coleridge at that time was a Unitarian minister, and had come to preach, instead of the minister for the time being, at Shrewsbury. Hazlitt rose before ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... less and meditate more, to search for things of true value and not for dross. Another has been a poet or musician, and has uttered in words or in song thoughts dimly possible to many men, but by them unutterable and left inarticulate. Another has been influenced still more directly by the universe around him, has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the countess, but as if careless of being answered, so listless was her tone, so nearly inarticulate ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... action: the man or the woman find themselves speaking in an unaccustomed voice, saying what they did not know they would say; doing unaccustomed things, which they had never intended to do, sometimes they lose control of their body—they rage, their speech descends to inarticulate cries. Then the old system of instinctive response to the outer world, which generally is inactive and so imperceptibly becomes disused, becomes by the sudden generation of excessive emotion stocked with energy, so that it exceeds in power the energy ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Inarticulate, enchanting whispers of the love and joy which have been in the world and may be again floated up to Vanno's imagination like the chanting of mermaids heard under the sea. He felt that, if he should meet his Giulietta now, he would believe ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Majesty extended across it, in a position denoting great agony, the drapery and bed-covering thrown off, and his whole body in a frightful condition of nervous contraction. From his open mouth escaped inarticulate sounds, his breathing appeared greatly oppressed, and one of his hands, tightly clinched, lay on the pit of his stomach. I was terrified at the sight, and called him. He did not reply; again, once, twice even, still no reply. At last I concluded to shake him gently; and at this the Emperor ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... from the break of the poop;—Robin-a-dale himself upon them, his bonds broken, his eyeballs starting, a wild blue-jerkined Ariel filled with tidings. In this moment a scant respecter of persons, he threw himself upon Nevil, pointing and stammering, inarticulate with the wealth of his discovery. The eyes of the two men followed his lean, brown finger.... Above the quay where boats made landing a sand-spit ran out from the tamarind-shadowed bank, and now in the red dawning the mist that clung to it lifted. A man who ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... complete solitude; he was overtaken by a fever for work. He did not dispute now with Pavel Petrovitch, especially as the latter assumed an excessively aristocratic demeanour in his presence, and expressed his opinions more in inarticulate sounds than in words. Only on one occasion Pavel Petrovitch fell into a controversy with the nihilist on the subject of the question then much discussed of the rights of the nobles of the Baltic province; but suddenly he stopped of his own accord, remarking ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... such things must be, there is a curious satisfaction in being "in it." And though the experiences they desire may be matters of everyday occurrence to us, children probably feel the craving even more keenly. "You may write what you like," said a teacher, and a somewhat inarticulate child wrote, "I was out last night, it was late." "Why, Jack," said another, "you've painted your cow green; did you ever see a green cow?" "No," said Jack, "but ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Peyton's thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not, surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height of his friend's devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity: the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the possibility at which poor Darrow's renunciation hinted. The nature ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... Uttering a wild, inarticulate cry, the lad sprang—to be caught in M'Ginnis's powerful grasp, but, even so, his fist grazed M'Ginnis's full-lipped mouth. For a moment Spike strove desperately to reach Bud's grim-smiling face until, finding his efforts vain, he ceased ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... the gallery so deep that the receding voices and footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were distinctly heard until they reached the end. Then Fletcher arose with an inarticulate exclamation. Clementina instantly put her finger to her lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand to him, and saying "Come," half-led, half-dragged him into the passage. To the right she turned and pushed open the door of a small room ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... light—out of error into truth—has been produced chiefly by Mr. Newman's deeply instructive volumes. If so, one will be apt to argue that a book-revelation may be of the very utmost use and benefit to mankind in general,—if only by making that which would else be inarticulate mutter of the internal oracle distinct and clear; and that if God would but give such a book, the same value at least might attach to it as to a book of Mr. Newman's. It little matters to this argument, the question of the possibility, value, or utility of an external revelation,—whether ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... terrible loneliness, where the only sound she heard was the stealthy whisperings of the breeze among the leaves, as if all the shadows up yonder were weaving some plot against her, while at times a low inarticulate moan or some sudden crackling of dry twigs floated to her out of the impenetrable gloom of the forest. At last she threw herself on her face under a great tree, and wept and wept ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... cries: 'Strike! spare her not! she did not spare our father,' Prometheus is fastened to a rock by nails driven through his stomach and his arms. The Furies reply to Clytemnestra's bleeding shade with inarticulate roars. Art was in its infancy in the time of AEschylus as it was in ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... himself with difficulty from the first, broke out upon this into an inarticulate noise, and raised one hand with an appearance of real dismay, as if he were about to interfere and contradict. But she checked him at once, looking up at him with a swift glance and an ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... letting it be known that they would die for England's glory with their tooral ooral, etc. Even the vices of that society (which 'sometimes, I fear, rendered the narrative portions of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as the chorus) were displayed with a more human softening than the same vices in the saloon bars of our own time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy wine in order ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... for no one could resist Lady Eleanor's smile, and opened his mouth confidently to speak; but he made only a few inarticulate sounds, and then thrust his knuckles into his eyes and began ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... forest of human heads, endless as far as eye could reach, every one of whom was in eager accord with the work in hand, and whose blended voices, while they waited to perform their own part in the great transaction, were carried to the ears of those in the hall like the inarticulate ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Henry Clay, of Andrew Jackson, of Abraham Lincoln. And the largest significance of Webster's arguments in 1830 arises from the definiteness and force which they put into popular convictions that until then were vague and inarticulate—convictions which, as has been well said, "went on broadening and deepening until, thirty years afterward, they had a force sufficient to sustain the North and enable her to triumph in the terrible struggle ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... bell, hoping that Arthur would be the person to respond, as he usually was. He was an extremely profane youth, but profane in a quiet, drawling, matter-of-fact manner. He was frequently semi-intoxicated by noon, and sometimes quite inarticulate by 9 P.M.; but I never saw him with his bodily equilibrium seriously impaired—in plainer words, I never saw him stagger. He openly confessed to a weakness for an occasional glass, but would have repelled with ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the bishop Tode started and uttered a little inarticulate cry of joy; then, as he understood what the bishop was saying, a singular expression passed over his face. The doctor, watching him closely could make nothing ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... but little of any language except his mother-tongue, his accent undeniably betraying him whenever he did attempt to express himself, thought silence would be his best course, so shaking his head he pointed to his tongue and gave forth some inarticulate sounds, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... leaped up and caught her in his arms. She struggled, beating upon his breast, and crying with a sad, inarticulate cry. She would have sunk to the floor if he had not kept his ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... royal sufferer-was still in the next room, attended by Sir George Baker and Dr. Heberden, and his pages, with Colonel Goldsworthy occasionally, and as he called for him. He kept talking unceasingly; his voice was so lost in hoarseness and weakness, it was rendered almost inarticulate; but its tone was still all benevolence—all kindness—all touching ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... something inarticulate, and almost snatched it away. It was the envelope of the fatal letter which Mademoiselle Violet had written him ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is an important point of this whole study. In the case of The Abbot it was the intellect which required development, even to begin upon the expression of that within which was mainly inarticulate, but mightily impressive, at least, to me. The Valley-Road Girl's mind was trained. She had obeyed scrupulously. In her case, the first business was to re-awaken her within, and her own words have ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... many of these savages together. Their lances seemed as numerous as stalks of grass. Their hoarse voices made a vast, inarticulate sound like ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... soul, but a plant in a pot. Perhaps they were not unsupported by experience. I suppose too many of us would have thought it so; there are flunkeys in all ranks, and to spare. Perhaps the true absurdity was the way in which I sat, demented, inarticulate, staring at Lillian, and only caring for any word which seemed to augur a chance of seeing her again; instead of saying, as I felt, that I had no wish whatever to rise above my station; no intention whatever of being sent to training schools or colleges, or anywhere else at the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... consciousness of time while that inarticulate passion of dread spent itself. But it was nearly half an hour later when she started up at the echo of a light step on the gravel path, dashing her handkerchief across ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was the way she greeted the Jimmy-legs of my barracks after I had introduced her to him with much elaboration. This completely floored the poor lad, and rendered him inarticulate. He thinks now that I come from either a family of thugs or maniacs, probably the latter. I succeeded in shaking the old thing for a while, and when I next found her she was demonstrating the proper method of washing whites to a group of sailors assembled in the wash room of one of our ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... Glenn whirled with an inarticulate cry. He saw Carley. Then—no matter how unreasonable or exacting had been Carley's longings, they ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... take a fresh start, and question what had been from the beginning? Had any authority interfered, with a decree that Gibbie should no more scour the midnight streets, no more pass and repass that far-shining splendour of red, then indeed would bitter, though inarticulate, complaint have burst from his bosom. But there was no evil power to issue such a command, and Gibbie's peace was ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... would it hold my weight? This I could not test, but I must perforce stake all upon the chance, for there was no other chance. Should a strand of the canvas give, down I must go hurtling to my death. There was no other way, and with an inarticulate prayer I gripped the strap fast with my other hand and swung myself upwards. A second later although in my agony it seemed an eternity and my hand clutched the pinnacle itself; a wild convulsive ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... such as no earthly consideration can overcome." "Lucy! Lucy! for the last time, think of it; for the love of Heaven, do not drive me mad; think of it once more; it is the last, last chance!" The speaker was white as a sheet, and his hollow voice came in hoarse, inarticulate whispers as he looked almost fiercely into that dear face to read his doom. Too well he knew the set, fixed expression of her delicate profile. She did not dare turn towards him; she could not have looked him in the face and persevered; but ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... has received as little as it has asked in times past. To call upon Christ's name, to bless God for goodness and mercy, suffice it; and no form of words enabling it to do this seems to be found too feeble, or affected, or grotesque. For anything more, the inarticulate tones of music are as adequate to devotion as the sublimest formula that Milton or Dante could have shaped. It is only since religion has been so much philosophized, and has in so great degree ceased to be a passion, that we have begun to find the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... my power to help him," murmured Phillip in inarticulate tones as he took up a newspaper that lay on the small table near. It was a late English paper and bore the address of Mr. Verne in a neat ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of words and incomplete sentences. It is inarticulate, and the secretary made no record of it. As I recall, however, it was about water, children, and the words "ten o'clock" repeated ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... overcome with gratitude at this generous speech of the English officer, uttered some inarticulate words, expressive more in sound than clearness, of her grateful feelings. Hambledon continued, "I will use my influence with Heselrigge, to prevent the interior of your house from being disturbed again; but it being in the course of military operations, I cannot ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... of The Student in Arms, that widely read book of the war, Donald Hankey has a chapter on "The Religion of the Inarticulate," in which he shows that the "Tommy" who for so long has been accused of having no religion, really has a very definite one. He has a religion that embraces all the Christian virtues, such as love, sacrifice, brotherhood, and comradeship, but he has never connected these with either Christ or ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... a sudden hush, prolonged for several minutes; then Stubbs dropped to his knee with an inarticulate cry and threw his arms around ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen and fixed is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness, and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds he now breaks silence, soon, however, controlling himself to say that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... feel as if I had been asleep five minutes, when I was rudely awakened, of course by noise, whistling, and inarticulate roaring, and I found that it was morning, and that the boatswain's mate was "turning the hands up" to wash decks. Alister was ready, and I found that my toilet was, if possible, shorter than ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gully, rising with awful deliberation between him and escape, sent a thrill of terror through his frame. The great, dull, bloodshot eyes glared at him with a dumb, wondering fury; the large wet nostrils were so near that their first snort of inarticulate rage made him reel backwards as from a blow. The gully was only a narrow and short fissure or subsidence of the plain; a few paces more of retreat and he would be at its end, against an almost perpendicular bank fifteen feet high. If he attempted to ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... gave vent to an inarticulate roar of rage and leaped into the air. As he rose toward Forrester, the defender closed his eyes and changed shape. He became a rock and dropped. He bounced off Mars' rising ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of the Point Quinton Light would be mentioned. But Captain David never knew of it. He tended and loved the Light with a fatherly interest. It was his life's trust, and David was a poet, an inarticulate poet, who spoke only through his shining Light. The government was his master. David thought upon the government in a personal way and served ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... and the bullet. He must learn to fear not God, but the warden, the captain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate orders, or for not understanding gestures without words; all of which encouragements to obedience are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules which were formulated in Washington and disseminated for the information ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... began to pace about the room as we all do in trouble, clasping her hands in a wild and inarticulate appeal to heaven. Death had never come across her path before save in the case of her father, an old man whose course was run, and his end a thing necessary and to be looked for. She could not get out of her eyes the vision of that little solemn figure, so motionless, so marble white. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... him in dull amazement. Then a flush crept into his sallow cheeks and mounted to his brow. An inarticulate grunt came from his ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other great roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed of men and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... well, I swung my left arm forward with hollowed palm, and shot away from the beast with head half-buried under the side-stroke's impetus, making a fierce effort to gain the center of the flow in time. Something long and dark swept past me. With an inarticulate gasp of triumph I seized it, managed to fall in head foremost over the stem, which in a tender craft of that beam is a difficult thing to do, and then, snatching the second paddle, whirled it madly. I felt the stout redwood bend at every stroke, my lungs ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... slightly deaf, he had heard scarcely anything, and had been noting the number and variety of the performances. It was his protest against much speaking. At dinner the same day, his cousin, Joseph Cartland, commented upon the inarticulate sounds that accompanied the remarks of one or two of the speakers. "Let us shame them out of it," he said, "let's call it grunting." "Oh, no, Joseph," said Whittier, "don't thee do that—take away the grunt, and ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... Mrs. Vane Bridgeman"—the Prophet at this point made an inarticulate, but very audible, noise that might have meant anything, and that did in fact mean "Merciful Heavens! what will become of me?"—"Mrs. Vane Bridgeman is also of a very retiring disposition and would hate to put such a man as you are to ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... proceeds. An inarticulate person is brought in on a litter, who looks like a Tammany man whom some irate young Democrat has "put a head on." He indulges in an inarticulate speech, which is warmly applauded by the gallery. Then the Weird Sisters meet MACBETH ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... Samson was to listen, with bowed head, to the renewed burst of Philistine hissings, howlings, and execrations, against him, before they would let him retire. It came from all quarters; but at least two persons stepped out from the crowd to convert the mere inarticulate uproar into distinct invective ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... on his knees, and took my hand—cried like a beaten child—sobbed and groaned. He raised the likeness of his sister to my eyes, and then I saw the fire sparkling in his own lustrous orb, and the supplication bursting from it, that was not to be resisted. He pointed to his mouth, compelled an inarticulate sound, and looked at me again, to assure me that he had spoken all his faculties permitted him. He ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... and with a forced attempt at merriment; but no wail of despair, no words of impassioned prayer, could have had such a depth of woe in them as the wild notes of the chorus. As if the poor, dumb heart, threatened,—prisoned,—took refuge in that inarticulate sanctuary of music, and found there a language in which to breathe its prayer to God! There was a prayer in it, which Simon could not hear. He only heard the boys singing noisily, and was well pleased; he was making them ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Kitty, in his ear, as she came across him in one of the drawing-rooms, "Lord Hubert takes me in to supper. Poor me!" She made an extravagant face of self-pity and swept on. Lord Hubert was one of the sons of the house, a stupid and inarticulate guardsman, Kitty's butt and detestation. Ashe smiled to himself over her fate, and went back to the ballroom in search of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... water's edge and gazed across defiantly at the little boys, who were clustered together at the far end of the pond. They were not her match at sarcasm and so were forced to answer with inarticulate jeers. For a few seconds no more words were exchanged. Then one of the boys attempted ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... said died away into inarticulate gasps, which seemed to choke him, and sinking into a chair, he dropped his face upon the table, and wept aloud. Perhaps in all the dismal scenes of domestic misery which had been acted in those spare and dreary houses—in all the petty miseries, the burning shames, the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... how came I here? Shall I wake at thy side and smile at my dream? The dream that grips me so hard that I cannot wake nor stir! O love! O my own love, found but to be lost! My soul sends over the waters a wild inarticulate cry, Like a gull's ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... feel those eyes upon her. All his strength and bigness, all his manhood, huge and unaware, seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood but of her ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... fifth week, the nipple pushed away with the lips: mouth-piece of bottle ditto. Tenth day, smile after eating. Fourth week, signs of satisfaction; laughing, opening and half shutting eyes; inarticulate ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... rest of them stretched out in several long lines, young bucks and old ones, squaws and pappooses, the families together, about seventeen hundred souls in all. I used to walk up and down between the lines, with the other women, and the squaws looked at our clothes and chuckled, and made some of their inarticulate remarks to each other. The bucks looked admiringly at the white women, especially at the cavalry beauty, Mrs. Montgomery, although I thought that Chief Diablo cast a special eye at our young ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... permanent despair upon your path, be sure that these are not masks of whole men, but of those who wilfully abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic and ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... sun and the wall, Cosmo rose, and passing to the other side of the house beyond the court-yard, and crossing a certain heave of grass, came upon one unfailing delight in his lot—a preacher whose voice, inarticulate, it is true, had, ever since he was born, been at most times louder in his ear than any other. It was a mountain stream, which, through a channel of rock, such as nearly satisfied his most fastidious fancy, went roaring, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... inarticulate assent, and Rice departed. Then he looked up at the man who so far had only bidden him a mechanical good morning, and wondered a little at the heavy frown upon his face. Perhaps his introduction had been a little unceremonious, but surely he could ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... than Leonard, older than the whole world. With a love almost impersonal in its unconscious motherliness, she yearned with the mighty power of her woman's body and soul to protect this immature and inarticulate being who was faring forth to the peninsula of the "Dead English" to make his silent sacrifice. The great house seemed to be listening, hushed, to the sober ticking of the clock on the landing. Suddenly, with a preliminary shudder, its melodious voice rang out nine ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... with every tone of anguish, hoarse shoutings, shrill screams, and the plaintive cries of children. Above all other sounds articulate and inarticulate was heard the word "God," as the stricken people appealed to Him, some on their knees, others as they stood dazed and almost paralyzed, and others still as they rushed toward open ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... his trembling clutches at them, the piteous appeal of his whole nature, of his eyes, of his mouth and of his nose as he smelt them, and he slobbered onto his table napkin with eagerness, while uttering inarticulate grunts. And the whole family was highly amused at this ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... The feeling of the writer is excellent, but the expression is bad. The writer has seen, but she cannot tell what she has seen; she has felt, but she cannot express her experience so as to enkindle a like experience in others. These poetical utterances of inarticulate poets are sometimes whimsical but oftener pathetic; sometimes they are like the prattle of little children who exercise their vocal organs before they have anything to say; but oftener they seem to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... because he "cannot reflect," would probably in another mood admit that "reflections" are not what we demand of a poet. We do not ask of him a rhymed book of proverbs. He should rather be the articulation of what in Nature is great but inarticulate. In him the thunder, the sea, the peace of morning, the joy of youth, the rush of passion, the calm of old age, should find words, and men should through him become aware of the unrecognised wealth of existence. Byron had the power above most poets of ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... the man uttered an inarticulate mutter, and flushed deeply, dashing out of the room ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... sweet old Amati!—the divine Stradivarius! Played on by ancient maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from his dying hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy symphonies ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... no sign of weakness as he went briskly up the walk and knocked at his own door. When Miriam opened it, astonishment made her welcome almost inarticulate, for she had not expected him home so soon. He gave her the small black satchel that he ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... gay and ironic. Only the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his inability to make a sustained ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... is first and chiefest a brooder. She broods in spirit till her child looks into her eyes, bearing the image, in face and mental impress and spirit, which the brooding months have given. She broods over the inarticulate days when the babe cannot tell the felt needs except to a brooding mother's ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... feet with a hoarse inarticulate cry. "They'll never get me into hell! God has got to keep His contracts and I've fixed it all up so He'll have to save me whether He wants to or not. The papers are all signed and everything. My lawyer has got them in his safe. God can't ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... The King dropped into inarticulate mumblings, shaking his grey head weakly from time to time, and gropingly trying to recollect what he had done with the Seal. At last my Lord Hertford ventured to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... young usher, the change of scene was rather bewildering. His eyes were still full of the light from gasolene-burners, his ears still rang with the confusion of tent-noise into which entered the prolonged monotones of inarticulate groanings, and the explosive suddenness of seemingly irrelevant Amens. Above all, he tingled from the electric atmosphere of intense religious excitement; he was charged with currents at a pressure so high that his nerves were unresponsive to dull ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... and muscles contracted with pain, was pitiable. Their legs swelled in an extraordinary fashion, and were covered with large blackish blue spots; their bloody gums and ulcerated lips only gave passage to inarticulate sounds; the vitiated blood no longer ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... perished utterly; while his own matchless lyrics, altogether original, find the breath of life on the lips of a people who have gotten them all by heart. What a triumph of the divine faculty thus to translate the inarticulate language of nature into every answering modulation of human speech! And with such felicity, that the verse is now as national as the music! Throughout all these exquisite songs, we see the power of an element which we, raised by rank and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... species of natural but inarticulate language, in which the thought is never disengaged from the feeling; in language its aim should be to awaken the feeling properly attached to the thought it modulates; it should be the tune of the thought of the Poet. To write a love song in alexandrines, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... was the combat, was fatal to the victor. There were few better runners in Dalton than my companion and myself, and we gained on the book-maker, who had probably trained on gin and bad tobacco, hand over hand. As we drew near him he turned round and inquired, with many expletives, made half inarticulate by want of breath, what we wanted with a gentleman engaged on his own ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... of the effigy, when the latter is put into it and the loose earth loosely restored so as to hold it in an upright position. Some magic powder of herbs is sprinkled around the body, and into the vertical orifice in it, when the head is put in place. A series of inarticulate utterances are chanted, when, if everything be favorable, the figure will perceptibly move up and down as if possessed of life. Fig. 18 represents another figure used in a similar manner. It consists of one piece, however, and is decorated with narrow bands ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... "My dear friends, may my death be an example to you, to incite you to preserve the gospel pure; bear faithful testimony that I died in the religion of Christ and His holy apostles." Hardly had these words passed his lips, than the death-blow was given and his chest crushed; a few inarticulate sounds, apparently prayers, were heard; the head fell back, the martyrdom ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... appearance of digression in these annals prevents my referring to various sporadic Irish combinations of the 18th century—Whiteboys, Steelboys, Oakboys, Peep-o'-day Boys, Defenders—some Catholic, some Protestant, some mixed; but each representing an inarticulate protest against agrarian or ecclesiastical aggression. Notice, however, that the customary dragging in of these irrelevancies, to confuse the main issue, is not to be wondered at, seeing that Orangeism itself is based, in a large, general way, on the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the ages; a love transcending and immortal, repeating itself in ever ascending stages of rapture. The flesh was but a passing instrument of temporal expression, a gross medium through which the spirit could speak only in poor, inarticulate phrases of its magnificent recognition of an eternal bond. ... Oh! I was soon high in the air again, riding my new Pegasus through the loftiest altitudes of lonely exaltation. I was a conqueror while I had the world to myself. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... poor mad boy, a sordo-muto, who had been overlooked. He was in a great hurry, making frightful inarticulate noises and running this way and that, being too much alarmed to go straight. Before he had found the mouth of the tunnel the curtain fell and we did not see what became of him. He may have been left behind ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... idol that no reason justifies, and sacrifices to its fatal shrine alike the Past and the Future. Not trusting himself to speak, the father drew his hand across his eyes, and dashed away the bitter tear that sprang from a swelling and indignant heart; then he uttered an inarticulate sound, and, finding his voice gone, moved away to the door, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... toward the church door. As they neared it they caught the clatter of hoofs, and Tom Ware on a hard-ridden horse dashed up; he was covered with dust and inarticulate with rage. Then a cry came from him that was like the roar of ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... of the tap). Time will show, madam. At prisent they seem to be in no hurry to spatter us with their word-jelly. Does some spark of pity linger in their marble bos'ms? or do they prefer inaud'ble chit-chat t' inarticulate mewing? ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... knife in his hand, feeling its edge, and neither heard nor saw. Then he turned up his face and frowned at the sky; his eyes seemed to have sunk into his head and become blind, and his lips stood out thick. He muttered a few inarticulate sounds, and started up toward ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity. "It's curious how, in those first days, too, something that I didn't understand came ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... spectator is fain at last to shut the eyes of his soul, and take refuge (as West Indian Spaniards do) in tobacco and stupidity. The man, too, who has not only eyes but utterance,—what shall he do where all words fail him? Superlatives are but inarticulate, after all, and give no pictures even of size any more than do numbers of feet and yards: and yet what else can we do, but heap superlative on superlative, and cry, "Wonderful, wonderful!" and after that, "wonderful, past all whooping"? What Humboldt's self cannot paint, we will ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... from Brion's. They were there still; and they are shown to me in a private room, lying on the floor, fast asleep. I try to wake them up, but in vain. I order to water them freely; but a pitcher of water thrown on their faces has no effect, save to make them utter an inarticulate groan. I guess at once what they have taken. I send for a physician, and I call on the wine-merchant for explanations. It is his wife and his barkeeper who answer me. They tell me, that, at about two o'clock, a man came in the shop, who stated that he was employed at Brion's, and ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... while, from time to time, his hands went from here to there over his levers. He seldom changed either attitude or expression. There surely is no engine-driver who does not feel the beauty of the business, but the emotion lies deep, and mainly inarticulate, as it does in the mind of a man who has experienced a good and beautiful wife for many years. This driver's face displayed nothing but the cool sanity of a man whose thought was buried intelligently in his business. If there was any ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... round his neck, her flushed face was hot on his, her hair hung over his shoulders. The strains of You Made Me Love You came inarticulate with passion out of the shrieking organ. Her elbow nudged him. Her lips were as fire beneath his. The machine slowed down and stopped. Gordon paid for five extra rounds. Dazed with new and hitherto unrealised sensations, Gordon forgot everything but the ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Montez, or no Lola Montez, there was in the eyes of his exasperated subjects more than enough to make them thoroughly dissatisfied with the Wittelsbach regime, as carried out by Ludwig. The Cabinet had become very nearly inarticulate; public funds had been squandered on all sorts of grandiose and unnecessary schemes; and the clerical element had long been allowed to ride roughshod over the constitution. Altogether, the "Ministry of Dawn," brought into existence ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... child in her arms, and was pressing her close, close. A rocking-chair was by; she had seen it, and knew where to lay her hand to draw it forward. She sank down in it, and rocked to and fro, murmuring inarticulate words of comfort. The night was warm, but still the child shivered; Margaret, groping again, found a shawl, and wrapped it round her. There was no more holding off, no more resistance; the little creature clung around Margaret's neck with a ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... said: the dull, deaf man was as completely out of the picture in that house party as an owl among peacocks; for he was an inarticulate person and could not talk interestingly even on his own subject, jewels. His idea of conversation with women was a discussion of the weather, contrasting that of England with that of America, or perhaps ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the consideration of the State is persons; ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the dull, intestinal aching grew sharper, parching, searing every strained muscle in throat and chest, he struck the table beside him, and clenched his teeth in the fierce rush of agony that swept him from head to foot, crying out an inarticulate menace on his household. And Dr. Grisby came into the room from the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... attractiveness of masculinity, as masculinity is understood by women alone. She had an intense desire to overhear such a conversation, and she felt that she would affront the unguessed perils of it with delight, drinking it up eagerly, every drop, even were the draught deadly. Meanwhile, the mere inarticulate sound of those distant voices pleased her, and she was glad that she was listening and that the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... for the undammed flood of confidence which had burst from the lips of the habitually taciturn Carrick. The tattered rags of the fellow's humble past were spread before him in all their pathetic squalor. He saw, as though a living thing, the barren, inarticulate childhood. He heard, under compulsion, the tale of youth's indefinable longings, with the meagre story of a love which lacked not its own shabby tragedy. The delicacy of a gentleman, who had intruded where he had no right, had caused him to draw back with an apology; but the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... any circumstances, a delightful occasion, and there was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good natured young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly appreciative. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little table, which was a very different affair from the great clattering seesaw in the saloon ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... clung neither to Patty nor Corinna, but to the austere face of the old hunchback. "'What am I to do with the child?' I asked, and he stepped right out of the circus crowd, and answered 'Give me the child. I like children'—" An inarticulate moan followed, and then she repeated clearly and slowly. "Just like that—nothing more—'Give me the child. I like children.' That was the first time I ever saw him. He had come to see some of the people ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... An inarticulate groan and a glance at the door from Lieders. "I just got to, papa. It aint righd for you to do the way you been doing for so long time; efery little whiles you try to kill yourself; ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... Her face, as I saw it, was livid, pinched in features, and corpse-like, and her pulse but a feeble flutter; and she seemed only to breathe from the top of her lungs. She tried, as she afterwards told me, to say, "I am dying," but her speech was husky and inarticulate. She says her sight and hearing were gone; and while Eliza and I were dragging her out of doors, she could not see the window, and did not feel her feet. We placed her in an upright position, with her back resting against a board-wall, a fresh breeze blowing full in her ...
— Theory of Circulation by Respiration - Synopsis of its Principles and History • Emma Willard
... found some difficulty in proceeding. He was trying to imagine the cousin of an Emperor riding a bicycle along a country road, staggering into his surgery at midnight, covered with dust, inarticulate, pointing only to the wounds beneath his ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in earnest. We could no longer distinguish the faces of the people who passed us by with an inarticulate good-evening. And the householders of Pont seemed very economical with their oil; for we saw not a single window lighted in all that long village. I believe it is the longest village in the world; but I daresay in our predicament every pace counted three times over. We were much cast ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... desirous of giving them some information, with regard to the enemy, but her strength was too far gone. Her brother sprung from his horse, and knelt by her side, endeavoring to stop the effusion of blood, but in vain. She gave him her hand, muttering some inarticulate words, and expired within two minutes after the ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... homely, but looked tolerably clean; and Clarissa was satisfied with it, although it was the poorest room that had ever sheltered her. She had her baby—that was the grand point; and he rolled upon the beds, and crowed and chattered, in his half inarticulate way, with as much delight as if the shabby chamber had been ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Mr. Thomas Potter, he would keep laughing out loud, and volunteering inarticulate declarations that he was 'all right;' in proof of which, he feebly bespoke the evening paper after the next gentleman, but finding it a matter of some difficulty to discover any news in its columns, or to ascertain distinctly whether it had any columns at all, walked ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... deal stirred by Carlyle; but Carlyle, after all, only woke people up, and made them look out of the window to see what was the matter, after which most of them went to bed again and slept comfortably. His cries were rather too inarticulate to furnish anything like a new gospel, and he never took hold of the intellectual class. But Mill did. The "Logic" and "Political Economy," as reinforced and expounded by his earlier essays, were generally accepted by the younger men as the teachings ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... sympathetically. Deep down within him lay an inarticulate affection for the hamlet in which he had been born and the great throbbing sea that lapped its shores. He therefore understood Jerry's attitude and shared in it far more than he would, perhaps, have been willing to admit. Nevertheless he merely knocked the drops from his rubber hat, ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... saw that there was another group of men at a little distance, gathered around something that lay still and straight on the grass. The sound of a hoarse groan reached him suddenly—an inarticulate cry of distress—and he felt with a savage joy that it was from Fletcher. He looked down, drawing together his tattered sleeves. For a time he was silent, and when he spoke it was with ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... which they were going to exchange. Yes, she replied to Geoffrey's questions, she had seen the memorial tablets of her father and mother, and their wedding photograph. But a strange paralysis sealed her lips, and her soul became inarticulate. She found herself absolutely incapable of telling that big foreign husband of hers, truly as she loved him, the veritable state of her emotions when brought face to face with ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... dickens," he wondered audibly, "does the infernal machine work?" As it happened, the thing worked with disconcerting abruptness as his untrained fingers fell hapchance on the spring. A sudden glare again smote him in the face, and at the same instant, from a point not a yard away, apparently, an inarticulate cry rang out upon ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... extravagant nor foolish in the expression of his love. He never ran to meet his god. He waited at a distance; but he always waited, was always there. His love partook of the nature of worship, dumb, inarticulate, a silent adoration. Only by the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the unceasing following with his eyes of his god's every movement. Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... avoiding every sight and touch, and at first turned round and round alone, but afterwards meeting many other souls whirling round and in the same condition as themselves, they moved about promiscuously with no particular object in view, and uttered inarticulate sounds, like yells, mixed with wailing and terror. Other souls in the upper part of the air seemed joyful, and frequently approached one another in a friendly way, and avoided those troubled souls, and seemed to mark their displeasure by keeping themselves to themselves, and their joy and delight ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the flush of a black, bilious anger mounted to the roots of his hair; he gave an inarticulate cry, leapt upon his feet, and began rapidly pacing the stone floor. At first he kept his hands behind his back in a tight knot; then he began to ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... becomes uncontainable, a pain of fulness, for which, after all effort, there is no complete relief; for language breaks under it in delivery, and Art falls to the ground. The psalm of David, the statue of Angelo, the chorus of Handel, are inarticulate cries. These men have not justified to us their confidence. It will be shared, not justified. They have divined what they cannot orderly publish, and their meaning will be by the same greatness divined again. The work of such men remains ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... lips, but she could only utter inarticulate sounds, then impatiently she used the language of her hands, for her tongue was still clumsy in forming words. She pointed down the garden and we saw Arthur lying in an invalid's chair. On one side of him was his mother, ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... moment's notice. The manoeuvre required great nerve and courage, scarcely to be expected in such young lads. It was not found wanting in them. With intense satisfaction Paul let the outlaw's head sink on the soft pillow. The man uttered a few inarticulate sounds, but gave no other signs of awaking. The boys held their breath, and for a minute dared not move lest they should make any noise which might even at the last arouse the man, or disturb any of the other sleepers. At last they ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Harry," said she, in a voice almost inarticulate from excess of weeping, "oh! kill me quickly, and do not leave me to linger out my days, and perish at last with ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked" in stores on Saturdays, or tended ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... of distress of any sort had gone. I went to bed and to sleep. My own idea now is, that the sound I heard was an inarticulate cry for help, probably by means of prayer. The influence I feel was bad, but ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... themselves in his close talks with Latimer. Among the friends of the man on whom all things seemed to smile, the man on whom the sun had never shone, and who faithfully worshipped him, was known as his Shadow. It was not an unfitting figure of speech. Dark, gloomy, and inarticulate, he was a strange contrast to the man he loved; but, from the hour he had stood by Latimer's side, leaning against the rail of the returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man's bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... born, he had not seen, heard, spoken or thought. Nature had granted him, it was believed, a fraction of the sense of smell, and perhaps a fraction of the sense of taste, but of even this there was no positive ascertainment. Nature had walled in his soul most effectually. Occasional inarticulate murmurings, and an incessant knitting and kneading of the fingers were his only manifestations of energy. On bright days they would place him in a little rocking-chair, in some spot where the sun ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... Daphne's cheek. She began, moreover, to feel herself at a disadvantage to which she was not accustomed. Dr. Lelius, meanwhile, turned to Mrs. Fairmile, whenever she was allowed to speak, with a joyous yet inarticulate deference he had never shown to his hostess. They understood each other at a word or a glance. Beside them Daphne, with all her cleverness, soon appeared as a child for ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could write. I would walk through the city and sit in her gardens; and the story grew. I found obscure cafes where I could sit with coffee and narghileh, and watch the Arabic letter-writers worming the thoughts from their inarticulate clients, and Aliens grew. And later, near the Greek Patriarchate, I found that which to me is home—a secondhand book-store. For I mark my passage about this very wonderful world by old book-stores. London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Genoa, Venice, New York, Ancona, Rouen, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... speak, from all the pores of that stone, acted upon her without her being aware of it. The edifice had also sounds fraught with such benediction and such majesty, that they soothed this ailing soul. The monotonous chanting of the celebrants, the responses of the people to the priest, sometimes inarticulate, sometimes thunderous, the harmonious trembling of the painted windows, the organ, bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three belfries, humming like hives of huge bees, that whole orchestra on which bounded a gigantic ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; But sometimes, in a smoking-room, one learns why ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... chiaroscuro of the countryside seemed suddenly to become calm, settling into an intelligible, more or less orderly arrangement of shining hills and shadowed hollows, spreading pastures and sombre woodlands. The chauffeur flung a few inarticulate words over his shoulder—readily interpreted as announcing the nearness of their destination; and of a sudden the car swung from the main highway into a narrow by-road that ran off to the right. A little later they darted through a cut beneath railroad ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... going to Governor's houses to swill sack; never"—but here the voice of the discontented woman, who, in her excitement, had risen from her seat and walked away, was lost in the pantry, or rather subdued into an inarticulate grumble; and Spikeman, after waiting awhile, and finding it improbable that the conversation would be resumed, knocked in a peculiar manner on the door, which was almost immediately opened by ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Clementina's thoughts since learning that Florimel had not run away with her groom? It were hard to say with completeness. Accuracy, however, may not be equally unattainable. Her first feeling was an utterly inarticulate, undefined pleasure that Malcolm was free to be thought about. She was clear next that it would be matter for honest rejoicing if the truest man she had ever met except his master was not going to marry ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... town, had been laid in a settle-bed in the little inn, and had his wounds dressed with such surgical skill as the town afforded. He had spoken once since he fell, and had then begged, in an almost inarticulate whisper, that Henri Larochejaquelin would come to him, and this message had been delivered, and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would "open doors," it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... brass, and make His helmet as a windy and wintering moon Seen through blown cloud and plume-like drift, when ships Drive, and men strive with all the sea, and oars Break, and the beaks dip under, drinking death; Yet was he then but a span long, and moaned With inarticulate mouth inseparate words, And with blind lips and fingers wrung my breast Hard, and thrust out with foolish hands and feet, Murmuring; but those grey women with bound hair Who fright the gods frighted not him; he laughed Seeing them, and pushed out hands to ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... government; and as in the one case he declared against all power which did not emanate from the people themselves, so, in his moral speculations, he was unwilling to refer any of the phenomena of nature to a final cause. When pushed, indeed, very hard, Bletson was compelled to mutter some inarticulate and unintelligible doctrines concerning an Animus Mundi, or Creative Power in the works of Nature, by which she originally called into existence, and still continues to preserve, her works. To this power, he said, some of the purest metaphysicians rendered a certain degree of homage; ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the Idea yet," said the Lord Chamberlain. "It's this," and he proceeded to tell them the Idea. They were stricken dumb with reverential admiration; it was some time before they could even coo little murmurs of inarticulate wonder. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... vigorous. Rearing, until he stood almost upright on his hind feet, the stallion pawed the air. Drew barely kept his seat. He fought with all his knowledge of horsemanship to bring the stud back to earth and under control. And he could hear Kirby's laugh and Boyd calling out some inarticulate warning ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... otherwise he is lost. As Cleggett cut and thrust and parried, a sudden seizure overtook him; he moved as if in a dream; he had the eerie feeling that he had done all this before, sometime, perhaps in a previous existence, and would do it again. The clangor of the meeting swords, the inarticulate shouts and curses, the dance of struggling men across the deck, the whirling confusion of the whole fantastic scene beneath the quiet skies, struck upon his consciousness with that strange phantasmagoric quality which makes the hurrying unreality of dreams so much more vivid and more real than anything ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... from the back of his chair to his knees, now swinging to the right, and again to the left. These movements of the sufferer were as regular and rapid as the vibrations of the pendulum of a clock. At the same time inarticulate murmurs ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... sick, as she moved her head to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy revolutions of those vast orbs, between which she knew that she was to be crushed at last, as by the nether and upper millstones. Her inarticulate cries to God were unheard. It seemed as if there were no God for that accursed ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Culpepper uttered an inarticulate roar and smote his patient horse on the side of the head for two minutes of fierce blows, digging with his heels into ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... living God were rushing into his empty soul. The Resurrection!... The air poured down his throat, the flood of new life swelled through him and penetrated to his very marrow. He felt like to burst, he wanted to shout, to shout for joy and sorrow: and there would only come inarticulate sounds from his mouth. He reeled, he beat on the walls with his arms, while all around him were sheets of paper flying on the wind. He fell down in the middle of the room ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland |
