"Disjointed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... miles across the widest part, and tapers to the east and west. As if nature aimed to provide for two distinct communities, a precipitous mountain spur, which sprawls several hundred miles north and south, ribs the territory almost mathematically in the centre, and tumbles onward, broken and disjointed, to the shores of the Caribbean Sea. The rumors that gold and diamonds are awaiting garnering in the wild solitudes have roused the earth hunger of more than one powerful nation, but the grim dragon that ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Guinness, for whom each day's bumpers had been frothed so high—came back in the familiar exits and entrances. The words were innocent enough as he altered them in reading for Kitty, though a good deal disjointed as to meaning; but she was not critical—forced herself to take an interest in his stories of Burton and Kean, and how he first saw ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... deadly torpedo, the water rushed upon the heated boilers, the explosion of which in turn ignited the magazines. By that deadly underwater thrust of the enemy the battleship was reduced in a few moments to a disjointed, disorganized, sinking mass of shapeless, ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... down the rough, disjointed, slippery declivity, and the others followed. They were soon perceived; the Apache swarm was instantly in a buzz; horses were saddled and mounted, or mounted without saddling; there was a consultation, and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... overtakes us and more numerous bodies of the enemy beset the way, let us break through those disorderly and irregular troops who are making a noise at our gates. By the sword and courage, a road may be made through enemies, however dense. In a wedge we shall make our way through this loose and disjointed band, as if nothing opposed us. Come along with me therefore, ye who wish the safety of yourselves and the state." Having thus said, he draws his sword, and forming a wedge, goes through the midst of the enemy; and as the Numidians discharged their ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... plastic period of their minds and characters. Allow for all these influences, allow for whatever impressions his German residence and his familiarity with German literature had produced; accept the fact that the story is to the last degree disjointed, improbable, impossible; lay it aside as a complete failure in what it attempted to be, and read it, as "Vivian Grey" is now read, in the light of the career which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of a garden" had stared at me, and when the key turned and grated in the rusty old lock of this dreary tenement, with its disjointed floors, disintegrated foundations, darkened apartments with shutters all closed, I almost thought I might encounter within the ghost of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... into a very bad way. His was not the nature that emits sweetness when bruised; it cankered and got black spots through it. And he knew no physician to whom he could go for healing; no power, greater than his own, to set his disjointed life straight. Love and faith, alike, stood afar off. The waters of desolation encompassed his soul, without a sign of olive ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... knees, squattered into pieces the boughts or pestles of their thighs, and so thumped, mauled and belaboured them everywhere, that never was corn so thick and threefold threshed upon by ploughmen's flails as were the pitifully disjointed members of their mangled bodies under the merciless baton of the cross. If any offered to hide himself amongst the thickest of the vines, he laid him squat as a flounder, bruised the ridge of his back, and dashed his reins like a dog. If any thought by flight to escape, he made his head to fly in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... With these and other disjointed impressions in my mind, I returned to the divannaia. As soon as every one had reassembled, the priest rose and prepared to read the prayer before confession. The instant that the silence was broken by the ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... set out, and, with few interruptions, arrived at a place half-way up the mountain called The Hermitage. Here they rested, and leaving their horses behind, walked on over a barren region to the foot of the cone. All around was the abomination of desolation. Craggy rocks, huge, disjointed masses of shattered lava-blocks, cooled off into the most grotesque shapes, mixed with ashes, scoriae, and pumice-stones. The cone towered frowningly above their heads. Looking up, the aspect was not enticing. A steep slope ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... with Lee's victorious troops. But there was no further disaster. Under the most adverse and dispiriting circumstances the Army of the Potomac fairly held their own until {15} they reached the impregnable position of Malvern Hill. There McClellan turned at bay and repulsed with heavy slaughter the disjointed attacks of the Army of Northern Virginia. He had withdrawn his army intact and had effected a change of base, unknown to the Confederate General Staff, from the York River to the James. This proved his strategic ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... for tones of comedy. He could get ten or twelve inflections out of a speech of about four lines; he had a wonderful method of getting the actors to accept and project these tones over the footlights. He got what he wanted from them in the most extraordinary way. With his disjointed, pantomimic method of instruction he was able to transfer to them, as if by telepathy, what ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... least, and he the most could wish himself. In consequence, then, I'm cut asunder, [12] disjointed, to my sorrow, by the devices of this scoundrel, who has bamboozled me by his tricks just as he has thought fit. But do, please, have a care that you ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... is the fruit of long and careful research among disjointed records left by survivors of the terrible events described. The writer wishes frankly to say that, in some instances, he has followed the course which all historians are compelled to take by using his imagination to round out the picture. But he is able conscientiously to declare that in the ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... exclusion of "that vain old idiot, Alresford," from any further chances of muddling a public department, that Lady Selina's talk made her at once nervous and irritable. She was afraid of being indiscreet; yet she longed to put her visitor down. In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving idealist nature—mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy—was always trying to reconcile the ends of eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of Sisyphus; but she would ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... regular soundings on the west side, but the ground is too hard for holding well, being coral rocks. The east side they did not examine. The low narrow part has evidently been overflowed and the island disjointed, for in the very center, as they walked across, they saw large beds of coral rocks, and shells in great abundance; and on the east side, which seems in general to be the weather side, the sea has thrown up a bank of sand, from twenty-five to thirty feet in height, which ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... say. Whatever interest they felt in each other was guarded, taciturn. When they talked it was in disjointed ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... her wrist out of joint. She could throw any of her joints out of place, but she properly chose her wrist upon this occasion as being the better joint to intrust to a young physician. If Jack had known that until his coming her wrist had been all right, and that it had not become disjointed until he rang the front door bell of the Barbett house, he might not have been so pleased as he entered the item against Judge Barbett in his book, nor would he have wondered ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... a complete failure, but while our losses were negligible and no impression was made on our line, the enemy added a large number to his recent very heavy casualties. It seems plain from the disjointed nature of his attack that he is finding it difficult to drive his infantry ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... causes above stated, he is aware that his work must not unfrequently appear somewhat disjointed and unconnected, and the style rude and unpolished: he has, nevertheless, permitted the tree to remain where he felled it, having, indeed, subsequently enjoyed too little leisure to make much ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... humanity, the restraining bond of all society; and, however large the separate petals have grown, however strongly, or even beautifully, a few of them have been marked, the whole is at present a loose, deformed, disjointed mass, without union, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... on the alert. See how, instantly active, he makes use of the voice from beneath to enforce his requisition of silence. Very speedily too he grows quiet: a glimmer of light as to the course of action necessary to him has begun to break upon him: it breaks from his own wild and disjointed behaviour in the attempt to hide the conflict of his feelings—which suggests to him the idea of shrouding himself, as did David at the court of the Philistines, in the cloak of madness: thereby protected ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... had grown uneasy in regard to the disjointed situation of our army, and, to inform myself of what was going on, determined to send a spy into the enemy's lines. In passing Valley Head on the 10th my scout Card, who had been on the lookout for some one capable to undertake the task, brought me a Union ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... condition, they were crowded with sick, hoping to derive benefit from the waters, which are still famed for their sanative power. These patients exhibited a strange spectacle as, wrapped in flannel gowns much resembling shrouds, they lay immersed in the tepid waters amongst disjointed stones, and overhung with ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... fluttering pulse grew stronger and the man roused from his stupor, disjointed phrases of sinister meaning fell from his lips. No names were used, and much of his talk was in Spanish, but it suggested a foul undercurrent of bribery, falsehood and conspiracy hidden by the bright magnificence of the young Queen's ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... Berber, and who had a very lively recollection of the events of 1884 and 1885, lost no time in the despatch of British troops; and the speed with which a force, so suddenly called for, was concentrated shows the capacity for energy which may on occasion be developed even by our disjointed military organisation. The 1st Battalions of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, of the Lincoln Regiment, and of the Cameron Highlanders were formed into a brigade and moved from Cairo into the Soudan. The 1st Battalion of the Seaforth Highlanders ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... have only a few disjointed fragments, with the exception, as has been before mentioned, of the dream of Scipio ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... "The line reeled back—disjointed already—in an instant in fragments. Our men were just behind the guns. They leaped forward upon the disordered mass; but there was little need of fighting now. A regiment threw down its arms, and, with colors ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... stultify himself with luxury any more than he should be permitted to cut off his right hand. Excuse me for being didactic—but you said you'd like to get my point of view and I've tried to give it to you in a disjointed sort of way. I'd sooner my son would have to work for his living than not, and I'd rather he'd spend his life contending with the forces of nature and developing the country than in quarreling over the division of profits that other ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... and already disjointed by the breaking of the root which held it, and by the shock it had received on touching the shore, the floating island opposed no great resistance to their efforts. The trunks of the trees which composed it, were torn asunder and pushed into the current—which carried them quickly away—and ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... air sent them along at a brisk gait, Lydia swinging easily between them, her head on a level with Rankin's, the doctor's hat on a level with her ear. She said nothing, and the two talked across her, disjointed bits of an argument apparently under endless discussion ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... takes two to make a quarrel. If I do not want to quarrel with a Mahomedan, the latter will be powerless to foist a quarrel on me, and, similarly, I should be powerless if a Mahomedan refuses his assistance to quarrel with me. An arm striking the air will become disjointed. If everyone will try to understand the core of his own religion and adhere to it, and will not allow false teachers to dictate to him, there will be ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... capable land, sea, air, and space forces if the implementing authorities are incapable of defining principles, goals, and integrating strategies for their employment? While this is not the province of the military to solve, the military must understand how disjointed policy, weak political leadership, or dysfunctional international cooperation will preclude success ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... reply; but began to strip with great expedition. Captain Crowe was so choked with passion that he could utter nothing but disjointed sentences. He rose from his seat, brandished his horsewhip, and, seizing his nephew by the collar, cried, "Odd's heartlikins! sirrah, I have a good mind—Devil fire your running tackle, you landlubber!— can't you ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... through the press, and being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes, memoranda, &c., and requested me to fashion them into some shape more fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and disjointed state of his manuscripts, I have felt wholly unable to do; yet, being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to segregate these from the rest, I have concluded to send ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... other comes from a vice of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought. Both kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker; but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... were more true than he realized. When, after a half-hour of uncomfortable, disjointed talk, he said good-night and went away, he found Lorimer waiting for him in his own rooms. Thayer's greeting was curt, for he was still smarting from the memory of his talk with Miss Gannion. He had been impenetrable to her questions, but not to her sharpness, and he was hurt by the disapproval ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... firstmonth," Hsiang-yuen remonstrated, "you shouldn't talk so much reckless nonsense! All these worthless despicable oaths, disjointed words, and corrupt language, go and tell for the benefit of those mean sort of people, who in everything take pleasure in irritating others, and who keep you under their thumb! But mind don't drive me to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... was on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, at the left of the Barriere Poissonniers. It was a two-story building, painted a deep red up to the first floor, and had disjointed weather-stained blinds. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... in one whole picture, and not till then, they form what, in a strict and literary sense, we are accustomed to call a TRADITION or TALE. I, at least," adds Ernst Willkomm, "in such an upgathering of these disjointed tones of tradition, could only accomplish something that satisfied me by searching out the profound hidden meaning of the people's poesy: and I have at last gone no further than attempting to compose these detached fragments of tradition, Lusatianwise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... itself to his thoughts, was met by an angry contempt, was rejected scornfully. As nothing could please or distract him, the only thing that remained was to support the discord. He felt as if he were a limb out of joint from the body of life: there occurred to his imagination a disjointed finger, swollen and discoloured, racked with pains. The question was, How should he reset himself into joint? The body of life for him meant Beatrice, his children, Helena, the Comic Opera, his friends of the orchestra. How could he set himself ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... dreary sensations, and the hideous confusion of my understanding. Time slowly restored its customary firmness to my frame, and order to my thoughts. The images impressed upon my mind by this fatal paper were somewhat effaced by my malady. They were obscure and disjointed like the parts of a dream. I was desirous of freeing my imagination from this chaos. For this end I questioned my uncle, who was my constant companion. He was intimidated by the issue of his first experiment, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... lay down on her bed, with her back to the window, and smoothed out the torn envelope. On one side were some disjointed memoranda which she did ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... slice the brain into more delicate atoms than he has done hitherto, in order to coin more names, and swell the dictionary? No! The work must now be retrospective, if we would render true knowledge progressive. It is not a list of new and disjointed facts that Science at present thirsts for; but she is impressed with the conviction that her wants can alone be supplied by the creation of a new and truthful theory,—a generalization which the facts already known are sufficient to supply, if they were well ordered according ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... if these disjointed scraps have interest for others, but I have recorded them, because to me they recall the young writer's glowing enthusiasm, and evince the confident hopefulness which is one of the most common traits of mental excellence. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... get the two loves to dwell together peaceably in her mind—a common difficulty with our weak, easily divided, hardly united natures—frangible, friable, readily distorted! It needs no less than God himself, not only to unite us to one another, but to make a whole of the ill-fitting, roughly disjointed portions of our individual beings. Tearfully but diligently she set about her duties; and not only the heart, but the limbs and joints of her grandmother were relieved by her presence; while doubtless ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... on the principal floor, and underneath other windows, which were perfect, though half filled up with fallen soil, and waving with a wild growth of brambles and chance growths of all kinds. This was the oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of gray wall, all incrusted with lichens, in which was a common door-way. Probably ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... in a state of nervous perturbation. When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavor by mixing. He continued his chat with Sir James about the poachers until they were all seated, and Mrs. Cadwallader, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... unthinkable. Falconer stood staring down at this girl whose white, upturned face, so amazingly ethereal and childish, met his astounded gaze with unfaltering fixity, and from his stiff lips dropped disjointed words and phrases, ejaculations of denial, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to be living in an atmosphere of fear as far as intercourse with the world outside their crater-like valley was concerned. They believed it was death to look upon the sea, of which they had heard disjointed tales, but which none of them had ever seen. They feared the coast people with a mortal fear, justified perhaps by the experiences of occasional meetings in times gone by. They fear each other to a certain ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... declare I forgot all about it," cried the earl, in a tone of vexation. "Not being accustomed to—this aspect of affairs is so new—" He broke off his disjointed sentences, unbuttoned his coat, drew out his purse, and ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Country; for, although the tendency of modern juristic thought is to ascribe "plenary" power to a Colony, restrictions nevertheless do exist in practice, and are contained, express or implicit, in a number of disjointed Acts. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... took to flight again; it sped, soft-footed, through the twilight gloom of the back avenue, while a disjointed, travelling clamour of hounds came nearer and nearer through the woods. The motor-car was within a hundred yards of the back lodge, when out of the rhododendron-bush burst a spectral black-and-white dog, with floating fringes of ragged wool ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... intending to go to America were now gathered in one vessel. Whatever previous disposition of them had been made, or whatever relations they might have had in the disjointed record of the exodus, were ephemeral, and are now lost sight of in the enduring interest which attaches to their final and successful "going forth" as ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... up and joined in. One of the young ones went to the bank where the Cat came down. As it blew its little nose over the fresh scent, the old Skunk waddled to the place, became quite interested, then climbed the bank. The little ones followed in a disjointed procession, varied by one of them tumbling ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... seem to have been an excellent type of the sturdy, clear-headed, but yet romantic and enthusiastic Englishman; gifted with much natural ability, sedulously increased by study; quietly humorous, self-restrained; and if temporarily soured by disappointment and the disjointed times, yet emerging at last into a greater serenity, a more unadulterated gaiety than had ever before characterized him. It is possible, but from his clear and sane balance of mind improbable, that many of his light later poems are due to deliberate self-blinding and self-deception, a ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... whispered, keeping her face hidden and jerking out disjointed sentences, "but I can't do anything for anybody. No one really depends on me for anything. Helen Baker must leave college, because they need her at home,—just think, need her! Isn't that happiness? And Mr. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... tried to while away the time by gaining little scraps of information from the Arabs and the natives, but we cannot fail to see what a serious stress was all the time put upon his constitution under these circumstances; the reader will pardon the disjointed nature of his narrative, written as it ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... harrowing and yet indefinable horror with which I was inspired by the fragmentary warning thus received. And "blood," too, that word of all words—so rife at all times with mystery, and suffering, and terror—how trebly full of import did it now appear—how chilly and heavily (disjointed, as it thus was, from any foregoing words to qualify or render it distinct) did its vague syllables fall, amid the deep gloom of my prison, into the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Destroyer, which was received with great disfavor at the time, and which first coupled his name with that of Wordsworth as of the school of Lake poets. It is in irregular metre, which at first has the charm of variety, but which afterwards loses its effect, on account of its broken, disjointed versification. In 1805 appeared Madoc—a poem based upon the subject of early Welsh discoveries in America. It is a long poem in two parts: the one descriptive of Madoc in Wales and the other of Madoc in Aztlan. Besides many ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... disposed towards the young fellow, several of whose New York friends, as it transpired, were old acquaintances of the doctor's—Dr. Dillon and his family, and the Delaneys. The conversation between Lynde and Dr. Pendegrast at the Hotel Meurice had been hurried and disjointed, and in that respect unsatisfactory; but the minute history of Ruth's previous case, which the doctor related to Lynde in the course of those long summer nights, set his ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... subconsciousness which did not entirely gibe with the gambler's remarks, and yet they were too dimly engraved to afford foundation for a definite theory. What he did know was this, that he doubted. Why? Because certain scraps of a disjointed conversation recurred to him, a few words which he had overheard in Stark's saloon, something about a Peterborough canoe and a woman. He knew every skiff that lay along the waterfront, and of a sudden he decided to see if this one was where it had ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... carefully built, and pointed between the joints of the masonry with the best cement, requires a total repair after that period, and often before. The window-sills and lintels of limestone break and crack, and the chimneys soon become disjointed and unsafe. Although it may seem paradoxical, yet it is true that the woodwork of a house lasts good much longer than the stone, or rather the cement, which joins the stone; but wood decays also very rapidly. A bridge becomes rotten in ten years, ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... that it was my seat, so to speak, for which they were scrambling. The choice, it appeared, began with second-class coaches, doomed therefore to be doubly popular. Second-class accommodation, by no means merely nominal, was evidently the height of luxury to the patrons of the country half of this disjointed line, which starts so seductively from Tokyo. Greater comfort is strictly confined to the ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... after street became visible, until gradually the whole of the great city lay spread out below them like a map, with the thoroughfares indicated by faint twinkling lines of fire. And, as they continued to rise, the various disjointed sounds which, even at that early hour, pervaded the city, began to reach their ears: the rumbling of a wagon or the rattle of a cab over the stone-paved streets, the barking of a dog, the crow of some unnaturally wakeful rooster, the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... been maliciously and treacherously slain by Owen Cyfeilioc, his cousin-german; and while he was thus venting his anger and revenge, and violently brandishing his lance, it suddenly snapped asunder, and fell disjointed in several pieces to the ground, the handle only remaining in his hand. Alarmed and astonished at this omen, which he considered as a certain signal for his taking the cross, he voluntarily offered ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... mysterious Providence, let it be known that no rule formed upon municipal maxims (if any such rule exists) will prevent the course of that imperial justice which you owe to the people that call to you from all parts of a great disjointed world. For, situated as this kingdom is, an object, thank God, of envy to the rest of the nations, its conduct in that high and elevated situation will undoubtedly be scrutinized with a severity as great as ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... would have liked to have said something concerning psychological marriages, but the appearance of the huge body beneath the bed-clothes restrained her: he wished to say something nice and kind, but Laura's presence put everything out of his head, and so his ideas became more than ever broken and disjointed, his thoughts wandered, until at last, lifting his eyes from the manuscript on the table, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... be pretty—indeed, we could not pretend to give even the outline of the conversation that followed. It was carried on in such broken and disjointed sentences, eyes and squeezes doing so much more work than words, that even a reporter would have had to draw largely upon his imagination for the substance. Suffice it to say that, though the thermometer ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... could talk but little; indeed, what we said was uttered in disjointed sentences; for the foaming sea kept tossing the log on which we sat up and down, so that we could with difficulty hold on to it. The sea-birds kept wildly screaming over our heads, while nothing could be seen around us but the foaming, ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... attention, surprise and half extemporized terror rose from the multitudes about us. It was a breathless moment. The oncoming shoals shot forward in rapid jets of fire now clouded together in igneous masses, now separated in disjointed streaks and radiant clusters of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... second generation. The last of them, Ursula Babb, the grand-daughter of John, was to be seen wandering up and down the little beach of Lynmouth, a half-crazed old crone, cursed with the evil-eye, and babbling disjointed and incoherent stories of the ruin of the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... impatient heart spurn that slower method of inquisition; but he realized that he was more likely to discover the truth by gathering instantly in one room all those persons whose self interest pointed to his undoing. Somehow, Sobieski's disjointed narrative aroused a dreadful suspicion that was ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... that I am admonished by the length to which I have extended this communication, that I cannot now discuss the Catholic question, as I had hoped to do at the outset, and I shall present only a few disjointed remarks in connection ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... part, of the work preceding her personal introduction proceeds principally from her pen or her lips: I have done little more than change it from Italian into English, and embody thoughts and sentiments that were often disjointed and detached. And throughout, whether she or others speak, I may safely say this work will be found the most circumstantial, and assuredly the most authentic, upon the subject of which it treats, of all that have yet been presented to the public of Great ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... This seemed to alleviate considerably my friend's grief, and excite my thirst —fortunately, perhaps for us; for if our eloquence had held out much longer, I am afraid our auditory might have lost their patience; and, indeed, I am quite certain if our French had not been in nearly as disjointed a condition as the spokes of the caleche, such must have been ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... not a fool; nor an honest man, but not a knave; nor a protestant, but not a papist. The chief burden of his brain is the carriage of his body and the setting of his face in a good frame; which he performs the better, because he is not disjointed with other meditations. His religion is a good quiet subject, and he prays as he swears, in the phrase of the land. He is a fair guest, and a fair inviter, and can excuse his good cheer in the accustomed apology. He has some faculty in the mangling of a rabbit, and the distribution ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... every gust from the flowing tide; gritty dust that settles in the nostrils and on the lips, the very residuum of all that is repulsive in the greatest city of the world. The noise of the traffic and the constant pressure from the crowds passing, their incessant and disjointed talk, could not distract me. One moment at least I had, a moment when I thought of the push of the great sea forcing the water to flow under the feet of these crowds, the distant sea strong and splendid; ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... put; the exclamations; the cross purposes; the inextricable conglomeration of past, present, and future history—public, personal, and local; uttered, ejaculated and gasped, in short, or incomplete, or disjointed sentences—all this baffles description. After a few minutes, however, they quieted down, and, while the new arrivals attacked the roast of beef, their former messmates talked incessantly, and all ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... ado to move, though my shoulder was not disjointed, only sorely bruised, but finally I was on my feet again, though standing rather weakly, and with an ear alert for the return of that wild, careering brute, and the little maid was close at my side, with one rosy ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... dream, a frightful one! and after those rude, disjointed images are fled, will light ever break in? Shall I ever feel joy? Do all suffer like me; or am I framed so as to be particularly susceptible of misery? It is true, I have experienced the most rapturous emotions—short-lived delight!—ethereal beam, ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... as she gave to the huckster about paltry, common things,—partly, as I said, from a hope to forget herself, and partly from a vague curiosity to know the strange world which opened before her in this disjointed talk. There were no morbid shadows in this Lois's life, she saw. Her pains and pleasures were intensely real, like those of her class. If there were latent powers in her distorted brain, smothered by hereditary vice of blood, or foul air and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... appropriate interlude, Fragments of old Norwegian tunes That bound in one the separate runes, And held the mind in perfect mood, Entwining and encircling all The strange and antiquated rhymes With melodies of olden times; As over some half-ruined wall, Disjointed and about to fall, Fresh woodbines climb and interlace, And keep the loosened stones ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... basis [[Greek: a hypothosis]] capable of supporting them, and accounting for them. Thus, if you were to assign a cause sufficient to account for the aurora borealis, that would be an hypothesis. But a theory, on the other hand, takes a multitude of facts all disjointed, or, at most, suspected, of some inter-dependency: these it takes and places under strict laws of relation to each other. But here there is no question of a cause. Finally, a system is the synthesis of a theory and an hypothesis: it states the relations as amongst an undigested ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... whose thighs were disjointed, skipped amid such a flying upwards of their petticoats that the lower portions of their frames were displayed. They kicked their feet up above their heads with astounding facility, balanced their bodies, wagged their backs and shook their sides, shedding around them a powerful scent ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... may appear somewhat bald and disjointed; but antiquity, both human and historical, is apt to be bald; and its dislocation and disjointed condition are owing to the frequent cataclysms, physical, political, and social, which needlework has survived, bringing down to us the same stitches which served the same purposes ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... of the most arbitrary nations would require the most incontrovertible proof. And what evidence, gentlemen of the jury, does the Crown offer to you in compliance with these sound and sacred doctrines of justice? A few broken, interrupted, disjointed words, without context or connection—uttered by the speaker in agitation and heat—heard, by those who relate them to you, in the midst of tumult and confusion—and even those words, mutilated as ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... anecdote is not always above suspicion. As a rule it is embodied in familiar correspondence, or in diaries, or in commonplace books, where clear and definite language is rarely met with; but, however disappointingly imperfect and trivial, however disjointed, however deficient in literary form the registered jottings of oral tradition may be, it is in them, if they exist at all with any title to credit, that future ages best realise the fact that the great man was in plain truth a living entity, and no ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... excited. This is beautifully illustrated by the following experiment: fix a paper sail, three or four inches in diameter, and made like that of a smoke jack, on a tube of pasteboard; on looking through the tube at a distant prospect, some disjointed parts of it will be seen through the narrow intervals between the sails; but as the fly begins to revolve, these intervals appear larger; and when it revolves quicker, the whole prospect is seen quite as distinct as if nothing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the rear. Bazaine had ordered three divisions to march towards the firing: one made for a wrong point and returned; the others made half-hearted efforts, and thus left Frossard to be overborne by numbers. The result of these disjointed movements was that both Frossard and Bazaine hurriedly retired towards Metz, while the First and Second German Armies now gathered up all their strength with the aim of shutting up the French in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... its master was wont to call himself in a style characteristic at once of his arrogance and of his weakness—with the same pretensions to rule from the Hellespont to the Punjab, and with the same disjointed organization; an aggregate of dependent states in various degrees of dependence, of insubordinate satrapies, and of half-free Greek cities. In Asia Minor more especially, which was nominally included ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... melancholy one. His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay more eggs and give ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... a feverish sleep, tossing wildly and raving incoherently. Kate, sitting by his bedside, he mistook for some one else, calling her "Agnes," and talking in disjointed sentences of days and things ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... of a large and busy town. Through its streets I was dragged publicly, much stared at and much staring. The street life was one busy nightmare of disjointed limbs. Professor Essig, could he have been dragged through Skitzton, would have delivered his farewell lecture upon his return. "Gentlemen—Fuit Ilium, Fuit Ischium, Fuit Sacrum, anatomy has lost her seat among the sciences. My occupation's gone." Professor Owen's book ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... house that stood some little way from the road in our favourite lane—a lane full of wild roses and speedwell, with a tiny footpath of disjointed flags like an old pack-horse track. Grass and milfoil grew thickly between the stones, and the turf stretched half-way over the road from each side, for there was little traffic in the lane, beyond the yearly rumble of the harvesting ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Walden heard all this disjointed talk with a certain impatience. Swinging along at a rapid stride, and glad in a sense that the old trees were to be saved, he was nevertheless conscious of annoyance,- -though by whom, or at what he was annoyed, he could ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and the syllogism is in the predicament of Humpty Dumpty. In this predicament was the Poet Laureate. The miscreant Proteus (could not) escape these chains!" So the miscreant Proteus—no bad name for an old actor—took his little cocked hat and marched, a smaller, if not a wiser man. Some disjointed words fell from him: "Mimicry is not acting," etc.; and with one bitter, mowing glance at the applauders, circumferens acriter oculos, he vanished in the largest pinch of snuff on record. The rest dispersed ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... perverse interpretations that ever were and never ought to have been, commend me to this of Ba's—after I bade her generosity 'understand me,' too!—which meant, 'let her pick out of my disjointed sentences a general meaning, if she can,—which I very well know their imperfect utterance would not give to one unsupplied with the key of my whole heart's-mystery'—and Ba, with the key in her hand, to pretend and poke feathers ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... with the wild disjointed chat which her rambling imagination suggested; a mood in which she was much more communicative respecting her own history, and that of others, than when there was any attempt made, by direct queries, or cross-examinations, to extract ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... fallen down in the direction of the Catacombs, and on dark nights lights could be seen in the dens of Malqua through the disjointed blocks. These in some places overlooked the top of the ramparts. It was here that the Mercenaries' wives, who had been driven away by Matho, were living with their new husbands. On seeing the men again their hearts could ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... any adequate account of the palaeontological record from the evolutionary standpoint, would require a large volume and a singularly unequal, broken and disjointed history it would be. Here the record is scanty, interrupted, even unintelligible, while there it is crowded with embarrassing wealth of material, but too often these full chapters are separated by ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... acquisition. The world was forgotten. Even the possibility of a formal and imperative ceremonial by which his newly-won treasure must be secured to himself at last, barely flashed across his consciousness. He did not trouble himself to put it into words. He listened to the brief disjointed fragments of her speech—fragments which gave a dim picture of her life in these empty years of division. Now and then he spoke of himself. She listened. Once she turned to him with an impulse of tenderness strange in one so ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... voice especially, but several other voices arose then; a word from one, a word from another, half sentences, disjointed hints, forming together an unmistakable whole. "The theft of old Galloway's bank-note has been traced to ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... definitely. I crawled to a house which was near by, fortunately, and remained there during the morning. I was badly, but not dangerously, injured. The skin was torn from one side of my face, and three of my fingers were disjointed. I was bruised all over, and cut slightly in several places. How I escaped death is a miracle, but escape it I did. The horse went on home and was found early in the morning, with the stirrup leathers dangling from the saddle. When the family saw the horse they at once were of ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... Edgar warmly by the hand. Sir Sidney Smith did the same, and with a smile stopped Edgar's disjointed words of thanks and pointed to the door. Some of the middies of the flagship nudged each other and smiled at his pale face as he ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... on without nobleness, propriety, or dignity, may be called a speech. We heard only these words—"Brothers in arms—frankness of a soldier." The interrogatories of the President were clear. Nothing could be more confused or worse enounced, than the ambiguous and disjointed replies of Bonaparte. He spoke incoherently of volcanoes—secret agitations—victories—constitution violated. He found fault even with the 18th Fructidor, of which he had himself been the prime instigator and most powerful ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... hair-dresser. This distinguished social leader employed a French maid who was very adept at dressing hair, but the two never got along very well verbally; Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene insisted on speaking in broken French while the maid persisted in broken English. Such conversation is naturally disjointed and leads nowhere. The particular hair-dresser who received Mrs. Haldene's patronage possessed a lively imagination together with an endless chain of gossip. Mrs. Haldene was superior to gossiping with servants, but a hair-dresser ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... broken plaster, here and there, the laths of the inner joists could be seen. On one of the stone corbels, which supported the beams, was the date 1463, without doubt the date of the construction of the building. The chimney-piece, also in stone, broken and disjointed, had traces of its original elegance, with its slender uprights, its brackets, its frieze with a cornice, and its basket-shaped funnel terminating in a crown. On the frieze could be seen even now, as if softened by age, an ingenious attempt at sculpture, in the way of a likeness ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... in silence. Not till the last man had had his say did he begin to speak, approving, suggesting, directing, moulding in his facile hands the incongruous and disjointed mass of information and opinion into a rounded whole. The men, listening to him with breathless attention, gave grim nods of approval. At one point of his discourse the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... pity. It seemed to them that the royal martyr whose remains had been consumed with quicklime, had been called up by their yearning and now stood, a shadow in their midst, in all the majesty of a king. They were celebrating an anniversary service for the dead whose body lay elsewhere. Under the disjointed laths and tiles, four Christians were holding a funeral service without a coffin, and putting up prayers to God for the soul of a King of France. No devotion could be purer than this. It was a wonderful act of faith achieved without an afterthought. Surely in the sight of God it was like the ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... here, and then go home, where I may perhaps find an Italian history, and then go for another visit and find something else, it will all be so disjointed." ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... mother's ball at Brussels for the field of Waterloo; and Miss Eliza Smith of Brighton, the vivacious and evergreen daughter of Horace Smith, who wrote the Rejected Addresses. But these admirable and accomplished ladies hate garrulity, and the mere mention of their names is a signal to bring these disjointed reminiscences ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... ones. He played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So did I. He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the breastboard. When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never knew what ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... there was a hypnotic lure in that bed of red coals. All that he had just heard—a disjointed and rather dramatic revealment—was having a peculiar effect upon him. He had become aware of some important facts that accounted for things, such as Rivers's appearance on the Point. He had attributed that advent to Maclin's secret business; but it was, evidently, ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... half-windows, and attics constructed so that standing erect within them is only practicable in one spot. How a three-feet-by-sixteen inches strip of threadbare carpet, a twelve-and-a-half-cents-Chatham-square mirror, and a disjointed chair may, in the lively imagination of boardinghouse proprietresses, be considered furniture. How double, triple, and even quintuple beds in single rooms, and closets into which he only succeeds in effecting entrance ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... unfortunately, I have found nothing to my purpose in Milton, and in all Shakspeare no trace of a bore; except it be that thing, that popinjay, who so pestered Hotspur, that day when he, faint with toil and dry with rage, was leaning on his sword after the battle—all that bald, disjointed talk, to which Hotspur, past his patience, answered neglectingly, he knew not what, and that sticking to him with questions even when his wounds were cold. It must have been a bore of foreign breed, not the good downright ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... next morning. Lute met me at the station. From his disjointed and lengthy story I gathered that Mother had been "feelin' fust-rate for her" until the noon before. "I come back from the post-office," said Lute, "and I was cal'latin' to read the newspaper, but Dorindy ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln |
