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More "Impossibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... o'clock Dick and I lagged our way unwillingly out to work again—rusty of muscles, with a feeling that the heat would now surely be unendurable and the work impossibly hard. The scythes were oddly heavy and hot to the touch, and the stones seemed hardly to make a sound in the heavy noon air. The cows had sought the shady pasture edges, the birds were still, all the air shook with heat. Only ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... sun from the earth, expressed in radii of the terrestrial orbit, a value differing only in a slight degree from that which was the fruit of so many troublesome and expensive voyages. According to the opinion of very competent judges the result of the indirect method might not impossibly merit the preference.[36] ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... this embarrassing subject dragged out into the light of day. Even men who have been chaste themselves—good fathers of families like the major—cannot be unaware of the complications incidental to frightening their women-folk, and setting up an impossibly high standard in sons-in-law. But Sylvia stood by her guns; at last she brought her father to his knees by the threat that if he could not bring himself to talk with Roger Peyton, she, Sylvia Castleman, would ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... "You did it anyhow. And in the second place you got me out of a villainous bad temper and turned an ugly goblin into a very happy butterfly. I'm downright ashamed of myself for being so horrid about Rose de Vigne. She isn't at all a bad sort though she is so impossibly beautiful. Your brother is going to dance with her now. See! There ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... of their past be silence, or at best the jangle of a broken chord? Would this latter end of Life, for both, be nothing but a joint anticipation of the grave? Gwen tried to sound the plummet of thought in an inconceivable surrounding, to guess at something she herself might think were she impossibly conditioned thus, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... said quickly, 'please don't think me impossibly rude if I turn you out. Some—some people are coming to see me. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... And, after all, she needn't have done any such thing, because the rich uncle, in leaving her all the contents of the mansion, had foolishly forgotten to mention a secret drawer full of Canadian securities. As for the villain, I really hardly dare tell you the impossibly silly way in which he allowed himself to be caught out. But of course all this melodrama is not what matters. The important thing about Miss CONYERS' people is that (whatever their private worries) a-hunting they will go; and Fiona, financed by her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... stream from Wharf Street and the confluent streets flowed on up Paradise Street, and gradually only the maimed and the aged, or the impossibly youthful, were left behind, to hear of the wonders afterwards at secondhand, a secondhand likely to add rather than detract from what actually took place. Even the Colonnade was empty and silent. Shiraz had ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... tie on her arm and briefly explained where she was to play and what she was to do. Unfortunately the girl she was to check was Georgia Fisher for whom Judith had taken an unreasonable dislike; partly because she disliked the way Georgia giggled, and partly because she thought her impossibly stupid. Judith hadn't ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard. He could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. But, ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... assent came from the others, who saw an impossibly difficult situation thus in a way to be solved as far as the two principals in the quarrel were concerned, while to themselves it gave time to adjust their attitude, which they did not all take as simply as had Killigrew. In a fight Doughty's superior size would have given ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the Deacon process cannot be treated in this manner, as chambers of impossibly large dimensions would be required. Originally the absorption of the Deacon chlorine took place in a set of chambers, constructed of large slabs of stone, containing a great many horizontal shelves superposed over one another. About sixteen such chambers were combined ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sudden, and, above all, the cool ignoring of his presence was so disconcerting. Moreover, through that half-sinister light, his long muzzle upstretched towards the moon, and raised as he was a little above the level on which Kane was standing, the wolf looked unnaturally and impossibly tall. Kane had never heard of a wolf acting in this cool, self-possessed, arrogantly confident fashion, and his mind reverted obstinately to the outworn superstitions of his habitants friends. But, after all, it was this wolf, not an ordinary brush-fence wolf, that ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Saturn at 0.51, Mueller at 0.88, a value impossibly high, considering that the spectrum includes no vestige of original emissions. Closely similar to that of Jupiter, it shows the distinctive dark line in the red (wave-length 618), which we may call ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to sound it, in spite of the impression from him of his holding off to see what she would do. She was saying to herself in secret: "CAN we again, in this form, migrate there? Can I, for myself, undertake it? face all the intenser keeping-up and stretching-out, indefinitely, impossibly, that our conditions in the country, as we've established and accepted them, would stand for?" She had positively lost herself in this inward doubt—so much she was subsequently to remember; but remembering then too that her companion, though ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... and purging alone would break down anyone's strength. Everybody knows that you are purged and starved to the edge of death. That's what two years' hard labour means. It's not the labour that's hard. It's the conditions of life that make it impossibly hard: they break you down body and soul. And if you resist, they drive you crazy.... But, please! don't say I said anything; you've promised, you know you have: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... big, absurd mistake thrown in,—thus, by the grace of humor keeping banality from becoming absolutely fatal. Madame Romedek was rather amusing. She tried to be the lady—which, as she doesn't know how, and only succeeds in being impossibly stupid, must have bored the men on each side of her tremendously. That's where foolish women of that sort spoil their own game. If they would make the best of the bargain, and be frankly a common cocotte gone right, they would certainly be more amusing, and might ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... all sound impossibly foolish!" cried the excited, desperate Maggie. "You might tell me so—and discourage me—and I simply must go ahead! I feel rather like—like a juggler who's trying for the first time to keep a lot of new things going in the air all at once. But I think ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... that which shews is verily but show! How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood: But not all height is holiness, Nor every sweetness good; And grace will sometimes lurk where who could guess? The Critic of his kind, Dealing to each his share, With easy humour, hard to bear, May not impossibly have in him shrined, As in a gossamer globe or thickly padded pod, Some small seed dear to God. Haply yon wretch, so famous for his falls, Got them beneath the Devil-defended walls Of some high Virtue he had vow'd ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... much, my dear fellow! But the thing is so impossibly absurd! A man of property like Evgenie to give IOU's to a money-lender, and to be worried about them! It is ridiculous. Besides, he cannot possibly be on such intimate terms with Nastasia Philipovna as she gave us to understand; that's the principal part of the mystery! He has given me his ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... left before nine, and at that hour (an impossibly dissipated one for the brick house) the family retired for the night. As Rebecca carried Mrs. Burch's candle upstairs and found herself thus alone with her for a minute, she said shyly, "Will you please tell ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... bargain with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment that the ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... a moribund conventionnel—might have been tolerable. We have, in the compactest edition I know, about a hundred and fifty. The ruin and desertion of Fantine would have been worth twenty more. We have from fifty to a hundred to tell us the story of four rather impossibly beautiful grisettes, and as many, alas! too possible, but not interesting, rascals of students. It is difficult to say how much is wasted on the wildly improbable transformation of Jean Valjean, convict ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... crystal platform appeared to be about half a square mile, he decided that he would now have sufficient space to spiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long to start, the distance would become impossibly great. ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... I. Supposed to be a copy by Sir Peter Lely from the original, which was painted about 1636, and destroyed in the fire at Whitehall in 1697. Not impossibly, however, the original painting itself, given by the king to the Prince Palatine. In the Dresden Gallery. Size: 4 ft. by 3 ft. 2 in. Cust, pp. 105 ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... affords some show of connection or coherence to the three remaining acts of "The Silver Age": the rape of Proserpine, the mourning and wandering and wrath of Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... unsophisticated and impossibly innocent shopgirl who—in the story—just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young man who heroically "marries the girl"; the adventures of the debonaire actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... younger brother all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Bordman felt the shocked incredulity of a man accustomed to routine when routine is impossibly broken. Of course survey ships made boat landings from orbit, and colony ships let down robot hulls by rocket when there was as yet no landing grid for the handling of a ship. But never before in his experience had an ordinary freighter, ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... back to her desk and papers. The room seemed all at once impossibly stuffy, her papers and letters dry, meaningless things. In the next office, separated from her by a partition half glass, half wood, she saw the top of Slosson's bald head as he stood up to shut his old-fashioned roll-top desk. He was leaving. She looked out of the window. Ella Monahan, in hat ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... present antiquated system, sir,"—Dubberley rather prides himself on preserving the courtly fashions of address of a bygone age,—"an impossibly long time. The average speed of a canal-boat at the present day under the ministrations of that overburdened and inadequate quadruped, the—er—horse, is three miles per ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... with passionate rapture out of a shielded port. There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years. The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Park Street in a hackney carriage, and as I passed St. Xavier's College I found it had started growing rapidly and was fast getting impossibly high within its enveloping haze. Then it was borne in on me that a band of magicians had come to Calcutta who, if they were paid for it, could ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... trapexits, the "foenerator Alpheus," who delighted to reap where he had not sown, and too often (I fear) allowed himself in practices which not impossibly have long since been found to qualify him for distant climates and "Botanic" regions,—even he, though I might truly describe him as a mere highwayman, whenever he happened to be aware that I had received ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... hat, could find no fault with it. Evidently its value was not diminished in his eyes. He was rather gratified that it did not come from some impossibly costly place. This pleased her; it was a good sign. Satisfaction at a moderate indication ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... arrangement, equally distasteful personally to both parties—to leave her with this impression and keep the pair as much as possible apart, until the actual wedding; and then to leave her awakening to Tristram—was his plan. A woman would be impossibly difficult to please, if, in the end, she failed to respond to such a lover as Tristram! He counted upon what he had called her moral antennae to make no mistakes. It would not eventually prejudice matters if the family did find her a little stiff, ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... I do not know what became of the theories about the dramatic art, and the careful and elaborate study necessary for its perfection. In this particular instance John Kemble's Rolla and Mrs. Siddons's Elvira must have been what may be called extemporaneous acting. Not impossibly, however, these performances may have gained in vivid power and effect what they lost in smoothness and finish, from the very nervous strain and excitement of such a mental effort as the actors were thus called ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Hiram's kingdom, could not grow enough for his people's wants. His country was 'nourished' by Palestine, long centuries after this time (Acts xii. 20), and the same was the case in Solomon's period. In verse 11, the quantity of oil is impossibly small as compared with that of wheat. 2 Chronicles reads 'twenty thousand' instead of 'twenty,' and the Septuagint inserts 'thousand' in verse ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he promised. "It isn't a thing, but a duty, a privilege, a responsibility. He shall stay here, where he is. He really won't crowd us too impossibly, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and result in selfishness. It is true that the nations of the Old World have not heretofore erred conspicuously in this respect; and as the "Balance of Power" was the word-juggle with which to conjure up wars and armaments in the eighteenth century, so the "Division of Trade" may not impossibly prove the similar conjuring word-juggle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, "isolation" is not compatible with the policy of a Great Nation under a call to assert itself as a World Power. Then follows the ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... impetuously as if it had been wanted for instant use in the recovery of some person apparently drowned, the single gentleman made Kit's mother swallow a bumper of it at such a high temperature that the tears ran down her face, and then hustled her off to the chaise again, where—not impossibly from the effects of this agreeable sedative—she soon became insensible to his restlessness, and fell fast asleep. Nor were the happy effects of this prescription of a transitory nature, as, notwithstanding that the distance ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe had improvised a method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't have done ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... hands have been at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, said that it was "not so gloomy as the truth"). So first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. "If the truth must be told," he says, "the life of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... erect, Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd She dictate false, and missinforme the Will To do what God expresly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoynes, That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve, Since Reason not impossibly may meet 360 Some specious object by the Foe subornd, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warnd. Seek not temptation then, which to avoide Were better, and most likelie if from mee Thou sever not; Trial will come unsought. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... presents all the appearance of artlessness. No one of an observant turn of mind, who is accustomed to the sight of English maids and matrons, can deny that making-up, as at present practiced, partakes of the amateurish element. Impossible reds and whites grow still more impossibly red and white from week to week under the unskilled hands of the wearer of "false colors," who does not like to ask for advice on so delicate a subject, for, even were she willing to confess to the practice, the imputation of experience ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... science became more strict, it was largely the curious and rare that were thought worthy of chronicling, and not the establishment or illustration of the common, or of general principles. With all his sovereign sound sense, Ambrose Pare has loaded his book with references to impossibly ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, I think it can never once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never called upon his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... fine to say anything, it would make the situation impossibly difficult if she invented an explanation. So she just blinked—and finally, after placing the fresh flowers by Mr. Derringham's bed, she left the room by the ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... at this minute of speaking as he had then, that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... vicious and ephemeral popularity; and any book, however trashy, with his name to it, would have been sure to sell. This "Life in Paris" was very probably the work of some obscure hack, who, when he was describing the "eccentric characters in the French metropolis," may not impossibly have been vegetating in the Rules of the King's Bench Prison. But crafty Mr. Cumberland, to insure the success of his enterprise, secured the services of George Cruikshank as illustrator. George had a brother Robert, who had caught something of his touch and manner, but nothing of his humorous genius, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... inform it and the ends that determine it—to condemn thereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon which is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a mosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossibly impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued together by platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety. It is certainly an obvious but greatly neglected truth that simplicity and candor in public speaking, largeness of mental movement, what Phillips Brooks called direct ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a powerful characteristic of the sailors engaged in landing stores on the coast. A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the stores were safely landed. As there was a "U" boat in the offing most of the time, however, the humour of the situation did not ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... for a nest in which to hide his Christine and create romance; and he had come to this very flat. More, there had been two flats to let in the block. He had declined them—the better one because of the furniture, the worse because it was impossibly small, and both because of the propinquity of the garage. But supposing that he had taken one and Concepcion the other! He recoiled at ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... against any one who sympathized with the condition of the agricultural laborer; quite the contrary. Becket was almost, as Felix knew—though perhaps it wasn't for her to say so—the centre of that movement; but there were ways of doing things, and one did so deprecate women like this Kirsteen—what an impossibly Celtic name!—putting her finger into any pie that really was of national importance. Nothing could come of anything done that sort of way. If Felix had any influence with Tod it would be a mercy to use it in getting those poor young creatures away from home, to mix a little with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that shines in a distance fair, Like a fairy dream, impossibly sweet,— Was life what it seem'd when we liv'd out there? Or was it only ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... that he thinks too much of himself, too little of his cause: but he is absorbed in the pursuit of truth as an abstract inquiry, he is led away by the headstrong and over-mastering activity of his own mind. He is borne along, almost involuntarily, and not impossibly against his better judgment, by the throng and restlessness of his ideas as by a crowd of people in motion. His perceptions are literal, tenacious, epileptic—his understanding voracious of facts, and equally communicative of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... people are used to breathing an atmosphere surcharged with oxygen and twice as dense as that of the earth. It doesn't trouble our breathing, simply giving us more energy; but we can live where they would gasp for breath. Air impossibly rare for them is all right for us, and that's what I am in search of, and we shall find it if we ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... force it step by step on its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few flowers—they shall not be peonies, I promise you—on the roadside. And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now, you needn't be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to the ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... when conviction of his bad life took fast hold of his conscience, he trembled, and was astonished. (Acts 9:6) And although we read not of any particular circumstance of his behaviour under his conviction outwardly, yet it is almost impossibly but he must have some, and those of the most solid sort. For there is such a sympathy betwixt the soul and the body, that the one cannot be in distress or comfort, but the other must partake of, and also signify the same. If it be comfort, then 'tis shewn; If comfort of mind, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Burgoyne never apologized for the old walnut chairs and tables, and the old velvet carpets, and the hopelessly old-fashioned white lace curtains and gilt-framed mirrors. Even Captain Holly's big clock—"an impossibly hideous thing," Mrs. White called the frantic bronze horses and the clinging tiger, on their onyx hillside—was serenely ticking, and the pink china vases were filled with flowers. And there was an air of such homely comfort, after all, about the big rooms, such a fragrance of flowers, and flood ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... once so exquisite and so surprising. It is like a child's dream of heaven and judgment, so untouched is it by the conventions of the world, so innocent, so daring, so tenderly imagined, and so impossibly probable. Alas, that most of us are too wise to understand it, and too worldly to receive it. Yet in nothing that Jesus uttered is there clearer evidence of deliberation. And it is of a piece with all He taught; so much so indeed that without it, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... had been consumed, and a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder—"Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... where fountains played, and the Queen's Guard in white and scarlet, and armour that shone like gold, stood by twos lining the way up the stairs; and a great body of them was massed by the vast door of the palace itself, where it stood glittering like an impossibly radiant peacock in ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... batteries were practically intact, nor had men enough been disabled to prevent any gun in the fleet from being fought. Could but a single working day be gained in taking up an anchorage, a defensive order could be assumed, practically impregnable to the enemy, covering Cornwallis, and not impossibly intercepting the French ships left in the Bay. In the case of many men such comment might be dismissed as the idle talk of the captious fault-finder, always to the fore in life; but in the case of Hood it must be received with deference, ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... why the Germans could expect that a sudden and terrific blow would permit them to get to Verdun, take the forts on the east bank, and possibly cut clear through the French lines and break them into two parts. Not impossibly this would mean retirement as far as the old Marne battle field: certainly it would mean the extinction of French hope. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... began. Then he grinned weakly and stopped. On the golf course, Stanton was impossibly good. One long drive to the green, one putt to the cup. An easy thirty-six strokes for eighteen holes; an occasional hole-in-one sometimes brought him below that, an occasional worm-cast or stray wind sometimes raised ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... decorating its externals. The pomp and pageantry of the drama are Egyptian and ancient; the play's natural and artificial environment is Egyptian and ancient; two bits of its music are Oriental, possibly Egyptian, and not impossibly ancient. But in everything else "Aida" is an Italian opera. The story plays in ancient Egypt, and its inventor was an archaeologist deeply versed in Egyptian antiquities, but I have yet to hear that Mariette ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... seemed too impossibly good to be true. Diana felt as if she were in the middle of a beautiful dream from which she might at any moment waken to the disappointing reality of things. Hardly able to believe the evidence of her senses, she ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... no, and not impossibly yes," replied Freydis. "For by the ancient Tuyla mystery they extract that which is best in them to inform their images, and this is apt to leave them empty of virtue. But I would have you consider that their best endures, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... his horse, again the stern ride together; saw again the Dark Tower, and all the love and sweet pleasure that they made. The bride in the church turning her proud shy head, the bride in his arm, clinging as they flew, the bride in the tower, the crowned Countess, the nestling mate—oh, impossibly lost! Inconceivably put away! ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... of the two years that I have been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in the house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, but exaggerate it, for it is so much more comfortable to have people ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the Assyrian, searching by order of the captain—as Lanyard ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... note the relation between the task and synthesis. When it becomes generally understood that the "Task," under Scientific Management is neither an ideal which exists simply in the imagination, nor an impossibly high estimate of what can be expected,—but is actually the sum of observed and timed operations, plus a definite and sufficient percentage of allowance for overcoming the fatigue,—then much ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn't find her a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... left it four centuries ago. Massive and arrogant, it loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... course of training extending for over a month or more prior to the actual event. It should be your aim to work yourself into such a condition that you can go for three nights without sleep, talk for hours to the most impossibly stupid of young women, and consume an unending amount of alcohol. You are then prepared for the bachelor dinner, the bridal dinner, the bridesmaids, the ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... is Chellalu. We never made any mistake about her. We never thought her good. Not that she is impossibly bad. She was created for play and for laughter, and very happy babies are not often very wicked; but she is so irrepressible, so hopelessly given up to fun, that her kindergarten teacher, Rukma, smiles a rueful smile at the mention of her name. For ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... are almost no heroines in novels. There are impossibly good women, absurdly patient and brave women, but few heroines as the convention of worldly thinking demands heroines. There is an endless train of what Thackeray so aptly described as "pale, pious, and pulmonary ladies" who snivel and snuffle and sigh and linger irresolutely under many trials which ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... even indicated, stripped off his belt with unearthly agility—Monsieur Auguste gave his, which we tongue-holed to The Zulu's—somebody else contributed a necktie—another a shoe-string—The Young Pole his scarf, of which he was impossibly proud—etc. The extraordinary rope so constructed was now tried out in The Enormous Room, and found to be about thirty-eight feet long; or in other words of ample length, considering that the window ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up suddenly; look at the sea,—and cry out! This sea is impossibly blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down, turn sky-blue,—a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... was on the point of putting himself forward as a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... only be a matter of months, maybe only weeks or days before the change would happen, and the world would be quietly, silently taken over by the other people, the different people who could walk through walls and think in impossibly complex channels. And no one would know the difference, because business would go on ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... rapacity of his dealings. When the moneylender lived in the village he had an interest in the solvency of the tenants who constituted his clientele and was also amenable to public opinion, even though not of his own caste. For it would clearly be an impossibly unpleasant position for him to meet no one but bitter enemies whenever he set foot outside his house, and to go to bed in nightly fear of being dacoited and murdered by a combination of his next-door neighbours. He therefore probably adopted the motto ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... and burned afterward. But who would reject a block and tackle in favor of an impossibly strong man? No, with the tackle in sight, the recollection of a man lifting that overturned automobile like a weight lifter pressing up a bar bell would be buried in any mind as a rank hallucination. Then one more item came driving home hard. So hard ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... affords the best suggestion of the large and primitive salamanders of the Coal-forest, while the Caecilia—snake-like Amphibia with scaly skins, which live underground in South America—may not impossibly be degenerate survivors of the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... as though to leap, then settled back. Plainly it longed to spring. Equally plainly it was afraid of the being that so impossibly was revealed to its nostrils but not to its eyes. Meanwhile, one tearing sweep of blunt claws or sharp fangs—and a fatal rent would appear in Thorn's ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... everywhere, in every detail. Even the woman's melancholy voice, still to be heard behind the paper partition, was evidently the proper way for them to sing—these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes among impossibly large flowers. Long before I arrived there, I had perfectly pictured Japan to myself. Nevertheless, in the reality it almost seems to be smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no doubt by reason of that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... impossibly disgusting and truculent. 'He found his fellow-servant, who owed him a hundred pence'—some three pounds, ten shillings—and with the hands that a minute before had been wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him; and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... way was four or five miles long, allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they ran headlong. It was clear that the knowledge ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... world, with a keen faculty of observation, which he has had many opportunities of exercising, and never varying from a code of honor and principle which is really nice and rigid in its way. There is a sort of philosophy developing itself in him which will not impossibly cause him to settle down in this or some other equally singular course of life. He seems almost to have made up his mind never to be married, which I wonder at; for he has strong affections, and is fond both of women ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... naturalness. The author of "The School for Scandal" creates for his comedies an atmosphere of superheated wit and intellectualism, which, whilst inevitably pleasing, is beyond probability. Certain novelists vaunt and revel in the creation of impossibly vivacious wits. Nature has a finer grace; its faithful reflection is purer art. Those true to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... them; the man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it. The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse, like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... very young and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... on a level with the eye of the passing pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his skill in mechanical dentistry, and afforded instruction and amusement to the boys of the neighbourhood, who criticised the glistening white teeth and impossibly red gums, displayed behind the plate-glass, with a like vigour and freedom of language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession confine itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case. A shabby-genteel young man ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm. Whichever it was, the disaster happened so fast that practically no warning at all was given. ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, mercifully unaware ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... considered himself now pledged to grant a large measure of Reform; but the Duke found the task impracticable, and then, as the only means of averting farther insurrectionary tumults, which bore no slight resemblance to civil war, and might not impossibly end in it, the King did at last consent to permit the creation of a sufficient number of peers to insure the passing of the bill. But he could not overcome his repugnance to the measure as a severe ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... light of day. Even men who have been chaste themselves—good fathers of families like the major—cannot be unaware of the complications incidental to frightening their women-folk, and setting up an impossibly high standard in sons-in-law. But Sylvia stood by her guns; at last she brought her father to his knees by the threat that if he could not bring himself to talk with Roger Peyton, she, Sylvia Castleman, would ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... Japan affords the best suggestion of the large and primitive salamanders of the Coal-forest, while the Caecilia—snake-like Amphibia with scaly skins, which live underground in South America—may not impossibly be degenerate survivors of the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the middle of the group—a little figure with an impossibly short and shabby ulster, thin black-stockinged legs, and a big hat crushed over a tangle ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... to be heard behind the paper partition, was so evidently the way they should sing, these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes in the midst of impossibly large flowers. Long before I came to it, I had perfectly pictured this Japan to myself. Nevertheless in the reality it almost seems to be smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no doubt by reason of that great ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Luke get his information of Peter's thoughts in that hour? This verse sounds like first-hand knowledge. Not impossibly John Mark may have been his informant, for we know that both were in Rome together at a later period. In any case, it is clear that, through whatever channels this piece of minute knowledge reached Luke, it must have come originally from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the love and sweet pleasure that they made. The bride in the church turning her proud shy head, the bride in his arm, clinging as they flew, the bride in the tower, the crowned Countess, the nestling mate—oh, impossibly lost! Inconceivably put away! Eternally his ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... across the amphitheatre at the distant Great Smoky Mountains shimmering in the hazy September sunlight—so ineffably beautiful, so delicately blue, that they might have seemed the ideal scenery of some impossibly lovely ideal world. Perhaps she was wondering what the unconscious Becky Stiles, far away in those dark woods about Pine Lick, had secured in this life besides her freckled face. Was this the sylvan deity of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the way, was a powerful characteristic of the sailors engaged in landing stores on the coast. A supply-ship, finding the sea at the Wadi Sukerier too high to permit of stores being landed, went on to Jaffa, found the breakers impossibly high there and returned to Sukerier. This amusing pastime went on for three days, when the waters abated somewhat and the stores were safely landed. As there was a "U" boat in the offing most of the time, however, the humour of the ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... honest-hearted fellow. His loud swagger, his frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... bonfires, and College rows. I want to live here, and walk on the Downs and write my book. I don't want to be stuffy, as Jack said. But it will be all right, when I have taken the plunge; and after I have been back a week, this will all fade into a sort of impossibly pleasant dream." ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... though the advice might be mistaken, it was absolutely impossible that it could be anything else but honest and sincere. It was not for them to see into the future, nor yet to solve those impossibly intricate problems of human passion, of human strength and weakness, which, in defiance of all laws human and divine, break through the traditions of ages, make a mockery of all commonplace laws, and finally solve themselves with an accuracy as ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Threadbare? By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny—the cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really preferred the cottage piano to the grand. The two carpets were both resigned, grim ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held a revolver and waited. The ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Lensman's query was skepticism incarnate. "It can't be done, except by an almost impossibly fortuitous accident. You yourself have been the most bitterly opposed of us ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... task, but the return journey was disastrous. Short rations soon began to tell, for they had taken longer than they had calculated, and no food was to be found by the way. Gray was the first to fail and to die. Heavy rains made the ground impossibly heavy, and the camels sank to the ground exhausted. Finally they had to be killed and eaten. Then the horses went. At long last the three weary men and two utterly worn-out camels dragged themselves to Cooper's Creek, hoping to find their companions ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... with perhaps just one good, big, absurd mistake thrown in,—thus, by the grace of humor keeping banality from becoming absolutely fatal. Madame Romedek was rather amusing. She tried to be the lady—which, as she doesn't know how, and only succeeds in being impossibly stupid, must have bored the men on each side of her tremendously. That's where foolish women of that sort spoil their own game. If they would make the best of the bargain, and be frankly a common cocotte gone right, they would certainly be more amusing, and ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... and stars as a great dream uses them when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. It is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a star WITHIN the ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... the levels of intellectual development. One might question what common grounds for social intercourse there would be between an American farmer's wife with either grammar-school or high-school education and some European peasant's wife, illiterate, impossibly shy, and downtrodden. ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... ago. Massive and arrogant, it loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... order this dinner," said he, handing over to Thorpe the card which an impossibly correct waiter presented him. "And I want it a good one. I want you to begin at the beginning and skip nothing. Pretend you are ordering just the dinner you would like to offer your sister," he suggested on a sudden inspiration. "I assure you I'll try to be just as critical ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard. He could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. But, unfortunately, he was only a ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few flowers—they shall not be peonies, I promise you—on the roadside. And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now, you needn't be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... heard me. "They're most of them more in want of money even than we. Therefore 'greatness' is out of the question—we really recognised that at an early stage. Your nephew's exactly the sort of young man we've always built upon—if he wasn't, so impossibly, your nephew. From head to foot he was made on purpose. Dear Linda was her mother's own daughter when she recognised him on the spot! One's enough of a prince to-day when one's the right American: such a wonderful price is set on one's not being the wrong! It does as well as anything ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... place several hours before Mrs. Drabdump's first attempt to wake deceased. Of course, it may have taken place between the first and second calls, as he may merely have been sound asleep at first; it may also not impossibly have taken place considerably earlier than the first call, for all the physical data seem to prove. Nevertheless, on the whole, I think we shall be least likely to err if we assume the time of death to be half-past six. Gentlemen, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Girondist party, in the conviction that his singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of the multitude might not impossibly rally. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... verses and travel sketches, a man exulting in primitiveness, in wildness, in beauty of woman and child, in beauty of landscape; but exulting, more than in all else, in his own moods aroused by these things that he loved. Even here, however, he is at times almost impossibly impersonal, so that you feel in a certain description that there is no man between you and the thing described, but that, to adapt a phrase of Thoreau, it is the hills and the sea and the atmosphere writing. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... is always close to the same temperature; when baking I soon learn to adjust the oven temperature and baking time to produce the kind of crust and doneness I desire. Precisionist, yes. I must bake every batch identically if I want the breads to be uniformly good. But not impossibly rigorous because once I learn my materials and oven, I've got it ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... yet complete. England is now apparently expected by many Moslems to separate herself from the Concert of Europe, and not impossibly to imperil the peace of the world, in order that the Turks should continue in occupation of Adrianople. The secretary of the Punjab Moslem League has informed us through the medium of the press that unless ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Gubbio, shown in our museums. So far as house-furnishing went, aside from palaces, there was but little that was appropriate for intimate domestic life. The early Renaissance furniture was palatial, architectural in outline and, one might almost say, in proportions. The tables were impossibly high, the chairs were stiff, and the cabinets immense and formal in outline. It had, however, much stately beauty, and very lovely are certain old pieces of carved and gilded wood where the gilt, put on over a red preparation and highly burnished, ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... prickly frontier, and the secret of combining them lay just beyond his reach. For his London mind, guided by reason, acted in a logical plane of two dimensions, while imagination, captained by childhood's fairy longings, cantered loose in all directions at once—impossibly. The first was the world; the second was the universe. As yet, he was unable to co-ordinate them. Minks, he was certain, could—and did, sailing therefore upon an even keel. There was this big harmony in ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... see how," rejoined Ross gloomily. "We cannot give an alarm. If we could control the valves for half a minute, I'd sink this blessed craft with all on board, myself included, for good and all. But it is no use talking of the impossibly heroic." ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... ourselves, each and all of us, mightily in love with art and with the human scene? And hadn't we, listening thus breathlessly to our amazing master, the enchanting assurance that we were on the track of a masterpiece? Not impossibly a whole gallery of masterpieces, since Heber Pogson had barely touched middle age as yet. For him there still was time. Fiction, we gathered to be the selected medium. He not only meant to write, but was actually now engaged in writing, a novel during those withdrawn ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... the framework from its place in the right-hand wall. It was clamped, I observed, by an arrangement in the floor just in front of the door. If I could get rid of that catch it would be easy to free myself, for to a man of my strength the weight would not be impossibly heavy. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of Goldsmith's dialogue lies in entire naturalness. The author of "The School for Scandal" creates for his comedies an atmosphere of superheated wit and intellectualism, which, whilst inevitably pleasing, is beyond probability. Certain novelists vaunt and revel in the creation of impossibly vivacious wits. Nature has a finer grace; its faithful reflection is purer art. Those true to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... surprised, She dictate false; and mis-inform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love, enjoins, That I should mind thee oft; and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve; Since Reason not impossibly may meet Some specious object by the foe suborned, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned. Seek not temptation then, which to avoid Were better, and most likely if from me Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought. ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder—"Four and Twenty ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... rapture out of a shielded port. There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years. The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward the rampart of mighty mountains towering over Lunar ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... connected with Tarascon—a bridge across the Rhone unites them—and that this latter name nearly resembles Tarragona, a place which in other French romances is actually called Terrascoigne. The shipwreck which in the story takes place, impossibly, at Beaucaire, may have originally happened, quite naturally, at Tarragona. Even the nonsense- name, Torelore, might easily have had its rise in Torello. Again, though it has been shown that all modern reports of the Couvade as existing in Biscay have been founded only on the ancient assertion ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... as well as of public life generally, could not but have been fascinating, by comparison with the stagnant society of Stratford. Hospitalities on a liberal scale would be offered to these men. Not impossibly this fact might be one principal key to those dilapidations which the family estate had suffered. These actors, on their part, would retain a grateful sense of the kindness they had received, and would seek to repay it to John Shakspeare, now that he was depressed in his fortunes, as opportunities ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... out before him, the past lives of a multitude of men, could not easily decide which past he himself would wish to have lived were he not able at the same time to witness the moral results of these dissimilar and unsymmetrical facts. He might not impossibly make a fatal blunder; he might choose an existence overflowing with incomparable happiness and victory, that sparkle like wonderful jewels; while his glance might travel indifferently over a life that appeared ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... an impossibly long ellipse now, surrounded by a vast array of smaller bodies, fragments and contents of the ship. Now the stricken globe moved completely free of its companion. It rotated, presenting a crescent toward us, then wheeled farther as ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... almost no heroines in novels. There are impossibly good women, absurdly patient and brave women, but few heroines as the convention of worldly thinking demands heroines. There is an endless train of what Thackeray so aptly described as "pale, pious, and pulmonary ladies" who snivel and snuffle and sigh and linger irresolutely under many trials ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... other times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night, hadn't it?—when Paula had given that recital of Anthony ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... because of this he resolutely throttled the recurring desires. She was right. He had scorned what she had termed as woman's instinct. She had read him with a degree of accuracy. In the eyes of God he was a good man, a dependable man; but he was not impossibly good. He was human enough to want her, human enough to appreciate the danger in which she stood of him. He was determined not to fail her. When she went back to her own world she would carry an unsullied memory of him. But, before God, he ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... life was a spiritual mystery, veiled from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... around the waist of the conventional female of such sensational journals, while in front, lying prone upon the ground, were half a dozen Indians, evidently slain by the singular hero in defending the impossibly attired female. The legend related how all this had been effected by the famous Kit Carson. I purchased the paper, returned with it to my room, and after showing it to several officers who had called upon Maxwell, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... accuracy. The Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe had improvised a method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't have done the job without ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... was about to begin. The page was one easily recognizable, for it was one upon whose margin he himself had drawn, in a moment of intense irritation with the argument advanced thereon, a rough outline of a donkey's head with impossibly long ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... character. "Well, I've done my best," she thought impatiently. "If he doesn't want to be friends he needn't be." Then, with a change of manner, she observed flippantly: "Sometimes one's relatives are useful and sometimes they're not." Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... profession, while a neat little glass-case, on a level with the eye of the passing pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his skill in mechanical dentistry, and afforded instruction and amusement to the boys of the neighbourhood, who criticised the glistening white teeth and impossibly red gums, displayed behind the plate-glass, with a like vigour and freedom of language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession confine itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case. A shabby-genteel ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... its title and part of its idea to Lucian, and sub-titled Les Princes Fortunes, is less conventional. It has a large fancy map for a frontispiece; there are fairies in it, and a sort of pot-pourri of queernesses which might not impossibly have come from the author or editor of the Moyen in his less inconveniently ultra-Pantagruelist moments. Le Cabinet de Minerve is actually a glorification of "honest" love. In fact, Beroalde is one of the oddest of "polygraphers," and there is nobody quite like him in English, though ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... him again, rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... indicated heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived. It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or it had again the freshness of the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they were sharing; let them do their best to make the result a happy one for themselves, and for the people among whom they had come. They were "making history," for this experience was a wholly new one, which might not impossibly prove helpful some day to others in ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... their past be silence, or at best the jangle of a broken chord? Would this latter end of Life, for both, be nothing but a joint anticipation of the grave? Gwen tried to sound the plummet of thought in an inconceivable surrounding, to guess at something she herself might think were she impossibly conditioned thus, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... garden-seat, Darnell, who occupied a wicker-chair brought out from the drawing-room, could not help feeling that this shadowy and evasive figure, muttering replies to Mary's polite questions, was almost impossibly remote from his conceptions of the rich and powerful aunt, who could give away a hundred pounds as a mere birthday gift. She would say little at first; yes, she was feeling rather tired, it had been so hot all the way, and she had been afraid to put ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... with a blue sky at sea—my word it is blue, impossibly blue, and the sun is beaming! We have had a quiet night, so everyone is very contented. On our left the Spanish coast is very mountainous, and little cloudlets are throwing shadows over the mountain sides. G. and I study our Spanish grammar; but perhaps "study" is hardly ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... tenant. That was a part of his bargain with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment that the job-holder ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... earth, expressed in radii of the terrestrial orbit, a value differing only in a slight degree from that which was the fruit of so many troublesome and expensive voyages. According to the opinion of very competent judges the result of the indirect method might not impossibly merit the preference.[36] ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... children were dumfounded by this extraordinary, impossibly monstrous thing—a boy who had not a papa; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt rising in them the hitherto inexplicable pity of their mothers for La Blanchotte. As for Simon, he had propped himself ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... whom he knew and most of whom came back regularly every year, as to the social or moral status of any new arrivals, then those arrivals must go. Miss Heap evidently had doubts. Her standard, it is true, was the almost impossibly high one of the unmarried lady of riper years, but Mrs. Ridding, he understood, had doubts too; and once doubts started in an hotel he knew from experience that they ran through it like measles. The time had come for him ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated with the mud, their eyes had been clear and steady and cheerful, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... and couldn't see. Some women like to make other women unhappy, but I think it is best for you to keep them blissfully unconscious until you get what you want. Anyway, I like that girl all over and I can't see that her neck is so absolutely impossibly flowery. However, I think she might have been a little more considerate about discussing Alfred's London triumph over the Italian mission. As a punishment I let Tom put his arm around my waist as we stood watching them drive off and then was sorry for the left gray horse that shied and came in ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it. The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse, like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression and license, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... come within reach again, but he only went up the roof to the ridgepole and looked down the other side and said "meow." I was in despair, when it occurred to me to get the step- ladder. You may think me impossibly silly, but I never supposed that he ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... will find that reason where no one but himself would have thought of looking for it. He does not seem to care for a reason that is not picturesquely located; one might almost say picturesquely and impossibly located. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined, and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and in vitality. Taken solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy of a great college can bring into close relationship the most impossibly divergent natures. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... that the character in fiction can to this same extent be more artificial. It is a test of the self-control and artistic restraint of the novelist if he can refrain from diving too deep into the unknown and arrogating to himself an impossibly full knowledge of the mental processes of other people. And now notice how Addison gives us just such revelations of the old Knight's character as the observant spectator would gather from friendly intercourse ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... antiquated system, sir,"—Dubberley rather prides himself on preserving the courtly fashions of address of a bygone age,—"an impossibly long time. The average speed of a canal-boat at the present day under the ministrations of that overburdened and inadequate quadruped, the—er—horse, is three miles ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... changes, the result of their co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short, although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations, when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... been wanted for instant use in the recovery of some person apparently drowned, the single gentleman made Kit's mother swallow a bumper of it at such a high temperature that the tears ran down her face, and then hustled her off to the chaise again, where—not impossibly from the effects of this agreeable sedative—she soon became insensible to his restlessness, and fell fast asleep. Nor were the happy effects of this prescription of a transitory nature, as, notwithstanding that the distance ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... quickly, 'please don't think me impossibly rude if I turn you out. Some—some people are coming to see ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... many elder brethren—sisters there were none—had run wild, and ended by running it so far afield that the narrow, whitewashed house, lonesome and bleak, saw them no more. Its mistress also died, failing, perhaps, other means of exit—running wild being in her case impracticable—and finding life impossibly dreary without Ned, the least-good-for of her sons; and the household was thus reduced to old Michael Rafferty, and his aunt, and little Ody. These domestic changes, in conjunction with other untoward chances, sadly hindered farming operations, and nature made ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Deacon process cannot be treated in this manner, as chambers of impossibly large dimensions would be required. Originally the absorption of the Deacon chlorine took place in a set of chambers, constructed of large slabs of stone, containing a great many horizontal shelves superposed over one another. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... every reason why the Germans could expect that a sudden and terrific blow would permit them to get to Verdun, take the forts on the east bank, and possibly cut clear through the French lines and break them into two parts. Not impossibly this would mean retirement as far as the old Marne battle field: certainly it would mean the extinction of French hope. So ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... conviction. Every day of the two years that I have been scattering myself about Europe I have wished myself at home in the house where I was born, and have wandered through the rooms in my dreams; yet now that I am here, I find that I was mixing the past impossibly with the present, in a way common to those over fifty. Yes, you see I no longer pretend, wear unsuitable headgear, and blink obliviously at my age as I did in those trying later forties. I not only face it squarely, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... and abrupt change. Impossibly strange! I walked toward one of the trees, stopped at a reddish boulder to examine it. And surprise caught at my throat. It was an artifact—a crumbling ruin, the remnant of an ancient structure whose original appearance I could not fathom. The stone ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... handicap ..." the therapist began. Then he grinned weakly and stopped. On the golf course, Stanton was impossibly good. It had taken him a little while to get the knack of it, but as soon as he got control of his club and knew the reactions of the ball, his score started plummeting. Now it was so low as to be almost ridiculous. One long drive to ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... weak place, show me that something was abrupt or lengthy, expose an unreal emotion, or, best of all, generously and whole-heartedly approve. It seems now, looking back upon it, that it was all impossibly happy and delightful, too good to be true. Yet I have everything that I had, except my unhappy writing; and the want of it poisons life. I no longer seem to lie pleasantly in ambush for pretty traits of character, humorous situations, delicate ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Aurelia! Impossibly fair, inexpressibly tender and wise, with that untaught wisdom of the child; daughter of pure religion, as I saw thee at first and can see thee still, can that my first vision of thee ever be effaced? Nay, but it is scored too deeply in my heart, is too surely ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... for a minute, overcome, while a procession of ideas crowded after each other through the flaxen head. It was her birthday; grandpa couldn't get the boat under the tablecloth. This beautiful dog—this impossibly beautiful dog, was a surprise present. He was for her, to love and to play with; to see his tricks every day, to teach him to know her and to run to her when she called. If she was given the choice of the Whole world on this sweet birthday ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... felt a pardonable pride. What feats could she relate of wonderful dresses got out of impossibly small patterns of silk! what marvels of silks turned that could not be told from new! what reclaimings of waists that other dress-makers had hopelessly spoiled! Had not Mrs. General Wilcox once been obliged to call in her aid on a dress sent to her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Felicia could have shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please her exacting employer, yet Felicia, ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... exhibited it in a private gallery, where "each day an eager crowd freely paid an entrance-fee of half-a-guinea." How, when he could achieve that kind of luck, could he be expected to take more than a languid interest in a tale where the most impossible people behave most impossibly; where, for example, a missing peer posts a letter to his wife at the back of a picture-frame for no earthly reason; where the villain, younger brother of the long-lost, comes into the heroine's ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... felt interested in what he said about the woman who had been the centre of so remarkable a society and his intimate friend for so many years. Having all her life appeared to suffer the most unusual terror, not of death only, but of any accident that could possibly, or impossibly, befall her, he said that she had died with perfect composure, and, though consciously within the very shadow of death for three whole days before she crossed the dark threshold, she expressed neither fear nor anxiety, and exhibited ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... are good 'uns—both to look at and to go. I roared out this morning, as soon as I was awake, "Next month," which we have been longing to be able to say ever since we have been here. I really do not know how we shall ever knock at the door, when that slowest of all impossibly slow hackney-coaches shall pull ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... yellow, sits in front of his easel. How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich, long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy, moon-lit "parterres," those living roses—Beardsley has planted them since in another "enchanted garden"—and those "eyes," that grow so luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved" by them—these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen" that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things none can take from him. The maniacal egoism ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... have only /S/a@nkara's bhashya before us, we are naturally inclined to find in the Sutras—which, taken by themselves, are for the greater part unintelligible—the meaning which /S/a@nkara ascribes to them; while a reference to other bhashyas may not impossibly change our views at once.—Meanwhile, we will consider the question as to the unbroken uniformity of Vedantic tradition from another point or view, viz. by enquiring whether or not the Sutras themselves, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... too impossibly difficult to track down and recapture an escaped criminal ... there's a worse thing one ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... once; the big red lights flashed once; the sirens barely started to growl, then quit. The whole vast fabric of the ship trembled and shuddered and shook as though it were being mauled by a thousand impossibly gigantic hammers. Deston did not know and never did find out whether it was his captain or an automatic that touched off the alarm. Whichever it was, the disaster happened so fast that practically no warning at all was given. And out ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... possession: it has had extraordinary influence on English literature, from the work of Byron, which it directly produced, and which pretty certainly would never have been produced without it, to that of Mr. William Morris, which may not impossibly have been its last echo—transformed and refreshed, but still an echo—for some time to come. But there was a little of the falsetto in it, and the interludes, of which the introductions to Marmion and to the Bridal are the most considerable, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... indicated, stripped off his belt with unearthly agility—Monsieur Auguste gave his, which we tongue-holed to The Zulu's—somebody else contributed a necktie—another a shoe-string—The Young Pole his scarf, of which he was impossibly proud—etc. The extraordinary rope so constructed was now tried out in The Enormous Room, and found to be about thirty-eight feet long; or in other words of ample length, considering that the window itself was only ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... dimly intelligible to any continental experience, rapidly cooled down in their pious enthusiasm against monastic delinquencies. Hatred, at any rate, and malignant anger the visitor had to face, not impossibly some risk of assassination, in prosecuting his inquiries into the secret crimes of monks that were often confederated in a common interest of resistance to all honest or searching inquiry. But, if to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... of the rich. She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the lectures at the institutions—at least at some of them—were directly addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none. This reason, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... his mother again, and presently afterwards of the news of war. But with him by her side Sylvia found her courage come back to her; the news itself, all that it certainly implied, and all the horror that it held, no longer filled her with the sense that it was impossibly terrible. Michael did not diminish the awfulness of it, but he gave her the power of looking out bravely at it. Nor did he shrink from speaking of all that had been to ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... blanket, smoked moodily. His thoughts drifted out on the tide of silence to Moonstone Canon and Collie and the Rose Girl, Louise Lacharme. For them he planned impossibly. Of them ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with her look as they silently left the room. She knew not how to enter upon what she had to say. To talk of the law and use threats in this atmosphere of serene domesticity seemed impossibly harsh. But the necessity of broaching the disagreeable ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... him, he longed to clasp her to his breast and give her everything she impossibly craved. And now it was he who sighed, and then clinched his hands as if ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Smellie was tall, thin, and flat. Most exceedingly and incredibly flat. Impossibly flat. Her figure, teeth, voice, hair, manner, hats, clothes, and whole life and conduct were flat as Euclid's plane-surface ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... companion, who, ashamed of being mistaken about them reproducing, did not want to believe that such a species could communicate. He had the gift of language as well as the Sirian. He could not hear the atoms talk, and he supposed that they did not speak. Moreover, how could these impossibly small beings have vocal organs, and what would they have to say? To speak, one must think, more or less; but if they think, they must therefore have the equivalent of a soul. But to attribute the equivalent of a soul to this species seemed ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... processes at work elsewhere have gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to see dimly, in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened. The struggle to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, of Russia, and, not impossibly, of Europe. For each country that develops to the end in this direction is a country lost to the economic comity of Europe. And, as one country follows another over the brink, so will the remaining countries be faced by conditions of increasingly narrow self-dependence, in fact ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... they were on almost equal terms, and then Sylvia became aware that her adversary was getting the upper hand of her. She had, however, no idea what the effort was costing him, until after a blazing fire of impossibly rapid volleys under which she went down to defeat, she stopped, called out, "Game and set!" and added in a generous tribute, "Say, you can play!" Then she saw that his face was almost purple, his eyes ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... this place! Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or was just ironical?" He went on to prove how the text might be given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not impossibly out. "I can't put it in writing as well as you; but I've done all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it some of them turns of yours. I'll cable the fellows in our office to say I've been misrepresented, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
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