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More "Thin air" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and his voice was deeper and more vigorous too. "Ah. Then we shall try another. See if you can find me." And before Chris's eyes Mr. Wicker vanished into thin air. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... instant it seemed that some titan breath had blown at the source, darkening the red to purple; and then, with startling suddenness, the whole wide range flamed up. The full red rim of the sun smote aloft, sending the shades scuttling down the valleys, to vanish in thin air. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... whence it proceeded, he saw a grave-looking man in black, with eyes of fire, driving before him a flock of ghosts with a switch, as you see turkeys driven on the western road, at the approach of Christmas. They were on the highway to Purgatory. The ghosts were shivering in the thin air, which pinched them severely, now that they had lost the covering of their bodies. Among the group, Larry recognised his old master, by the same means that Ulysses, Aeneas, and others, recognised the bodiless forms of their friends in the regions of Acheron. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... grew better. I knew beforehand the impossibility of sinking in this buoyant water, but I was surprised to find that I could not swim at my accustomed pace; my legs and feet were lifted so high and dry out of the lake, that my stroke was baffled, and I found myself kicking against the thin air instead of the dense fluid upon which I was swimming. The water is perfectly bright and clear; its taste detestable. After finishing my attempts at swimming and diving, I took some time in regaining the shore, and before I began to dress I found that the sun had already evaporated the water which ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically." To which the Christians responded, "You spawn of Satan, you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a satanic interpretation of the word of revelation and falsifying the oracles of God. You are converting the solid facts of our ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... on the cold heights of the sublime—the thin air stifles'—I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... to be somewhere," remarked Mr. Ormond. "The lad's perfectly honest, I should say, and can't have walked off with it. At the same time, a carving-knife isn't a thing that disappears into thin air." ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery
... time; nay, it is sometimes essential to a full comprehension of recent events. Bishop Proudie, we fear, would scarcely venture to take an active part in the Roman Catholic emancipation; he would be dissolved into thin air by contact with more substantial forms; but if you would appreciate the intrigues which were going on at Paris during the campaign of Marengo, you must study the conversations which took place ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... humanity— nothing but the present generation of nature. And yet there are traces of the past generations of nature to be seen. The depressions of the soil here and there to be observed, covered with a thick meadow grass, are unmistakeable indications of lakes which have now "vanished into thin air." That these gentle hollows were once filled with water is the more certain from the appearance of the shores of the present lakes, where the low water mark seems to have grown lower and lower every year. But if the past is blank, these scenes are suggestive of ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... into thin air, thin space," Hayes quarreled back. "She must be on your ship somewhere. When ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to common eyes seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... air-resistance that increases when an airplane goes faster is a property of air and not of the plane. Maybe we need to work out a theory that all inertia is a property of space. We'll see if we need that. But anyhow, just as a plane can go faster in thin air, so matter—any matter—will move faster in this field as soon as we get the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... because Chicago is such a big city that criminals may securely hide themselves here for months—even for years—without being discovered. Mrs. Orme was clever enough to leave few traces behind her; as far as clews are concerned she might have evaporated into thin air, taking Alora with her—except for this matter of the cabman. That's why I am pinning my faith to this search, knowing all the time, nevertheless, that Mrs. Orme may have provided for even that contingency and rendered the discovery of the cabman impossible. To do that, however, she ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... stiffened his muscles. With delight he felt all the big sinews about his shoulders come into play. Straight and true the big fist drove into the face of the smaller man, but Robert Macklin found that he had punched a hole in thin air. It was as if the very wind of the blow had brushed the head of Ronicky Doone to one side, and at the same time he seemed ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... vividly as if they actually existed in duplicate. So real was the illusion that for some hours I was under the impression that a broad yellow gravel path actually stretched across the lawn on my left. It was only when a little dog ran along the spectral path and suddenly vanished into thin air that I discovered the illusion. Nothing could be more complete, more life-like. The real persons who walked up the gravel to the house walked across the spectral gravel, apparently in duplicate. Both could be seen at one and the same time. I instantly thought that they could be photographed, so ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... said Hartley, "I came at this impossible hour to bring you some bad news. I'm sorry. Perhaps," he modified, "bad news is putting it with too much seriousness. Strange news is better. To be brief, Ste. Marie has disappeared—vanished into thin air. I thought ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... if it had some secret it was bursting to disclose. It remained in this attitude until I was within two or three feet of it—certainly not more—when, to my unlimited amazement, it absolutely vanished—melted away into thin air. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... giving my judgment that the seventeenth is the finest hole to be found on any links. I say so because it is the best specimen of a really perfect two-shot hole. If there is the slightest flaw in either the drive or the second stroke, all prospect of reaching the green in two vanishes into thin air. Mr. Laidlay once lost a match and an amateur championship because his second shot here was not quite good enough. A good tee shot well into the middle of the course, a second that is as clean as a shot can be and as straight as a bullet from a gun, with the gods of golf ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... ray which has enabled them to so perfect aviation that battle ships far outweighing anything known upon Earth sail as gracefully and lightly through the thin air of Barsoom as a toy balloon in ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... criticised by us; those that were written formerly have been criticised long ago; but a new book is the property, the prey of ephemeral criticism, which it darts triumphantly upon; there is a raw thin air of ignorance and uncertainty about it, not filled up by any recorded opinion; and curiosity, impertinence, and vanity rush eagerly into the vacuum. A new book is the fair field for petulance and coxcombry ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to me. To whom our Saviour with unalter'd brow Thy coming hither, though I know thy scope, I bid not or forbid; do as thou find'st Permission from above; thou canst not more. He added not; and Satan bowing low His gray dissimulation, disappear'd Into thin Air diffus'd: for now began Night with her sullen wing to double-shade 500 The Desert Fowls in thir clay nests were couch't; And now wild Beasts came forth the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... genius, would have been lacking. K—— (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as if he had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated being, a psychic effect that genius often has; and K—— admitted to me confidentially that he felt that possibly he and Upward were being a little crazy and happy together by themselves, breaking out into infinite space ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... gloom, Vanish from sight! O'er us thine azure dome, Bend, beauteous light! Dark clouds that o'er us spread, Melt in thin air! Stars, your soft radiance shed, Tender and fair! Girt with celestial might, Winging their airy flight, Spirits are thronging. Follows their forms of light Infinite longing! Flutter their vestures bright O'er field and grove! Where ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... rapidly accelerating fall, and heat built up, even from the thin air at a hundred and twenty miles. At the rocket's velocity of fall, Rick had less than two minutes to live. Pegasus was approaching dense air that would ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... suit (which was precisely like the one Johnnie had worn when he first came to the Barber flat—except, of course, that it was larger). The marble-topped table and the fat chairs folded themselves up out of sight. And all those delicious fruit pies dissolved into thin air. ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... press To centre inward, rather only those Of earth and water (liquid of the sea, And the big billows from the mountain slopes, And whatsoever are encased, as 'twere, In earthen body), contrariwise, they teach How the thin air, and with it the hot fire, Is borne asunder from the centre, and how, For this all ether quivers with bright stars, And the sun's flame along the blue is fed (Because the heat, from out the centre flying, All gathers there), ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... underwear—yet until nigh noon feet were like lumps of iron and fingers were constantly numb. That north wind was cruelly cold, and there can be no possible question that cold is felt much more keenly in the thin air of nineteen thousand feet than it is below. But the north wind was really our friend, for nothing but a north wind will drive all vapor from this mountain. Karstens beat his feet so violently and so continually against the hard snow to restore ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... latter he was becoming exceedingly disappointed. With the exception of the facts just mentioned, he had learned absolutely nothing to help him. Mr. Coburn might as well have vanished into thin air when he left the Peveril Hotel, for all the trace he had left. Willis could learn neither where he went nor whom he met on any one of the four days he had spent in London. He congratulated himself, therefore, that on the following ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... bare-armed and shouldered, her usually stiffly-netted hair falling wildly down her back, Steena watching empty space with narrowed eyes and set mouth, calculating a single wild chance. Bat, crouched on his belly, retreating from thin air step by step ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... scoundrel started back with staring eyes in which rage gave place to dismay as he grasped the change in the situation and saw the stick swinging for his head in turn. He ducked neatly; the stick whistled through thin air; and before Duchemin could recover the other had turned and ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the fore-saloon!" Then there was a lively scene; the door was shut, and all hands started hunting. All the cabins were emptied and rummaged, the piano, too; everything was turned upside down, but the rat had vanished into thin air. ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish. Mirage plays us strange tricks in the way of optical delusion in these regions. We seem to be approaching land which we never reach, but which at the moment when we should fairly make it, fades into thin air. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... swallowing lumps of disappointment and chagrin as she saw the whole inspiring plan break and vanish into thin air like an iridescent bubble. "It's all over and we won't ever try it again. I'm going in to do overcasting as hard as I can, because I hate that the worst. Aunt Jane must write to Mrs. Burch that we don't want to be home missionaries. Perhaps we're not big enough, anyway. I'm perfectly certain ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the trail, its surprises, its new dangers, its apparent vanishings into thin air, only to be found, after an all but impossible curve, up the side of another cliff, coaxed us on and on; and when or where we would have been able to say, "thus far and no farther" is an ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... I threw forward the Remington and let drive. Following the bellow of the rifle, so loud in that thin air, a sharp, harsh report cracked up from below. A puff of yellow dust rose in front of the lioness. I was in line, but too far ahead. I fired again. The steel jacketed bullet hit a stone and spitefully whined away into the canyon. I tried once more. This ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... teetering object rose and moved away from Ultra Vires, its blades whirring a sparkling circle in the thin air. ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... Ned firmly, as he laid his hand on the other's, arm; "I don't want money; I've given up begging. You gave me your advice once, and I have taken that—it has been of more value to me than all the wealth that is being melted into thin air, John, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... Famine; and black blight on herb and tree; And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds 175 Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother's hate Breathed on her child's destroyer; ay, I heard Thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, 180 Yet my innumerable seas and streams, Mountains, and caves, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... many others whose education should have taught them better, that persons of a mysterious aspect used to visit the inns and hotels of Paris, and eat of the best meats and drink of the best wines, and then suddenly melt away into thin air when the landlord came with the reckoning. That gentle maidens, who went to bed alone, often awoke in the night and found men in bed with them, of shape more beautiful than the Grecian Apollo, who immediately became invisible when an ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... this meeting, to the lecture-room of this church, and there we will endeavor to fix upon the best possible plan we can gather from the counsels of the many. I hope this enthusiasm may be directed to good and legitimate ends, and not allowed to evaporate into thin air. I hope we shall aid greatly in the establishment of this Government on the everlasting foundation of justice ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... forks would have soon passed, - by a mysterious system of loss which undergraduate powers can never fathom, - into the property of Mr. Robert Filcher, the excellent, though occasionally erratic, scout of your beloved son, and from thence have melted, not "into thin air," but into a residuum whose mass might be expressed by the equivalent of coins of a thin and golden description, - if you could but have foreseen this, then, infatuated but affectionate parent, you would have been ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... there are in the multiplication of small but cheerful givers. Like Wesley, too, he combined the genius for great conceptions with the genius for practical detail, without which great conceptions soon vanish into thin air. He was more masterful than Wesley. When he broke away from the Methodist New Connexion, and founded the Christian Mission of which The Salvation Army was the evolution, he found that committees wasted their time in talk and ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... service with the Sahibs, who ride about in two-wheeled carts and spend money with a spade. Presently, grave and aloof, walking very heavily, the lama joined himself to the chatter under the eaves, and they gave him great room. The thin air refreshed him, and he sat on the edge of precipices with the best of them, and, when talk languished, flung pebbles into the void. Thirty miles away, as the eagle flies, lay the next range, seamed and channelled and pitted with little patches ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... compatriot in Rome or Florence, under the impression that he was within its mystic limits. Illusion! An effect of mirage, making that which appears quite tangible and solid when viewed from a distance dissolve into thin air as one approaches; like the mirage, cheating the weary traveller with a vision of what he most ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or ether or unit of force or perpetuum mobile or anything else. But also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying Excelsior and trying to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... because from a flimsy philosophy he span an imaginative tissue of such magical and marvellous beauty. But Shelley dwelt in an ethereal region, where ordinary beings found breathing difficult. There facts seemed to dissolve into thin air instead of supplying a solid and substantial base. His idealism meant unreality. His 'trumpet' did not in fact stimulate the mass of mankind, and his fame at this period was confined to a few young gentlemen of literary refinement. The man who ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... she said gently; "but I know that he has passed over." She then kissed my hand, and faded away before my eyes, not apparently returning to the curtain (close to which I stood), but vanishing into thin air. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Serpent, which enringed the world in its coils, and the toothless she-wrestler was Old Age! What wonder that Thor was brought to his knees? On finding himself thus made game of, Thor grew wroth, but had to go his ways, as the city of Utgard had vanished into thin air, with its cloud-capped towers and enormous citizens. Thor afterwards undertook to catch the Midgard Serpent, using a bull's head for bait. The World-Snake took the delicious morsel greedily, and, finding itself hooked, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... noiselessly behind us. One was the Wrap-up-his-Tail man, and they talked merrily while the half-broken horses bucked about among the trees. And so a cavalry escort was with us for a mile, till we got to a mighty hill strewn with moss agates, and everybody had to jump out and pant in that thin air. But how intoxicating it was! The old lady from Chicago ducked like an emancipated hen as she scuttled about the road, cramming pieces of rock into her reticule. She sent me fifty yards down to the hill-side to pick up a piece ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... guards had seen me materialize out of thin air, plus the fact that they knew you could make yourselves invisible, convinced them that my story ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... crazy reversal of feeling, the old man sat in a kind of ecstasy, enamoured of his own creation, looking into thin air. As for Louie, during the description of the Queen's dress she had drunk in every word with a greedy attention, her changing eyes fixed on the speaker's face. When he stopped, however, she drew ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Of Nature's finest crockery, Now but thin air and mockery, Lurks by Avernus, Whose honest grasp of hand Still, while his life did stand, At friend's or foe's command, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... third day they reached the highest point of the trail and started down. Both men had felt the effects of the thin air during the last twelve hours and so the descent came as a welcome relief. They camped that night among trees and in an atmosphere that relieved their tired lungs. They also built the first fire they ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of the bright presence of the young soldier, all the sad forebodings seemed to vanish into thin air. While listening to his brave words of hope, they forgot that the sunny hours of this most happy day were hastening by. Already the shadows lay long upon the grass, and there remained yet so much ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... surprising, therefore, that by General Grant's testimony,(1) the entire charge was dissipated into thin air, and proved to be only one of the thousand baseless rumors which in that exciting period were constantly filling the political atmosphere. It was perhaps the intention of the Committee in examining General Grant on this point, to give him an opportunity in an official ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... cruel river to bear her back to death. She felt her strength ebbing quickly—her strokes now were feeble and futile. With a prayer to her Maker she threw her hands above her head in the last effort of the drowning swimmer to clutch at even thin air for support—the current caught and swirled her downward toward the gorge, and, at the same instant her fingers touched and closed upon something which swung ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thet bawl," sang out one of the noisiest. A few more whirling, desperate lunges on the part of Nels, all as futile as if the ball had been thin air, finally brought to the dogged cowboy a realization ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... fearful crash was heard, as if all the pillars of the palace were giving way, and the palace itself, with towers and doors, windows and the cauldron, whirled round the bewildered Prince's head. This continued for a few minutes, and then everything vanished into thin air, and Iwanich found himself suddenly alone upon a desolate heath ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... that corpulent individual had disappeared as if into thin air; only a stir in one of the bunks betrayed his hiding-place. At the first sight of Willie's revolver he had dived for a refuge and was now flattened against the wall, a pillow pressed over his head to ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... of paper," she remarked, "of the size of this one cannot be spirited away, or dissolved into thin air. It exists; it is here; and all we want is some happy thought in order to find it. I acknowledge that that happy thought has not come to me yet, but sometimes I get it in what may seem to you a very odd way. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... punishment as quid pro quo, as arbitrary assignments, as external equivalents, do not so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we move. For this view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to us, fades into thin air. Jesus could by no possibility have met the punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner. Then he must have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others. That portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of another's sin may rightfully be called by almost any other ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... their main care is for their own genius. The same is true in a minor degree of some of his great English successors. Keats has a palette of richer colours, but he seldom condescends to "human nature's daily food." Shelley floats in a thin air to stars and mountain tops, and vanishes from our gaze like his skylark. Byron, in the midst of his revolutionary fervour, never forgets that he himself belongs to the "caste of Vere de Vere." Wordsworth's placid affection and magnanimity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... efforts and approaches? Would she be sinning in the flesh, if she allowed the intrusions of one who was always roaming about her? Would that be sheer adultery?" Such was the sly roundabout way in which sometimes he stayed and weakened her resistance. "If I am only a breath, a smoke, a thin air, as so many doctors call me, why are you afraid, poor fearful soul, and how does it ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... left, and had been sufficiently humiliated, to perceive that he could not escape the necessity of devouring this unpalatable piece of humble pie, and that the only choice left him was a choice of bitters. The false manliness which he had been diligently cultivating had vanished into thin air, and something of the child's spirit, so long despised, was coming back to him,—the longing for the sound of a familiar voice, and the touch of a tender hand. Even Aunt Temperance would have received, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... too, one must pay for exact knowledge with painstaking care and patient study and ceaseless effort. He discovered how fatally easy it is to spoil a good specimen; how fairy-fragile a wee wing is; how painted scales rub, and vanish into thin air; how delicate antennae break, and forelegs will fiendishly depart hence; and that proper mounting, which results in a perfect insect, is a task which requires practice, a sure eye, and an expert, delicate, and dexterous touch. Also, that one ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... original informant, who wrote to me the letter of a gentleman. It seems that an anxious lady had said something or other which had been misinterpreted, against her real meaning, into the calumny which was circulated, and so the report vanished into thin air. I closed the correspondence with the following letter to ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... is to K. The War Office Army has melted into thin air and it only remains to express my heartfelt ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the false ideas of constancy which are generated and cherished in its name, if not by its agency. Your enemies are intense, but temporary. Time wears off the edge of hostility. It is the alembic in which offences are dissolved into thin air, and a calm indifference reigns in their stead. But your friends are expected to be a permanent arrangement. They are not only a sore evil, but of long continuance. Adhesiveness seems to be the head and front, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... hail or small shot upon the face. See how the waves dash in at the outlying rocks, hurrying onward like blood-hounds in full cry, scuffling, struggling, madly jostling one another in eagerness to be first in the fray; joining issue with tremendous crash, only to be spent, broken, dissipated into thin air. Overhead the sky changes almost with the speed of the blast; sometimes the sun winks from a corner of the leaden clouds and tinges with glorious light the foam-bladders as they burst and scatter around their clouds of spray; in between the headlands the sea is ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... to me in dreams, urged me forward even to these regions. Permit me now to clasp thee in my arms, and do not withdraw from my embrace." Thrice did he attempt to throw his arms about the shade, which being only composed of thin air, was not perceptible to his touch. While the two conversed together, AEneas observed at no great distance from them a stream, at which prodigious numbers of ghosts were incessantly crowding to drink, swarming like bees round ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... perverted young life, showed after all a certain plausible side, DID in the case before them flaunt something like an impunity for the social man; but he could at least treat himself to the statement that would prepare him for the sharpest echo. This echo—as distinct over there in the dry thin air as some shrill "heading" above a column of print—seemed to reach him even as he wrote. "He says there's no woman," he could hear Mrs. Newsome report, in capitals almost of newspaper size, to Mrs. Pocock; and he could focus in Mrs. Pocock the response of the reader of the journal. He could ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... guard. "Yes—I mean, no. Your objection was what set me to thinking; but the opportunity of doing our people a service—that, Mona, is what—" He hesitated; it was not easy, with the girl staring innocently at him, declare that he had not deliberately formed his opportunity out of thin air. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... thong-hole of the door and was dissipated into thin air; but Penelope rose from her sleep refreshed and comforted, so vivid ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... occupation, and he had, in the excess of his feeling, made a flourish of the knife, as if it were a dagger, when Montaiglon's query checked him. He was a bubble burst, his backbone—that braced him to the tension of a cuirassier of guards—melted into air, into thin air, and a ludicrous limpness came on him, while his eye fell, and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... such a belief—we have reason to think that our destiny is different from that of animals; and though we cannot altogether shut out the childish fear that the soul upon leaving the body may 'vanish into thin air,' we have still, so far as the nature of the subject admits, a hope of immortality with which we comfort ourselves on sufficient grounds. The denial of the belief takes the heart out of human life; it lowers men to the level of the material. ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... flowed for the last two centuries, and feasted my eyes with its rugged grandeur. From Messina I came on here, and had the great good fortune to find Vesuvius in eruption. Before this fact the vision of good Bence Jones forbidding much exertion vanished into thin air, and on Thursday up I went in company with Ray Lankester and my friend Dohrn's father, Dohrn himself being unluckily away. We had a glorious day, and did not descend till late at night. The great crater was not very active, and contented itself ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of this state of society, gradually withdrew from it their confidence; not in the first instance without a struggle; but cool reflection presented so many obstacles, that the plan, of itself, as the understanding expanded, gradually dissolved into "thin air." A friend had suggested the expediency of first trying the plan in Wales, but even this less exceptionable theatre of experiment was soon abandoned, and sound sense obtained ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... distance of many hundred miles. Rumors might fill the social atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel but slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis, and perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to the steps, and I was so crippled with fatigue and so dizzy and sick with the thin air, that I hardly knew what I was doing. We entered a low-browed, dark, arched, stone passage, smelling dismally of antiquity and dogs, when a brisk voice accosted me in the very choicest of French, and in terms of welcome as gay and courtly as if we ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... framers never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they at its creation guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution. It was not intended by its framers to be the baseless fabric of a vision, which at the touch of the enchanter would vanish into thin air, but a substantial and mighty fabric, capable of resisting the slow decay of time and of defying the storms of ages. Indeed, well may the jealous patriots of that day have indulged fears that a Government of such high powers might violate the reserved rights of the States, and wisely did ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... remote period it would reach our shores, has already reached us, and the waters are still rising. The superstitions formerly attaching to the possession of land, to hereditary descent, to ancestral titles, to the feudal pretensions of the squirearchy, are all dissipating into thin air. If it is not yet proved whether science is a democratic power, at any rate it asserts the predominance of natural laws, and at their fiat artificial distinctions must tend ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... day forth he was often filled with a silent wonder at all the sleepless life that moved beneath the vast waters, and that knew nothing of the little human lives that fretted themselves out in the thin air above. That day was to him like the opening of a door into the vast heart ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Eternal Thought. The fact that Thought continues to exist an instant, after it makes its appearance in the soul, proves it immortal: for there is nothing conceivable that can destroy it. The spoken words, being mere sounds, may vanish into thin air, and the written ones, mere marks, be burned, erased, destroyed: but the THOUGHT itself lives still, and must ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... to her memory what she had in her excitement forgotten: the adventure she had come out to meet had faded into thin air! The unexpected one which had so startlingly taken its place would end to-night, and she would be left to the dreary existence from which she had ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the United States to settle in Upper Canada. The restrictions being relaxed, his only cause of hostility to the Administration vanished, and he ceased to clamour against it. His sympathy with Mr. Gourlay's projects vanished into thin air. Those projects contemplated enquiry and reform. Dickson, having accomplished his own ends, desired no further reform; and as for enquiry, he had excellent reasons for burking it, as it would probably lead to the disclosure of certain reprehensible transactions on the part of himself and Claus, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... proved themselves to be of sterling metal. Before them the future stretched in a long, smooth road under sunny blue skies, and behind them the black clouds, out of which they had emerged, were dispersing into thin air. Evil passes, ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... lo! Sir Tristram was not there, but only the empty walls. Then at first they were greatly astonished, and knew not what to think. And some who came cried out: "Is that man then a spirit that he can melt away into thin air?" But after a little, one of them perceived where the window of the chapel stood open, and therewith several of them ran thereunto and looked out, and they wist that Sir Tristram had leaped ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... murder of a secret if I told you. He isn't particularly romantic. I have seen him in a poor light; I have watched him in a most undignified temper; I have known him when he wanted a shave. I don't exist in this World of mine. I am just a column of thin air, ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... this in the middle of the night makes one feel altogether a different person, and the daylight life an illusion. Then again, this morning, that midnight world faded away into some dreamland, and vanished into thin air. The two are so different, yet ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... action in the past in regard to treaties and small States. But faint as is this denial of this part of our case, it becomes fainter still, it dissolves into the thinnest of thin air, when it has to deal with our contention that we and our allies are withstanding a power whose aim is nothing less than the domination of Europe. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... his leaping forward, out from his corner, and striking; Royce's answer to that was another quiet laugh. He had slipped aside; Blenham had flailed at the thin air; Royce, grown still again, knew one of the moments of sheer joy which had been his during ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... to me in that instant, but I maintained my outward serenity. I knew that he was a clean, honourable man and worthy in every way of the hand and heart of Grace Harding. Possibly they had been long engaged. All of my alleged rights and wrongs faded into thin air. Besides, what was the use of whimpering? It was a stunning blow, but I would stand it ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... triangle, which conducts all the rays of light into one point. Now when it is placed opposite to the sun, so that all the rays coming from all quarters are collected together into that point, the ray thus formed passes through the thin air, and at once lights the dryest and lightest of the objects against which it strikes, for that ray has the strength and force ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... garbed as a man, she had hung about the palace, and—known to nearly all the sweepers—she had overheard things. Garbed as a man again, she suddenly evaporated in thin air, and Rosemary McClean was left without a servant or any means of communication with ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... in the northwest a towering mass of grayish-white clouds hung, threatening trouble. The region was, if anything, even wilder and more difficult than the country they had hunted through on the two previous days. The ice made the footing perilous, and in the cold thin air every quick burst they made up a steep hill caused them to pant for breath. But they were not unrewarded. Crawling cautiously over a sharp ledge they came suddenly upon two mountain rams not a hundred yards away. Roosevelt dropped ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... which her daughter was sufficiently unfilial to draw a diverting picture of a stalwart policeman trying to arrest an elusive adept who could probably make himself invisible at will, or call to his aid fire-breathing dragons, just as easily as he could make a tennis ball evaporate into thin air, or grow lovely witch-roses and wither them to ashes with ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... incident. But, unfortunately, it was displayed upon a hillside where no water could ever have reached it; and thus the audience, all unconsciously, was confronted with the remarkable spectacle of a husbandman applying himself diligently to the task of ladelling thin air on to crops that grew upon barren sand. If only his imagination had been controlled by a knowledge of Egypt, the picture might have ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... smallest degree nearer the solution of the riddle. Again, who on earth was it? What social inferior was there, could there possibly be, at Woodleigh, to cause Pia a moment's trouble? Every preconceived notion on Trix's part, including the colour of the soap-bubble, vanished into thin air, and left her contemplating ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... suddenly and unexpectedly that my heart seemed to leap into my mouth, and for a moment I felt unable to move from the spot to which I seemed rooted. This was not the case with the Kaffir Billy, who instantly vanished (taking, of course, my spare rifle with him) 'into thin air.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... But the courts decided that Saint-Simonism was not a religion and its ministers were not religious teachers. This decision struck them with death. Their prestige vanished. They scattered, dissolved in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would say, into endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the disappearing children and saw the fabric of her dream fade into thin air; but she was a person of considerable individuality for her years. Her lip quivered, tears rushed to her eyes and flowed silently down her cheeks, but without a glance at Eldress Abby or a word of comment she walked slowly away from the laundry, ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... walked after it admiringly, to see where it was going. It made straight for a church steeple, after the common but sacrilegious fashion of all lightning, struck the gilded cross on the topmost pinnacle, and then immediately vanished, like a Virgilian apparition, into thin air. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... springing recklessly forward. The hall was dark, but for a patch of moonlight at the further end. Against this he caught an instant, flitting glimpse of the intruder. It was a woman, yet even as his eyes told him this, she seemed to vanish into thin air—the hall was empty. ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... space-suited, was coming through. He saw them, tried to spring back into the shelter of the ship. But a blue ray stabbed out and caught him in mid-flight. There was a spatter of dust, and the hapless creature disintegrated into thin air. ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... yet is before I fail to see the connection of ideas which led you to swear by your mother. You were thinking of mine when you spoke. To please her, you would deceive her son. But as soon as he touches the lie it vanishes into thin air, for it has no more substance than a soap bubble!" The last words were at once sad, angry, and scornful; but the philosopher, who had listened at first with astonishment and then with indignation, could no longer ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... physical environment, of social convention, of accepted moral and esthetic standards interpose seemingly impassable barriers between us and the savage mind, but at the touch of an all-pervading human sympathy these barriers dissolve into very thin air. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the young lime-trees that backed the garden, switchbacking—that was one of his tricks of escape, made possible by a long tail—and yelling fit to raise the world. The sparrow-hawk's skinny yellow claw, thrust forward, was clutching thin air an inch behind his central tail-feathers, but that was all she got of him—just thin air. There was no crash as he hurled into the green maze; but she, failing to swerve exactly in time, made a mighty crash, and retired somewhat dazed, thankful that she retained two whole wings ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... We could see nothing; we merely became suddenly aware that there were no longer hands clutching at our throats or hairy bodies crushing us to the ground. It was as though the horde of unseen devils had melted into thin air. There were movements on the ground, for many of them had been wounded; a man cannot always reach the spot in the dark. This lasted for two or three minutes; they were evidently removing those who still had life in them, for the straining ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... would come when we'd have to leave here," Lake said. "We'd have to go north up the plateau each spring. There's no timber there—nothing but grass and wind and thin air. We'd have ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... profound, And Chimborazzo's height rolled back the sound. With lifted arm, and towering stature high, And aspect frowning to the middle sky 40 (Its misty form dilated in the wind), The phantom stood,—till, less and less defined, Into thin air it faded from the sight, Lost in the ambient haze of slow-returning light. Its feathery-seeming crown, its giant spear, Its limbs of huge proportion, disappear; And the bare mountains to the dawn disclose The same long line of solitary ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the subject some time, and my fears vanished into thin air. If this man had taken that law into favor it would surely stand, and as he predicted be "improved and enlarged." I have never been so forcibly impressed by any stranger. His compactness of body and soul, the clear outlines of face and figure, the terseness of his sentences, and firmness yet tenderness ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... plump terraced hills. She was in the Real West, and it was hers, since she had won to it by her own plodding. Her soul—if she hadn't had one, it would immediately have been provided, by special arrangement, the moment she sat there—sailed with the hawks in the high thin air, and when it came down it sang hallelujahs, because the sagebrush fragrance was more healing than piney woods, because the sharp-bitten edges of the buttes were coral and gold and basalt and turquoise, and because a real ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the reader to the scene of slaughter; for if he remains on board of the Aspasia, he will distinguish nothing but fire and smoke. Don't be afraid, ladies, if I take you on board of the schooner—"these our actors are all air, thin air," raised by the magic pen for your amusement. Come, then, fearlessly, with me, and view the scene of mortal strife. The launch has boarded on the starboard gangway, and it is against her that the crew of the privateer ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the very last of them. Today then, is ours, and in it rests our hope. The sun that rose on our sorrow this morning guards us in its course. Until it sets tonight, that monster must retain whatever form he now has. He is confined within the limitations of his earthly envelope. He cannot melt into thin air nor disappear through cracks or chinks or crannies. If he go through a doorway, he must open the door like a mortal. And so we have this day to hunt out all his lairs and sterilize them. So we shall, if we have not yet catch ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... son, in a moved sort, As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: 150 And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 155 Leave ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... as Rossetti or the Pre-Raphaelites (though their superior as one who could make palpable his visions). In the Louvre—where the Salon Carre is little changed—Manet's Olympe, with her every-day seductiveness, resolves the phantasies of Moreau into thin air. Here is reality for you, familiar as it may be. It is wonderful how long it took French critics to discover that Manet was un peintre de race. He is very French in the French gallery where he now hangs. He shows the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the children shouting together. Their shouts rose to one yell of laughter as, recovering himself, he dived at my neck, and produced the two struggling rabbits. His opera-hat opened with a snap, and in they went. A second later it shut flat again, and they were gone, into thin air. He opened the hat with a puzzled frown, plunged a hand, and dragged forth yard upon yard of ribbon—red, green, white, blue, yellow ribbon, mixed up with packs of playing cards that, with a turn of the hand he sent spinning into air, to fall ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... at Marseilles, but, hearing at last of her lover's plight, she too visits the magic castle, and would have been decoyed into its dungeons had not Astolfo appeared with a magic horn, whose first blast makes the castle vanish into thin air! Thus freed, the magician's prisoners gaze around them in wonder, and Rogero and Bradamant embrace with rapture, planning to marry as soon as Rogero ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... spread throughout the country, but no one of them had encountered the delinquent. He did not move continuously from place to place, even at his amazing speed, but seemed to appear only for a moment and then to vanish into thin air. True, he had at length remained visible along the entire route from Prairie-du-Chien to Milwaukee, and he had covered in less than an hour and a half this ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... rancher responded, his cheek twitching weakly. "You are quite right, we must hunt this scoundrel down. But we know what has gone before—I mean, before he was supposed to have died. The man could never be traced. He seemed to vanish into thin air. What do ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... from sheer untalked talk. For lack of a creative listener they gradually fill up with unexpressed emotion. Presently this emotion begins to ferment, and finally—bang!—they blow up, burst, disappear in thin air. In all that community I suppose there was no one but the little faded wife to whom the minister dared open his heart, and I think he found me a godsend. All I really did was to look from one to the other and put in here and there an inciting comment or ask an understanding question. After he had ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... chatter the house-party had given itself over to a thorough enjoyment of the remainder of breakfast. Ultimatums and the alarums of war vanished into thin air, like mists dispelled by the sun. The serious face of the ex-officer and the unwonted air of distraction on Lord Durwent's countenance were the only indications that the morning was different from any other. Tongues and hearts were light, and airy ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... special favour with St. Nick. Now and then I harbour a rascally suspicion that he is an indolent, time-serving person, who slips down the widest, cleanest chimneys to the people who clamour the loudest; but this abominable cynicism melts into thin air the moment that I look at his jolly visage on the cover of a picture-book. Dear, fat, rosy, radiant Being! Surely he is incapable of any but the highest motives! I am twenty-eight years old, but age shall never make any difference in the number or extent of ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... iridescent and magnificently discolored; the sandal straps fell into dust as I bent above them, leaving the sandals clinging to her feet only by the wired silver core of the thongs. And, as I touched it fearfully, the veil-like garment covering her, vanished into thin air, its metal stars twinkling in a shower around her ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... the young-lady Happy Jacks went to at these times, the boldest speculator has failed to discover: they vanished, as it were, into thin air, and were seen no more till the sunshine came, when they returned with the swallows. The lady herself was a meek, mild creature, skilful in the art of living on nothing, and making up dresses without material. She adored her husband, and believed him the greatest man in the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... perfectly sound, and cured you by stopping another tooth. Which tooth was the situation of the toothache? Again, a man has an arm amputated, and experiences sensations in the hand which he has lost. The situation of the imaginary hand is in fact merely thin air. You look into a mirror and see a fire. The flames that you see are situated behind the mirror. Again at night you watch the sky; if some of the stars had vanished from existence hours ago, you would not be any the wiser. Even the situations of the ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... writer in his three hundred inspired volumes, while Plutarch, Seneca, and the elder Pliny made such free use of their libraries; and it has happened that Epicurus, with his unsubstantial nothingness, has "melted into thin air," while the solid treasures have buoyed themselves up amidst the wrecks ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... possessor of four dollars—an amount of riches that almost took away his breath. He had never in his whole life owned more than ten cents at a time. As he tramped along the road home, he kept his hand in his pocket, holding fast to the money, as if he feared it would otherwise dissolve into thin air. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... child-loving, arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in decent taste, his land pleasure-giving, his wines good. By this time he would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and thick eyelids. But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;—so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... devices kept the aim exact, as the first of the magnetic bombs started down. At five-second intervals they were projected outward, invisible globes of concentrated magnetic energy, undetectable in space. Seven seconds passed before the first became dimly visible in the thin air of Mars. It floated down, it would miss the fort it seemed—so far to one side— Abruptly it turned, and darted with tremendously accelerating speed for the great magnetic field of the fort. With a vast ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... you—" a clash and buzz hummed over the wire into the receiver. There was a jangle and tangle and a rough man's voice cut in with, "Working on the wires, hang up, please," and David limply hung up the receiver and collapsed in solitude, for his committees had been evoked out of thin air. ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... any one else. And to think he hasn't sent her one reassuring word since last summer! There isn't enough of him to cast a shadow. Catch me moping after such a dim outline of a man! But it's just like Millie. If he'd only vanish into thin air she might give him up, and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Trooper Punch Peerson had his philosophic "doots". He, like others of that set, had heard of a big chap who was a marvel at Sandhurst with the gloves, sword, horse, and other things, and who had suddenly and marvellously disappeared into thin air leaving no trace behind him, after some public scandal or other.... But that was no concern of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... grass and looked up at the unfamiliar constellations, smelling the frozen sterility of the thin air. ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... saying, 'I do not want to go.' It was so in this case. How all these absolute impossibilities, which made it perfectly out of the question that the three recreants should sit down at the table, would have melted into thin air if, by any chance, there had come into their minds a wish to be there! They would have found means to look after the field and the cattle and the home, and to be in their places notwithstanding, if they had wanted. The real reason that underlies ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... into blue, Unbroken the horizon, saving where A wreath of smoke curls up the far, thin air, And points the distant lodges ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... creaking note? It is the cry of the Northern shrike, of whom tradition says that he catches little birds and impales them on sharp thorns. At the sound of his voice the concert closes suddenly and the singers vanish into thin air. The hour of music is over; the commonplace of day has begun. And there is my lady Greygown, already up and dressed, standing by the breakfast-table and laughing at ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... priori, and therefore is hardly to be distinguished from a mere pure conception. Deceived by such a proof of the power of reason, we can perceive no limits to the extension of our knowledge. The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... cliffs of stone. I did not attend much to this, however, being in dread of the difficulty of landing and passing through the custom-house with our twelve or fourteen trunks and numberless carpet-bags. The trouble vanished into thin air, nevertheless, as we approached it, for not a single trunk or bag was opened, and, moreover, our luggage and ourselves were not only landed, but the greater part of it conveyed to the railway without any expense. Long live Louis Napoleon, say I. We established ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... slowly back to the gateway. To me, it had seemed that he ducked into the street-shrine and vanished into thin air, but I've lived on Wolf long enough to know you can't trust your eyes here. I said so, and the kid swore again, gulping, more upset than he wanted to admit. "Does this kind ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... thin air, a neat little horse and phaeton, and a trooper perched on a high Turkish saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly across his back, and the bey himself, glasses, fez, and all, astride an Arab steed. We were to be taken for a drive. Toward the end of it we reached the flour-mill, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... we?" he stammered through tight-set lips. The balloon, caught in a pocket of thin air, had caused the car ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
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