"Thin air" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Grow forgotten all the good words he had heard to-day from the circuit-rider? Had they melted into thin air during his long ride from the church? Were the houseless good words wandering with the rising wind through the unpeopled forest, seeking vainly a human heart where they might ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... from a flimsy philosophy he span an imaginative tissue of such magical and marvellous beauty. But Shelley dwelt in an ethereal region, where ordinary beings found breathing difficult. There facts seemed to dissolve into thin air instead of supplying a solid and substantial base. His idealism meant unreality. His 'trumpet' did not in fact stimulate the mass of mankind, and his fame at this period was confined to a few young gentlemen of literary refinement. The man who had ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... they reached the highest point of the trail and started down. Both men had felt the effects of the thin air during the last twelve hours and so the descent came as a welcome relief. They camped that night among trees and in an atmosphere that relieved their tired lungs. They also built the first fire they had lighted since the start and enjoyed a hot meal of coffee and toasted porkscraps. They found ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ills of humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest. Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his mediaeval predecessors did at the touch of ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... itself very much alive in the person of a middle-aged, middle-class American. Within three months the man's claim was substantiated, and estate, fortune, position, and home—as far as John Rallywood was concerned—had melted into thin air. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... indeed it proved. Through every teepee they searched in hot haste, tumbling out squalling squaws and papooses. But all in vain. Copperhead had as completely disappeared as if he had vanished into thin air. With faces stolid and unmoved by a single gleam of satisfaction the Indians watched ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... done so. She had bravely grasped the phantom in both hands, and it had vanished into thin air. What she dreamed was not. There was no disgrace anywhere. A morbid young woman had conjured up a possible tale of wrong. There was no wrong. She, Mrs. Home, was to be pitied, and Charlotte would help her; but beyond this no dark or evil thing had ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... Ned firmly, as he laid his hand on the other's, arm; "I don't want money; I've given up begging. You gave me your advice once, and I have taken that—it has been of more value to me than all the wealth that is being melted into thin air, John, by ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... up the glen, was the work of an instant; and as he turned angle after angle of the indented banks of the valley, without meeting that which he sought, he became half afraid that the form which he had seen at such a distance had already melted into thin air, and was either a deception of his own imagination, or of the elementary spirits by which the valley was ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... a reddish plain. Above them, the red sun filled a twelfth of the sky. That sky was one vast swirl of crimson. Even the few clouds seemed to be on fire. And yet their instruments showed that the temperature of the thin air outside ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... breeze contended with the mist, intrenched in the stronghold of the valley. From the east the red orb began its attack; out of the west rode the swift-moving zephyrs, and, vanquished, the wavering vapor stole off into thin air, or hung in isolated wreaths above the foliage on the hillside. Soon the conquering light brightly illumined a medieval castle commanding the surrounding country; the victorious breeze whispered loudly at its gloomy casements. A great ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... shallow water, where men go down with a diving-dress, they grow so light that they have to hang weights about their necks, and have their boots loaded with twenty pounds of lead—as I know to my sorrow. And with all this, and the helmet, which is heavy enough of itself to any one up here in the thin air, they are carried about like gossamers, and have to take every kind of care not to be upset and stood upon their heads. I went down once in the dress, and speak from experience. But if we could get down for a moment near where the fishes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it can be caught; as I understand, this species of being is not like an apparition, that may be composed of thin air, and utterly impalpable to the human touch, but it consists of a ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the subject some time, and my fears vanished into thin air. If this man had taken that law into favor it would surely stand, and as he predicted be "improved and enlarged." I have never been so forcibly impressed by any stranger. His compactness of body and soul, the clear outlines ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... little fice dog, you—" this to Morty, "you—you—" Morty dashed around the table toward the Judge, but before he could reach the man to strike, the Judge was moving his jaws impotently, and grasping the thin air. His mouth foamed as he fell and he lay, a shivering, white-eyed horror, upon the floor. The bank clerks lifted the figure to a leather couch, and some one summoned ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... hall was dark, but for a patch of moonlight at the further end. Against this he caught an instant, flitting glimpse of the intruder. It was a woman, yet even as his eyes told him this, she seemed to vanish into thin air—the hall was empty. ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... of thinking steel man made to match his own, To guard and guide the death disks packed in the war head's hammered cone, To drive the cask of the thin air flask as the gyroscope ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... what, to him, seemed an apparition. He had seen that pale, pensive face in his dreams for years. It had followed him out to sea, and in far lands where he sought to avoid it. He arose from the sofa, and approached Daisy with hesitating steps, as if he were afraid she would vanish into thin air before he reached her. Daisy shrunk from him, and looked inquiringly at her mother. Walters laid his hand ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... wafted the pearly maiden over the pine-clad hills and past Fuji mountain. All the time sweet music rained through the air until, as the fisherman strained his eyes toward the fresh-fallen snow on Fuji's crest, he could no longer distinguish the moon-maiden from the fleecy clouds that filled the thin air. ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... corpulent individual had disappeared as if into thin air; only a stir in one of the bunks betrayed his hiding-place. At the first sight of Willie's revolver he had dived for a refuge and was now flattened against the wall, a pillow pressed over his head to deaden the ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... perverted spirit you ought to be able to exorcise me, Monsignor!" she said,—"With the incense of early Mass clinging to you, and the holy water still fresh on your hands, you have only to say, 'Retro me Sathanas!' and if I am NOT Sylvie Hermenstein I shall melt into thin air, leaving nothing but the odour of sulphur behind me! But if I AM Sylvie Hermenstein, I shall remain invincible and immovable,—both in ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... tribute of admiration to the MANES of departed heroism is like burning incense in a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt into a sound—into thin air.... Not only a man's actions are effaced and vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him also. His intellect only is immortal, and bequeathed unimpaired to posterity. Words are the only things that last ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... aberrations, has tended towards such a belief—we have reason to think that our destiny is different from that of animals; and though we cannot altogether shut out the childish fear that the soul upon leaving the body may 'vanish into thin air,' we have still, so far as the nature of the subject admits, a hope of immortality with which we comfort ourselves on sufficient grounds. The denial of the belief takes the heart out of human life; it lowers men to the level of the material. As Goethe also ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... disappeared into thin air, thin space," Hayes quarreled back. "She must be on your ship somewhere. When was ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... odd horned beasts that stirred upon the ledges. From that day forth he was often filled with a silent wonder at all the sleepless life that moved beneath the vast waters, and that knew nothing of the little human lives that fretted themselves out in the thin air above. That day was to him like the opening of a door into the vast ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... view the bright Elysian fields around, and pointed to a green dale where at last they beheld Anchises. The hero hastened to approach his father, eager to embrace him, and thrice did he attempt to throw his arms about his neck, but thrice did the form escape his hold, for it was nothing but thin air. ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... the long rider lightly across the mouth with the back of his hand, and Silent lunged with the snarl of a beast. His blow spent itself on thin air. He whirled and struck again. Only a low laughter answered him. He might as well have ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... her rival that just homage—she 'would half persuade herself that no doubt lingered in her mind; it was right to destroy the letters, and whatever was right Wilfrid must have done. But she could not live at all hours in that thin air; the defects of her blood were too enduring. Jealousy came back from its brief exile, and was more insinuating than ever, its suggestions more maddening. By a sort of reaction, these thoughts assailed her strongly in the moments which followed her outburst of passion and Wilfrid's response. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... opposite points of the world, to pass a night together and boast of their respective powers. Winter blew his breath, and the streams were covered with ice. Spring blew his breath, and the land was covered with flowers. The old man is finally conquered, and vanishes into "thin air." ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... thrust and parry, we tramped up a wide bit of ground, while there was no sound of the struggle, except our hard breathing, with now and then a fierce curse from him as his flashing steel nicked on my gun-barrel, or flew off into thin air just as he thought to ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... but did you ever in this twentieth century, when witchcraft and black magic are supposed to be as dead as Queen Anne, hear of such a marvel as a man putting on a blue leather belt that was said to have the power of rendering the wearer invisible, and then forthwith melting into thin air and floating off like a cloud of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... if thou e'er Hast, on a mountain top, been ta'en by cloud, Through which thou saw'st no better, than the mole Doth through opacous membrane; then, whene'er The wat'ry vapours dense began to melt Into thin air, how faintly the sun's sphere Seem'd wading through them; so thy nimble thought May image, how at first I re-beheld The sun, that bedward now his couch o'erhung. Thus with my leader's feet still equaling pace From forth that cloud I came, when now expir'd The ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... celebrated with a great feast the festival of Saint Patrick, and had every day repeated certain chapters of the hymn which had been composed in his honor; and therefore, they said, had Saint Patrick snatched him from their hands, as his own proper right. Thus saying, the demons vanished into thin air; and Kaennechus rejoiced in these things, and by the relation excited many unto the frequent repetition of this hymn in honor ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... recapture the first shy sweetness of their dawning passion. They play little love-games. He pretends he is a Jew, carrying her away from her family to a tribal feast; then that they twain are spirits of stars, meeting in the thin air aloft. The intensity of their bliss is sharpened by the black cloud of danger in which they move: for if the Three, husband, father, and brother of the lady become aware of this secret liaison, there can be only one end to it—a tragedy of blood. The lighted taper held ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... usually exasperating, and having exhausted the patience or repelled the company of all the rest, found itself alone, and set up a fretful, continuous scream, disagreeable even to me, and torturing to Martial ears, which, adapted to hear in that thin air, are painfully alive to strident, harsh, or even loud sounds. Instantly obeying a sign from her mother, Eveena rose in the middle of a conversation to which she had listened with evident interest, and devoted herself for half-an-hour ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... times they spoke of themselves. To-morrow Helen might be mistress of a bonanza; to-morrow she might be, as she was to-night, a girl but briefly removed from pennilessness. As the stars waxed and began at last to wane and the sky brightened, as the still thin air grew colder at the first promises of another day, they discussed the matter quietly. And it seemed that this was not the only consideration in the world, nor yet ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... into the trail there arose on either side of her from out of the bushes that border the path, as though materialized from thin air, a score of tall, white warriors of the Ho-don. Like a frightened deer Pan-at-lee cast a single startled look at these menacers of her freedom and leaped quickly toward the bushes in an effort to escape; but the warriors were ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that he was a fool. Yet the music was suddenly sweeter, his vague antipathy to the King had vanished into thin air, the taste of life ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... hearing at last of her lover's plight, she too visits the magic castle, and would have been decoyed into its dungeons had not Astolfo appeared with a magic horn, whose first blast makes the castle vanish into thin air! Thus freed, the magician's prisoners gaze around them in wonder, and Rogero and Bradamant embrace with rapture, planning to marry as soon as Rogero ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... brown and lavender ranges, the wholesome tang of the thin air, the far sweep of the afternoon sky, seemed suddenly ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was gone before either Aunt Nell or Judith had accomplished any of the things they had meant to do, and the good times, especially Nancy's visit, which Judith had looked forward to with such pleasure, seemed to have vanished into thin air. ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... double force and relish from the quantity of flesh through which they make their way, as he shakes his fat sides with laughter, or "lards the lean earth as he walks along." Other comic characters seem, if we approach and handle them, to resolve themselves into air, "into thin air;" but this is embodied and palpable to the grossest apprehension: it lies "three fingers deep upon the ribs," it plays about the lungs and the diaphragm with all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... special favour with St. Nick. Now and then I harbour a rascally suspicion that he is an indolent, time-serving person, who slips down the widest, cleanest chimneys to the people who clamour the loudest; but this abominable cynicism melts into thin air the moment that I look at his jolly visage on the cover of a picture-book. Dear, fat, rosy, radiant Being! Surely he is incapable of any but the highest motives! I am twenty-eight years old, but age shall never make any difference in the ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... AEneas, "continually appearing to me in dreams, urged me forward even to these regions. Permit me now to clasp thee in my arms, and do not withdraw from my embrace." Thrice did he attempt to throw his arms about the shade, which being only composed of thin air, was not perceptible to his touch. While the two conversed together, AEneas observed at no great distance from them a stream, at which prodigious numbers of ghosts were incessantly crowding to drink, swarming like bees round ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... the foreigner, when he does not need him, as thin air, when he does need him, as a piece of goods; consequently, when he sits in the Cabinet, he considers that, towards a foreign State, a lie is not a lie, deceit is not deceit, and a surprise attack in time of peace is a perfectly ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... shot through with the rose of dawn. Then, rapidly, the mountains lifted into view, range beyond range, all their gullies deep blue and purple, and here and there sharp triangles of snow. There was not a cloud, not a trace of mist, and through the crisp, thin air the vision carried as if through a telescope. They could count the trees on the upper ridges; and that while the floor of the valley was still in shadow. This in turn grew brilliant, and everywhere the sage brush glittered like foliage ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... where no water could ever have reached it; and thus the audience, all unconsciously, was confronted with the remarkable spectacle of a husbandman applying himself diligently to the task of ladelling thin air on to crops that grew upon barren sand. If only his imagination had been controlled by a knowledge of Egypt, the picture might have been both ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... wealth had done in the eyes of his gudgeons, furnished her with a small portion of paper-currency; and this, added to the contents of a fairy purse of gold, which she found in her shoe on the eventful morning when Mr. Touchandgo melted into thin air, enabled her to retreat into North Wales, where she took up her lodging in a farm-house in Merionethshire, and boarded very comfortably for a trifling payment, and the additional consideration of teaching English, French, and music, to the little Ap-Llymrys. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... and Fletcher, in spite of repeated imitations by them from previous plays of Shakspere. And so the argument in support of the theory is a pyramid of ifs, supporting an apex that vanishes into the thin air of an invisible conclusion. ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... For ever it seemed coming to meet her, hasting, running steep, as if straight out of the heaven to which she was drawing nearer and nearer. The wind woke now and then, and blew on her for a moment, as. if tasting her, to see what this young Psyche was that had floated up into the wild thin air of the hills. The incessant meeting of the brook made it a companion to her although it could not go her way, and was always leaving her. But it kept her from the utter loneliness she sought; for loneliness is imperfect while sound is by, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... secret it was bursting to disclose. It remained in this attitude until I was within two or three feet of it—certainly not more—when, to my unlimited amazement, it absolutely vanished—melted away into thin air. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... in the United States language, and have a bank account. This spring they may be wearing chaparajos and swinging a quirt through the thin air, and in July they may be at Long Branch, or coloring a meerschaum ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... chatting, with arms akimbo, over its basin; before the plate for the left picture is got ready, "one shall be taken and the other left"; look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur where the other is melting into thin air as she fades forever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... it's a whole lot better than thin air with a hard-working circle around us—an' you know what that means," retorted Mr. Connors. "But if you don't want to take a chance in the shack, why mebby we can make Wallace's, or the Cross-O-Cross. That is, if we don't get turned ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... Bob could duplicate that performance on the following day, it was "good-night to Harmony." But then there was a slight difference between the pitcher of the scrub team and the mighty slab artist who officiated for Harmony; and possibly, Bob might only find thin air when he struck savagely at the oncoming ball, dexterously tagged for a drop, ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... fans and pointed triangles, close fitted; emerald green of the turnips; yellow of the charlock lifted high and clear; red brown and pink and purple of ploughed land and fallows; red gold of the wheat and white green of the barley; shimmering in a wash of thin air. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... maintained my outward serenity. I knew that he was a clean, honourable man and worthy in every way of the hand and heart of Grace Harding. Possibly they had been long engaged. All of my alleged rights and wrongs faded into thin air. Besides, what was the use of whimpering? It was a stunning blow, but I would stand ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... consequence of being good. Reward or punishment as quid pro quo, as arbitrary assignments, as external equivalents, do not so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we move. For this view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to us, fades into thin air. Jesus could by no possibility have met the punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner. Then he must have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others. That portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of another's sin may rightfully be called ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... But, indeed, it was wonderful to see what kind feelings were called out by this poor man's coming amongst us. And also wonderful to see how the great Cranford panic, which had been occasioned by his first coming in his Turkish dress, melted away into thin air on his second coming—pale and feeble, and with his heavy, filmy eyes, that only brightened a very little when they fell upon the countenance of his faithful wife, or their pale and ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... resembling the quince, but unknown in Europe. These ghosts love to mix with the living and deceive women. They take on the form of a man, and seem to wish to enjoy a woman's favour, but when about to accomplish their purpose they vanish into thin air. If any one thinks, upon feeling something strange upon his bed, that there is a spectre lying beside him, he only needs to assure himself by touching his belly, for, according to their idea, the ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... sought to give, And I, in fleeing it, have learnt to live. For, by the tender love that Time hath brought The other vanquished is, and turned to nought; Once did it lure and lull me, but I swear It now hath wholly vanished in thin air. And so your love and you I gladly leave, And, needing neither, will forbear to grieve; The other perfect, lasting love is mine, To it I turn, nor for ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Pure air and the bright sunshine! Is this your health for mind and body? Oh! weak, weak, unstable one that I am! Poor Mary!" This was said in a low, mournful, and scarcely audible voice. "Thus has my promise to you vanished into thin air!" ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... The soldiers of the Republic fought their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts without some such refreshment before starting. Indeed, my fasting, and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of the three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, and melting human hearts. But so delicate and illusive is it that when used for a purely selfish purpose, it evaporates into thin air, and the erstwhile possessor is left with only the mask of beauty and the husk of a personality. George Peabody had Charm of Manner from his nineteenth year to the day of his death. Colonel Forney crossed the Atlantic with him when ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... in the circle of a sea and sky widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth, just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing sunshine, very harsh and desolate ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... "Illustrious Lazy." In my professional studies and avocations, I have been so hard driven, in order to make up for four idle years, that I am wasted almost to a shadow, and fears are entertained that I shall wholly vanish into thin air. My physician talks gravely about my having exhausted my nervous energy, and sends me to Ratborough, as the place of all others the most favorable for entire intellectual repose. I am living with an old aunt, Tabitha Flint, ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... possessor of four dollars—an amount of riches that almost took away his breath. He had never in his whole life owned more than ten cents at a time. As he tramped along the road home, he kept his hand in his pocket, holding fast to the money, as if he feared it would otherwise dissolve into thin air. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that stuck by you found themselves out of a job because of your pig-headedness? And what harm are you doing by dropping the story, anyway? We've got this thing beaten, right now. It isn't spreading. It's dropping off. What'll the 'Clarion' look like when its great sensation peters out into thin air? But by that time the harm'll be done and the whole country will think we're a plague-stricken city. Don't do all that damage and spoil everything just ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... TIME?—From the thin air of such speculations as we have been discussing let us come back to the world of the plain man, the world in which we all habitually live. It is from this that we must start out upon all our journeys, and it is good to come back to it from time to ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... Breathing thin air into our nostrils we live and look on the torch of the sun, all we who live what is called life; and are as organs, receiving our spirits from quickening airs. If one then chokes that little breath with his hand, he robs us of life, and brings us down to Hades. ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... do tell her. He told me that, when I discovered his whereabouts to mother or grandmother, he will either report himself at the nearest military station, or will shoot himself, according as he feels inclined. And in our family such promises are not wont to dissolve in thin air." ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... always accompanied by a remarkable servant named Tony, a half-breed in whom the Portuguese strain predominated. Tony bought his master's clothes, paid his bills, and was a court of last resort "below stairs." Rhodes declared that his man could produce a satisfactory meal almost out of thin air. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... lost track of him altogether. Her feelings were those of Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania for flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to embrace his soul, she clasped thin air. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... hollow.... The style of furnishing was that of a sergeant's mess." There was one piano, provided at the prisoners' expense. The billiard tables and other accessories imagined by perfervid patriots vanish into thin air. ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... herb yielding seed," etc., "and it was so"; "let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so"—seems even to imply them. Agreeing that they were formed of "the dust of the ground" and of thin air only leads to the conclusion that the pristine individuals were corporeally constituted like existing individuals, produced through natural agencies. To agree that they were created "after their kinds" determines nothing as to what were the original kinds, nor in what mode, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... high There shineth ... Is some spirit there Of earth or heaven? That thin air Was never trod by things that die! What bodes it now that forth they ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... But one sees, also, that she has but to open her eyes, and lift her hands, and all the entanglement would fall off of itself. The picture offers the most typical lesson of life. All imprisonment of conditions is dissolved into thin air the instant one impresses his own will-power on the affairs and circumstances of his life. He can do that which he desires to do. The desire has only to be intensified into conscious, intelligent choice, into absolute will,—and all the minor barriers ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... is to K. The War Office Army has melted into thin air and it only remains to express my heartfelt thanks for the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... Shakespeare there is no Wagnerian, Euripidean "apologia." There is no "Parsifal" or "Bacchanals." From the meaningless tumult of mortal passions he returns, with a certain ironic weariness, to the magic of Nature and the wonder of youth. Prospero, dismissing his spirits "into thin air," has the last word; and the last word is as the first: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea of a pessimistic ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... than that of having read a work that we have not! Books that are to be written hereafter cannot be criticised by us; those that were written formerly have been criticised long ago; but a new book is the property, the prey of ephemeral criticism, which it darts triumphantly upon; there is a raw thin air of ignorance and uncertainty about it, not filled up by any recorded opinion; and curiosity, impertinence, and vanity rush eagerly into the vacuum. A new book is the fair field for petulance and coxcombry to gather laurels in—the butt set up for roving opinion to aim at. Can we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... compunction, which had been putting up a fight, vanished into thin air. The sweep had offered me money. I was prepared to ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... of childhood days. Instead of laboriously piling small squares of wood one upon another in an endeavor to build the tiny semblance of a house, I now, in this second childhood of mine, projected against thin air phantom edifices planned and completed in the twinkling of an eye. To be sure, such houses of cards almost immediately superseded one another, but the vanishing of one could not disturb a mind that had ever another interesting ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... need to be. There's nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean it seems to be governed by the laws of time and space. It's not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that's so, I defy it to get in here. We'll leave the place in the morning. I for one have bottomed the depths of fear. Fill your glass, man! The windows are all shuttered, the door ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was far advanced in that Northern latitude, but the chill of winter had not yet come. The wide sky of glittering blue hung high, and in the thin air the mountain-peaks that stood far away came near; the wooden houses of the new town were gilded and softened by ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... old Joe's withering irony could affect the patient, so profoundly pleased was he to find the supernatural visitors gone— melted, as it were, into thin air. ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... have been stimulated to greater exertions; but there has been no warmth of approbation, so that I have always written with benumbed fingers. I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes through a peep-hole I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... untimely weight. In self-depreciating contrast he recalled a certain young lady's airy, winning way—airy way of winning—and coveted it for himself here and now: a wrestler's nimble art of overcoming weight by lightness; of lifting a heavy antagonist off his feet into thin air where his heaviness would be against him. His small, trim grandfather had it, in good degree; was using it now. Would it were his own in this issue, where the senator held in his hand the folded petition, having already vainly proffered it to the commodore, who had as vainly ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... all the rays of light into one point. Now when it is placed opposite to the sun, so that all the rays coming from all quarters are collected together into that point, the ray thus formed passes through the thin air, and at once lights the dryest and lightest of the objects against which it strikes, for that ray has the strength and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... to the steps, and I was so crippled with fatigue and so dizzy and sick with the thin air, that I hardly knew what I was doing. We entered a low-browed, dark, arched, stone passage, smelling dismally of antiquity and dogs, when a brisk voice accosted me in the very choicest of French, and in terms of welcome as gay and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... being, of course, within the chamber of gum-elastic. Through this tube a quantity of the rare atmosphere circumjacent being drawn by means of a vacuum created in the body of the machine, was thence discharged, in a state of condensation, to mingle with the thin air already in the chamber. This operation being repeated several times, at length filled the chamber with atmosphere proper for all the purposes of respiration. But in so confined a space it would, in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... one, for we must educate ourselves on the trip to use the sort of atmosphere we expect to find when we land. For instance, going to Mars we must use an atmosphere more and more rarefied each day, until gradually we become used to the thin air we expect to find there. Of course, there is an especially designed barometer and thermometer, capable of being read in the rear compartment, but exposed outside near the rudder. The barometer will give us the pressure of the earthly atmosphere as it becomes ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... pass certain resolutions, recognizing the right of subjects of the United States to settle in Upper Canada. The restrictions being relaxed, his only cause of hostility to the Administration vanished, and he ceased to clamour against it. His sympathy with Mr. Gourlay's projects vanished into thin air. Those projects contemplated enquiry and reform. Dickson, having accomplished his own ends, desired no further reform; and as for enquiry, he had excellent reasons for burking it, as it would probably lead ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... education should have taught them better, that persons of a mysterious aspect used to visit the inns and hotels of Paris, and eat of the best meats and drink of the best wines, and then suddenly melt away into thin air when the landlord came with the reckoning. That gentle maidens, who went to bed alone, often awoke in the night and found men in bed with them, of shape more beautiful than the Grecian Apollo, who immediately became invisible when an alarm was raised. It was also said that many persons found ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... occupation, and he had, in the excess of his feeling, made a flourish of the knife, as if it were a dagger, when Montaiglon's query checked him. He was a bubble burst, his backbone—that braced him to the tension of a cuirassier of guards—melted into air, into thin air, and a ludicrous limpness came on him, while his eye fell, and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... end of his career at Perpignan. Vanished were the dreams of civic eminence; melted into thin air the statue on the Quai Sadi-Carnot; faded, too, the vision of the modest Stephanie crowned with orange-blossom; gone forever the two hundred and fifty thousand francs. Never since Alnaschar kicked over his ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... replied, "only a little younger than Carthoris, and, barring one, the fairest thing that ever breathed the thin air of dying Mars. Only Dejah Thoris, her mother, could be more beautiful than Tara ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... through the hot thin air. The noonday sun blazed down upon it and the desert world below. All about was the solemn silence of death. No living thing appeared either in the air or on the drab, gray earth. Only the aircraft itself displayed any signs of life. The ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... memory what she had in her excitement forgotten: the adventure she had come out to meet had faded into thin air! The unexpected one which had so startlingly taken its place would end to-night, and she would be left to the dreary existence from which she had ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Consequently a low-priced table or a cheap sofa was a consolation, if not a source of rejoicing, and their happiest hours were spent in counting the cost of parlor carpets never to be purchased, and window curtains of thin air. They even economized sternly in minor matters, and debated the expenditure of an extra shilling as closely as if it had been a matter entailing the deepest anxiety; and on the whole, perhaps, practical persons ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... books. Sometimes he read to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn't had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm and walked her up and down, and he said: 'Isn't it like a ship? The earth is like a ship, and we're ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... she called, beckoning eagerly, as though the kittens might evaporate into thin air if Molly didn't get there at once. Molly forgot what she was going to say, climbed madly up the steep pile of hay, and in a moment was lying flat on her stomach beside the little family in a spasm of delight that satisfied even Betsy and Eleanor, ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... their three cows and two goats to pasture on the mountain slopes. Here through the sunny days the years had passed in a slow, warm thoughtlessness wherein, without thinking, many thoughts had entered into her mind and many pictures hung for a moment like birds in the thin air. At first, and for a long time, she had been happy enough; there were many things in which a child might be interested: the spacious heavens which never wore the same beauty on any day; the innumerable little creatures living among the grasses or ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... the pavements were empty, not a soul was in sight. Two minutes before the place was busy with passers-by, and a newspaper man selling the Corriere, and little carriages rattling through. Now, as if by magic, nobody, nothing. It was as if they had all melted into thin air. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... definite profession or permanent job—one of the innumerable host which flits from post to post, always restive, always trying something new—perhaps a neighborhood garage-keeper in the end. Well, the girl begins with the Caine colossus: he vanishes into thin air. She proceeds to the moving picture actors: they are almost as far beyond her. And then to the man of God, the junior partner, the department manager, the clerk; one and all they are carried off by girls ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... environment, of social convention, of accepted moral and esthetic standards interpose seemingly impassable barriers between us and the savage mind, but at the touch of an all-pervading human sympathy these barriers dissolve into very thin air. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... spear and bow remained upon his back. The Arab, recovered from his first surprise, dashed in with raised sword to annihilate this presumptuous stranger. He aimed a mighty blow at the ape-man's head, a blow which swung harmlessly through thin air as Tarzan ducked from its path, and then the Arab felt the other's horse brushing his leg, a great arm shot out and encircled his waist, and before he could recover himself he was dragged from his saddle, and forming a shield for ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... It seems that on the eve of her death, this Nichoune received a visit from an old man—a beggar—whom I am unable to identify—who has vanished into thin air.... Would you like me to keep you informed? Rue Richer ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... manner he had achieved this feat of faery, and he told her that he would in time instruct her as to the manner of accomplishing it. He then dismissed the spirit attendants and dissipated the castle into thin air, but retained the garden at the request of Vivien, naming ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... assertion by any amount of corroborative detail. I am thoroughly familiar with the facts, and if I were to go on the witness-stand to-morrow for the defendant in this suit, your hopes and schemes would vanish into thin air. Now, I have no great desire to do this; I have still a friendly feeling left for Old Simon, and as for the boy, he is a nice fellow, and I would like to see him prosper. But in my circumstances, as they are at present, ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... live always on the cold heights of the sublime—the thin air stifles'—I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, 'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull interspans between these sacred moments we need ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... demand for tropical timber are contributing to deforestation; soil erosion from overgrazing and poor cultivation methods (including slash-and-burn agriculture); desertification; loss of biodiversity; industrial pollution of water supplies used for drinking and irrigation natural hazards: cold, thin air of high plateau is obstacle to efficient fuel combustion, as well as to physical activity by those unaccustomed to it from birth; flooding in the northeast (March-April) international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... furniture from vanishing into thin air to-morrow morning at the auction mart, eighteen hundred francs! To repay my friends, as much again! Three quarters' rent to the landlord—whom you know.—My ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... The thin air was crystal clear; his gaze penetrated for miles. And far up in the heights, where his own ship could never reach and where no clouds could be, were diaphanous wraiths. Like streamers of cloud in long serpentine forms, they ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... to do things by halves.—Introduce you? Of course I can. But suppose it done, with all pomp and ceremony, what will you get from it? I know Louise. A word or two, if her ladyship is in the mood; if not, you will be so much thin air for her. And after that, a nod if she meets you in the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the crowd beneath—peas, eggs, potatoes, and bags of flour or of sulphur; while those below, wherever they found room to swing an arm, returned the fusillade with interest. The doctor's views of academical serenity and the high converse of pallid students vanished into thin air as he gazed upon the mad tumultuous scene. Yet, in spite of his fifty years, he laughed as heartily as any boy at the wild pranks of the young politicians, and the ruin which was wrought upon broad-cloth coat and shooting jacket by the hail of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... afraid my sudden appearance has put your sister out dreadfully. I assure you I would have made myself into thin air if I could," went on Archie, penitently; "but all the same it was impossible not to applaud the winner. I felt inclined to wave my hat in the air, and cry, 'Bravo, Atalanta!' half a dozen times. You made such pretty running, Miss Challoner; and I wish Grace ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... pressed man was not unnaturally averse from drawing upon such a source of supply as long as any chance of escape remained to him.] wherewith to cover his nakedness or shield him from the cold, and before the Sunday muster came round the garments had vanished—not into thin air, indeed, but in tobacco and rum, for which forbidden luxuries he invariably bartered them with the bumboat women who had the run of the vessel while she remained in harbour. Or allow him on deck to take the air and such exercise as could be got there, and the moment your back was turned he was ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... which entices with reward and threatens with punishment; and yet we are apt to forget that, were fate possessed of the most rudimentary sense of justice, our conception of a lofty, disinterested morality would fade into thin air. What merit in being just ourselves if we be not convinced of the absolute injustice of fate? We no longer believe in the ideals once held by saints, and we are confident that a wise God will hold of as little account the duty ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... mule, threw himself directly in front of the advancing 'rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when, to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed through men and carriage as if they had been thin air. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... grass, the herb yielding seed," etc., "and it was so;" "let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so"—seems even to imply them. Agreeing that they were formed of "the dust of the ground," and of thin air, only leads to the conclusion that the pristine individuals were corporeally constituted like existing individuals, produced through natural agencies. To agree that they were created "after their kinds" determines nothing ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... our own action in the past in regard to treaties and small States. But faint as is this denial of this part of our case, it becomes fainter still, it dissolves into the thinnest of thin air, when it has to deal with our contention that we and our allies are withstanding a power whose aim is nothing less than the domination of Europe. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... In any case, I have not been talking to thin air; nor, indeed to this new friend of ours only. Who knows but I may not have been talking to many people? For perhaps our guest may some day go back to the people he has come from, and may take a message from us which may bear fruit for ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and all is made ready for me. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... was a jangle and tangle and a rough man's voice cut in with, "Working on the wires, hang up, please," and David limply hung up the receiver and collapsed in solitude, for his committees had been evoked out of thin air. ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... into. But I think that your lawyer has the right idea. This is a neat piece of blackmail and your claimant will disappear into thin air if you have a few concrete facts to face him down with. Are you sure you've looked through all the family ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... of an hour—during the last half of which we walked slowly and cautiously through the fast-thickening darkness—there was enough warmth in the air about us to make camping for the night endurable. But we still were at a great elevation, and the thin air was bitingly keen, and all the more so because of the scant meal that we had to comfort us and to put strength into us before we wrapped ourselves in our ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... door and walked out with her across the court-yard. The night was now clear and calm; the stars burned; the trees whispered; the distant ghylls, swollen by the rain, roared loud through the thin air; a bird on the bough of a fir-tree whistled and chirped. The storm was gone; only its wreckage lay ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... I followed the bell-boy up the stairs, keeping between him and Wilhelmina, for I dreaded to see him walk through her as if she were thin air. A trim maid rose to meet us and conducted us through a hallway into a large apartment. She threw open all the bedroom-doors and said, 'Will monsieur ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... so slowly that a small crowd walked after it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made straight for a church steeple, after the common but sacrilegious fashion of all lightning, struck the gilded cross on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately vanished, like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Spaniard of the 15th and 16th centuries. It would be an interesting subject for the anthropologist to trace the construction of that people who are so often spoken of as possessing the pure blood of Castile, and as the facts should be brought to view, another proud fiction would dissipate in thin air, as we should see the Spaniard arising to take his place among the ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... light-headed. At intervals he imagined that it was Ailsa seated behind him, her arms around his waist, her breath cool and fragrant on his neck; and still he knew she was a phantom born of fever, and dared not speak—became sly, pretending he did not know her lest the spell break and she vanish into thin air again. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... give the Norwegian revolution an essential justification before an enlightened public, are unnessary. The terrible breach of agreement, on the part of Sweden, which was trumpeted all over Europe, on closer examination, vanishes into thin air. ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... only a Thing of Beauty, but a Joy for Ever, wrought by elfin fingers, fashioned of gossamer threads at once fine and prehensile. Yet so Gargantuan and Goliardic that the reader holds his breath, lest the whole beatific caboodle should vanish into thin air and leave him lamenting like a Peri shut out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... his face and pulling out his whiskers, eventually making good its retreat into the cupboard, where Miss C. was presumably bound hand and foot. I must confess the fact of that escape rather prejudiced me in favour of Katie, though I would rather she had evaporated into thin air, and left the dialectical whiskers intact. Still it scored a point on Katie's side, and I eagerly availed myself of the opportunity to pay my devoirs at the shrine of Miss C.; the more so as the Professor had asserted twice that he had seen and handled the form of the medium while ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Mr. Gosse, "during these first years was confined to London upon which he would make sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks and melting into thin air again. He was much at my house, and it must be told that my wife and I, as young married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too large for our slender means immediately to furnish. The one person ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... seemed as if all the celebrity she had acquired during all these years, all her fidelity, all her prestige as nurse at the Veyergangs, was to vanish at one stroke into thin air! ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... give their dead to be torn by the vultures. We shudder at cremation, but the sacred fire of the funeral pile as it flames to heaven has something awe-inspiring about it. Man sprung from the dust mingles at last with the purer element of fire, and "vanishes into air, into thin air," leaving no trace behind. But deliberately to throw our dead out to be torn in pieces and devoured by vultures—who can endure the thought! And yet many of the inhabitants here would be most unhappy if denied the consolation of believing that their ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... distinguished it. It was not that—it was the fact that she had neither passed by the house on whose steps he stood, nor come out of any of the adjoining houses. It was as though she had suddenly and miraculously appeared out of thin air, and taken form on a sidewalk a little way down ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... lava streams have flowed for the last two centuries, and feasted my eyes with its rugged grandeur. From Messina I came on here, and had the great good fortune to find Vesuvius in eruption. Before this fact the vision of good Bence Jones forbidding much exertion vanished into thin air, and on Thursday up I went in company with Ray Lankester and my friend Dohrn's father, Dohrn himself being unluckily away. We had a glorious day, and did not descend till late at night. The great crater was not very ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... we?" he stammered through tight-set lips. The balloon, caught in a pocket of thin air, had caused the ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... than at its highest point; it gradually faded, till a faint white glimmering light alone marked where its place had been, and even that disappeared after some half-hour's time. It was so fair and lovely a vision I was grieved when it vanished into thin air, and could have cheated fancy into the belief that it was the robe of some bright visitor from another and a better world;—imagination apart, could it be a phosphoric exhalation from some of our many swamps or inland lakes, or was it at all connected with the aurora that is so frequently ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... coils, and the toothless she-wrestler was Old Age! What wonder that Thor was brought to his knees? On finding himself thus made game of, Thor grew wroth, but had to go his ways, as the city of Utgard had vanished into thin air, with its cloud-capped towers and enormous citizens. Thor afterwards undertook to catch the Midgard Serpent, using a bull's head for bait. The World-Snake took the delicious morsel greedily, and, finding itself hooked, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various |
