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More "Bodiless" Quotes from Famous Books



... (for he could not be sure that it was not the trick of his imagination) that he saw dim, spectre-like, but gigantic forms floating through the mist; or was it not rather the mist itself that formed its vapours fantastically into those moving, impalpable, and bodiless apparitions? A great painter of antiquity is said, in a picture of Hades, to have represented the monsters that glide through the ghostly River of the Dead, so artfully, that the eye perceived at once that the river itself was but a spectre, and the bloodless things ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... like that gleam any more than he understood it, and he did not understand it at all. It went around him—through him—much as though Garry was peering cunningly at a far-off, bodiless something which the other man could not see. And throughout the whole morning Steve was conscious of it whenever they met after skirting a swamp, or slipped noiselessly over a hardwood knoll, to rejoin ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... liberal air, 50 Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd;[121] My soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment[122]—born and dying With the blest tone which ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... and, as it were, to release her mind from the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the dreadful strides she takes! By this odious crew beset,[8] I began to rage and fret, And resolved to break their pates, Ere we enter'd at the gates; Had not Clio in the nick[9] Whisper'd me, "Lay down your stick." What! said I, is this a mad-house? These, she answer'd, are but shadows, Phantoms bodiless and vain, Empty visions of the brain. In the porch Briareus stands,[10] Shows a bribe in all his hands; Briareus the secretary, But we mortals call him Carey.[11] When the rogues their country fleece, They ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... before him, and no man to pick them up. I think the devil would have been afraid to be alone in such a company; but Keola was past fear and courted death. When the fires sprang up, he charged for them like a bull. Bodiless voices called to and fro; unseen hands poured sand upon the flames; and they were gone from the beach before ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... concert was very successful except for Madam Glynn's item. The poor lady sang Killarney in a bodiless gasping voice, with all the old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation which she believed lent elegance to her singing. She looked as if she had been resurrected from an old stage-wardrobe and the cheaper parts of the hall made fun of her high wailing notes. The first tenor ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... a fearful," he answered, "for there shall my Spirit meet them who watch the gates, and who knows what may chance when the bodiless one that yet hath earthly life meets the bodiless ones who ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... not bring every line of discussion to a pin's point," said Bonpre smiling, as he walked slowly across the room still leaning on the Abbe's arm. "We can reduce our very selves to the bodiless condition of a dream if we take sufficient pains first to advance a theory, and then to wear it threadbare. Nothing is so deceptive as human reasoning,—nothing so slippery and reversible as what we have decided to call 'logic.' The truest compass ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... when she was worn out with longing for a closer companionship, she set out to find her adored sun; and as she sighed, 'Shall I find him never?' some one from a grotto near by answered, 'Ever?' 'Who are you?' cried the maid. 'I am a bodiless spirit,' was the answer, 'the voice of one that is gone. I tell impossible things. I am the shadow of the past, the substance of events to come. Man is a mocker.' 'Can you tell me where to find my lover?' asked the maid. Echo told her ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... Celtic legends there may be found a lovely belief that our thoughts are independent realities, that they go about in the void seeking creatures to control. They are as bodiless souls. When they descend into a human being they possess his moods, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... to lift the avenging steel, I did believe all things were shadows—yea, Living or dead all things were bodiless, Or but the mutual mockeries of body, Till that same star summoned me back again. Now I could laugh till my ribs ached. Fool! To let a creed, built in the heart of things, Dissolve before a twinkling atom!—Oswald, I could fetch lessons out of wiser schools ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... a little more or a little less than the truth. We cannot exactly hit the mark; or if we do, we cannot be sure of it. I do not speak of the just judgement of quality; as for that, any critic of any art is in the same predicament; the value of a picture or a statue is as bodiless as that of a book. But there are times when a critic of literature feels that if only there were one single tangible and measurable fact about a book—if it could be weighed like a statue, say, or measured like a picture—it would be a support in a world of shadows. Such an ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... "Majlis"sitting. The postures of coition, ethnologically curious and interesting, are subjects so extensive that they require a volume rather than a note. Full information can be found in the Ananga-ranga, or Stage of the Bodiless One, a treatise in Sanskrit verse vulgarly known as Koka Pandit from the supposed author, a Wazir of the great Rajah Bhoj, or according to others, of the Maharajah of Kanoj. Under the title Lizzat al-Nisa (The Pleasures—or enjoying—of Women) it has been ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... with the burdens of life; but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world; for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats

... of my life, either physically, morally, or spiritually, I hated, detested, despised. The man who finds solace for a wounded heart in self-indulgence may indeed be capable of angelic virtues, but in the mean time his conduct is that of the devils who went into the swine rather than be bodiless. The man who can thus be consoled for the loss of a woman could never have been worthy of her, possibly would not have remained true to her beyond the first delights of possession. The relief to which I could open my door must be such alone as would operate through the enlarging and elevating ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... vague dark mass almost within touching distance. Julia stood on deck and listened while the little Dutch boat crept up; she found something fascinating in this strange, shrouded river, haunted, like a stream of the nether world, with lamentable bodiless voices. The fog had delayed them, of course; the afternoon was now far advanced; they had been compelled to wait some long time while the tide was down, and even now that it was coming up, they could go but slowly. The last through train to Marbridge ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... hollow forms are those! They fill, They crowd the place! I have no longer room here! Mercy! Still more! More still! The hideous swarm, They press on me; they chase me from these walls— Those hollow, bodiless ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... of all the year," Dr. Drew chanted, "when, though stormy the sky and laborious the path to the drudging wayfarer, yet the hovering and bodiless spirit swoops back o'er all the labors and desires of the past twelve months, oh, then it seems to me there sounds behind all our apparent failures the golden chorus of greeting from those passed happily on; and lo! on the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too, was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back, a half-senseless heap, against the barn wall; the blind, mad rage, as much a wildly hysterical ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... roll-call was proceeding. A resounding and mysterious voice called out names, and at each name a man stepped briskly from the crowds and saluted and walked away. But there was no visible person to receive the salute; the voice was bodiless. George became increasingly apprehensive; he feared a disaster, yet he could not believe that it would occur. It did occur. Before it arrived he knew that it was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... whole of the stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical novel proper—that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim—and I suppose no sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it—that even more than in the case ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... fable—pipes in the liberal air, 50 Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd;[121] My soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment[122]—born and dying With the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books—in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn. With the exceptions of Tom, Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight. The Twins are mere bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether. The character of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the murder trial is thrilling in the extreme. Identification by thumb-marks was a new feature ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... pleasure to read once more only the words, Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... book taking the Crowd for my hero—that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... collection of hells quite unique in their varied unpleasantness. Maybe the difference is a question of race rather than of creed; that the vigorous life of the West shrinks from its antithesis, and that its unimaginative common-sense finds a bodiless condition too lacking in solidity of comfort; whereas the more dreamy, mystical East, prone to meditation, and ever seeking to escape from the thraldom of the senses during earthly life, looks on the disembodied state as eminently desirable, and as ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant

... the face of Teata rose like an eerie flower. She had adorned the two long black plaits of her hair with the brilliant phosphorescence of Ear of the Ghost Woman, the strange fungus found on old trees, a favored evening adornment of the island belles. The handsome flowers glowed about her bodiless head like giant butterflies, congruous jewels for such a temptress of such a frolic. The mysterious light added a gleam to her velvet cheek and neck that made her seem like the ghost-woman of old legend, created to lead ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... be," muttered Seguin. "There are no others here. Indians! No! There never were such as them. See! they are not men! Look! their huge horses, their long guns; they are giants! By Heaven!" continued he, after a moment's pause, "they are bodiless! ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... can it be right— This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, Laughingly through the lattice drop— The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully—so fearfully— Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring sould lies hid, That ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think——Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... you, Monsieur Valmont? Thank God, thank God! I thought I was going insane. I saw a hand, a bodiless hand, holding a white sheet ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... wings, our faces yearn Together, as his fullgrown feet now range The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare: Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn Be born his children, when Death's nuptial change Leaves us for light the halo of ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... It is recovery not alone from the war, but from something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black, red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves with the days before we ceased to be ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... he hung. The slow noise of his breathing only intensified the complete silence outside. The well padded suit encompassed him so gently there was no sense of pressure on his body to make up for the weightlessness. Johnny felt as though he were bodiless, a naked brain with ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor

... Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there ... in the centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... rose in the dreams of the dead and that rise in the dreams of the living, Fleeting, bodiless songs that passed in the night, Winging away on the moment of wonder their cadence was giving Into the deeps of the valleys of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... intimate acquaintance with the facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of human character, and of woman's even more than of man's. For the first time the actors in this long tragedy appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names, but as beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, organic, even in their inconsistencies. Catherine of Arragon is still the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley

... for instance, has a loathsome horror that a complete skeleton or conventionally equipped wraith could not achieve. Who can doubt that a bodiless hand leaping around on its errands of evil has a menace that a complete six-foot frame could not duplicate? Yet, in Quiller-Couch's A Pair of Hands, what pathos and beauty in the thought of the child hands ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... and a fearful," he answered, "for there shall my Spirit meet them who watch the gates, and who knows what may chance when the bodiless one that yet hath earthly life meets the bodiless ones who live no ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... part of the concert was very successful except for Madam Glynn's item. The poor lady sang Killarney in a bodiless gasping voice, with all the old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation which she believed lent elegance to her singing. She looked as if she had been resurrected from an old stage-wardrobe and the cheaper parts of the hall ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... been reading The Twilight of the Gods. There was the disintegrating recollection of that book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory of mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which uniformed officials treated the essential institutions of civilization. All this gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... With last words, and last words to say, With bodiless cries from far away— Chiding wailing voices that rang Like a trumpet-call to the tug and fray; ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... Not one of these countenances exactly resembled the other. Each was distinguished by a revolting character of its own. Yet, however deformed might be their other features, the eyes of all were preserved unimpaired. Speechless and bodiless, they floated in unceasing myriads up to the fantastic trellis-work, which seemed to swell its wild proportions to receive them. There they clustered, in their goblin amphitheatre, and fixed and silently they all glared down, without ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... Nothing in Scripture, nothing in reason, commands or authorizes us to assume or suppose any bodiless creature. It is the incommunicable attribute of God. But all bodies are not flesh, nor need we suppose that all bodies are corruptible. 'There are bodies celestial'. In the three following paragraphs of this sermon, we trace wild fantastic positions grounded on the arbitrary ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... reflected herself in that mirror, breathed that air, without somehow detaching invisible fibres of her being, delicate films of herself, that must gradually, she being gone, draw together into a separate individuality an image not quite bodiless, that replaces her in her absence, as the holy Theocrite was replaced by the angel. If there are ghosts of the dead, why not ghosts of the living also?" This lover's fancy so pleased him that he brought to bear upon it the whole force of his imagination, and it grew ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... light was, the first day, Only enduring unrest till the darkness possess it, the last day. Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living: All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness; Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembrance Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit,—the trouble Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created,— And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion, Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness. Naught but the dark in my soul remained to me constant and ...
— Poems • William D. Howells









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