"Undistinguishable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... us the veritable notchings of Robinson Crusoe on his stick, the indubitable records of a life long since swallowed up in the blackness of darkness, traced by a hand the very dust of which has become undistinguishable. The foolishest egotist who ever chronicled his daily experiences, his hopes and fears, poor plans and vain reachings after happiness, speaking to us out of the Past, and thereby giving us to understand that it ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... housetops since the firing ceased had changed suddenly into hand-clappings, and the cries, though still undistinguishable, were of a different sound. Clay saw that the Americans on the balconies of the club and of the theatre had thrown themselves far over the railings and were all looking in the same direction and waving their hats and cheering loudly, and he heard above the shouts of the people the regular ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... human body. From that point of view Agni, like other powers, rose to the rank of a Supreme God.[222] He is said to have stretched out heaven and earth—naturally, because without his light heaven and earth would have been invisible and undistinguishable. The next poet says that Agni held heaven aloft by his light, that he kept the two worlds asunder; and in the end Agni is said to be the progenitor and father of heaven and earth, and the maker of all that flies, or walks, or stands, or ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... line. His men found the same difficulty that is mentioned in reports of other commanders, of distinguishing the enemy except when close at hand, or in motion. Their uniform, of the same color with the dead leaves of dense scrub-oak, uniforms and foliage at a short distance were undistinguishable. McArthur drew his brigade back out of the contest, halted, and obtained ammunition and rations. His men, who had fasted thirty-six hours, had one good meal before they moved toward night to the extreme left, in support of the troops ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... out her head, her mouth stuffed with Banbury cakes, adding her shrill affetuoso—whilst the odd-looking man in the white hat, seated behind, is blue from terror, and with chattering teeth, mumbles undistinguishable sentences of furious driving and prosecution. Surely such moments half redeem our miseries! What bitter thought can travel ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... as, for instance, the mammary gland, in preparation for lactation, and you will find massing columns and nests of cells pushing out into the surrounding tissue in all directions, in a way that is absolutely undistinguishable in its earlier stages from the formation of cancer. It is a fact of gruesome significance that the two organs—the mammary gland and the uterus—in which this process habitually takes place in adult life are the two most fatally liable to the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... convulsions of laughter and spasms of terror at the portentous female figure, who, with a stick in her hand, a man's hat on her head, and a coachman's box-coat of drab cloth with manifold capes over her petticoats (English women had not yet then adopted a costume undistinguishable from that of the other sex), stalked about the house and grounds, alternately superintending various matters of the domestic economy, and discussing, with equal knowledge and discrimination, questions of musical criticism ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... The poetic interpolations are introduced merely to show the general spirit of her conversation. They take the place of her sighs, which are by their nature unprintable. Many times each day she is wont to sink into one low chair, and, extending her feet in another, close her eyes and murmur undistinguishable plaints which come to us in a kind of rhythmic way. She has such a shaking right hand we have been obliged to give up coffee and have tea, as the former beverage became too unsettled on its journey from the kitchen to the breakfast-table. She ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... miles—flat, sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour. This tract is almost without trace of habitation, save where, at distant intervals, utter destitution has raised a mud-hovel, undistinguishable from the hillocks of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned with its spray, and then we look again for it, and where is {119} it? It has sunk again into the undistinguishable level of the sea. ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... we were talking about," said Mrs. Travers, altering slowly her position so as to confront d'Alcacer whose face was almost undistinguishable. "Oh, well, then, we talked about opera, the realities and illusions of the stage, of dresses, of people's names, and ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... manufacturing towns are apt to grow petty Plutocracies, in which after wealth, ignorance and assumption are the principal qualifications. Brass turns up its nose at iron, and both look down upon tin, although half an hour in the world's fire make all so black as to be undistinguishable. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... these Marseillese remain inarticulate, undistinguishable in feature; a blackbrowed Mass, full of grim fire, who wend there, in the hot sultry weather: very singular to contemplate. They wend; amid the infinitude of doubt and dim peril; they not doubtful: Fate and Feudal Europe, having decided, come girdling in from without: they, having ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... an external door in their immediate neighbourhood reached Elfride's ears. It came from the further side of the wing containing the illuminated room. She then discerned, by the aid of the dusky departing light, a figure, whose sex was undistinguishable, walking down the gravelled path by the parterre towards the river. The figure grew fainter, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... view of the famed fort and palace of Beejaghur is very singular, planted on the summit of an isolated hill of sandstone, about ten miles off. A large tree by the palace marks its site; for, at this distance, the buildings are themselves undistinguishable. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... visitors, to be alone once more, so as to think out the epilogue of this glorious adventure. Ten thousand francs was the reward offered me by this adorable creature! Well, then, why should not M. Charles Saurez, on his side, pay me another ten thousand for the same document, which was absolutely undistinguishable from the first? ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... table, drew across it a fast and furious bow. Master Pory, arrived at the maudlin stage, alternately sang a slow and melancholy ditty and wiped the tears from his eyes with elaborate care. Master Edward Sharpless, now in a high voice, now in an undistinguishable murmur, argued some imaginary case. Peaceable Sherwood was drunk, and Giles Allen, and Pettiplace Clause. Captain John Martin, sitting with outstretched legs, called now for a fresh tankard, which he emptied at a gulp; now for his pistols, which, as fast as my lord's servants brought them ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... heavy with vapours and odours that had no chance at any time to feel the purification of a draught of free air. Poor cookery, soapsuds, unclean humanity and dirty still life, mingled their various smell in one heavy undistinguishable oppression. ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... increasing to the breadth of half a mile with many rapids between the rocky islands. The banks were luxuriantly clothed with pines, poplars, and birch trees, of the largest size, but the different shades of green were undistinguishable at a distance and the glow of autumnal colours was wanting to render the ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... ourselves against its jagged sides, until our leader suddenly came to a dead halt. I was next to him, and coming up as close as I could, I found that one step further would have precipitated the adventurous guide into an abyss, the bottom and sides of which were undistinguishable; after gazing for a moment into this apparently insurmountable obstacle to our further progress, I could just perceive a narrow ledge about sixteen feet below me, that the eye could trace for a few yards only, beyond which it was lost in the deep gloom surrounding us. Our conductor had ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... the ferryman to his duty. He hastens to his bark on the sea-shore, and has no sooner launched it than he perceives its hull sink sensibly in the water, so as to express the weight of the dead with whom it is filled. No form is seen, and though voices are heard, yet the accents are undistinguishable, as of one who speaks in his sleep. Thus he traverses the strait between the continent and the island, impressed with the mysterious awe which affects the living when they are conscious of the presence of the dead. They arrive upon the opposite coast, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... nine-men's morris is filled up with mud; And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, For lack of tread, are undistinguishable." ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the slightest obstacle to its fearful progress. In one place lay a disembowelled steed panting its last; mangled in a confused and unintelligible mass lay beside him another, the limbs of his rider in many places undistinguishable from his own. One poor wretch, whom he assisted to extricate from beneath the body of his struggling horse, cried to him for water, and died in the prayer. Fortunately for the few who survived the catastrophe—among ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... the poor German baker, about whom I have hitherto said nothing, except to note that he was one of the crew. That awful blow put an end summarily to all his earthly anxieties. As it shore obliquely through the centre of the boat, it drove his poor body right through her timbers—an undistinguishable bundle of what was an instant before a human being. The other members of the crew escaped the blow, and the harpooner managed to cut the line, so that for the present they were safe enough, clinging to the ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... wayward and morbid irritability of his boyish pride; but the high spirit, the generous love of independence, the scorn of mercenary calculation, were strong as ever; these were in the grain of his nature. In common with all who in youth aspire to be one day noted from the "undistinguishable many," Lionel had formed to himself a certain ideal standard, above the ordinary level of what the world is contented to call honest, or esteem clever. He admitted into his estimate of life the heroic element, not undesirable even in the most practical point of view, for the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Now it was on the pillow, she felt its heart beat against her hand,—it was trembling; its hairs bristled up, and the howl changed into a shrill bark of terror and wrath. Alarmed, she looked round; quickly between her and that ray from the crevice a shapeless darkness passed, and was gone, so undistinguishable, so without outline, that it had no likeness of any living form; like a cloud, like a thought, like an omen, it came ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be the flexuous stem of a creeping plant endowed with life and threading its way amongst the leaves and branches. This animated liana turned out to be a pale-green snake, the Dryophis fulgida. Its whole body is of the same green hue, and it is thus rendered undistinguishable amidst the foliage of the Guajara bushes, where it prowls in search of its prey— treefrogs and lizards. The forepart of its head is prolonged into a slender pointed beak, and the total length of the reptile was six feet. There was another kind found amongst bushes on the borders of the forest ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... sofas, a few chairs, a small table, and three or four indifferent prints, which we have ample time to study. For company, we see a stray New York or Philadelphia family, a superannuated Mexican who smiles and bows to everybody, and some dozen of those undistinguishable individuals whom we class together as Yankees, and who, taking the map from Maine to Georgia, might as well come from one place as another, the Southerner being as like the Northerner as a dried pea ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... bearers, that I would rather leave my body with our dead comrades in the rocks than to leave behind any of our wounded men. But we had proceeded but a short distance when the lines crumbled and became mixed up, in fact, an undistinguishable mob. Under these circumstances, and relying on undisciplined troops, our position was critical in the extreme. One shot would have precipitated a stampede. Wheaton, Ross and Miller were somewhere mixed up ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... dark nor fair, short nor tall; amongst a crowd of other women, she seemed undistinguishable by any special gifts; yet when you had realized her there was no other woman in the room. She had the eyes of an angel, only they were generally veiled; she had the figure of a miniature Venus, soft and with delicate curves, which seemed somehow to be always ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... low-roofed building with small arched windows, through which the sun's rays streamed upon a plain tablet on the opposite wall, which had once recorded names, now as undistinguishable on its worn surface, as were the bones beneath, from the dust into which they had resolved. The impressive service of the Church of England was spoken—not merely READ—by a grey- headed minister, and ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... and hills and trees among which he toiled. Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior. He had about him none of the highlights and sharp points of the city man. He seemed to blend in with the background of nature so as to be almost undistinguishable from it, as were the furred and feathered creatures. This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance are ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable, the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... molecule of matter? Is such a thing even conceivable? If we answer these questions in the negative, it follows that volition may be a sign, but cannot be a cause, of bodily motion. If we answer them in the affirmative, then states of consciousness become undistinguishable from material things; for it is the essential nature of matter to be the vehicle ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the right to be a gentleman, the costumes and badges of trade are studiously avoided. Even the tailor is undistinguishable in the mass of his "fellow-citizens." The land of character-dresses lies farther to the south-west—Mexico ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... appear A mighty prince to his last dying hour? Well now, what then? Duke Friedland is as others, A fire-new noble, whom the war hath raised To price and currency, a Jonah's gourd, An over-night creation of court-favor, Which, with an undistinguishable ease, Makes ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... from the wood into the highroad when a buggy dashed past him, containing a man and a woman. The woman wore a thick veil; the man was almost undistinguishable from dust. The glimpse was momentary, but dislike has a keen eye, and in that glimpse Mr. Hamlin recognized Van Loo. The situation was equally clear. The bent heads and averted faces, the dust collected in the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Egyptian style, now darker and more sombre in the gloom of evening and the shadows of surrounding trees. The door was open. As they entered, two figures advanced from the shadows of the trees. One of these wore a white surplice; the other was undistinguishable in the gloom, save that his stature was that of ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... not upon the mass of undistinguishable tree-tops or the line they made against the sky that his gaze lingered. It was on something more material; something which rose from the brow of the hill in stark and curious outline not explainable in itself, but clear enough to one ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the National Gallery. I came away with a reeling undistinguishable mass of form and colour before my eyes. I felt sick. Only one single picture stood out clear. Paragot talked Italian art to my uncomprehending ears all the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... faint outline of the part obscured Thread-like curved visible from horn to horn,— And Jupiter, supreme among the orbs, And Mars, with rutilating beam, came forth, And the great concave opened like a flower, Unfolding firmaments and galaxies, Sparkling with separate stars, or snowy white With undistinguishable suns beyond,— They paused and rested on their oars again, And looked around,—in adoration looked. For, gazing on the inconceivable, They felt God is, though inconceivable;— And, while they mutely worshipped, suddenly A change came ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... or more across the moor to his habitation, and the black expanse lay before him, disappearing dismally in the darkness. So that, looking straight before him, sky and land blended together in an undistinguishable and awful blank. ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... God and man. You are, Sir, a presumptuous, self-conceited pedagogue, a stirrer up of strife and commotion in church, in state, in families, and communities. You are one, Sir, whose righteousness consists in splitting the doctrines of Calvin into thousands of undistinguishable films, and in setting up a system of justifying-grace against all breaches of all laws, moral or divine. In short, Sir, you are a mildew—a canker-worm in the bosom of the Reformed Church, generating a disease of which she will never be purged, but ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... of a brother who had fallen at his father's side. The young officer fainted at the sight. The two skeletons were buried together, covered with a Highland plaid, and the Pennsylvanian woodsmen fired a volley over the grave. The rest of the bones were undistinguishable; and, being carefully gathered up, they were all interred in a deep trench ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... unopened cologne bottle, its kid cover cracked and yellow under its faded ribbons, and three small photographs: Blair, a baby in a white dress; a little boy with long trousers and a visored cap; a big boy of twelve with a wooden gun. They were brown with time, and the figures were almost undistinguishable, but Blair recognized them,—and again his ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... which it was death to put one's head, the grey free sky, the only thing free along that awful row of parallel ditches that stretched from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, the clay-covered, shapeless figures of men, their fellows, almost undistinguishable even by ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the same mind, for Rob was never happy out of sight of Jock. Johnny worshipped his aunt, and Joe was gregarious, so there was generally an accompanying rabble of six or seven boys, undistinguishable by outsiders, though very individual indeed in themselves and adding a considerable element of noise, high spirits, and mischievous enterprise. The man in the velvet coat, whose proper name was Orlando Hughes, was as much of ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the chateau, lion and human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming perhaps of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... his first metaphysical inquiries by a feeling contemplation of outward phenomena. Now, in the material world, when individual forms perish, each sensible component relapses into its original element and becomes an undistinguishable portion of it. Our exhaled breath goes into the general air and is united with it: the dust of our decaying frames becomes part of the ground and vegetation. So, it is strongly suggested, the lives of things, the souls of men, when they disappear from ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... My mother's anxiety would not allow her to remain where she was. She rose, and seated herself at the window. She strained her sight to get a view of the dome, and of the path that led to it. The first painted itself with sufficient distinctness on her fancy, but was undistinguishable by the eye from the rocky mass on which it was erected. The second could be imperfectly seen; but her husband had already passed, or had taken ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... I see by the scope of this same letter of yours that the records of The Garden, You, and I, instead of being a confection of undistinguishable ingredients blended by a chef of artistic soul, will be a home-made strawberry shortcake, for which I am to furnish the necessary but uninspired crust, while you will supply the filling ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... traversing "the lonely heath, with the stream murmuring hoarsely, the old trees groaning in the wind, the troubled lake," and the still more troubled sisters. As may be supposed, she very soon grew weary of the walk. The bleak wind pierced her to the soul; her silk slippers and lace flounces became undistinguishable masses of mud; her dogs chased the sheep, and were, in their turn, pursued by the "nowts," as the ladies termed the steers. One sister expatiated on the great blessing of having a peat moss at their door; another was at pains to point out the purposed site ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier |
