"Petrifaction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that was a laugh and a concerted 'rush' that all but carried the girl and her companions off their feet. To Henderson's petrifaction, the door of the brougham was hastily opened and then slammed to, leaving Miss Levering in the road, saying to ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... a period of petrifaction, that might have lasted for one minute or ten: Bullard could not have gauged it. At last he came to himself. His teeth were chattering slightly. He examined the ruler, drew it through his fingers; ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This thought is the magic ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... hereafter, But what and where depend on life's minute? Hails heavenly cheer or infernal laughter Our first step out of the gulf or in it? Shall Man, such step within his endeavor, Man's face, have no more play and action Than joy which is crystallized forever, Or grief, an eternal petrifaction? ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... coldly to one another. Lavretsky went to his lodgings, and locked himself in. He was experiencing emotions such as he had hardly ever experienced before. How long ago was it since he had thought himself in a state of peaceful petrifaction? How long was it since he had felt as he had expressed himself at the very bottom of the river? What had changed his position? What had brought him out of his solitude? The most ordinary, inevitable, though always unexpected event, death? ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... lynx might have been frozen to marble; and old One Eye might have been dead. Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... Reasons for so doing Unruly behaviour of the Irish Agricultural concerns look ill The Norfolk sloop returns from Van Dieman's Land Particulars Twofold Bay described The natives there Kent's Group Furneaux's Islands Preservation Island Curious petrifaction there Cape Barren Island ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... Hardness. — N. hardness &c. adj.; rigidity; renitence[obs3], renitency; inflexibility, temper, callosity, durity [obs3]. induration, petrifaction; lapidification[obs3], lapidescence[obs3]; vitrification, ossification; crystallization. stone, pebble, flint, marble, rock, fossil, crag, crystal, quartz, granite, adamant; bone, cartilage; hardware; heart of oak, block, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... all literature, so to speak—are the letters of the alphabet. How often by changing a letter in a word, by reversing their order, or by substituting one letter for another, we get a word of an entirely different meaning, as in umpire and empire, petrifaction and putrefaction, malt and salt, tool and fool. And by changing the order of the words in a sentence we express all the infinite variety of ideas and meanings that the books of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... recovering from his petrifaction. "Then, am I to understand, that when you called that day at my house, you carried no intention with ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... attention, and it came across and poked its head into the opening where Arthur sat. As the creature saw him, its start of surprise would have shattered the nervous system of anything but a cat. It stood half thrown back on its haunches, its ears flattened, its eyes glaring in a petrifaction of amazement. Arthur sat motionless as marble, laughing inwardly. For full two minutes the two stared at each other without moving a muscle, and then, without relaxing its tense attitude, the cat by almost imperceptible degrees withdrew one paw and then ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... shortly hear so much of petrifaction and disintegration, that it may be as well, before I actually begin my story, to convince ourselves that the old religion was in its peculiar way a real expression of religious feeling, and not merely a set of meaningless conventions ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... derivation of the Greek types of form from the forest-hut is too direct to escape observation; but sufficient attention has not been paid to the similar petrifaction, by other nations, of the rude forms and materials adopted in the haste of early settlement, or consecrated by the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the intersecting timbers at the angles of the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... this society, in which regularity of form did not conceal petrifaction of heart, induced Chopin to think that the CONVENANCES and courtesies of manner, in place of being only a uniform mask, repressing the character of each individual under the symmetry of the same lines, rather serve to contain ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... French parties, French plays, French lectures. We read French, speak French, sing French, and look French; and, if you are so barbarously ignorant as not to understand that language, why, you might just as well retire for an old fossil or petrifaction. You're obsolete, that's all; as much behind the times as RIP VAN WINKLE himself, after his memorable sleep. English is out of date here—a relic of the Dark Ages. Fashionable ladies return from Paris, bringing with them accomplished bonnes, and every one is prohibited from speaking a word of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... meant an impression of a laurel ([Greek words]) instead of an impression of a fish ([Greek words]). Delarue is wrong in blaming the correction of Jacob Gronovius in changing the laurel into a sardel. The petrifaction of a fish is also much more probable than the natural picture of Silenus, which, according to Pliny (lib. xxxvi., 5), the quarry-men are stated to have met with in Parian marble from Mount Marpessos. 'Servius ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... of his one desire." That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... her chair as she spoke, too much absorbed in her own impatience to note the petrifaction of horror on the faces of the waiters at the counter, and in the doorway came face to face with a plump, dignified little lady, accompanied by a girl in ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... green, that it looked a perfect grove. The leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... back to Moscow he relapsed again into a state of petrifaction. Though he was secretly delighted that he had attained the object of his journey, still all thoughts of Clara he deferred till he should be back at home. He thought much more about her sister Anna. 'There,' he thought, 'is an exquisite, charming ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... them there is associated a legend or a myth. A deep river's gorge is called 'the Blind Man's Pass,' because a peculiar bit of rock, looked at from a certain angle, assumes the outline of the human form, and there comes to be connected therewith a pleasing story which reaches its climax in the petrifaction of the hero. A mountain's crest shaped like a swooping eagle will from some one have received the name of 'Eagle Mountain,' whilst by its side another shaped like a couchant lion will have a name to match. There is no lack of poetry among the people, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... others of the party, were successively asked their opinions. One of the young ladies guessed it to be the petrifaction of an antediluvian mussel. Lord Curryfin said petrifactions were often siliceous, but never pure silex; which this purported to be. It gave him the idea of an ass's head; which, however, could not by any process have ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... dwellings, and two of them were fathers of families, but their true dwelling places were the sea, and the stony beach that edged its familiar shore, and the fish-houses, where much salt brine from the mackerel kits had soaked the very timbers into a state of brown permanence and petrifaction. It had also affected the old fishermen's hard complexions, until one fancied that when Death claimed them it could only be with the aid, not of any slender modern dart, but the good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... ground on which the fainting multitude had been fed, and was shown some massive fragments—relics, I was told, of that wondrous banquet, now turned into stone. The petrifaction was most complete. I ascended the heights on which our Lord was standing when He wrought the miracle, and looked away eagerly eastward. There lay the Sea of Galilee, less stern than Wastwater, less fair than gentle Windermere, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... was biscuit not unconquerable by teeth used to the fare of the sea life, and picking up a whole one, I sat me down on the edge of a cask and fell a-munching. One reflection, however, comforted me, namely, that this petrifaction by freezing had kept the victuals sweet. I was sure there was little here that might not be thawed into relishable and nourishing food and drink by a good fire. The sight of these stores took such a weight off my mind that no felon reprieved from ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell |
