"Penumbra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... focussed intensely upon reality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understand is seen through a single point of life—a hole pierced in the wall between two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most often twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the obscurity of night ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... appears to be denser and more cloudy than our own. I am led to this conclusion by other evidence that has long been fairly generally accepted as fact. The terminating edge of the phases of Mercury is not sharp, but diffuse and shaded—there is here an atmospheric penumbra. The spectroscope also shows lines of absorption, which proves that Mercury has a ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... whitewashed piers, prostrate figures in the penumbra, rows of yellow slippers outside in the sunlight—out of such glimpses one must reconstruct a vision of the long vistas of arches, the blues and golds of the mirhab,[A] the lustre of bronze chandeliers, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... awkward and shy youth (although an exceedingly handsome one), we cannot tell. That is the great secret behind the veil. The answer is not yet made, the oracle has not spoken, and we must not invade the penumbra ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... its use and end— From emptiness, how sweetest music flows! How absence, to possession adds a grace, And modest vacancy, to all gives place. So from Hillario, some effect may spring; E'en him—that slight penumbra of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle or illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They looked up, squinting their ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Defiance, resolute and stern, desperate resolves never to give in, and that very same defiant determination sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. A deep abyss of abdominal discontent, revealing afar the shadow, the penumbra, of the approaching retch. And there were bouleversements, and hoarse confidences to the sea of every degree of misery. The wind was really risen quite to a gale, and the sea ran with fearful power. Two sailors, standing near, said, "I wouldn't ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals, heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians. The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black. The ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... followed suit. The lamplight, striking across his face beneath the greenish penumbra of the shade, discovered a countenance ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of costume—Rolfe wore morning dress, Morphew the suit of ceremony—accentuated the younger man's advantage in natural and acquired graces; otherwise, they presented the contrast of character and insignificance. Rolfe had a shaven chin, a weathered complexion, thick brown hair; the penumbra of middle-age had touched his countenance, softening here and there a line which told of temperament in excess. At this moment his manner inclined to a bluff jocularity, due in some measure to the bottle of wine before him, as also was the ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... touched by the mysterious and almost fanciful emotion which northern hearts discover and enjoy in the works of the Amsterdam master. No, instead of a forest they want a few trees, standing out clearly against the horizon; instead of a multitude swarming in the penumbra of reality, a few personages, larger than nature, forming harmonious ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Even objects that were immediately before us appeared to us in a vague, dusky phantasmagoria and got confounded with precious objects in an inextricable manner. The world became a sort of kaleidoscope to us, seen in a dream through the penumbra ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant |
