"Immobility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should say, Sonetchka had returned to the room with her work, and seated herself in a far corner—a corner whence, as I was nevertheless sensible, she could observe me. Madame must have felt some surprise as she gazed at my crimson face and noted my complete immobility, but I decided that it was better to continue sitting in that absurd position than to risk something unpleasant by getting up and walking. Thus I sat on and on, in the hope that some unforeseen chance would deliver me from my predicament. That unforeseen chance at length presented itself in ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... agitated by some impulsion given it from a distance. Often they believed this beat and plash to be the boat they lay in wait for, running in ashore; and again and again they would have started up, but for the immobility with which the informer, well used to the river, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... later the spot where in a rude cavern, now sheeted with marble and jasper, "from all the youth of Sicily, Saint Rosalie retired to God." The handicraftsmen of Palermo still occupy almost exclusively the streets named after their trades,—an indication of immobility rarely to be met with nowadays, though Rome displays it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... was silent. Silent, but not deserted. There were men below, armed, helmed. He recognized the uniform of the Wrecker warriors, saw one or two who wore the gray of the Foanna servants. They stood in lines, unmoving, without speech among themselves, men who might have been frozen into immobility and arranged so for some game in which they were ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... pulled the chauffeur out of his seat by the scruff of his neck. The sight of the Mauser had cut short all remonstrance, and under its compulsion the little man had pulled open the bonnet and extracted the sparking plugs. Having thus secured the immobility of his capture, the masked man walked forward, lantern in hand, to the side of the car. He had laid aside the gruff sternness with which he had treated Mr. Ronald Barker, and his voice and manner were gentle, though determined. He even raised ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she felt his arm around her neck. She couldn't move her body. She could only turn her head from his hot breath. For a moment he held her, and yet another moment; and then, terrified at what this strange immobility might mean, she raised her eyes and saw he was not looking at her. Though he held her fast he was not conscious of her. Straight over her head he looked, through the window and down, into the garden. Her eyes followed. It lay beneath, the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... strange adversary with visible anxiety. His superhuman calm had an effect upon him. In vain, appealing to his reason, did he tell himself that in so unequal a combat all the advantages were on his side. The immobility of the blind man froze him. He had settled on the place where he would strike his victim. He had fixed upon it! What, then, hindered him from putting an ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... a moment or two with eyes of glowering resentment; but in the end he put forth a hand not wholly steady and took the sheet held out to him. Monck stood beside him in utter immobility, gazing out over the valley with a changeless vigilance that ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... murmured Von Stein. He lifted a hand for silence: then his fingers leaped among the gadgets on the table. After that came a brief period, measured by seconds, of immobility. Then the table sank from view, the copper bowl lifted, and Dr. von Stein went ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... to know his features. Robert placed the salver upon the table, and either because he was naturally a silent man, or because the presence of the countess struck him dumb, or because he had no message to deliver that morning, retired without speaking. Bertha looked anxiously at her aunt; the immobility of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the most volatile thing in the world. It can laugh and sigh and groan and weep, as well as shout and storm, with the ease of an infant, and then immediately regain its immobility and fixed attention. With Ollie's simple statement a sound rose from it which was a denunciation and a curse upon the ashes of old Isom Chase. It was as if a sympathetic old lady had shaken ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of those fearful pictures of devastation presented to our imaginations by the historical narratives of the past, but is rather due to the sudden revelation of the delusive nature of the inherent faith by which we had clung to a belief in the immobility of the solid parts of the earth. We are accustomed from early childhood to draw a contrast between the mobility of water and the immobility of the soil on which we tread; and this feeling is confirmed ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the other; thus if a hungry man, as Plato says (Cf. De Coelo ii, 13), be confronted on either side with two portions of food equally appetizing and at an equal distance, he is not moved towards one more than to the other; and he finds the reason of this in the immobility of the earth in the middle of the world. Now, if that which is equally (eligible) with something else cannot be chosen, much less can that be chosen which appears as less (eligible). Therefore if two or more things ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... in equally deplorable mood. Both seemed more sensible to "Whoa" than to "Hadaap." Podagrous beasts, yet not stiffened to immobility. Gayer steeds would have sundered the shackling drag. These would never, by any gamesome caracoling, endanger the coherency of pole with body, of axle with wheel. From end to end the equipage was congruous. Every part of the machine was its weakest part, and that fact gave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... immobility, the desert around the lonely little station of Manzanita smouldered and slumbered. Nothing was visibly changed from five years before, when Banneker left, except that another agent, a disillusioned-appearing ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the expansion of his chest, he leaned back again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly as a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... beside him, still and silent figures in the dusk, apparently growing from the earth like the bushes about them, and fixed as they were. The suggestion to go on that had risen to his lips never passed them and he settled into the same immobility. ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... You have to choose between the intact body which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... flung herself down upon the red sofa, and buried her head in the rags which covered the bosom of her mother, and wept there. The old woman received her daughter without issuing from her state of immobility, or displaying any emotion. The mother possessed in the highest degree that gravity of savage races, the impassiveness of a statue upon which all remarks are lost. Did she or did she not love her daughter? Beneath that mask every ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... was it? I looked across at Semyonov, who was now seated on Vera's right hand just opposite Boris Grogoff. He was very quiet, very still, looking about him, his square pale beard a kind of symbol of the secret immobility of his soul. I fancied that I detected behind his placidity an almost relieved self-satisfaction, as though things were going very much ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... never attempted to explain); I saw the lantern jaws, the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of the hips; and the movements of these figures as they came and went seemed to me no whit less extraordinary than their sepulchral immobility as ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... steady maintenance of fire; that in view of the ominous spectacle of the swift and confident advance, under torture of the storm of shell-fire and the hail of bullets which they have to endure in immobility, the defenders, previously shaken by the assailants' artillery preparation, become nervous, waver, and finally break when the cheers of the final concentrated rush strike on their ears. That this was scarcely true as regarded French regulars the annals of every ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with the high-bridged, curving noses, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... the car Straker noticed that Furnival's face had a queer, mottled look, and that the muscles of his jaw were set in an immobility of which he could hardly have believed him capable. He was actually trying to look as if he didn't see Miss Tarrant. And Miss Tarrant was looking ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the intangibility of the Statuto. Statutes are made to prevent governments from retrograding, not from advancing. Before us there can be nothing but progress.... If we retain immutable the fundamental law of the state, we desire immobility, and should throw aside all advances which have thus far been made by the constituted authorities. I understand that in the Statuto of Charles Albert nothing is said of revision, and this was prudent. But how should this silence be interpreted? It should be interpreted in the sense that ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... planted there on our side of the street, hugging the wall, with its hood over its eyes, preserved its attitude of obstinate immobility. Newlands' car, hugging the wall on the other side of the street, stood discreetly apart from the discussion. But a Belgian military ambulance car ran up, smaller and more alert than ours. And a Belgian Army Medical Officer strolled up ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... mourning of the house; the various articles were scattered at sixes and sevens in the dirty windows. Behind the linen caps hanging from the rusty iron rods, the face of Therese presented a more olive, a more sallow pallidness, and the immobility of ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... interrupt her. All the time she was speaking he was studying the profile of her face as if fascinated by its strange immobility. For the matter of a full half-hour he sat on the rail, his back against a post, his arms folded across the breast of the thick ulster he wore, staring at her, drinking in every word of the story she told. A look of surprise ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... this a coldness that somehow spoke for itself as the greatest with which he had ever in his life met an act of reparation and that was infinitely confirmed by his sustained immobility. "But of ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... contributed to form. Yet, never did woman exhibit in her person and face, more opposite extremes of beauty. If the one was strikingly characteristic of warmth, the other was no less indicative of coldness. Fair, even to paleness, were her cheek and forehead, which wore an appearance of almost marble immobility, save when, in moments of oft recurring abstraction, a slight but marked contraction of the brow betrayed the existence of a feeling, indefinable indeed by the observer, but certainly unallied to softness. Still was ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... resting on clumps of wood or blocks of stone, a mode of construction which enables them, when tired of or displeased with their locality, to transport them elsewhere. I was told that a street of stone huts, constructed for their use, is almost abandoned, by reason of the immobility of such residences. I consider this locomotive propensity a favourable trait in their character. Behind the barracks we stopped at a hut on the rising ground whereon the barracks ought to have been placed, and assuredly I never saw a more contented ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... by those words, and she hung on them for a little. They distressed her; they caused her to understand the forced immobility of his face as he spoke, and wish that he would give way to his feeling. The phrase "out of one's hands and in another's" referred undoubtedly to Ruth Gardner. She did not trust herself ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... health of her child; for I have been told that Prince Achille Muratz is subject, to this day, to frequent attacks of epilepsy. As is well known, the First Consul went on to the opera, where he was received with tumultuous acclamations, the immobility of his countenance contrasting strongly with the pallor and agitation of Madame Bonaparte's, who had feared not so much for herself as for him. The coachman who had driven the First Consul with such good fortune was named Germain. He had followed ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... he did in a mild, emotionless manner. There was no boyish interest or amusement in it. Just a calm, serious immobility that gave one the impression of a painting by one of ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... persuaded to play various grave parts, Gwendolen having flattered him on his enviable immobility of countenance; and at first a little pained and jealous at her comradeship with Rex, he presently drew encouragement from the thought that this sort of cousinly familiarity excluded any serious passion. Indeed, he occasionally felt that her more formal treatment of himself was such ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... her to have patience till he could show his finished work. Now, with her eye upon the door, her ear alert to catch the coming step, her mind disturbed by contending hopes and fears, she sat waiting with the vigilant immobility of an Indian on the watch. She had not long to look and listen. Manuel entered hastily, locked the door, closed the windows, dropped the curtains, then paused in the middle of the room and broke into a low, triumphant laugh as he eyed his wife with an expression she had ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... when Charles had exhausted his fury, he sat with his features fixed in stern and rigid immobility, like one who broods over some desperate deed, to which he is as yet unable to work up his resolution. And unquestionably it would have needed little more than an insidious hint from any of the counsellors who attended ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Desire, nor Hate, we are said to Contemne: CONTEMPT being nothing els but an immobility, or contumacy of the Heart, in resisting the action of certain things; and proceeding from that the Heart is already moved otherwise, by either more potent objects; or from ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... instance, the presence of demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, obscene, monstrous and revolting, is the result of a corruption ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... undisplaced, notwithstanding the journey of millions of miles which the earth was now acknowledged to make each year around the sun. In the face of the gradual and immense improvement in telescopes, this apparent immobility of the stars was, however, not destined to last. The first ascertained displacement of a star, namely that of 61 Cygni, noted by Bessel in the year 1838, definitely proved to men the truth of the Copernican system. Since then some forty more stars have been found to show similar tiny displacements. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin's commerce—the ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... gentleman of stiffness and English immobility appeared, clothed in extreme evening dress, and established himself, ramrod-like, in a customary spot in the center of the floor. There was a figure on the Persian rug whereon Mr. Gwynn never failed to take position. Once in place, eye as expressionless ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... into a tiny ball. Embracing her knees with her hands, and resting her chin upon them, she stared doggedly at the river with wide-open eyes; on the pale patch of her face they seemed immense, because of the blue marks below them. She never moved, and this immobility and silence—I felt it—gradually produced within me a terror of my neighbour. I wanted to talk to her, but I knew ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... it then life to breathe? Such tranquillity will breed torpor rather than dream. If the immobility of Fate be the theme and burden of my days I dare the more. Let us bare our breasts to the arrows of Fortune, let us invite the shafts of Chance, let us taunt Fate, let us dare our doom, why should we fear? The hands ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... conformity to type, the type being not the 'little flock' of Christ or the Church of the Apostles, but the absolute monarchy above described. It has long been the crux of Catholic apologetics to reconcile the theoretical immobility of dogma with the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Chinese civilization, and he considers it to be an early offshoot from Babylon.[61] He supports his theory on linguistic grounds, and we must anxiously wait to see if it is corroborated by further researches into the earliest records of the archaic Chinese literature. But immobility in art is a Chinese characteristic, and no national cataclysms seem to have disturbed it. The oldest specimens known are very like the most modern. Yet an adept, learned in Chinese art, can detect the signs which ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... fact, due, no doubt, in a great measure to the immobility of the air, is, that sounds are transmitted to incredible distances in the unbroken forest. Many instances of this have fallen under my own observation, and others, yet more striking, have been related to me by credible and competent witnesses familiar with a more primitive condition of the Anglo-American ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... penetration," Blunt remarked to me with that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on Mills' account. "Positively nothing." He turned to Mills again. "After some minutes of immobility—she told me—she arose from her stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition. Allegre was nowhere to be seen by that time. Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of nature, the climate and the scenery, exert an appreciable and an acknowledged influence on the mental characteristics of a people. The sprightliness and vivacity of the Frank, the impetuosity of the Arab, the immobility of the Russ, the rugged sternness of the Scot, the repose and dreaminess of the Hindoo are largely due to the country in which they dwell, the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the landscapes and skies they daily look upon. The nomadic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... been mere talk and threat could now be put into instant action. And so when he had given the King his run, and listened to the royal obstinacy in all its varying phrases of repetition, contradiction, reproach, till it reached its final stage of blank immobility, he formally tendered the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... into outstretched claws. His head sunk between his shoulders. Of the eyes, only red pin-points showed in the twitching face. I stood stone-still, struck into utter immobility. My brain was trying to urge me to fly, fly! This is the Black Death, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... and refreshing, with his direct purposes and solid immobility. You could be of use to Leslie, because he had a single eye; he knew what he wanted, and requested you to obtain it for him. That was simple; he didn't make your task impossible by suddenly deciding that after all he didn't really want what you were getting for him. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... did but show him the voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England: an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into absolute immobility by the conflicting claims of duty. For overhead, high in the blue, was an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... in a low chair with the guitar in her lap and her feet stretched out upon a stool. Her companions, two young men, hardly more than boys, were standing near a table on which stood a bottle of liquor. All had been stricken into instant immobility by the sudden interruption of the ranger. Each stared with open ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... was firing into silence. Something rattled and flopped in a chute at his elbow. He turned, irritably. That Mr. Pierce's attention should have been diverted even for a moment by this was sufficient evidence that he was disconcerted by the immobility of the foe. But his glance quickly reverted and with added weight. Heavily he stared, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... element of our pre-eminence as a nation: it possesses a force corrective and directive, and at once restrains the excess, while it affords a point of resistance, to the current of the popular will. And this immobility, it should never be forgotten, is owing to that very elevation so hated and so envied: wanting which the aristocracy would be subject to the vulgar ambitions, vulgar passions, and sordid desires ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... telegraphic style in their printed programme. They begin by stating that they will sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essential elements of their poetry will be courage, daring, and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified serene immobility, ecstasy, and sleep; they will extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. They declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its frame adorned by great pipes, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... rush in before him, and seize his prey. But the same person advancing to pluck an apple, that hangs within his reach, has no reason to complain, if another, more alert, passes him, and takes possession. What is the reason of this difference, but that immobility, not being natural to the hare, but the effect of industry, forms in that case a strong relation with the hunter, which is wanting in ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... are waiting to receive us. Tall men they are, robed in violet and purple silks shot through with dragon-patterns in gold. Their lofty fantastic head-dresses, their voluminous and beautiful costume, and the solemn immobility of their hierophantic attitudes make them at first sight seem marvellous statues only. Somehow or other there comes suddenly back to me the memory of a strange French print I used to wonder at when a child, representing a group of Assyrian astrologers. Only their eyes move ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... silently turned the key, locking herself in. Then her manner changed; she moved about the room in a half-aimless, half-conscious way, as though some purpose was beginning to take shape in her mind. Her motions had an easy, cat-like grace, in contrast with their immobility a little while before. Gradually her step became quicker, while ripples of feeling began to pass over her face, which was fast losing its pallor. Gleams of light began shooting from her eyes, that were so dull and stony when her husband found her with Edith's letter crushed in her grasp. ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... fire (for having transcended all ignorance), the great Rishi said these words unto his son who resembled a fire wrapped in smoke.[1104] Instructed by what he said, I also, O son, shall again expound to thee that certain knowledge (which dispels ignorance). The properties possessed by earth are immobility, weight, hardness, productiveness, scent, density, capacity to absorb scents of all kinds, cohesion, habitableness (in respect of vegetables and animals), and that attribute of the mind which is called patience of the capacity to bear. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... stirred. My limbs were benumbed by that long immobility, and with the cold which was all the more intense from the rain first and the dew afterwards, both of which had drenched me to ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... sky; whereas the other's irregular features had always seemed to owe their brilliancy, their saucy, insolent charm to the false glamour of the footlights in some cheap theatre. The touch of statuesque immobility formerly noticeable in Claire's face was vivified by anxiety, by doubt, by all the torture of passion; and like those gold ingots which have their full value only when the Mint has placed its stamp upon them, those beautiful features stamped with the effigy of sorrow had acquired since the preceding ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... in movement, for a modification which takes place in the soul can only be manifested in the sensuous world as movement. But this does not prevent features fixed and in repose also from possessing grace. There immobility is, in its origin, movement which, from being frequently repeated, at length becomes habitual, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the wrangling of boys in thin shrill tones. A dog thrust his head into the entrance and blinked wolfishly at them for a space, the slaver dripping from his ivory-white fangs. After a time he growled tentatively, and then, awed by the immobility of the human figures, lowered his head and grovelled away backward. Tantlatch glanced apathetically at ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... held the letter under the red shade of the lamp, the usual immobility of his icy face gave ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Mill's exposition by Mr. Cairnes(259) is, that the word "international" (in default of a better term) should be applied to those conditions either within a country, or between two countries, which, because of the actual immobility of labor and capital from one occupation to another, furnishes a substantial interference with industrial competition. The obstacles to the free movement of labor and capital which produce the conditions called "international" are: 1. "Geographical distance; 2. Difference in political institutions; ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... from these premises before night, I shall feel bound—indeed, I am bound—to—to—to quit the premises myself!" I rather absurdly concluded, knowing not with what possible threat to try to frighten his immobility into compliance. Despairing of all further efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final thought occurred to me—one which had not been wholly ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Hist. de l'Astron. Anc., tom. i. p. 301.] He regarded astronomy as more intimately connected with mathematical science than any other branch of philosophy. But even he did not soar far beyond the philosophers of his day, since he held to the immobility of the earth—the grand error of the ancients. Some few speculators in science, like Heraclitus of Pontus and Hicetas, conceived a motion of the earth itself upon its axis, so as to account for the apparent motion ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... till the train stopped at Columbus for dinner. The old Squire showed the same appetite as at breakfast: he had the effect of falling upon his food like a bird of prey; and as soon as the meal was despatched he went back to his seat in the car, where he lapsed into his former silence and immobility, his lank jaws working with fresh activity upon the wooden toothpick he had brought away from the table. While they waited for a train from the north which was to connect with theirs, Halleck walked up and ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves the respectable part of the nation. They are, as they pretend, the virtuous part of the people, because they are quiet; as if virtue consisted in immobility! There is a canting Scotchman in London, who publishes a paper called the 'Champion' who is everlastingly harping upon the virtues of the 'fireside,' and who inculcates the duty of quiet submission. Might we ask this Champion of the teapot ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... caused by unskillfully applied apparatus, must not be overlooked among the occasional incidents; nor must lockjaw, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Even founder, or laminitis, has been met with as the result of forced and long-continued immobility of the feet in the standing posture, as one of the involvements of unavoidably ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... Florence; Sparta, firmly based upon an ancient constitution, indifferent to culture, and solid at the cost of some rigidity, with Venice. As in Greece the philosophers of Athens, especially Plato and Aristotle, wondered at the immobility of Sparta and idealized her institutions; so did the theorists of Florence, Savonarola, Giannotti, Guicciardini, look with envy at the state machinery which secured repose and liberty for Venice. The parallel between Venice and Sparta becomes still more remarkable ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... The immobility of this figure under the moon's rays was terrible. I felt my tongue freezing, my teeth clinched. I was about to cry out in terror when, by some incomprehensible mysterious attraction, my glance fell below, and I distinguished, confusedly, the old woman crouched at her window in the midst ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... this morning in the ride between Vacz and the capital. And how, since the telegraph lines were closed to the German agent, could this person have been put upon the scent? It hardly seemed possible that this was an agent of Germany. And yet as the miles flew by, the stranger's silence, immobility and unchanging expression got on Renwick's nerves. He was in no mood to do a psychopathic duel with ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... we came to know his stage well—the purple semicircle of hills, the slim trees leaning over houses, the yellow sands, the streaming green of ravines. All that had the crude and blended colouring, the appropriateness almost excessive, the suspicious immobility of a painted scene; and it enclosed so perfectly the accomplished acting of his amazing pretences that the rest of the world seemed shut out forever from the gorgeous spectacle. There could be nothing outside. It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... were of no consequence, But this argument, though perfectly sound with reference to such passages as Joshua x. 12-14, where an event is described as it appeared to those who witnessed it, is not admissible in such a passage as Psalm xcvi. 10, where the supposed immobility of the earth is alleged as a proof of God's sovereignty, and is made the foundation of the duty of proclaiming that sovereignty among the heathen. When the supposed proof was found to be a fallacy, the statement in support of which it was alleged would be more or less shaken. In ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... the wreck around, all was as he had left it. Aldonza, poor child, with her black hair hanging loose like a veil, for she had been startled from her bed, still sat on the ground making her lap a pillow for the white-bearded head, nobler and more venerable than ever. On it lay, in the absolute immobility produced by the paralysing blow, the fine features already in the solemn grandeur of death, and only the movement of the lips under the white flowing beard and of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... previous studies of paralysed victims have made me familiar: the antennae slowly waving, the mandibles opening and closing, the palpae trembling for days, for weeks, even for months. The thighs tremble for a minute or two at most; and the struggle is over. Henceforth there is complete immobility. The significance of this sudden inertia is forced upon me: the Philanthus has stabbed the cervical ganglions. Hence the sudden immobility of all the organs of the head: hence the real, not the apparent death of the bee. The ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... days, the waving of plumes and the clashing of arms, reawoke his combative spirit of old. Or, possibly his brute intelligence penetrated the dwarf's knavish pusillanimity, and, changing his tactics that he might still range on the side of perversity, resolved himself from immobility into a rampant agency of motion. Furiously he dashed into the thick of the conflict, and Triboulet, paralyzed with fear and dropping his lance, was borne helplessly onward, execrating the nag and ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... path; the clipped bushes uprose in dark rounded clumps here and there before the house; the dense foliage of creepers filtered the sheen of the lamplight within in a soft glow all along the front; and everything near and far stood still in a great immobility, ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... had thrown her arm across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda, with her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his children. The sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic in expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible to discover what he thought. Bushy grey eyebrows ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... It is very different. You do not understand the psychic immobility of labour. Habits grow stronger as the mentality is simplified. I have heard that there are animals in the zoological garden that still perform useless operations that their remote ancestors required ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... repast to vanish. The reptile plunges, the birds continue without suspicion to come and go. Suddenly there emerges before them the huge open jaw armed with formidable teeth. In the moment of stupor and immobility which this unforeseen apparition produces a few imprudent birds have disappeared within the reptile's mouth, while the others fly away. In the same sly and brutal manner he snaps up dogs, horses, oxen, and even men who come to the river ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation. Yet in Georgian's eyes he had lost none of his formidable qualities, for the dismay with which she followed his words ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... interval to some free but nonsensical pursuit, such as sharpening skates not wanted for any special purpose, or racing about after the peasant women. His favorite attitude was one of concentrated immobility. He was capable of standing for hours at a stretch in the same place with his eyes fixed on the same spot without stirring. He never moved except on impulse, and then only when an occasion presented itself for some rapid and abrupt action: catching a running dog by the tail, pulling ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... obedience of the Papacy. By its rejection of all but episcopal orders the Act of Uniformity severed it as irretrievably from the general body of the Protestant Churches whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus cut off from all healthy religious communion with the world without it sank into immobility within. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy all change, all efforts after reform, all national developement, suddenly stopped. From that time to this the Episcopal Church has been unable to meet the varying spiritual needs of its adherents ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... administration of chloroform, no description of the method is needed here, as it will be found fully detailed in most good works on general surgery. Where great immobility is needed, it is one of the most valuable means of restraint we have. Apart from that, its use in any serious operation is always to be advocated, if only on the score of humane consideration for the dumb animal ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... red, watched without word or motion. The rest of the class, their countenances too showing an unnatural ruddiness, likewise maintained silence and immobility until the last of the nine had shuffled his feet into place. Then there burst upon the stillness a snigger which, faint as it was, sounded startlingly loud. Whereupon pent up emotions broke loose and a burst of laughter went up that shook ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... he was urging on the coachman, who was putting in the horses, and was furiously angry at his deliberateness. Gemma too said nothing to Sanin, she did not even look at him; from her knitted brows, from her pale and compressed lips, from her very immobility it could be seen that she was suffering inwardly. Only Emil obviously wanted to speak to Sanin, wanted to question him; he had seen Sanin go up to the officers, he had seen him give them something white—a ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... thus in presence of the most absolute contrast which can be imagined. The third peculiarity lies in the arrangement of the characters in horizontal lines, over which we run our eyes. If we maintain during reading a perfect immobility of the book and the head, the printed lines are applied successively to the same parts of the retina, while the interspaces, more bright, also affect certain regions of the retina, always the same. There must result ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... knees, frantic to press her down once more into the chair, terrified at the rigid immobility of the upright figure, Mrs. Coblenz paused then, too, her clasp falling away, and leaned forward to the open sheet of the newspaper, its black head-lines ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... without coughing, that he coughed now without being able to spit; no longer rising from his chair, he who had so often risen for humanity; but drinking dry, eating heartily, saying nothing, but having all the appearance of a living Canon of Notre Dame. Seeing the immobility of the aforesaid canon; seeing the stories of his evil life which for some time had circulated among the common people, always ignorant; seeing his dumb seclusion, his flourishing health, his young old age, and other things too numerous ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... think there's any way I could help the parson for awhile, I'd be proud to try, miss. It's true," he added casually, with a sphinx-like immobility of countenance, "that I'm what might be called handy ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sabah; it keep her good," grinned the boy, and when he delivered that message to his majesty, a smile nearly destroyed the immobility of his features. A slave handed Lewis a package done up in green leaves, and when he curiously loosened the wrappings, a handful of seed-pearls, beautiful in luster and ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... figure-heads, almost dazzling in their purity, overhung the straight, long quay above the mud and dirt of the wharfside, with the busy figures of groups and single men moving to and fro, restless and grimy under their soaring immobility. ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace, into the setting of the most powerful emotion of his life, ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... not at all; they even saw infants only a week old spending the two hours' intervals between successive meals calm and rosy, with wide-open eyes, so silent that they gave no sign of life, like Nature in her moments of solemn immobility. Why indeed should they cry continually? Those cries were the sign of a state of things which must be translated by these words: ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... that mediaeval method of interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently conservative, the Lutheran States became the stronghold of rigid immobility, and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the Swiss reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause with politics. Zurich and Geneva were Republics, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... got the joke on me, boys," he ventured with a nervous little laugh. And then his voice died away against the stony immobility of the man opposite as laughter sinks to nothing against the horror of a great darkness. Bennington began to feel impressed in earnest. Across his mind crept doubts as to the outcome. He almost screamed ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... properly, keeps free from excitement and worry, but does not get despondent; a little company; his partners and some of the boys from the Ledge will drop in occasionally; not too much of THEM, you know; and of course, absolute immobility of the injured parts." The lady nodded; the patient lifted his blue eyes for an instant to hers with a look of tentative appeal, but it slipped off Miss Trotter's dark pupils—which were as abstractedly critical as the doctor's—without being absorbed by them. When ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility has been stirred, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever kept in reserve, and very seldom committed to any definite action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite as is the invention of the Greeks in this direction, the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Stephane with a sheepish air and open mouths. Not one of them stirred. Their immobility, and their seven pairs of fixed round eyes directed upon ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... to get Rea's meaning, then vigorously shook his head and gazed at Jones in fear and horror. Following this came an action as singular as inexplicable. Slowly rising, he faced the north, lifted his hand, and remained statuesque in his immobility. Then he began deliberately packing his blankets and traps on his sled, which had not been unhitched from the ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... dense darkness. He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the dark on unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the oppression. Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And yet he was unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless vigil. The man of the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... with his warriors half hid among the trees as motionless as himself. Winslow leaning against a great white birch on the edge of the little glade rested his left hand upon the hilt of his sword, and setting the other upon his hip imitated the immobility of the savages, and in his glistening steel cap and hauberk, his gauntlets and greaves, his bristling moustache and steady outlook, presented the fitting counterpart to the savage grandeur of Massasoit. It was one of those momentary tableaux in which ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching almost to her throat—her small oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and nodded in comprehension, then, as an officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the girl knew he would ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... anticipated this bloodthirsty suddenness. He had expected, first of all, to talk with Kedsty as man to man. And yet—it was the Law. He realized this as his eyes traveled from Kedsty's rock-like face to the expressionless immobility of his old friends, Constables Pelly and Brant. If there was sympathy, it was hidden except in the faces of Cardigan and Father Layonne. And Kent, exultantly hopeful a little while before, felt his heart ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... to note their passing. There were many balconies on each building and not a one that did not hold its silent party of richly trapped men and women, with here and there a child or two, but even the children maintained the uniform silence and immobility of their elders. As they approached the center of the city the girl saw that even the roofs bore companies of these idle watchers, harnessed and bejeweled as for some gala-day of laughter and music, but no laughter ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... little town of Arcis, without much means of transition, doomed apparently to the most complete immobility, is, relatively, a rich town abounding in capital slowly amassed ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... degeneracy, and immobility is the first stage of dissolution. John Quincy Adams sought not merely to consolidate the Republic, but to perpetuate it. For this purpose he bent vast efforts, with success, to such a policy of internal improvement as would increase the facilities of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... ankylosis, is seldom observed. It is only in cases of severe injury, where the articular portions of the bones are damaged at the time of infliction of the injury, and where the articulation remains exposed for weeks at a time, together with immobility of the parts because of attending pain, that permanent ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... called the land of quiet repose, content to remain anchored to the hoary past, and proud of her immobility. Invasion after invasion has ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... prompt. The awful vampire, gathering its horrible legs under it, sprang clear of the carcass. It stood for a moment in rigid immobility, then ere the maniacal echoes of that shout had quavered into silence among the cliffs, it shoggled over the ridge ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... face was that of a man about Gerald Burton's own age. The features were stilled in the awful immobility of death: but for that immobility, the dead man lying there before them might have ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... a while—English national consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. She has built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility, than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national political and social organization—the advantage of combining great ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... are people the Thoracic comes very near disliking. Their evident self-complacency and immobility are things he does not understand at all and with which he has ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... double-peaked head-dress, and the train of her long brocade robe undulated about her little feet. Same face, same figure. It was she indeed; and to prevent any possible doubt of it, she was seated on the back of a huge old- fashioned book strongly resembling the "Cosmography of Munster." Her immobility but half reassured me; I was really afraid that she was going to take some more nuts out of her alms-purse and throw the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... fever is frequently overlooked and often fatal, for the asthenic patient makes no fight for air, and hoarseness, if present, is very slight. The laryngeal lesion may be due to cordal immobility from either paralysis or inflammatory arytenoid fixation, in the absence of edema. Perichondritis and chondritis of the laryngeal cartilages often follow typhoid ulceration of ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... American constitution as it actually exists, end here. In the decisions of the Court we may trace the rise of question after question—that is, of conflict after conflict—as to the respective rights of the Federation and the individual States. From the history and from the immobility of the constitution, we may perceive the extent to which the existence of a Federal pact checks change, or, in other words, reform. Every institution which can lay claim to be based upon an organic law acquires a sort of sacredness. Under a system of Federalism, the Crown, ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... been more natural than this man's appearance there: who upon earth more suitable for door-keeper to the distinguished visitors than he, who had given his office to the Settlement to-day, in lieu of more expensive gifts? Yet by some flashing trick of Carlisle's imagination, or of his air of immobility, seen darkly through the glass, it was almost as if he might have, been waiting there ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... which it finds itself possessed. Nevertheless, the forms under which societies are organized are subject to the social will, and, if disapproved, are modified or abolished. Some change is taking place even where there is apparent immobility, as becomes evident when the history of institutions is followed through long periods of time. The utmost that can be said is that, where intelligence is little developed and energy at a low ebb, the social will may bear the stamp of passive acceptance of the inherited, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the heels of the thought more quickly than one word could have been uttered. The six men who operated the disintegrator rays were stung out of their startled immobility, and the soft hum of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... partly hid her face. How often had he seen her sitting thus by the fireside at home! But though he stood without in the dark and cold for many minutes, she did not stir; neither hand nor foot moved. At last he grew terrified at this utter immobility, and stepping through the hall he told the landlady that the English lady had business with him. He opened the door, and then ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... with fine immobility. "Three-man job, by rights. Will you give us a hand, Collins?" For Price and Mosey were silently returning ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... emancipation than in the United States. Yet here, a majority of the original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. The civil war makes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... previous position. In inflammation of the throat, as in pharyngolaryngitis, the head is extended upon the neck and the angle between the jaw and the lower border of the neck is opened as far as possible to relieve the pressure that otherwise would fall upon the throat. In dumminess, or immobility, the hanging position of the head and the stupid expression are rather characteristic. In pleurisy, peritonitis, and some other painful diseases of the internal organs, the rigid position of the body ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... self-supporting, were the essential needs which determined the structure of the great fiefs. The upper classes rarely went far afield, while the "rural population lived in a sort of chrysalis state, in immobility and isolation within ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... round Bixschoote. A like prudence was not, however, observed all along the line, for every now and then the trenches would be suddenly illuminated at a point where for a few seconds a useless volley would ring out. Then everything relapsed into darkness and immobility. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... stamped with ennui, and gnawed at the fences; roan horses, from Vyatka, huddled close to one another; race-horses, dapple-grey, raven, and sorrel, with large hindquarters, flowing tails, and shaggy legs, stood in majestic immobility like lions. Connoisseurs stopped respectfully before them. The avenues formed by the rows of carts were thronged with people of every class, age, and appearance; horse-dealers in long blue coats and high caps, with sly faces, were on the look-out for purchasers; gypsies, with staring eyes and curly ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... had watched the tall, ponderous brother help the bright fairy sister to fly airily into her saddle, and her sparkling glance, and wave of the hand, as she cantered off, contrasting with his slow bend, and immobility of feature, she could not help saying that Meta's life certainly was not too charming, with her fanciful, valetudinarian father, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... delicate, cunningly mingled tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains on her long white hands. In her dark immobility, among the rich, clear objects scattered so artfully about the sun-lighted chamber, she had a marvellous effect of being the chief figure in some modern French artist's impressionistic "interior." She gave a distinct sense of having been bathed and dried, scented and curled, dressed—and ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... to listen for now. Yet he continued to listen. Once or twice, half arousing himself, he drew toward him his unfinished work. And then relapsed into immobility. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of immobility passed from his face; his eyes grew warmer, and it seemed to her that he became more alive and more human. "Oh, I think a great deal. My ideas have changed too." He was talking rapidly and without connection. "I ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... proclaimed the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy by the way. The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined it had organized free competition, while it had but organized the oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had represented individuality in its every phase; had ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... however, the latter prevails, and the progressive movement, more or less rapid, goes on continually. Improvements gradually force themselves upon the attention of the most prejudiced minds, and eventually conquer opposition in spite of professional immobility and aversion to change. Observation has shown that the most important steps of progress usually originate outside of the professions, and are only adopted when they can no longer be resisted with safety to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... immobility. He half rose from his chair, staring at her in a startled way—but it ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... which she owned, she struck him as intrinsically young; and he wondered how so evanescent a quality could have been preserved in the desiccating Murrett air. As the play progressed he noticed that her immobility was traversed by swift flashes of perception. She was not missing anything, and her intensity of attention when Cerdine was on the stage drew an anxious ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... she had a subsequent attack, during which she was treated at another hospital. From the description this again seems to have been a typical stupor (immobility, mutism, tendency to catalepsy, rigidity). According to the account of the onset sent by that hospital (it was obtained from the mother), this attack began some months before admission, with complaints of being out of sorts, not being ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... in the form of the skull, should have arisen? Experience assures us that these are changes assumed only by slow degrees, and not with abruptness; they come as a cumulative effect. They plainly enforce the doctrine that national type is not to be regarded as a definite or final thing, a seeming immobility in this particular being due to the attainment of a correspondence with the conditions to which the type is exposed. Let those conditions be changed, and it begins forthwith to change too. I repeat it, therefore, that he who receives the doctrine of the unity ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... she could not liberate it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient to the demands of the feelings, of which ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... rhetorical action, hardly moves at all in the pulpit, stirs neither head nor hand except upon special occasions; but he has a powerful voice, he pours out his words in a strong, full volume, and the force he has in this respect compensates for the general immobility ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... still standing stock still in startled immobility at the recognition of Mr. Bell's ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... with some difficulty, were within a few feet of the governor's box. Within reach of them sat Carroll Morrison, his long, pale, black-bearded face set in that immobility to which he had schooled it. But the cold eyes roved restlessly and the little muscles at the corners of ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... angry with her for the loneliness and the immobility which pained his chivalry and struck at his sense of pity. If he could think of her as going away, too, as wandering, in Switzerland, in Italy, in some lovely place, he would feel all right. But always he saw her ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... in much closer relation to sensation and movement, than do the operations of thought. The latter, indeed, necessitate immobility, and, if sufficiently intense, diminish the power of sensation; they seem to indicate a concentration of nervous action upon organs unconnected with motility or sensibility. On the contrary, movements of some kind are the ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the same time turning down the line, and waving one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle, till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the line of ploughs lost its immobility, moving forward, getting slowly under way, the horses straining in the traces. A prolonged movement rippled from team to team, disengaging in its passage a multitude of sounds—-the click of buckles, the creak of straining leather, the subdued clash of machinery, the cracking of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... were the sculptors of the Renaissance more fortunate than in being in advance of us with their tombs: they have left us nothing to say in regard to the great final contrast—the contrast between the immobility of death and the trappings and honours that survive. They expressed in every way in which it was possible to express it the solemnity of their conviction that the marble image was a part of the personal greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the redemption, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... lady betrothed to that curious cross-barred phantom of a Mr. Porterfield. But I am bound to add that she gave me no further warrant for suspecting them than by the simple fact of her encouraging her mother, by her immobility, to linger. Somehow I had a sense that she knew better. I got up myself to go, but Mrs. Nettlepoint detained me after seeing that my movement would not be taken as a hint, and I perceived she wished me not ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been characteristic ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... accusation. A single tear escaped from his eyes and froze on his pale cheek. The doctor and Bell looked at him with a sort of terror. Leaning on his stick, he looked like the genius of the North, upright in the midst of the whirlwind, and frightful in his immobility. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... drawn by a magnet Alan turned to watch it. It landed on the wall. Alan was aware of Dr. Kent rushing with trembling steps to a shelf where bottles stood. Glora was stricken into immobility, the blood ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... to walk up and down the room every now and then taking a stolen glance at Miss Horn, a glance of uneasy anxious questioning. She stood rigid—a very Lot's wife of immobility, her eyes on the ground, waiting ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald |
