"Immobility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so has your daughter, that she goes back and back in these dreams of her own childhood, which no doubt are made up of ... which no doubt may have been told her by ..." He stopped intentionally. He wanted to stagger her immobility by making her recite the nonsense about ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... a fairly good-looking fellow when rid of the self-consciousness of jealousy. His eyes, mouth, chin, and nose, acquired from reliable and recognizable sources, were good features, and statuesque in their immobility beneath the drooping curves of his broad soft hat. He was tall, with the slenderness of youth, despite his evident weight and strength. He was long-waisted and lithe and small of girth, with broad square shoulders, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the girl knew he would ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gesture, signal, gesticulation; port, gait; impulse. Antonyms: inertia, rest, stagnation, immobility, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... there when Miriam came downstairs dressed for church. Something in his immobility struck home to her. "You'd better come to church than mope," ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the first rays of the sun which were reddening the window panes, the old servitor had gone to the embrasure of a window and stood leaning against a corner of it. There, with his face towards the wall, he seemed to be estimating its thickness, keeping his body in such absolute immobility that he might have been taken for a statue. In the middle of the room the countess beheld a short, stout man, apparently out of breath and stupefied, whose eyes were blindfolded and his features so distorted with terror that it ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... joke on me, boys," he ventured with a nervous little laugh. And then his voice died away against the stony immobility of the man opposite as laughter sinks to nothing against the horror of a great darkness. Bennington began to feel impressed in earnest. Across his mind crept doubts as to the outcome. He almost screamed aloud as some one stole up behind and dropped over his throat the soft cold coil of a lariat. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... thawed into swift comprehension and dismay, lit a flame in her cheeks, throbbed burningly at the lobes of her ears, spread magnetic and prickling over her whole stung body, and ebbed and froze again to immobility. She opposed her cousin's kind eyes with ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... and not for the first time, either. She had startled and discomposed him several times in the course of their brief acquaintance; and he always resented it, priding himself in private, as he did, upon his coolness and immobility. He could not think of the right thing to say just now, so he ...
— A Fair Barbarian • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his choice of several possible methods of procedure. The simplest, though not the most effective method, is to write out the argument in full, and to memorize it word for word. The weakness of such a course lies in the immobility of its attack and defense. The first speaker for the affirmative may decide beforehand exactly what he will say and the order in which he will say it, but all those who are to follow should adapt their arguments, to some extent at least, to the exigencies of the debate. They ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... people on the benches—limp and sodden outlines. Dickie had glanced at them and had glanced away. He did not want to think that he looked like one of these—half-crushed insects,—bruised into immobility. A bus swept round the corner and moved with a sort of topheavy, tipsy dignity under the white arch. It was loaded with humanity, its top black with heads. "It ain't a crowd," thought Dickie; "it's a swarm." His eyes followed the ragged sky-line. "Why is it so horrible?" he ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... His Majesty's immobility on certain questions had the practical effect of literally placing them in abeyance in the councils of his Ministers. As it was found to be impossible to form a strong Administration that should unanimously agree with His Majesty, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... were most ludicrous; and finding all these of no avail, he tried to make the Indian understand him by repeating English words very loudly and distinctly again and again. The Indian sat with his eye fixed steadily upon him, and in spite of the rigid immobility of his features, it was clear at a glance that he perfectly understood his military companion's character and thoroughly despised him. The exhibition was more amusing than politic, and Tete Rouge was directed to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... an ascendency, which the genius of Richelieu had been able to fetter, but not to destroy. Powerful to resist, but not to impel, Austria was more fitted to sustain than to act; her force lies in her situation and immobility, for she is like a block in the middle of Germany,—her power is in her weight; she is the pivot of the balance of European power. But the federative diet weakened and enervated its designs by those secret ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... man, soul and body, heart, hand, and spirit, stood beside the other, who was a shadow, and beside her, who was a woman—and the tragedy began in the prologue of contrast. Strength to weakness, motion to immobility, the grace and carriage of manly youth to the sad restfulness of helpless, hopeless limbs that never again could feel and bear weight; that was the contrast from which there was no escaping. On the steps of love's temple, at the very threshold, the one lay half ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... him into the studio, the famous Pompeian room, on the second floor. I shall never forget the frozen immobility of the three actors in the tragedy. Esther Levenson, wrapped in peacock-blue scarves, stood upright before the black mantel, her hands crossed on her breast. Cecil Grimshaw was lying full length on a brick-red satin couch, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. The dead man sprawled ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... for thee then,' Margot said, 'for in all the twenty hours no man hath sought thee here.' She had the heavy immobility of an elemental force. No fright could move her till she saw the cause for fright. 'I will fetch thee ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... him the look of the great Napoleon. The contour of feature was the same: and on his brow, broad and massive, there might be seen those grand shadows with which French artists love to glorify the Emperor. Yet in addition to this he had that same serene immobility of countenance which characterized the other, which could serve as an impenetrable mask to ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the hall, and listened. There hovered before him in the darkness the face of Philippina. She showed the same scornful immobility that she showed when her father struck her in the face. He stepped to the railing, and sat down on the top step; a fit at once of weakness and aimless defiance came over him. He buried his face in his hands; he could still hear Theresa ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... side, the elbows steady by the hips, the brim of the hat level and undisturbed in its onward glide, until the keen edges of Boldwood's shape sank by degrees over the hill. To one who knew the man and his story there was something more striking in this immobility than in a collapse. The clash of discord between mood and matter here was forced painfully home to the heart; and, as in laughter there are more dreadful phases than in tears, so was there in the steadiness of this agonized man an ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... eyes, hallowed by disease, retained a singular steadiness. A superior spirit was fighting there with death. It seemed as if Bartholomeo sought to kill with his dying look some enemy seated at the foot of his bed. This gaze, fixed and cold, was made the more appalling by the immobility of the head, which was like a skull standing on a doctor's table. The body, clearly outlined by the coverlet, showed that the dying man's limbs preserved the same rigidity. All was dead, except the eyes. There was something mechanical in the sounds which came from the mouth. Don Juan ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... step nearer towards her. Something of the servility of his manner had gone. For the first time she looked at him closely, appreciated the tense immobility of his features, the still, penetrating light of his cold eyes. A queer premonition of trouble ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. She has built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility, than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national political and social organization—the advantage of combining ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... horse!" exclaimed the prince, attempting to lean forward to look out of the door; but the movement he was obliged to make cost him so much trouble that he soon hastened to resume his immobility. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... landscape, and, imaginatively, not much more. But just as they could not contemplate the obliteration of part of the landscape, so it was difficult to conceive permanent idleness at the works. It was a case of the immobility of the non-speculative mind, which is lethargic in hours of exaltation but comfortably steadfast in times ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... have been told that Prince Achille Muratz is subject, to this day, to frequent attacks of epilepsy. As is well known, the First Consul went on to the opera, where he was received with tumultuous acclamations, the immobility of his countenance contrasting strongly with the pallor and agitation of Madame Bonaparte's, who had feared not so much for herself as for him. The coachman who had driven the First Consul with such good fortune ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... printed lines some faint, reflective thrill of the more vital world of strife in which he was living. For a moment the roar of London was in her ears. She saw the lighted thoroughfares, the crowded pavements, the faces of the men and women, all a little strained and eager, so different from the placid immobility of the world in which she lived. She rose to her feet and moved restlessly about the room. Presently she lifted the curtain and looked out. There was a pause in the storm and a great mass of black clouds had just been driven past the ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inflammation of the throat, as in pharyngolaryngitis, the head is extended upon the neck and the angle between the jaw and the lower border of the neck is opened as far as possible to relieve the pressure that otherwise would fall upon the throat. In dumminess, or immobility, the hanging position of the head and the stupid expression are rather characteristic. In pleurisy, peritonitis, and some other painful diseases of the internal organs, the rigid position of the body denotes an effort of the animal to avoid pressure ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... have ever bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened lips had the immobility of the bazar. People looked at their playbills to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his foot upon her ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... no sign, but her very immobility told something. Jennie went over to her and quickly discovered that she had ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of the immobility of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... the same principle underlying the scientific doctrine of evolution. People often think loosely that the idea of evolution, in the case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, with his immobility, his long legs, his pointed beak, his muscular neck, is that such characteristics have been evolved through long ages by birds that have had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the wood. It was cut more than half through! By raising my elbow to its original position, and using it as a lever, I could tear apart the crushed fibres. I saw this; but in the anticipation of a visit from the marker, I prudently preserved my attitude of immobility. In a moment after, the grinning savage came gliding in front of me; and, perceiving the track of the bullet, pointed it out to those upon the plain. I was in a feverish state of suspense lest he might suspect design; ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... approached, the Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with the high-bridged, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... orders the Act of Uniformity severed it as irretrievably from the general body of the Protestant Churches whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus cut off from all healthy religious communion with the world without it sank into immobility within. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy all change, all efforts after reform, all national developement, suddenly stopped. From that time to this the Episcopal Church has been unable to meet the varying spiritual ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... and wide travels of the priest. Padre Salvi's swoon was the excessive sorrow that took possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little fruit borne among the Indians by his pious sermons, while the immobility and fright of the other guests, among them the Countess, who "sustained" Padre Salvi (she grabbed him), were the serenity and sang-froid of heroes, inured to danger in the performance of their duties, beside whom the Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... you know," she said, with a desperate anger at his immobility. "When I saw you with her to-day, I did not—I ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... officers; he was urging on the coachman, who was putting in the horses, and was furiously angry at his deliberateness. Gemma too said nothing to Sanin, she did not even look at him; from her knitted brows, from her pale and compressed lips, from her very immobility it could be seen that she was suffering inwardly. Only Emil obviously wanted to speak to Sanin, wanted to question him; he had seen Sanin go up to the officers, he had seen him give them something white—a ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... moments on self-reproach or panic. While he was still rolling under his jeep, his mind had been busy with plans to retrieve the situation. Something touched the heel of one boot, and he froze his leg into immobility, at the same time trying to get the big Smith & Wesson free. The shoulder-holster, he found, was badly torn, though made of the heaviest skirting-leather, and the spring which retained the weapon in place had been wrenched and bent until he needed ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... you realize what centuries of suppression are doing to my sex? Do you understand that woman is degenerating into an immobility—an inertia—a molluskular condition of receptive passivity which is rendering us, year by year, more unfitted to either think or act for ourselves? Even in the matter of marriage we are not permitted by custom to assume the initiative. We may only shake our heads ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... reappeared at the door, preceded this time by two commissaires de police. These men entered the room and, amid the unbroken silence and total immobility of the Assembly, summoned the Representatives to disperse. The President ordered them to retire themselves. One of the commissaires was agitated and faltered; the other broke out in invectives. The President said to him: "Sir, we are here the lawful authority and sole representatives ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... struck in Central Brazil by the almost absolute immobility of the clouds. One seldom experienced a strong wind; contrary to what must have taken place there in ages gone by, when that country must have been the very home of terrific air-currents and disturbances on a scale ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... down upon her bosom, but, as her immobility continues, he experiences for the first time a faint sensation of fear. This is born of his love for her, and, in a frantic endeavour to recall her to life, he bends down and kisses her passionately. At the magic touch of his lips, Brunhilde opens her eyes, and, overjoyed ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... pulpit, stirs neither head nor hand except upon special occasions; but he has a powerful voice, he pours out his words in a strong, full volume, and the force he has in this respect compensates for the general immobility he displays ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... everything; it is metallic, and everything is made of the same horrible white metal. Nothing seems familiar; not only are the wonted forms and outlines vanished, and all their varied textures and materials and beautiful diversity of color gone also, but there is a steely immobility restraining everything which is so complete that it seems as if it were a shell that ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... these were always shifting in the strife of winds, and the sun shone through them petulantly. As we climbed the rollers, or sank into their trough, the outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed, suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty of mountains contrasted with the weltering waste of water round us—now blue and garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squally rain-storms, and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy. Each of these vignettes was photographed for one ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the waist for safety—a situation which, however repugnant to maiden bashfulness, time, and perhaps necessity, had reconciled her to. At all events, poor Paddy's terror would have been the amplest refutation of scandal, while the stern immobility of Miss Betty during the embrace ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... a bench within two steps; he carried her there, but after laying her upon it, instead of affording her the required assistance, he remained in an attitude of strange immobility before that lovely and helpless form. A long silence followed, broken only by the gentle and monotonous ripple of the brook. Shaking off his stupor at last, Monsieur de Lucan called out several times in a loud and ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... his strange adversary with visible anxiety. His superhuman calm had an effect upon him. In vain, appealing to his reason, did he tell himself that in so unequal a combat all the advantages were on his side. The immobility of the blind man froze him. He had settled on the place where he would strike his victim. He had fixed upon it! What, then, hindered him from putting an end ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... deprives the morality of China of enthusiasm, its social system of vitality, its order of any progress, and its conservatism of any improvement. It is a system without hope, and so has remained frozen in an icy and stiff immobility for fifteen hundred years. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... instrument as such is to be moved by another, but not to move itself; this belongs to the will. Consequently, however much the will be moved in the contrary direction, the character is not removed, by reason of the immobility of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... seething mass of confusion. The pilots distributed spacesuits and helped passengers into them while the cabin continued to sway and lurch. Fear-crazed passengers ran aimlessly in circles. Some fainted and others were shocked into immobility. ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... wilderness engineering had progressed for an hour under the watchers' eyes, Jabe began to grow very tired. The strain of physical immobility told upon him, and he lost interest. He began to feel that he knew all about dam-building; and as there was nothing more to learn he wanted to go back to camp. He glanced anxiously at the young face beside him—but there he could see no sign of ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... silent in her uncertainty. His expression was grave, almost absent-minded. And again her troubled eyes rested on the disturbing symmetry of feature and figure in all the unconscious grace of repose; and in his immobility there seemed something even of nobility about him which ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... arm across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda, with her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his children. The sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic in expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible to discover what he thought. Bushy grey ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... secret revealed to me by feelings instead of words,—as the sensation of the eye passing from darkness into light, or as the rapture of some mystical soul, secure in the possession of its God. It was dazzling light, intoxication without giddiness, repose without heaviness, or immobility. I could have lived on thus during as many thousand years as there were ripples on the lake, or sands upon its shores, without perceiving that more seconds had elapsed than were required for a single ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... I do not know that I had any reason to be ashamed or to feel myself in any sort a traitor to the duchess. Yet some such feelings I had as I backed out of the room leaving her standing there in unwonted immobility, her eyes haughty and cold, her lips set, her grace congealed to stateliness, her gay agility frozen ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... her whole form quivered, then came immobility. Her limbs straighten, the rose fades from her cheek, her brow becomes like marble. The man lifted the inert form in his arms, and slowly, with infinite precautions, he moved toward the portiere, which he ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... a voyage, the kedge sent ashore, and the decks tidied down: a good three-quarters of an hour's work, during which I raged about the deck like a man with a strong toothache. The transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon had wrought strange distress among my nerves: I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... imperceptible to my heated brow, but vigorous enough to keep them moving. Often, too—indeed nearly always—I have found that after exhausting my all too scanty stock of patience, and making an "exposure" in despair, the errant blossoms and leaflets would settle down into perfect immobility, as if to say, "There! don't be cross—we'll behave," when it ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... feet and stood staring. The quickness of his movement—ordinarily he moved measuredly—frightened her. She fluttered, drifted away, paused. Frank stiffened. His immobility reassured her. She drifted nearer. Something impelled Frank to hold his rigid pose. But, for some unaccustomed reason, his hand trembled. His book dropped noiselessly on to the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... that Finn found his mate when he arrived at the cave that morning from Nuthill. For some moments Finn also gazed down at the victims, pondering over their immobility and his mate's mournful cries. Then, very tenderly at first, he nuzzled the dead puppies. That process flashed a picture into his mind, and he saw again Warrigal's dead children in the Mount Desolation cave. So he understood. His head moved now far more vigorously, almost roughly, indeed, as ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... flung herself down upon the red sofa, and buried her head in the rags which covered the bosom of her mother, and wept there. The old woman received her daughter without issuing from her state of immobility, or displaying any emotion. The mother possessed in the highest degree that gravity of savage races, the impassiveness of a statue upon which all remarks are lost. Did she or did she not love her daughter? Beneath that mask every human emotion might brood—good and evil; and from ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... be found only in movement, for a modification which takes place in the soul can only be manifested in the sensuous world as movement. But this does not prevent features fixed and in repose also from possessing grace. There immobility is, in its origin, movement which, from being frequently repeated, at length becomes habitual, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... repetition "keep still." As a matter of fact, in these movements the little one is seeking the very exercise which will organize and coordinate the movements useful to man. We must, therefore, desist from the useless attempt to reduce the child to a state of immobility. We should rather give "order" to his movements, leading them to those actions towards which his efforts are actually tending. This is the aim of muscular education at this age. Once a direction is given to them, the child's movements ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... more paces, rifle up, ready to fire the instant Queen lifted a gun. The man's immobility brought the cold sweat to Jean's brow. He stopped to bend the full intense power of his gaze upon this inert figure. Suddenly over Jean flashed its meaning. Queen was dead. He had backed up against the pine, ready to face his foe, and he had died ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Francois turns his searching gaze on the Judge, parrying every move, does the lawyer feel how the immobility of the clergyman is proof against ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Sarah, in a faltering voice, for, notwithstanding her habitual immobility, in reflecting upon the immense importance of the revelation she was about to make to Rudolph, she felt herself more agitated than she could have thought possible. After a moment's silence, Sarah, no longer ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... time in their lives, the two men eyed each other fairly. Indescribable hate was written upon one face; the other was as blank as the surrounding snow. Its very immobility chilled Tom Blair and cowed him into silence. Without a word he replaced shoe and coat and took up his blanket. An advancing step sounded behind him, and, understanding, he moved ahead. After a while the foot-fall again ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... the lagoon. The islands in their spring verdure slumbered peacefully. Far away the shipping in the bacino lay still like enchanted craft. Only a steamer or two, and here and there the black line of a gondola with its standing, solitary rower, broke the immobility of things. And Venice, russet and rose and grey, brooded in the sunset, a city of dreams. They murmured words of wonder and regret. Instinctively they drew near and their shoulders touched. Their clasp ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... charming restfulness, her head inclined, looked at the dying embers in the grate. Her thoughtful mood had flown. Nothing of it remained on her face, a little saddened, nor in her languid body, more desirable than ever in the quiescence of her mind. She kept for a while a profound immobility, which added to her personal attraction the charm of things ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the natural reason, belongs to direct motion. When, however, it arises from Divine illuminations, it comes under oblique motion, as we have already said (in the reply to the second argument). Lastly, only the immobility which he mentions will ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... beard descended to his middle. He wore the usual loin-cloth, but was usual in nothing else. He looked older than Methuselah, yet strong, for his muscles stood out like knotted whip-cords; and active, for he stood on the balls of his feet with the immobility that only comes of ableness. The most unusual thing of all was that he spoke. He said several words in Sanskrit to the Gray Mahatma, before turning his back on us and leading ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... disclosed to the outside critics of his life and conduct. Only the King and Queen, and Professor von Glauben knew it;—for even Sir Roger de Launay had not been entrusted with the story of his secret marriage. The Queen had received the news with her usual characteristic immobility. A faint cold smile had parted her lips as she listened to the story of her son's romance,—and her reply to the King's brief ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... on the score of waste of zinc by local action, because of the electro positive metal being exposed to the chromic liquid; but if the battery be out of action and the circulation stopped, the zinc amalgam is protected by the immobility of the liquid and the formation of a dense layer of sulphate of zinc on its surface. When in action, that effect is neutralized from the fact that carbon in chromic acid is more highly electro-negative ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... of the tragedy, Dick had not understood. Indeed, he was still dazed by the suddenness of it all. But the falling of Griggs before the leveled weapon of the other man, there to lie in that ghastly immobility, made him to understand. He leaped toward Garson—would have wrenched the pistol from the other's grasp. In the struggle, it fell ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation. Yet in Georgian's eyes he had lost none of his formidable qualities, for the dismay with which ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... nature, the climate and the scenery, exert an appreciable and an acknowledged influence on the mental characteristics of a people. The sprightliness and vivacity of the Frank, the impetuosity of the Arab, the immobility of the Russ, the rugged sternness of the Scot, the repose and dreaminess of the Hindoo are largely due to the country in which they dwell, the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the landscapes and skies they daily look upon. The nomadic Arab is not only indebted ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of the apostolic age was characteristic of that mediaeval method of interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently conservative, the Lutheran States became the stronghold of rigid immobility, and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the Swiss reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause with politics. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Bixschoote. A like prudence was not, however, observed all along the line, for every now and then the trenches would be suddenly illuminated at a point where for a few seconds a useless volley would ring out. Then everything relapsed into darkness and immobility. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... care and skill. We watched her for hours, and she showed no sign or gleam of recovery. Her sleep was deeper than either Sebastian's or Hilda's had been. She had taken a big dose, so as to secure immobility. The question now was, would she recover at all from it? Hour after hour we waited and watched; and not a sign of movement! Only the same deep, slow, hampered breathing, the same feeble, jerky pulse, the same deathly pallor on the dark cheeks, the same corpse-like ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... had a subsequent attack, during which she was treated at another hospital. From the description this again seems to have been a typical stupor (immobility, mutism, tendency to catalepsy, rigidity). According to the account of the onset sent by that hospital (it was obtained from the mother), this attack began some months before admission, with complaints of being out of sorts, not being able to concentrate and fearing that another ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace, into the setting ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... and then he took her home. He was a little frightened, for there was something not like her in the way she had taken it, a sort of immobility that might, he thought, cover heartbreak. But she smiled when she thanked him, and went ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in a brooding stare. She was all in delicate, cunningly mingled tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains on her long white hands. In her dark immobility, among the rich, clear objects scattered so artfully about the sun-lighted chamber, she had a marvellous effect of being the chief figure in some modern French artist's impressionistic "interior." She gave a distinct sense of having been bathed ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent, to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the wide-eyed, terrified stare ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... to make marks in the earth with the point of her parasol, but she stopped and listened to him in perfect immobility—immobility save for the appearance by the time he had stopped speaking of a flush in her guarded clearness. Such as it was it told Longmore she was moved, and his first perceiving it was the happiest moment of his life. She raised her eyes ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... class. To be complete within itself, secure from military attack and economically self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... forward to meet him. As he was carrying something clasped to his breast, they supported him to the opening. But at the same moment the object of his search and his burden, a misshapen wedge of gold and quartz, dropped with him, and both fell together with equal immobility to the ground. He had still strength to turn his fading eyes to the other millionaire of ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... strength, which in this case relieved my painful feelings. And the man seemed to have done nothing. Except for the change of position in order to use his feet, which made us all start by its swiftness, my recollection is that of immobility. But he had bent the bars wide apart. And now he could get out if he liked; but he dropped his legs inwards, and looking over his shoulder beckoned to the soldiers. 'Hand up the water,' he said. 'I will give them all ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... declining years the life of this man was a pitiful tragedy, his filmy eyes sightless, his thin white fingers ever eager and nervous, his hours full of deep thought and silent immobility. To him, what was the benefit of that beautiful Perthshire castle which he had purchased from Lord Strathavon a year before his compulsory retirement? What was the use of the old ancestral manor near Caistor in Lincolnshire, or the town-house in Park Street, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... Von Stein. He lifted a hand for silence: then his fingers leaped among the gadgets on the table. After that came a brief period, measured by seconds, of immobility. Then the table sank from view, the copper bowl lifted, and Dr. von Stein went ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... months. As we had plenty of wood, and caution was the word, I brought up in the middle of the stream. The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had set. The current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on the banks. The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed into stone, even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep—it ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... were somewhat stupefied by the continual rotation and their enforced immobility. They spoke but seldom and must have dozed frequently, for Phoebe was much surprised to find, on looking at the clock, that it was ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... be rough to Mr. Clavering. He is so very hard. Hannah shall do it. Will you make her understand?" Mrs. Clavering promised that she would do this, wondering, as she did so, at the wretched, frigid immobility of the unfortunate woman before her. She knew Lady Clavering well; knew her to be in many things weak, to be worldly, listless, and perhaps somewhat selfish; but she knew also that she had loved her child as mothers always love. Yet, at this moment, it seemed that she was ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... with it, however gently, fierce enthusiasts in the row in front would turn on her—old gentlemen of an otherwise humane appearance, rapt ladies with eyeglasses and loose clothes—and sh-sh her with furious hissings into immobility. "Oh, Letty, try and sit still," Miss Leech, who dreaded publicity, would implore in a whisper; but who that has not had them can know the torture of chilblains inside thick boots, where they cannot be got at? As soon as the chilblains went, the Saturday concerts ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... to dish up the visitor's dinner before she could tackle him upon the subject in hand. She trotted to and fro upon her task, too intent for further speech with Rufus, who sat in unbroken silence, gazing steadily before him with a Sphinx-like immobility that made ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... he got there. As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else; a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... previous studies of paralysed victims have made me familiar: the antennae slowly waving, the mandibles opening and closing, the palpae trembling for days, for weeks, even for months. The thighs tremble for a minute or two at most; and the struggle is over. Henceforth there is complete immobility. The significance of this sudden inertia is forced upon me: the Philanthus has stabbed the cervical ganglions. Hence the sudden immobility of all the organs of the head: hence the real, not the apparent death ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... and English immobility appeared, clothed in extreme evening dress, and established himself, ramrod-like, in a customary spot in the center of the floor. There was a figure on the Persian rug whereon Mr. Gwynn never failed to take position. Once in place, eye as expressionless as the eye of a fish, Mr. Gwynn would ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... cessation, immobility, inertia, quiet, suffering, deliberation, inaction, passion,[A] repose, suspension. endurance, inactivity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... was that of a man about Gerald Burton's own age. The features were stilled in the awful immobility of death: but for that immobility, the dead man lying there before them might have ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... at Albert Hall the Resisters were addressed by a duchess who was "supported by a man-servant." What can a mere Act of Parliament do when confronted by such a combination as that? Passive resistance takes on heroic proportions when a duchess and a man-servant confront the Law with haughty immobility. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... injustice for another to rush in before him, and seize his prey. But the same person advancing to pluck an apple, that hangs within his reach, has no reason to complain, if another, more alert, passes him, and takes possession. What is the reason of this difference, but that immobility, not being natural to the hare, but the effect of industry, forms in that case a strong relation with the hunter, which is ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... of the line came the shrill trilling of a whistle. At once the foreman nearest Vanamee repeated it, at the same time turning down the line, and waving one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle, till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the line of ploughs lost its immobility, moving forward, getting slowly under way, the horses straining in the traces. A prolonged movement rippled from team to team, disengaging in its passage a multitude of sounds—-the click of buckles, the creak of straining leather, the subdued clash of machinery, the ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a hungry man, as Plato says (Cf. De Coelo ii, 13), be confronted on either side with two portions of food equally appetizing and at an equal distance, he is not moved towards one more than to the other; and he finds the reason of this in the immobility of the earth in the middle of the world. Now, if that which is equally (eligible) with something else cannot be chosen, much less can that be chosen which appears as less (eligible). Therefore if two or more things are available, of which one appears to be more (eligible), ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... period of immobility and so sat for a long time. Suddenly her face hardened, became coarse, common, vicious in line. Flinging out her hand, she struck me in the breast. 'What do you want of me?' she demanded, in the voice of a harridan. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... red, watched without word or motion. The rest of the class, their countenances too showing an unnatural ruddiness, likewise maintained silence and immobility until the last of the nine had shuffled his feet into place. Then there burst upon the stillness a snigger which, faint as it was, sounded startlingly loud. Whereupon pent up emotions broke loose and a burst of laughter went up that shook ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... pit vanished. A clear light sprang up in the big room. Simultaneously, Halder felt the nightmare immobility draining from him and the sensation of dreamlike unreality fade from his mind. He turned to the right, found Kilby's eyes already on him, saw the Rellis couple sitting beyond her ... Rane, no longer disguised, looking like ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... session of July 23, 1881, by Crispi, as follows: "I do not admit the intangibility of the Statuto. Statutes are made to prevent governments from retrograding, not from advancing. Before us there can be nothing but progress.... If we retain immutable the fundamental law of the state, we desire immobility, and should throw aside all advances which have thus far been made by the constituted authorities. I understand that in the Statuto of Charles Albert nothing is said of revision, and this was prudent. But how should this silence be interpreted? It should be interpreted in the sense ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the many and changing concrete and conscious wishes. As wishes find expression in characteristic forms of behavior they may also be thought of in spatial terms as tendencies to move toward or away from their specific objects. The wish for security may be represented by position, mere immobility; the wish for new experience by the greatest possible freedom of movement and constant change of position; the wish for response, by the number and closeness of points of contact; the wish for recognition, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... anguish so inured That thou hast neither sentiment of grief Nor sense of pity for terrestrial ills? Can agonizing and heart-rending scenes Relax thy obdurate and placid face To semblance of emotion? Can man's woes Excite thy tranquil immobility To the pathetic look of tenderness, Or touch thy bosom's calm indifference With profuse throbs of sympathetic ruth? Can'st thou unmoved behold the widow's tears, Or those of orphaned childish innocence, Or ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the skyline of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. "He says maybe 'lectricity would help her some. I'm goin' to git her the batteries and things soon's I git the rubber bandages ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... to Champlain as umpire of the quarrel. The great council-house was filled with Huron and Algonquin cltiefs, smoking with that immobility of feature beneath which their race often hide a more than tiger-like ferocity. The umpire addressed the assembly, enlarged on the folly of falling to blows between themselves when the common enemy stood ready to devour them both, extolled the advantages of the French trade and alliance, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... again like Philomel to her vain regrets.[17] With Reinagle ... Newman and Blanco White had frequent (trios) at the latter's lodgings, where I was all the audience.... Most interesting was it to contrast Blanco White's excited and indeed agitated countenance with Newman's sphinx-like immobility, as the latter drew long rich notes with a steady hand."[18] Dr. Newman was still "bowing" forty years later, by which time the alleged "sphinx-like immobility" had made way for an ever-varying expression upon his face as strains alternated between grave and gay. Producing his violin from an old ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... more favorable to emancipation than in the United States. Yet here, a majority of the original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. The civil ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in—" Cara, beginning to speak almost as she entered, broke off abruptly as she caught sight of Ann's stricken face. She hurried to her side. The girl's mute immobility frightened her. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... and revived paganism; qualities that do not affect its essential integrity or authority but do misrepresent it before men, and work as a handicap in its adaptability and in its work of winning souls to Christianity and re-establishing the unity of Christendom. Fortunately this very immobility has saved it from a surrender to the new forces that were developed in secular society during the last two centuries, as it did yield to the compulsion of those that were let loose in the two that preceded them. It has never subjected questions ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... who had shown much more agitation and feeling than any of those present would have credited him with, had taken off his big loose coat and laid it on the ground, and at once Varick had followed his example. But as Bubbles lay there, in the dreadful immobility of utter unconsciousness, both Blanche Farrow and Helen Brabazon believed her to ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... stillness, in the shade of one of the chapels, he had two or three times noticed as he made, and made once more, his slow circuit. She wasn't prostrate—not in any degree bowed, but she was strangely fixed, and her prolonged immobility showed her, while he passed and paused, as wholly given up to the need, whatever it was, that had brought her there. She only sat and gazed before her, as he himself often sat; but she had placed herself, as he never did, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... monkey haunches. One he offered to McKay, the other to Rand. The latter's immobility vanished in a flash. With a lightning grab he seized the proffered meat and sank his teeth in it. As he wolfed down the tough flesh the three men standing over exchanged glances. Tucu laid a hand on his stomach and pressed inward, signifying that the man had long gone hungry. The others nodded. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... that!" she answered with gentle immobility. "Don't trouble about me, please. I must stay here till I know what has happened; and I think Miss Maurice will wish to stay too. We shall come to no harm. We women have ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... frankly recognized that a language is a living thing, and that {209} life means growth and growth change. So far as it lay in the power of the French critics the new dignity that came to their language in the seventeenth century was made to involve a pedantic and sterile immobility. The meaning, the spelling, the arrangement, of words was to be regulated by immutable law, and all who disobeyed were to be punished as lawless and insolent rebels. Johnson knew better. Both his melancholy and his common sense taught him that "language is the work of man, of ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... him, in that first vision of her, of "Phiz's" pictures of Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, and always afterwards that connection remained with him. Her thin, spare figure had something intense, almost burning, in its immobility, in the deep black of her dress and hair, in the white sharpness of the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, obscene, monstrous and revolting, is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... train of her long brocade robe undulated about her little feet. Same face, same figure. It was she indeed; and to prevent any possible doubt of it, she was seated on the back of a huge old- fashioned book strongly resembling the "Cosmography of Munster." Her immobility but half reassured me; I was really afraid that she was going to take some more nuts out of her alms-purse and throw ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... he answered. Suddenly it flashed through her mind why he had come. Her heart gave a great beat against her chest. The thought had never entered her head. She sat down and waited for him to speak. He did not move. There was a singular immobility about him when something absorbed ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... once perfectly pleased to see him, completely aware of what he had most in mind, and singularly serene in face of his sense of their impediment. It was as if for all the world she didn't take it for one, the immobility, to say nothing of the seeming equanimity, of their tactless companion; at whom meanwhile indeed our friend himself, after his first ruffled perception, no more adventured a look than if advised by his constitutional kindness that to notice her in any degree would perforce be ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... clean-shaven upper lip, but neither that nor the pallor which had long since settled on the rigid features had given anything of ghastliness to the face. The dead man lay back in his chair in such an easy posture that but for his utter quietness, his intense immobility, he might have well been taken for one who was ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... cobra swiftly strikes at any moving object within its range. Complete immobility is usually one's sole ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... stage well—the purple semicircle of hills, the slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow sands, the streaming green of ravines. All that had the crude and blended colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the suspicious immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed so perfectly the accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of the world seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be nothing outside. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... seemed so close, that black and white mountainous disc. We were, I suppose, some twenty thousand miles from it, gathering speed as it pulled at us. But that motion was not apparent now. Distance dwindled all these celestial motions, so that all the firmament seemed frozen into immobility. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... out of the stony immobility in which she gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had moved, was incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex start as though she had been struck. But at the sight of it, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... above him, seemed for a moment as though he were caught up in the cloud of some wondrous dream. Still the enormous throng of people stood hushed and motionless,—not a word, not a sound escaped them,—there was something positively appalling in such absolute immobility,—at least it appeared so to Theos, who could not understand this dispassionate behavior on the part of so large and lately excited a multitude. All at once a voice marvellously tender, clear, and pathetic trembled on the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... on his ray gun. There was a harsh crackling sound and Tom and Astro stiffened into immobility, every nerve and muscle deadened. With the exception of their hearts, and sense of seeing and hearing, they might ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... The immobility of this figure under the moon's rays was terrible. I felt my tongue freezing, my teeth clinched. I was about to cry out in terror when, by some incomprehensible mysterious attraction, my glance ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... opposite side of the hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes steadily fixed on his old friend's face, had not moved since the tale began. He continued to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally asked: "But how long did you ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... present an air of strolling nonchalance. He gestured fluidly with a graceful tentacle. "You!" he said to Crownwall. "Follow me. His Effulgence commands you to appear before him at once." The two guards withdrew their pikes and froze into immobility at the sides of ...
— Upstarts • L. J. Stecher
... dug the heavy turf, all that thundering host—which but a second before had seemed inevitably bound to trample down the Legion under a hurricane of white-lathered horses and frenzied, long-robed men—came to a dead halt of silence and immobility. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... like this, it now became evident that his face was one of those which are, all along, intended for death—intended, that is, to lie waxen and immobile, to show to best advantage. In life, there had been too marked a discrepancy between the extreme warmth of the girl's colouring and the extreme immobility of her expression. Now that the blood had, as it were, been drained away to the last drop, now that temples and nostrils had attained transparency, the fine texture of the skin and the beauty of the curves of lips and chin were visible to every eye. Only one hand, so the LEICHENFRAU ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... trickling sound of water. It was barely perceptible, and we listened hard, indefinitely, while the silence congealed in our ears, and the darkness condensed about our eyes, filling up space, and stopping thought save just for the sound of the brook. It seemed a sort of growing immobility, eternal, like ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... been so, but, whether it were so or not, the crisis came like a bolt out of the blue, and he was checked in full career, as if a voice had spoken to the sea in its wildest storm, and frozen its waves into immobility. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... his breath he resumed that immobility which extended even to his eyes. He recalled the thoughts of her that had filled his captivity, all his memories of their union which had gained, from "the pathos of distance," and from the passage of time, an immaterial, an ideal, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... muscles, and interlaces and crosses them in every direction. Now, if these fibers remain long in a fixed position, or are involved in inflammation, there is danger of adhesions forming between them, producing permanent immobility; gliding movements are interfered with, and the muscle ceases to perform its function. Inflammation gives rise to effusion, or the formation of a kind of cement which binds together the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... for Mainwaring to conceal his astonishment at so unexpected a sight, and whether or not his own thoughts lent color to his imagination, it seemed to him that Eleazer Cooper concealed under the immobility of his countenance no ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... called the land of quiet repose, content to remain anchored to the hoary past, and proud of her immobility. Invasion after invasion ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... in his chair, and for some minutes complete silence reigned in the room. He was evidently thinking deeply, and his eyes were fixed upon the open book with inscrutable immobility. Once he glanced slowly towards Rene Drucquer, who sat with downcast eyes and interlocked fingers. Then he pressed back his elbows and inhaled a deep breath, as if weary of sitting ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to stiffen where he stood, even as a man in a catalepsy might do, and that he stood so rigid and tense for the space, as it seemed to Maleotti, of several minutes, though why he stood so or what the cause of his immobility this Maleotti could in nowise conjecture. I, of course, know very well that this was one of the moments when the God of Love made itself manifest to him. But after a while, as he affirmed that told it to me, Messer Dante seemed ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... undisplaced, notwithstanding the journey of millions of miles which the earth was now acknowledged to make each year around the sun. In the face of the gradual and immense improvement in telescopes, this apparent immobility of the stars was, however, not destined to last. The first ascertained displacement of a star, namely that of 61 Cygni, noted by Bessel in the year 1838, definitely proved to men the truth of the Copernican system. Since then some forty more stars have been found to show similar tiny displacements. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... uncertain halt and stared at the stranger. At first he was unseen, for the stranger looked straight out into the street with singular fixity, and the death-like pallor of his face added a weirdness to the immobility of his gaze. Then he took ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... its efforts, despite the powerful methods it used to split this ice, the Nautilus was reduced to immobility. Ordinarily, when someone can't go any farther, he still has the option of returning in his tracks. But here it was just as impossible to turn back as to go forward, because every passageway had closed behind ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... us alluringly to its magnificence; then, fading like an exquisite mirage created by the genii of the desert, it swiftly sank into the desolation from which the sun had summoned it, to crown it briefly with supernal glory. Turning at last from its cold immobility to the activity around us, I saw some representatives of the fallen race of California, as Indian bucks and squaws came from their squalid hovels to sell the trifling products of their industry, and stare ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... overshadowed vale. Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions. Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs and over the apple-trees ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... is the most volatile thing in the world. It can laugh and sigh and groan and weep, as well as shout and storm, with the ease of an infant, and then immediately regain its immobility and fixed attention. With Ollie's simple statement a sound rose from it which was a denunciation and a curse upon the ashes of old Isom Chase. It was as if a sympathetic old lady had shaken her head ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... silence, that absolute immobility of face and limb. If her faculty of hearing was dulled, possibly she would yield to that of touch. Stooping, he laid his ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... there would be no fighting; it was thought that the demonstration Lalor and his men were making would have the effect of bringing the powers to reason, and this opinion was held in spite of past bitter experience of the stupid immobility of the ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... think there's any way I could help the parson for awhile, I'd be proud to try, miss. It's true," he added casually, with a sphinx-like immobility of countenance, "that I'm what might be called handy ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler |
