"Objectless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upright, till it seems as if it stood on end with fear. His features are not visible, for he has grasped his cloak with both hands, and drawn it from either side across his face. The picture is seemingly objectless. It tells no tale, but there is a weird power about it that haunts one, and it was for that I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... it is to abandon habits, and how soon a new habit takes the place of the old. Some months ago I put writing aside in despair, feeling that I was turning away from the most stable thing in life; yet even now I have learned largely to acquiesce in silence; the dreary and objectless mood visits me less and less frequently. What have I found to fill the place of the old habit? I have begun to read much more widely, and recognise how very ill-educated I am. In my writing days, I used to ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the toils, The perils they had undergone, amid The strife of warriors, and the angry waves. Stirr'd by such mem'ries, bitter tears he shed; Now turning on his side, and now again Upon his back; then prone upon his face; Then starting to his feet, along the shore All objectless, despairing, would he roam; Nor did the morn, above the sea appearing, Unmark'd of him arise; his flying steeds He then would harness, and, behind the car The corpse of Hector trailing in the dust, Thrice make the circuit of Patroclus' tomb; Then would he turn within his tent to rest, Leaving ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... by even the vision of Babbie in the dogcart was blotted out. If nothing had taken its place, he would not have gone on probably; and had he turned back objectless, his strength would have succumbed to the rain. Now he saw Babbie and Rintoul being married by a minister who was himself, and there was a fair company looking on, and always when he was on the point of shouting ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... mighty underground forces, the broad lands sink a little way—perhaps only a few feet—and the ocean tide rushes in, overwhelming the forests, trees and plants and living creatures, in one dire desolation.—No, not dire, for the ruin is not objectless or needless. It is all a part of the wonderful preparation for the life of man ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... could exceed the vacillation and confusion that reigned in the English cabinet at that time. The forces of England were frittered away in small and objectless expeditions, the plans of action were changed with every report sent either by the interested leaders of insurrectionary movements in Spain, or by the signally incompetent men who had been sent out to represent England, and who distributed broadcast British money and British ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... thought her, though reasonable, a trifle insane. She sat at a window for hours watching a 'last man' of the fly species walking up and plunging down a pane of glass. On this transparent solitary field for the most objectless enterprise ever undertaken, he buzzed angrily at times, as if he had another meaning in him, which was being wilfully misinterpreted. Then he mounted again at his leisure, to pitch backward as before. Emilia found herself thinking with great seriousness that it was not wonderful for boys to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to have penetrated to French inns. In this one at least wimple and kirtle reigned supreme; doublets and hose were few in number, and feeble in act. The landlord himself wandered objectless, eternally taking off his cap to folk for want of thought; and the women, as they passed him in turn, thrust him quietly aside without looking at him, as we remove a live twig in bustling through ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... view, moreover, waste of life and material in organic Nature ceases to be utterly inexplicable, because it ceases to be objectless. It is seen to be a part of the general "economy of Nature," a phrase which has a real meaning. One good illustration of it is furnished by the pollen of flowers. The seeming waste of this in a pine-forest is enormous. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... little information of any value, and when Inspector Forrest had elicited all that he could, he thanked Mannering and rose to depart. I accompanied him to the garden gate. He appeared a little loth to leave me. Twice he turned away and returned to make some objectless remark to me. The third ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... past eighteen months the Duchesse de Langeais had been leading this empty life, filled with balls and subsequent visits, objectless triumphs, and the transient loves that spring up and die in an evening's space. All eyes were turned on her when she entered a room; she reaped her harvest of flatteries and some few words of warmer admiration, which she encouraged by a gesture or a glance, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... is going the rounds:—"How many a great man is now basking in the sunshine of fame generously bestowed upon him by the prolific genius of some reporter! How many stupid orations have been made brilliant, how many wandering, pointless, objectless, speeches put in form and rendered at least readable, by the unknown reporter! How many a disheartened speaker, who was conscious the night before of a failure, before a thin, cold, spiritless audience, awakes delighted to learn that he has addressed ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... easily—he had money enough for that; yet he would keep architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a community where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciously paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life was ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... After breakfast I play billiards in some public room, consume endless pipes, read the papers, and so on. Later in the day I scowl through a picture-gallery, or a string of studios; or take a pull up the river; or start off upon a long, solitary objectless walk through miles and miles of forest. Then comes dinner—the inevitable, insufferable, interminable German table-d'hote dinner—and then there is the evening to be got through somehow! Now and then I drop in at a theatre, but generally take refuge in some plebeian ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... into a narrow groove wherein to struggle would only have been to injure herself ineffectually. There comes a time when every intellectual being is forced to choose some definite pursuits. Evadne had been formed for a life of active usefulness; but now she found herself reduced to an existence of objectless contemplation, and she suffered acutely until she had recourse to St. Paul and the pulpit, from which barren fields she succeeded at last in collecting samples enough to make up a dose of the time-honoured anodyne sacred to her sex. It is a delicious opiate ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... fighting—not such brushes as that I witnessed at Irun—might take place, was a mystery. The movements of the Republican leaders were inexplicable, and conducted in contravention of all known principles of the art of war. They harassed their men by long and objectless marches. They ordered towns to be put in a state of defence at first, and then withdrew the garrisons. They engaged whole columns in defiles, where a company of invisible guerrilleros could tease them. They acted, in most instances, as if they had no information or wrong information. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! How little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... great world: he must teach her its laws, instruct her how to shine, how to make the most of herself, how to do honour to his choice! He had but the vaguest idea of the folly that possessed her. He thought of her relation to the poor but as a passing—indeed a past phase of a hitherto objectless life. Anything beyond a little easy benevolence would be impossible to the wife of lord Gartley! That she should contemplate the pursuit of her former objects with even greater freedom and devotion than before, would have seemed to him a thing utterly incredible. And Hester would have been ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... that they scarcely come in competition. Alfieri's play is short, and the characters are few. He describes no scene: his personages are not the King of Spain and his courtiers, but merely men; their place of action is not the Escurial or Madrid, but a vacant, objectless platform anywhere in space. In all this, Schiller has a manifest advantage. He paints manners and opinions, he sets before us a striking pageant, which interests us of itself, and gives a new interest to whatever is combined with it. The principles of the antique, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in his structure to ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The following objectless tale, still extant, I believe, in the mountainous parts of Denbighshire, is another instance of the credulity in former days ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... concern is, What is the object aimed at? The end determines the means to be employed, and if the nature of the end be clearly kept in view, then no objectless complications will be introduced into the means. All this seems too obvious to be stated, but it is just the failure to realise this simple truth that has given rise to the whole body of odium theologicum, with all the persecutions and massacres and martyrdoms which disgrace the pages of history, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... with its variety of material forms of existence and individual souls is not unreal Maya, but a real part of Brahman's nature, the body investing the universal Self. The Brahman of /S/a@nkara is in itself impersonal, a homogeneous mass of objectless thought, transcending all attributes; a personal God it becomes only through its association with the unreal principle of Maya, so that—strictly speaking—/S/a@nkara's personal God, his I/s/vara, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... and sometimes carrying Hilda, Mrs. Hooven set off upon her objectless journey. Block after block she walked, street after street. She was afraid to stop, because of the policemen. As often as she so much as slackened her pace, she was sure to see one of these terrible figures in the distance, watching her, so it seemed ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I picked up the conversational language with unusual ease, perhaps owing to the drilling in Latin which my father had given me; and I liked the easy, objectless ways of the people, and the smiles which so readily took the place of the sallow gravity which their faces wore in repose. But it was the Transteverini women who chiefly attracted me; they wore an antique costume familiar enough in paintings, and they claimed ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... too young and too handsome to be doing nothing but lounging about the streets of London, and even if he should be ordered to the Indies, it is something to feel that he is no longer aimless and objectless in life—a mere squanderer of time, without interest, stake, or duty, in this existence. I am sure this news will pacify you, and atone for the day's delay in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... at the performance of a play through thick glass or with closed ears has much the same absurd effect that is produced by also stopping the ears while at a ball and watching the apparently objectless capering of the dancers, without the aid of musical accompaniment. Diderot, in his Lettre sur les sourds muets, gives his ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... could seize that moment to pry into his dark and mysterious nature, and if he proved modest and upright, as no doubt he would, how would I astound him with a gratuitous half-bit! Or if he resented that, (it might be,) I would have him at nine-pins; I would send him of errands; make up objectless and boot-less employment, if necessary, and so contrive to benefit him unawares; to cherish and sustain his high moral tone, and at some future day, (it was not impossible,) raise him to the dignity of trowsers! I would do this without casting ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... at the sea, if not quite as blue as a poster sea, yet—as already stated—amazingly blue. Josephus lay on a bit of hot earth watching him, his nose between his forepaws, and quite exhausted after a mad and wholly objectless ten minutes' race round ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... raised his double-barrelled shot-gun to his shoulder and pulled both triggers. Down went the sixteen Indians as if the bird-shot had been fatal to all. The plain became in an instant as objectless as it was ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... anything but happy, for her illness had deprived her of courage, and probably roused her conscience. Robert followed the pair, saw them enter The Great Labourer—what could the name mean? could it mean The Good Shepherd?—and turned away helpless, objectless indeed, for he had done all that he could, and that all was of no potency. A world of innocence and beauty was about to be hurled from its orbit of light into the blackness of outer chaos; he knew it, and was unable to speak word or do deed that should frustrate the power ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and occasionally whole groves of bananas were in sight. We passed many Chinamen, and many Chinese shops, showing them to be the dominating race, always moving promptly as if bent on some fixed purpose; while the natives, seen now and then on the road, were listless and objectless in their appearance,—true children of the equatorial region. The former were bent on accumulating the means to return to their native land in independence; the latter were utterly heedless of ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... profession, that he was so rich that he was far above the straits in which Morris found himself more and more frequently involved, only added to the flame that consumed him; life without Silvia herself would be dull, colorless, objectless; life without her music would be but "wind along ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... failure to find it, it really existed, and that our disappointment had arisen in some error as to its exact position. For my own part, I hardly knew what to think. I could not for a moment believe that the Spaniard, knowing himself to be a dying man, would tell a wanton and objectless falsehood; and I had never supposed him to be otherwise than in the full possession of his senses whilst relating his story. But he had given the position of the island definitely, and, on our arrival at the latitude and longitude named, we had found no land at all. True, ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... the consciousness of perpetual endeavour to advance our race be not alone happier than the life of ease, let us see what this vaunted ease really is. Tell me, is it not another name for ennui? This state of quiescence, this objectless, dreamless torpor, this transition du lit a la table, de la table au lit,—what more dreary and monotonous existence can you devise? Is it pleasure in this inglorious existence to think that you are serving pleasure? Is ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... come to thee in all youth's brightest power, As on the day thy faith to mine was plighted, And then I'll tell thee weary hour by hour, How that spring's early promise has been blighted. I'll tell thee of the long, long, dreary years, That have passed o'er me hopeless, objectless; My loathsome days, my nights of burning tears, My wild despair, my utter loneliness, My heart-sick dreams upon my feverish bed, My fearful longing to be with the dead;— In the dark lonely night, When sleep and silence ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... the church she had taken her stocking and wires out of her pocket, and was now knitting busily. How her needles did go! Her eyes never regarded them, however, but, fixed on the slabs that paved the tower at a yard or two from her feet, seemed to be gazing far out to sea, for they had an infinite objectless outlook. To try her, I took for the moment the position of ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... to-morrow there must be one each day, then two a day. To-day the footman's hands must be clean; to-morrow he must wear gloves, and in his clean gloves he must present a letter on a clean salver. And there are no limits to this cleanliness, which is useless to everybody, and objectless, except for the purpose of separating oneself from others, and of rendering impossible all intercourse with them, when this cleanliness is attained by the ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... a time, to lie around in vacuous idleness —to spend days that should be crowded full of action in a monotonous, objectless routine of hunting lice, gathering at roll-call, and drawing and cooking ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... valley, forest and lake, waterfall and ocean, did that scene, which was no scene, or next to none, bind me in the spell of its fascination. The motion of our craft, as we careered noiselessly through the shoreless and objectless void, without sense of effort or friction, was a charm of itself,—bringing to a flower, crystallizing into refulgent stars, the dim, obscure, however glorious, poetry of life. Here were the wildest imaginations of the dreamer melted in a crucible, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box, with a sliding panel in the window, indicating a loge de concierge. Before going in we walked up the street, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of labor which machines, commercial freedom, and progress of all sorts, gradually annihilate; not useful labor, but labor which has become superfluous, supernumerary, objectless, and without result. On the other hand, protection restores it to activity; it replaces us under the water, so as to give us an opportunity of pumping; it forces us to ask for gold from the inaccessible national mine, rather than from our national manufactories. All ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... an acrid taste in The Philanderer; and certainly he might be considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in You Never Can Tell. This play is the nearest approach to frank and objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw's work. Punch, with wisdom as well as wit, said that it might well be called not "You Never Can Tell" but "You Never Can be Shaw." And yet if anyone will read this blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as Pickwick ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was objectless as they And loitering idly day by day; But whenever I heard the recruiters come, I left my ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were tumbling down the mountain sides like cataracts, and seemed actually to descend upon the river-bed; there could be no serious difficulty in reaching them by following up the river, which was wide and open; but it seemed rather an objectless thing to do, for the main range looked hopeless, and my curiosity about the nature of the country above the gorge was now quite satisfied; there was no money in it whatever, unless there should be minerals, of which I saw no more signs ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the moving crowd. Now and then his eyes rested on Josephine Thorn's graceful figure, and he noticed how her expressive features lighted up in the conversation. John could hear something of their conversation, which was somewhat noisy. They were talking in that strain of objectless question and answer which may be stupid to idiocy or clever to the verge of wit, according to the talkers. Joe called ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... gain by a crime so objectless. Dr. Poulain's first suspicions were effaced by this thought. Who could have any possible interest in Cibot's death? His wife?—the doctor saw her taste the herb-tea as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... about to turn away, withdrawing my privacy from his fatuous, objectless attempts to test what sort of stuff it was made of, when he laid down his pipe in an extremely significant manner, you know, as if a critical moment had come, and leaned sideways over ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... observation shows, that, as time runs on, matter tends more and more to become goods, the blind forms of motion in nature to become useful labor and useful sustenance, impersonal and objectless existence to be transformed into personal property and personal culture, Schaeffle inclines to the belief that the whole mechanism of unconsciously governing nature is destined ultimately to aid in the realization ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... success which many simple people believe him, is a signal and most miserable failure; that instead of pursuing a career of various enjoyments and keen excitements, he is a martyr to ennui, bored by the monotony of an objectless existence, utterly weary of the splendid clubs, in which he is presumed by unsophisticated admirers to find an ample compensation for want of household comfort and domestic affection: that as soon as ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson |
