"Unthinkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him the thunderous rush of subterranean waters, and presently came to the bank of a great, underground river, tumbling onward, no doubt, the length of a world to the buried sea of Omean. Into this torrential sewer had unthinkable generations of ulsios pushed their few handsful of dirt in the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... basis of the second; and the relation of double degree, which we have already found existing between aesthetic and logical activity, is repeated between these two on a larger scale. Knowledge independent of the will is thinkable; will independent of knowledge is unthinkable. Blind will is not will; ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... numerous and well equipped. The vastness of our country, her poor roads, and her severe climate are her defenses. The French frontier is strongly fortified. A quick surrender is unthinkable, and there is no reason for surrender, for the war will continue to ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... to have patience with the slow processes of nature," said Erica, smiling a little. "If you allow unthinkable ages for the perfecting of a layer of rocks, do you wonder that in a few hundred years a church is ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... as was said of the effect of the war on the South, that reconstruction was something more than excessive taxation, grinding and unjust as that was, something more than the fear of black domination, as unthinkable as that is. There was the uncertainty of the situation, the sense of despair that rankled in the hearts of men, with the knowledge that nothing the South could do could have any influence in deciding its fate. It ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... perfectly ready to marry Peggy. It was almost a preordained thing. A rupture of the engagement was unthinkable. Her undeviating loyalty bound him by every fibre of gratitude and honour. But it was essential that Peggy should know whom and what she was marrying. The Doggie trailing in her wake no longer existed. If she were prepared to follow the new Doggie, well and good. If not, there would be conflict. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... followed, and yet the best interests of each and every one of God's creatures be served as truly as if God directly wielded the machinery of nature only for the special benefit of the individual. The thing is unthinkable to us: yet directly we reason on the necessarily unlimited capability of a Divine Providence, we are led to the conclusion that it must be possible. Here then is the ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... called Corpuscles or Electrons, which at the last seem to be nothing but a unit of Electricity, tied up in a "knot in the Ether"—although just what the Ether is, Science does not dare to guess. And Energy, also seems to be unthinkable except as operating through matter, and always seems to be acting under the operation of Laws—and Laws without a Law giver, and a Law giver without mind or something higher than Mind, is unthinkable. And Mind, as we know it, seems to be bound up with matter and energy in ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... so well with the Gloria who lay in the corner—no longer a proud Gloria, nor any Gloria he had known. He asked himself if it were possible. While he did not believe she would cease to love him—this, of course, was unthinkable—it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lived. Never, in temple or cathedral, on mountain or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and oaken wattles. Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, or blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes of those cries to God, would ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... be, she would see him again before leaving Vienna, although not that day perhaps. Indeed, anything else was quite unthinkable. Why, then, was she a prey to this dreadful agitation, as though all were over between them? But why was his answer so long in coming?... He had, in any case, gone out to dinner—of course, he had no one to keep house for him! So the earliest that he could be home ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... undeniable that population will increase prodigiously-just as it has increased prodigiously during the last few centuries, following upon the increase in food-getting efficiency. The magnitude of population in that future day is well nigh unthinkable. But there is only so much land and water on the surface of the earth. Man, despite his marvellous accomplishments, will never be able to increase the diameter of the planet. The old days of virgin continents will be gone. The habitable planet, from ice-cap to ice-cap, will be inhabited. And in ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... democracy. If the laws are bad, improve them. If the public is uneducated, educate it. If our system gives us poor lawmakers, change the system. But to give up the attempt at legal control, to leave things as they are or rather, to leave them to go from bad to worse, is unthinkable. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... In another it might have signified a spitefulness unthinkable in Sylvia Armytage; therefore it puzzled him very deeply. He stood silent, wondering what precisely she might mean, and thus in silence they continued for a spell. Then slowly she turned and the blaze of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... really high-minded youth setting out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar in literature. The Thirty Years' War had familiarized Germany with marauding bands who recognized no authority save that of their leader. Even in the eighteenth century the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the endeavour of the classes without political influence to abolish their isolation from the community and from government. Their standpoint is that of the State, an abstract whole, which exists only in and through its separation from real life, which is unthinkable without the organized antagonism between the general idea and the individual existence of man. Consequently a revolution of political souls organizes a ruling clique in society, in accordance with the limited and doubly-cleft nature of these souls, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... desperately that he could take the gross fool and tear him into tastefully arranged pieces. But there was always Gerda. And since this particular idiot happened to be her younger brother, Ed Symes, anything in the nature of violence was unthinkable. ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge, to turn my discreet way of life ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... Thus, he praised the Princess of Wales [523] for hearing her children say their "little prayers," [524] every night at her knee, and he is credited with the remark: "A man without religion may be excused, but a woman without religion is unthinkable." Priests, ceremonials, services, all seemed to him only tinkling cymbals. He was always girding at "scapularies and other sacred things." He delighted to compare Romanism unfavourably with Mohammedanism. Thus he would say sarcastically, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... felt that henceforth she would be in the way of everybody; she would have no home. Leah married to Rochez; a new and young Mme. Goldberg ruling in the old house of the Rue des Medecins! Ah, it was unthinkable! ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of ratification itself. But when the treaty is acted upon, I must know whether it means that we have ratified or rejected it. We cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it without changes which alter its meaning, or leave it, and then, after the rest of the world has signed it, we must face the unthinkable task of making another and separate kind of treaty with Germany." In conclusion he declared: "If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for him to conceive of ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... life can go on in this way, indefinitely, is unthinkable. What will happen, I don't know. But there will have to be a change, somewhere. There will have to be a change, but I am too tired to worry over what it will be. I'm too tired even to think of it. That's something which lies in the lap ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... brutality in it which militates against any subtly voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his Anglo-Saxon readers? No—that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a physiological brutality as the sort of penance ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... some time before he began to succeed, for Clare was hard to annoy. Patient, and right ready to be pleased, he could hardly imagine offence intended; the thought was all but unthinkable to Clare's nature; so he let evil pass and be forgotten as if it had never been. Once, as he ran along with a heavy pail of water, Gunn shot out his foot and threw him down: he rose with a cut in his forehead, and a smile on his lips. He carried the mark of the pail ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... years: the congratulations and good wishes, or whatever they were, must have been spoken between the three in the parlour before dinner; and they spoke now of harmless usual things—news of the countryside and tales from Derby; gossip of affairs of State; of her Grace, who, in a manner unthinkable, even by now dominated the imagination of England. None of these three had ever seen her; the squire had been to London but once in his life, his two guests never. Yet they talked of her, of her state-craft, of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... transient; all is in a state of flux, of motion, of perpetual disintegration or re-integration. But there is one thing fixed and abiding—that which we call spirit—and amid all uncertainty, one truth is certain—that to a loving human soul a parting which shall be eternal is unthinkable."—Elizabeth R. Chapman. ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... frightened me," he said. "This is a quarrel, Sabina—our first and last, I hope. Never, never let anything come between us. That's unthinkable and I won't have it. You must give and take, my precious girl. And so must I. But look at it. What on earth happens to us if Daniel fires ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... into it. Understand you wanted to help fellow out of the ditch—good old Benson—most worthy. Couldn't help him out without getting in yourself? But going to get out soon as possible, of course? Unthinkable for Rich Kendrick ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... gained that the man of science seems to the unscientific to claim finality for his results. He himself is the first to point out that dogmatism is unjustified when its assertions are not so thoroughly grounded in reasonable fact as to render their contrary unthinkable. He seeks only for truth, realizing that new discoveries must oblige him to amend his statement of the laws of nature with every decade. But the great bulk of knowledge concerning life and living forms is so sure that science asserts, with a decision often mistaken for dogmatism, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue—a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or by any of their friends, but by Rudyard Kipling. The case had meant a great deal to him. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... them into the wilderness. Such a war is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman love of cruelty for cruelty's sake,[20] which marks the red Indian above all other savages, rendered these wars more terrible than any others. For the hideous, unnamable, unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their captured foes, and on their foes' tender women and helpless children, were such as we read of in no other struggle, hardly even in the revolting pages that tell the deeds of the Holy Inquisition. It was inevitable—indeed it was in many instances ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... because Ida was going to England, and she had a well-favored son. It is also possible that, being a lady of conventional ideas, she acted instinctively and could not help herself. That a young woman of extensive possessions should encourage a camp-packer was, from her point of view, unthinkable. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... to remain inactive while there was a chance to save her father's life was unthinkable. And so, for his sake, she kept on and ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... of speech seemed to desert me. It was unthinkable that Deeping, with whom I had been speaking less than an hour ago, should now be no more; that some malign agency should thus murderously have thrust him into the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... them in potentiality. This is, no doubt, a highly abstract idea, but it is essentially that of the centre from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is that last residuum which defies all our powers of analysis. This is truly "the unknowable," not in the sense of the unthinkable but of the unanalysable. It is the subject of perception, not of knowledge, if by knowledge we mean that faculty which estimates the relations between things, because here we have passed beyond any questions of relations, and are face to face ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... whom the lawfulness of re-marriage for an innocent divorcee is, like the rest of their religious beliefs, a matter of opinion, the scruple of a character like Madge Riversdale is unthinkable and incredible. Such women do not trouble their heads about theological points; still less, make heroic sacrifices for their private and peculiar convictions. But those for whom the Church is a definite concrete reality—almost a person—governing and teaching with divine authority, will easily understand ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... quiet enough it may come to you; but this thing alone of all things you cannot steal, nor can it be given to you by the County Council. It cannot be communicated, and yet you may get it. It is unspeakable but not unthinkable, and it is born as certainly and unaccountably as you were yourself, and is of just as little immediate consequence. Long, long ago in the dim beginnings of the world there was a careless and gay young man who said—"Let truth go to hell"—and it went there. It was his misfortune ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... unthinkable: Russia wouldn't do such a thing. In spite of all that is said about the Russian Government, its members are gentlemen. Of course, if such a thing happened, there would be trouble. That is a point where we're touchy. A very cheap ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... addition to the Court fan and the dog collar—possessions which were commonly supposed to be destined for the college, the Lee-Satterlees having no issue. Accordingly, Mrs. Robert Lee-Satterlee was allowed liberties unthinkable in another; but, be it said to her credit, she never abused them. Since she, or at least her property, was to take such an active part in Woodbridge affairs when she passed into the next world, it was only reasonable that she should take an active part while she was still in this; and it is safe ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship with some illustrious dead. For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fancy, as probably my mother is at this moment trying to persuade my father, at what age do you suppose it will please God to give me the heart of a man? My mother is sure to prefer somebody not fit to stand in your dingiest cotton frock. Anybody but you for my wife is a thing unthinkable. God would never degrade me to any choice of my mother's! He knows you for the very best woman I shall ever have the chance of marrying. Shall I tell you the sort of woman my mother would like me to marry? Oh, I know the ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning the truth—that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in that direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day, or, rather, the dawning of the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... "Lady, it's unthinkable. You don't know what you're suggesting. Abandon one of my clubs that my father put me up for when I was a boy! I'd as soon join a Trade Union. No! My innocent but gluttonous children shall ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... understand Knowledge to be high Brahman.[143] Brahman is very far off, and its attainments depends upon a knowledge of the Vedas. It is free from all pairs of opposites, it is divested of all qualities; it is eternal; it is endued with unthinkable qualities: it is supreme. It is by knowledge and penance that those endued with wisdom behold that which is the highest. Verily, they that are of untainted minds, that are cleansed of every sin, and that have transcended all passion and darkness (succeed in beholding it). ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, to that God whom (in trouble) we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says: "Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power into energy."[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the proposition is unthinkable! A most ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... Palmolive Building, the Mark Hopkins—all still intact? Only when commentators, rummaging nervously among old manuscripts, recalled the solemn gentlemen's agreement never to use heavierthanaircraft of any description should the unthinkable war come, did the public give a heartfelt sigh of relief. Of course! Both the Soviet Union and the United States were nations of unstained honor and, rather than recall their pledged word, would have suffered the loss of a dozen wars. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... gain by a break of any sort. Bert was not the type to be intimidated by sulks and silences, and more definite steps might quickly carry the situation out of her hands. The present with Bert was difficult, but a future that did not include him was simply unthinkable. No, a woman who had four young children to consider had no redress; she could only endure. Nancy liked the martyr role, and frequently had cause, or imagined she had cause, for ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... fell off his chair with surprise. That some philanthropist should rag Mill's study was only to be expected. Mill was one of the worst. A worm without a saving grace. But Trevor! Captain of football! In the first eleven! The thing was unthinkable. ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence, so entirely convincing his facts adduced—his modern instances, as you may say—that there really was nothing for the old man to answer. Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it was absurd to think they could. The Librarian had not a leg to stand on; that was flat. Accordingly he rose to his feet—and bowed.—"Sir," said he, with all prescribed honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... how delicately he must be handled. If St. George's pride, or his love for his favorite chattels—things personal to himself—should overcome him, the whole scheme would fall to the ground. That any gentleman of his standing had ever seen the inside of a pawn-shop in his life was unthinkable. This was what Gadgem faced. As for Todd, he had not drawn a full breath since ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hours, grandfather and his father before him considered that a good citizen paid his poll tax, served on juries, and patrolled his home for fire. Going to bed without banking fires in stoves and fireplaces was unthinkable. The rest of the household also had a proper respect for lighted candles and other possible fire breeders. Of course, under this simpler mode of living, light and heat were generated within view and what is seen ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... all the last. You will have some involuntary shudder of horror at him, or you will obey your heart and run to comfort Daisy, and give it all away. Yours is one of the schemes that don't come off, because they are unthinkable." ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... imprisonments and death were enacted from time to time to maintain its circulation at fixed values, there was a steady depreciation in value until it reached zero point and culminated in repudiation. The aggregate of the issues amounted to no less than the enormous and unthinkable sum of $9,500,000,000, and in the middle of 1797 when public repudiation took place, there was no less than $4,200,000,000 in face value of assignats and mandats outstanding; the loss, as always, falling mostly upon ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... go out, I saw her eyes upon me, dry, unwinking. But I know the look that means that death is unthinkable, that a woman has concentrated all her love on one being. It is not the appeal of a man or woman—that look. Her eyes were not human. I tell you, they were the praying eyes of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Janice as he talked. He moved doggedly toward the village, dragging at the donkey's head. They neared the houses very slowly, and Coburn considered that he walked into the probability of a group of other creatures from unthinkable other star systems, disguised as men. It did not occur to him that his sudden outburst about Dillon ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Of course, it is unthinkable, even from the point of view of the most conventional of orthodox Christians, that there can be any immorality in sex, for sex in itself is absolutely a work of the deity, hence of the highest morality, if it can have any such attribute at all. As well might one give digestion a moral quality. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... tot he cause of Democracy would be almost unthinkable; the great men who made her a united nation were all in different ways apostles of Democracy. Mazzini was its preacher; Garibaldi fought for it on many fields, in South America, in Italy and in France; Victor Emmanuel was ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real unity, dissolved with his death, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 1.83 to 1.86), which we have recognised as one of the chief palingenetic embryonic forms of the vertebrate group, and from which we have inferred the existence of a corresponding ancestral form for all the vertebrates and tunicates, is quite unthinkable as the stem-form ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... decided regretfully, would make a tame showing on the warpath, however much they might lend themselves to the spirit of the joke. He did not quite know how he was going to manage it, but he was hopeful still. It was unthinkable that real live Indians should be permitted to come and go upon the ranch without giving Evadna Ramsey, straight from New Jersey, the scare ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... a thing as that is unthinkable, sir," said Harry. "We may not win always, but here in the East we never lose. Remember Antietam and the ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... upon the public consciousness, through a thousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which is developing all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that when the solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will become unthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to the supposed needs of another; when the rights of human life have successfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property, it will become impossible to sell the young and heedless into degradation. ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... ourselves should go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This universe of astronomical whirligigs makes ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young Englishman should find himself in Razumov's situation. This being so it would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at this ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she'd do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I've remarked before, should always stimulate ...
— Reginald • Saki
... Foa with all the Italian charm. "Dauphin must paint you. The contrary is unthinkable. My husband and I have often ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... of the Armada was to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers—a victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Nema suggested. Her voice was troubled. "Pray rather that we never have reason to doubt you. Otherwise the wisest of the Satheri would spend their remaining time in planning something unthinkable ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... a prayer is a real prayer from person to person. To pray to the Cosmic Spirit, to the Higher Being, to the Kantian, Hegelian, quintessential, formless God is impossible and unthinkable. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Carton himself, not one of his assistants, was to conduct the case. If Dopey Jack, who had violated almost every law in the revised statutes and had never suffered anything worse than a suspended sentence, could not get off, then no one could. And it was unthinkable that Dopey should not only be arrested and held in jail without bail, but even be convicted on such a trivial matter as slight irregularities that swung the primaries in a large section of the city for his ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... complicated in the extreme! It is possible, therefore, that you were about to swear in perfectly good faith. But you will have to admit that, though each of you may well be the mother of twins—two mothers for one child is unthinkable! ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... this ground that it was counted sacred. Licht has also published a learned study of paiderastia in Attic comedy (Anthropophyteia, vol. vii, 1910), and remarks that "without paiderastia Greek comedy is unthinkable." Paiderastia in the Greek anthology has been fully explored by P. Stephanus (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ix, 1908, p. 213). Kiefer, who has studied Socrates in relation to homosexuality (O. Kiefer, "Socrates und die Homosexualitaet," Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the legitimate child of that lack of self-respect which caste systems engender. Such a solution of the Negro problem is not one which the saner sense of the nation for a moment contemplates; it is utterly foreign to American institutions, and is unthinkable as a future for any self-respecting race of men. The sound afterthought of the American people must come to realize that the responsibility for dispelling ignorance and poverty, and uprooting crime ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Allendyce had a vivid understanding of the tie that bound these two. And it was unthinkable that this man would let the girl go and do nothing. Yet it was not of any possible embarrassment he might suffer that Cornelius Allendyce thought at this moment; it was of the heartbreak of the father. He had not considered him at all; carried ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... bard!—we don't sing at our work. Over the whirr and roar and hum all day long, and with iteration that is childish and irritating to the intelligent greenhand, float unthinkable adjectives and adverbs, addressed to jumbucks, jackaroos, and mates indiscriminately. And worse words for the boss ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... for yourself, now that you are face to face with the thing, that it is impossible. It's quite unthinkable that you can wander for the next month all alone in the desert with those damned niggers. Though my legal guardianship over you terminated last September I still have some moral obligations towards you. Though it has been convenient to me to bring you up as ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... taken to help them. That we should, without effort of any sort, suffer ourselves to be cruelly snatched away far beyond the reach of those desperately struggling men, leaving them to miserably perish, was unthinkable! ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... she had taken as a matter of course; it impressed her as being not unlike that of the big hotel at Tampico, but to be expected to live and move around and sleep in this fragile, stifling, cluttered doll's house of a room was unthinkable. It was hers, the maid had said so; therefore, she would make the best of ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... reconcile the eternal conflict between poverty and pomp. In the abysmal void between the disappearing star and the aspiring glowworm men tramp upon, there seems to be sufficient latitude for the play of gratitude or grief. A Napoleon exiled by the French or a Ney shot down by Frenchmen is unthinkable today. In like manner, when the revolutionary passions of Russia have subsided, there may be men and women of the humblest estate who will wonder how it happened that their Emperor, whose darkest sin, apparently, was ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... Henri knew that the papers would have to be given up. They were clever, those revolutionaries. The thought of holding innocent children as hostages could only have originated in minds attuned to the villainies of devils. But it was unthinkable that the children ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... done for him—that's flat!" declared Raymonde. "You don't suppose we can allow him to be taken to the workhouse? It's unthinkable! He'd break his poor old heart. And we'd miss him so, too. Won't the landlord change his mind ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... she heard his breathing as his lips sought hers. Her right arm was held down at her side but her left hand struck at his face, tore at him, thrust him each possible quarter of an inch away, shielded her face. Again and again she struck, an unthinkable ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... of General Ashley and of Wyeth—names to be followed by others really of less importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont. That there could be farms, that there ever might be homes, in this strange wild country, was, to these early adventurers, unthinkable. ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... of being able to help poor Hornby," said I, "though I cannot imagine how you propose to go to work. To me his case seems as hopeless a one as it is possible to conceive. One doesn't like to condemn him, but yet his innocence seems almost unthinkable." ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... dissemination, in respect of probability. On the other hand we have the Scylla of tribal property in land, an idea so firmly rooted in our own day in the minds of the Australians as to make wars of conquest unthinkable to them, and to transform the practical part of their intertribal feuds into mere raids. If, therefore, investigation showed that the central and eastern tribes are in possession of a stock of folktales with many items in common, we should always ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... the letter aside and picking up another. "Now, how's this ... good grief! The Ancient Order of Hibernians, if you please, formally requests that ... since '58 Beta was launched on St. Patrick's day ... to do otherwise with this launch would be unthinkable, sacrilegious, treasonable, etc, etc." ...
— If at First You Don't... • John Brudy
... Can you imagine a God of Love devising hideous tortures hereafter, for the punishment of the pigmies who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable—it's almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we can understand and thank God for. But the other—oh, the other is sheer imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Notes, I cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. I can see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task. Necessity—the mother of invention—being even unthinkable in this case, I do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion I don't even know how to begin to exert myself. Here too the natural inclination comes in. I have been ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... it could to help the enemies of the Entente. By what right, and on what ground could they mutilate our country? The opinions once expressed by M. Venizelos, and since abandoned even by their author, do not constitute a sufficient ground for spoliation. The whole thing is an unthinkable outrage: it shows that our fears were justified and our demand for a guarantee ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... in my ears as I rode to Salem. They had sounded fantastic when he uttered them. Now that I was alone they repeated themselves most ominously. The flying hoofs of my horse pounded them into my ears. War with England was unthinkable, and yet the colonel's speech lifted me up to a dreary height and I was gazing over into a new and very ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... with luck, might return a wealthy man. These alone were sufficient inducements; but there was another and still stronger one, which was—Nell Lestrange. She was so young at the time of her abduction, was so young still, that I hoped nothing very terrible had thus far happened to her; but it was unthinkable that a white girl should be permitted to grow up to womanhood among savages, and I was not altogether without the hope that during the progress of my journey I might be able to ascertain her whereabouts and effect her rescue. With so many strong inducements in ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... ever. His persistence had scared her badly on that night at Baronmead. She was horribly afraid of what he might feel impelled to say to her, almost terrified at the bare notion of an explanation, and the prospect of a possible apology was unthinkable. It was easier for her to sacrifice his good comradeship, though that of itself was no easy matter, and she could only thrust her sense of loss into the background of her thoughts by the ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... growing up who would discourage a world war—would not permit it. There were increasing millions of people who had never seen a soldier, never seen a battleship. Would they want to pay the cost in blood and billions of treasure? It was unthinkable. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... of this particular difficulty had rested on the outcome of the visit to her apartment, the miserable result of which we know. Not only had he upset all of his fondest calculations, but he had heaped unthinkable ruin in the place he had set ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... into training camps like Bill, very tired, anaemic, with a shop and office pallor; and they came out of the war like Bill,—new, virile, interested, placing a value on themselves which would have been unthinkable prior to ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... could scarce open the gigantic portal quickly enough for him. He fled—fled, surrounded by nightmare visions of horrible publicity in a law-court. Unthinkable tortures! He damned Mr. Oxford to the nethermost places, and swore that he would not lift a finger to save Mr. Oxford from penal servitude ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... never expected anything like this. That Belgium, peace-loving Belgium, with her neutrality guaranteed by practically all the great civilized Powers, should, in spite of it, be about to be forced into a great European war had seemed unthinkable. Yet so it was, and it seemed that war was inevitable, for Max did not believe Belgium would ever allow foreign troops to cross her territory to attack a country with which she was at peace. With Belgium, then, on ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... It is indeed unthinkable that we should turn Mindanao over to the Moros. Abandonment of it by us would in the end result in this, as they would take possession of the entire island in the course of time. Neither the other wild tribes nor the Filipinos could stand against them. I heartily ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... nothing incongruous in their doing so. It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton descends from the empyrean throne of contemplation to use the language of the gutter or the fish-market. The bathos is unthinkable. The universal intellect of Bacon shrank to the paltry pursuit of place. The disproportion between the intellectual capaciousness and the moral aim jars upon the sense of fitness, and the name of Bacon, "wisest, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... and live it, to take the April paths together through green woods. The time was not long past, though it seemed endless years ago, when he would have liked them to be four, when he would have liked Denis to come too, because he had so loved Denis that to hurt him and leave him would have been unthinkable. But the time was past. Peter and Lucy had come to the place where they couldn't share and didn't want to, and no love but one matured. They had left civilisation, left friendship, which is part of civilisation, behind, and knew only the primitive, selfish, human ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... London Spectator—it would be a great pity if those potentates were to make the great mistake of supposing that the Government would acquiesce in the excision of the land clauses of the Budget by the House of Lords. Such a course is unthinkable. Any Liberal Government which adopted it would be swiftly ruined. The land proposals of the Government have not been made without long deliberation and full responsibility. We shall not fail to carry them effectively through the House of Commons; ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... well, then. And because of a silly convention you would ruin all your life by going on with these ways—it is unthinkable!" and his deep voice vibrated with feeling. "It is a mistake, that is all, and can be rectified,—if you were already married to this man I would not plead so, because then you would have crossed the Rubicon, and assumed responsibilities which you would have to accept or suffer the consequences. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... attacks on "land grabbers."[31] Hitherto we have, broadly speaking, kept the peace. That we should now forsake this duty, and, washing our hands of Ireland, leave the Protestant and the landowner, at or small, to his fate is unthinkable. ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various |
