"Amorphous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were to be rescued from the heathen darkness in which it has dwelt, and to be admitted within the community of scientific truth, by being christened a monolith. If it be large and shapeless, it may take rank as an amorphous megalith; and it is on record that the owner of some muirland acres, finding them described in a learned work as "richly megalithic," became suddenly excited by hopes which were quickly extinguished when the import of the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... world furnished with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... be of desirable shade, was softer and lighter in weight than true emerald. It was also a true glass and hence singly refracting and without dichroism, whereas emerald is crystalline (not glassy or amorphous), is ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... approach, or at least some comparison to make between vegetables and animals, this can only be by opposing plants the most simply organized, like fungi and algae, to the most imperfect animals like the polyps, and especially the amorphous polyps, which occur in ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... sulphur. Flowers of sulphur, the preparation of which has been described, consists of a mixture of rhombic crystals and amorphous particles. When treated with carbon disulphide, the crystals dissolve, leaving the amorphous particles as ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... genus the carbonate of lime is present in the form of very minute amorphous lumps until near to maturity, when it is dissolved and reappears as bicarbonate of lime deposited in comparatively ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... and teasing of a knot of idle boys. A half-tipsy slut of a woman threatened a child, who, in soiled tights and spangles, crouched against the muddy hind-wheel of a wagon, tears dribbling down his cheeks, his arm raised to ward off the impending blow. From the menagerie—an amorphous huddle of gray tents, ranged behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung with advertisements of the many attractions within—came the hideous laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of stolid English faces staring daily, hourly, between ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of a poem lies not in words but in meaning; and if the author have any skill at all in recording thought through language, he will be able to refine the uncouth mass of spontaneous verbiage which first comes to him as representing his idea, but which in its original amorphous state may fail entirely to suggest the same idea to another brain. He will be able to preserve and perpetuate his idea in a style of language which the world may understand, and in a rhythm which may not offend the reader's sense of propriety with ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... forms an amorphous mass with a bronze-like luster; it is sparingly soluble in water, freely so in alcohol, its alcoholic solution being strongly dichroic; its green colored solution in concentrated sulphuric acid becomes ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... of an amorphous Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with unfailing skill the good ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... that the corresponding images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased, he coined new words, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... finely ground glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes. A nodding drowsiness overtook him, his head rolled forward, he sank slowly into a bowed amorphous heap. Harry Baggs roused ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... suffered the pause to lapse without comment—save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes and those of ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... gleefully continued their course for a little while longer, though the handwriting on the wall had begun to blaze forth when all the canons of art and the fruit of years of serious effort were insulted by the production of the amorphous creation of one whose sole claim on popular attention as a composer was that he was a royal duke and the brother-in-law of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the characters quoted. It may be added that the capillitial threads are always exceedingly delicate, probably tubular, but never filled with lime throughout; the peridium may be almost nude or encrusted with lime, which, where present, is always amorphous, never crystalline; the sporangia when distinct may be either sessile or stipitate, and the stipe in the latter case is often hollow and charged with lime. In capillitium intermediate between Leocarpus and Badhamia, since in the first the capillitium is unequally calcareous, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... to the house a ragged, poorly-dressed, grey- headed, awkward, amorphous—in short, a very strange-looking— little old man. At first glance it might have been thought that he was perpetually ashamed of something—that he had on his conscience something which always made him, as it were, bristle up and then shrink into himself. Such curious starts and grimaces did ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of these injections showed concentric circles like ropy lava. The shape of the block is a saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced by quartz veins of the amorphous type, crystals being everywhere rare in Midian (?) The filons and filets, varying in thickness from eight metres to a few lines, are so numerous that the whole surface appears to be quartz tarnished by atmospheric corrosion to a dull, pale-grey yellow; while the fracture, sharp and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... flat, op. 61, given to the world September, 1846, is dedicated to Madame A. Veyret. One of three great Polonaises, it is just beginning to be understood, having been derided as amorphous, febrile, of little musical moment, even Liszt declaring that "such pictures possess but little real value to art. ... Deplorable visions which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within the graceful circle ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... them both." He mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... me a touching glance,—or rather, a glance which her amorphous features meant to make touching,—and, waving musk from her handkerchief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... still holds possession of them. Nor is this due to the fast approaching fog. That could not frighten men who have dared every danger of the deep, and oft groped their way through icy seas shrouded in darkness almost amorphous. ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... morals of our franchised men, our unfranchised women and our young Americans of both sexes, as hypocrisy is to a church member or spurious currency to a bank. It is to be remembered that the evils which are pointed out in our commonwealth today are not the evils of a democracy but of an amorphous something which is afraid to be a democracy. Whether the opposition to women's voting be honestly professed or whether it is concealed under chivalrous idolatry, distrust and skepticism are behind it.... ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... rather, when once donned, never to have been absent; as if, indeed, she had always been this royal creature, this woman bright and winning as some warm, rich summer's day. The fire that sleeps in marble never flashes and informs the whole mass so fully; if a pearl—lazy growth and accretion of amorphous life—should fuse and form again in sparkling crystals, the miracle would be less. And with what complete unconsciousness had she stepped from passive to positive existence, and found this new state to be as sweet and strange as any child has found it! Long ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... drawer and pulled them out. She had barely reduced them to a single amorphous lump when Mr. Fredericksohn passed ...
— Hex • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... diamond, graphite, amorphous carbon, coke, mineral coal.—Carbon a reducing agent, a decolorizer, disinfectant, ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... situation in Europe was almost disheartening. Imperial Russia had disappeared and the Germans were preparing to carve up the vast amorphous Russian carcass. Having driven their way through the Balkans to Constantinople they were on the point of opening their boasted direct route from Berlin to Bagdad. England, France and Italy began to feel ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... corner, looked weird enough. Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A draped lay figure leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night. Nothing was alive in this part of the room, nothing ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... decoration—black velvet and bugles—on the bodice. Instinctively I felt that a middle-aged, fat, second-hand-clothes-dealing Jewess had built it many years ago for synagogue wear. On the girlish figure it looked preposterous. Preposterous too was her head-gear, an amorphous bonnet trimmed in black, with a cheap ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... strength for a homogeneous plate of crystalline sulphur is not less than 33,000 volts per centimetre, and probably a good deal more. If the sulphur is contaminated with up to 3 per cent of the amorphous variety, as is the case if it is cooled fairly quickly from a temperature of 170 deg. C. or over, the specific resistance falls to from 10^25 to 10^26 at ordinary temperatures; and the specific inductive capacity ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process would recommence ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... investigated the dimorphism of arsenious acid and antimony oxide. In 1841 he made the discovery that dimorphous bodies have different fusing points, according as they are in the crystallized or amorphous condition. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had got in Strathaivron was a fairly ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with the past ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... cold despair and you think with animosity: "Where then is that celebrated, broad, beautiful Russian soul? So much was and is being said about it, but wherein does its breadth, might and beauty actively manifest itself? And is not our soul broad because it is amorphous? And it is probably owing to its amorphousness that we yield so readily to external pressure, which disfigures us so ...
— The Shield • Various
... the curious and the unusual in Australian life. The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies: their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of topsy-turveydom. There is quite an amazing variety of occasional records of this class in forgotten books, magazines and pamphlets. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... he not outrun any of the youth in Budge Street? He took his place in the line of competing children. Far away in the grassy distance were two men holding a stretched string. On one side of him was a tubby boy with a freckled face and an amorphous nose on which the perspiration beaded; on the other a lank, consumptive creature, in Eton collar and red tie and a sprig of sweet William in his buttonhole, a very superior person. Neither of them desired his propinquity. They tried to hustle him from the line. But Paul, born Ishmael, had ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... faculty and the same elements are necessary for the personification of such types or idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... this beach are fishermen's huts constructed of tree-stems which are smothered under multitudinous ropes of grass, ropes of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly fresh, others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay. There is a smack of the stone ages, of primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... remember that its colour was, on the whole, fair, a light brown. But he had forgotten her mouth, he had failed to name the colour of her eyes. She wore glasses, it is true. And her dress was indefinite in his memory—an amorphous dinginess. ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... Ashton Portway sailed off to receive other guests, and Henry was alone with Miss Marchrose in a nook between a cabinet and a phonograph. Many eyes were upon them. Miss Marchrose, a woman of thirty, with a thin face and an amorphous body draped in two shades of ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... alkaloids in the living plant, it has, on the other hand, a decidedly injurious action upon the quinine in the bark stripped from the tree. On drying such bark in full sunlight the quinine is decomposed, and there are formed dark-colored, amorphous, resin-like masses. In the manufacture of quinine the bark is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... literary rather than a dramatic triumph. His chief models were literary dramas. 'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's day ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... huge, amorphous house some three-quarters of a mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau, the palace; it united all tastes and contravened ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... isolated an amorphous resin of yellowish color and very bitter taste. It is soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, slightly soluble in sulphuret of carbon, insoluble in turpentine or benzin. He believes that it is the active principle of the root, and produces the anthelmintic action already mentioned: the proper ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... mass, and is to be regarded as a beneficent appointment, with such special view. That structure compels each mountain to assume the safest contour of which under the given circumstances of upheaval it is capable. If it were all composed of an amorphous mass of stone as at A, Fig. 19, a crack beginning from the top, as at x in A, might gradually extend downwards in the direction x y in B, until the whole mass, indicated by the shade, separated itself and fell. But when the whole ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... have seen in other samples obtained, I think, by special request some weeks ago, and which do not favorably correspond with the sample under consideration, being much more highly colored, and in comparison having a very strong odor. Saccharin now occurs as a very pale yellow, nearly white, amorphous powder, free from grittiness, but giving a distinct sensation of roughness when rubbed between the fingers. It is not entirely free from odor, but this is very slight, and not at all objectionable, reminding ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... contributed not a little, to the good health and heart of the party. Almost every exploring party on short commons, records some favourite cookery, some dish that their souls loved. In McKinlay's journey, the dish most in vogue was a kind of "amorphous" black-pudding, made of the carefully-saved blood of the bullock, horse, or sheep, as the case might be, boiled with some fat, and seasoned with a little condiment, which being of light carriage, can always be saved for such high occasions. In the present instance, ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... days of solitude—and this, too, even before Matilda had gone—a queer new something had begun to stir within her, almost as though threatening an eruption. It seemed a force, or spirit, rising darkly from hitherto unknown spaces of her being. It frightened her, with its amorphous, menacing strangeness. She tried to keep it down. She tried to keep her mental eyes away from it. And so, during all these days, she had no idea what the fearsome ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... spaces there is a substance which is called amorphous or structureless, and a filling to be in harmony with this substance should be amorphous or structureless in its composition. The only materials we have which meet these conditions are gutta-percha ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... not, and newspapers were in their infancy, the shelves of the British Museum and other repositories groan beneath mountains of State papers, law reports, pamphlets, and chaotic raw materials, from which some precious ore may be smelted down. But these amorphous masses are attractive chiefly to the philosophers who are too profound to care for individual character, or to those praiseworthy students who would think the labour of a year well rewarded by the discovery of a single fact tending to throw a shade of additional perplexity upon the secret of Junius. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination, the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... development. The Leicestrian period, despite its record of incompetence and failure, had however the distinction of being the period which for good or for evil gave birth to the republic of the United Netherlands, as we know it in history. The curious, amorphous, hydra-headed system of government, which was to subsist for some two centuries, was in its origin the direct result of the confused welter of conflicting forces, which was the legacy of Leicester's rule. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... that quality in a man which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men and lifting ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... crowded the liquid as motile threads, are destroyed and disappear. After the action of the air, only fine amorphous granules can be found, unfit for culture as well as for the transmission of any disease whatever. It might be said that the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... the conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet long-suffering and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... chief impurity found in raw cotton. It can be obtained in the form of an amorphous substance of a light yellow colour, not unlike gum in appearance. It is soluble in boiling water, and the solution has a faint acid reaction. Acids and many metallic salts, such as mercury, chloride and lead acetate, precipitate pectic acid from its ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral metres, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... screen, which now showed an amorphous black mass, jutting up from a foundation of even deeper black. "Is that operation ...
— One-Shot • James Benjamin Blish |
