"Fleeting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the proposition from which Pythagoras started was the fundamental idea of all Greek speculation—that beneath the fleeting forms and successive changes of the universe there is some permanent principle of unity[428] The Ionian school sought that principle in some common physical element; Pythagoras sought, not for "elements," but for "relations," ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the streets through which we passed. My mind was on the friend whose name I had taken, whose work I was to do. I was back with him in our boyhood days, and lived again for the fleeting minutes the life we had lived in common; and the resolve grew stronger on me that ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... was a tragedy. While lighted here and there with a fleeting joy, its prevailing tone was one of sadness. The heroic courage with which he met disease and poverty impart to his life an inspiring grandeur. He was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His sensitive spirit early responded to the beauties of Nature; and in ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... a little, flexed his muscles, grown stiff by his cramped position, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of a figure on the south face of the wall. But it was so fleeting he was not sure. If he had only brought his glasses with him he might have decided, but he was without them, and he concluded finally that it was merely an optical illusion. He and the Indian had the mountain walls to themselves, and the warrior could not have ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... would carefully secure the cabin against intruders, they now disdained any further preparation than kicking the kitten out of doors, and removing the kettle of boiling stew from the fireplace to the ground before the door. A fleeting smile did cross Elsa's face, as she reflected that the meddler with her knitting would probably scald itself in the pot, but she didn't care. Her whole mind was now set upon Sobrante and its mistress, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... the Green Gables lane. Poor Gilbert hardly had a chance to get a word in edgewise. Anne felt rather relieved when they parted. There had been a new, secret self-consciousness in her heart with regard to Gilbert, ever since that fleeting moment of revelation in the garden of Echo Lodge. Something alien had intruded into the old, perfect, school-day comradeship—something that threatened ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in one year there be, So many windows in this church you see, As many marble pillars here appear As there are hours throughout the fleeting year, As many gates as moons one here does view, Strange tale to tell, yet not more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... take the same tranquil pleasure as our youth—Lady Vargrave devoted much of her monotonous and unchequered time. She seemed to love them almost as living things; and her memory associated them with hours as bright and as fleeting as themselves. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... retreats into space to perform another revolution. The question then arises as to how we are to recognise the body when it does come back? The personal features of its size or brightness, the presence or absence of a tail, large or small, are fleeting characters of no value for such a purpose. Fortunately, however, the law of elliptic motion established by Kepler has suggested the means of defining the identity of a comet with ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... and flourishing but fleeting days. My father, when he went to the fair to purchase his team, happened to see a fine hunter on sale. It was a beautiful beast. Who could forbear to prefer him and his noble form, high blood, and spirited action, to the slouching dull and clumsy cart-horse? Hugh Trevor was not a ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... is difficult, owing to the movements being often extremely slight, and of a fleeting nature. A difference may be clearly perceived, and yet it may be impossible, at least I have found it so, to state in what the difference consists. When we witness any deep emotion, our sympathy is so strongly excited, that close observation ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... careering furiously away, between them and the western sun, what looked like a purple column, reaching from earth to heaven, and bespangled with living gold-dust, whirling round in giddy spirals, and all the time fleeting so fast that it was diminishing every moment, and was gone in ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light would banish as unreal. His thankfulness for this token of dawn, after the long, black, weary night of gloom through which he had struggled, could not find words enough in which to praise God for this promise of brighter days. He prayed that it might not be fleeting, and that morning might not show this gleam of brightness to be only imaginary. But the morrow came, and proved yesterday's events to be real and true, and Uncle Richard still without his stern and gloomy face, and ready to perfect the ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... leaped at the fallen boy, and as his body paused a fleeting moment in midair before it began the descent, a rifle cracked, a bullet struck him in the throat, cutting the jugular vein and coming out behind. His body fell lifeless on the snow, and he who had fired the shot came on swiftly, shouting and ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful, that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came before him at his most doleful moments—sometimes unsought by his imagination, though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadness played upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree he could die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and purity the very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighed in this same austere atmosphere ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... those extraordinary letters of his, to his friends and to his love, we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World, there was neither Unity, nor Progress, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... time to laugh, a brief hour to smile and love and pity, just as through this dreary easterly storm, bringing clouds and rain, sobbing against casement and door with the inarticulate wail of tempests, there comes now and then the soft shine of a sun behind it all, a fleeting glitter, an evanescent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... love appears but as an atom of dust floating in the sunbeam. All its beauty, all its splendor, all its attraction are nothing but the reflection of this uncreated sun, the brilliant, transitory, fleeting spark that is cast off from that ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... with sudden ebullitions, Flashes of fun, and little bursts of song; Petulant, pains, and fleeting pale contritions, Mute little moods of misery and wrong. Only a girl of Nature's rarest making, Wistful and sweet—and with a ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... She caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he dodged into a doorway with the evident intention of hiding till they got tired of the hunt. Also, it was certain he had not seen Betty and had no idea that ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... predecessor as Clerk of the Acts, to whom he paid part of the salary. Barlow held the office jointly with Dennis Fleeting.] ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Harry," was known vaguely as "him," "Skeesicks," or "that coot." It was remembered long after, with a feeling of superstition, that he had never even met with the dignity of an accident, nor received the fleeting honor of a chance shot meant for somebody else in any of the liberal and broadly comprehensive encounters which distinguished the camp. And the inundation that finally carried him out of it was partly anticipated by his ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... to him was bedewed, but that of Timmendiquas was as cool and calm as his own. It seemed to him that just the touch of a smile appeared in the eyes of the chief, as if he understood and appreciated, and the fleeting look of Henry was not too brief to give back the smile. A singular bond of mutual respect was established in quick time ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... aware of noticing several things, as though they took place in sequence. He looked toward where the gun had stood. It was in ruins. The young inventor saw something, which he took to be the projectile, skimming across the sea waves, and he had a fleeting glimpse of the greater portion of the immense weapon itself sinking into the depths ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... not explain to herself the impression that he made on her with that honest face, worn by suffering, and with those bright blue eyes which seemed to bring with them echoes of those beloved fields and woods, those quiet glens, that golden sunlight and the free and bounteous life of nature. For one fleeting moment her mind dwelt on all this, but at the same time there awoke memories of all her sufferings ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... crowded corner by the Cafe de la Paix, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Laploshka. He smiled, slightly raised his hat, and vanished. I never saw him again. After all, the money had been GIVEN to the deserving rich, and the soul of ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish, too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... her and her eyes on the path. The faces of both looked pale, even that far away, but when they neared the porch, the General was joking and Margaret was smiling, nor was anything perceptible to Chad when he said good-by, except a certain tenderness in his tone and manner toward Margaret, and one fleeting look of distress in her clear eyes. He was on his horse now, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... of children at play, a sound that had not been heard for many months, and someone singing the old, old songs. For a few fleeting hours that day, for the first and last time on Ragnarok, there was the magic ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... not merely with Cicero and Virgil, not merely with heavy treatises on canon-law and school divinity, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time, nay even with the most admired poetry and the most popular squibs which appeared on the fleeting topics of the day, with Buchanan's complimentary verses, with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lettice; for the first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him ... she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... suddenly attracted by a dull vacancy that seemed to be forming in his countenance. It stole upon the features as if they were being slowly sprinkled with fine dust, blotting their expression into a flat lifelessness. Then the rush of a train passing over the bridge disturbed him. With a fleeting look of pain he sat up, glanced first furtively at me, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... to mark the passage. But the result was something very attractively unlike the ordinary product of the age. She had had, from the conditions of her life, no very intimate and confidential girl friends by whose point of view to readjust and possibly lower her own, and with whom to compare every fleeting manifestation of thought and feeling. She remained unconsciously surrounded by an atmosphere of reticence and reserve, a certain shy aloofness, mingled with a direct simple dignity, that gave to her bearing an ineffable grace and charm. The mothers of ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... that it is really the infinite whom we seek in our pleasures. Our desire for being wealthy is not a desire for a particular sum of money but it is indefinite, and the most fleeting of our enjoyments are but the momentary touches of the eternal. The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited,—to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... psaltery and recorders and other instruments, and the bowl went merrily round. Hereupon such gladness possessed me that I forgot the sorrows of the world one and all and said, "This is indeed life; O sad that 'tis fleeting!" I enjoyed their company till the time came for rest; and our heads were all warm with wine, when they said, "O our lord, choose from amongst us her who shall be thy bed-fellow this night and not lie with thee again till forty days be past." So I chose a girl fair of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... mediaevalism was lost.' It resulted in the revolt connected with Wat Tyler, a revolt that 'was not only dramatic but was domestic'; it ended in the death of Tyler and the intervention of the boy king, who, in swaying the multitude that was a dangerous mob, 'gives us a fleeting and final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... uncertain idea, she studied him closely, while in her own mind she went over and over her list of acquaintances, trying to find the person of whom she was thinking. Nor could she tell wherein the resemblance lay, whether in the voice, the manner, or in some feature; and yet it was there all the time, a fleeting, haunting likeness to some former friend. Then she thought she had a clue, for, in answer to a sudden jest on her part, the stranger laughed until his glasses fell off and dropped to the floor, and as he stooped to pick them up, she caught ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... Some slight intellectual satisfaction there may be in the doing of evil; but none the less does each wrongful deed clip the wings of our thoughts, till at length they can only crawl amidst all that is fleeting and personal. To commit an act of injustice is to prove we have not yet attained the happiness within our grasp. And in evil—reduce things to their primal elements, and you shall find that even the wicked are seeking some ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... specimen of the genus Baronet in Sir Barnet Skettles, who was so kind to Paul Dombey and so angry with poor Mr. Baps. Sir Leicester Dedlock is on a larger scale—in fact, almost too "fine and large" for life. But I recall a fleeting vision of perfect loveliness among Miss Monflathers's pupils—"a baronet's daughter who by some extraordinary reversal of the laws of Nature was not only plain in ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... and on the Sunday preceding the week when the usual Christmas decorations were to commence he came again before his people, his face very pale and worn, and wearing upon it a look which told of a new baptism, an added amount of faith which had helped to lift him above the fleeting cares of this present life. And yet there was much of earth clinging to him still, and it made itself felt in the rapid beating of his heart when he glanced towards the square pew where Lucy knelt and knew that she was giving thanks for ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... he bore the body from the room, he shot a quick but searching glance toward me, and then his eyes fell once more upon the bald and shiny dome of the dead man in his arms. The last fleeting glimpse that I obtained of his profile as he passed from my sight without the chamber revealed a cunning smile ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of his mule—even like this monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life—these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is another poem that attempts to restore a fleeting moment, full of profound thought and feeling, by giving it individuals, and showing them living in it, instead of meditating about it with fine after-thoughts. Pamphylax describes the death of St. John in a desert cave. At first the individuals are clearly seen; but the poem soon lapses into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... it is a fleeting world; the flowing of water the future of men. Before this I performed the service of the inner apartments of the Hosokawa House. The marriage! Connected in thought with Iemon Dono the honoured dismissal was requested, that I should become a bride. Without ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... boys to go into town without guard, all was new policy, and the only interest Glen had in it was to take advantage of it. Let him get one single chance to go to town alone and the reform school would see no more of him. Just what he would do he did not know. Sometimes a fleeting thought of going home to see the mother whose heart must be almost broken by his waywardness and the young sister and brother who were carefully guarded from knowledge of the disgrace he had brought upon them would come to him. But though he was supposed to be dead to impulses ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... you, my Julia, ye are unconscious how the fleeting hours have slipped away. The night hath far advanced into the third watch. I would not part ye needlessly, nor over soon, especially when you must so soon perforce be severed; but we must not forget how long a homeward walk awaits our dear Arvina. Come, then, and partake some slight refreshment, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... placed in such circumstances, in the midst of intense darkness, can "take no note of time." An hour of horror will sometimes seem an age, while a week of unalloyed pleasure will often glide by seemingly with the same rapidity as a few fleeting moments. It may have been one hour—it may have been ten—that the Corporal sat on the floor of his dungeon; when suddenly he was startled by the noise of the trap-door above his head being opened, and looking up, he beheld Sow Nance gazing down upon him, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... THE CLIFF The sands and the sea, and the white gulls fleeting, The mist on the island, the cloud on the hill; The song in my heart, and the old hope beating Its life 'gainst the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a very happy girl to-day, and I must write to tell you so before the mood vanishes, for I have learned that good moods are very fleeting.... The cause of my happiness is, of course, that I have at last met Terry and we have had a long, delightful talk together, and I hope our misunderstanding is all cleared up. Only, now I am afraid I shall ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... and he was growing weary. He closed his eyes and then he opened them again because he felt for a moment on his face a fragrant breath, fleeting and very light. He looked up into the eyes of Julie Lannes. They were blue, very blue, but with infinite wistful depths in them, and he noticed that her golden hair had faint touches of the sun in it. It was a crown of glory. He remembered that he had seen something like it in the ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... spend his time, in as agreeable a manner as could be expected under his present circumstances: but, alas! all our happiness is too fleeting, and we scarcely taste the pleasure before it is ravished from us: and thus it happened to our hero; for they had scarcely been under sail five weeks before the good Captain Simmonds was taken ill, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... had yet to fleet by. Who would throw away a happiness because it is fleeting? L'Isle had sunk into a delightful reverie, anticipating the pleasures of the evening, when his man of method laid before him the despatch from his other correspondent, Sir ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... benefit of the non-pugilistic, is that portion of the anatomy which lies hid behind the third button of the human waistcoat. It covers—in a most inadequate way—the wind, and even a gentle tap in the locality is apt to produce a fleeting sense of discomfort. A genuine flush hit on the spot, shrewdly administered by a muscular arm with the weight of the body behind it, causes the passive agent in the transaction to wish fervently, as far as he is at the moment physically capable of wishing anything, that he had never been born. ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... nature, dealt out to us in successive moments, a possession which is most coveted, and can the least be hoarded, which comes, but never returns, which departs as soon as given, and is lost even in the receiving,—strange indeed that such a gift, so precious, so transient, so fleeting, should ever press ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... came to the door. His ordinarily stoical features bore signs of a great, though subdued excitement. I had a fleeting glimpse of Britton in the distance,—a sort of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... the rear parlour that was Mrs. Page's bedroom was a rather dim and dreary place; such light as it had fell through one long, high window that gave only upon a narrow air shaft; it was only in mid-July that the actual sunlight—a bright and fleeting triangle—touched the worn red carpet and the curly-maple bed. In winter the window gave almost no light at all. Julia dressed by gaslight ten months out of the year, and had to sit up in her warm blankets and stare at the clock on a certain ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... why this killing, more than that of poor Harkness, should make her sick to her soul's foundations. Yet it was so. Even the thought of her sworn duty was vague before her for a time. Then it seemed to come forward out of the mass of fleeting memories—Kenset that day at Baston's steps shapely, trim, halted—Kenset laughing over the little meal beside the table where the books lay—Kenset grasping her shoulder when she whirled to mount El Rey and challenge the Stronghold single-handed—to ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... What a crowd of confused and joyous hopes enter into you with the mild, light air! You drink them in with the breeze, and they awaken in your heart a longing for happiness which increases with the hun ger induced by walking. The fleeting, charming ideas fly and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... like your adorable Lord, this "ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which, in the sight of God, is of great price." Be "clothed" with gentleness and humility. Follow not the world's fleeting shadows that mock you as you grasp them. If always aspiring—ever soaring on the wing—you are likely to become discontented, proud, selfish, time-serving. In whatever position of life God has placed you, be satisfied. What! ambitious to be on a pinnacle of the temple—a higher place in the Church, ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... and fifty, with Lennox deducted and less ten per cent, would not take her as far as the drawbridge. The fleeting vision of the castle passed, replaced by ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Rosalind, in spite of her unkindness, seems to have been fondly cherished by the poet, and yielded to no rival vision—though there may have been fleeting fits of passion—till some fourteen years after he and she had parted—till the year 1592, when, as we shall see, Spenser, then living in the south of Ireland, met that Elizabeth who is mentioned in the sonnet ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... contact with death, and it filled me with awe. Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency and change of the westward moving Border Line.—Like the wild flowers she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled with the soil of the little burial ground ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... shock of the arrest called forth in this, to all appearance, previously normal individual, a marked excitement accompanied by hallucinations and fleeting delusional formations. This excitement, which required the application of constant restraint, was followed by a stuporous state and total clouding of consciousness. Upon being removed to a hospital, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... and when the year is out, he calls to him all the lords, kings, and princes of his realm, and in their presence casts off his wife, and causes a knight to behead her, that no man may wed her after him; thus with the bitterness of an early death does she pay for the fleeting honour of royal wedlock; and when his wife is dead, the Admiral, with intent to replace her with another, summons the maidens who are within the tower to appear before him in a garden, which trembling they enter, none ...
— Fleur and Blanchefleur • Mrs. Leighton
... towards all men, which seemed to be around her, had power to stir long silent depths in both those seared and angry hearts; the bitter strife, whose cause and results had become magnified to their distorted vision, to an importance which nothing on this fleeting earth could really merit, almost melted away before her presence, who seemed prepared to walk through life in such joyousness and singleness of heart, with eyes that could see nothing but beauty, and a mind that could perceive only goodness. Lady Randolph came forward, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... world, and her command to have the mausoleum built, she imagined that the season of love was over. Any new additions to this chapter of the life of her heart were but the close. Even the jealousy which had clouded the happiness of her love like a fleeting, rapidly changing shadow, she believed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the loveliest creature at Saint Germain or the Louvre, far surpassing in beauty the Cardinal's niece, who has managed to set young Louis' heart throbbing with a boyish passion. But I doubt you bestow too much care on the cherishing of a gift so fleeting." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... I had only the vaguest conception, haunted me all that afternoon; and I scarcely removed my eyes from those oddly constructed mounds of drifted sand, striving vainly to gain, through some depression between them, a fleeting glimpse of the restless waters that had helped to shape ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... there is the domain of the myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... who seeks the reformation of a sinner tell me that virtue is indispensably necessary, but not disguise its difficulty and its attendant denials. Say that the enjoyments of love are fleeting, if you will, that they are rigidly forbidden, that they lead with certainty to eternal suffering; and, what would assuredly make a deeper impression upon me than any other argument, say that the more sweet and delectable they ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... had been too hurried for more than fleeting moments of self-study, but on this idle Sunday morning Price Ruyler's perturbed mind wandered to that inner self of his to which he once had longed to give a freer expression. It was odd that the conservative training, the rigid traditions of his family, conventional, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... half-dead sot," replied the doctor, "whose loss will not be very severely felt. But the moral of all this is that honors are fleeting, and we must not take too ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... turn them back into the miseries of Samsra. The text distinctly teaching this is 'He who behaves thus all his life through reaches the world of Brahman and does not return' (Ch. Up. VIII, 15). And the Lord himself declares 'Having obtained me great-souled men do not come into rebirth, the fleeting abode of misery; for they have reached the highest perfection. Up to the world of Brahma the worlds return again, O Arjuna; but having attained to me, O son of Kunti, there is no rebirth' (Bha. Gi. VIII, 1, 5-16). As, moreover, the released soul has freed itself from the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... passenger on board the Bella Cuba, whose expected presence had carefully been concealed from her. For this passenger elaborate preparations had been made. Everything behind that locked door was beautiful, but nothing was new. In the fleeting glimpse Kate had obtained before the sound of Celestine's descending steps had sent her flying from her stolen inspection, she had been impressed with the feeling that the decorations of the stateroom ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... country. But notwithstanding the fears of the purists and the philologers, it does not threaten the existence of the English language here, nor is it at all likely to affect it permanently even by the addition of one phrase or word. For our use of slang of this kind is the most fleeting of temporary fashions. Such slang passes rapidly into use and into general recognition, and passes as quickly out again. Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms" is full of words of this kind—locofoco, for example—which ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... he again found a frightened group huddled together and apprehensively awaiting him. But they were stronger now, and the children uttered little squeals of joy at sight of the meat he had brought, while even the haggard face of their mother was lighted by a fleeting smile. ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... private whether there could have been any misunderstanding with Colonel Keith to lead Rachel to avoid him in a manner that was becoming pointed. Grace deemed it nothing but absorption into the F. U. E. E., and poor Mrs. Curtis sighed over this fleeting away of her sole chance of seeing Rachel like other people. Of Mr. Mauleverer personally she had no fears, he was in her eyes like a drawing or music-master, and had never pretended to be on equal terms in society with her daughters, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... afraid there are, but instead of new light, I find nothing but darkness visible, that serves only to discover sights of Wo. I look back through my chinks—I find errors, follies, faults; forward, old age and death, pleasures fleeting from me, no virtues succeeding to their place—il faut avouer, I want all my quicksilver to make such a background receive ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... was jealous of the fleeting hours, and his close friends were few; but those who knew him loved him to a point just this side ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... never to utter a falsehood, and, above all, a sycophantic falsehood; and, in the false homage of the modern press towards women, there is horrible sycophancy. It is as hollow, most of it, and it is as fleeting as is the love that lurks in uxoriousness. Yet, if a woman asks me to tell a faleshood, I have long made up my mind—that on moral considerations I will, and ought to do so, whether it be for any purpose of glory to her, or of screening her foibles (for she does commit ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life, its lustre and perfume; And we are weeds without ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... this fact very clearly in his last book, Through Nature to God. He shows that "in the morning twilight of existence the Human Soul vaguely reached forth toward something akin to itself, not in the realm of fleeting phenomena, but in the Eternal Presence beyond." He argues by the analogy of evolution, which always presupposes a real relation between the life and the environment to which it adjusts itself, that this forth-reaching and unfolding of the soul implies the everlasting ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people has a right to dissolve it without any reason but its will. Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with some of their fleeting projects: it begins and ends with that scheme of polity which falls in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... turned to his companion, anticipating a responsive smile. Instead he was rewarded by an expression of acute dismay in her dark eyes. He recalled seeing just such a look in the eyes of a cornered deer. She met his gaze for a fleeting instant and then, turning away, walked rapidly over to the little window, where she peered out into the darkness. He waited a few moments for her to recover the composure so inexplicably lost, and then spoke,—not without a trace of coldness ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... truth with the dark red seal; it came from two men who had not been mistaken, of whom either, suspecting a mistake, would have slain the other for the mere accusation; old men not carried away by a fleeting resemblance, by the breath of a word half understood, by suspicion of a glance only half seen; stern, bold men—too stern to relent, but far too brave to be moved suddenly to senseless wrath against an innocent woman; proud men, both, who would ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... his face cleared. The tension induced by the perusal of the letter had momentarily aged it, affording a fleeting glimpse of the man as he might be ten years hence if things should chance to go awry with him—hard and relentless, with more than a suggestion of cruelty. But now, the strain lessened, his face revealed that charm of boyishness which is always curiously attractive in a man ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... times also in the midst of society the most fascinating, I—contemplating the idea of that gloomy academic dungeon to which for three long years I anticipated too certainly a sentence of exile—felt very much as in the middle ages must have felt some victim of evil destiny, inheritor of a false, fleeting prosperity, that suddenly, in a moment of time, by signs blazing out past all concealment on his forehead, was detected as a leper; and in that character, as a public nuisance and universal horror, was summoned instantly to withdraw from society; prince or peasant, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to be of a very fine gravel, the grains whereof whoso had nought else to do might, an he would, have availed to number; nor, looking into the water, was the bottom alone to be seen, nay, but so many fish fleeting hither and thither that, over and above the pleasure thereof, it was a marvel to behold; nor was it enclosed with other banks than the very soil of the meadow, which was the goodlier thereabout ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... it pass from hand to hand, Circling still with ceaseless flight, Till the streaks of gray expand O'er the fleeting robe of night. ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... have lost a valuable art." There was a fleeting glance, and she vanished within, leaving him puzzled and astonished by the unexpected softening of her voice. How long he stood there, with his gaze fixed upon the vacant doorway, he never knew. What did ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... The Persians were not barbarians, and, had they achieved their purpose, they might have promoted civilisation in Europe; but that civilization would have been Asiatic in its character, and it might have been as fleeting as the labors of the Carthaginians in Europe and Africa. Nor would they have felt any interest in the preservation of the works of those Greeks who wrote before the Marathonian time, which they would have regarded with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the projects which amused the exiled Jacobites into hopes that ended in bitter disappointment, and many the fleeting visions of a restoration of the Stuarts. During one of these brief chimeras, Lochiel and Clunie visited Charles at a retreat on the Upper Rhine, whither he had retired after the perfidious imprisonment at the Castle of Vincennes. They found the Prince sunk in the lassitude which ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... the names of things. Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odour of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odours, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... figures to himself the internal by the external, by some facial appearance, some telling attitude, some brief and topical scene, by such specimen and shortcuts, so well chosen and detailed that they provide a summary of the innumerable series of analogous cases. In this way, the vague, fleeting object is suddenly arrested, brought to bear, and then gauged and weighed, like some impalpable gas collected and kept in a graduated transparent glass tube.—Accordingly, at the Council of State, while the others, either jurists or administrators, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... give a good deal of thought to the summer at Mallowe. There was an extraordinary luxury in living again each day of it, the morning when she had taken the third-class carriage which provided her with hot, labouring men in corduroys as companions, that fleeting moment when the tall man with the square face had passed the carriage and looked straight through her without seeming to see her at all. She sat and smiled tenderly at the mere reminiscent thought. And then the glimpse of him as he got into the high phaeton at the station; and the ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now, as always; but Berenice was bolder, she kept Lucien informed of their difficulties; and the budding great man, moved, after the fashion of poets, by the tale of disasters, would vow that he would begin to work in earnest, and then forget his resolution, and drown his fleeting cares in excess. One day Coralie saw the poetic brow overcast, and scolded Berenice, and told her lover that ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... must be done, too, according to the teacher's knowledge of the principles of evolution, and not merely out of regard to small and fleeting interests. The teacher must therefore gradually learn his own place in evolution, so that he may become one-pointed as to himself; unless he practises one-pointedness with regard to his own ideal for himself, he will not be able to bring it to bear on his surroundings. He must try to be ...
— Education as Service • J. Krishnamurti
... exquisitely appointed. His father's portrait was gone from over the mantel, and an old French water-color hung there instead. That was too bad of Natalie. Or had it been Rodney? He would bring it back. And he gave a fleeting thought to Graham and his request to go abroad. He had not meant it. It was sheer reaction. But he ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God's operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... be false to the lessons I have endeavored to teach you in these last fleeting hours of my ill-spent life, were I not to rejoice in any destiny that would wrap up your future career in the glory of God; but I fear the enthusiasm of your young heart will misguide you. I know, from the serious tone of your voice and look in asking that question, you have ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... guises, a procession of Lorrys passing across the blue background. Then he saw her as she had been the last time and that Lorry had not passed with the rest of the procession. She had lingered, reluctant to follow the fleeting, unapproachable others, had seemed to draw nearer to him, almost with her hands out, almost with a shining question in her eyes. Holding that picture of her in his ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... she was outside, leaning on the rail and looking down upon the crew grouped about the inboard end of the uptilted landing-stage. He was there; the man for whose destiny accident and the conventional sense of duty had made her responsible; and as she looked she had a fleeting glimpse of his face. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... who was speaking now was not the Myra Nell he knew; her tone of real concern struck him very agreeably. Beneath her customary mood of intoxication with the joy of living he had occasionally caught fleeting glimpses of a really unusual depth of feeling, and the thought that she was concerned for his welfare filled him with a selfish gladness. Nevertheless, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... You should rather envy me. I am the joy of life. I grasp and clasp all pleasures, heedless of the passing hour. I make the most of our little summer, our fleeting sunlight. To drink, to love, to laugh is the swallow flight of my soul. You shall be as wise as I am and ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the chief's office while I was there. I had only a fleeting glance of him at the time. I left the room almost as soon as he entered it. I did not see him again for five years, at which time he came in disguise to the thieves' headquarters where I was staying. I recognized ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... her precious cloak receding from her along the wet road, recklessly wisped up in the grasp of as thankless a thievin' black-hearted slieveen as ever stepped, and not yet, perhaps, utterly out of reach, though every fleeting instant carried it nearer to that hopeless point. However, she and her neighbours stood the test unshaken. Mrs. Ryan rolled her eyes deliberatively, and said to Mrs. M'Gurk, "The saints bless us, was it yisterday or ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... none, and Port Royal must be abandoned. Built on a false basis, sustained only by the fleeting favor of a government, the generous enterprise had come to naught. Yet Poutrincourt, who in virtue of his grant from De Monts owned the place, bravely resolved that, come what might, he would see the adventure to an end, even should it ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... be over in six weeks," said the doctor easily. And there they left it. Only, with a fleeting thought, Alvina wondered if it would affect the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. She had never heard any ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... room, Catherine a little slimmer than most of the others, and with a strange grace of slow movement which must have come to her from some Russian ancestor. Her last words lingered in his mind. He was to talk to her about art! A fleeting vision of the youth in the yellow oilskins mocked him. He remembered his morning's tramp and the broken-down motor-car under the trees. The significance of these things was beginning to take shape in his mind. He resumed his seat, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Sunday, and, as Mr. Marble expressed it, "the better day, the better deed," the pilot came off, and all hands were called to "up anchor." The cook, cabin-boy, Rupert and I, were entrusted with the duty of "fleeting jig" and breaking down the coils of the cable, the handspikes requiring heavier hands than ours. The anchor was got in without any difficulty, however, when Rupert and I were sent aloft to loose the fore-top-sail. Rupert got into the top via the lubber's hole, I am sorry to say, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... memorials of the great dynasties that wielded the temporal power. There is, however, another element which find its incarnation in matter, yet transcends its transmutation and apparent destruction: that is the burning flame born of thought which has been handed down through fleeting generations. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the meaning of a "perennial plant" in botany? Ans. A plant continuing more than two years.—Give the contrary of "perennial." Ans. Fleeting, short-lived. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... A certain fleeting effect was produced in England by the erection of a New Republic in France in place of the fallen Empire, while the family of the defeated ruler—rejected by his realm more for lack of success than for his bad government—escaped ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... realized, so far as Kit's two comrades were concerned, was soon expended in fleeting pleasures and a new outfit for the next trapping expedition which might offer. Kit's former experience had been sufficient on this score, and he had become impressed with the highly important fact that there existed a much wiser course to be pursued. With his characteristic consistency, Kit ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... through the window beside his bed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his very earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom without a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... shape and fleeting apparition, Sublime in age or with clear morning eyes, Ever I seek thee, tantalizing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... a most cordial display of kindnesses and hospitalities, I prepared to return to my own country, "that precious stone set in the silver sea." I had to part with those who, in the short space of one fleeting month, had, by their endearing and flattering attentions, rivetted themselves to my affections, with the force of a long, and frequent, and cherished intercourse, who, in a country where I expected to feel the comfortless sensations ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... first secret is detachment of mind, putting aside self-consciousness, which is very often other-people-consciousness, the second secret is an increasing consciousness of God. Is it not an extraordinary thing that when we are only here for a few fleeting years, and everybody around us is hurrying to his grave as fast as he can, and when the only person whose opinion matters the least is the eternal God, Who goes on generation after generation, and before Whom everyone must appear ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... knelt upon the cushion and rested her brow against the crucifix. The archbishop covered his eyes, and the state physician bent his head. Chastity and innocence at the feet of God; yet, not even these can hold back the fleeting breath of life. She asked God to forgive her the bitterness in her heart; she prayed for strength to repel the weakness in her limbs. Presently she rose, an angelic sweetness on her face. She looked down at Maurice; there was no sign of life, save in the fitful drawing in of the nether ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... ray from a momentary cloudrift in the western sky smote the stained glass of the dome, lighting its gleaming inscription with a fleeting radiance. ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Ginnungagap," added Jafnhar, "that lies towards the north was thus filled with heavy masses of gelid vapour and ice, whilst everywhere within were whirlwinds and fleeting mists. But the southern part of Ginnungagap was lighted by the sparks and flakes that flew into ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... ever deem it sin To seek the owner of all worth to win? Deserving rather of our blame were he Who having seen thee undisturbed could be.' None such was I, for, straightway stricken sore, My heart bowed low to Love, the conqueror. And ah! no false and fleeting love is mine, Such as for painted beauty feigns to pine; Nor doth my passion, although deep and strong, Seek its own wicked pleasure in thy wrong. Nay; on this journey I would rather die Than know that thou hadst fallen, and that I Had wrought thy shame and foully ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... that art is long, and life but fleeting:—Nay; life is long, and brief the span of art; If e're her breath vouchsafes with gods a meeting, A moment's favor 'tis of which we've ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... heirs: And they, who with Aeneas to the end Endur'd not suffering, for their portion chose Life without glory." Soon as they had fled Past reach of sight, new thought within me rose By others follow'd fast, and each unlike Its fellow: till led on from thought to thought, And pleasur'd with the fleeting train, mine eye Was clos'd, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of doors, all save the barkeepers and the singing Bacchuses. Some fleeting thought of saving his own dignity entered MacDonald's head, for he approached ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... most successful leaders of their fellow men have had the clearest views of their own insufficiency to attain their own objects. If Napoleon ever said, as has been attributed to him, "Je propose et je dispose," it must have been in one of those fleeting moments in which success blinded him to the fact of his own insufficiency. No man had a deeper reliance on fortune, cast the result of great events on the decrees of fate, or more anxiously watched the rising and setting of what he called his "star." This was a ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... heavy lids, until there came a resounding crash that seemed to set my very bones vibrating—a metallic, jangling crash, as the fall of heavy chains. I thought that, then, I half opened my eyes, and that in the dimness I had a fleeting glimpse of a figure clad in gossamer silk, with arms covered with barbaric bangles and slim ankles surrounded by gold bands. The girl was gone, even as I told myself that she was an houri, and that I, though a Christian, had been consigned ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... of the past night, the very existence of the passengers below had been forgotten by most of those whose duty kept them to the deck. If they had been recalled at all to the recollection of any, it was at those fleeting moments when the mind of the young mariner, who directed the movements of the ship, found leisure to catch stolen glimpses of softer scenes than the wild warring of the elements that was so actively raging before his eyes. Nighthead had named them, as he would have made ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... half-converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... for her sake, it was good to remember that some one had said that Dr. Leslie, unlike most physicians, was a man of fortune. And nothing remained but to win an affection which should match his own, and this impatient suitor walked and drove and spent the fleeting hours in waiting for a chance to show himself in the lists of love. It seemed years instead of weeks at last, and yet as if he had only been truly alive and free since love had made him captive. He could not ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... relief, I found it very lonesome upstairs. The pictures which crowded upon me of the various groups of excited and wildly gesticulating men and women through which we had passed on our way up, mingled themselves with the solemn horror of the scene in the writing-room, with its fleeting vision of youth and beauty lying pulseless in sudden death. I could not escape the one without feeling the immediate impress of the other, and if by chance they both yielded for an instant to that earlier scene of a desolate Street, with its solitary lamp shining ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... live by, 'what would David like?' Be happy, dear. Follow the sunshine. I think it guides us truly, for a pure kind heart can not mistake fleeting gaiety for lasting joys like you and I have had. So wherever your journey of joy may take you, follow it and be assured that I am smiling at ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... with the society which we afforded one another. Soon I came to enjoy these intervals, to look and to plan for them. In them I seemed to get glimpses of what my young cousin ought to be always; but they were brief and fleeting. An intrusion ended them; or, more often, they were doomed to perish at my hands or at hers. A troubled shyness would suddenly eclipse her mirth; or I would be seized with a sense that my cheating of fate was useless, and served only to make the fate more bitter. She seemed to dread any ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... no longer How to lead this life of sadness In this everlasting trouble, In an age when all is fleeting. Shall I rear in wind a dwelling, Build a house ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... seek the vain that dies? The life begirt by death? The fame, the power that flies With the expiring breath? The good that carries ill besides, And for a fleeting hour abides? ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... saw Lois, and their eyes met. Not a word did they say, but in that fleeting glance the expression that he saw in the eyes of the woman he loved gave ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... main road in a cloud of dust. It sped on the fleeting tires of a high-powered motor which flew from its dust-grey hood a red flag with two white stars. It blew into the villages and out, through the billets and cook tents, mess halls, and picket lines. The whirlwind ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... call for a little more attendance than ordinary; and I had reason to think myself slighted, where an indulgent father can least bear to be so, that is, where he most loves; and that by young upstarts, who are growing up to the enjoyment of those pleasures which have run away from me, fleeting rascals as they are! before I was willing to part with them. And I rung and rung, and "Where's Polly?" (for I honour the slut with too much of my notice), "Where's Polly?" was all my cry, to every one who came up to ask what I rung for. And, at last, in burst the pert baggage, with an air of ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... rest among the nodding stalks. The charioteer with wond'rous gesture talks To the trees and mountains; and there soon appear Shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear, Passing along before a dusky space Made by some mighty oaks: as they would chase Some ever-fleeting music on they sweep. Lo! how they murmur, laugh, and smile, and weep: Some with upholden hand and mouth severe; Some with their faces muffled to the ear Between their arms; some, clear in youthful bloom, Go glad and smilingly, athwart the gloom; Some looking back, and some with upward ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... crash. Jimmy Holden both heard and felt the sharp Bang! as the right front tire went. The steering wheel snapped through his father's hands by half a turn. There was a splintering crash as the car shattered its way through the retaining fence, then came a fleeting moment of breathless silence as if the entire universe had stopped still ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... frame of Thespis' chariot fair, Resembling much the bark of Acheron, That carries naught but shades and forms of air; And if rude life should venture to press on, The fragile bark its weight no more can bear, For fleeting spirits it can hold alone. Appearance ne'er can reach reality,— If nature be victorious, art ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to Switzerland." He had a fleeting glimpse of the quiet place with the green water-fall, where he might have made tryst with his vision; then he turned his mind from it and said: "We'll go just where you want. How soon can you ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... people knew. Allee was most familiar with the brown-eyed dream-child, the little family at the parsonage were quite well acquainted with her, and occasionally Gail caught a fleeting glimpse of that hidden spirit, but to the rest of the little world in which she lived she was a bright-eyed, gay-hearted little romp, whose efforts to lend assistance to others were always leading her into ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... it smiled With seeming kindness which beguiled Your Thyrsis lately, when he thought He had his fleeting Caelia caught. 40 'Twas shaped like her, but, for the fair, He fill'd his arms with ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he was plaintively demanding, "And what are the ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... bridges and culverts. Glancing along them, Alex was surprised to see a man's head cautiously emerge from an opening in the lumber on one of the cars, and quickly disappear on discovering him. A moment after he had a fleeting glimpse of the intruder running low along the side of the train toward ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... all of the hours that are fleeting, You ask for an "extra"—you can't be denied. But though, doubtless, soft nothings may set your heart beating, Yet they're awfully ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various |
