"Decipherable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prevail upon our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with their fathers from generation to generation—as the dates and ages decipherable on our monuments will testify—would not annihilate them; and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... week, an unsigned communication which, for a long while afterward, I did not comprehend. It was the photograph of an infant, with the photographer's address scratched from the cardboard and without of course any decipherable postmark; and upon the back of the thing was written: "His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the flowers; and gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him. Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... everything, if resistance were attempted, but finding little or none; and acting now in a peaceable or even friendly capacity. In the Southampton country he came in contact with the then Bishop of Winchester, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury, excellent Elphegus, still dimly decipherable to us as a man of great natural discernment, piety, and inborn veracity; a hero-soul, probably of real brotherhood with Olaf's own. He even made court visits to King Ethelred; one visit to him at Andover of a very serious nature. By Elphegus, as we can discover, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... by his picking up near the porter's seat a small silver-topped bottle and a handkerchief, both marked with coronet and monogram, the last of which, although the letters were much interlaced and involved, were decipherable as S.L.L.C. ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... the East as president. There were still many things needed—dormitories, laboratories of one kind and another, a great library; and, last but not least, a giant telescope—one that would sweep the heavens with a hitherto unparalleled receptive eye, and wring from it secrets not previously decipherable by the eye and the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... impossible to draw a line above which a variant is important and below which it is negligible; that, to use a word of the poet's own coining, his emendations are rarely if ever 'lightheartednesses'; and that if a collation of the printed text with MSS. is worth studying at all the one must be as decipherable as the other. Facsimiles are rare and costly productions, and an exhaustive table of variants is the nearest approach to a substitute. Many, I know, are the shortcomings, too many, I fear, are the errors in the footnotes to this volume, but now, for the first ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... suburbs of large cities than elsewhere, since in thinly-settled districts the main road at least is generally easy to keep. Occasionally the post is a mocker, its painted letters being suffered to grow so dim with time as not to be decipherable; or perhaps the board has been carried off by a gale, or else turned the wrong way by some joker, who relies on the authorities to neglect the mischief. It would save much time and temper for wayfarers were guide-boards multiplied fourfold in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... He recognised it at first glance for a map of the coast and country about Polpeor, and for this he was prepared; but the same glance showed him a slip of paper pinned to the map's left upper corner. The paper bore a scrawl in pencil, ill-written, but decipherable— ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... found sticking in the timbers, and further search revealed shell-holes through the hull and cut rigging. A signal was flying from the mizen halyards, and the name on the counter, although spattered with shot, was still, in part, decipherable—Rickivik, Copenhafen. ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Church divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should be added that with equal regularity he dropped the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable person in religious matters—as ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the words written on the wax were carefully effaced, and hardly a letter was decipherable; indeed, there were so few lines that it seemed as though the letter had never been ended-which was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of late thought, we should say that by it everything is made 'an antiquity.' When, in former times; our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as occupied with coins, and medals, and Druids' stones; these were then the characteristic records of the decipherable past, and it was with these that decipherers busied themselves. But now there are other relics; indeed, all matter is become such. Science tries to find in each bit of earth the record of the causes which made it precisely ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... dust laid itself again, as all dust does if you leave it well alone? Much obscuration would thus of its own accord fall away; and, in Mr. Hare's narrative itself, apart from his commentary, many features of Sterling's true character would become decipherable to such as sought them. Censure, blame of this Work of Mr. Hare's was naturally far from my thoughts. A work which distinguishes itself by human piety and candid intelligence; which, in all details, is careful, lucid, exact; and which offers, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... and one inch deep. It was neatly tied with thin scarlet twine, and innocent of markings except for the superscription in a precise, copperplate hand, and the smudge of the postmark across the ten-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner. The imprint of the cancellation, faintly decipherable, showed that the package had been mailed at the Madison Square substation at half-past seven o'clock of ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... he had to strip from the pad the page on which he had begun the letter to Jeanne. He wrote: "Dearest Peggy." Then the pencil-point's impress through the thin paper stared at him. Almost every word was decipherable. Recklessly he tore the pad in half and on a virgin page scribbled his message to Peggy. The nurse departed with it. He took up the flimsy sheet containing his interrupted letter to Jeanne and glanced at it in dismay. For the first ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the corner; unfolding one and another document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of merchants, never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we bestow on the corpse of dead activity,—and exerting my fancy, sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... (veiling it under discreet asterisks, which are now decipherable enough), The Durchlaucht of Lippe-Buckeburg had summoned six Brethren of the Hamburg Lodge; of whom we mention only a Graf von Kielmannsegge, a Baron von Oberg, both from Hanover, and Bielfeld himself, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... desperately poor, Mr. Royson. They have mortgaged their credit to its utmost extent to enable them to keep up appearances, and they dread some catastrophe which will interfere with our search, though the only authority we have for the existence of the Roman legion's loot is a scrap of scarcely decipherable writing, which, though genuine enough, may be nothing ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... read by anyone with a claim to eyesight was Yellow Barbee's devotion; equally plainly decipherable, thought Helen, was the fact of Mrs. Murray's amusement at Barbee's infatuation. It meant nothing to her; she was playing with him as, no doubt, she had played with many another susceptible youngster. Helen was sure she read that in the eyes which ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... rites of the ludi took place, came upon a mediaeval wall partly made of ancient material, in which some marbles were found covered with inscriptions relating to this same celebration.[930] This treasure was badly mutilated, but the inscription was easily decipherable; it contains a letter from Augustus giving instructions, two decrees of the Senate, and a series of records of the Quindecemviri, who were of course in charge of a ritual which had been ordered by a Sibylline oracle. Some few points were at ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... was profound at finding himself afloat in the open sea, with the convict-ship—the name on the bows and stern of which was easily decipherable by him—close alongside. He stared alternately about him and at the steamer that lay gently heaving upon the slight swell within a biscuit-toss of him with an expression of mingled bewilderment and incredulity that proved highly diverting to the two men ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... literary and political life,—coming, through his professional interests, frequently and closely in contact with certain of its central figures,—and should during this interval have written twenty original plays, three long poems, and over one hundred and fifty sonnets, without leaving in this work decipherable reflections of the characters and movements of his time. That these conscious, or unconscious, reflections have not long ago been recognised and interpreted I impute to the lack of an intimate knowledge of contemporary history on the part ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson |
