"Inanition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of inanition if fed on but one kind of food, however congenial, yet lives if he has all in succession, so ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... dear Harry, how little do you know of life; there is a kind of man whose appetite for the marvellous is such, that he must be crammed with miracles or he dies of inanition, and you might as well attempt to feed a tiger upon pate de foie gras, as satisfy him by mere naked unvarnished truth. I'll just give you an easy illustration; you saw his delight this morning when the 'Duke' rode past; ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... of others and sublimely unconscious of our own until one day—ah, yes—one day we meet Ourselves face to face and see beneath all our pitiful shams and hypocrisies and know ourselves at last for what we really are—behold the decay of faculties, the degeneration of intellect bred of sloth and inanition and know ourselves at last—for exactly what ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... taken to blind the people, and they drink in the vile poison with silent rapture. The poison contaminates their souls. Boredom whirls about in an idle dance, expiring in the agony of its inanition. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... when we are fatigued or exhausted. It is related by Sir Henry Holland that on one occasion he descended, on the same day, two mines in the Hartz Mountains, remaining some hours in each. In the second mine he was so exhausted with inanition and fatigue, that his memory utterly failed him; he could not recollect a single word of German. The power came back after taking food and wine. Old age notoriously impairs the memory in ninety-nine men out ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... twopence until his two surplus copies have secured two new readers. . . . The League would have to make itself responsible for the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... never be without a topic. Public disturbance is the element in which they live. They must assault the government, or perish of inanition; and they must stimulate the mob by the novelty of their demands, and the violence of their declamation, or they must sink into oblivion. The Irish opposition now turned to another topic, and brought forward the Roman Catholics for the candidateship ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in that strange condition, inert and still—neither dead nor living but, as it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is any man when insensibility ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... believe the mass of the English people are still as unacquainted with the characteristics of the colony, and the manners of colonial life, as if the vast continent of Australia remained in its primitive inanition. Poor as is the knowledge of our friends "at home" respecting their periecian brethren, I grieve to say, with regard to, or rather of, the Australian colonists, that knowledge is too frequently tinged with prejudice ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... settling on the head. Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,—calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have passed through the successive stages of inanition. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... growth and improvement, by laws akin to those which make the sun-flower turn to the sun or the willow to the stream. Ladies of this disposition, permanently thwarted in their affectionate bias, gradually languish away into intellectual inanition, or sprout out into those abnormal eccentricities which are classed under the general name of "oddity" or "character." But, once admitted to their proper soil, it is astonishing what healthful improvement takes ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... so. He arose refreshed. He got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of spruce and fir and silver birch. And then suddenly his mental inanition was at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave again. He was astonished that for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... homoeopathic treatment of sin is folly. The slaughtering of men and bulls cannot possibly bring life to the soul. To mortify the body for the sins of the flesh is palpably futile, for in desire alone lies all the ill. Quench the desire, and the deeds will die of inanition. Man himself is sole cause of his own misery. Get rid, then, said the Buddha, of these passions, these strivings for the sake of self, that hold the true soul a prisoner. They have to do with things ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... through inherent weakness—because they are not "fit" to survive—is also suggested by a study of the causes of death. From a third to a half of the deaths during the first year of life, and particularly during the first month, are due to what may be termed uterine causes, such as debility, atrophy, inanition, or premature birth. Although in many cases such a death is the result of lack of prenatal care, in still more it must be ascribed to a defect in ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... in your virtue, and refuse to spend a couple of shillings, as deeming it robbery of the fry at home. You wear out at least a shilling's worth of boot leather, pay twopence for a roll and fourpence for a more villainous compound called coffee; come home in a state of inanition, cram down a quartern loaf and a quarter of a pound of rancid butter, washed down with weak tea; and if self-satisfaction and exhaustion combined are soporific, it is only to leave you a prey to nightmare. Then, to say nothing of poorness of blood producing paucity of ideas, it is fearful ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delicate allusions to breakfast. The truth is that the bread-and-cheese supper was nothing to me now but an unsatisfactory recollection, and, with the sense of vacuum that distressed me, I was unwilling to follow the monk upon the promised round, lest I should die of inanition on the way. He asked me what I would like to eat, and I said, 'Anything that is near at hand.' Had I suggested that a chop or a steak would be suitable after so light a dinner, I should not have had ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... qui nous dict tout nous saousle et nous degouste." Holofernes is an amazing example of Donatello's power. He is a really drunken man: we see it in the comatose fall of the limbs, in the drooping features, the languid inanition of the arms. The veins throb in his hands and feet: the spine has ceased to be rigid, and were it not for the support of Judith's hands buried in his hair, he would topple over inanimate. The treatment of the bronze is successful and its patina is admirable. ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... was then, I was pleased with the idea that, by increasing, that weakness would at last kill me. I was delighted to see that no one disturbed me to offer me some food, and I congratulated myself upon having dismissed my servant. Twenty-four more hours passed by, and my weakness became complete inanition. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... faint sigh choked before it rose to his lips,—both manhood and hope were so dead with inanition; yet a life's failure went ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... dead, started up, and began to strike for herself, with some success, the instant Walpole's SOUP-ROYAL (that first 200,000 pounds, followed since by abundance more) got to her lips. Touched her poor pale lips; and went tingling through her, like life and fiery elasticity, out of death by inanition! Cardinal moment, which History knows, but can never date, except vaguely, some time in 1741; among the last ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... weak to move the limb, but the belly of the acting muscles is seen to swell, and the tendon to be stretched. These weak convulsions, as they are occasioned by the disagreeable sensation of faintness from inanition, are symptoms of great general debility, and thence frequently precede the general convulsions of the act of dying. See a case of convulsion of a muscle of the arm, and of the fore-arm, without moving the bones to which they were ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... probability in the assertion of some of his biographers that it was on this occasion that he invented ardent spirits; but, even if he did, the mere conception of a glass of brandy could only increase his sufferings. So the long January night wore wearily on, and Lucifer seemed likely to expire from inanition, when a key turned in the lock, and Cardinal Anno cautiously glided in, bearing a lamp, a loaf, half a cold roast kid, and a bottle ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... a chance of safety present itself—only allow that a moment of action be necessary—where shall we find the means of action if we allow ourselves to be reduced to physical weakness by inanition?" ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... sudden fall, while in the very act of seizing the arm of his prisoner, his gigantic efforts must have been crowned with the fullest success. But the reader has already seen how miraculously Captain de Haldimar, reduced to the last stage of debility, as much from inanition as from the unnatural efforts of his flight, finally accomplished ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... a position to become themselves invaders. Then, by driving the enemy from Niagara, securing that important pass, and thus cutting off the communication between Canada and her interior dependencies, all the French posts in the West would die of inanition.[197] In order to commend these schemes to the Home Government, he had painted in gloomy colors the dangers that beset the British colonies. Our Indians, he said, will all desert us if we submit to French encroachment. Some of the provinces are full of negro slaves, ready to rise against ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... availed as little as the appeals of the Greek Government to Allied and neutral Governments. Month after month the blockade went on, and each month produced its own tale of suffering: deaths due directly to starvation; diseases due to the indirect effects of inanition; a whole nation wasting for want of food; horses starved to provide it; mothers praying to God for their daily bread with babes drooping at their desiccated bosoms.[11] Yet of yielding there was no sign: "Give in?" said a woman outside a soup-kitchen at the Piraeus, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... served by the clear statement of rigorous facts, by the simple explanation of economical truths which no sophism could darken, and which no opposing eloquence could charm away. The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. It died of inanition: its force was spent. Sir Robert Peel came into office. Cobden, who then entered the House of Commons for the first time, seemed to have good hope that even Peel, strong Conservative though he was, might prove to be a man from whom the Free ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... herself in shame and bliss. Almost consciously, she waited. He waited, but, until the time came, more unconsciously. When the time came that he should kiss her again, a prevention was an annihilation to him. He felt his flesh go grey, he was heavy with a corpse-like inanition, he did not exist, if ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... and refuse. She expostulated. For she well knew that the twenty minutes for dinner were allowed at the Carlisle station; and even if there had been no chocolate and no sherry, she would have endured on, even up to absolute inanition, rather than step out upon this well-remembered platform. "You must eat, or you'll be starved," he said. "I'll fetch you something." So he bribed a special waiter, and she was supplied with cold chicken and more sherry. After this Frank smoked ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... crumbs of biscuit, which he had kept most carefully in his pocket. I chewed that mixture of bread, dust, and tobacco, but I could not swallow it, and gave it all masticated to one of my young brothers, who had fallen from inanition. ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... literature where so many other periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto, and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's New Monthly, though Curtis had already ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... victim to an illness which reduced him to a skeleton, and defied all the efforts of the physicians to cure it. He went to the Adirondacks and took Harris with him. Sage had always been an active man, and he couldn't idle any day wholly away in inanition, but walked every day to the limit of his strength. One day, toward nightfall, the pair came upon a humble log cabin which bore these words painted upon a shingle: "Entertainment for Man and Beast." They were obliged to stop there for the night, Sage's strength ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... these laws of inanition, the craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from one source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is only eight o'clock at present. Fetch me a glass of sherry and a biscuit while I am waiting, for I am actually falling through sheer inanition." ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the yellow corn, 160 Idly, as bent on pastime, while the morn Smiles on his devious voyage; if inclosed In the exhausted prison,[121] whence thy breath With suction slow is drawn, he feels the change How dire! in palsied inanition drops! Weak flags his weary wing, and weaker yet; His frame with tremulous convulsion moves A moment, and the next is still in death. So were the great and glorious world itself; The tenants of its continents, all ceased! 170 A wide, a motionless, a putrid waste, Its seas! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... same soothing medicine to two or three of the more violent among the ladies; though loath to do so (he explained), because it sometimes gave the crowd a wrong impression when the bodies in this temporary state of inanition were ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Inlander, whose long and honorable, if somewhat spasmodic, career as a literary magazine only came to an end finally in 1918. Wrinkle, Michigan's first humorous paper, appeared in 1893 and was immediately popular. It survived until 1905, when it also died of inanition, to be succeeded after a few years by the present Gargoyle of varying merit. With the first discontinuance of the Inlander, about the same time Wrinkle died, the student body was left with only the Daily and the Michiganensian as unsatisfactory ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that it was a longing for life. It was there only that his mind could be quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without impair, and he foreboded with ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... truth, who are willing to take art to their affections or respect only when it has lost its bloom and has been duly appraised and ticketed by other generations or foreign scholars. And yet, even worse than this languorous inanition is the active policy of those who despise everything contemporary or native, and substitute sciolism for catholicity, contempt ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Zabel had seen his brother sinking rapidly from inanition; this their condition amply shows. He was weak himself, but John was weaker, and in a moment of desperation he rushed out to ask a crumb of bread from Agatha Webb, or possibly—for I have heard some whispers of an ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... if from sheer fatigue or inanition. The Rebel officers tried to get us to assist it up the grade by dismounting and pushing behind. We respectfully, but firmly, declined. We were gentlemen of leisure, we said, and decidedly averse ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the funds husbanded for this end were to be transferred to the Government at Mulinuu, which has never done anything to mention but pay salaries, and of which men have long ceased to expect anything else but that it shall continue to pay salaries till it die of inanition. Let us suppose this raid on the municipal treasury to have been just and needful. It is plain, even if introduced in the most conciliatory manner, it could never have been welcome. And, as it was, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... toxic symptoms, cast discredit over the whole, and proofs were demanded and promised. This was the last of the subject, however, which soon passed into oblivion, though whether from failure on the part of the medico to substantiate his assertions, or from the inanition of his colleagues, it is difficult to determine, though the presumption is largely in favor of the former. Nevertheless, it is worthy of consideration and exhaustive experimentation, since it is no less plausible than the theory which rendered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... or passionate impulsiveness herself, she knew how to allow for these in others. The other was a woman of my years, of the most precious gifts in heart and genius. She had also beauty and fortune. She died at last of weariness and intellectual inanition. She never, to any of us, her friends, hinted her sufferings. But they were obvious in her poems, which, with great dignity, expressed a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... teaspoonful of water or milk, I sometimes force her to take it by using an instrument to pry open her mouth, but that is painful to her. As early as 1865 I endeavored to sustain life in this way, for I feared that, in obedience to the universal law of nature, she would die of gradual inanition or exhaustion, which I thought would sooner or later ensue; but I was mistaken. The case knocks the bottom out of all existing medical theories, and is, ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... he found, on examination, all the internal organs of the deceased sound. There was no food whatever in his stomach, or in any part of the alimentary canal. There was a small quantity of thin faeces in the lower portion of the large intestine. Is of opinion that deceased came by his death from inanition, or want of food. Verdict: "James Byrne came by his death in consequence of having no food for some days; ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... Douglas anything more than a mere existence. A blow stuns, but one may recover. Repeated failure gradually benumbs hope and willpower and effort, like some ghoulish vampire sucking away a man's life-blood till he faint and die from very inanition. The blow, poor Eric had suffered, when he lost Miriam; the repeated failure, when we could not restore her; and I saw this strong, athletic man slowly succumb as to some insidious, paralyzing disease. The thought of effort seemed to ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... author read: "Nous avons fait entrer cette observation dans le cadre des delires apyretiques d'inanition, car c'est a l'ischemie cerebrale que nous rattachons cet ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... integral portion of Julia Vickers's nature; admiration was all she lived for: and even in a convict ship, with her husband at her elbow, she must flirt, or perish of mental inanition. There was no harm in the creature. She was simply a vain, middle-aged woman, and Frere took her attentions for what they were worth. Moreover, her good feeling towards him was useful, for reasons which ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... asleep only. Atheistic Philosophy was true on its side, and Hume and Voltaire could on their own ground speak irrefragably for themselves against any Church: but lift the Church and them into a higher sphere. Of argument, they died into inanition, the Church revivified itself into pristine florid vigor,—became once more a living ship of the desert, and invincibly bore you over stock and stone. But how, but how! By attending to the "reason" of man, said Coleridge, and duly chaining up the "understanding" ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... shining, so that he had instinctively fallen back in his chair as for the wondering, the resigned acceptance of it; where her last words stirred in him a sense of odd deprecation. Only for "that"? "That" was everything, at this moment, to his long inanition, and the effect, as if she had suddenly and perversely mocked him, was to press the spring of a ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Mrs. Spicture comes back"—thus Dolly—"she shall set in her own chair wiv scushions, and she shall set in her own chair wiv a 'igh hup bact, and she shall set in her own chair wiv...." Here came a pause, due to inanition of distinctive features. Dolly's style was disfigured by ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... for immediate use, and with the smallest cost of time; and therefore it is sought in abstracts and epitomes, which afford meagre food to the intellect, though they take away the uneasy sense of inanition. Tout abrege sur un bon livre est un sot abrege, says Montaigne; and of all abridgments there are none by which a reader is liable, and so likely, to be ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... ruler, and waiting with an exasperating patience to see what they were really going to do in the business which they had undertaken. They must make some move or they would become ridiculous, and their revolution would die and their confederacy would dissolve from sheer inanition. The newspapers told their leaders this plainly; and a prominent gentleman of Alabama said to Mr. Davis: "Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the Union in ten days." On the other hand, the people of the North ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... all the Affairs of his Conscience, Zeokinizul became senseless, so that he was thought dead by all his Attendants. But this sudden Alteration was the happy Crisis which saved his Life. During this Interval of Inanition, the Mind recover'd its former Situation, and freed itself from all its Anxieties. The Body performed its Functions, and the Passages which all the Art of the Physicians could not relax, opened of themselves, which was followed by such copious Evacuations as saved the ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon |
