"Dumb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The dumb cry of his remorse, his despair, must have struck back to where she still stood, her hands on her bosom, staring at him ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... was sitting beside him, slowly drawing her fingers through his thick masses of snow-white hair in the way he liked best, when he looked suddenly right into her eyes with his own strangely similar ones, deep, earnest eyes, full now of a sort of dumb yearning. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Any terminal with an addressable cursor; the opposite of a {glass tty}. Today, a terminal with merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features mentioned in sense 1, is called a {dumb terminal}. ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... last of all ZOON follows. Exeunt all the Princes. Sounds as of rough protest heard from the workers off. The grim brown heads of two or three peer round the door by which the Princes entered. Many come on, dumb, puzzled, turning their brown heads, searching. At last they cluster ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... is a touching simplicity in this union of the artist and his labours, made in these instances all the more impressive by its utter want of pretension. There is no affectation—no studied artistic or classical portraying; we have simply the man and his work before us, appealing by their dumb native eloquence to that homage and love, which are their due by their ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... possible to find more detestable Gojim than these impure and dumb children of Talvus—these Christian swine?" [Footnote: Children of Edom, children of harlots, swine, dogs, abominations, worshippers of the crucified, idolaters, are titles of honour freely given to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... what had befallen her parents, she was struck dumb with grief, but she had been taught that no misfortune was ever mended by tears, so she soon dried her eyes, and began to think what was best to do, and to whom she could turn for help. She ran quickly ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... the conviction that species have been created successively, at distinct intervals."[40] Revelations of God's special interpositions in the affairs of this world are thus written by his own finger in the fossils and coal, and engraved on the everlasting granite of the earth's foundation stones. Dumb beasts and dead reptiles start forward to give their irrefutable testimony to the repeated supernatural acts of their Creator in this world which he had made. Every distinct species of plants and animals is proof of a distinct supernatural ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... declines." It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind of dumb-show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others. I am for this synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... am rude in my discourse, and little suited to this illustrious company. But, Signore, God hath given to the fisherman the same feelings, and the same love for his offspring, as he has given to a prince. Did I place dependence only on the aid of my poor learning, I should now be dumb, but there is a strength within that gives me courage to speak to the first and noblest in Venice in behalf ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... year to year his conviction of the futility of all earthly things grew to a profounder certainty. He had knocked at the iron gate of humanity with his hammer and his chisel; they had broken into fragments and sorrow made him dumb. There is a stage in the life of every genius when he comes to this gate, when he has to show his credentials and reveal the inmost kernel of his being. Dante attempted to grasp the transcendental in one gigantic vision, Goethe ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... held out his hand. With over-acted reluctance, Lemuel unbuttoned his coat. The distant dog barked again as he gave the letter back. "Please excuse my dear old dog," he said with maudlin tenderness; "the poor dumb animal seems to know that I'm taking his side in the controversy. Bow-wow means, in his language, Fie upon the cruel hands that bore holes in our head and use saws on our backs. Ah, Nathan, if you have got any dogs in that horrid place of yours, pat them and give ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... Jim Langly, let him hev it," and then she dropped back gray and still. Jim Langly had seen that gray stillness before, and he stood looking upon it now in dumb terror. His wife had been ailing a long time, it was true, yet no one had thought of death. But the grim visitor was there in all his quiet majesty. The weary spirit, which had for so many years longed for flight into new ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... healthy state, and their lives prolonged to the profit of their owners and the advancement of that cause—one of the evidences of the progress of our age in true enlightenment—which has for its beneficent object the prevention of cruelty to the dumb and ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... Indian courier to report each night, I hunted up an old habitant guide, named Paul Larocque, who had often helped me to thread the woods of Quebec after big game. Now Paul was habitually as silent as a dumb animal, and sportsmen had nicknamed him The Mute; but what he lacked in speech he made up like other wild creatures in a wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. Indeed, it was commonly believed among trappers that Paul possessed some nameless sense by which he could ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... sages and philosophers; yet were they clearly proved in the present instance to betoken a most abject and brutified nature, totally beneath the human character. But the benevolent fathers, who had undertaken to turn these unhappy savages into dumb beasts by dint of argument, advanced still stronger proofs; for as certain divines of the sixteenth century, and among the rest Lullus, affirm, the Americans go naked, and have no beards! "They have nothing," says Lullus, "of the reasonable ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Moliere's Tartuffe, and what audience would bear its mere stage-business? Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons Othello's mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film? Or between Shakespeare's Lear and any one else's Lear? No, it seems to me that all the interest lies in the new opening for the mass ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... chasten'd down, enough; And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought; And of the happiest moments which were wrought Within the web of my existence, some From thee, fair Venice! have their colours caught: There are some feelings Time can not benumb, Nor Torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... these natural outdoor sports come the artificial games; baseball, football, hare and hounds, lawn tennis, croquet, and hockey. When neither natural nor artificial sports can be had, then the dumb-bells, the Indian clubs, and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... expression, "quit," and the only means I could use to get a "move on," was to shoot the tips of his ears off with my revolver. I will say further that this is the only instance in my life when I was cruel to a dumb brute, but I justified myself then and now ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... than saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path. What was it? The spur of a hill? Or was it a house! Yes. It was a house right close, as though it had risen from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid; from some dark recess of the night. It towered loftily. He had come up under its lee; another three steps and he could have touched the wall with his hand. It was no doubt a posada and some other traveller was trying for admittance. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... appeal, Brenton was dumb. What was the use, especially to a man like Professor Opdyke? It was all very well to talk about Reed's being safe in his Maker's hands, when common sense and science alike were insisting upon it that it was in all probability the hands of the surgeon ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... knew for what, since we had given up the hermit, when a single bird note arrested me. Then, as his first rich clause fell upon the air, I turned to my companion, who was a few steps behind me. She stood motionless, both hands raised, but dumb. ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... Cope sat dumb. And next morning he hurried away before breakfast. You know what kind of a morning it was. Anything very pressing at the University on a ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... his life, was sailing away on his ship—was it not his ship? was not its cargo his hopes and dreams and plans?—was sailing away with another man at the helm! And he could do nothing—must sit dumb upon ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... as quoted by Hutchinson. What was the real cause or motive of this discrepancy among the witnesses does not appear. The facts, that at first they went into fits in beholding him, were all struck dumb for a while, and Ann Putnam saw him on the beam, were likely to have an unfavorable effect upon the minds of the people, and threatened to explode the delusion. But Ann, with a quickness of wit that never ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Marcel stood dumb with amazement. His eyes were alight with a laugh he strove to restrain, but they were alight with something else, too. An-ina watched him. And her laugh came again as ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... deprived, stood out boldly for better terms. Hugh Brady, the queen's Bishop of Meath, then proceeded to attack him. According to him everybody in Dublin from the archbishop to the petty canons were "dumb dogs," "living enemies to the truth," "neither teaching nor feeding any save themselves," and "disguised dissemblers."[44] As this did not produce any effect, he wrote once more, demanding that the authorities should "call home the old unprofitable ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... confessing under the cross, in the name of the disinterested spectators, 'Truly, this was the Son of God;' and by Judas himself, the immediate witness of his whole public and private life, exclaiming in despair: 'I sinned in betraying innocent blood.' Even dumb nature responded in mysterious sympathy, and the beclouded heavens above and the shaking earth beneath united in paying their unconscious tribute to the divine purity of their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... he only advanced, in silence and dumb heroics. I now ventured to look more steadily at the face, and then to exclaim-" "Is it ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... of all, the thing you had under your coat was a saw. I saw you hide something under the woodpile here, but I'm so dumb that I didn't think much of it at the time. Now, the log over the gully was a ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... Ish only grunted in retort, his head nodding drowsily. The tremulous tracery the wood-fire cast upon his face gave it an expression of dumb intensity which adumbrated all the pathos and the patience ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... more toleration in Pagan Rome, aye, even when Nero was emperor, than it has in Papal Rome under Pio Nono. When Christianity entered Rome in the person of the Apostle Paul, did the tyrant of the Palatine strike her dumb? By no means. For the space of two years, her still small voice ceased not to be heard at the foot of the Capitol. "And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house [in Rome], and received all that came in unto him; preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... with the lesser beauty, the lesser harmony, instead of the greater, be sure that it is a very rudimentary kind of instinct; and that you are no more thoroughly aesthetic than if you could make your sense of right and wrong be blind and dumb at your convenience, you could be ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... death, in absolute loneliness— such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no motion—not the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent from far-off field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man, that he is conscious only of that ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Getting up in the middle of the night and stomping around like cattle. You'd better build a shed in the back yard and sleep there if you're so dumb you can't tell ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... drew his sword on the little black hound, But it would not pierce its skin, He tried to pray, but his lips were dumb Because ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson
... War began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. It was the last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become benumbed ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... frightened beasts of a caravan On Sahara's sands when the simoon blows. Sharp were the twangs of the hunters' bows, And swift and humming the arrows sped, Till ten huge bulls on the bloody snows Lay pierced with arrows and dumb and dead. But the chief with the flankers had gained the rear, And flew on the trail of the flying herd. The shouts of the riders rang loud and clear, As their foaming steeds to the chase they spurred. And now like ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... to these discontented queries were forthcoming. Durend could have spoken, but would not. Dale might have spoken; for though he knew not the plans of his chief, his position at the rudder enabled him to conjecture a great deal. But he, too, was dumb. So it was that the Benson crew could answer the questions of their distressed friends only by referring them with disparaging shrugs of the shoulders ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... think me often alone, and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence, though ever so abruptly, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... a child, for the years which had elapsed had transformed her into a woman; but she had retained her old characteristics of shyness, simplicity, and a worshipful love of Raphael. She had followed him to Rome, so he told me, like some faithful, dumb animal which could not live away from its master, and moved by her great affection he had given her lodging and employment as his model. There lacked not malicious tongues who called her his mistress; but so modest yet unabashed was her demeanour that I can well believe that she deserved to the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... keep close together," began Joshua, but forbore to chide, as he saw the dumb agony in the eyes of the ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... a fierce struggle to command her temper. Both she and Fountain were dumb for a minute; then ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... season, in Cyprus rain was most unwonted, surely a sign of Heaven's displeasure! Still they waited in the darkness of the night, with shivering hearts, with the wind growling like angry fiends out beyond the harbor and down from the environing hills—upheld to this costly tribute of devotion by the dumb, dog-like loyalty which their beautiful young Queen had roused within them, by a smile on her wedding-day and the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... so eccentric that he will deny being a doctor, but they must beat him well. So they find the faggot-maker, whom they beat soundly, till he consents to follow them. He is introduced to Lucinde, who pretends to be dumb, but, being a shrewd man, he soon finds out that the dumbness is only a pretence, and takes with him L['e]andre as an apothecary. The two lovers understand each other, and Lucinde is rapidly cured with "pills matrimoniac."—Moli['e]re, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union? Indeed, is it worth while? We are all incompris, only more or less concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lapdogs. Sometimes we catch an eye—this is our opportunity in the ages—and we wag our tail with a poor smile. "Is that all?" All? If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plucks an anemone, and places it on an altar; he also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is; but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian Church, he may be overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous rites. In a service ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Island," the cabbie said, "or even farther away, you are deaf, dumb and blind. Everybody in New York knows what is going on by this time. I admit that it is not in the newspapers, but the newspapers do not tell the truth since, as I remember it, the City Council election of 1924, and ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... The king, struck dumb with amazement, looked inquiringly at his chamberlain, then recovering his presence of mind he shook hands ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... risen in his heart at this sudden failure of nerve never found expression. There was something in the young fellow's face that spoke of more than a qualm of nervousness. It was a pitiful terror that met Trevannion's eyes—the pleading terror of a dumb, helpless animal before ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the south of England, seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of savage land; and when a conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little civilized creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... him at once and not even any other ragamuffin lifted his voice. The audience were startled mute. They were quite ready to applaud the girl's daring, but the shocking impropriety of her breach of decorum struck them dumb. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... than he became a laughingstock to all who heard him. The Goddess, to console him, said, "But you far excel in beauty and in size. The splendor of the emerald shines in your neck and you unfold a tail gorgeous with painted plumage." "But for what purpose have I," said the bird, "this dumb beauty so long as I am surpassed in song?" "The lot of each," replied Juno, "has been assigned by the will of the Fates—to thee, beauty; to the eagle, strength; to the nightingale, song; to the raven, favorable, and to the crow, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... We are in Indiana, remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,—a red, flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it, he could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the beauty of the scene to act on him. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... there were twenty or thirty people, a sort of irregular investment of people, all bombarding me with dumb interrogation, with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion of their ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... at the door of his old quarters, and a boy standing between him and it, with marvellous courage in mortal danger. He understood at once that Nimrod had broken loose and come back. But when he came near enough to recognize Clare, astonishment, and something more sacred than astonishment, held him dumb. Ever since the unjust blow that sent the boy from him, his heart had been aware of a little hollow of remorse in it. Now all his former relations with him while his adoptive father yet lived, came back upon him. He remembered him dressed like the little gentleman he always ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... of the Manchesters repulsed 200 Boers. The gunners have momentarily thrown over their first commandment and cheerfully split up batteries. They also lie beneath the schanzes and let the enemy bombard the dumb guns if he will—till the moment comes to fire; that moment you need never be afraid that the R.A. will be anywhere ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... suspect be false, forgive me, God, For judgment only doth belong to thee. Fain would I go to chafe his paly lips With twenty thousand kisses, and to drain Upon his face an ocean of salt tears To tell my love unto his dumb deaf trunk, And with my fingers feel his hand unfeeling; But all in vain are these mean obsequies; And to survey his dead and earthy image, What were it but ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... his art of juggling, when he says that by his embassy he wrested Byzantium from the hands of Philip, and that his eloquence led the Acarnanians to revolt, and struck dumb the Thebans. He thinks, forsooth, that you have fallen to such a degree of weakness that he can persuade you that you have been entertaining Persuasion herself in your city, and not a vile slanderer. And when at the conclusion ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and intimated, in dumb show, that I must leave the caravanserai at once, as he was shutting up for the night. I bought a pound or so of the sweetmeat to pacify him, and, if possible, glean some information about the fair one, but my advances were of ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... is aught happened since I saw you last? Methinks a sadness dwells upon your brow, like that I saw before my last long absence. You do not speak: My friend dumb too? Nay then, I fear some more than ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... that stuff, and you ought to know better than to ask me. I got back all right with the exception of the dumb ague, which took me just as I got ready to leave Fort Gibson. Have ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... started out to look for Indians (unless his services were required in camp), was always in the lead, and this being his first Indian, took his scalp, and sent it to the writer, with written instructions how to preserve it. To this end we handed over both to a deaf and dumb printer in the office, who boasted somewhat of his chemical knowledge, who spent considerable time for a number of days in following the Doctor's instructions. After the killing of this Indian, some of the scouts ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... activity, and we may truly say genius, with which he has laboured to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. But for an account of Dr Howe's exertions to extend the blessings of education to the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, we must refer to Dickens' American Notes. The other still watches the slow progress of the Greeks towards that free and independent condition of which these friends of their cause once fancied they beheld the approaching dawn. We may, therefore, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... That from Oechalia's highland leddest then This bride that followed swiftly in thy train, How fatally overshadowing was thy fear! But these wild sorrows all too clearly come From Love's dread minister[4], disguised and dumb. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the Mexican woman, and order warm water, towels, dressings, and adhesive plaster. It seemed to him more than a fancy that there was healing in the cool, soft fingers which washed his face and adjusted the bandages. His eyes, usually so hard, held now the dumb hunger one sees in those of a faithful dog. They searched hers for something which he knew he would never find ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... Indians, for goodness only knows how long, that we'd better provide enough food to keep from starving. I love the fawn as well as you do, and Mr. Glenn loves it because you gave it to him; but its natural to prefer our own lives to the lives of dumb animals." ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A ...
— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... have perished in the Jackson Hole country, from starvation and exposure. The ranchmen of that region have had terrible times,—in witnessing the sufferings of thousands of elk tamed by hunger, and begging in piteous dumb show for the small and all-too-few haystacks ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... Dumb with terror, Fernando had watched the whole proceeding. He could only hold on to a sail and, by the sheer strength of his hands and arms, save himself from being carried overboard, as sea after sea swept over them. He strained his eyes ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can by repeated efforts render myself finally insensible; to which add this other difference, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I became unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and, as it were, drowned in the inundation of the appetites, passions, and imaginations to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sit down in these sober, plug-away days—when we are kind to the poor dumb policemen and don't dare wear straw hats after the first of September—and think about the good old college times, I wonder how we ever had the nerve to imitate insanity the way we did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... poor, worn little stocking, arranged with much care so that Santa Claus should have as little trouble in filling it as possible. The edge of a hole in the knee had been drawn together and tied with a string to prevent anything falling out. The boys looked on in amazed silence. Even Savoy was dumb. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... I dare say, that these dear little children are deaf and dumb; that is, they can neither hear nor speak. They cannot go to school and live at home, and see papa and mamma night and morning, as you can; for there are no schools for them near their homes. They have to go a long way from home, and stay in school many long weeks without ...
— The Nursery, No. 165. September, 1880, Vol. 28 - A Monthly Magazine For Youngest Readers • Various
... away Without delay, Whilst the gentle time doth stay. Green woods are dumb, And will never tell to any Those dear kisses, and those many Sweet embraces, that are given; Dainty pleasures, that would even Raise in coldest age a fire ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the clanging bells of Time! Soon their notes will all be dumb, And in joy and peace sublime We shall feel the silence come; And our souls their thirst will slake, And our eyes the King will see, When thy glorious ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... a long way from those sentiments to genuine philanthropy, by which we understand the recognition of our fellow-man as our equal, and not merely that chilly benevolence which we entertain towards even dumb animals. Real philanthropy is as inconsistent with exploitation as with cannibalism. For though the new form of the struggle for existence abhors the death of the vanquished, it substitutes for it the oppression ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... it thunders in March The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say; As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch Of the villa gate this warm March day, No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled In the valley beneath where, white and wide Washed by the morning water-gold, Florence lay out on the mountain side River and bridge and street and square Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, Through the live ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... relieved. He had been put in mind of what Doctor Franklin had said long ago, one evening in Albany, of his struggle against the faults and follies of his youth. For a moment Mr. Pinhorn was dumb with astonishment. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... dumb; grant me but this; have nothing made up for her out of the house: you know there is no dressmaker in Barkington can cut like you: and then that will put some limit to our inconsistency." Mrs. Dodd agreed; but she must have ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... rest of the tormented, forced-smiling crowd. We can never be ourselves— our veritable selves—for, if we were, the air would resound with our ceaseless lamentations! It is HORRIBLE to think of all the pent-up sufferings of humanity—all the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed! When I was young,—how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon me—when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I inherited the fatal love ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of air-pressure, condensation and compression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that some gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to solve—it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like demon were flailing him until he answered—and that he could ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... saddle and bridle from his mount. Rapidly as he worked, he had only just removed the bridle when the pony sank to its knees, struggled for a moment to rise, then sank slowly to the ground, where it lay looking up at its master with dumb appealing eyes. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... hopping over on her crutches with her only treasure, a black rabbit, to console her friend. But of all the comfort given, Mother Bunch's share was the greatest and best; for that very first sad day, as Patty wandered about the house disconsolately, puss came hurrying to meet her, and in her dumb way begged her mistress to follow and see the fine surprise prepared for her—four plump kits as white as snow, with four gray tails all wagging in a row, as they laid on their proud mamma's downy breast, while she purred over them, with her yellow ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... had a letter from that sage Privy Councillor and booby of a Baronet,——. This unutterable idiot proposes to me that I shall propose to the Dowager Duchess of ——, and offers his own right honourable intervention to bring so beautiful a business to bear. I am struck dumb with the assurance of his folly—absolutely mute and speechless—and how to prevent him making me further a fool is not easy, for the wretch has left me no time to assure him of the absurdity of what he proposes; and if he should ever hint at such a piece of d——d impertinence, what ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... "It strikes me dumb, too," muttered Jarvis. "I don't know how to tell it; I'm a chemist, not a poet. Paradise is as good a word as I can think of, and that's not at all right. It was Paradise ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... arrives within gun-shot distance of the yucca-tree she checks the mustang to a slower pace—to a walk in short. In the spectacle of death, in the throes and struggles of an expiring creature, even though it be but a dumb brute, there is something that never fails to excite commiseration, mingled with a feeling of awe. This last has come over the young girl, as she draws near the spot where the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... convent, they entered the courtyard in exact order, one behind the other, and there awaited the coming of the abbess. All night they stood thus without making a sound, as if struck dumb by their guilty consciences. But when morning came, they uttered the most pitiful cries as though asking pardon ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... his mate, The caged birds bewail Freedom gone; Shall not man mourn over fate? Dumb ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... manufacture crippled children, and pale, peaky little Cockneys whose nerves are gone; (and, to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) Blind and deaf and dumb industrialism is the accursed thing in this ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... chief eunuch, who had come to take them to the harem, Brigit and Monny might almost as well have been deaf and dumb. Brigit knew practically nothing of Arabic; and Monny, though she had been vaguely studying since her arrival, had been too passionately occupied with other things to give much time or attention to the language of Egypt's invaders. Her ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... if she's milked them cows," he muttered to himself. He gave a sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his sake, but for the sake of the poor, patient, dumb brutes. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... it not be a very great condescension on his part? Would it not be familiar? And would he not thereby lose his importance?" And in consequence of such reflections, he always remained in the same dumb state, uttering from time to time a few monosyllabic sounds, and thereby earning the name of the most ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... children thus, happiness stills my griefs—just as those griefs are dumb, and even disappear, when I see them failing. My friend," she said, her eyes shining with maternal pleasure, "if other affections fail us, the feelings rewarded here, the duties done and crowned with success, are compensation enough for defeat ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... beneficent Being, but must be a cruel, voracious and devouring Devil, whose End was not the Good, but the Destruction of his Creatures: But to such a Height was the blind demented World arriv'd to at that Time, that in these sordid and corrupt Ways, they went on worshiping dumb Idols, and offering human Sacrifices to them, and in a Word, committing all the most horrid and absurd Abominations that they were capable of, or that the Devil could prompt them to, till Heaven was again put, as it were, to the Necessity of bringing about a ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... thing, professor. You've got to go dumb on this job, for which I double the twenty.' He looked puzzled, but when he finally understood me, he said 'Surely' again, and I ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... Hood after a moment of dumb wonderment; and he and all his men bent reverently upon their knees, as ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... stopped a few days to take breath, and then caught the cold that wore him out. Over there, in that drawer, are the notes, a few scraps of paper. The rest of it—the experience of a strong life, a visioning life, are with the mind that is dumb. Sometimes when I sit here I hear it all played, an orchestra ... new harmonies, pure emotion.... The wonder and then the pain of it are ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... eyes opened very wide and fixed themselves enquiringly upon Piers' face. There was something in them, a species of dumb appeal, that went straight to his heart. He moved impulsively, and knelt ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the Prevention of Cruelty to Dumb Animals. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Little Children; and a certain influential gentleman, who does some things well and other things very badly, ought to attend to it. The name of this gentleman is ...
— The Little Violinist • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... had met the man of the polished boots on that occasion. His modest love could not show in public by any outward signs, except the eyes (with which the poor fellow ogled and gazed violently to be sure), but it was dumb in the presence of third parties; and so much the better, for of all the talk which takes place in this world, that of love-makers is surely, to the uninitiated, the most silly. It is the vocabulary without the key; it is the lamp without ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... silence which reigns in the sea beneath us, notwithstanding its agitation, than with any other phenomenon presenting itself. The waters give up no voice to the heavens. The immense flaming ocean writhes and is tortured uncomplainingly. The mountainous surges suggest the idea of innumerable dumb gigantic fiends struggling in impotent agony. In a night such as is this to me, a man lives—lives a whole century of ordinary life—nor would I forego this rapturous delight for that of a whole ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... when a man contains an idea, when he is the incarnation of a fact—when he is a symbolical man, at the same time that he is a man of flesh and blood—is not the responsibility still more oppressive? Thence the care-laden docility and the dumb anxiety of Gwynplaine; thence his obedience when summoned to take his seat. A pensive man is often a passive man. He had heard what he fancied was the command of duty itself. Was not that entrance into a place where oppression could be discussed and resisted the realization of one of his deepest ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a recent number of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN I notice an ingenious method of teaching deaf and dumb persons to converse in the dark, which is also applicable to blind mutes, and it brings to my recollection a method which was in use among the "telegraph boys" some years ago when I was one of them. Sometimes when we were visiting and asked to communicate to a "brother chip," ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... entirely in the hands of his unscrupulous son. The old man was kept quiet by the return of Alice Perrers to court. She had sworn on the rood never to see the king again, but the prelates were "like dumb dogs unable to bark" against her; and no effort was made to prosecute her for perjury. Latimer and Lyons returned from their luxurious imprisonment in the Tower to their places at court. The duke roundly declared that the late parliament ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... reverenced and obeyed as "God's most intimate presence in the soul, and His most perfect image in the world." He had a passionate hatred of injustice, and the very thought of cruelty to human beings or to dumb animals made him aflame with anger. A master or a games captain who allowed himself to be influenced by favouritism he despised. Naturally quick-tempered and impatient, he tried hard to curb these propensities, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him, like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-consciousness, that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and women,—and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it inspired, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... live at home"—again virtuously—"but I've got some heart if I am dumb. My folks couldn't get along without what I bring home every week. A lot of the girls have flats. But that ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... women, whether serious or comic, are easily within her grasp. Betsy Trotwood, embodied by her, becomes a living reality; while on the other hand she suffused with a sinister horror her stealthy, gliding, uncanny personation of the dumb, half-insane Hester Dethridge. That was the first great success that Mrs. Gilbert gained, under Augustin Daly's management. She has been associated with Daly's company since his opening night as a manager, August 16, 1869, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... O damsel! By Allah, this is a fair hour!" Whereupon she sprang up and kissed his hand, saying, 'O my lord, in very sooth the hands stand still before thy presence and the tongues at thy sight, and the eloquent when confronting thee wax dumb; but thou art the looser of the veil."[FN141] Then she clung to him and cried, "Stand;" so he stood and said to her, "Who art thou and what is thy need?" She raised a corner of the veil, and behold she was a damsel as she were the full moon rising or the levee glancing, with two ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... these weep? What has happened when one dies? Where has the spark of life gone? Did it fall to these sodden pavements, for ever done, or did it go on up, to meet the kiss of the rising sun? And the sparrows, which fall to the ground, answered not. The sun rose calm and passionless, but dumb. The sky folded in, large but inscrutable. None the less arose the voice of lamentation and ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... time I passed the empty store, I stepped in to explain, but the artist had a black eye, and his own interest was so engrossed in Chinese lacquer-work and a stormy divorce case he had coming on shortly, that I was struck dumb. What was a short story in comparison with such issues? And I knew he had no more opinion of me as an author than I had of him ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... and penal institutions: a home for Confederate veterans, at Mountain Creek; an institution for the deaf, an academy for the blind, and a school for the negro deaf, dumb and blind, all at Talladega; a hospital for the insane, opened in 1860, at Tuscaloosa; a penitentiary, established in 1839, at Wetumpka; and a state industrial school for white boys, at East Lake (Birmingham); and a state industrial school ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... propriety, the semblance of virtue, the hypocritical ways of a married woman who never allows anything to be seen but the vulgar needs of the household, and affects to refuse every kind of extravagance, leads to silent ruin, dumb disaster, which is all the more startling because, though condoned, it remains unaccounted for. It is the ignoble bill of daily expenses and not gay dissipation that devours the largest fortune. The father of a family ruins himself ingloriously, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... made it noble, and, from another point of view, quite senseless. For their dying had proved nothing. Men who could have been much better spared than they, were still alive in the trenches, and for no reason but through mere dumb chance. There was no selection of the unfittest; it seemed to be ruled by unreasoning luck. A certain number of shells and bullets passed through a certain area of space, and men of different bulks blocked that ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... importance in a community of carelessly dressed men. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of good families, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believed to be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale, the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family. Between these and the white people, among whom the boys knew of no distinctions, they were aware that there was an impassable gulf; and it would not be easy to give a notion ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... the house paced the floor with a slow, regular step, his hands behind him; his countenance placidly ruminative, his thoughts apparently engaged with anything rather than the pain upon the corner-sofa, whose leave-taking he had mercilessly marred. Frederic dumb and furious; Mabel equally dumb and amazed to alarm, knowing as she did that her brother's actions were never purposeless, sat still, their hands clasped stealthily amid the folds of Mabel's dress; their eyes saying the dear and passionate things ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... came to Mochuda a secular who brought with him his deaf and dumb son whom he besought the saint to heal. Mochuda prayed to God for him and said, "My son, hear and speak." The boy answered immediately and said, "Man of God, I give myself and my inheritance to you for ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... bullocks to the team, and driving them in silence to the field, or shepherds interchanging some inevitable whispers while they watched their flocks; or wheelwrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades like the inmates of some dumb asylum, and all pausing from their labours as the convent bell, sounding the hours of prime, nones, or vespers, summoned them to join in spirit where they could not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic buildings might be seen the belt of cultivated land continually ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... holding to a veriest trifle with such a deathless cramp of the will, might naturally be regarded as a notable exception to a general rule; but his brethren who sit on church steps during services, who are dumb to those whom they should love, and will not enter familiar doors because of quarrels over matters of apparently no moment, are legion. Pembroke is intended to portray a typical New England village of some sixty years ago, as many of the characters flourished at that time, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... word. It was the first time in his life that any one had dared to anger him. Ah, if any one else had dared to do such a thing, what a scene there would have been! The heydukes, the coachmen, stood before him trembling. Even Mr. Peter Bus himself was speechless as he looked upon that dumb listening countenance staring fixedly at him with bloodshot eyes. With great difficulty the heydukes hoisted him into his carriage. The two little girls took their places by him, one on each side. Then he beckoned the innkeeper to approach, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... an odd silence. All the customers in the room, drinking and eating as many of them were, seemed to be under a dumb spell. Tom o' the Gleam's presence was at all times more or less of a terror to the timorous, and that he, who as a rule avoided strangers, should on his own initiative enter into conversation with the two motorists, was of itself a circumstance that awakened considerable wonder and interest. David ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... knowing nothing of such practices, but in heart he had been a Nazarite from his youth up,—serving God in his harsh, unloving way; loving God, as he thought; certainly loving nothing else, if it were not the dumb creatures, to whom he was always kind and just. And now—what had happened to him? He asked himself the question sternly, sitting there before the cheerful blaze, yet neither seeing nor feeling it. The answer seemed to ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... ground, in the heart of a mountain, near the river San Juan. Their food was meat, which they had in abundance, for all kinds of game were closed up with them in their cave; but their light was dim, and only endured for a few hours each day. There were, happily, two dumb ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly |
