"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up, then arose—for he slowly drew her—breathless, the color gone, much of the capable practicality that was hers completely eliminated. She felt limp, inert. She pulled at her hand faintly, and then, lifting her eyes, was fixed by that hard, insatiable gaze of his. Her head swam—her eyes were filled ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... that the inventors have applied this radial arrangement practically, for it does not appear to be advantageous. The parts of conductors which are perpendicular to the radius, and which can be only inert (even if they do not become the seat of disadvantageous currents), have, in fact, too great an importance with respect to the radial parts.—A. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... could be had of a dark aperture, something like the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination. To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind him, to gain his footing ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... inert laziness and ignorance of the people is their own and their country's bane. They are all totally unaware of the treasures at their feet. This dreadful sloth is in part engendered by the excessive bounty of the land in its natural state; by the little ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... always a crowd there about this hour, but it is generally a very quiet motionless crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... gives us a connected narrative of creation. Before the earth and sea and the all-covering heaven, one aspect, which we call Chaos, covered all the face of Nature,— a rough heap of inert weight and discordant beginnings of things clashing together. As yet no sun gave light to the world, nor did the moon renew her slender horn month by month,— neither did the earth hang in the surrounding air, poised by its own weight,— nor did the sea stretch its long arms around the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... and harbor constructors to remove sunken rocks out of the way of shipping. But thanks to it, too, the Communards were enabled to blow up the finest monuments of Paris in a few hours. It was at once a powerful instrument of industrial development, and of progress in the conquest of man over inert matter, and a terrible engine of devastation in warfare, and of massacre and vandalism where homicidal and destructive passions were aroused ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.—Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three-thousand years: but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, or even ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... thrown to the ground. He had picked himself up and had fled, abandoning his gun and knapsack, and at last, worn out by the forced marches endured for eight days, undermined by fear, weakened by hunger, he had rested himself in a trench. He had remained there dazed, inert, stunned by the roar of the bombs, resolved no longer to defend himself, to move no more; then he thought of his wife, and, weeping, demanded what he had done that they should make him suffer so; he picked ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." The revised text expresses the true thought that Christ was quickened, that is to say, was active, in His own spirit state, although His body was inert and in reality dead at the time; and that in that disembodied state He went and preached to the disobedient spirits. The later reading fixes the time of our Lord's ministry among the departed as the interval ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... sounds of voices and of footsteps approaching, but Marishka could not move. She was prone, inert, helpless. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... plastic power Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone; Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowd Whose fulgurous vans about the world had blown Triumphant storm and seeds of polity; Of Venice, fading o'er her shipless sea, Last iridescence of a sunset cloud; Than this inert prosperity, This bovine comfort in the sense alone! 150 Yet art came slowly even to such as those. Whom no past genius cheated of their own With prudence of o'ermastering precedent; Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose, Secure ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish, lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths whither the perceptions of the exterior organs no ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... capriciously with the silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, which characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down upon his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words. His cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling into a well. The young woman nervously pressed my hand, as ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... the match, the gas burst into light and burned with a steady flame. Ardan immediately bent anxiously over the prostrate bodies of his friends. They lay on each other like inert masses, M'Nicholl ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... sense. Again, in speaking of the similarity of facts and the regularity of sequences, we refer them to a law of nature, just as if they were sentient beings acting under the will of a sovereign. Parts of pure matter—the chemical elements, for instance—do not act at all; being brute and inert, it is only by a strong metaphor that they are said to be subject to law. Again, we attribute force, power, &c., to the primitive particles of matter, and speak of their natural agencies. Just so, we talk of tone in coloring, and of a heavy or light sound; ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... those higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert: every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the most subtle, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... military efforts of democratic France, and luring England into a career of Continental conquest. Monarchy and aristocracy would have gone unchallenged, except within the "natural limits" of France; and the other nations, never shaken to their inmost depths, would have dragged on their old inert fragmentary existence. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles which are commanded by the human brain, which again is guided in its volitions by the voice of the great half-living creature. A strange cross between the form and functions of animated beings, on the one hand, and the passive conditions of inert machinery, on the other! Its utterance rises through all the gamut of Nature's multitudinous voices, and has a note for all her outward sounds and inward moods. Its thunder is deep as that of billows that tumble ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and forming flint or chert nodules; ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... o'clock he lifted her out of her wheel chair. Harriett saw his stoop, and the taut, braced power of his back as he lifted. Prissie lay in his arms with rigid limbs hanging from loose attachments, inert, like a doll. As he carried her upstairs to bed her face had a queer, exalted look of pleasure ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... can the country be exposed to danger or suffering from an infliction such as now threatens? It is impossible, unless we assume all the parties interested—whether the government, the landed proprietors, the farmers, or the labourers—to be inert, and forgetful of their respective interests to an extent of which the world has not yet seen a parallel ... Is it possible to imagine that such a cooperation can be withheld: can the alienation and ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... without end The old man gathers what he dares not spend, While, as for action, do he what he will, 'Tis all half-hearted, spiritless, and chill: Inert, irresolute, his neck he cranes Into the future, grumbles, and complains, Extols his own young years with peevish praise, But rates and censures these ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... bodily indeed at St. Ronan's, but, so far as society was concerned, on the road towards the ancient city of Coventry; and his banishment thither, incurred by that most unpardonable offence in modern morality, a solecism in the code of honour. Though sluggish and inert when called to action, the Baronet was by no means an absolute coward; or, if so, he was of that class which fights when reduced to extremity. He manfully sent for Captain MacTurk, who waited upon him with a grave solemnity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... career by those "improbable events," so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—a robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Ibsen's works; it is certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks for an audience, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... interesting her, since no detail was likely to do so. Unfortunately it didn't interest her much. Franklin's eagerness about some local election, or admiration for some talented pupil, or enthusiasm in regard to a new theory that delved deeper and circled wider than any before, left her imagination inert, as did he. But to-night all these things were transformed by the greatness of her own need and of her own relief. And when she read that Franklin was to be in Europe in six weeks' time, and that he intended to spend some months there, and, if ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... value of their remedies is "next to nothing." It must be admitted that many of the plants used in their medical practice possess real curative properties, but it is equally true that many others held in as high estimation are inert. It seems probable that in the beginning the various herbs and other plants were regarded as so many fetiches and were selected from some fancied connection with the disease animal, according to the idea known to modern folklorists as the doctrine of signatures. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... extremes of Polynesian diversity. The Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one of the tallest—the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to religion, childishly self-indulgent—the Paumotuan greedy, hardy, enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates—the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred that of this poetical vigor Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more; for every other writer, since Milton, must give place to Pope; ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... polarized, or retained its magnetic energy, and we are now taking out one set of lines and putting in reversely polarized lines of force. This done, we break the reversed current without much effect of self-induction. The ring remains polarized and inert until an opposite flow of current be sent through. Iron is then a different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... stream, as it usually does. This state of things greatly increased the chances of flood in the middle Danube, as the descending volume of water and ice-blocks found the lower part of the river still frozen and inert. Even up to the 21st the daily rise in the river was only six inches, and if the large floes of ice which passed the town had only gone on their course without interruption all might still have been well. Unfortunately, however, this was far from being the case. It seems that ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... practised; and Molly was young enough to believe that, after any exercise of virtue, the spirits rose, cheered up by an approving conscience. Such was not the case with Cynthia, however. She sometimes said such things as these, when she had been particularly inert and desponding,— ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted by the necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been hurriedly unpacked, its contents hidden here and locked away, and some other content, inert and heavy, had taken the ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... pleasing herself, to do nothing which would lower her in the eyes of the world, exercised a powerful influence over her actions. Intellectually brilliant, a clever woman of business, and mentally active; she was yet on some occasions curiously inert, and carried the state of mind embodied in the words "live and let live," to dangerous lengths. She must have possessed great determination, as even Balzac's adoration, and his undoubted powers of fascination, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... interrupted the conversation. The two youths looked down. The deck plan of the tug lay flat and empty save for the inert form of Gaskin. The noise came from inside the cabin and arose to a shouting. It was a drunken ribald sound. A suspicion flashed ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours—until the tall clock above his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain. Something aroused him; he ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... of Nature." He says: "We were assured, not long ago, that at Brussels a hen had brought forth half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does a ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... lethargy. Whips cracked, and the gigantic vision had passed. That was June 11—Waterloo was the 18th. On the 20th, three or four hours after the first doubtful rumour had reached us, a carriage drew up to change horses. There was the same inert figure, and the same question and answer. The team broke into a gallop, and the fallen Napoleon was gone. Soon all went on in the ordinary way, and in our little town, isolated in the midst of its forest, one might have thought no changes had taken place; people had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... vacant self-possession would put down all the Grattans and Currans and Jeffreys and Sydney Smiths in the world. I defy the most brilliant, the readiest, the most genial of talkers to vivify the mass of inert dulness he will find now at every ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... repeat all the arguments, by which I have proved [Book II. Part III. Sect 3.], that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection, it will be easy to recollect what has been said upon that subject. I shall only recall on this occasion one of these arguments, which I shall endeavour to render still more conclusive, and ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... loud sigh of relief at his narrow escape. After a moment he peered cautiously around the edge of the door, and seeing the way clear to the control deck, ran back to the ladder. He paused at Roger's inert form and bent over, his lips close ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... scientific questions you will find that "Name ist Schall und Rauch" even more emphatically than Faust says it is in Theology. Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions "Force," "Gravity," "Vitality," which our own brains have created. I do not know anything about "inert" things in nature. If we reduce the world to matter and motion, the matter is not "inert," inasmuch as the same amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways. To go back to my own illustration. The fabric of the watch is not ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of these things the Believer must do, for the mind is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your soul, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a nurse were in the room when they entered. Murphy lay inert on the bed. He had never regained consciousness, the doctors said, and he was in such a weakened condition that only a miracle beyond the skill of surgery and medicine could save him. The mayor ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... the resemblances of anything existing without the mind, or unperceived, but they will have our ideas of the primary qualities to be patterns or images of things which exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance which they call MATTER. By MATTER, therefore, we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion DO ACTUALLY SUBSIST. But it is evident from what we have already shown, that extension, figure, and motion are ONLY IDEAS EXISTING IN THE MIND, and that an idea can be like nothing but another idea, and that consequently neither ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... in his arms and lifted her a little, pressing his lips to her face. She was inert as a statue. She feared him still, and she felt the shiver of horror at his touch, but it could not move her limbs any more. Her eyes opened and looked into his, very close, but his were shut. The mask ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... they ceased to bolt. Standing behind the bushes—against which I now placed the gun to be nearer at hand—I watched the nets till my eye was caught by the motions of the ferret-bag. It lay on the grass and had hitherto been inert. But now the bag reared itself up, and then rolled over, to again rise and again tumble. The ferrets left in it in reserve were eager to get out—sharp set on account of a scanty breakfast—and their motions caused the bag to roll ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... vary any more for the loud tone than for the low tone. The opening must be the same. The low tone must have the power of the loud tone, since it is to be equally understood. The acoustic organs should have nothing to do with the transmission of sound. They must be inert so that the tone may be homogeneous. The speaker or singer should know how to diminish the tone without the contraction of the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion. Who does not know the instinct, when one is crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust—those masters of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... a crowd was collected round the poor, inert mass of humanity which lay motionless in a pool of blood. But two workmen, roused by Vignol's shrieks, were soon on the spot, and pushed their way through the crowd of persons who were gazing with a morbid curiosity on ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... I climbed from the inert body. The torch had hissed itself out. Grantline swung on our building corner, and I leaned down with him to examine it. The torch had fused and scarred the surface of the wall, burned almost through. A pressure-rift had opened. We could see it, a curving gash in the metal wall-plate ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of Marie Antoinette!' said the invalid, raising a petulant hand, and letting it fall again, inert. 'All the silly memorials of her they sell here!—and the sentimental talk about her! Arthur, of course, now—with his picture—thinks of ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... France; in spite of the disorder in the finances and the crushing weight of the imposts, she was working and growing rich; intellectual development was following the rise in material resources; the court was corrupt and inert, like the king, but a new life, dangerously free and bold, was beginning to course through men's minds the wise, reforming instincts, the grave reflections of the dying Montesquieu no longer sufficed for them; Voltaire, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... I could hear distinctly the echo which followed it. Orrin may have heard it too, for he gave a groan and drew in his horse, and when I reached him I saw him sitting there before the smouldering ashes of his home, silent and inert, without a word to say or an ear to hear the instinctive words of sympathy I could not now ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... unknown captain, had done that which as a junior admiral he did later at Copenhagen, at a moment far more critical to Great Britain. By his own unusual powers of impulse and resolve he had enforced, as far as was possible against the passive, inert lethargy—not to say timidity—of his superior, the course of action which at the moment was essential to the interests of his country. Truly great in his strength to endure, he knew not the perturbations nor the vacillations that fret the temper, and cripple the action, of smaller men; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... individual soul which, dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When time ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... first to make fun of him at the club, to find those easy words which are remembered, and to turn that smooth, flabby, pink, ugly face, like that of an old woman, and of a Levantine eunuch in which the mouth is like a piece of inert flesh, and where the small eyes glisten with concentrated cunning, and remind us of the watchful, angry eyes of a gorilla, at the same time, into ridicule. I knew that he was selfish, without any affection, unreliable, full of whims, turning like a weathercock ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in public religious gatherings might be encouraged to relate in a proper, earnest, and modest manner their religious experiences, and might also entreat others to become converted. He maintained that much of the criticism of an inert ministry was well founded, that much of the enthusiastic work of laymen and of the itinerants deserved to be recognized by the regular clergy, and that they ought to bestir themselves in furthering such enthusiasm among their own people. Edwards urged also his belief in the ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... provinces, and nowhere else, we have, stronger than before, a sense of a stationary region overhead, or a region that receives products like this earth's products, but from external sources, a region in which this earth's gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert—if for many weeks a good part of this substance did hover before finally falling. We suppose that, in 1685, Mr. Vans and the Bishop of Cloyne could describe what they saw as well as could witnesses in 1885: nevertheless, it is going far back; we shall have to have ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... He then aspired not to a higher name Than sober clerks of moderate talents claim; Gravely to pray, and rev'rendly to preach, Was all he saw, good youth! within his reach: Thus may a mass of sulphur long abide, Cold and inert, but, to the flame applied, Kindling it blazes, and consuming turns To smoke and poison, as it boils and burns. James, leaving college, to a Preacher stray'd; What call'd he knew not—but the call obey'd; Mild, idle, pensive, ever led by those Who could ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... forests—more than robes, a vital part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a union and compact ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... of reasoning it may be sufficient to observe, that the contractile fibres consist of inert matter, and when the sensorial power is withdrawn, as in death, they possess no power of motion at all, but remain in their last state, whether of contraction or relaxation, and must thence derive the whole of this property from the spirit of animation. At the same time it is not ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to overcome the Revolution and save the monarchy, remained inert and sterile. The Opposition insultingly charged it with impotence; it called it the hectoring ministry, the dullest of ministries, and, for answer, it prepared the expedition of Algiers and prorogued the Chambers, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... then found themselves alone on the "Waldeck" after the collision, having no means of raising that inert hull, without even power to leave it, because the two boats on board had been shattered in the boarding. They were reduced to waiting for the passage of a ship, while the wreck drifted little by little under the action of the currents. This action ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... found that they had still retained their pristine savor and strength. No argument of mine, however, could convince my Manbo friends to the contrary. The spirits had consumed the soul, and there remained, according to their staunch belief, nothing but the outward form and inert bulk ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... on the oak chest. The simple, faltering words just spoken had shaken him to the core. Hidden there—hidden even from himself—had lain inert for months a mighty passion such as only a great heart can know. In one moment he had seen it and known it for what it was. Yes, he had indeed loved this girl; he loved her still. When he spoke again his voice seemed to have ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... solely by its strong appeal to the individual conscience. St Simonian institutions, or delightful phalansteres, will in vain flatter every passion and indulge every sense; if they leave the conscience inert, if nothing is built on the sense of duty, they will no sooner rise but they will crumble back ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Sara? 'Smat-ter?" Hattie's tired hand crept toward her friend; but her volition would not carry it across and it fell inert ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... remained thus, crying and half inert with mental anguish and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he had begun ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... lifeless, deceased, inanimate, defunct, extinct, departed; inert, obtuse, impassive, callous, torpid, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... like steel. It needed all her strength to support him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short, sighing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... much for Potter. He had brilliant and unusual powers of expression, but this was beyond them. He went to the chair beside the little table, flung himself upon it, his legs outstretched, his arms dangling inert, and stared haggardly upward ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... manifested fatigue upon noticing that you had been an ass, that would have been logical, that would have been rational; whereas it seems to me that to manifest surprise was to be again an ass, because the condition of intellect that can enable a person to be surprised and stirred by inert ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... out-of-doors, taking a leaf from Nature's book and noting how she conceals ugliness wherever she finds it. Then there was the satisfaction of being mistress of the poor domain; of planning, governing, deciding; of bringing order out of chaos; of implanting gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... secondary likenesses between the abortive forms of the creative imagination and the impotent forms of the will. In its normal and complete form will culminates in an act; but with wavering characters and sufferers from abulia deliberation never ends, or the resolution remains inert, incapable of realization, of asserting itself in practice. The creative imagination also, in its complete form, has a tendency to become objectified, to assert itself in a work that shall exist ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... living matter are self-preservation and the propagation of the species. The instinct for self-preservation causes a plant to turn away from cold and damaging winds toward the life-giving sun; the inert mussel to withdraw within its shell; the insect to take flight; the animal to fight or to flee; and man to procure food that he may oppose starvation, to shelter himself and to provide clothes that he may avoid the dangers of excessive cold and heat, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... not go to bed that night. She threw herself, dressed as she was, on her bed, and she had not even the strength to cry left in her, she was so thoroughly dumfounded. She remained quite inert, scarcely knowing that she had a body, and without being at all able to collect her thoughts, though, at moments, she remembered something of what had happened, and then she was frightened at the idea of what might happen. Her terror increased, and every time the great ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... upon a rock, watching her without understanding. Yarra, who had stolen near to Ryder's body, crouched upon the rock, staring intently at the face of his friend. Presently Jim noticed that Lucy was lying inert, and he lifted her to the pool and bathed her forehead with the cool water. Yarra brought a pannikin and a bottle containing brandy from the cave, and Jim poured a little of the spirit between the girl's lips. Lucy revived after a few minutes, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... men on the veranda Galen Albret's identity alone was evident. Grim, four-square, inert, his very way of sitting his chair, as though it were a seat of judgment and he the interpreter of some fierce blood-law, betrayed him. From under the bushy white tufts of his eyebrows the woodsmen felt the search of his inspection. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... a queen. Popular feeling ebbs and flows with prodigious force, and the change from one state to the other depends, sometimes, on very accidental causes. The news of Mary's escape spread rapidly over the land. Her friends were encouraged and emboldened. Sympathies, long dormant and inert, were awakened in her favor. She issued a proclamation, declaring that her abdication had been forced upon her, and, as such, was null and void. She summoned Murray to surrender his powers as regent, and to come and receive orders from her. She called ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... from her drawer a key, handed it to Hermann, and gave him the necessary instructions. Hermann pressed her cold, inert hand, kissed her bowed head, and left ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... by the laws of nature. But it is impossible to comprehend how physical force can enrich itself at a given moment by a conscious force. Physical force is reduced to movements of bodies and to displacements of atoms; how could a change of position in any inert objects give rise to a judgment, a reasoning, or any phenomenon of the consciousness? It is further said: this idea of function, which materialists here introduce to render more comprehensible the passage from a material body to a spiritual action, contains ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... home of their own. I would warn all brides to superintend the choice of that home. A man, certainly one of the nicest kind, has not what may be called a domestic eye. If he is artistic he will choose a dwelling for its picturesqueness, regardless of drains and dank ditches near the house. An inert man will value his home for its proximity to the station. Another considers the garden the most important feature. The stay-at-home will be influenced by the place which affords the most scope for the pursuit of ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he carried ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... remained of the spring term. School would close on May twenty-eighth. Already Washington had become insufferably warm, and even Columbia Heights School situated upon its hill, was very trying. The girls were almost too inert to work and spent every possible moment ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... to damage them with our engines from a distance, and also possible to burn them to the water's edge with incendiary missiles; and if they do venture to stir from their place, they will not overtake anyone by pursuing nor escape by fleeing, since they are so heavy that they are entirely too inert to inflict any damage, and so huge that they are exceptionally liable ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... and left the room. He went upstairs slowly, surprised at the feeling of apathy that had come over him. In the face of direct action the high tension of the last few weeks had snapped, leaving him dull, almost inert, and reluctance to go forward grew with every step. But at the head of the stairs his mood changed suddenly. All that the coming interview meant to him revealed itself with startling clearness. With a deep breath he caught at the rail, for ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... it will act. Something may surely be expected from those in arms who even without them would be considered awkward customers; they show no inert pasty masses of flesh, no cadaverous skinniness, they are not shade-blighted women; they do not quiver and run with sweat at the least exertion, and pant under their helmets as soon as a midday sun like ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... power will that army be invested when it rises up and stands upon its feet! We may form some faint idea of it, when in our large cities any thing occurs to excite the interest and warm up the feeling of that apparently inert Celtic mass. The largest halls constructed cannot contain the multitudes who have only read the announcement of a meeting, a lecture, or a charitable undertaking. Such scenes are witnessed every day along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician's pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn't be very long—but only ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... been perfectly inert up to this time, threw out a marvelous light, which illuminated the depths ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... state analogous to the ordinary "waking trance" of the hypnotists. It is believed that all bodies convey, or are the vehicles of certain universal property called od or odyle (od-hyle), which is not regarded as a force but as an inert and passive substance underlying the more active forces familiar to us in kinetic, calorific and electrical phenomena. In this respect it holds a position analogous to the argon of the atmosphere, and is capable of taking up the vibrations of those bodies to which it is related and ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... a fish snap at my bait, checked it, and knew that I was fast into a monster. For a few moments he let me feel something heavy and inert at the end of my line, then there was a plunge and a rush, the line went hissing out, and try as I would to check it, the fish ran straight off till I dragged with all my might, and felt that either the line must break or my hands ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... and thought over those words. Oh, ethics! Oh, logic! Oh, wisdom! At his age! So they deprived him of his only remaining pleasure out of regard for his health! His health! What would he do with it, inert and trembling wreck that he was? They were taking care of his life, so they said. His life? How many days? Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred? Why? For his own sake? Or to preserve for some time longer the spectacle of his impotent ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... people generations before they are seized with such political fanaticism, but judging from precedents, it is a rational probability that the absolute monarchy of China may yet become the object of furious attack by her now inert and abject populace, apparently in happy ignorance of the nature of sovereign authority, the free and unrestrained exercise of which they may learn ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... activity on our satellite. Heat, therefore, there was once in the moon; and accordingly we are enabled to conclude that, on a retrospect through illimitable periods of time, we must find the moon transformed from that cold and inert body she now seems to a glowing and incandescent mass of molten material. The earth therefore and the moon in some remote ages—not alone anterior to the existence of life, but anterior even to the earliest periods of which geologists have cognizance—must have been both globes of ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty—not one of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless forests,—even as he himself was every morning born anew out of darkness,—so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the type of his translation to himself of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... now deep in her siesta. She was inert, relaxed, untroubled by dreams. Her hair was damp ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and knew it. His body lay along the rocky road, inert and unresisting. He breathed in convulsive gasps, but apart from that, now that he was down, he never moved. He was as tired as a man well could be. Varney sitting closely upon him, holding him ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the broken end hurtled over the ledge. The eagle's fight was done. It swerved from its course, and frantically tried to recover itself. But all in vain. Far out over the hillside it swung, and then a helpless and inert mass, it dropped down, and crashed into the tops of the firs and jack-pines, which lifted their heads like pointed ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... he said: "Oh, one can swallow it—it's strange, but it is comparatively inert if swallowed even in a pretty good-sized quantity. I doubt if Mrs. Ralston ever heard of it before except by hearsay. If she had, she'd have scratched herself with ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... given a little study to the nature of soils and plant food. Some of his land needs draining. The ground is sour and cold from stagnant water beneath the surface, and the plant food which Nature originally placed in it is inert and in no condition to be used. Nearly all of his uplands have been depleted of organic or vegetable matter. He did not put into the soil all that the plants needed, and the fact that his crops were poor proves it. The materials he used may have been adulterated, or not in a form ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... with the tuberculous focus. One of the obstacles to this is that the focus is often surrounded by tissues or fluids which have been almost entirely deprived of bactericidal substances. In the case of caseated glands in the neck, for example, it is obvious that the removal of this inert material is necessary before the tissues can be irrigated with fluids of high bactericidal value. Again, in tuberculous ascites the abdominal cavity is filled with a fluid practically devoid of anti-bacterial substances, so that ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. It must be owned, there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter (we contend, under correction) has not this creative ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... propagated, the spiritual realm of the Roman Pontiff policed, and his secular authority augmented. A Spanish Order rose at the right moment to supply that intellectual and moral element of vitality without which the Catholic Revival might have remained as inert as a stillborn child. The devotion of the Jesuits to the Papacy, was in reality the masterful Spanish spirit of that epoch, masking its world-grasping ambition under the guise of obedience to Rome. This does not mean ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... has now been standing with its handle secured for about eight hours. No excitement is apparent, but still it may not be absolutely inert. Of this each one present must judge, but I will connect it with this electroscope (Figs. 13 and 14), and then move the handle slowly, so that you may see when the excitement commences and judge of its absolutely reliable behavior as an instrument ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... But Dr. Guenther informs me that the sluggishness of the common tope (Galeus vulgaris) is much like that of the sturgeon, and yet the bodies of its vertebrae are distinct and well-ossified. Moreover, the great salamander of Japan is much more inert and sluggish than either, and yet it has a well-developed, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... and the train swept farther west she became dull, languid, almost inert. Lack of food and the previous night's exposure induced in her a feeling of giddiness which at times had in it something of the nature of delirium. In this state her mind turned persistently to Thalassa, and the object of her return to him. She was struggling towards him, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... had envied the loungers in the parks—those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all the long summer day, their shabby hats over their faces, their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... understanding is at once pitifully weak and odiously perverse, and whose heart is from the beginning wicked, corrupt, and given over to reprobation. The difference is plainly enormous. The theologian discourages men; they are to wait for the miracle of conversion, inert or desperate. The naturalist arouses them; he supplies them with the most powerful of motives for the energetic use of the most powerful of their endowments. "Men would always have Grace," says Holbach, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... bud, and the new leaves are capable of performing their office of exposing these juices to the influence of the air; the placental vessels cease to act, coalesce, and are transformed from sap- wood, or alburnum, into inert wood; serving only for the support of the new tree, which ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... against an unhappy fate. Though his frame was lithe, vigorous, and admirably proportioned, all his movements were slow and apathetic, like those of an old man. His gestures were entirely devoid of animation, his whole expression inert, and it was evidently a matter of perfect indifference to him where he might chance to find himself at home, in his dismal chateau, or abroad in ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... two or three electrodes from which the air has been exhausted, or which is filled with an inert gas, and used as a detector, an amplifier, an oscillator or a modulator in wireless ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... except that I traded horses twice, reaching my destination within a week, having seen no country en route that could compare with the valley of the Clear Fork. The capital city was a straggling village on the banks of the Colorado River, inert through political usurpation, yet the home of many fine people. Quite a number of cowmen resided there, owning ranches in outlying and adjoining counties, among them being my acquaintance of the year before and present ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... acid, of which the process of burning deprives it. The effects of these two preparations are exceedingly different on animal bodies; the former causing rapid decomposition and consumption; the latter being, on the contrary, quite inert. Loaf-sugar, though prepared by means of lime, ought never to contain a particle of it, and scarcely ever does. So that, on the whole, the remarks in the text are totally incorrect. As a matter of fact, again, the writer, from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... unpleasant topics. He left alone the subject as to why Millicent had trapped him and forced her company upon him. For the time being she was good and gentle, the reason being that she also was relaxed and inert—the result of a good meal after a ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... fell over her hopeless eyes; her lips drooped; the flush of her splendid florid beauty had faded as if it had never bloomed. She discovered that she was gasping in the dull, chill air. She leaned against the balustrade of the stairs, limp, inert, as if every impetus of vigor had deserted her. But it would never do for her to faint, she reflected. She must act for others, with just judgment, with foresight, with effective housewifely care, and with good heart ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was doomed I knew, but I was prevented from seeing the destruction by a spur of the hill that shut off the view of the city. It is impossible for me to tell how long I stood there inert. Probably it was only a few seconds, but so vivid were my impressions that it now seems as though I stood as a spectator for many minutes. When I recovered possession of my senses I ran to my house and collected the members of the family, all of whom were panic stricken. I hurried ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... model for his case. His outstretched feet and legs are in one. The form of the knee, the swell of the calf, the contours of the thigh and the trunk, are summarily indicated, and are, as it were, vaguely modelled under the wood. The head, apparently the only living part of this inert body, is wrought out in the round. The dead man is in this wise imprisoned in a kind of statue of himself; and this statue is so well balanced that it can stand on its feet if required, as upon a pedestal. In the other type of sarcophagus, the deceased lies at full length upon his tomb, and his ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... applied the term force also to that molecular attraction which we called chemical affinity. When, however, we spoke of the conservation of force, in the case of elastic collision, we meant neither a pull nor a push, which, as just indicated, might be exerted upon inert matter, but we meant force invested in motion—the vis viva, as it is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... liquid and uncrystallized. Think how these fools of men have called diamonds precious above all gems through these many weary years, and showered them on their kings, or tossed them to their mistresses' feet, never dreaming that the silly stone they lauded was inert, crystallized life!" ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the attitude informed with life. The turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw—If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Gresham, Secretary of State in the early part of Cleveland's second term, died in May, 1895, being succeeded by Richard Olney, transferred from the portfolio of Attorney General. In a day, Cleveland's foreign policy, hitherto so inert, became vigorous to the verge of rashness. Deeming the Monroe Doctrine endangered by Great Britain's apparently arbitrary encroachments on Venezuela in fixing the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... bent over, he opened his eyes, smiled, pronounced her name, still smiling and keeping his sunken eyes on her. They were filmy and bluish, like the eyes of the very old; and the hand she lifted and held was the stricken hand of age—inert, lifeless, without weight. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy in the cerements of the past. At the beginning of the century, there were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of the time, that it was a relic of exploded superstition; and ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple— comparatively, anyhow—because inert ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... slept, but lay inert and not unhappy. Now and then one of his gentlemen, given permission, tiptoed into the room, and stood looking down at his royal master. Annunciata came, and was at last stricken by conscience to a prayer at his bedside. On one of her last visits that was. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and chaos of people to the hill and the moon. But the people stood round her like stones, like magnetic stones, and she could not go, in actuality. Skrebensky, like a load-stone weighed on her, the weight of his presence detained her. She felt the burden of him, the blind, persistent, inert burden. He was inert, and he weighed upon her. She sighed in pain. Oh, for the coolness and entire liberty and brightness of the moon. Oh, for the cold liberty to be herself, to do entirely as she liked. She wanted to get right ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... leaned her head against the back and closed her lids; presently they grew pink. Then, with drooping head, inert hands and staring ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various |
