"Inconsequential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his pleasant, inconsequential observations, and Gerald lay with closed eyes, quite motionless, until, watching him, Selwyn saw his hand was trembling where it lay clinched beside him. And presently the boy turned his face to ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... mathematics. He was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing, but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight. "Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... reinforced fact with fiction, and given us art for truth, then his character of Samuel Johnson is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has omitted the irrelevant and inconsequential, and by playing off the excellent against the absurd, he has placed his subject among the few great wits who have ever lived—a man who wrote remarkably well, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... for three or four weeks in this gipsy fashion, mayhap getting a peep at a moose, a wolf, or even a bear (to say nothing of such inconsequential fry as ermine, mink, beaver, and otter), the family arrive at their holding of ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... even the rudiments of the trade. He didn't have any more idea of news values than a rabbit. He had the most amazing faculty for overlooking what was vital in the news, but he could always be depended upon to pick out some trivial and inconsequential detail and dress it up with about half a yard of old-point lace adjectives. He never by any chance used a short word if he could dig up a long, hard one, and he never seemed to be able to start a story without a quotation from one of the poets. It never ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... Edgars, Fawcett and Saltus, and the days when every visiting Englishman, no matter what he might have done in real life, in fiction had to stay, while in New York, at the Brevoort House. All sorts of inconsequential novels flit through the mind in recalling that bygone period. There was a gentleman whose atrociously written, but marvellously constructed "thrillers" were to be found in every deck chair at the noon hour on transatlantic steamers of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... know," he replied. "How old are you?" And he laughed, too. The sound of our merriment mixing so rhythmically was music to my ears. I thought I had forgotten how to be foolish, and inconsequential. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... Miss Leroy was believed by the strongest circumstantial evidence to wash herself all over every morning, a habit which Mrs. Mobbs thought "weakening," and somehow connected with ethical impropriety. When Miss Leroy was married, and first as an elderly woman became known to me, she was very inconsequential in her opinions, or at least appeared so to our eyes. She must have been much more so when she was younger. In our town we were all formed upon recognised patterns, and those who possessed any one mark of the pattern, had all. The wine-merchant, for example, who went to church, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... with insurance matters to have any knowledge of the printed schedule she was studying, yet he had to concede that she was giving a splendid imitation of an experienced hand. Her acting annoyed him. He turned toward Hilmer with an indifferent comment on the weather and the talk veered to inconsequential subjects. Helen continued ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... me about Mr. Blake, anyway? I don't want to hear a lot of inconsequential gossip. I am worried about ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... His mind was completely obsessed with details. He would go to a lecture, or to a play, and invariably, instead of grasping the main argument of the lecture, or the lesson of the play, he saw only a few inconsequential details of action in the play, and remembered only stray and somewhat irrelevant statements made by the lecturer. A novel or an essay appealed to him in the same way. Present to him a business proposition and his whole attention would be absorbed by some chance remark. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... between as they are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily—otherwise, they would not be business men and would ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... with the endless and inconsequential debates and wars between Islam and Christianity, he had betaken himself to Cipango, [Footnote: Supposably Japan.] wherever that might be. There, in a repentant hour, he had conceived the idea of a Universal Religious Brotherhood, with God for its accordant principle; and he was now returned to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... piazza—an amusement that under the most favorable conditions has its limitations. But to-day—even though the rain had further interfered with his arrangements by making it necessary to cancel the trip he had planned for Marjory and Peter to Cannes—the weather was an inconsequential incident. It did not matter greatly to him whether it rained ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... stream of inconsequential testimony, and of reasoning to match; the 'irregular ramble,' as Sir John Hawles has termed it. Snagge's book was discussed; how Ralegh borrowed it from Burleigh's library; and how Cobham had it, whether by gift from Ralegh, or by borrowing it when Ralegh ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... the incidents converge to one main incident will avoid tiresome enumerations of inconsequential events, which frequently fill the compositions of young pupils. Such essays generally start with "a bright, clear morning," and "a party of four of us." After recounting a dozen events of no consequence whatever, "we came home to a late supper, well repaid for our day's outing." These compositions ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... studious attitude of an incorruptible neutral. Old Grandsire Templey, his father-in-law, sat always in the same low chair on the porch in summer and back of the stove in winter, with his palsied hands crossed on his staff-head and his toothless gums mumbling in inconsequential talk. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... chef busily at work, now, cleaning up. As Kennedy asked him a few inconsequential questions, his eye caught a row of books on a shelf. It was a most complete library of the culinary arts. Craig selected one and turned the pages over rapidly. Then he came back to the frontispiece, which showed a model dinner- table set for a number ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... of them are good-looking and more intelligent than you would believe," Louise rejoined carelessly. She had put Lawford Tapp aside as inconsequential. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... what would be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The fellow had come from somewhere—nobody in Marion seemed to know. He had been discharged from the employment ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... you! You won't mind my saying so, Jim, but I had it in my mind to ask you to be a bit inconsequential—especially when Doane was around—about your taking his place. But I ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... time, has, in his Recollections, placed on opposite pages—all the more striking to me because unintentional—illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make—that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain to produce ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Sage and Carnegie Foundations, which we rightly call munificent. Reading the index of private schools and colleges is important for their children and youth, but still more important for the community upon which unbridled passion, inability to work or to spend properly, inconsequential thinking, mediaeval ideals of caste, etc., can inflict greater injuries than can ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... using each other's materials and conclusions at the right moment and in the right places. The folklorist has the most to do to get his results ready, and to explain and secure his position. He has been wandering about in a somewhat inconsequential fashion, bent upon finding a mythos where he should have sought for a persona or a locus, engaged in an extensive quest after parallels when he should have been preparing his own material for the process of comparative science, seeking for origins amidst human error when he ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... disciplinary aim. On the other hand, the controlling aim in any subject may be to develop the power to reason about natural phenomena, the power to observe, and the power to discriminate between vital and inconsequential details. If this be the aim, the assignment of subject matter must be reduced, the phenomena studied must be submitted in the forms of problems, first-hand observations must be made, and students must be led to see the errors in their ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... over whether to carry an umbrella on this particular trip; whether to wear black shoes or tan shoes today; whether to go calling or to stay at home and write letters this afternoon. Such a person is usually in a stew over some inconsequential matter, and consumes so much time and energy in fussing over trivial things that he is incapable of handling larger ones. If we are certain that we have all the facts in a given case before us, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose,) that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'—a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "the admiral's eyes haunt me. Perhaps you know that he plays a game—a game of solitaire. I have good reason to remember that game. It is a silly inconsequential game. You would scarcely believe that it once sent ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... way this girl, sitting there—this inconsequential and negligible atom—typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever stumbling into the traps of the crafty—they, too, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... magnet, as though he were unaware that he was really present. Curls hopped about on one leg frankly, knowing that the others would be blamed for any naughtiness of hers. Her radiant impudence never needs any apology. What a plague of inconsequential violators of any necessary peace! When would ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide these funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... is not like that I] This speech is confused, and inconsequential, according to the disorder of ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... Yorick." He determines to journey where it is most sentimental and passes the various lands in review in making his decision. Having fastened upon Germany, he questions himself similarly with reference to the cities. Yorick's love of lists, of mock-serious discrimination, of inconsequential reasonings is here copied. The call upon epic, tragic, lyric poets, musicians, etc., which follows here is a further imitation of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... The pale, gray, childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtain,—watching the monotony of every-day occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on the Battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza. An uniform mass of ten lines thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I WEEN and I WEET, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... surprised that I should remember all this so well. What is a passing emotion or half-formed thought to last in so many years of a man's changing, inconsequential life? But what has fixed the emotion of that evening in my recollection so that the slightest shadows remain indelible was an event of strange finality, an event not likely to be forgotten in a life-time—as ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... brain over the inconsequential matter something stirred upon the floor close to his feet, and presently he jerked back a booted foot that a rat had ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... President, I ask you! Here were eight rational beings, all standing at the threshold of life, all at a most impressionable age, who valued the chance to acquire such minor and inconsequential chattels as kid gloves above a period of pleasurable instruction in a magnificent treasure trove of the Old Masters. In my then spent condition the admission, so frankly vouchsafed, left me well-nigh speechless. I could ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... anything but impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to The Dunciad as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of long-established ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... for convenience sake, the fact of my social inferiority. Centuries of army tradition demanded it; and I discovered that it is absolutely futile for one inconsequential American to rebel against the unshakable fortress of English tradition. Nearly all of my comrades were used to clear-cut class distinctions in civilian life. It made little difference to them that some of our officers were recruits ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... write home; with his kind of people, to ride to-day's new interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature itself. He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water—and added a few inconsequential millions to each project. And he said that people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world would open its eyes when it found out. And he closed his ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... piece of analysis, or a bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is "George's Mother," a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a cumulative effect ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... that arbitrary arrangement of figures, each combination having its own special significance; but, besides these, there was the key to a complete cipher into which any message might be coded, and—But why was her brain swerving off at inconsequential tangents? What did a coder or code book, matter ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the fact that he wove a great deal of himself into the character of the stars. In other words, the personal element counted a great deal. When somebody once remonstrated with him about giving up so much of his valuable time to what seemed to be inconsequential talks with his ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... A change, indeed!" he exclaims sadly. It is not alone in the features. The new man is growing meager. He is an inconsequential person. He is a character to be kept waiting in an ante-room while strutting personages walk ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... soldiers beat their swords into ploughshares and then confess that they have never been taught to plough. That's where I shall score—by beating my sword into a pen. But what to write about—! Everything will seem so little and inconsequential after seeing armies marching to mud and death, and people will soon get tired of hearing about that. It seems as though war does to the individual what it does to the landscapes it attacks—obliterates ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... finding myself in a position to feel this, just this and no more, a sufficiently fortunate event ... but I must needs get up, or imitate, or ... what is it you fancy I do? ... an utterly distinct, unnecessary, inconsequential regard for you, which should, when it got too hard for shamming at the week's end,—should simply spoil, in its explosion and departure, all the real and sufficing elements of an honest life-long attachment and affections! that I should ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... of the same kind, interesting to a rural community but considered inconsequential by those conversant ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... views on this question were strong reasons for watchful and careful prevision. It was obvious to Mr. Wilson from the outset that insurmountable difficulties lay in his path, but he brushed them aside as if they were inconsequential. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... effectually silenced the one friend she possessed among the three. Mayence slowly turned his head, and looked upon the colleague at his right, as much as to say, "Do you wish to add your quota to this inconsequential talk?" ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... Martie, who was rambling on in her old inconsequential way, presently added, "but Rod is merely SMUG. I happened to mention some building in New York—I didn't know what to talk to the man about! He immediately told me that the Mason building down town was reinforced concrete throughout. I said that I had always missed the orchards in the East, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... said Lena contritely. "Besides, I don't mean—what do I mean? I never thought it out. But it's so easy to tell you everything, Mr. Percival. And I think it's rather nice for a girl to be more silly and inconsequential part of the time." She laughed in a ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... of which was a sacred rite. On such occasions he tossed aside the cloak of the everyday. A "celebration" meant that you were different. Humdrum life and habits must be relegated to the background. It was permitted that, unabashed, you be as silly, as frivolous, as inconsequential, as boisterous, as lighthearted, as delightfully irresponsible as your ordinary concealed boyishness pleased. Customary repressions had nothing to do here. This was a celebration! And in the aforementioned our very wise woman ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... outwardly, both of space and importance. These, however, must sooner or later end as they began; they perish in the lie they make; and it were well did not other falsehoods take their places, to prolong a life whose only tenure is inconsequential succession,—in ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... along?" (Penny was an inconsequential dog that had been given to Clytie by one whom she called Cousin ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... can not understand you. You are very inconsequential. It does you a great deal of harm. You intend to leave your home without any reason, without even a pretext. And you wish to run through Europe with whom? With a Bohemian, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... zero at the time when the consumers' leagues have been joined by the majority of the whole working class. Can anybody talk seriously of the working class turning its attention to a means which gives it no aid whatever as a class, and furnishes its individual members this inconsequential relief only until the time when the class as such has completely, or to a large extent, made use of it? If the German working class is willing to enter upon such a treadmill round, the time before the real improvement of its position will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... is called, is so retrenched or abbreviated in many parts, as to be almost throughout inconsequential, and often so obscured by the unskilful abridgement of Purchas as to be nearly unintelligible. We have not therefore deemed it necessary or proper to insert it in our Collection, as not tending to any useful purpose, nor containing ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... joss-sticks, rice, fish, pork, and a jar of samshoo (rice arrack) are taken aboard, and by ten o'clock we are underway. Two men, named respectively Ah Sum and Yung Po, a woman, and a baby of eighteen months comprise the company aboard. Ah Sum, being but an inconsequential wage-worker, at once assumes the onerous duties of towman; Yung Po, husband, father, and sole proprietor of the sampan, manipulates the rudder, which is in front, and occasionally assists Ah Sum by poling. The boat-wife stands at the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... trance Jim seemed quickly to awake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... which is integral and immortal—our very essence. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: its loveliness can never pass away" is a truth of experience, not the idle fancy of the poet. For to have seen the beautiful is not inconsequential, it is not even a responsibility entirely your own; the beautiful thing has also seen you. Henceforth your life can never be quite the same, and the beautiful thing looked upon has either become ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... creature he was, with red face and black hair which seemed to scramble in all directions at once, and with a mustache which appeared to scamper in even more directions than his hair. Fairchild was a large man; suddenly he felt himself puny and inconsequential as the mastodonic thing before him swooped forward, spread wide the big arms and then caught him tight in them, causing the breath to puff over his lips like the exhaust ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... seeing the distance of their operations from home; while Great Britain, relying wholly on her navy for the integrity of her empire, equally cannot afford the hostility of a nation having twenty battleships, and with whom her points of difference are as inconsequential to her as they are ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... indistinct in the twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky. Almost inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense and confused entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated quite, at this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... landlady, reported the disappearance of her two roomers on August first, a week after she last saw them. First, however, to the disgust of the police, she cleaned their apartment, giving to the trash man all valueless and inconsequential articles, including a box of old sea shells which she found in the closet. It was a curious fact that neither Sutter nor Travail possessed relatives or friends to make inquiry as to their whereabouts and thus without incentive the ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... that and the other thing, all inconsequential, and Helen had to admit that Sanchia had her charm, that she was vivacious and clever and pretty. Helen contented herself for the most part with a quiet 'Yes' or 'No,' and sat back and made her judgments. In the first place, Sanchia was no woman's woman, but the type to lead a ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... in the dreamy, inconsequential way of one whose thoughts were elsewhere. "I suppose I shall have to take them ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... at last; but Denman, having slept nearly all day, was long in getting to sleep. A curious, futile, and inconsequential thought bothered him—the thought that the cheerful Billings had ceased his singing in ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... Alaire was only too glad to give up the wheel, for her nerves were indeed unsteady and she was grateful for an opportunity to think out the best course to pursue in this unexpected difficulty. Later, as she listened to Law's inconsequential talk with Dolores and Jose, and watched the way he handled the car, she marveled at his composure. She wondered if this man could ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... be honourable and zealous, he must develop the underlying virtues in private life. He must strengthen the individual character, and to do this he must deal with many things seemingly remote and inconsequential from a national point of view. Everything that crosses a man's path in his day's round of little or great moment requires of him an attitude towards it, and the conscious or unconscious shaping of his attitude is determining how he will proceed in other spheres not now in view. Suppose the case ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... pointed out the fact that this wholesale decoration was done immediately after the Rothschilds had floated a rather large and risky loan for his Kingship. This is irrelevant, inconsequential, and outside the issue. That the House of Rothschild with its branches had an open sesame upon the purse-strings of Europe for half a century is a fact. Nations in need of cash had to apply to the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds didn't loan them the money—they merely looked ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... JOANNA makes a third at table. They are all a little inconsequential, as if there were still some ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... a man beside him, and he could feel the legs of two men on the seat facing him. These, with the driver, would make four. He was still well guarded! The car itself was a closed car—not hooded, the sense of touch told him—therefore a limousine of some description. These facts, in a sense inconsequential, were absorbed subconsciously; and then Jimmie Dale's brain, remorselessly active, in spite of the pain from his throbbing head, was ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... mind. On board this craft are five people without whom it would be rather hopeless for anyone to go on building the Pollard type of boat. Therefore, besides risking a valuable craft and our own rather inconsequential lives, we go further and put the United States Navy in danger of having only a couple of our boats. Now, the fact is, we want the Navy to have three or four dozen of our submarine craft, for we ourselves believe implicitly in the great worth of ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... suppose brought me hither? However, I by no means purpose any discussion. I have only a few words more to say to this gentlewoman, and as my time is not wholly inconsequential, I should not be sorry to have an early opportunity ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... intend to," answered Stratton; "but I found out all I wanted to know, nevertheless. You see, I shall have to ask what appears to be a lot of rambling, inconsequential questions because you can never tell in a case like this when you may get the key ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... away, away, shimmered the city's million inconsequential lights. Above, stars were peeping out—were spying down at all this feverish mystery of human life. Some of the low-hung stars seemed to blend with the far lights along the Palisades. The Master's lips tightened with impatience, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the other traffickers in vice were inconsequential, mere retailers, hucksters, peddlers in their way. They were as vicious as unquenchable fire, certainly, and numerous, but small, and largely under the patronage of the king of the proscribed, Peden of ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... was not over thirty. A dapper, exquisite little man. He was distraught at the sight of this tearful damsel and, very naturally attributed her distress to unpreparedness. Petty was a pretty, inconsequential little creature born to play upon the feelings of one man or another. It did not much matter who he happened to be so long as he could satisfy the sentimental element in her makeup, and she ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... mind, I doubt not but that I should achieve the same results as if I had started upon my journey with a dream. If this be true, and I firmly believe that it is, in the case of that universally used and apparently inconsequential word "the," to which the normal person can be expected to have such a large number of associations, of varying degrees of intimacy or remoteness, how much truer is it when we have such a definite mental fact or mental ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... that day Scattergood busied himself in searching out old friends and neighbors of the Newtons. Nothing seemed to interest him which happened later than eight years before, but no event of that period was too slight or inconsequential to receive his attention and to be filed away in his shrewd old brain. He was looking for the answer to a question, and the answer was piled under the rubbish of eight years of human activities—a hopeless ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... race. Indeed, he would have much preferred it should die out altogether and make room for better material. The truth was that his prolonged residence abroad had made the questions of American politics exceedingly vague and inconsequential. He believed them to be ephemeral to the last degree— in the main, mere struggles of parties and partisans for power and spoils; and for their hopes, schemes, and stratagems to gain temporary ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... she has not wanted. Only the married woman who has been constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes become inconsequential in nature ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... studying Watusk's words from every angle. The result of his cogitations was nil. Watusk's mind was at the same time too devious and too inconsequential for a mind like Ambrose's to track it. Ambrose decided that he was like one of the childish, unreasonable liars one meets in the mentally defective of our own race. Such a one is clever to no purpose: he will blandly attempt to lie away the presence ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... man and man was at first vague and inconsequential. It was only after settled and organized communities, based originally on the family relation, and held together by the possession of property in common, had been formed, that war became more effective in its results. The chief ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... were in her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever. For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface. Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech. There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his arms, which he ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... man's eyes met his for a moment, then shifted to the opposite wall, became fixed there. He sat half turned in his chair. He seemed to grow intent on something, to become wrapped in some fog of cogitation, through which Hollister and his affairs appeared only as inconsequential phantoms. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... There was a good school, and the Ohio river-packet stopped twice a week, and a Mr. Inchpin in the town was reported to be the owner of a number of books. Jason's mother was an Eastern woman and sometimes the loneliness and hardship of her life made her find solace in what seemed to Jason inconsequential things. Still, he was glad of the school, for he was a first-class student and already had decided to take his father's and mother's advice that he study medicine. And the packet, warping in twice a week, was, after all, something to which one might look forward and Mr. Inchpin's ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... undertaking. Harriet had to bring all the resolution she possessed to the task of supporting her weakened limbs; but she managed it, with now and then a rest, leaning against a tree or a rock. Tommy had found her tongue again, to keep up a running fire of inconsequential chatter that served its purpose well, assisting Harriet in keeping her mind from ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... overseas apostle of Gallic paternalism to "order everything as seemed just and proper," even when this brought his hand into the very homes of the people, into their daily work or worship or amusements. Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential to have an ordinance devoted to it. As general regulator of work and play, of manners and morals, of things present and things to come, the intendant was the ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... the parting words, both grave and gay, which were spoken by those who had been her companions during the long journey, fell on ears which heard, but transmitted them to her mind vaguely, and her answers were inconsequential, so much so, that more than one friend regarded her with troubled surprise and whispered to another that Rose was either not well, or was dazed with happiness. And when Dorothy ventured to hint at the latter alternative, the girl acknowledged it with a strained imitation ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Council (says Knight) are elected by the same class as the aldermen, but in very varying and—in comparison with the size and importance of the wards—inconsequential numbers. Bassishaw and Lime Street Wards have the smallest representation—four members—and those of Farringdon Within and Without the largest—namely, sixteen and seventeen. The entire number of the Council is 240. Their ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... inconsequential conversation and chatter continued for fully half an hour without one word being spoken on the all-important subject they had presumably been brought together to arrange. They touched on everything theatrical, ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... She must have worked it surreptitiously, like a mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me; the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! Oh, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... then, as inconsequential, let us say that the trend of cosmic evolution is downward rather than upward, from complex units to simpler units rather than from simple units to ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... tawdry conveniences and gayeties of city life. Tunis could not wholly understand why any sane person should assume this attitude; in fact, he suspected a good deal of it was put on. How could a girl, even one as inconsequential and flighty as Ida May evidently was, hold in contempt the offer he had brought her from Cap'n Ira and ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... be a more illogical proceeding? And here follows the treatise,—a Defense of Results, an Apology for Opportunism,—conceived in agreeable procrastination, devoted to the praise of the inconsequential angleworm, and dedicated to a childish memory of a whistling carpenter and his ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... other inconsequential fellows of his class, Bunny was usually a man of his word in ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... (1) sequel, sequence, consequence, subsequent, consecutive, execute, prosecute, persecute, sue, ensue, suitor, suitable, pursuit, rescue, second; (2) obsequies, obsequious, sequester, inconsequential, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... overcome them until life rings true and until all our acts and thoughts become the solid and inevitable expression of a healthy growing regard for the best in life, a call to right living that is no mean dictum of policy, but which is renewed every morning as the sun comes out of the sea. However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits. Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion. Whatever its origin, whether it stands ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor. Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seeking within it with the reaching fingers of intelligence. His probing thoughts seemed baffled and turned aside, brushed away, as inconsequential. His mind sent an order to the great machine that had made this tiny globe, scarcely a foot in diameter. Then again he sought to reach the thing he ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... the preachers do not feel this more and so recover their consciousness of an indispensable mission. One wonders that the churches can be so timid and dull and negative, that our sermons can be so pallid and inconsequential. One wonders why in the pulpit we have so many flutes and so few trumpets. For here is a world with the accumulating energies of the new science in its hands, living in the purlieus of hell because it cannot gain spiritual mastery over the very power in which it glories. Here is a world ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... and shook his head. She was such a treasure—so inconsequential. Aileen, busy driving and talking, could not see or hear. She was interested in Sohlberg, and the southward crush of vehicles on Michigan Avenue was distracting her attention. As they drove swiftly past budding trees, kempt lawns, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... has importance only as an illustration of a stable American economic process. Its pitiful syndicalism, its street-corner opposition to the war, are the inconsequential trimmings. Its strike alone, faithful as it is to the American type, is an illuminating thing. The I.W.W., like the Grangers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliance, the Progressive Party, is but a phenomenon of revolt. The cure lies in taking care of its psychic antecedents; the ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... of trite and inconsequential things. It was very necessary that they become firmly grounded on their new footing of genuine friendship before departing into personalities; and so, for two days, they avoided any but the most ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... the last I saw of it, barrin' a few inconsequential frills that a good eye could make ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... higher circles in Germany there is a gushing idealism about the relations of the sexes. In their songs and sayings, as well as in their mythology, there is a laudation of love that is overstimulating. The lines of that inconsequential philosopher, that irresponsible moralist, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... shows how small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... to wander away from the direct line and ramble about among irrelevant and inconsequential trifles. Sometimes these rambles are altogether entertaining and enable her pupils to pass the time pleasantly, but they lack "terminal facilities." They lead from nowhere to nowhere in the most fascinating and fruitless meanderings. Such expeditions bring back no ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... and explained and defended himself. But Johnny had already drifted off into troubled meditation rendered somewhat vague and inconsequential by his rapid changes of financial condition, moods, environment—the brief ecstasy of his triumphant flight that had so ridiculous a climax. Small wonder that Bland's whining voice failed to register anything but a dreary monotone of meaningless ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... half dragged the limp body through the door of the laboratory and propped it in a chair. It required but a moment for him to see that Shelton's injury was inconsequential. He had only been stunned and already showed signs ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... will give Kennedy credit for a tactfulness that I didn't know the old fellow possessed. He carried through the preliminary questions very well for a pseudo-doctor, appealing to me as his assistant on inconsequential things that enabled me to "save my face" perfectly. When he came to the critical moment of opening the black bag, he made a very appropriate and easy remark about not having brought any sharp shiny instruments or ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... other. It is possible for one and the same man to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between them—possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a process in the ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... I am good at!" Clio laughed in sheer relief. "If talking were music, I'd be a full brass band!" and she kept up a flow of inconsequential chatter, until Costigan told her that it was no longer necessary; that he ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... sense of beauty. Before long I have a distinct impression of her. Sometimes, as with a woman, this first impression has to be revised; sometimes not. Sometimes, on acquaintance, a single feature, or trait, becomes so important in my eyes that all else seems inconsequential. A noble spirit may cover physical defects; beauty may seem to compensate for weaknesses of character. The spell of a beautiful city which is bad resembles the spell of such a city's ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... principally because he was coming to realize the great change in himself. More and more that change was forcing itself upon him. The stories and novels he had read during the first years of the war, the stories by English writers in which young men, frivolous and inconsequential, had enlisted and fought and emerged from the ordeal strong, purposeful and "made-over"—those stories recurred to him now. He had paid little attention to the "making-over" idea when he read those tales, but now he was forced to believe there might ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... t' gracious!" he exclaimed. "Dat suttinly am a most inconsequential mannah in which to project a transmigatory object in contiguousness ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... "Is—inconsequential! The main point is—the 'Frisco Pet is dead. Gillett won't speak; you won't; Lord Ronsdale can't. Another to whom I am about to tell the story, will, I am sure, ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the slipping heritage of individual ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... them on the weather again; then ensued a conversation perfectly inconsequential, and yet remarkable, to Janet at least, for the amount of guidance it needed. She felt, as if her fate depended on it, that there must be nothing of intimacy, not even suggestion. So much might come from the drift of the conversation. She kept it as inconsequential as ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... but I am sure that if you had never lived long enough in one country to become acclimated, you wouldn't feel very responsible, either," said Eleanor in such rueful tones that the girls laughed, although they secretly disapproved of Eleanor's inconsequential attitude. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... turn great events! Tragedies swing on such inconsequential hinges. It is so exasperating to look back over the path of a calamity and see how easily it might have been averted! If one man in the little town of Lawrence a generation ago had eaten two pieces of pie-plant pie instead of three for supper, the night of a certain ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... lives of men there are a thousand actions and events—casual spoken words, recurrent processes such as eating and dressing, hours of idleness and futility which, because repetitious, habitual, or inconsequential, throw no light upon that alone in which we are interested,—character and fortune. To describe a single example of these facts suffices. In the novel and drama, therefore, the personalities and life histories ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Peep O'Day's direction in all the unremarked and unremarkable days of his life put together were focused upon him. Persons who theretofore had regarded his existence—if indeed they gave it a thought—as one of the utterly trivial and inconsequential incidents of the cosmic scheme, were moved to speak to him, to clasp his hand, and, in numerous instances, to express a hearty satisfaction over his altered circumstances. To all these, whether they were moved by mere neighborly good will, or perchance were inspired by impulses of selfishness, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... estimated at twenty-three. "Skinny" they called him because of his exceeding slenderness. At the moment Ferguson settled into his seat the young man was filling the room with rapid talk. This talk had been inconsequential and concerned only those small details about which we bother during our leisure. But now his talk veered and he was suddenly telling something that gave promise of consecutiveness and universal interest. Other voices died ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the killing is the fact that the gunpowder is there, lying around loose, and ready to be touched off. What engenders this gunpowder state of mind would make a valuable sociological study, but it may well be that a seemingly inconsequential fact may so embitter a boy or man toward life or the human race in general that in time he "sees red" and goes through the world looking for trouble. Any cause that makes for crime and depravity makes for murder as well. ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... all this. I left it in that, to us, inconsequential manner in which a bird flies away from a comfortable branch. It was as though all unknowing I had heard a whisper or seen something. Well—perhaps! One day I was perfectly right and the next everything was gone—glamour, flavour, interest, contentment—everything. It was one of these moments, ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... kindness in turning back, he continued his ramblings, and she gathered the impression that he was a dull, inconsequential talker, that he considered young couples "kittle cattle," that artists were always absorbed in their work, that females had a habit of needless worrying, and that commuting in winter was distracting to a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... latter,—Harrington still travelled on in hopes of finding some better shelter, and now, in the dark night, and a night of tempest too, finds himself on the open heath. To employ his own words, "he could not rest contented with one-sided theories or inconsequential reasonings, and has pursued the argument to its logical termination." He is ill at ease in mind, I hear, and not in robust health; and I am just ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... reality ordinary people, ordinary in looks, ordinary in intelligence, some subtle marks of superiority, that made them at a glance superior to the common run. This ecstasy of snobbishness deluded me as to the women only—for, as I looked at the men, I at once felt myself their superior. They were an inconsequential, patterned lot. I even was better dressed than any of them, except possibly Mowbray Langdon; and, if he showed to more advantage than I, it was because of his manner, which, as I have probably said before, is superior to that of any human being I've ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... fire-maker's hand was laid on the trespass board, even as his inconsequential muscles were braced to rip it loose from its post,—a squeal from the girl in the blue picture hat and the Nile-green georgette waist, checked ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... revealed her as plainly as though he had known her all her days. She comprehended none of life's big problems; the relations of men to one another had not compelled her attention; the fine, deep impulses of sympathy had not touched her. She was selfish, self-centered, light, inconsequential—a woman who danced from under the burdens of life and laughed at those who were forced to bear ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to the call of ROMANCE. And occasionally, in the twilight hour between afternoon study and the dressing bell, as they gathered in the window-seat with faces to the western sky, the talk would turn to the future—particularly when Rosalie Patton was of the group. Pretty, dainty, inconsequential little Rosalie was preeminently fashioned for romance; it clung to her golden hair and looked from her eyes. She might be extremely hazy as to the difference between participles and supines, she might ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... make for ambition, for right living, for honor and position, but how pitifully small and inconsequential besides the mighty tomes which, circling the globe, comprise the lexicon of love. Love—the symbol and sequel of birth, the solace of death—the essence of divinity! Frozen indeed is the heart which has never felt its glow; gross and sordid the soul which has ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... Should he get out a search warrant or a writ of replevin? This whimsical view of the case only exasperated him the more as it presented the utter hopelessness of approaching her—of ever seeing her again—and, when the dogs came chasing an utterly inconsequential and useless butterfly in his direction, he pelted them with stones until they yelped. Hang the dogs, anyhow. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... breath. So she was a mere frivolous, inconsequential butterfly, after all. Why try longer to lend the Helping Hand—why not cut things short and be satisfied with the Social Triumph and let it go at that? "I was meaning to ask you to dine with me some evening next week at a ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... the miraculousness—I don't know there is such a word, but there should be—of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me. And I find myself saying over and over: "WHAT have I ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... things!" What richer legacy can you hand down? This is fame! This is glory! And do not these come of honest ambition? But there are incidents, episodes, deeds that come under the observation only of the few—sometimes of the individual—which, little in themselves and seemingly inconsequential, help to make up the grand story. It is an old, old story now, but the story has become history. A full and true history of the late war has never been written—never will be. But little links can be picked up—even as we pick up battered bullets ...
— Bugle Blasts - Read before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of - the Loyal Legion of the United States • William E. Crane
... party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... almost without exception by old, old conceptions of planes and spheres. There is always a preponderance of the trivial—though the advocates of spiritism claim, and the justice of this claim must be allowed, that this is inevitable and that only through the veridical character of the inconsequential can the consequential be established. Moreover, the impartial student working over the records should at least recognize the pathetic importance which those, believing themselves to be in touch with their own dead, naturally attach to even the ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... inconsequential tales, the rodeo outfit therefore rose up and was gone before the light, raking the exposed lowland for its toll of half-fed steers; and even Rufus Hardy, the parlor-broke friend and lover, slipped ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... that those inexplicated incidents in your novel might have been elucidated by their consequences if you had chosen a person whose actions were of the kind to have some important consequences. In tying up to an inconsequential ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... is a terrible stroke of bad news, Hester," drawled one of the older girls. "Now, you would better keep still and let some of the rest of us talk a while. For a sophomore, you have a lot to say that is inconsequential." ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison |
