"Breathlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day, though the woods have been very much thinned since the revolution. Perhaps there never was any thing in the whole universe better calculated to inspire religious awe than the first view of this monastery. It was imposing even to breathlessness. The total solitude—the undisturbed and chilling silence, which seem to have ever slept over the dark and ancient woods—the still lakes, reflecting the deep solemnity of the objects around them—all impress a powerful image of utter seclusion and hopeless separation from ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... only two feet from the front stoop when he become aware of danger, something, a familiar scent, a breathlessness, and then a sudden stir. A dark thing ahead and the feeling of something coming behind. Billy as if a football signal had been given, grew calm and alert. Instantly both arms flashed up, and down the mountain shot two long yellow winks ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... thin sunshine, whirring through the traffic of the crowded streets, neither spoke for breathlessness. Cornelius Allendyce stared at the buildings and swallowed at regular intervals to steady his nerves—a trick he had always found most helpful in important legal trials. Robin kept her eyes glued on the back of the taxi driver's head but he might have had two heads and ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... Southron formed their long ranks into lines, each man occupying his place as by magic, and preparing to cover themselves by large shields, called pavesses, which they planted before them, I again felt a strange breathlessness, and some desire to go home for a glass of distilled waters. But as I looked aside, I saw the worthy Kempe of Kinfauns bending a large crossbow, and I thought it pity he should waste the bolt on a true hearted Scotsman, when so many English were in presence; ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... and gave me an overhaul this morning. He tells me my heart is dilated—hence my severe breathlessness. I was told I must go to England, but need not expect to get away for a fortnight or so. The hospital is very ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... hence there is balance between them, and this also we not only know to be there, but feel there. The characteristic mood of the evolutionary type of unity is equally unique—either a sense of easy motion, when the process is unobstructed, or excitement and breathlessness, when there is opposition. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... flower-show Juliet scarcely left Vera Fielding's side. During those five days Vera lay at the point of death, and though her husband was constantly with her it was to Juliet that she clung through all the terrible phases of weakness, breathlessness, and pain that she passed. Through the dark nights—though a trained nurse was in attendance—it was Juliet's hand that held her up, Juliet's low calm voice that reassured her in the Valley of the Shadow through which she wandered. Often too spent for speech, her eyes ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... very well," she said, with a shade of meaning. "But"— here I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness—"but who is the officer? I ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... especially make a bolder attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to breathlessness; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emulated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... almost impossible. Closing together they avoided the latter, and holding each other well up, became one irresistible wedge-shaped mass. At times they yelled, not from consciousness nor bravado, but from the purely animal instinct of warning and to combat the breathlessness of their descent, until, reaching the level, they charged across the gravelly bed of a vanished river, and pulled up at Collinson's Mill. The mill itself had long since vanished with the river, but ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... Bullet had no such troubles. Any of the mountain horses will hop cheerfully up or down ledges anywhere. They will even walk a log fifteen or twenty feet above a stream. I have seen the same trick performed in Barnum's circus as a wonderful feat, accompanied by brass bands and breathlessness. We accomplished it on our trip with out any brass bands; I cannot answer for the breathlessness. As for steadiness of nerve, they will walk serenely on the edge of precipices a man would hate to look over, and given a palm's ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... mad she looked, how insane the whole scene was, and she gave way to her emotions. Partly through physical exhaustion and breathlessness, and partly through helpless terror, she fell on ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... suddenly. She leaned a little further forward. Her lips were parted. The fire in her eyes had given way to a great wonder, and the breathlessness of her silence was like a thing to be felt. It held us all dumb. We waited—we scarcely knew for what. Only we knew that she had something more to say, and we were impelled to wait for ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ascends that bracing cheer with which in our still barbarous times we welcome our champions on the eve of a big fight. The Old Man has hurried, for he is out of breath; and the deadly pallor of his cheek is almost affrighting to see. But he soon recovers himself, though when he rises to speak the breathlessness is still very apparent, and he has to gasp almost now and then for more voice. Fortunately on this occasion we have not long to wait for the big announcement which everybody is so anxiously expecting. It is usually the fate of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... indeed Miss Sarah Williams, and in a state of breathlessness. She had been running, perhaps to escape the unseemly embraces of the wind, which had taken great liberties with her skirts,—liberties no less shocking because of the darkness of the evening; for though De la Rochefoucauld has settled it that man's alleged courage ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of sublimity, perhaps, I still adhere to my first opinion, that nothing so great was ever beheld. The atmosphere for this, for the Memnon, was the breathlessness which belongs to a saintly trance; the holy thing seemed to live by silence. But there is a picture, the pendant of the Memnon, there is a dreadful cartoon, from the gallery which has begun to open upon ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... after an alarming attack of breathlessness and giddiness, he returned to London. In Green Street he was happy in the proximity and skill of his son-in-law, Dr. Holland, and "a suite of rooms perfectly fitted up for illness and death." This phrase occurs in the last of his published letters, dated the 7th of November 1844. ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... force himself to look at her; did not speak. She gazed at him curiously, and when she saw the grayness of his face, the lines about his mouth, and eyes that advanced his age by twenty years, she felt a little catch at her heart, a breathlessness, a ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... Karen, her voice keeping its earnest control, "I cannot be happy with you and Tante unless you can enjoy her for yourself. Try to know Tante, Gregory," she went on, now with a little breathlessness; "she wants that so much. One of the first things she asked me when she came back was that I should try to make you care for her. She felt at once—and oh! so did I, Gregory—that something was ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... has not lost itself in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume. The fire that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes. The rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of midday heat. The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers on that day is available for us all. If, like that waiting Church of old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... he been less excited. In time of riot the place for a Sikh officer would be at the regiment's headquarters, in readiness for the order from a civil magistrate without which interference would cost him his commission. But the babu was beside himself, what with breathlessness and disappointment. He decided it was expedient to strengthen his appeal, and his ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... servant's horse, approaching from the direction of Chippenham, broke the stillness of the moonlit country; but round the three men who sat motionless in their saddles, glaring at one another and awaiting the word for action, was a kind of barrier, a breathlessness born of ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... alive, how is it that we never hear of a revival in a dissecting-room? Then, on another point of physiology, M. Payerne states, with regard to the distress experienced by many persons in the ascent of a high mountain, 'that the lassitude and breathlessness felt in elevated places appear to proceed, not from an insufficiency of oxygen, but rather from the rupture of the equilibrium between the tension of the fluids contained in our organs and that of the ambient air, whatever be the way in which the rupture ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... unspeakably happy in passing, but, in remembrance, burdened with pain—and looking around on each familiar object with strange emotions. Soon a light step was heard descending the stairs, and moving along the passage. The door opened, and Edith—no, her aunt—entered. The young man had risen in the breathlessness of expectation. ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was heard from back of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the same work would nine times out of ten be free. . . . It ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... of a purple faced, cursing figure who leaned over the rickety old fence that bounded the garden, shook his fists in John Anderson's mildly puzzled face and roared threats until he had to cease from very breathlessness. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... delicate shell. When they could no longer perceive him they still rowed on speaking no word,—the measured, musical plash of the oars through the smooth, dark olive-green water alone breaking the stillness around them. There was a curious sort of hushed breathlessness in the air; fantastic, dream-like lights and shadows played on the little wrinkling waves; sudden flushes of crimson came and went in the western horizon, and over the high summits of the surrounding mountains mysterious shapes, formed of purple ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... housekeeper. Their evidence, corroborated by that of several friends, tends to show that Sir Charles's health has for some time been impaired, and points especially to some affection of the heart, manifesting itself in changes of colour, breathlessness, and acute attacks of nervous depression. Dr. James Mortimer, the friend and medical attendant of the deceased, has given ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... of the argument when the carriage from Stone Hover arrived. It was a stately barouche the coachman and footman of which equally with its big horses seemed to have hastened to an extent which suggested almost panting breathlessness. It contained Lady Edith and Lady Celia, both pale, and greatly agitated by the news which had brought them horrified from Stone Hover without ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... an eager young reporter on a Boston paper came out to the college by appointment to interview a group of Wellesley women, alumnae and teachers, grief-stricken by the catastrophe which had befallen them. He came impetuously, with that light-hearted breathlessness so characteristic of young reporters in the plays of Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. He was charmingly in character, and he sent his voice out on the run to meet the smallest alumna in ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... That wind which resides in the vital breaths called Prana and Apana occurring within this compound of the five primal elements, rushes upwards, from a situation of distress, leaving the embodied creature. It is even thus that the wind leaves the body. Then is seen breathlessness. The man then becomes destitute of heat, of breath, of beauty, and of consciousness. Deserted by Brahman (for Jiva is Brahman), the person is said to be dead. By those ducts through which he perceives all sensuous objects, the bearer of the body ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... strain and breathlessness of him, the agitation with which he appeared to be laboring, and especially the simple, matter-of-fact detail of his story, carried absolute conviction to Ellen Jorth. Her vague doubt of him had been created by his attitude toward her. Emotion dominated her intelligence. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... in the church and the seats were all filled. It gratified him, at the same time that it hopelessly abased him to observe all this evidence of her power. As he waited for her to appear that tremor came into his hands again, and that breathlessness, and curiously enough he felt that horrible familiar sinking of the heart which he always felt just before ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... indefinitely falling through the blackness. Laughing, shouting, splashing, the campers sported in the water until all of a sudden a red canoe shot into their midst and the director of Camp Altamont, accompanied by two assistants, came in an advanced stage of breathlessness to find out what the matter was. They heard the noise and the splashing of water and ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... impearl'd With lily shells, and pebbles milky white, Poor Cynthia greeted him, and sooth'd her light Against his pallid face: he felt the charm To breathlessness, and suddenly a warm Of his heart's blood: 'twas very sweet; he stay'd His wandering steps, and half-entranced laid His head upon a tuft of straggling weeds, 110 To taste the gentle moon, and freshening beads, Lashed from the crystal roof by fishes' ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... gravely to the young man beside her. He was looking down at her, too. And as their eyes met, and clung for an instant, a slow dark color rose in his face. Prudence felt a curious breathlessness,—caused by ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And all that was beside the cross was ugly and fearful to me, as it had been much occupied with fiends." Then the upper part of her body becomes insensible, and the only pain left is that of weakness and breathlessness. Suddenly she is totally eased and apparently quite cured, which, however, she regards as a momentary miraculous relief, but not as a deliverance from death. In this breathing space it suddenly occurs to her to beg for the second of those three wounds which were the matter of her unconditional ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... was a satisfaction, and to know that it was true gave me mysterious breathlessness and made me hear fragments of old songs during my walk that night. I walked very far, under the trees of the Bois, where I stopped for a few moments to smoke a cigarette at one of the tables ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... quarter of a mile, then threw up her arms, fell down amongst the fern, and lay there on her face. At first her heart hurt her so that she felt nothing but that physical pain. If she could have died! But she knew it was nothing but breathlessness. It left her, and that which took its place she tried to drive away by pressing her breast against the ground, by clutching the stalks of the bracken—an ache, an emptiness too dreadful! Youth to youth! He was gone from her—and she was alone again! She did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hand on his arm for support and walked with the same breathlessness into the restaurant. "My head's in a whirl. . . . I nearly telephoned to say I couldn't come—but I didn't see what good that would do. Eric, I want you to straighten this out for me; Jack was reported ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... performer in all that skating multitude, moving in endless maze over the vast surface of the frozen water-meadow, liked best this season of the year for its expression of a perfect impassivity, or at least of a perfect repose. The earth was, or seemed to be, at rest, with a breathlessness of slumber which suited the young man's peculiar temper. The heavy summer, as it dried up the meadows now lying dead below the ice, set free a crowded and competing world of life, which, while it gleamed very pleasantly russet and yellow for the painter Albert Cuyp, seemed wellnigh ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... on Jacob by Jabbok with the assurance of blessing or as on Jeremiah with a firmer impression of the Will not his own; but no strength is left to glory in the Nature behind the Will. There is a horrified breathlessness about ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... there was no sound. It was still, unreal, and like a scene on the stage. The birds, skimming over the tops of the trees from time to time, threw in as it were a note of fear and suspense. There was breathlessness in the air. A couple of hares, like white shadows in their spotless winter coats, shot from covert to covert ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... with a natural felicity of execution, which amply compensated for the absence of those Italian arts, which so frequently elevate the music at the expense of the sentiment. Stevens looked and listened, and half forgot himself in the breathlessness of his attention—his eye fastened with a gaze of absolute devotion on her features, until, having finished her song, she detected the expression of his face, and started, with blushing ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... surprise that it was barely five o'clock. She wondered that she felt so little sleepy, since she had been up late the night before. All the family and connections had gathered, and she had talked with an eager breathlessness and had listened as eagerly to pick up all those details of home news which do not go into letters; those insignificant changes and events that make up the physiognomy of an existence, without which one cannot again become an integral ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... swift and headlong, passing within a hand's breadth of their wheel, the enormous, toppling, loaded team; its three strong horses in a wild, plunging gallop; heels, heads, haunches, one dark, frantic, struggling tumble and rush. An instant more, of paralyzed breathlessness, and then a thundering fall, that made the ground quiver under their feet; then a stillness more suddenly dreadful than the noise. A great cloud of dust rose slowly up into the air, and showed dimly in ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... so, doctor!" replied the dying uncircumcised Philistine. But he added at whiles, his breathlessness being grievous, and often broken by a sore hiccup, "I am, however, no saint, as you know, doctor; so I wish you to put in a word for me, doctor; for you know that in these times, doctor, it is the duty of every good subject ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... with us," writes Miss Henderson, "has perhaps become obsolete; our national breathlessness cannot brook this paradox of pastoral musings within sight and sound and smell of the busy lure of money making. Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city life. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... A strange breathlessness attacked her, and she attributed it to the celerity with which she was being carried along. Pulling the hood down over her face, she sank low in the seat. The whir of the car now seemed to be a world-filling ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... moment Sofia thought him on the point of bowing, as one might on unexpectedly encountering an acquaintance after many years: there was that hint of impulse hindered by uncertainty. And in that moment the girl was conscious of a singular sensation of breathlessness, as if something impended whose issue might change all the courses of her life. A feeling quite insane and unaccountable, to be sure; and nothing came of it whatever. With a readiness so instant that the break in his walk must have been ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the hurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with real life, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated me with a kind of deference—as if I were a great unknown. His "you literary men" was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... began; then hastily took off his cap and begged the girl's pardon, to which she could not reply for breathlessness. But he seemed to understand what was needed at once, for, after a swift glance from her to the man who was close at hand now, he said in loud, ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... they proceeded, the least little bit as if they knowingly pretended—he giving her the example and setting her the pace of it, and she, poor dear, after a first inevitable shyness, an uncertainty of wonder, a breathlessness of courage, falling into step and going ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... beasts, they came at each other with great fierceness, and so fared for two hours, feinting and striking, and so heavy were their blows that each bled from many wounds as they stood. At last, for sheer breathlessness, each leaned ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... the messenger. There was a suspicion of breathlessness in his voice when he tried ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... contracted that he was compelled to creep on hands and knees, by which method he slowly and painfully overcame foot after foot of the ascent. A little later he was forcing his way with infinite labor, an inch at a time, through a space so narrow that he was squeezed almost to breathlessness. He was also bathed in perspiration, and was obliged to recruit his strength by ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... white like paper, and her hands were cold and shaking, but her voice, except for a certain breathlessness, was cheerfully steady. With more or less noise and with a running fire of inconsequent comment, she rummaged among the trunks and boxes, gradually working her way to, ward the desk ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... on the tone. What did it mean? It was a breathless tone, though not in any manner like the woman's. It was as if he had run and stumbled and caught himself up, and all the time been strangled from within by rage or some like madness. The woman's breathlessness had simply meant life's going out of her with sheer fright. Now the man was coming up the slope, bent at the shoulders, as if he carried a heavy load or as if almost doubling himself helped him to go the faster. He was a thin man with long arms and he carried an ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... down. O'Neil was lifting her from her warm nest of rugs now and telling her to fear nothing. The launch crept closer, coughing and shuddering as if in terror at this close contact. There was a brief instant of breathlessness as the girl found herself swung out over the waters; then a short climb with O'Neil's protecting hand at her waist and she stood panting, radiant, upon steel decks which began to throb and tremble ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... lifted the receiver, and his preliminary "Hello!" was his deepest-throated growl. But then the scene changed. Red Pepper listened, the scowl giving place to an expression of a very different character. He asked a quick question or two, with something like a most unaccustomed breathlessness in his voice, and then he said, in the businesslike but kind way which characterized him when ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond |
