"Chaotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Japanese find it to know which way to take. Their whole basis has been shaken and on the surface all has become chaotic. Ten years hence it will be possible to take a just view. There is much reason for high hopes. For one thing, the burden of old thought does not rest so heavily on us as might be supposed. We are very free in many ways. In the matter of religion Japan is ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... grove encircled a chaotic mass of rock. The clearing was illuminated by the flaring torches carried by a dusky band of men. Weird shadows leaped and played in the dense foliage, where, high above the ground, rude shelters had been made in the thick branches of the trees. The form of a woman, flashing with silver ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... race to rise against their foreign oppressor, and against their native princes who betrayed the interests of the Fatherland, gained the sanction of a Court hitherto very little inclined to form an alliance with popular agitation. If the chaotic disorder of the Austrian Government had been better understood in Europe, less importance would have been attached to this sudden change in its tone. No one in the higher ranks at Vienna was bound by the action of his colleagues. The Emperor, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the road was bad, and the tax-cart no "patent inaudible," neither of us spoke. To me this was a great relief. The events of the last few days had given them the semblance of years, and all the reflection I could muster was little enough to make anything out of the chaotic mass,—love, mischief, and misfortune,—in which I had been involved since my leaving ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... with an overture representing chaos. Its effect is at first dull and indefinite, its utterances inarticulate, and its notes destitute of perceptible melody. It is Nature in her chaotic state, struggling into definite form. Gradually instrument after instrument makes an effort to extricate itself, and as the clarinets and flutes struggle out of the confusion, the feeling of order begins to make itself apparent. The resolutions indicate harmony. At last the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... the better classes: an inborn composure, a calm orderliness of the emotions. Mrs. Wrandall was conscious of a sense of surprise, of a wonder that increased as her thoughts resolved themselves into something less chaotic than they were at the time of contact ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Elbow Rock: "Look there, Brian. See how the river is broken into bits. See how its smoothly flowing, onward sweep is suddenly changed to wild, chaotic turmoil; how it rages and fumes and frets and smashes itself against the rocks. But it goes on just the same. Life cannot be always calm and smoothly flowing like the peaceful Bend. But life can always go on. Life must always go on. And you will find, my dear boy, that a little way below ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural arrangement of the evolution of the earth from its chaotic misty past ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Arima's mind now was: what precisely was it that had happened to his young master, and whither and why had he gone? For even thus far no glimmering of the hideous truth had reached the Indian's mind. His suspicions and apprehensions were all as yet chaotic and formless, and he was very far from fearing that Escombe's life was in danger. But as he proceeded with his business, seeking from time to time to get some relief from his splitting headache and the other extremely disagreeable ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... of a party is a week or fortnight of previous discomfort and chaotic tergiversation, and the mistress of it all distracted and worn out with endless cares. Such a party bursts in on a well-ordered family state as a bomb bursts into a city, leaving confusion and disorder all around. But it would be a pity if such a life-long ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to the door of a building that was a marvel even in the chaotic frontier architecture of the street. The houses on either side—irregular frames of wood or corrugated iron—bore evidence of having been quickly thrown together, to meet the requirements of the goods and passengers who were once disembarked on what was the muddy beach of the infant city. But ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those measures were not long continued. Just as he caught the swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inert ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the certainty that its execution will depend at least as much on chance as on plan: that responsibility will be so attenuated as to pass off in vapour; and that the collection so brought together will consist of parts bearing but a chaotic sort of relation to ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... details, upon the raising, management, and collection of the revenue, including a scheme for revenue cutters; as to the estimates of income and expenditure; as to the temporary regulation of the chaotic currency; as to navigation laws, and the regulation of the coasting trade, after a thorough consideration of a heap of undigested statistics; as to the post-office, for which he drafted a bill; as to the purchase of West Point; on the great question of public lands and a uniform ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... general freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, reduced and simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... paralleled in the German propaganda. With merciless logic and incisive phrase he showed how the Bolsheviki were using the formula, "the self-determination of nationalities," as the basis of a propaganda to bring about the dismemberment of Russia and its reduction to a chaotic medley of small, helpless states. To Lenine's statements about the readiness of the German working class to rebel, Kerensky made retort that Lenine should have remained in Germany while on his way to Russia ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... is by no means so wild and imperfect as might be expected from a nation in such a chaotic and uncultivated condition. The people of Greece are hardly more civilized than the Servians, the Dalmatians, or any other of the half-savage tribes that inhabit the south-eastern corner of Europe, but the influence exercised by the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those elements. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... 1644, when Calvert returned to Maryland, there were strong symptoms of revolt, which came to a head when Ingle came back to St. Mary's with a commission from Parliament in February, 1645. Chaotic times ensued, during which Catholics were made victims of the cruel prejudices of the Protestants. The two Jesuit priests, Father Andrew White and Father Philip Fisher, were arrested, loaded with irons,[18] and sent prisoners into England, while ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... and the Far Eastern empire were an inevitable outcome of the future. This chimera is unthinkable by anyone really familiar with the trend of Japanese sentiment, but it may encourage in China a dangerous mood, and it helps always to foster an unquiet feeling. On the whole, when we add the chaotic condition into which China is apparently falling, it has to be admitted that the second decade of the twentieth century does not open a peaceful vista ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... wealthy admirer of Akbar and his achievements may appear and provide the considerable funds required for the preparation of the desired treatise. The Christian antiquities of Agra also deserve systematic treatment. At present the information on record is in a chaotic state. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... grew more aware that he hadn't even a dim candle of talent; that he was ill-planned and unpurposed; that he would have to settle down to the ordinary gray limbo of jobs and offices—as soon as he could get control of his chaotic desires. Literally, he hated himself at times; hated his own egotism, his treacherous appetite for drink and women and sloth, his imitative attempts at literature. But no one knew how bitterly he despised himself, in lonely walks in the rain, in ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... wasn't sure just when the last straw had been added, but he was sure that he had had enough. The restrictions, red tape, security measures of these government laboratories seemed to close in on his mind in boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... Miss Ashe," she said presently, "what a chaotic, unpleasant place this world would be without law, ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... of discords of sound, if reproduced on a music roll, would present a chaotic jumble ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... filaments, and curved spiral wreaths project outward from the parent mass, and become gradually lost in the surrounding space. This object remained for long a profound mystery; no telescope was capable of resolving it, nor was it known what this 'unformed fiery mist, the chaotic material of future suns,' was, until the spectroscope revealed that it consists of a stupendous mass of incandescent gases—nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elementary substances, occupying a region of space believed by some to equal in extent the whole ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... sickly pallor over the jagged scarp of the Mesa, bounding the chaotic labyrinth of bowlders, crag and canon beneath. Far up the rugged valley, jutting from the faded fringe of pine, juniper and scrub oak that bearded the Mogollon, a solitary butte stood like sentry against the cloudless ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... was actually challenged by slave rebels. It was during the chaotic days of 1630-1654, when the Dutch were in occupation of Pernambuco, and the Brazilians were at war with them, that hundreds of slaves fled to the interior, where they established an independent ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... thought out the subject in early manhood, that God would continue existence if He did not make it a blessing. But to others who, like many before him, had intelligently accepted of a sterner theology, and who had been struggling through years of chaotic doubts and fancies for footing on which to rest, he saw that these assurances gave real strength and support. An hour had passed amidst these manifestations—the interest of the believers continued to be unflagging, but Francis felt a little ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the three great spaces of sea and land and sky, were incarnadined with the glory of it. The ocean floor was a blinding red radiance, the hills were amethyst, the sky one gigantic opal, and they two seemed poised in the midst of all the chaotic glory of a primitive world. It was New Year's Day; the earth was new, the year was new, and their love was new and strong. Everything was before them. There was no longer any past, no longer any present. ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... not readily suggest a design fitting the conditions of a panel her tendency is always towards unity of arrangement. If you take a bunch of flowers or leaves and haphazard stuff them into a vase of water, you will probably get a very chaotic arrangement. But if you leave it for some time and let nature have a chance you will find that the leaves and flowers have arranged themselves much more harmoniously. And if you cut down one of a group of trees, what a harsh discordant gap is usually left; but in time nature will, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... his huge, slow-moving, in some respects chaotic mind turned over as rapidly as he could all of the possibilities in connection with this unexpected, sad, and disturbing revelation. Why had Cowperwood not been satisfied with his wife? Why should he enter into his (Butler's) home, of all places, to establish a clandestine ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Australia. She held the degree of Doctor from the University of Melbourne; a doctor of music. Jaime, suppressing his astonishment at this news from a distant world, told of himself, of his family, of his native land, of the curiosities of the island, of the cavern of Arta, tragically grand, chaotic as an ante-chamber of the inferno; of the Dragon's caves with their forests of stalactites, glistening like an ice palace, of its thousand placid lakes, from the deep crystal depths of which it seemed as if nude sirens would arise like those Rhine maidens who ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... bedroom; the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is an historical expression of the successive Ages of the world's growth. The central fountain symbolizes the nebulous world, with its innate human passions. Out of a chaotic condition came Water (the basin), and Land (the fountain), and Light (the Sun, supported by Helios, and the electroliers). The braziers and cauldrons symbolize Fire. The two sentinel columns to the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... a nation would be absurd, for nation, properly speaking, it is not; but to consider it in its present chaotic state, is well worth the labour. It would not only exhibit to the living a somewhat new picture of the human mind, but, as a curious page in the Philosophy of History, it would hereafter serve as a subject of review for ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... midsummer drive through, the Pyrenees. We realize it almost suddenly, and with regret. We seek to absorb and enjoy every minute as we drive down the long hills and on through the Vale of Campan in the evening light toward Bigorre. It is a chaotic, delightful array of memories that our minds are whirling over and over in their busy hoppers,—incidents and scenes, grains of legend, kernels of history, gleanings of quick, nearer life,—all the intermingled associations now sown for ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... chiefly to the medical journals, but I would include with these the reports of medical associations, and those separate publications which, coming in the form of pamphlets, heap themselves into chaotic piles and bundles which are worse than useless, taking up a great deal of room, and frightening everything away but mice and mousing antiquarians, or possibly at long ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the music and papers on the table; in chaotic drawers; beneath dirty, fat-scaled dinner-dishes on the washstand; between door and stove, through a kind of rubbishheap that had formed with time, of articles of dress, spoiled sheets of music-paper, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a tense expectancy—the rift of blue sky between the filigree of dark pines high above, the rush of white-streaked water thundering down the gorge below and frothing high about the massive boulders, and one huge fang of promontory which a touch of her finger would, if all went well, reduce to chaotic debris. Groups of workmen waited on the opposite side of the flood, all staring towards her expectantly, and Thomas Savine stood close by holding an insignificant box with wires attached to it, in a hand that was not quite steady. Tom from Mattawa sat perched upon a spire of rock holding up a ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the further he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity intact, did ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... no rest, no cessation of the stir and turmoil in the great house, and amid it all Nell moved like a kind of good fairy, contriving to just keep the whole thing from smashing up in chaotic confusion. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... to come? A feeling half of sadness crept into Roger's heavy eyes as he looked at the man, at his smiling face and then at other faces in the multitudes sweeping past. The moment he tried to single them out, how doubly chaotic it became. What an ocean of warm desires, passions, vivid hopes and worries. Vaguely he could feel them pass. Often in the midst of his life, his active and self-centered life, Roger had looked at these crowds on the street and had thought ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... law was in a very chaotic state, Queen Bess was not at all disturbed by the threats of the Vatican or the Armada of Spain. With old Lord Cecil as her prime counsel, she never hesitated to believe in her own destiny, and, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... and system are very pretty words. But you make a small mistake. It is not I that embroil. I find confusion already established; and, since I cannot correct it, give me a reason why I ought not to profit by the chaotic hubbub?' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... alternated with conversations on divers topics. Whenever I and Seraphina began to get too absorbed in sentimental dreams and vague aspirations, the Lady Adelheid, though now hardly young enough to be so naive and droll as she once was, yet intervened with all sorts of merry and somewhat chaotic nonsense. From several hints she let fall, I soon discovered that the Baroness really had something preying upon her mind, even as I thought I had read in her eyes the very first moment I saw her; and I clearly discerned the hostile influence of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." In preparing his History, Gibbon spent fifteen years. Every chapter was the subject of long-continued study and careful original research. From the chaotic materials which he found, he constructed a history remarkable as well for its scholarly precision as for the vastness of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... philosophers were all evolutionists. So Aristophanes, quoting from these or Hesiod concerning the origin of things, says: "Chaos was and Night, and Erebus black, and wide Tartarus. No earth, nor air nor sky was yet; when, in the vast bosom of Erebus (or chaotic darkness) winged Night brought forth first of all the egg, from which in after revolving periods sprang Eros (Love) the much desired, glittering with golden wings; and Eros again, in union with Chaos, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... below, and around me, are mountains piled on mountains in chaotic confusion. Some are bald and bleak; others exhibit traces of vegetation in the dark needles of the pine and cedar, whose stunted forms half-grow, half-hang from the cliffs. Here, a cone-shaped peak soars up till it is lost ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... spontaneous expression of feeling had fitted in her mind to the Cause which possessed her as a religious idea, and had capped in him the human yearnings which were leading him to the same goal. And so, what with his overflowing sympathy for the sleeping outcast, and his swelling love for Nellie, and the chaotic excitement roused in him by all he had seen and heard during the preceding hours, that kiss burnt itself into his imagination and became to him all his life through as a sacred symbol. From that moment his life was forecast—a woman tempted ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... passed beyond the limitations of its own age, and assumed a position sub specie aeternitatis, that it was able to free itself from the prevalent confusion of the imaginary and the real, the word and the idea, and to perceive that success in allegory depends, not on the chaotic intermingling of the attributes of the type and the thing typified, but on so representing the one as to suggest and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... on chatting with Peggotty that the old gentleman's mind is in somewhat of a chaotic state with respect to the wrecks that abound in the bay. He has been here for forty-eight years, and the fact is, in that time, he has seen so many wrecks that the timbers are, as it were, floating in an indistinguishable mass through ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... researches after the longitude (for which the mischief-loving Swift discharged on their heads a most savory stanza), has distinguished himself by a very admirable theory respecting the earth. He conjectures that it was originally a chaotic comet, which, being selected for the abode of man, was removed from its eccentric orbit; and whirled round the sun in its present regular motion; by which change of direction, order succeeded to confusion in the arrangement of its component parts. The philosopher adds that the deluge ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... have proclaimed have, no doubt, encountered a vast, unorganized, negative opposition from them, but the subtle and varied attack of natural forces they have neither the collective intelligence to recognize, nor the natural organization to resist. The shareholding body is altogether too chaotic and diffused for positive defence. And the question of the prolonged existence of this comparatively new social phenomenon, either in its present or some modified form, turns, therefore, entirely on the quasi-natural laws ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... which is spreading its fatal branches in all directions, should ever succeed, it could not but result in the most frightful despotism ever contemplated by men. Ireland in such an event would be the infinitesimal part of a chaotic system worthy ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... months he indulged himself in a few petty extravagances as he crossed the city to get his train. The day had excited him, had destroyed the calm of his usual controlled, plodding habits. The feverish buoyancy of his mood made it pleasant to thread the chaotic streams of the city streets. It was intoxicating to rub shoulders with ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... architect as lightly as you would select a cravat. To him you are intrusting the task of putting your chaotic and half-expressed thoughts and desires into a set of plans that will guide and control masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and painters in their work. As your professional adviser, it will be his job to bridge the gap between the date of purchase and the happy occasion ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... in royal history; and having been reported in the world with infinite noise and censure, made up of laughter and horror, it will behoove us to be the more exact in relating them as they actually befell. Very difficult to pull, out of that ravelled cart-load of chaotic thrums, here a thread and there a thread, capable of being brought to the straight state, and woven into legible narrative! But perhaps, by that method the mingled laughter and horror will modify itself a little. What we can well say is, that ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... that neither has empirical aesthetics said the last word concerning beauty. Criticism is still in a chaotic state that would be impossible if aesthetic theory were firmly grounded. This situation appears to me to be due to the inherent inadequacy and inconclusiveness of empirical aesthetics when it stands alone; the grounds of this inadequacy I shall seek ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... on you when you defied me was one thing ... to fight you when you are helpless is another.... I wasn't fighting you then but the rock-bound bigotries of your ancestors." He paused, finding it hard to choose words because of the chaotic ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... immense charm, the subduing, victorious quality of art, to the power of mere emotion as such; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness of beauty and wonder, by the fascination of what is finer than ourselves, into deeper consciousness of our innermost, primaeval, chaotic self: the stuff in which soul has not yet dawned. We are made to enjoy what we should otherwise dread; and the dignity of beauty, and beauty's frankness and fearlessness, are lent to things such as we regard, under ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... patience slowly disentangled the chaotic labyrinth of threads again, and then exclaimed with a ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... knew to be everything, so they swept up the gorge like a whirlwind. Thus both parties drew nearer to the chaotic opening styled the Wild-Cat Pass—the trappers, all ignorant of what awaited them there; the savages bent on giving their ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Babylonian account, "the heavens and the earth are represented as existing, though in a chaotic ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... interest to philosophy; while, on the other hand, the ponderous Germans, who living in clouds of smoke have a positive genius for making the obscure obscurer, are thought to be original, because they are so chaotic and clumsy. But we have yet to learn that lead is priceless because it is weighty, or that gold is valueless because it glitters. The Damascus blade is none the less keen because it is polished, nor the Corinthian shaft less strong because it is fluted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... inclined her to take their part almost involuntarily, so deep was the craving of her chilled nature for sympathy. If she had been brought up in loving dependence she would not have been so well equipped for the chaotic emergency. Having no hope of good counsel from natural advisers, she did not waste a moment in seeking it, or weakly hesitate for its lack. What her bright, active mind suggested as right and best, that she was ready to do instantly. ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... to arraign her chaotic thoughts and reason the affair out. Was the mislaying of a hypodermic needle such a heinous offence? Impossible! There was no sense in it. Was it then that the doctor had a sort of fixation on the subject of precision, that she had unknowingly offended him in a vulnerable spot? That explanation ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... and this is just what we Russians lack. Oh, if we could educate our unusual powers and abilities, if we had the will to apply them actively in our chaotic, untidy existence, which is terribly blocked up with all kinds of idle clack and home-spun philosophy, and which gets more and more saturated with silly arrogance and puerile bragging. Somewhere deep in the Russian soul—no matter whether it is the "master's" or the muzhik's—there lives a petty ...
— The Shield • Various
... about me. My head reeled, the wine, the excitement, my long previous illness, all pressed upon me; and as my temples throbbed loudly and painfully, a chaotic rush of discordant, ill-connected ideas flitted across my mind. There seemed some stir and confusion in the room, but why or wherefore I could not think, nor could I recall my scattered senses, till Sir George Dashwood's voice roused me once ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... England to preside over the courts, but also as a consequence of the steady determination of the majority of French Canadians to ignore laws to which they had naturally an insuperable objection. In fact, the condition of things became practically chaotic. It might have been much worse had not General Murray, at first, and Sir Guy Carleton, at a later time, endeavoured, so far as lay in their power, to mitigate the hardships to which the people were subject by being forced to observe laws of which ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... with an historical play too enormous for the stage, closed in 1843 with Les Burgraves, which is an epic in dialogue. Aspiring to revolutionary freedom, the romantic drama disdained the bounds of art; epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy met and mingled, with a result too often chaotic. The desired harmony of contraries was not attained. Past ages were to be revived upon the stage. The historic evocation possessed too often neither historic nor human truth; it consisted in "local colour," and local colour meant a picturesque display of theatrical bric-a-brac. Yet a drama ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... room seemed suddenly to congeal. The silence was intense. Adhemar himself remained thunderstruck in his chair, his tongue dry, his thoughts chaotic, unable to form a reply to the child's virulent attack. For the sake of breaking up this general paralysis, Maurice Renaud finally suggested that they should vote upon the decision to be given ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... unravel; the point d'appui is missing; the interest is nowhere focussed, though the dancer woman soon catches the eye. No doubt a crowded supper room in a Continental cafe, the white napery, variegated colours of the women's attire, the movement and blinding glare of the lights are a chaotic blur when you first open your eyes upon them; but the human eye with its almost infinite capacity for adaptation soon resolves disorder into order, formlessness into form. The trouble with the Futurist ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... from it, harries you. Your wit's in a whirl, as you think, if some girl with a penchant for you, ups and marries you. And ties you for life to the thing called a Wife,—that figment, that fraud, that illusion, Where, what will you be? And you can't find a key to the epoch's chaotic confusion. It seems Local Option is sure of adoption, and what a tyrannic majority May "opt" for one day, you're unable to say, and in vain you appeal to Authority. The Law of the Land is a labyrinth grand, which you can't understand, nor can anyone, And that is a thought, with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... and the grave beauty Of England's Helicon, whose eternal light Shines like a lantern on that road of duty, Discerned by few in this chaotic night. ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... by the maxim "Nature unaided fails"; but the difficulty is that if enhanced powers were attained by the whole population of the world without any common basis for their use, their promiscuous exercise could only result in chaotic confusion and the destruction of the entire race. To introduce the creative power of the Individual and at the same time avoid converting it into a devastating flood is the great problem of the transition from ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... intense heat and intense cold to which the moon is continually exposed, will account for the formation of many of those tremendous chasms and precipices which we see everywhere around us, as well as for the huge mounds of dislodged rocks and debris, which are piled up in such chaotic confusion on the ledges of the mountains and ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... of elements drawn from the experiences of waking life, but, in spite of their fantastic character, bear some semblance of ordered reality, so the impulses of even the most unintelligent and inconsequent of human beings are not wholly chaotic, but differ only in the degree of their organization from those of the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Martin, and more changes. He was delighted with his work in the El Nido mine, the "Emmy Younger," and everything he had to say about it was amusing and interesting. It was still in a rather chaotic condition, he reported, but the "stuff" was there, and he anticipated a busy winter. He was to have a cottage, a pretty crude affair, in a few weeks, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... straight down, dragged to bottom by the heavy ballast. So quickly did it all happen that I was entangled in the sail and drawn under. When I fought my way to the surface, suffocating, my lungs almost bursting, I could see nothing of the oars. They must have been swept away by the chaotic currents. I saw Demetrios Contos looking back from his boat, and heard the vindictive and mocking tones of his voice as he shouted exultantly. He held steadily on his course, leaving ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... not organized like a business office, with sharply defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, "dirty nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief work for refugees, and in the commissariat ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... firmly in Foma's mind, and growing clearer, larger and more vivid with each time it arose before him, rousing in his breast something chaotic, one great indefinite feeling into which fell, like streams into a river, fear and revolt and compassion and wrath and many another thing. All this boiled up within his breast into strained desire, which was thrusting ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... jungle, and muskiness, and decay, and flowers, and every conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every kind of message they could possibly ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... significance of SILENCE: it is boundless, never by meditating to be exhausted, unspeakably profitable to thee! Cease that chaotic hubbub, wherein thy own soul runs to waste, to confused suicidal dislocation and stupor; out of Silence comes thy strength. "Speech is silvern, silence is golden; speech is human, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... long as things came his way. His amours had always been of the safe rather than the wildly adventurous sort. Sansome had no morals; but being found out produced effects so closely resembling those of conscience that they could not be distinguished. In the chaotic collapse of this heroic episode he managed to cling to but one thing. That was Morrell's often reiterated warning: "Don't let Keith get ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... it would be dreadful not to have a country, but her mind is quite chaotic on the subject. She is glad, however, to have been ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... gee-pole would be the easier task, and a man would come back to it to rest after having completed his spell to the fore, breaking trail with the snowshoes for the dogs. Such work was far from exhilarating also, they must expect places where for miles at a time they must toil over chaotic ice-jams, where they would be fortunate if they made two miles an hour. And there would be the inevitable bad jams, short ones, it was true, but so bad that a mile an hour would require terrific effort. Kama and Daylight did not talk. In the nature of the work they could not, nor ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... had, in sheer desperation, wooed so recklessly. When the thing was done it was something for angels and devils alike to tremble before. It meant nothing, of course, but, like many inscrutable and unfathomable things, it terrified by its sheer blank, chaotic madness. He hung it in the exhibition. And it was—yes, it was—the hit of the occasion. This is not a fairy tale—not even fiction. The story was told me by the culprit—or was ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... and negative, were evidently pointing; and here, after such brief attempting or thoughts to attempt at other posts, he already in this same year arrives. As many do, and ever more must do, in these our years and times. This is the chaotic haven of so many frustrate activities; where all manner of good gifts go up in far-seen smoke or conflagration; and whole fleets, that might have been war-fleets to conquer kingdoms, are consumed (too truly, often), amid "fame" enough, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... each of which certain bunches of bills are referred before they are permitted to come before the house, would be no longer necessary. This system, which became necessary in order to deal with the enormous mass of undigested matter which has overwhelmed every legislature as a result of the present chaotic and irresponsible procedure, is perhaps both the most undemocratic device ever put in practice by a democracy, and the most fruitful of venality, corruption and injustice. It is unnecessary to labour this ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... understood the complex and extensive nature of these sentiments, and, whatever might be their opinion concerning his guilt or innocence of the specific charge under discussion, they greatly feared the graver charge which emanated from the chaotic darkness of superstition, ignorance, prejudice and jealousy and the location of which could be determined only by occasional and ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... spirit would be incorrect. He seemed to be preparing for immediate hostilities, and so, not to be taken at a disadvantage, I closed with him as he leaped out of bed. The melee lasted probably five minutes, during which brief period his furniture was hurled in chaotic profusion all round the room, my black mess jacket was divided up the back from the tail to the collar, his pyjamas carried away, and the skin was detached from his bare feet by my boots. So ended a glorious evening. Next ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... the giants in literary research and industry,—a race now almost extinct. Without a literary education, and impeded too, it appears, by much trouble of mind and infirmity of body, he has accomplished such a thorough work of classification and description for the chaotic mass of Irish literature, that the student has now half his labour saved, and needs only to use his materials as Eugene O'Curry hands them to him. It was as a professor in the Catholic University in Dublin that O'Curry gave ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... lower and lower. It seemed to me as we stood in that empty garage that an invisible hand was drawing a net closer and closer about Isobel and my ideas became increasingly chaotic, for the purpose of it all eluded me, try how I would to conceive of a scheme by which any one could profit which necessitated the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved horribly in the Gaelic O'Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man's unnatural fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: "Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... regiments had thrown down their arms, which were lying in regular lines on the ground, as if for inspection; suppers just prepared had been abandoned; tents, baggage, wagons, cannons, half-slaughtered oxen, covered the foreground in chaotic confusion, while in the background a host of many thousand Yankees were discerned scampering for their lives as fast as their limbs could carry them, closely followed by our men, who were taking prisoners by the hundreds, and scarcely ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Zend-Avesta. We cannot here enter into the grammatical arguments by which each of these translations is supported. We only wish to show what is the present state of Zend scholarship, and though we would by no means disguise the fact of its somewhat chaotic character, yet we do not hesitate to affirm that, in spite of the conflict of the opinions of different scholars, and in spite of the fluctuation of systems apparently opposed to each other, progress may be reported, and a firm hope expressed that the essential ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... that even when in the first dim vision, the organizing hand of Law moved among the unordered truths of my Spiritual World, poor and scantily-furnished as it was, there seemed to come over it the beauty of a transfiguration. The change was as great as from the old chaotic world of Pythagoras to the symmetrical and harmonious universe of Newton. My Spiritual World before was a chaos of facts; my Theology, a Pythagorean system trying to make the best of Phenomena apart from the idea of Law. I make no charge against Theology in ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... in a muddle now; not that it was ever in very good order. Russians in general are broad in their ideas, Avdotya Romanovna, broad like their land and exceedingly disposed to the fantastic, the chaotic. But it's a misfortune to be broad without a special genius. Do you remember what a lot of talk we had together on this subject, sitting in the evenings on the terrace after supper? Why, you used to reproach me with breadth! Who knows, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
