"Deadened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... waned; the wind sighed and sighed; the dreary rain fell; the trees clashed their boughs dolorously together, and their turbulence deadened the sound of galloping horses. As Dundas sat and gazed at the girl's intent head, with its fleecy tendrils and its massive coil, the great hounds beside her, all emblazoned by the firelight upon the brown wall near by, with the vast fireplace at hand, the whole less like reality ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... invisible movements, the sound of his footsteps deadened by the carpet; and they did not doubt but that he had already crossed ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... applied the spark bravely to the match. The spark—a feeble spark, first principle of conflagration—shone in the darkness like a glow-worm, then was deadened against the match which it set fire to, Porthos enlivening the flame with his breath. The smoke was a little dispersed, and by the light of the sparkling match objects might, for two seconds, be distinguished. It was a brief but splendid spectacle, that of this giant, pale, bloody, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Stones fell from deadened hands and the threatening growls and cries were lost in a unanimous gasp of alarm. A moment's pause and then—utter rout. There was a mad stampede and in a trice the street was empty. Rebecca was alone under that inoffensive ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... each other with appalling swiftness, and nothing was done. By imperceptible degrees his horror of San Giacinto began to invade his mind even when it was most deadened by drink. So long as an idea is new and has not really become a habit of the brain, brandy will drive it away, but the moment must inevitably come when the stimulant loses its power to obscure the memory of the thing dreaded. Opium ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the sail, Well pleas'd to leave so cruel sea behind; And of that second region will I sing, In which the human spirit from sinful blot Is purg'd, and for ascent to Heaven prepares. Here, O ye hallow'd Nine! for in your train I follow, here the deadened strain revive; Nor let Calliope refuse to sound A somewhat higher song, of that loud tone, Which when the wretched birds of chattering note Had heard, they of forgiveness lost all hope. Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... thy low bed, with pulseless, deadened heart; Calm, calm and sweet, 0 warrior rest! thou well hast borne thy part, And now a glory wreath for thee the angels singing twine, A glory wreath, not of the earth, but made ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... evening, and was to remain with him at night. The rest were comforted by the assurance that Dr. May was still calm, and did not seem to have been injured by what had passed. Indeed, it seemed as if the violence and suddenness of the shock, together with his state of suffering, had deadened his sensations; for there was far less agitation about him than could have been thought possible in a man of such strong, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... unknown to ordinary Christians, He begins His work by imparting to it a sense of its distance from Him. As soon as it has perceived and felt this distance, the natural inclination which it has to return to its source, and which has been, as it were, deadened by sin, is revived. Then the soul experiences true sorrow for sin, and is painfully conscious of the evil which is caused by this separation from God. This sentiment thus implanted in the soul leads it to seek the means of ridding itself ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... poverty. Nicholas Perrot and Greysolon Du Lhut were conspicuous examples. It was a highly speculative game. At times large profits came easily and were spent recklessly. The trade encouraged profligacy, bravado, and garishness; it deadened the moral sense of the colony, and even schooled men in trickery and peculation. It was a corrupting influence in the official life of New France, and even governors could not keep from soiling their hands in it. But most unfortunate of all, the colony was impelled ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... grinds His poor people to powder All day and all night I can hear, Their cries growing louder and louder. Oh, God, have You deadened ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... presence, had given him a moment's illusion, had absorbed him for a moment, acting on his deadened nature like a narcotic at once soothing and stimulating. As some wild animal in a forgotten land, coming upon ruins of a vast civilization, towers, temples and palaces, in the golden glow of an Eastern evening, stands abashed and vaguely wondering, having neither reason to understand ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... the highly intricate difficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of the reasons that must have given rise to many erroneous or unsatisfactory theories of laughter is that many things are comic de jure without being comic de facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them the comic quality. A sudden dissolution of continuity is needed, a break with fashion, for this quality to revive. Hence the impression that this dissolution of continuity is the parent of the comic, whereas all it does is ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... day, but the chauffeur hated it. He was a city product and looked as much at home on that hill-top as a dancing-master in a hay-field. He smoked cigarettes and read the sporting page of the paper in the garage, where gasoline rather deadened the country smells of flowers and hay, and tried to forget his degrading surroundings, but he was overjoyed when the day to start for home arrived. I did not share his feelings, and yet I was ready to go. It ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... fear. Presently a form that was like a shadow passed under a lamp that glimmered opposite. She could see only the outlines of a Spanish cape. But she listened for the footsteps, and she knew them. They came on and paused, came up and paused again, and then they went past and deadened off and ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... the curtain began to send forth luscious strains, deadened and distant, as if through far-off glens and woodlands; and from the side passages issued three Graces, led by Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, bearing a herald's staff in her hand. She advanced to the altar in the centre ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... over a year since he had heard that voice, and he had tried to believe his heart was deadened to its influence; but now to-night, at the first sound, it thrilled him again with its old-time music. A moment later she closed her door and the hall was dark, and his heart began to beat faster now that he grasped the truth. He ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... the serpent sank down on the ground. But still its jaws were open, and those dreadful jaws threatened Jason. Medea, with a newly cut spray of juniper dipped in a mystic brew, touched its deadly eyes. And still she chanted her Magic Song. The serpent's jaws closed; its eyes became deadened; far through the grove its ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... by the more powerful states, who, however, enjoyed most of the prosperity accruing from them, were defended by a few princes for whom they were almost without value. The possession of territories and dignities deadened courage; the want of both made heroes. While Saxony, Brandenburg, and the rest drew back in terror, Anhalt, Mansfeld, the Prince of Weimar and others were shedding their blood in the field. The Dukes of Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Luneburg, and Wirtemberg, and the free cities ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... consciousness that the eyes of comrades are upon him, puts a man upon his mettle and upon his pride, and compels him oftentimes to simulate a contempt for danger which he does not feel. The senses are too, in some sort, deadened to the hazards of the scene and, in battle, one finds himself doing with resolute will things which under normal conditions would fill ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... dart in the shadow of the gate. The broken-nosed pirate had fired at me. The report, deadened in the vault, hardly reached my ears. Don Balthazar's arm seemed to swing me back. Then I felt him lean heavily on my shoulder. I did not know what had happened till I ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... proof in support of them; the energy degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of public talk, and his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... processes and tools of production. We have until recently greatly neglected the human factor that is so large an element in our very productivity. The development of vast repetition in the process of industry has deadened the sense of craftsmanship, and the great extension of industry has divorced the employer and his employee from that contact that carried responsibility for the human problem. This neglect of the human factor has accumulated much of the discontent and unrest throughout our great ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... the fog of Things cannot see Truth. Ears deafened by the din of Things cannot hear Truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of Things cannot think Truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of Things cannot feel Truth. Throats choked by the dust of Things cannot ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright
... besides, his engagements with Miss Bath at that time took total possession of him, and guarded his heart from the impressions of another woman; and, when he had dined with her in town, the vexations through which she had lately passed had somewhat deadened her beauty; besides, he was then engaged, as we have seen, in a very warm pursuit of a new mistress, but now he had no such impediment; for, though the reader hath just before seen his warm declarations of a passion ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no single moment at which he could conveniently halt and "straighten the record." At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had formerly put upon it. What if she should ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... reel deadened now, and the stride of Miltiades was perceptibly lessened and then became but a vigorous up-and-down hop, while the tense line sang ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting. I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were produced upon an audience, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... round of the garden was reddened With pillars of fire in a great high ring— One look—and our souls forever were deadened, Though our feet yet move, ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... said, at last. "There is no sound to the west. Don't forget your instructions," and he turned his horse and disappeared in the darkness, the clatter of his horse's feet soon becoming deadened by ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... then she looked gratefully. He had not seemed to belong to her among all these others; he was different then—not her Paul, who understood the slightest quiver of her innermost soul, but something else, speaking another language than hers. How it hurt her, and deadened her very perceptions. Only when he came right back to her, leaving his other, his lesser self, as she thought, would she feel alive again. And now he asked her to look at this garden, wanting the contact with her again. Impatient of the set in the field, she turned to the quiet ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the left, leading to the baroness's salons, whose windows looked on the courtyard just above the counting-room, so that, during the warm season, when everything was open, the chink of the gold pieces, the noise made by piles of crowns toppling over on the counters, slightly deadened by the rich hangings at the long windows, formed a sort of commercial accompaniment to the subdued conversations carried on by ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... holding me fast by the thighs commenced shoving in and out furiously. A sensitive woman never receives an insertion of this kind with impunity. The friction began to excite feelings that first deadened the pain of entrance, and then began to awaken the delicious sensations of lubricity. The enjoyment I began to experience was delicious, and I could not refrain from heaving up to meet ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... particularly liable to accidents, and suffers immensely in "wet seasons" from the "rust" and "rot." The first named affects the leaves, giving them a brown and deadened tinge, and frequently causes them to crumble away. ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... years, and feelings that had become deadened by experience, contribute to render the view less striking, less grand, in any way less pleasing than we had hoped to find it? So far from this, all our expectations were much more than realized. In one particular, touching ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Cain's rude way! 'A good man by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, promises so much:' woe to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that they were given! To a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not making money, all 'promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be pleaded for in Courts of Requests, address themselves ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there depicted, is doing nothing more ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... would learn If, on a rock, by Lindisfarne, Saint Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame The sea-born beads that bear his name: Such tales had Whitby's fishers told, And said they might his shape behold, And hear his anvil sound: A deadened clang—a huge dim form, Seen but, and heard, when gathering storm And night were closing round. But this, as tale of idle fame, The nuns ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... deadened by fatigue, his imagination seemed quickened and set free. It carried him back to the lonely heights and the rugged dales of his own land, and once more in vivid memory he roamed the upland heath with Evelyn. She had attracted him strongly when ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... the horrible, unbelievable word. The man was incapable of feeling—every other pain was deadened in this great suffering which ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... dried sea-grass thrown up by the high tides, deadened their footsteps as they crawled into the cave. For an instant they crept on through the darkness. Then a twist in the pathway brought a faint gleam of light ahead. Smith flattened to the kelp and wriggled nearer ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... character, as well as the painful nature of the reflections which occupied his thoughts, had hitherto prevented his experiencing. The ideas of his mind began to be so little corrected by the exertions of his senses, worn out and deadened as the latter now were by extremity of fatigue, that the visions which the former drew superseded or perverted the information conveyed by the blunted organs of seeing and hearing, and Durward was only sensible that he was awake, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... were detailed to go to the houses and help the women carry the furniture and other household goods out in the fields to the watering-troughs; the rest hastened to the brook and scattered along it, and threw water on the brush at the edge, hoping the flames would be deadened when ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... with a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was already married to Laodice, whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two children, Seleucus and Antiochus; but political ambition had deadened the feelings of his heart, and he agreed to declare this first marriage void and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if any should be born to him by Berenice, should inherit the throne of Babylon and the East. Philadelphus, with an equal want of feeling, and ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... deadened the intensity of his affliction. The violent paroxysms of grief subsided into a deep but calm regret. It was as if a mist had spread itself over every object which presented itself before him, robbing them indeed of half ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... over and the torch quivered in his hand. He had seen men die in the Great War. He had been near death himself. But never before had he been near death in so horrible a form. The sodden noises in the mud, the deadened flopping of the sinking body—mud-plastered hands beating frantically on mud, spattering, agonising in darkness—"My God," he breathed, "anything but ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... day, a sudden pause in that place to the roar of the great thoroughfare. The many sounds become so deadened that the change is like putting cotton in the ears, or having the head thickly muffled. At that time the contrast was far greater; there being no small steam-boats on the river, no landing places but slippery wooden stairs and foot-causeways, no ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Life Guards, had been made to retire, that the old General, whose heir he was, might keep him in attendance on him. Already self-indulgent and extravagant, the idleness of the life he led with the worn-out old roue had deadened his better feelings, and habituated him to dissipation, while his debts, his expensive habits, and his dread of losing the inheritance, had bound him over to the General. Both had been saved from the fire in the Ninon, ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by him. I always felt sure Big Bill would come to some bad end. My mother said that a cruel childhood was often a training school for the gallows, and the boy who killed defenseless birds and bugs deadened his sensibilities and destroyed his moral nature so that it was ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... had begun to rumble through the streets at daybreak and was now approaching its meridian stunned the young man's nerves. Deadened by the sound of it all, he could not dissociate from the volume that particular note, which would be his note, and live oblivious to the rest.... So this was business! And what a feeble reed he was with which to prop it! Visions ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... deadened is the public mind by the conventional public utterances, so accustomed have we grown to public men talking this sort of pompous nonsense and no other, that we are sometimes quite shocked by ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... flogging the intellectual interest in this strange conception distracted his mind from the pain of the blows; also his bare back was protected by the idol and his leggings and trousers deadened the lashes. A moment more he hesitated. But he was unarmed and had voluntarily taken on the adventure, so he would see it through. As he broke into a shuffling run, for the idol fortunately was lighter than the previous one and he was a more powerful man than Kawa Kendi, another ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... clasp, fiercely, desperately; her long hair burst its fastenings, and enveloped us both in its rippling splendor; she beat my face, she wound her fingers in my hair, but my lips smiled on, for the hammer in my brain had deadened all else. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... self- preservation from fire, water and high places. A heavily sleeping person is often so sodden in slumber that his senses of smell and hearing are temporarily dead; and many a sleeping man has been asphyxiated by gas or smoke, or burned to death, because his deadened senses failed to arouse him at the critical moment. (This dangerous condition of mind can be cured by efforts of the will, exercised prior to sleep, through a determination resolutely to arouse and ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... whitened my hair and deadened the ardor of my senses, my imagination does not take such a high ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... slid off the roof and fell into the road with a deadened thud, whilst white flakes of straw and wood-ash were flying in the wind like feathers. At the same time two of the cottages adjoining, upon which a little water had been brought to play from the rector's engine, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... the cigar once more from his lips and looked thoughtfully at his granddaughter, where she sat on the edge of the vast bed, upright and beautiful, perfect in the most meticulous detail. Most women when they return from a long evening out look more or less the worse for it—deadened eyes, pale cheeks, loosened coiffure tell their inevitable tale. Miss Benham looked as if she had just come from the hands of a very excellent maid. She looked as freshly soignee as she might have looked at eight that evening instead of at one. Not a wave of her ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling gradually deadened. It did not disappear—any incident might have revived it—but the anxious desire for immediate war when the opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... like a man that had been cast into an angry sea, and had battled his way through hungry waves to shore. Saved, the utter weariness of fierce strife hung heavy over his soul, and exhaustion deadened his joy of escape. Just saved, bereft of everything, he looked back over the dark waters and shuddered. And before him a dreary waste of desert shore-land stretched out interminably, and he must wander alone over its ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... General Assembly of the ante pure and triumphant Kirk of Scotland, even into their very arms and bosoms. Our faithfu' champions o' the testimony agree e'en waur wi' this than wi' the open tyranny and apostasy of the persecuting times, for souls are hardened and deadened, and the mouths of fasting multitudes are crammed wi' fizenless bran instead of the sweet word in season; and mony an hungry, starving creature, when he sits down on a Sunday forenoon to get something that might warm him to the great work, has a dry clatter o' morality driven about ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... petition. It was in vain that complaints were poured into his ears; nor did the death of his mother, who had been blamed for much of this cruelty, and who this year was called to her account at the bar of an offended Maker, make any change in the proceedings of a disposition which her maxims had deadened to the voice of mercy. Earl Grey, on assuming the reins of government, very properly refused to make an alliance with such an infamous usurper; notwithstanding, he was blamed for this line of policy by the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the beer had deadened his senses and his jealous anger had evaporated. Half an hour later his wife crossed the street cautiously and went inside. Doughy saw her and, having reached the maudlin stage, got up and lurched across the street, anxious to make it up and be friends. Quite like the old ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... the stairs to the balcony, I close at her heels. The shadows veiled us, the thick carpet deadened the sound of our tread, or certainly we must have been detected by the man who entered the room we ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... hated her, or was angry with her, I could not be sure the feeling would not die. As it is, she has deadened me into a creature of indifference. So you just revise your viewpoint a little, Elnora. Cease thinking it is for you to decide what I shall do, and that I will obey you. I make my own decisions in reference to any woman, save you. The question you are to decide is whether I may remain here, ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... the horror of his situation tripled his energy; excitement deadened the pain of his wounds; with elbows held tight to his sides, and holding his breath, he went along at such a speed that he soon distanced his pursuers; the noise of their feet became gradually ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... at him with newer interest as they passed down the room, and so to a tight little office the walls of which were specially deadened against the transmission ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... in so good condition as they did with the fleet; and therefore I the less wonder that the Prince was distasted with my discourse the other day about the sad state of the fleet. But it pleases me to hear that he did expect great thanks, and lays the fault of the want; of it upon the fire, which deadened every thing, and the glory ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... The rugs deadened the sound of his steps. He stopped on the threshold of that upper room. He could see the faint outlines of the tall white figure; he knew the ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... employment of these passages, is not merely that they are so present to his mind that they come up for use in the most exciting moments of composition, but that he embodies the spirit of them in such a new form as reveals to minds saturated and deadened with the sound of the words, the very visual image and spiritual meaning involved in them. "The primrose ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... it grew dark. A sense of sadness filled me, and I was glad when the conductor lighted the lamp and made up my berth. We lay down as we were, all dressed, and the train rushing and swinging along deadened ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... Shakespeare; is not the brain difference the obvious cause of the mental difference? Are there not diseases of the brain that affect thought in a definite manner? Is not thought excited by stimulants, and deadened or even annihilated by narcotics? Is it not entirely suspended in healthy sleep? Will not a man of genius become an imbecile if his brain softens? Will not a philosopher rave like a drunken fishfag if he suffers from ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... some way on the other side of the ridge, and descending towards a streamlet that ran through a narrow valley. I paused and listened. The distance I had come, or the intervening masses of thicket, deadened any sound that might be coming from the enclosure. The air was still. Then with a rustle a rabbit emerged, and went scampering up the slope before me. I hesitated, and sat down in the ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... window. Only the deadened sound of the hoofs of our own horses, the deadened roll of our own carriage wheels, were audible in the stillness of the night. Then I thought I heard yells and faint hoof-beats in the distance, but again there was silence except for the muffled ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... write letters: and if the business of life consisted in letter-writing, and was carried on by the post (like a Spanish game at chess), human nature would be what Richardson represents it. All actual objects and feelings are blunted and deadened by being presented through a medium which may be true to reason, but is false in nature. He confounds his own point of view with that of the immediate actors in the scene; and hence presents you with ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the motor lorries at the cross-roads deadened the noise of his approach as he came softly up behind her, and then his suspicions were confirmed beyond ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Illinoy, nor anywhere else that I knows on. Two-story house, and painted instead of being whitewashed; blinds on the winders; no thirty-dollar horses in the barn, an' no old, unpainted wagons around; no deadened trees standin' aroun' in the corn-lot or the wheat-field—not a one. Good cribs to hold his corn, instead of leaving it on the stalk, or tuckin' it away in holler sycamore logs, good pump to h'ist his drinkin'-water with, good help to keep up with the work—why, ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... lying broadside to broadside, not twenty yards apart, and every shot told. For ten minutes this position was held, and the two crews worked like Furies in loading and firing the great guns. The roar of the cannon was incessant, and the recoil of the heavy explosions deadened what little way the ships had on when fire was opened. Capt. Manners was too old an officer not to know, that, in an artillery duel of that kind, the victory would surely rest with the side that carried the heaviest guns: so ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... stop, the others imitating his example. They were now more distant from the breakers,—whose roar was somewhat deadened by the intervention of a sand-spur. In consequence, the other sounds were heard more distinctly. They could no longer be mistaken,—even ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... conscience and get its approval, without using force or specious logic, then he begins to know what real Happiness is. But the individual must be careful that he is not appealing to a conscience perverted or deadened by the wrongdoing and subsequent deafness of its owner. The man who is honestly seeking to live his life in Consecration, Concentration and Conquest, living from day to day as best he can, by the light he has, may rely ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... they were all silent, with their eyes fixed on the door of the cow-house, which formed a sort of black hole in the wall of the building. Nothing could be seen inside, but they heard a vague noise, movements, and footsteps and the sound of hoofs, which were deadened by the straw on the floor, and soon he reappeared in the door, wiping his forehead, and went towards the house with long, slow strides. He passed the strangers without seeming to notice them, and said to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... seeks to bound what has no bounds, endeavours to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses, is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language, and asserts boldly that the human mind is too limited in its nature to conceive of infinite ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... towers of Stirling rang With soldier-step and weapon-clang, 20 While drums, with rolling note, foretell Relief to weary sentinel. Through narrow loop and casement barred, The sunbeams sought the Court of Guard, And, struggling with the smoky air, 25 Deadened the torches' yellow glare. In comfortless alliance shone The lights through arch of blackened stone, And showed wild shapes in garb of war, Faces deformed with beard and scar, 30 All haggard from the midnight watch, And fevered with the stern debauch; ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... His words deadened her doubts like a soporific. She glanced about for the moment at the Dionysian spectacle of the Mammoth Store ravished to chaos by the holiday delirium; at the weary stream of shoppers and workers bending into the storm ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... his life. He engaged in all affairs, because he had not power to resist the importunities of those who drew him in for their own advantage, and came off always with shame for want of courage to go on. His suspicious temper, even from his childhood, deadened those lively, gay colours which would have shone out naturally with the advantages of a fine, bright genius, an amiable gracefulness, a very honest disposition, a perfect disinterestedness, and an ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... mean rebellious spirit, but rose in revolution with its motto, "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," written on its brow to be known of all men. And I think as we slowly sail up the bay on our vessel, Does that deadened soul respond to what lies before him? Does there in his heart rise the prayer, Oh, God! make me true to the duties about to be laid upon me; make me worthy of being free? Yes, then, for the first time I felt the full depth of the indignity offered to my womanhood. I ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... their virtues, or rather of the single virtue they practice, and under shadow of which they consider themselves able to dispense with all others? Did he not fear that the profound mathematical knowledge of that learned person might have slightly deadened her heart and given a dogmatic tone to her mind, of which he doubtless with his usual penetration suspected the narrowness, likely to render its science pernicious to the heart? All this is easily to be believed, when we see how preoccupied he was ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... clumsy garbage cart to the modern automobile. Almost every person and every vehicle carried luggage. Drivers of vehicles were disregardful of these exhausted, hungry refugees and drove straight through the crowd. So dazed and deadened to all feeling were some of them that they were bumped aside by carriage wheels or bumped out of ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... all times in the genuineness of brotherly or sisterly love. Perhaps familiarity has deadened its keenness. Like the appreciation of the sunlight which rushes with thrilling force on the victim of blindness, separation or misfortune may rouse the dormant affection and prove its nobility and its power; but in our experience manifest fraternal charity is one of those things ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... spot which falling drops decayed? For each betraying sound is deadened there. No yawning breach should in the walls be made, So treatises on robbery declare. Where does the palace crumble? Where the place That niter-eaten bricks false soundness wear? Where shall I 'scape the sight of woman's face? Fulfilment of my ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... of fortune, culture, position, wealth, that there was a grim irony in their sitting here helpless in the face of coming death. To their reverie, moreover, the mention of love could not but give color. No woman has ever come to speak of love entirely unmoved, though her heart may have been deadened or crushed beyond the power of thrilling or quickening at any other thought. These two, who had led lives so happy, so protected, so rich, sat there silent before the possibilities which lay in the love of a girl; until at last both sighed, whether with regret or tenderness perhaps they could not ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... who had not yet crossed out through the passes were the only ones that moved, pushing on through the storm, and the herd bulls traveling with them bugled to hold their cows together; but the snow-filled air deadened these distant sounds. And for two days Breed heard nothing but the soft hissing of the snow through the branches or the groaning of overburdened trees. The third night a big gray owl hooted gruffly an hour before dawn, ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... suddenly shot forth to the neck of his assailant. His muscular fingers closed in a deft and vice-like pinch directly below the silk handkerchief. It was the pneumogastric nerve, which he reached: a nerve which, when deadened by Oriental skill, paralyzes the vocal chords. Not a sound emanated from the mysterious man, even when Shirley's right hand shot forward, under the chin of the other, for a deft blow across the thorax. The ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... whence a fact Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look."— "Vibrations in the general mind At depth of deed already out of reach."— "Live fact deadened down, Talked over, bruited abroad, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... with a deadened tone due to a cracked rim, can be given its original clear ringing sound by sawing out the crack with a common hacksaw. Make the saw cut along the line of the crack. The opening caused by the saw will allow the free ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... a door and Chip was placed upon a bed. The room was sumptuously, even elegantly, furnished. Pictures adorned the walls, a heavy carpet deadened the sound of the feet, and rich curtains kept ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... sweetheartings of others had always seemed sordid and commonplace. Had Vane been presumptuous she would have had nothing to say to him, but she was drawn towards him because he was drifting to his ruin and she yearned to save him. That she should see him no more deadened her heart and numbed her brain. So she made no effort to find out the why and wherefore of his death and ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... soft sandy-soil received and deadened the impact of her hoofs. Off she flew through the grey of the morning, soundless ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... instantly lowered their boats for the purpose of towing her off, but two of the boats were struck and swamped, and many of those in them were drowned before help could be rendered by those on board. Just as the flames seemed about to catch the "Torbay" they suddenly decreased, and were deadened. It seemed almost like a miracle; but when the men afterwards examined the fire-ship, she was found to be loaded with snuff, which immediately the fire reached it ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... wrap this cloak about you, pull this cap over your brows—your long, dark hair will aid the disguise. The jailer will not detect it, or mark your taller figure, by this dim and gloomy light. He is sleepy and weary, and I know his senses are deadened by brandy; I perceived its burning fumes as we walked that close and narrow passage. Clinton, there is no danger to myself in this release, you know there is not. The moment they discover me, they will let me go. Hasten, for he will ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... struck ten. Mrs. Hare took her customary sup of brandy and water, a small tumbler three parts full. Without it she believed she could never get to sleep; it deadened unhappy thought, she said. Barbara, after making it, had turned again to the window, but she did not resume her seat. She stood right in front of it, her forehead bent forward against its middle pane. The lamp, casting a bright light, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... The voice of Lance sounded too clearly in Roy's brain; and the more intimate pain, deadened a little by illness, struck at his ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... accustomed. Scott is, if not the infinitely various but never mutable Scott of the earlier years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... heard quick hoof-beats of trotting horses. Peering out, he saw dim, moving forms in the darkness, quite close at hand. They had approached against the wind so that sound had been deadened. Five horses with riders, Dale made out—saw them loom close. Then he heard rough voices. Quickly he turned to feel in the dark for a ladder he knew led to a loft; and finding it, he quickly mounted, taking care not to make a noise with his rifle, and lay down upon the floor of brush and poles. ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... Vane, ever anxious to dispel an illusion, "but more probably custom has deadened to him all that overpowers ourselves with awe; and he may tread among these ruins rather seeking to pick up some rude morsel of antiquity, than feeding his imagination with the dim traditions that invest them with so august ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more shut up, and the cottage leveled to the ground. It was not, however, until fifty years had in some measure deadened the memory of the terrible transaction, that the ground was cultivated. It is now a fine ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... a trance of agitation, mistress neither of reason nor of feeling. She felt his spell, as she had always done. The woman in her thrilled at last to the mere name and neighbourhood of love. The heart in her cried out that pain and loss could only be deadened so—the past could only be silenced by filling the present ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... handle all specimens with tweezers; avoid spilling it on clothing. It will cause dark brown stains on clothing, skin, and fingernails. Such stains are not easily removed. Areas of the skin subjected to prolonged contact are deadened, will turn ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... Jim was pretty well deadened to shocks by this time, but the news that his wife had been disloyal found an untouched spot in his heart to stab. It gave him a needed resentment, however, and a much-needed something ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the wind was sighing without and they heard nothing. A storm had come up with the setting of the sun and occasional flashes of lightning lighted the darkened room where Welcome found himself while the thunder deadened the sound of his stumbling feet. He made his way through the kitchen to a bedroom and sank down exhausted ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... first low, then louder and louder; yet she heard him not. At last, when he uttered the dear name with an energy yet more powerful, a hollow echo from the mountain-summits around the valley returned the deadened sound, "Bertalda!" Still the sleeper continued insensible. He stooped down; but the duskiness of the valley, and the obscurity of twilight would not allow him to distinguish her features. While, with painful uncertainty, he was bending ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... to himself, "very much a virgin," and he found himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor. The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. No one would tell him to clean his rifle. There would be no one to salute. He would not have to worry about making himself ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... high-souled thoughts, to warrant her being termed ill-natured. But Madame was endowed with a spirit of resistance—a gift frequently fatal to its possessor, for it breaks where another disposition would have bent; the result was that blows did not become deadened upon her as upon what might be termed the cotton-wadded feelings of Maria Theresa. Her heart rebounded at each attack, and therefore, whenever she was attacked, even in a manner that almost stunned her, she returned ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the counting-house, and wondered which spot was blessed by the presence of Robert. It so happened that neither locality had that honour; for Robert was half a mile away from both, and much nearer to Caroline than her deadened spirit suspected. He was at this moment crossing the churchyard, approaching the rectory garden-gate—not, however, coming to see his cousin, but intent solely on communicating a brief piece ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... virtuous, ideal and brave? The result of such ridiculous teaching is a dull, shallow patriotism, blind to its own limitations, with bull-like stubbornness, utterly incapable of judging of the capacities of other nations. This is the way the spirit of youth is emasculated, deadened through an over-estimation of one's own value. No wonder public opinion can ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... 1891, was the day set for Mr. Barnum's funeral. The morning was cold, gray, and dismal. Nature's heart, with the spring joy put back and deadened, symboled the melancholy that had fallen upon Bridgeport. No town was ever more transformed than was this city by one earthly event. On the public and private buildings were hung the habiliments of woe; flags were at half mast, and, in the store windows were to be seen ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... Gabriel wondered, his thoughts seeming to hum and roar in his head, in harmony with the shuddering diapason of the muffler-deadened exhaust. "No way of telling, now. Each man for himself—and each ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... press the wick together, and then lie down on the other side, and draw his nightcap down again; but then a doubt would come upon him, if every coal in the little fire-pan below had been properly deadened and put out—a tiny spark might have been left burning, and might set fire to something and cause damage. And therefore he rose from his bed, and crept down the ladder, for it could scarcely be called ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... borne on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death. He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot to praise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... upon his feet, a veil before his eyes, his sense of hearing deadened, he made such a vigorous rally that, supporting himself on his hands, he saw his enemy standing calmly over him, and heard him speak. "You call me murderer," said Obenreizer, with a grim laugh. "The name matters very little. ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... recovered sufficiently from the shock of surprise to make some show of fighting back. Confused sounds of scuffling and hard breathing became audible, with a thump or two deadened by the rug; but more than that, nothing—never a word from either combatant. There was something uncanny in ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... lay down in the dark. The partition between his room and Rose's might as well have been paper for all the sound it deadened. He could have escaped that, but he wanted to be near her.... And he listened to Rose's moans in the darkness. Lane shuddered there, helpless, suffering, realizing. Then the foreboding silence became more dreadful than any sound.... ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... a vision of the blow that awaited the bishop's pride. He even wondered whether the disclosure would kill him, but he made no comment. In his own heart a sense of anger deadened for the time being his sense of loss. Since his discovery of the fact that she was a married woman, her treatment of him appeared so much more heartless that he felt he ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... exquisite sounds which they unintentionally delivered. Animals there were, too, now unknown and forgotten; but I must not forget the fellow who beat the kettledrums, mounted on an enormous mammoth, and the din of whose reverberating blows would have deadened the thunder ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... feelings, he found his feelings stand very much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to the pleasurable, and, looking for his happiness elsewhere, he wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened. And, in truth, the English character, and English social circumstances, make it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the sympathies, that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an Englishman's scheme of life. In most other ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... set," ordered his friend to send him a "fluted pot," i.e., a helmet ridged and furrowed on the surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the flutes and fillets of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... essence of the soil, the mother of nature, may be extracted by abuse, either from omission or commission, until neither the light of the sun, nor the moisture of the heavens will wake the flush of life, so may the spiritual essence be deadened when the soil of the soul is filled with the aged and multiplying weeds of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... gulch. This was so plainly evident, so easily and so quickly to be seen, for the smooth face of the wall of a canyon offers few opportunities of concealment, that the gloom of bitter disappointment deadened the spirits of all; and, consequently, it was a very downhearted and discouraged company of men that now started to make ready for the night under the overhanging ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... gits to Texas we gits married, but all they was to our weddin' am we jus' 'grees to live together as man and wife. I settled on some land and we cut some trees and split them open and stood them on end with the tops together for our house. Then we deadened some trees and the land was ready to farm. There was some wild cattle and hawgs and that's the way we got our start, caught some ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... changed in the short time since Cecily had seen her. Ceaseless pain had worn away the last traces of her girlish beauty; the drawn features, the deadened eyes, offered hope that an end must come before long. She gave a look of recognition as the visitor approached her, but did ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... began that other wonderful process called reconciliation, whereby the wish gradually overcomes scruples through the cunning mean of falsifying their aspects. Whereunto, again, the new mistress contributed in the adroit way of all such wretches—instilling into his ear the moral poison which deadened the apperception of these scruples at the same time that it brought out the advantages of disregarding them. The result of all which was, that Jenny's husband, of whom she had made a slave, for his own good and benefit, as she thought, and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various |
