"Recoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... get it back," she went on while he looked at her in silence a little. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was caused by no foresight of his probably having also to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs. Rooth. It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, together with a sense that this intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. He would wish to know what it was supposed to be, like Nash's histrionics. Miriam after a moment ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... will would solidify into stone—whereas his must break. In him something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did break. His will flew loose in a recoil: a recoil away from her. He left her, as inevitably as a broken spring ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... lance them in the back; clumsy escopetos drop loaded from the hands of dying cowards. Such are the battles of New Mexico. It is only when these red-skinned Tartars meet Americans or such high-spirited Indians as the Opates that they have to recoil before gunpowder. [Footnote: Since those times the Apaches ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... a matter of no ordinary difficulty, as they apprehended that the Bodagh and his wife would recoil with indignation at the bare notion of even condescending to discuss a topic which, in all probability, they would consider as an insult. Not, after all, that there existed, according to the opinion of their neighbors, such a vast disparity in the wealth of each; on the contrary, ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to say about that. Having been placed on guard, and not yet relieved, he would permit no hand but his master's to touch anything in his charge. A frightful growl made the boy recoil and go backwards over ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... about women not to warn Honey against talking confidentially with Mrs. McLaughlin, since this would excite her suspicions and recoil upon him, Skinner, with a shower of inconvenient questions. The only thing he could do, then, was to see to it that he and Honey should avoid places where the McLaughlins were liable to be. Skinner ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... profanation. I have only condescended to mention the composition, and the last anecdote, to show how much the world is deluded, by the received opinion that the french are become a new race of exemplary devotees. The recoil from atheism to enthusiasm, is not unusual, but the french in general have not, as yet, experienced this change. That they are susceptible of extraordinary transitions, their history and revolution have sufficiently manifested. In the Journal de Paris, written in the reigns of Charles ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... certain discount for friction and the recoil of the gun, the net work realized by the powder-gas as the shot advances AM is represented by the area ACPM, and this is equated to the kinetic energy e of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... planter class with the bulk of the people had been impaired. Misapprehension appeared on both sides. Too much has been said lately, however, in justification of the poorer classes who were thus wakened suddenly to a distrust of the aristocracy; and too little has been said of the proud recoil of the aristocracy in the face of a sudden, credulous perversion of its motives—a perversion inspired by the pinching of the shoe, and yet a shoe that pinched one class as hard as it did another. It is as unfair to charge the planter with selfishness in opposing the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... starting off when the door opened, and Cordelia Burr came in. She stared about her in her odd frowning way, and then hurried forward to join the runners. Eva gave a little start of recoil. Alice gave more than a start. She seized Eva and Janey by the wrists, and, pushing them before her, sent a nod and backward to several others who had left the bars to come over to the race-track. She did not say even to herself that she meant to crowd Cordelia out; but ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... same. Let them say to the young men, "You shall not do the things you prohibit us from doing; you shall not, behind our backs, do things you would despise us for doing; you shall not bring into our society characters from which you know every honest and pure woman ought to recoil as she would from a basilisk; you shall not breathe into our faces the pestiferous breath of the drunkard, nor burden our ears with the hateful sound of the blasphemer; you must be what you would have us, or you must be out of our society." Let young women talk thus ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... love that was infinite? Love which was not essential to his divine nature, could never have carried him through so great a work as this: Passions here would a failed, would a retreated, and have given the recoil; yea, his very humanity would here have flagged and fainted, had it not been managed, governed, and strengthened by his eternal Spirit. Wherefore it is said, that "through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... yourself, 'Did it begin, in her time, with a harsh word from him and with a hasty reply from her? Will it one day end with me as the jury half feared that it ended with her?' Hideous questions for a wife to ask herself! You will stifle them; you will recoil from them, like a good woman, with horror. But when we meet the next morning you will be on your guard, and I shall see it, and know in my heart of hearts what it means. Imbittered by that knowledge, my next harsh word may be harsher still. Your ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... them; and let me tell him further, as my lord will tell you, gentlemen, that a counsel, in the discharge of his duty to his client, is neither to be intimidated, nor bullied, nor put down; and that any attempt to do either the one or the other, or the first, or the last, will recoil on the head of the attempter, be he plaintiff or be he defendant, be his name Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... cannot make them to be fortune's prizes, scattered to tempt the cupidity of all; but which a few only can catch, while their luck proves the disappointment and vexation of the many. The supposition were monstrous. We so instinctively recoil from supposing such to be the appointment of nature's Author, and so consciously grasp it for a truth clear by its own light—the conviction of a provision fully made in nature for all, whenever nature's wants are truly consulted—that we may safely reject, by this test, every ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... loudly proclaimed; but it is very likely to have indisposed them towards listening. Meantime, so far as I am acquainted with these Roman Catholic demurs, the difference between them and my own is broad. They, without suspecting any subtle, fraudulent purpose, simply recoil from the romantic air of such a statement—which builds up, as with an enchanter's wand, an important sect, such as could not possibly have escaped the notice of Christ and his apostles. I, on the other hand, insist not only upon the revolting ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... mark. Black Bear was struck in the chest with such force, that he was carried off his feet and knocked half fainting to the earth. The other was hit and compelled to recoil a step, but the weapon struck him lengthwise, and he was not harmed. He rallied and brought his gun to his shoulder, but by the time it was leveled, the ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... nothing impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the object, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as the exclusion of all. If we may ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... wild turmoil of winds and seas around him, which usually lifted his spirits, was sad, feeling lonely and wretched; he was suffering from the recoil of his little friend's charming presence. Pearl came on deck again looking for him. He did not see her, and the child, seeing an opening for a new game, avoided both her father and mother, who also stood ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late charges are sent up (with another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Boche dugouts now!" said he; and remembering the dugouts I had seen, I could picture the awful fate of those within, the choking fumes, the fire-scorched bodies! Truly the exponents of Frightfulness have felt the recoil of their own ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... course, be avoided from the start by the guns being altogether more strongly mounted on broad-tyred wheels and broad axles of similar height, size and pattern, and, above all, with a strong and uniform system for checking the recoil of the carriage, of which the drag-shoe, as it was fitted and sent up to us, ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his hardihood. In spite of the sudden blight and shadow on her face, instinctive recoil that meant, he knew, the closing of the door, he grasped her hands, both her soft white hands, and seemed, to his anguished mind, to be dragging himself in by them, and even in the face of that look of hers was over the threshold ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... suddenly came to Mlle. Moriaz; there was no time to recoil from it. She ordered up her coupe. M. Moriaz had just gone out to make a call in the neighbourhood. She determined to profit by his absence, and besought Mlle. Moiseney to make ready in haste to accompany her to Paris, where she had to confer with her dressmaker. Ten minutes later she stepped ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... imagination alight; his own recoil from the conjunction, overborne by immediate concern for Dyan. Unable to forget her—who could?—he had thrust the pain of remembering into the dark background of his mind; and there it remained—a hard knot of soreness and bitterness—as Aruna ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... back. She was far away in thought, and the action was unintentional. In very truth she had been dreaming of Iver, and the embrace chimed in with her dream, and the action of shrinking and repulsion was occasioned by the recoil of her moral nature from any undue ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... straight from here on to the Bethune road along which the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez. But all that ground is under regular and terrible attention. Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... something to write about that we would even undertake so trifling a subject as haberdashery; but as we went downstairs again to our kennel, au dixieme, as Mr. Wanamaker would call it, we thought seriously about this and decided that we would cause Pete's light-hearted suggestion to recoil violently upon his friendly brow, and that we would write a little essay about this tie and tell its story, which, to be honest, is very interesting to us. And this essay we are now endeavouring to write, even if it has to run ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... relieve you of your watch a short time," said Arthur; and the woman left the room. He led Helen to the bedside, and turning back the sheet, exposed the venerable features composed into everlasting repose. Helen did not recoil or tremble as she gazed. She even hushed her sobs, as if fearing to ruffle the inexpressible placidity of that dreamless rest. Every trace of harshness was removed from the countenance, and a serene melancholy reigned in its stead. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... time!" called his friend. Sam made no reply. He was watching the wind pushes and waiting for a strong one. It came—it struck the tree-top. There was an ominous crack, but Sam had left enough and pushed hard to make sure; as soon as the recoil began he struck in very rapid succession three heavy strokes, cutting away all the remaining wood on the west side and leaving only a three-inch triangle of uncut fibre. All the weight was now northwest of this. The tree toppled that way, but swung ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics, there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not,—this dead recoil Of weary fibres stretched with toil, The pulse that flutters faint and low When ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... delicious landscape; the air cool and serene; my thoughts collected,—heart and conscience alike at peace. I took, then, the wand, and adjusted it to the palm of the hand as I had done before. I felt the slight touch of the delicate wire within, and again the thrill! I did not this time recoil; I continued to grasp the wand, and sought deliberately to analyze my own sensations in the contact. There came over me an increased consciousness of vital power; a certain exhilaration, elasticity, vigour, such as a strong cordial may produce on a fainting man. All the forces ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vanity—it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in it that makes the misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the mistake. If gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as death—the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... was no refuge. She had been too much tired to hear anything the night before, but to-night there was scratching, nibbling, careering, fighting, squeaking, recoil and rally, charge and rout, as the grey Hanover rat fought his successful battle with his black English cousin all over the floors and stairs—nay, once or twice came rushing up and over the bed—frightening its occupant almost ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sort of spiritual selection, as flowers have their own colours, and the creatures their own forms and features?" To this we answer (i.) that if you are to be a saint, as God has called you to be, you must have the qualifications and nature of a saint; (ii.) we ought not to recoil from this sum, as if the casting of the figures were necessarily a long process. No, not long! how long does it take one to reach love? Why, we commonly use the expression "falling in love"; and when the ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... had only just missed them. She had intended to marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with a child of eighteen—a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and glanced and blushed ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was a peaceful world, because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... thrusting them down with pikes, hurling grenades and stink-pots from the tops; while the swivels on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... in which it would not be my first interest to be honest?" said Andrew. "Would not my judgment be quickened by the compulsion and the danger? In no danger myself, might I not judge too leniently of things from which I should myself recoil? Selfishly smoother with regard to others, because less anxious about their honesty than my own, might I not yield them what, were I in the case, I should see at once I dared not allow to myself? I can perceive no use in making ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... Dalgetty. "Unless you insist on loaded connotations. It's a necessary period of rest. Recoil time for a whole society—well, it all works out neatly in Tighe's formulation. The present state of affairs should continue for about seventy-five years, we feel at the Institute. In that time, reason can—we hope—be so firmly ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... the nature of the payment might be: but when that matter was explained by the old woman, the honest lad rose up in horror, to think that a woman should traffic in her child's dishonour, told her that he came from a country where the very savages would recoil from such a bargain; and, having bowed the old lady ceremoniously to the door, ordered Gumbo to mark her well, and never admit her to his lodgings again. No doubt she retired breathing vengeance against the Iroquois: no Turk or Persian, she ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... love me!" he cried after a moment's misery in the depths, his spirits leaping high with the quick recoil. His eager hands seized her shoulders and drew her close, so close that their bodies touched and his impassioned eyes were within a few inches of hers of startled blue. "I'll make you ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... support of your prisoners in our hands, nor accommodation for the mere existence of ours, who are now languishing in your prison-ships, it becomes my duty, Sir, to state these pointed facts to you, that the imputations may recoil where they are deserved, and to report to those, under whose authority I have the honor to act, that such measures as they ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... was going to do, struck first, with the broom-handle rapping the beast on its tender nose. Hannibal recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second sweeping stroke of his mighty paw. Again he was anticipated, and the rap on his nose sent him into recoil. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes. Even in his recoil from what she said Ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty. But for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Well in recoil from Manteuffel and his furies, the beaten Russians succeed in forming "a long Line behind Palzig Village," with that Second, slighter or Branch Quagmire between them and us; they get the Village beset, and have the Churchyard of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... because he happened to be steeped in philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... latter they made the fatal mistake of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed convictions, traditions, and instincts of ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... one-fourth the weight of the ball, or one ounce of powder, with which it carries with great nicety and terrific effect, owing to its great weight of metal (twenty-one pounds); but it is a small piece of artillery which tries the shoulder very severely in the recoil. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... and Charles was dead; lastly, Savonarola had prophesied his own fall like the man who paced around the holy city for eight days, crying, "Woe to Jerusalem!" and on the ninth day, "Woe be on my own head!" None the less, the Florentine reformer, who could not recoil from any danger, was determined to attack the colossal abomination that was seated on St. Peter's holy throne; each debauch, each fresh crime that lifted up its brazen face to the light of day or tried to hide ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Salisbury, John had created, in 1351, by way of following suit, a brotherhood called Our Lady of the Noble House, or of the Star, the knights of which, to the number of five hundred, had to swear, that if they were forced to recoil in a battle they would never yield to the enemy more than four acres of ground, and would be slain rather than retreat. John was destined to find out before long that neither numbers nor bravery can supply ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions. Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the laws and government under which they and their husbands and children must live and die. Equal ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the many young and zealous friends who gathered around him. These meetings were even more numerously attended after his return from Boston than they were before he was summoned to the bar of the General Assembly; for persecution and injustice naturally recoil on the perpetrators of it, and the victim of such harsh measures is sure to gain friends and supporters among the warm-hearted and ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... wage—in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen at country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of arm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and the amount of the recoil—dependent, of course, on the force with which it is struck—is represented by a series of notches or marks. The world is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... fifty years afterwards. The Maoris of Poverty Bay had a story that Cook gave to one of their chiefs a musket with a supply of powder and lead. The fate of the musket was that the first man to fire it was so frightened by the report and recoil that he flung it away into the sea. The powder the natives sowed in the ground believing it to be cabbage seed. Of the lead they made an axe, and when the axe bent at the first blow they put it in the fire to harden it. When it then ran about like water they tried to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the means to please her that a husband would recoil from. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... he had turned to bay in a willow thicket. We heard him howl the long-drawn howl for help, and before we could reach the place King saw the Dogs recoil and scatter. A minute later there sped from the far side of the thicket a small Gray-wolf and a Black One of very ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... anti-slavery movement of the nation. Should the war cease to-morrow, it has inaugurated a new era in our nation's history. The folly of the Gulf States, in throwing away a political condition where the conservative sentiment stood by them only too well, must inevitably recoil on their own heads, whether the strife last a day or a generation. No man can estimate the new measures and combinations to which it is destined to give rise. There stands the Constitution, with all its severe conditions,—severe or weak, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Waterloo. The author must himself have been drunk when he wrote it. Are you not ashamed to set such pitiful cant, I will not say such wilful falsehood and slander, before any rational creature? Did you not know that an overcharged gun would knock the musketeer over by its recoil? I do not tell you to give the convicts all and any books they may desire; but pray what harm would an arithmetic do, unless it taught them to refute the statistics of your lying almanac, which gravely advises farmers to feed ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... this gave play to the sole and the framework, separated the two platforms, and the breeching. The tackle had given way, so that the cannon was no longer firm on its carriage. The stationary breeching, which prevents recoil, was not in use at this time. A heavy sea struck the port, the carronade, insecurely fastened, had recoiled and broken its chain, and began its ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... us to esteem also another form or type of character, and the opposite one; that which is remarkable for—in which predominates—not so much charity as justice; that which was seen in the warriors and prophets of old; who perchance, had a more strong recoil from vice than sympathy with virtue; whose indignation towards that which is wrong and hypocritical was more intense than their love for that which is good: the material, the character, out of which the reformer ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... chocs. The Vicar called the other day, and I have caught several cups of tea on the recoil at the Vicarage since. Miss Stevenson, his ewe-lamb, is A1, and we have had some splendid sport together. We caught eleven beauties yesterday; one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... As They Are to Godwin's mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly asserts: "Caleb Williams was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me"[75]—a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Paris for his "churching," with ten thousand lances instead of tapers. And, as was his fashion, he started to keep his word: his advance guard was burning villages up to the gates of Paris, when, according to the story, his horse stepped on some hot cinders at Mantes and in his sudden recoil so injured the monarch that he died soon ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... wild, passionate utterances of Lillie that Harry felt a recoil of mingled conscience, fear, and that disgust which man feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself to seek. There is no edification and no propriety in highly colored and minute drawing of such scenes of temptation ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wreak his revenge on Essex and Manchester, though the blow would probably recoil upon himself.[b]He proposed in the Commons what was afterwards called the "self-denying ordinance," that the members of both houses should be excluded from all offices, whether civil or military. He would not, he said, reflect on what was passed, but suggest ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... nucleus divides. The first division, as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which was perfect one now divides again, and in the recoil becomes ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to exclaim: "You poor soul, don't double and turn—come straight back to me, and we'll find a way ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... itself, as far as possible, according to rule, do find this state of matters most unofficial unsatisfactory,—is not to be denied. Complaints are made; attempts are made: but without effect. The attempts even recoil; and must be desisted from, for fear of worse: the sceptre is departed from this Legislative once and always. A poor Legislative, so hard was fate, had let itself be hand-gyved, nailed to the rock like an Andromeda, and could only wail there to the Earth and Heavens; miraculously ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... manner its more entire incorporation into the English language. Thus 'shash', a Turkish word, becomes 'sash'; 'colone' (Burton) 'clown'{55}; 'restoration' was at first spelt 'restauration'; and so long as 'vicinage' was spelt 'voisinage'{56} (Sanderson), 'mirror' 'miroir' (Fuller), 'recoil' 'recule', or 'career' 'carriere' (both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely English words which ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... officer's grip tightened convulsively; the night of a sudden seemed alive with men close to them—pressing around them. Almost involuntarily he got up and moved back a few steps, still peering, straining to see in the inky blackness. Something loomed up and bumped into him, only to recoil with a muttered oath; and even as he realised it was a German he heard his sergeant's low voice from a few feet away. "Where are you, sir? Where are you?" The next moment he was back ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... century ago, Jefferson wrote to Spencer Roane, "The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."[39] And however much we may recoil from admitting Jefferson's conclusion to be true, it none the less remains the fact that it has proved itself to be true, and that the people have recognized it to be true, and have taken measures to protect themselves by bringing the judiciary under the same degree of control which they ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... summits of the bergs had come into contact with such violence that both the projecting masses of ice had become detached and had gone thundering down into the water, fortunately at some few yards' distance astern of the whaler, and the shock of collision had been so great as to compel the momentary recoil of the bergs, with the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... dark object at the top of the snow-crusted knoll. Tom was twisting round to get aim across the rail—and the next instant both of us were nearly kicked out of the sleigh by the recoil of the greatly overloaded gun. We both scrambled to our feet, for we heard an ugly snarl. I think the animal leaped upward; I was sure I saw something big and black rise six feet in the air, as if it were coming straight for ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... scandal is so common every where in life, that multitudes are addicted to it without the shadow of a suspicion that they are so. Thousands and thousands of young women whose hearts would recoil at the bare recital of deeds of butchery and blood—nay, who would faint at the sight of the severities, not to say cruelties, which, under the guise of parental discipline, or on the plea of authority, are often and hourly inflicted on ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... but one step which is irrevocable, namely, the final one, and in Charlotte Farnham's besetment this step was the mailing of the letter to Mr. Galbraith. Many times during the evening she wrought herself up to the plunging point, only to recoil on the very brink; and when at length she gave up the struggle and went to bed, the sealed letter was still ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... unfaithfulness of the people.[3] What! these victims who died for their faith, these heroic Maccabees, this mother with her seven sons, will Jehovah forget them eternally? Will he abandon them to the corruption of the grave?[4] Worldly and incredulous Sadduceeism might possibly not recoil before such a consequence, and a consummate sage, like Antigonus of Soco,[5] might indeed maintain that we must not practise virtue like a slave in expectation of a recompense, that we must be virtuous without hope. But the mass of the people could not be contented with that. Some, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency to which, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was a convention, not a march. Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old times"—which usually means the bad old abuses—and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men." Their return to power is often hailed as ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... spoke, and from beneath her black eyes seemed to shoot baleful fires of hate and rage unutterable. The full intensity of her nature was aroused, and the expression of her face was terrible in its fury and malignancy. But Gualtier did not recoil. On the contrary, he feasted his eyes on her, and a smile came ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... once gave a movement of recoil. At the first glance, at the first sight of those motionless people, she suspected the danger which her feminine instinct had already foreseen. And, deathly pale, deprived of all her strength, she dared not ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... wife and she loved him. She loved him just as all good women love, with a complete abandon—with heart, mind and strength. He at first had periods of such abandon, too, but his conscience soon made him recoil from an affection of which God might be jealous. He believed that a man should forsake father, mother, wife and child in order to follow duty—and duty to him was the thing we didn't want to do. That which was pleasant ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... resolution of never being taken by them alive; or, at least, unwounded, or unmutilated. I see, I feel that the love of country is our "ruling passion;" and it is this that has and will give us the superiority in battle, by land and by sea, while the want of it will cause some folks to recoil before the American bayonet and bullets, as the British did at Chippewa, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... who insult the holy name of God by profane and blasphemous language. On all those who now hear me I lay this charge: publish everywhere that I have no hope for such men. They cast in the face of Heaven the stone which will, one day, recoil upon them and crush them. I would also most earnestly exhort you as regards the duty of fasting. Many fathers and mothers come to me in order to impart to me the sorrow which they experience in considering the melancholy fact which cannot escape their observation, that the demon of uncleanness ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... it is clear that we must not seek too high for Jeremiah's rank as a poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome some recent writers—is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was reared—sometimes of an exquisite ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... anybody on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the enthusiasm of women at the South in aid of the Slave-holders' Rebellion, and can form some estimate of the "fierceness of their wrath"; but, God be thanked, the days approach when their mad passions will recoil upon themselves—the days approach when their evil cause must die. Let us unitedly pledge ourselves to stand by the Government, in our legitimate sphere, and out of it, if needs be. Let us, with womanly zeal, help to crush the power ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... this, your children will be your curse and the curse of the state. Wherever they go they will become the standard-bearer of the turbulent, and brandish the torch of discord, until at last, perhaps, they will die in a dungeon or upon the gibbet. And then the curse will recoil upon you. It will strike deep into your hearts. It will come to you in the darkness of unfulfilled promises and blighted hopes and injured affections and desolated homes and wounded spirits and disgraced names and infamous memories! And you, in the face of these, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... of masterly mind, too, is Kue Pih-yuh! When the land is being rightly governed he will serve; when it is under bad government he is apt to recoil, and brood." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... more delightful amusements.' Johnson's Works, iv. 145. Of Pope Johnson wrote (ib. viii. 321):—'To make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last. ... He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure.' Thomas Carlyle, in 1824, speaking of writing, says:—'I always recoil from again engaging with it.' Froude's Carlyle, i. 213. Five years later he wrote:—'Writing is a dreadful labour, yet not so dreadful as idleness.' Ib. ii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... muttered low and deep, and swung the heavy rifle around to the left. Far along the slope a figure moved. Ladd began to work the lever of the Winchester and to shoot. At every shot the heavy firearm sprang up, and the recoil made Ladd's shoulder give back. Gale saw the bullets strike the lava behind, beside, before the fleeing Mexican, sending up dull puffs of dust. On the sixth shot he plunged down out of sight, either hit ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... for the general good. Nor do I conceive there is reason to doubt their personal courage, though they are too good-natured often to excite others to put that quality to the test. It is true, they will recoil with horror at the tale of an Indian massacre, and probably cannot conceive what should induce one set of men deliberately and without provocation to murder another. War is not their trade; ferocity forms no part of the disposition of the Esquimaux. Whatever manly qualities they ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... recoil in every fibre of her nature, Diana turned to take up her life burden. She felt as if she had had ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... have been deserted, save for the smoke he saw rising from the kitchen chimney. He tried to call, but found he had no voice left. An unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled and wheezed in his throat. He fumbled for the rifle, got it to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the discharge tore through his frame, racking it with a thousand agonies. The rifle had fallen across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulder failed. He knew he must be quick, and felt ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... its deformity by losing all its grossness." If there be a deep and ulcerated wound, we think the more "the richly-embroidered veil" is torn away the better. Such a deep social wound exists in France; we wish its cure, as we wish the health of all nations and of all men; so far indeed would we "recoil towards a state of nature." We believe that nature wills marriage and parentage to be kept sacred. The fact of their not being so is to us not a pleasant subject of jest; and we should really pity the first lady of England for injury here, though she be a queen; while the ladies of the French ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... block of oak to the top, through which I pierced a hole for the insertion of the match; and this great petard I so placed, that when it exploded it should blow out the side of the vessel next which the pinnace lay. Then securing it with chains, that the recoil might do no damage, I told the boys I was going ashore earlier than usual, and calmly desired them to get into the boat. Then lighting a match which I had prepared, and which would burn some time before reaching the powder, I hastened after them with a beating heart, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... vision of her march through the great grey rooms—so many of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace—for the moment; the question of the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... who forged his uncle's signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room. His tragedy, like Hamlet's, was the tragedy of an over-powerful will—a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision. It is easy for a weak man to be decided—there is so much to make him so; but a strong man, who can do anything, sometimes leaves everything undone. Fortunately Beddoes, though he did far less than he might have ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... talent for acting; he knew the ways of the establishment intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but everything favored it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It developed ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... not! Prostitution is the source of this domestic infelicity. The "mistress" sips the sweet nectar that is denied to the deceived wife. Legislators have battled with intemperance, but have done comparatively little to banish from our midst this necessary (?) evil. They recoil with disgust from this abyss of iniquity and disease. Within it is coiled a hydra-headed monster, which invades our hearthstones, contaminates our social atmosphere, and whose very breath is laden with poisonous vapors, the inexhaustible source ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the damps away: But, like a gloomy storm, at once to sweep And plunge her to the bottom of the deep. Black were his robes, dejected was his air, His voice was frozen by his cold despair; Slow, like a ghost, he mov'd with solemn pace; A dying paleness sat upon his face. Back she recoil'd, she smote her lovely breast, Her eyes the anguish of her heart confess'd; Struck to the soul, she stagger'd with the wound, And sunk, a breathless image, to the ground. Thus the fair lily, when the sky's o'ercast, At ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... eyes caused him to recoil in horror. There, pressing their shapes against the steel sides, and over the bull's-eyes of the ship were two more of ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood |
