"Slowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tendency to make the long vowels diphthongal is noticed by foreigners as a peculiarity of the orthoëpy of our language; and this tendency will, of course, be strengthened by any cause which produces greater slowness and fullness of articulation. Besides the influence of the habit of reading, there is some reason to think that climate is affecting our articulation. In spite of the coldness of our winters, our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States belongs, upon ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard to heat ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... lie like a log just drifting, while a more seaworthy ship is flying along at the rate of, perhaps, three hundred miles a day in the desired direction. Ships of the CACHALOT's bluff build are peculiarly liable to delays of this kind from their slowness, which, if allied to want of buoyancy, makes it necessary to heave-to in good time, if safety ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... the offenders and hoping that this evidence of their displeasure will finally induce the world to believe that they are determined to get reasonable treatment. The Chinese as a people may be very irritating in the slowness with which they do certain things—though they are as quick in business as the quickest Anglo-Saxon—but that is no excuse why men who call themselves superior should treat them with contempt. The Chinese are the first to acknowledge that ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... face whatever problems my recovery involved than to continue in this monotonous and meaningless existence. So I convalesced by degrees and got about the hospital, and was permitted to wait on myself. But I cultivated a slowness ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... has been a perfect and at the same time an economical mixer. Concrete can be mixed by hand and the materials well incorporated, but this is an expensive and man-killing method, as the handling of the wet mass by the shovel is extremely hard work, besides which the slowness of the method allows part of a large batch to set before the other is mixed, so that small batches, with attendant extra handling, are necessary to make a good job. Mixers with a multiplicity of knives to toss the material have been used, but ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... slowness usually in parents found, Induced the girl, whose heart by LOVE was bound; To celebrate the Hymeneal scene, As in the statutes of Cythera's queen. Our legendary writers this define A present contract, where they nothing sign; The thing is common;—marriage made in haste: LOVE'S ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... observable. The movement, such as it is, is accelerated, and the whole structure of society in America is becoming affected more or less for good or evil, and very often for evil, through the extreme tenacity or slowness of those who ought to be leaders in every revolution of thought, but who, on this subject, are pleased to leave their places to the unqualified and the fanatical. Wise men will be sorry presently. When Faraday was asked to go and see Hume, to see a heavy table lifted without ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... for the present break off my arduous work of educating the Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success of the first representation. It is not often that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... words came with a slowness that meant finality. "Why need to-morrow or a year from now be different from to-day unless we make ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... who had served under William of Orange in Ireland, and afterwards under the Duke of Savoy in Piedmont, disappointed with the slowness of his promotion, had taken service under Louis XIV., and was now employed as a partizan chief in the suppression of his former co-religionists in Languedoc. Like all renegades, he was a bitter and furious persecutor; and in the councils ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... relief that the nurse came back and said quietly, "You've talked enough." As she walked to the door, Eleanor found that her will was focused on the operation of her feet, commanding them to move with decent slowness. Had she obeyed her impulse, she should have run. She forced herself to turn at the door and smile back, forced herself to bridle her emotions and go quietly to breakfast and to her ordeal with the lightning ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... average length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year. Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... blows away that froth in time, and then—as for example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions are gradual, and in their very slowness lies their ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Abraham Froth and his friends of the 'Hebdomadal Meeting', all 'Grave, Serious, Designing Men in their Way' have a confused notion in 1711 of the Methuen Treaty of 1703 as 'the Act for importing French wines,' with which they are much offended. The slowness and confusion of their ideas upon a piece of policy then so familiar, gives point to the whimsical solemnity of their ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of those dreams were now for ever impossible, others only possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and she dared not ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... that did that deed was no other than the hand of the Venetian girl, Paolina Foscarelli," said the lawyer, with deliberate and impressive slowness, emphasizing his words with extended forefinger as he ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... than a lightning (conductor) flash to seize any situation in which I am concerned. But I don't need to tell you that! You, too, have married a Britisher, and know just how much that dear old American joke about English slowness of comprehension amounts to—unless the ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... University is based entirely on the mediaeval principle of mnemonics, and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to the duration of any given course, nor is any disgrace attached to slowness in learning, it is not surprising that many students, coming as youths, linger by the fountain of Kairouiyin till their hair is gray. One well-known oulama has lately finished his studies after twenty-seven years at the University, and is justly proud of the length of his ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... with seemingly infinite slowness, with all the hundreds of straining, thrusting, clumsy pushpots clinging to it and pushing it ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... as these that this winter at length drew to an end, while my prospects of getting to Germany gradually grew more hopeful, though with a slowness that sorely tried my patience. I had kept up a continuous correspondence with Dresden respecting Rienzi, and in the worthy chorus-master Fischer I at last found an honest man who was favourably disposed to me. He sent me reliable and reassuring reports ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... side. Seen from this distance, they looked like bright-colored beetles flying through the air; the motion appeared slow, and the throwing out of the horses' fore and hind legs almost mechanical. But in spite of the apparent slowness, they cleared the ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... acutely felt as he becomes more intelligent and more sensitive; and thus there has arisen a number of sorrows which poor humanity has tried to relieve by all the means in its power. Humanity in its misery has put question after question to science, and has lost patience at the slowness of the advance of knowledge. It has declared that the answers already found by science are futile and of little interest. But science, confident of its methods, has quietly continued to work. Little by little the answers to some of the questions ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they must go both to Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in going from Vienna to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare. Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it up. While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout porters came on board, and shouldered his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... parties to carry wire and stakes up to the front line. These journeys were made through heavy shelling, and we were always thankful to return safely. My policy was never to allow the pace to become that of the slowest man, for there was no limit to such slowness. I myself set a pace, which I knew to be reasonable, and men who straggled interviewed me next day. By this policy the evening's work was completed in two-thirds of the time it would otherwise have taken, and my disregard of proverbial maxims probably ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the great day of the cake-baking he came in earlier than usual, with his hands quite full of letters and parcels. All the girls made a rush for him at once; but he fended them off with an elbow, while with teasing slowness he read the ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... the breeze; and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created any animal to pass an existence of pain. The fact is, that the sloth is formed to live in trees, to climb, and to feed on leaves, and not to walk on the ground. Though ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Lady Martindale, with the slowness of one little wont to originate a scheme, 'how pleasant it would be, if we could keep Arthur and Violet always with us. I cannot bear to part with the dear children, and I am sure they will all be ill again if they go ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at inopportune moments, and greatly to the annoyance of the sufferer. This is sometimes accompanied by a sense of fulness in the head, a giddiness, and dulness of the brain, sometimes going so far as to cause an uncertainty in the step, a slowness of comprehension, and a feeling as if one might fall at any moment in some sort ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild with impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to an end before the campaign; to have forced a confession from the prisoner, and have dishonored King ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to the distant range. Swan's cruelties multiplied with his impatience at her slowness to master the shepherd's art. The dogs were sullen creatures, unused to a woman's voice, unfriendly to a woman's presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman's attire and dress as a man to gain the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... many feet in depth gradually accumulated on the floors of the caverns, slowly filling them up. And that, in some cases at least, this cave residence ended a very long time ago, we are assured, for since then a great thickness of stalagmite, which is deposited with extreme slowness, has spread over the lower cave ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... which come over are rejected as they carry with them traces of water remaining in the salt. The platinum receiver is then attached, and the heat increased, allowing the decomposition to proceed with a certain degree of slowness. The receiver is then surrounded with a mixture of ice and salt, and from this moment all the hydrofluoric acid is condensed as a limpid liquid, boiling at 19.5 deg., very hygroscopic, and, as is well known, giving abundant fumes in presence of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... Stillman, Mrs., sister-in-law of W.J. Stillman, Paul, brother of W.J. Stillman, Russie, son of W.J. his illness his death Stillman, Thomas B., brother of W.J. Stillman, William James early life and training religious experience intellectual slowness love of nature and struggles of conscience runs away from home returns attends school in New York city, living with his eldest brother goes to a school at De Ruyter, N.Y. mental slowness disappears college education decided on by the family continues preparation ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... battle, and repulsed the enemy. The Spaniard, as often as he had done before, so now with great earnestness sent to the duke of Parma, to send forty fly-boats, without which they could not fight with the English, because of the greatness and slowness of their ships, and the agility of the English, entreating him by all means now to come to sea with his army, which army was now to be protected as it were, under the wings of the Spanish Armada, until ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... O di Giotto!" ("Thou art rounder than Giotto's circle"). This proverb can be called beautiful not only from the occasion that gave it birth, but also for its significance, which consists in the double meaning; tondo being used, in Tuscany, both for the perfect shape of a circle and for slowness ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... when she was sitting meditatively in the room set apart for her use, Alton passed the half-opened door, and noticing the curious slowness of his pace she signed him to enter. She had, somewhat to the indignation of Mrs. Margery, taken the room in hand, and with the aid of a few sundries surreptitiously brought from Vancouver with Seaforth's connivance, made a transformation in its aspect. A red ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... with painful slowness, as though suddenly grown old, the reprieved assassin rode away up the mountain, his head low, his ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... to whatever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the question; and some did attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were not idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though considerably ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... added, as showing the slowness of reform, that even when, in 1828, two medical superintendents were appointed at Bethnal Green, no less than seventy, out of four hundred patients, were in irons; there was no bath, no book or newspaper, and little ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... reacted upon PREMIER. He spoke with unusual slowness, further developing tendency of recent growth to drop his voice at end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ride behind. And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be the slowest. Comparative success implies the comparative failure. But where this actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits, obviously. The record is advanced. Pshaw! the word "advanced" comes unadvised to the pen. It is difficult to remember in what a fatuous theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one's ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... The Giant had now pushed off his slippers, and was waiting until the men should bring his boots; and as one lazy fellow was poking around, as if he was half asleep, Tur-il-i-ra was so irritated at his slowness that he slipped the toe of his stockinged foot under him, and gave him a tremendous send right out of the door, and he went flying over the trees at the bottom of the lawn, and over the barley-field on the other side of the ditch, and over the pasture, where the cows were ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... obediently after him and Raven, though he saw in her slowness the hesitating desire to express her distaste for putting any one out, paid no attention but went on ahead ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... who will not tire his horse at the beginning of a long day's journey, and knows not where he shall pass the night, he was aware of a man on foot coming up behind him at a slow, steady, loping, wolf-like trot, which in spite of its slowness gained ground on him so fast, that he saw at once that the man could ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... fallacies of Malobservation. Malobservation may be due to obtuseness or slowness of perception; and it is one advantage of the physical sciences as means of education, that the training involved in studying them tends to cure these defects—at least, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... opportunity to take in all the details of her costume, and he did so with a practised, sophisticated eye. It was, after all, of a fashion two years old, evidence of the slowness with which the modes reached these outposts of civilization. Here was a perfect fitting blue frock of the then popular changeable gros de zane, the skirt very wide, set on the body in large plaits, one in front, one on each side and two behind. The sleeves also were wide from shoulder ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... repulsion, took its place, a look of consciousness of her own high breeding—a pride, not of life, but of circumstance of life, which disappointed me in the midst of so much that was very lovely. Her voice was sweet, and I could have fancied a tinge of sadness in it, to which impression her slowness of speech, without any drawl in it, contributed. But I am not doing well as an artist in describing her so fully before my reader has become in the least degree interested in her. I was seeing her, and no words ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... direction, and as the crowd was then scattering, there appeared in the midst of them, and advancing with the slowness of a phantom, a human being, bent, lean, entirely naked, and covered down to his flanks with long hair bristling with dried leaves, dust and thorns. About his loins and his knees he had wisps of straw and linen rags; his soft ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... mixture of dog and wolf. He was a sleek and lively little fellow from the beginning, for there was no division of mother strength and attention. He developed with the true swiftness of the wolf-whelp, and not with the slowness ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... that Catherine, perspiring under the sultriness of the August evening, thought him the coolest person she had ever seen. He greeted her with gallantry when introduced, and, though he spoke English with slowness, his pronunciation was ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... not with the city, but with the United States. Its postal arrangements are at best erratic, at worst miserable. Letters which would be delivered in London in three or four hours take in New York anywhere from six to sixteen hours. It was a long time before I realised and learned to allow for the slowness of the postal service. At first I used mentally to accuse my correspondents of great dilatoriness in attending to notes that called for an immediate reply. On one occasion I posted in Madison Square at 3 P.M. a letter addressed to the Lyceum Theatre, not a quarter of ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... comply with his sister's wish and to go off at once without delay. He seized his staff and started away, but stopped now and then for his brother-in-law and his suite, to whom he gave a good chiding for their slowness.[FN423] They continued thus their march until they came to the palace of the queen, the ugly king's sister; but when they arrived there the one-eyed king cried with a roaring voice to his sister, and asked her what she wished, as she had ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... speech (says Bacon in his ESSAYS) without a good speech of interlocution, shews slowness; and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, sheweth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course, are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... slowness, steadily. Nevertheless, it was hot work. The sun rose over the bank and shone on him through the limbs of the uprooted tree. His hat was on the ground alongside of him. The sweat ran down his face, streaking ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... like to take it as God gives it to me; not before he gives it to me. This slowness—or faith—or whatever it is, is one of my inheritances from my blessed father. Who is it that says, 'I'd see to it pretty sharp that I didn't hurry Providence.' ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... undertaken. My patience, which nothing exhausts, the fruit of my miserable childhood, ripened under this last trial. The count was delighted when he could jeer at me for not putting in practice the principles or the rules he had explained; if I reflected before I played he complained of my slowness; if I played fast he was angry because I hurried him; if I forgot to mark my points he declared, making his profit out of the mistake, that I was always too rapid. It was like the tyranny of a schoolmaster, the despotism of the rod, of which I can really ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Livingstone acknowledged the kindness of the Directors, with whom, for sixteen years, he had never had a word of difference. He referred to the slowness of the African tribes, in explanation of the comparatively small progress of the gospel among them. He cordially acknowledged the great services of the British squadron on the West Coast in the repressing of the slave-trade. He had been told that to make such explorations as he was engaged ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... now undertaken. But a strange fastidiousness, a most uncharacteristic anxiety about the smallest matters, delayed him through every stage of his present undertaking. Mrs. Peckover, who came every morning to see how he was getting on, was amazed at the slowness of his progress. He was, from the first, morbidly scrupulous in keeping the board smooth and clean. After he had shaped it, and fitted it to its upright supports; after he had cut in it (by Mrs. Peckover's ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... and slowness of the Dutch character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,—finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found in their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the ship's books for a three years' viage, an' no help for it. I feel nigh to six hundred years old when I think how long that viage was. There isn't no hour-glass as runs slow enough to keep a tally of the slowness of them fust hours. But I done my duty like a man, seem' there wasn't no way of gettin' out of it. I told my shipmates of the trick as had been played on me, an they tried to cheer me up a bit; but I was sore sorrowful for ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... slowness he raised his head over the matted underbrush that masked the entrance. For the moment he could see nothing in the pitchy blackness. Then a dim shape loomed to one side. From within it there came a ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... required the same. There he meditated awhile with himself how he might counterplot and bring the bear to disgrace (who he knew loved him not) and himself to honor; at last he came forth, and said, "Dear uncle Bruin, you are exceeding welcome. Pardon my slowness in coming, for at your first speech I was saying my even song, and devotion must not be neglected. Believe me, he hath done you no good service, nor do I thank him which hath sent you this weary and long journey, in which your much sweat and toil far exceeds the worth ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... possess. Besides this, you must remember that a want of quickness and facility in recollection, of ease and distinctness in expression, is quite as likely to arise from desultory and wandering habits of thought as from the slowness referable to deep reflection. Most people find difficulty in forcing their thoughts to concentrate themselves on any given subject, or in afterwards compelling them to take a comprehensive glance of every feature of that subject. Both ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... room but two diners beside himself. These were a man and a woman, who by many little obvious evidences made manifest that they were not husband and wife. They had arrived at the dessert and were eating ice cream with genteel slowness, conversing the while with great decorum. Both were tall and fair, singularly well matched as to height and the ample and shapely proportions of their figures, and both were well, though quietly and even simply, dressed. They were nearly of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... America are not to be compared with Australia. Unfortunately, England doesn't know it. Australia herself doesn't half realise it, and as for America and Canada, they haven't the remotest ghost of a notion of it. In England they learn with regrettable slowness, and their knowledge is scanty indeed; but across the Atlantic the ignorance is deplorable. "Australia?" says the Canadian. "Oh yes! Let's see, that's the place where it's always droughty—yes, yes, to be sure, the place where y' can't get a ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... few stops judiciously through his copy, and having done so began to upbraid his partners for their slowness. ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Such variations multiply, and when various observers of the same event describe it they do it according to their different characteristics. And the differences may be tremendous. Substitute numerals for letters and the thing becomes clear. The relative slowness of our apprehension of visual elements has the other consequence that we interpolate objects in the lacun of vision *according to our expectations. The best example of this sort of thing would be the perception of assault and battery. When ten ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... vault; and as he looked he saw that a patch of paler green had appeared below it. All in a moment he saw too the flying buttress crook itself like an elbow and disappear. Then the vault was gone and the roof beyond; the walls sank with incredible slowness and vanished. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... rough; no gay fish darted Like silver arrows from the quivering wave; But monsters, with thick scales and hideous eyes, Looked sullenly up in stupid wonderment, While some swam to'ards me, with rapacious maws Sharp-fanged and bloody, and exulting fins Flapping with demon slowness their huge sides;— ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... eternal; I only assert that our true being is eternally one with the being of God and that to be separated from a full knowledge of that truth is to have undergone a fall. But this fall has no sinister antecedents; its purpose is good, and there is nothing to mourn over except our own slowness at getting into line with the cosmic purpose. Another way of describing it would be to call it the incarnation of God in nature and man, a subject about which I must say more in another chapter. This view of the meaning ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... to the slowness and overcrowding of the trains. Police search the travellers for evidences of "speculation," especially for food. The police play, altogether, a much greater part in daily life than they do in other countries—much ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... The old stall, with two shelves loaded with books attached to them by chains, and a desk and seat for the use of the reader, was manifestly no longer adequate, when books could be produced by the rapidity of a printing-press, instead of by the slowness of a writer's hand. And yet, as we ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... ineradicable evil had been sown, mischiefs had grown by neglect, abuses been established by custom; and his own personal disadvantages, his mauvaise honte, his reserved, apparently proud manner, his slowness of speech, dislike to interruption, and over-vehemence when excited, had so much increased upon him, as, in spite of his efforts, to be serious hindrances. Kind, liberal, painstaking, and conscientious as he had become, he was still looked upon as hard, stern, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of a man, who was decent and orderly. The occasions of life, however, are often reasons for men going quicker or slower; but in the incorruptible nature of the stars, it is not possible that any cause can be alleged of quickness or slowness." It is seeking an argument of analogy very far, to suppose that the stars must observe the rules of decorum in gait and carriage prescribed for themselves by the long-bearded philosophers satirized ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... principle," said the Colonel, with something of the same slowness of comprehension as his son. "If excuses are to be made for everything, I don't wonder that there is no teaching one's boys truth or common ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gentleman, but she feared that he would never be more. There was nothing imposing about him. He had lifted her out of sordid want, but he would not raise her to the pinnacle of greatness. The bland flat face of Mr. Early and his commanding slowness of movement impressed her imagination much as a great stone image might its votary. Here was indeed the truly illustrious. She devoured every floating newspaper paragraph that concerned Sebastian; for she was still ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... distributors of consolation and of despair! In the agony of waiting, minutes lose their mathematical value, and the hands of the clock become motionless on the dial like impaled serpents. The operations of the office proceed with a slowness that seems like a miniature eternity. This anxious crowd stand in single file, forming a living chain of eager notes of interrogation, and, as fate always reserves the last link for me, I have to witness the filing-off of these ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold by gradual development as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at the sight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds in producing something absolutely new. Being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. No omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at Bayreuth; no one except Wagner knew either the goal or the long ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... course, are waiting for the facts," he presently resumed, speaking with a slowness which told of a mind labouring for the right mode of expression. "These are so scanty, I fear, of so, shall I say, phantom a kind, that even when they are in your possession you will consider me to be merely the victim of a delusion. In the first place, then, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... for the morrow to spring within his bosom, sent his eyes at Master Gammon, who was half an hour behind his time for bed, and had dropped asleep in his chair. This unusual display of public somnolence on Master Gammon's part, together with the veteran's reputation for slowness, made the farmer fret at him as being in some way an obstruction to the lively progress of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... meditating on the propriety, or on the means, of effecting the desired end. He envied their promptitude, while they never saw reason to envy his wisdom; for his conscience, tender and not strong, frequently transformed slowness of determination into irresolution: while a delicacy of the sympathetic nerves tended to distract him from any predetermined course, by the diversity of their vibrations, responsive to influences from all quarters, and destructive to ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... all my seven brothers, awkward heavy Oddity, as usual, in the rear. He had often been laughed at for his slowness, but this time it was well for him that he was slow! On rushed the six foremost, almost together, scrambling one over another in their haste; they disappeared into what looked like a dark hole, and then— alas! ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... slow drift is remarkable in spite of the high winds. If there should be land to the north? I begin more and more to speculate on this possibility. Land to the north would explain at once our not progressing northward, and the slowness of our southward drift. But it may also possibly arise from the fact of the ice being so closely packed together, and frozen so thick and massive. It seems strange to me that there is so much northwest wind, and hardly any from the northeast, though the latter is what the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... slowness caused his removal early in November, Burnside succeeding him. The new commander, who, as the head of the army, was an amiable failure, proposed to move directly against Richmond, but Lee flung himself in his ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Constantine Pavlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the beginning of the campaign but had subsequently been removed from the army by Kutuzov. Now having come to the army, he informed Kutuzov of the Emperor's displeasure at the poor success of our forces and the slowness of their advance. The Emperor intended to join the army personally ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... city and class and class, there is one common characteristic of the Dutchman which, like the mist which envelops meadow and street alike in Holland after a warm day, pertains to the whole race, viz. his deliberation, that slowness of thought, speech, and action which has given rise to such proverbs as 'You will see such and such a thing done "in a Dutch month."' The Netherlander is most difficult to move, but once roused he is far more difficult ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... exhibited the Czar and himself as firmly allied. He perceived clearly that Austria was determined on another campaign; gave orders for concentrating and increasing his own armies, accordingly, both in Germany and Italy; and—trusting to the decision and rapidity of his own movements, and the comparative slowness of his ancient enemy—dared to judge that he might still bring matters to an issue in Spain, before his presence should be absolutely ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... pressure of changed circumstances which make it useless or harmful, unless the man consciously recognises the inutility of the custom and sets himself to root it out and plant another custom in its place. So the slowness of this work of industrial adjustment has been in no small measure due to the lack of definite realisation by the members of modern communities of the need and importance of this adjustment. A society which should bring its conscious will to bear upon the work of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... long next morning, and, dressing with comfortable slowness, noticed with pleasure that the sun was shining. Visions of a good breakfast and a digestive pipe, followed by a walk in the fresh air, passed before his eyes as he laced his boots. Whistling cheerfully ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... night and day, in their despair, upon the ruinous fragments. But the most horrid fate—(a fate too dreadful to conceive or to relate)—was theirs, who, buried alive beneath the fallen edifices, awaited, with an anxious and doubtful hope, the chances of relief—accusing, at first, the slowness, and then the avarice, of their dearest relations and friends; and when they sank under hunger and grief—with their senses and memory beginning to fail them—their last sentiment was that of indignation against their kindred, and hatred of humanity. ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... If endowed with the attributes of humanity, it may seem to them that he would long before that time have achieved civilization. Such persons do not consider the lowliness of his first condition and the extreme slowness with which progress must have gone forward. On this point the geologists and the sociologists agree. Says Mr. Geikie: "The time which has elapsed from the close of the Paleolithic Age, even up to the present day, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... did Mr. Darwin, and we have seen that in the later editions of the "Origin of Species" he found himself constrained to lay greater stress on these than he had originally done. Substantially, Mr. Chambers held much the same opinion as to the suddenness or slowness of modification as Mr. Darwin did, nor can it be doubted that Mr. Darwin knew ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no longer clean ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the letter with quivering features. Then, laying it down on the table with a reverential slowness, went to Euphra, put his arms ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... despair and hurls herself on me. So then Tessie is nearest to me in the whole factory, and Tessie is slow. The faster I pack the more it shows up Tessie's slowness. If Ida scolded Tessie it would break my heart. The thought of the man who owns that factory, and his orders and his profits and his obligations, never enter my or any other packer's head. I will not pack so many boxes that Tessie gets left ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... to Bolbeck, where he established his camp, and was joined by Abaz Pasha, his nephew, at the head of 800 men. But his presence was required in other quarters. Divisions had broken out at several points, and the slowness with which the operations of the siege of Saint Jean d'Acre was carried on had damped the ardour ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... sail a week after the departure of the packet; and that possibly, he may be the bearer of orders from the treasury, to repay Fiseaux' loan, with the money you borrowed. But it is also possible, he may bring no order on the subject. The slowness with which measures are adopted on our side the water, does not permit us to count on punctual answers; but, on the contrary, renders it necessary for us to suppose, in the present case, that no orders will arrive in time, and to consider whether any thing, and what, should be done. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... slowness of communication in those days that, when Congress reassembled at the regular session in November, no decisive news had arrived of the fate of the special mission. Adams with proper prudence thought it would be wise to consider ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... was much consulted in relation to the civic and religious welfare of the community. His conscientious habit of deciding in all things, great and small, upon the absolutely right course of action gave him an air of slowness and hesitation in manner. He would stand listening intently, without comment, to violent arguments for and against a project, turning toward each speaker the frank dark eyes that illumined his pale countenance. When it came to ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... eyes came on, with a strange slowness, and as they came they moved from side to side as if their owner walked unevenly. Nothing could have exceeded the horror with which I awaited their approach,—except my incapacity to escape them. Not for an instant did my glance pass from them,—I could not have shut my eyes for all the gold ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... assistants, his appointed collaborators, who keep and relieve guard, undertaking, in his absence, some observation already in hand, so that no detail may be lost, no incident of the story that unrolls itself sometimes with exasperating slowness beneath the bell-covers of the laboratory or on some bush in the garden. He inspires the whole household with the fire of his own genius, and all those about him are almost as ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... these prizes were matters of secondary interest, the great thing was to get them for ridiculous prices. So the trophies from the auction-rooms now began to inundate the apartment which, at the beginning, he had been furnishing with such desperate slowness. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste, slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is no lisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear as a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are either melodious, ("na," for "not,"—"pu'd," for "pulled,") or as normal ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... this slowness, this sadness, and leisurely mounted his horse. The king pushed on sharply, the lieutenant followed him. At the bridge Louis turned around for the last time. The lieutenant, patient as a god who ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... responded, with some slowness; "you look the same—and you look different. A healthier color, perhaps, sir—and the eye clearer." He grew more confident under Loder's half-humorous, half-insistent gaze. "Now that I look ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of long deep breathing will often put persons to sleep when all other devices fail. The lungs should be filled to their utmost capacity, and then emptied with equal slowness, repeating the respiration about ten times a minute, instead of eighteen or twenty, the natural rate. Those who fall asleep upon first going to bed, and after a few hours awake, and are unable to sleep again, may find relief by getting out of bed, and rubbing the surface of the body with ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... left them with Mr. Hardie; the bills he took to his desk to note them on the back of the receipt. Whilst he was writing this with his usual slowness and precision, poor Dodd's heart overflowed. "It is my children's fortune, ye see: I don't look on a sixpence of it as mine: that it is what made me so particular. It belongs to my little Julia, bless her:—she is a rosebud if ever there was ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... willing to forget many disagreeable things which he has caused me for your sake. The "Flying Dutchman" will go to Uhlig tomorrow. I was unable to send it sooner, because the copying here is done with the most troublesome slowness. It is therefore no fault of mine that this return has been delayed so long, for I have pushed it on every day. The two first pianoforte rehearsals of the "Flying Dutchman" I have already held, and can guarantee a successful performance on February 16th. After ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... answer,' which the Twelve She-deputies returned in to seek. Slim sylph, she has set forth, through the black muddy country: she has much to tell, her poor nerves so flurried; and travels, as indeed to-day on this road all persons do, with extreme slowness. President Mounier has not come, nor the Acceptance pure and simple; though six hours with their events have come; though courier on courier reports that Lafayette is coming. Coming, with war or with peace? It is time that the Chateau also should determine on one thing or ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... all very kind to Mr. Wood, in their own way, but they were a little impatient of his slowness to be sociable, and had, I think, a sort of feeling that the ex-convict ought not only to enjoy evening parties more than other people, but to be just a little more grateful ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Eclectic schools was that of the Carracci, at Bologna, which was founded by LODOVICO CARRACCI (c. 1555-1619), a scholar of Prospero Fontana and Passignano at Florence. In his youth he was nicknamed "the ox," partly from his slowness, but possibly also for his study of long-forgotten methods, by which he arrived at the decision that reform was necessary to counteract the independence of the mannerists. He therefore obtained the assistance of his two ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... a story which doubtless had for its germ a joke regarding the slowness of an errand boy in a friend's household, but which at the same time shows us how rapidly Rembrandt worked. The artist had been carried off to the country to lunch with his friend Jan Six, and as they sat down at the table, Six discovered there ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... rent or investments or pensions would presently be very busy thinking how they were going to get food when the butcher and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only with comparative slowness that the bulk of men would realise that a fabric of confidence and confident assumptions had vanished; that cheques and bank notes and token money and every sort of bond and scrip were worthless, that employers had nothing to pay with, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... tree tops. He remained so long motionless that I thought he was not aware of our approach. But he had heard us. Only it was no part of his orders to make abrupt movements. With infinite caution, with the most considerate slowness, he turned, scowled, and waved us back. It was the care with which he made even so slight a gesture that persuaded me the Germans were as close as the colonel had said. My curiosity concerning them was satisfied. The sentry did not ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... deserves to be considered a good one, not only from the circumstances out of which it arose, but much more for its meaning, which is due to the two-fold significance of the word tondo in Tuscany, that of a perfect circle, and slowness and heaviness of mind. Accordingly the Pope sent for Giotto to Rome, where he received him with great honour, and recognised his worth. He caused him to paint for the tribune of St Peter's five subjects from the life of Christ, and the principal ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... kept up for some years at the cost of much exertion on his part. I have often heard him speak of the wearisome drives of ten miles to or from Croydon or Sydenham—the nearest stations— with an old gardener acting as coachman, who drove with great caution and slowness up and down the many hills. In later years, all regular scientific intercourse with London became, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... length of nose, The excellence of Woman (softer creature) Consisted in the shortness of that feature. Few arguments were wanted to convince The already more than half persuaded Prince; Truths, which we hate, with slowness we receive, But what we wish ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... MacDonald's warning, he kept his pistol in his hand. The moon was just beginning to rise over the shoulder of a mountain, and after a little it lighted up the more open spaces ahead of him. Now and then he paused, and turned to listen. As he progressed with slowness and caution, his mind worked swiftly. He knew that Donald MacDonald was the last man in the world to write such a message as he had sent him through Blackton unless there had been a tremendous reason for it. But why, he asked himself again and again, should Culver Rann want to kill him? Rann knew ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the gift of not being able to classify the people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister's attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole situation ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... decomposition with extreme slowness, as is at once illustrated by the fact that its shining scales may frequently be met with entirely unchanged in the soil. Its persistence is dependent on the small quantity of alkaline constituents which ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... recovering himself is by increased deliberation. He must pause, and give himself time to think;—"ut tamen deliberare non haesitare videatur." He need not be alarmed lest his hearers suspect the difficulty. Most of them are likely to attribute the slowness of his step to any cause rather than the true one. They take it for granted, that he says and does precisely as he intended and wished. They suppose that he is pausing to gather up his strength. It excites their attention. ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... times more favourable to mankind than to think them blind to the beauties of his works, and imputed the slowness of their sale to other causes; either they were published at a time when the town was empty, or when the attention of the publick was engrossed by some struggle in the parliament, or some other object of general concern; or they were, by the neglect of the publisher, not diligently ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... "Hearty Cow," was kept by people who were new to him—"foreigners, from up-country." The fat landlord complained to Seymour of the slowness of the Clinton people, that they never could be induced to see things to their own proper advantage. "A dead-alive place I call it," he said; "but still, mind you," he added, "it's got a sort ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole |
