"Moribund" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impressionable, had refused to profit by the advice, and now the consequences of his stubbornness were upon him. He had said truly that his literary gift was novelistic and nothing else; and here he was, stranded and desperate, with the moribund book on his hands, and with no chance to write another even if he were so minded, since one can not ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... gate, gives no idea of the true state of things. The ridicule was continuous, searching, and universal. I was the laughing-stock of the neighborhood. Anonymous letters from supposed persons in a moribund condition, offering to guarantee the delivery of their prospective remains in consideration of a small immediate advance, reached me from various quarters. If I went into a hayfield, one laborer would speak to another, ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... himself thinking that perhaps Sir Isaac might last for years and years, might even outlive a wife exhausted by nursing. And anyhow to wait for death! To leave the thing one loved in the embrace of the moribund!) ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... forth, Mr. Abbey made a monumental financial fiasco; but his was a heroic effort to galvanize Italian opera, which seemed moribund, into vitality. He showed an honest desire to keep all his promises to the public made when he asked support for his enterprise, and all in all, his administration was signalized by virtues too frequently absent in the doings of operatic managers. His stage sets were uniformly ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... excellent and detailed work on the retinal currents of the frog, has shown how the sign of response is reversed in the moribund condition of ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Hero-worship better; that to do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,—Heaven's blessed life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one. To resuscitate the Asphyxied, apparently now moribund and in the last agony if not resuscitated: such and no other seems ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... been blackballed at three or four clubs, but had effected an entrance at two or three others, and had learned a manner of speaking of those which had rejected him calculated to leave on the minds of hearers a conviction that the societies in question were antiquated, imbecile, and moribund. He was never weary of implying that not to know Mr Alf, not to be on good terms with Mr Alf, not to understand that let Mr Alf have been born where he might and how he might he was always to be recognized as a desirable ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... no heed. She marched Honora swiftly along the awakened streets and into the bereaved house, past the desecrated chamber where David's bed stood beside his wife's, up to Kate's quiet chamber. Honora stretched herself out with an almost moribund gesture. Then the weight of her sorrow covered her like a blanket. She slept the strange deep sleep of those who dare not face the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... same story in Gower (Story of Florent), and in Voltaire: "Ce qui plait aux Dames."—Friar's tale: a summoner taken away by the devil, from one of the old collections of exempla.—Tale of the Summoner (somnour, sompnour): a friar ill-received by a moribund; a coarse, popular story, a version of which is in "Til Ulespiegel."—Clerk of Oxford's tale: story of Griselda from Petrarch's Latin version of the last tale in the "Decameron."—Merchant's tale: old January beguiled by his wife May and by Damian; there are several versions of this story, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Reverent countenance, and taking our Four Meals a day, with Refreshing Soups between whiles. And I have always found that the vicinage of a Sick Room is apt to make one exceeding Hungry and Thirsty, and that a Moribund, albeit he can take neither Bite nor Sup himself, is, in his surroundings, the cook's best Friend, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... could have none, and might with justice have exclaimed, 'A plague on both your houses!' What cared they, on the one hand (and this was the popular sentiment), for the hypocritical crusade undertaken for purposes of aggrandisement; or, on the other, what sympathy could they have with the moribund State which had ever been to them as the daughters of the horseleech, and whose atrocities were identical with those that were perpetrated in the days when Huns and Vandals devastated their own fair ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... mannerism easily detectable as his—they're the things that sell, you know, and are collected at fabulous prices for the world's museums, after the great man is gone; we'll have a ton of them ready—a ton! And all that time the rest of us will be busy supporting the moribund, and working Paris and the dealers—preparations for the coming event, you know; and when everything is hot and just right, we'll spring the death on them and have the notorious funeral. You get ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bent, upheld by a cane, one hand poignantly resting on his back. The face was drawn with pain and despair. "For twenty years I suffered untold agonies," this person was made to confess in large print. It was heartrending. But opposite the moribund wretch was a figure of rich health, erect, smartly dressed, with a full, smiling face and happy eyes. Surprisingly this was none other than the sufferer. One could hardly have believed them the same, but so it was. "The Ajax Invigorator made a new man of me," continued ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve! Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle was that ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... old mother of ours is in a moribund condition, in order that you may gather in as many of her scattered children as possible to stand at her bedside? Ah, my dear Holland! the moribund brings together the wolves and the vultures and all unclean, hungry things to try and get a mouthful off ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... de Girardin's insinuations about the failure of "La Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin," Balzac remarked that this had been written for L'Epoque, not for La Presse, and that it had not been necessary for Girardin to purchase it from the moribund journal, unless he had approved of it. Girardin had hurt him on his tenderest point when he branded his works as failures. With pride and bitterness in his heart he went through the accounts with Mr. Rouy, and found that out of the 9,000 francs received from La Presse, he still owed 5,221 francs ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... not able to make any such study, because the Soviet system is moribund.[4] No conceivable system of free election would give majorities to the Communists, either in town or country. Various methods are therefore adopted for giving the victory to Government candidates. In the first ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... what was taking place at the Palais while Lucien's protectresses were obeying the orders issued by Jacques Collin. The gendarmes placed the moribund prisoner on a chair facing the window in Monsieur Camusot's room; he was sitting in his place in front of his table. Coquart, pen in hand, had a little table to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... to glow again. No one who has ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth and before her poised basketful of the finer appeals to fond fancy was actually upset, wants to stop loving her; so that our bleeding and wounded, though perhaps not wholly moribund, loyalty attends us as a hovering admonitory, anticipatory ghost, one of those magnanimous life-companions who before complete extinction designate to the other member of the union their approved successor. So it is at any rate that ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... louder came the sound, and soon they saw a white, postillioned pony, a chaise and, yes, girth immensurate among the cushions, a weary monarch, whose face, crimson above the dark accumulation of his stock, was like some ominous sunset.... He had passed them and they had seen him, monstrous and moribund among the cushions. He had been borne past them like a wounded Bacchanal. The King! The Regent!... They shuddered in the frosty branches. The night was gathering and they climbed silently to the ground, with an awful, indispellible ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... venture to quote in this connection a letter from my father, which needs a word of preface. Among his experiments in journalism, Fitzjames had taken to writing for the 'Christian Observer,' an ancient, and, I imagine, at the time, an almost moribund representative of the evangelical party. Henry Venn had suggested, it seems, that Fitzjames might become editor. Fitzjames appears to have urged that his theology was not of the desired type. He consulted my father, however, who admitted the difficulty to be insuperable, but thought for ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... a panther. They conquered them without extermination, and converted them to Christianity! An amazing feat, and one which disposes for all time of that old, outworn legend that the Spain of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a moribund and degenerate nation. ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... made the transformation artistically complete by walking a few squares in the dust of a loaded cotton float on the levee. Then he made a tramp's bundle of the manuscript of the moribund book, the pistol, and the money in the red handkerchief; and having surveyed himself with some satisfaction in the bar mirror of a riverside pot-house, a daring impulse to test his disguise by going back to the restaurant where he had breakfasted ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... substituting non-intercourse with England and France. Thus Jefferson left office under the shadow of a monumental failure. His theory of commercial coercion had completely broken down; and he had damaged his own and his party's prestige to such an extent that the moribund Federalist organization had sprung to life and threatened ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... rose from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, 'It is a matter of minutes now,' and then—and then—the slow creeping of her hand to her husband's mouth, the outspreading of her palm across the livid lips—its steady clinging there, smothering the feeble gasps of one already moribund, till the quivering form grew still, and Frank Postlethwaite lay dead ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... a long succession of them, filled with melancholy evidences of incapacity and defeat in almost every department of human activity—plans of abortive military campaigns, prospectuses of moribund business enterprises, architectural and engineering drawings of structures never to be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes for the North Pole. It depressed ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... that Cracow has completely fallen to decay. This is not the case. Austria has erected some very handsome buildings; and a town with such fine pictures, good museums, and two universities, can not be complained of as moribund. At the same time, I can only record faithfully my impression, and that was that everything new, everything modern, was hopelessly out of tone in Cracow; progress, which, tho' desirable, may be a vulgar thing, would not suit her, and does not seem ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... were perspicacious enough to see in the Terrestrials' coming not a threat but a last hope of revivifying their own moribund species. Accordingly, the Earthmen were encouraged to go ahead building on the sites originally selected, the only ban being on the type of construction materials used—and a perfectly reasonable one under ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... missionary spirit, by intemperate zeal in propaganda, by a tendency, always social, to crystallize conviction into dogma. We can scarcely, unless we are as high-hearted as Tolstoy, hope now-a-days for an art that shall be world-wide. The tribe is extinct, the family in its old rigid form moribund, the social groups we now look to as centres of emotion are the groups of industry, of professionalism and of sheer mutual attraction. Small and strange though such groups may appear, ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... 'Can't I get her to lunch at a restaurant and ply her with the wines of Eastern France? No, she is Temperance personified. Can't we send her a forged telegram to say that her mother is dying? Servants seem to have such lots of mothers, always inconveniently, or conveniently, moribund.' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... been reduced to serious pecuniary embarrassment, and had temporarily withdrawn himself from the jurisdiction, pending an arrangement with his creditors. It is in the highest degree improbable that another number of the paper would ever have been issued. It was moribund, if not already dead. But when matters had arrived at this pass, the violence of Mackenzie's enemies led them to commit an act of lawless ruffianism which gave the Advocate a new lease of life. The act moreover aroused much popular indignation against the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... no very strong position, for the Chamber was now moribund and the many groups which had been formed, in the effort to create a war Chamber out of one that was elected in the days of peace, were now dissolving. An incident towards the end of November exhibited not only the contrivances by which these groups hoped to preserve themselves, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous lightsomeness—he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... lonely, Gabrielle would walk down the road to Clonderriff, not because she found it beautiful, as it surely was, but for the sake of its homeliness and the contrast of its gentle life to the moribund atmosphere of Roscarna. She loved the pale cabins, each a cradle of mysterious life; she loved the sound of placid cattle feeding in the darkness, and above all she loved the sound of human voices when the men sprawled by ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... to throb; it was as if the stillness of the sanctuary had given a sign. At first there was no recognition in the young man's gaze. Then the dull pupils began visibly to brighten. There came to his lips the commencement of that strange moribund smile which seems so ineffably satirical of the things of this world. O imposing spectacle of death! O blessed soul, marked for promotion! What earthly favor is like thine? Lizzie sank down on her knees, and, still clasping John's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... christening the principle was directed against an apprehended intervention in American affairs, which depended not upon actual European concern in the territory involved, but upon a purely political arrangement between certain great powers, itself the result of ideas at the time moribund. In its first application, therefore, it was a confession that danger of European complications did exist, under conditions far less provocative of real European interest than those which now obtain and are continually growing. Its subsequent applications ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... who he was—only a petty chief of a conveniently isolated corner of Mindanao, where we could in comparative safety break the law against the traffic in firearms and ammunition with the natives. What would happen should one of the moribund Spanish gun-boats be suddenly galvanized into a flicker of active life did not trouble us, once we were inside the bay—so completely did it appear out of the reach of a meddling world; and besides, in those days ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... if over they failed to lie moribund, dauntless the heroes Stooped down to impossible putts for a half or a win, Stooped down in voluminous knickers and all sorts of queer hose And stuffed the ball in, Like American packers of pig-meat, hard home to the floor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... were lost on Daphne, for just then, to Mrs. Stimpson's surprise and secret dismay, the entrance was formally announced of the Court Godmother, whom she had imagined to be at least moribund, if not dead. She came in, looking frail and feeble, but still with much of the energy and vitality that had seemed to have ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... generous control of such a Committee, possessed of no practical experience in Canadian matters, would, he knew, doom the Church to a dwarfed, and unnatural, and a miserable existence. Events had already proved to Dr. Ryerson (while the Union during 1839-1840 was in a moribund state) that the Church, controlled by a dominant section of the British Conference, would be a prey to internal feuds and jealousies. In the conflicts that would then ensue spiritual life would die out, missionary zeal would be fitful in its efforts, and every Church ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... how one clung to that good fellow! The New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now. I wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund woman sank for the last time into the arms of ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the least. They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, "Muchas gracias," but the others merely smiled sadly; and I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity. Italians would have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation. Perhaps there are even ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... obedience, nor slacken in the smallest degree the stringency of a command. This obligation lies upon us as fully as it did upon them, and the discharge of it by professing Christians would bring new life to moribund churches. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... resolve seemed to lend me strength and to revive the hope that lay moribund in my breast. And then, scarce was it taken, when the door again opened, and a man, who was splashed from head to foot with mud, in earnest of how hard he had ridden, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... angel you have been? Do I know something about you, or do I not? Well, now, are you satisfied with that paper? Can you suggest to me means of improving it? It wants some fresh blood, I think—I must find it? I bought the thing last year, in a moribund condition, with the old staff. Oh! we will certainly take counsel together about it—most certainly! But first—I have been boasting of knowing something about you—but I should like to ask—do you know anything ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... [FN35] So the moribund father of the "babes in the wood" lectures his wicked brother, their guardian: "To God and you I recommend My children deare this day: But little while, be sure, we have Within this world to stay." But, to appeal to the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... For a few minutes the progenitor emptied his ancient lungs of some further moribund intimations of tone. Later came ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... James, John Adams was having no better luck in pressing the rights of the moribund Confederation. Notwithstanding the explicit terms of the Treaty of 1783, British garrisons still held strategic posts along the Great Lakes, exercising a strong influence upon the Indians and guarding ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... extinguished by Christianity. As the result of a similar policy we find the names and functions of the pagan gods and the earlier Christian saints confused in the most extraordinary manner; the saints assuming the duties of the moribund deities where those duties were of ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... house. Of a Jesus of Nazareth bearing the cross upon his shoulders, and crowned with thorns; of an Ecce Homo, insulted and scourged, with a reed for derisive scepter, and his hands bound with a rough cord; of a Christ crucified, bleeding and moribund, Pepita would not have dared to ask what she now asked of a Saviour, still a child, smiling, beautiful, untouched by suffering, and pleasing to the eye. Pepita asked him to leave her Don Luis; ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... know," said I, "that there is something in all this very like democracy; and I thought that democracy was considered to be in a moribund ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... by baptizing dying children than by any other work of conversion in which they can be engaged. The sums which they expend in sending people about the streets, to administer this sacrament to all the moribund children they can find; the arts which they employ to perform this office secretly on children in this state whom they are asked to treat medically; and the glee with which they record the success of their tricks, are certainly remarkable. From some passages ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP), KAYSONE PHOMVIHAN, party chairman; includes Lao Patriotic Front and Alliance Committee of Patriotic Neutralist Forces; other parties moribund ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... powers of resorption there can be no greater proof than the elimination of Buddhism from India, where, in spite of its tremendous uplift in the days of Asoka and the intermittent favours it enjoyed under later and lesser monarchs, it was already moribund before the Mahomedans gave it its final deathblow. Jainism, contemporary and closely akin to Buddhism, never rose to the same pre-eminence, and perhaps for that very reason secured a longer though more obscure lease of life, and still survives as a respectable but numerically ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... you allow that this organization is necessary, why do you believe it to be your duty to maintain it at the cost of your best feelings? Who has made you the nurse in charge of this sick and moribund organization? Not society nor the state nor anyone; no one has asked you to undertake this; you who fill your position of landowner, merchant, tzar, priest, or soldier know very well that you occupy that position by no means with the unselfish aim of maintaining the organization ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... they deposited at the door coffins made to order—elm or oak—so many feet and so many inches; the clergymen of all the neighbouring parishes, high church or low church, were ready to minister to the spiritual wants of the unfortunate moribund, but retired in disgust when they found that some forty fishmongers had been engaged to purvey 'cod's head and lobsters' for a person professing to be on ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... article, we have been informed that the object of our funeral oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the better: we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by one of the children in the wood, and "kill him two times." The Abbe de Vertot, having a siege to write, and not receiving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this picture and that of our church at the beginning of the nineteenth century! Then two moribund congregations were feebly holding the fort. One of these soon surrendered, "on account of the present embarrassment of finances." Now a compact army had already been assembled, while new races and languages ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... only spoken out a little year ago—had you only told her Majesty's Commons what you told the Livery of London—then, at this moment, you had been no moribund minister—then had Sir Robert Peel been as far from St. James's as he has ever been from Chatham. But so it is: the Whig Ministry, like martyr Trappists, have died rather than open their mouths. They would not hear the counsel of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various |
