"Unimaginable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Minnie—why, suppose Minnie had favoured his suit, he would have been son-in-law of a peer! As it was, whom might not the girl marry! She would pass from the neighbourhood of Battersea Park Road to a house in Mayfair or Belgravia; from Doulton's and the china shop to unimaginable heights of social dignity. And who more fit for the new sphere? Mr. Gammon sighed, but in a moment remembered ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... rod, and, after a few remarks about the fish, which ought not to be set out in print, said in a meditative way, "I wonder what would happen if there were no dramatic critics." To which came the reply, that there would be no performances, since performances without an audience are almost unimaginable, and every spectator acts to some extent as ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... with eating, as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor. Then, he thought, how soon he'd turn his back upon the old schoolhouse; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... our flag. There are times when this seems but a poor nation: boastful, corrupt, violent, and preparing, as it is now, to steal another country by fraud and war; yet the stars on the flag always make me happy and confident. Do you see the constellations swinging above us, such unimaginable vastnesses, not roving or crashing through the illimitable at haphazard, but moving in more excellent measure, and to a finer rhythm, than the most delicate clockwork man ever made? The great ocean-lines mark our seas with their paths through the water; the fine brains of the earth are behind ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the transgressions of all men in general! At that moment, my heart seemed wholly changed into love for Him who had shown me this signal mercy, and it was filled at the same time with indescribable, and even unimaginable sorrow for having offended Him. This feeling of loving sorrow was so overpowering, that I would willingly have thrown myself into flames, if thus I could have appeased it, and strangest of all, its force was full of gentleness. It sweetly bound my soul by its very ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... If I could but describe her! Languorous, slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were /her/ lover, my boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and sudden, how hostile, how ecstatic, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... West under these new conditions was an unthinkable thing. There had been no European war within living memory, and the Eastern wars of the last century had been under the old conditions. Now, if tales were true, entire towns would be destroyed with a single shell. The new conditions were unimaginable. Military experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no precedents with which to compare it. It was as ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... consciousness: and this was the fatal journal of the interval—interval so long as measured by my fierce calendar of delirium—so brief measured by the huge circuit of events which it embraced, and their mightiness for evil. Wrath, wrath immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like a cancer. The worst had come. And the thing which kills a man for action—the living in two climates at once—a torrid and a frigid zone—of hope and fear—that was past. Weak—suppose I were for the moment: I felt that a day or ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... like unimaginable riches. There were moments in which he had counterpart thoughts for hers in his own mind; as if she spoke from another lobe of his own brain. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement in process, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... hall, temple within temple, new splendours opening at every step! of all the creations of luxurious art, the Museum of the Vatican may alone defy any description to do it justice, or any fancy to conceive the unimaginable variety of its treasures. When I remember that the French had the audacious and sacrilegious vanity to snatch from these glorious sanctuaries the finest specimens of art, and hide them in their villanous old ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... unimaginable disaster. She had never dreamt that Marian, the still, gentle Marian, could be driven to revolt. And it had come with the suddenness of a thunderclap. She wished to ask what had taken place between father and daughter in the brief interview before dinner; but Marian ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days and nights, and to those who have not I believe it must be unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water from its prolonged agitation is beaten not into mere creaming foam but into masses of accumulated yeast which hang in ropes and wreaths from ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... reproduction of minute detail and local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too often hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there. Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that egotism and selfishness are forced ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... "hopeless for many people even to try to get through Pickwick" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough, and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it "describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of society" that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus. What he gives is full of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... him. After the prince was slain, all the gold, obtained in consequence of the Rishi's boon, disappeared. The ignorant and senseless robbers struck one another. And striking one another thus, they perished and with them that wonderful prince on the earth. And those men of wicked deeds sank in an unimaginable and awful hell. Seeing that son of his, obtained through the Rishi's boon thus slain, that great ascetic, viz., king Srinjaya, afflicted with deep sorrow, began to lament in piteous accents. Beholding the king afflicted with grief on account of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... product of a really mighty brain, a brain re-enforced by the many perverted but powerful intellects which Roger had won over to his cause. It was powered by the incalculable force of cosmic radiation, powered to drive its unimaginable mass through space, against any possible attractions, for an indefinite number of years. It was armed and equipped to meet any emergency which Roger's coldly analytical mind had been able ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... from each battalion of the division found them. The first impression was: "What a contrast with Havrincourt!" It was the exact antithesis in every respect. This was a country where the desire to kill and destroy had developed to an unimaginable intensity. Nothing of use was to be left by either side, and every yard of ground almost was searched by the gunners to carry ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are they overwhelmed by a sense of his littleness and insignificance! They see the earth which he inhabits dwindle to a speck in the unimaginable infinities of space, and the brief span of his existence shrink into a moment in the inconceivable infinities of time. And they ask, Shall a creature so puny and frail claim to live for ever, to outlast not only the present starry system but every other that, when earth and sun and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of a divan. If by chance your apartment is in disorder, you ought to have sufficient discernment to know that there is only one place in which a man could bestow himself. Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made himself so small that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for we may expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to look in an exactly opposite direction, and then nothing is easier for a husband than ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... was no longer a moving power in man, but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to slash and burn the world with a history of unimaginable horror. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... wants absolute equality, friend Jonathan, for it is as undesirable as it is unimaginable. What Socialism wants is equality of opportunity merely. No Socialist wants to pull down the strong to the level of the weak, the wise to the level of the less wise. Socialism does not imply pulling anybody down. It ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... he said gently. "All those months and months, when you were at an unimaginable distance from me, actually and morally, - and prospectively, - do you think I had no chance to exercise myself in the lesson of submission? I fought ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... length, she stood for a second or two to gather her strength. She still felt ill and dizzy, as though the world she knew had suddenly fallen away from her and left her struggling in unimaginable space, like a swimmer in deep waters. But she conquered her weakness, and, drawing aside the tent-flap once more, she ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... awestruck whisper, as her eyes travelled over immense spaces; for she thought that the desert might have dropped out of the sun. The colour of sand and sky was colour on fire, blazing. The whole Sahara throbbed with the unimaginable fire of creative cosmic force, deep, vital orange, needed by the primitive peoples of the earth who had not risen high enough yet to deserve ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the jockey-boy, and the artist are exactly alike; they are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... traversal.(6) The harmonic properties of poles and polars are given, but Desargues seems not to have arrived at the metrical properties which result when the infinite elements of the plane are introduced. Thus he says, "When the traversal is at an infinite distance, all is unimaginable." ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... reasons I am not going into this beautiful summer morning, with fish waiting to be caught, we are liable to be landed in foreign waters with all Europe as our enemy and our second-rate statesmen at home pleading for a new Constitution— which would mean a new United States and unimaginable and interminable difficulties. Have I said enough to make you understand why I think we owe a higher duty to a country that should and could be greater than it is, than even to two hundred thousand ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... hair grow, never to cut or even to comb it till this feat were done, and the peerless Gyda his own. He proceeded accordingly to conquer, in fierce battle, a Jarl or two every year, and, at the end of twelve years, had his unkempt (and almost unimaginable) head of hair clipt off,—Jarl Rognwald (Reginald) of More, the most valued and valuable of all his subject-jarls, being promoted to this sublime barber function;—after which King Harald, with ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... pleasure, to examine its diversified splendors, and penetrate its chasms and gorges, otherwise inaccessible to man. But to describe them is impossible. Broad fields of sparkling snow, pyramids of ice, wide fissures shining like steel mirrors,—produced by some unimaginable convulsion, possibly a thousand or ten thousand years ago, and large enough to ingulf a city,—with black humps or spires of granite here and there projecting through the white; while afar down the rocky sides of interminable swells and precipices came up a sound ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Every morning, wet or fine, crowds of picturesque peasants would gather about the little side door of our hospital, women in blazing coloured hand-woven skirts, like Joseph's coat, children in unimaginable rags, but with the inevitable belt tightly bound about their little stomachs, men covered with tuberculous sores and so forth, on some days as many as a hundred. Jo, having finished breakfast, had then to assume a commanding air, and to stamp down the ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... to say the new medicine relieved her at once. A crape has been removed from the day for all of us. To make things better, the morning is ah! such a morning as you have never seen; heaven upon earth for sweetness, freshness, depth upon depth of unimaginable colour, and a huge silence broken at this moment only by the far-away murmur of the Pacific and the rich piping of a single bird. You can't conceive what a relief this is; it seems a new world. She has such extraordinary ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... better instance of this than the passage in the second Book of the Excursion, where he describes with a fidelity, at once realistic and poetic, the worn-out almsman, his patient life and sorry death, and then the unimaginable vision in the skies, as they brought the ancient man down through dull mists from the mountain ridge to die. These hundred and seventy lines are like the landscape in which they were composed; you can no more appreciate the beauty of the one ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... too, none of them dared to come nearer than the distance of a few steps. Every time the long whip, our weapon against snakes, alighted on the back of one of them, the whole horde disappeared with unimaginable noise. Nevertheless, the drivers did not dispense with a single one of their superstitious precautions against tigers. They chanted mantrams in unison, spread betel over the road as a token of their respect to the Rajas of the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... from that sick room, and the anticipated stir of that lovely form into conscious life and suffering. Her eyes—I could see her eyes wakening upon the world again, after her long wandering in the unknown and unimaginable intricacies of ungoverned thought and delirious suggestion. Eyes of violet colour and infinite expression; eyes which would make a man's joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Colossal oil-tanks, painted red, disfigure the shore. Each tank holds 4,000 tons of oil, 30,000 tons per month being the usual export. Kerosene taints the air, but is considered to be innocuous, and to drive away the curse of mosquitos. The unimaginable and ferocious heat makes every step a terror, during a snail's progress up a wooded road. Sun-hat and white umbrella scarcely mitigate the scorching rays on this perilous promenade, but there is only a day at disposal, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... steps which even we who are still so near the bottom of the golden ladder may see rising above us, so that we may report them to those who have not seen as yet, in order that they too may open their eyes to the unimaginable splendour which surrounds them here and now in this dull daily life. This is part of the gospel of Theosophy—the certainty of this sublime future for all. It is certain because it is here already, because to inherit it we have only to fit ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... the rivers of hell, for whom the daughters of Ocean are ministers, to whose primeval birth the gods of Olympus are the upstarts of a day, whose soul is the treasure-house of a secret which threatens the realm of heaven, and for whose unimaginable doom earth reels to its base, all the might of divinity is put forth, and Hades itself trembles as it receives its indomitable and awful guest! Yet, as I have before intimated, it is the very grandeur of Aeschylus that ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... He hated to admit it, but he was afraid of her, not so much of falling in love with her and going through tragedy, which was probably what it would come to, as of the terrible force so skillfully hidden in that white and delicate body, of a powerful personality fortified by an unimaginable past. She gave the impression of a woman who had been at grips with life and conquered it, from first to last. Formidable creature! An extraordinary achievement if true. But was it? Women, no matter how beautiful, wealthy, highly placed and powerfully ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Valencia pumpkins, &c., which they had for dessert, were the only things that gave them unmixed satisfaction. With anything but pleasure they made the discovery that the chief ingredient of Majorcan cookery, an ingredient appearing in all imaginable and unimaginable guises and disguises, was pork. Fowl was all skin and bones, fish dry and tasteless, sugar of so bad a quality that it made them sick, and butter could not be procured at all. Indeed, they found it difficult to get anything of any kind. On account of their non-attendance ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... will be a very short time before she turns her attention to the United States. If you could meet the refugees from Belgium flocking into England and have the opportunity of checking their statements of unimaginable atrocities and barbarities studiously committed, you would, I am sure, think as seriously on these matters as we do, and in your unpreparedness for modern war you would do well to think very seriously ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty; I say that much and I have said all ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... great space of earth and sky. The sky, from the eastern horizon to the zenith—and that was all that Dave Patton had eyes for—was filled with a celestial rabble of rose-pink vapours, thin aerial wisps of almost unimaginable colour. Except the horizon! The horizon, just where the magic portals of the trail revealed it, was an unfathomable radiance of intense, transparent, orange-crimson flame, so thrilling in its strangeness that Dave seemed to feel his spirit striving to draw it in as his lungs were drawing ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... had gained wonderfully in richness. Yet it was with difficulty that she commanded utterance, and her agitation touched him in a way quite other than he was prepared for. In truth, he knew not what experience he had anticipated, but the reality, now that it came, this unimaginable blending of memory with the unfamiliar, this refinement of something that he had loved, this note of pity struck within him by such subtle means, affected his inmost self. Immediately he laid stern control upon his feelings, but all the words which he had designed to speak ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... to live under a roof and suddenly condemned to live in the open suffers nothing for the first few hours. Then there gradually comes upon him a weariness and distress almost unimaginable to those who have not experienced it. He craves not only for a roof but for walls around him to protect him from the great open spaces that seem sucking away his individuality. A man living absolutely in the open without tent or cave or house wherein to ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... expiate our transgressions. Mystery of mysteries before which we stand appalled and lost in wonder. Self-styled rationalists love to point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all the unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any special interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, inhabiting such an infinitesimal speck of matter as the earth, which depends for its very life and light upon a second or third-rate ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... whose spirits rose with eating, as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendour. Then he, thought, how soon he'd turn his back upon the old school-house; snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... repudiating some injudicious and hazardous pacificist considerations put forth by Novikov, the distinguished French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, points out that law has no rights against war save in force, on which war itself bases its rights. "Force in abstracto creates right. It is quite unimaginable that a right should exist which has not been affirmed at some moment as a reality, that is to say a force.... What we glorify under the name of right is only a more intense and habitual state of force which we oppose to a less frequent form of force."[234] The old Quaker and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... ears, as we approached, a certain wailing melody, thin, quavering, distant, weird. As it rose upon the hot afternoon air it seemed absolutely strange, unimaginable, impossible. The spine of each ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of forage on their heads—melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... seamen, who declared that the plan was feasible in every particular, that it is hard to think they could all have been mistaken in thus supporting the leading engineer of the day. It may easily be supposed that every other imaginable and unimaginable objection was raised, but to one and all Eads gave an ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... boats. But the interior of the typical submarine may be imagined as in size and shape something like an unusually long street car. Along the sides, where seats would normally be, are packed wheels, cylinders, motors, pumps, machinery of all imaginable kinds and some of it utterly unimaginable to the lay observer. The whole interior is painted white and bathed in electric light. The casual visitor from "above seas" is dazed by the array of machinery and shrinks as he walks the narrow aisle lest ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... received them into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning. The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with the clearness of yellow consomme, but ahead it stood thick, like a puree of bad vegetables. They passed through Belgravia, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... blackness beneath. What they would do next was answered by a blaze of light, revealing the silhouette of a man, engaged in touching flame to a torch of hemp. It flung forth a dull yellow glare, and revealed a scene of unimaginable horror. Our assailants were massed half way back, so blended together I could not judge their number, many between us and the light with faces darkened by shadow. Between us, even ten feet from the stairs, the deck was littered with bodies, ghastly faces ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... intolerable nausea would begin. She was calm now, until she made the attempt to think what it was that had so prostrated her, and then the anguish spread through her being and convulsed her with unimaginable distress ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... Fairfax! Nobody had conjectured that she and Mrs. Leighton were the same person. It was unimaginable that a dressmaker should have had near ancestors in the peerage. It was more than a year and a half since she left the town. Mrs. Carter was able to say that not a single letter had been addressed to her, and she ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... was empty. He then began gradually to unwind his huge woollen comforter, and when he thought himself unobserved, he stole the encumbrance into his ample coat-pocket. He next proceeded to toss about, with a careless abstraction, the large masses of cold fowl and ham in his plate, and, by some unimaginable process, without the use of his knife he contrived to separate them into edible pieces. They disappeared rapidly, and the plate was almost as soon ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... "Five-storied Pagoda" which flames in red at one of its angles, is a striking feature in the view. As we sat on stone seats by stone tables in what might be called its shadow, under the cloudless heaven, with the pure Orientalism of the Tartar city spread out at our feet, that unimaginable Orientalism which takes one captive at once, and, like the first sight of a palm or a banana, satisfies a longing of which one had not previously been conscious, a mundane disappointment was severely felt. We had been, as the Americans say, "exercising" for five hours ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... he kissed her. He kissed her again and again, with light kisses brushing her face for its sweetness, with quick, hard kisses that hurt, with slow, deep kisses that stayed where they fell; kisses remembered and unremembered, longed for, imagined and unimaginable. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... prodigious, colossal, Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, Bunyanesque, Herculean, Gargantuan; infinite &c 105. large as life; plump as a dumpling, plump as a partridge; fat as a pig, fat as a quail, fat as butter, fat as brawn, fat as bacon. immeasurable, unfathomable, unplumbed; inconceivable, unimaginable, unheard-of. of cosmic proportions; of epic proportions, the mother of all, teh granddaddy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Child himself has answered; but for Ben-Hur there were only the words of Balthasar, "On the earth, yet not of it—not for men, but for their souls—a dominion, nevertheless, of unimaginable glory." ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased And still increasing lights! what are ye? What Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, wherein ye roll along as I have seen The leaves along the limpid streams ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... warp and woof. I stumble and flounder, but I know that over all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very high, beautiful things—the reality. I haven't got it, but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses. I've never seen the goddesses nor ever shall—but it takes all the fun out of the mud—and at times I fear it ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In 1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates "the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect." And in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of the queen mother, "this miserable old queen," as Lilly calls ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... tinged with splendors compared with which the gilding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold. Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent ranks of many-colored drooping silken pennons. What seemed to be either fruits or flowers, pied with a thousand hues lustrous and ever varying, bubbled from the crowns ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... rapacious, and insubordinate became their temper. Well knowing the greatness of the peril, and that the very best of his captains had scarcely the will, if they had the power, to restrain the license that soon became barbarity unimaginable, he spoke sadly overnight of his dread of the day of surrender, when it might prove impossible to prevent deeds that would be not merely a blot on his scutcheon, but a shame to human nature; looking back to the exultation with which ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than those which obtain here, for there man is destitute of his bodily environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable, wholly unimaginable, but not inconceivable. These are high matters, like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an image or representation of a bodiless existence ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... happen that through his control of elemental forces and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the better accomplishment of her apparent ends,—that, though unimaginable now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic motions,—chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is discernible in ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... pictorial drama, suggesting, hinting, revealing an inside world of Spirit and Will; that every slightest fragment of the seen is big with significance as a revelation of an unseen realm, which again is an egress from the unimaginable Splendour of God. He believes, like Paracelsus, that everything in Nature—plants, metals, and stars—"can be fundamentally searched out and comprehended" by the inward way of approach, can be read like an open book by the children of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the past, which he idealises. And, as we have seen, even the creative artist cannot escape from the fascination of this ever-changing environment, where the unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... petting. She gives up to everybody, and smiles her way through life; such a comical little mouth it is, to match the comical eyes. All she ever asks with insistence is somewhere to play. Bereft of room to play, Puck might become disagreeable, though a disagreeable Puck is something unimaginable. Yesterday it was needful to keep her in the shade; and as a special policeman-nurse could not be told off to keep watch over her, she was tied by a long string to the nursery door. At first she was sorely ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... strange dialect? It trails lengths of red silk. Such red! The pigment is twirled and heaped with quaint device, until it seems to be beautiful embroidery rather than painting; and the straw-coloured hair, and the blond light on the face, and the unimaginable coquetting of that fan.... ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... unfathomable depths beyond. Descartes (1596-1650) revived the old Greek idea of a gradual evolution of the heavens and the earth from a primitive chaos of particles, taught that the stars stood out at unimaginable distances in the ocean of ether, and imagined the ether as stirring in gigantic whirlpools, which bore cosmic bodies in their orbits as the eddy in the river causes the cork ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Down through unimaginable thousands of feet, straight and swift swept the machine, making such a sweep as the eagle in its pride would never have dared. People held their breath to watch, expecting every moment some catastrophe. But the machine kept on an even ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... come back again the next day. Having thus got rid of her—he knew that on no account must she be allowed to stay here the night—he must go at once to Mr. Pomeroy and tell him of this terrible, hitherto unimaginable, calamity. He told himself that it would be, if not exactly easy, then certainly possible to ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... man's activities infinitely more wonderful, and infinitely more comprehensible than is the conception that his activities may be accounted for by the existence of an unknown, unimaginable, and intangible force called ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... honey and fire in the veins of the mortals who drank of it, has become for me one of the nobilium poculorum of story. And thus did the ship put forth from the village and sail away in a great tempest of wind—to what unimaginable ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... fate? Must we not feel that had there not been intelligent agency at work somewhere, other and less terrifically intricate results would have ensued? And if we further try to symbolise in thought the unimaginable complexity of the material and dynamical changes in virtue of which that thought itself exists,—if we then extend our symbols to represent all the history of all the orderly changes which must have taken place to evolve human intelligence into what it is,—and if we ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... hideous coverlet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... assassin in the darkness of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their priests and kings. But this is wonderful to me—oh, how wonderful!—to see the tender and delicate woman among you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than the air of heaven, and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... protection Of the sweet sanctum of their earlier days, Toward those who flatteringly speak their praise And ask in special confidence their years, Who pass the time in fifty pleasant ways And designate them "charms" and "pretty dears," Beset with all those unimaginable fears! ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... I looked on said to me, and that all I heard in the sea and in the air said to me, 'Be comforted, mortal, that thy life is so short. Our preparation for what is to follow has endured, and shall endure, for unimaginable ages.' ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... freed from limitations, and blossoms out into capabilities of joy and of activity beyond anything suggested by the most golden dreams of earth. To him all life is a unit, beginning here and destined to unimaginable development hereafter. Earth is regarded as a place of tutelage where man may learn to set foot on some one path to heaven. And no work begun here shall ever pause for death. Even apparent failure here counts for little so the quest be not abandoned. Each of us may, as Abt Vogler, look without ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... loving eyes were not to be deceived. So with infinite fuss, and terms of endearment, she insisted upon accompanying her offspring to his room, where the dignified housekeeper was summoned, and his every imaginable and unimaginable want arranged ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cavemen until now possibilities of expression in line and colour have been achieved whose full expansion we cannot guess. Architecture evolved from the crude huts of primitive man until now our cathedrals and our new business buildings alike mark an incalculable advance and prophesy an unimaginable future. One may refuse to call all development real progress, may insist upon degeneration as well as betterment through change, but, even so, the basic fact remains that all the elements which go to make man's life come into being, are what they are, and pass out of what they are into something ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... experience for the instruction of nations. The rapid advance of modern colonisation tends to underrate the first efforts of our predecessors. The first colonial boat-builder founded a great commercial navy; the first shepherd held in his slender flock a treasure of unimaginable worth. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... pictured to the mental eye. What was difficult, and, as it then seemed, impossible, was to apprehend them as believable. The idea could be put together, of men sticking on by their feet to the under side of the earth; but the belief would follow, that they must fall off. Antipodes were not unimaginable, but they were unbelievable. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... putting her hand, fantastic with rings and long gilded fingernails, upon his shoulders so that ripples of delight, at all the voluptuous images of his desire, went through his whole body, making it quiver like a flame with yearning for unimaginable things. It all muddled into fantastic gibberish—into sounds of horns and trombones and double basses blown off key while a piccolo shrilled the first bars ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Of all the hosts and hierarchs of heaven, Moved by one universal impulse, urged Their steeds of swiftness up the arch of light, From sphere to sphere increasing as they came, Till world on world was emptied of its race. Upward, with unimaginable speed, The myriads, congregating zenith-ward, Reached the far confines of the utmost sphere, The home of Truth, the dwelling-place of Love, Striking celestial symphonies divine From the resounding sea of melody, That heaved in swells ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... of Christianity is neither all sunshine nor all shadow, checkered certainly, but leading to a final abode of unimaginable bliss; and, with the Bible to guide her, the orphan walked fearlessly on, discharging her duties, and looking unto God and his Christ to aid her. She sat on the steps of the sepulcher, watching the last rays of the setting sun gild the monumental shafts ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... crowns and orders, ropes of pearls, rubies and diamonds (which still glorify the tiaras of the pope and emperors)—all these were sold for a few sous or were trampled in the snow by the ignorant shepherds and cowherds of the Alps. After such an unimaginable tragedy, Duke Charles, like a beaten child, weeping with rage and sick with despair, at last roused himself to send with the consent of the Duchess Yolande a deputation to treat with the Confederates; ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... in the face of proposals so contumelious of his authority Ieyasu preserved a calm and dignified mein, merely replying that his country was open to all comers, and that, if other nations had quarrels among themselves, they must not take Japan for battle-ground, it is nevertheless unimaginable that he did not strongly resent such interference with his own independent foreign policy, and that he did not interpret it as foreshadowing a disturbance of the realm's peace ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... out of the car and went to get ready for a Christian dinner served by Moslems, feeling like a person out of the Arabian Nights, who had just met the owner of a magic carpet on which one only had to sit in order to be wafted by invisible forces into unimaginable realms of mystery. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect then that the human soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable metamorphoses and hallowed sorrows, and if, under the spell of such thoughts, I gave to the clause I chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a humaner sense, an added respect for the soul and its rights, and for the universal order of things, ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out—that he might even remember the important ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... That is to say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the "unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as thought and memory in his words: when Shelley ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the gospel, to discover to him the paths of happiness, he should yet continue wildered and wandering in the disorders of his life. "Which the Lord avert," continued Xavier; "and may it please him to hear the prayers which day and night I shall pour out for your conversion. I wish it with an unimaginable ardour, and assure you, that wheresoever I shall be, the most pleasing news which can be told me, shall be to hear that the king of Bungo is become a Christian, and that he lives according ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... From Melody's divinest fount! All heaven Glow'd bright, as, like a viewless river, swell'd The deepening music!—Silence came again! And where I gazed, a shrine of cloudy fire Flamed redly awful; round it Thunder walk'd, And from it Lightning look'd out most sublime! Here throned in unimaginable bliss And glory, sits The One Eternal Power, Creator, Lord, and Life of All: Again, Stillness ethereal reign'd, and forth appear'd Elysian creatures robed in fleecy light, Together flocking from celestial haunts, And mansions of purpureal mould; the Host Of heaven ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... week, with unwearying persistence, they had pushed on, upward, always upward, through regions sacred to the eagles and the clouds; working along streams that cut their way through hillsides steep as houses, or along tracks that ran to polished ledges of rock and dropped sheer to unimaginable depths; clambering over formidable ranges by any chance opening that could be dignified by the name of a pass; the eternally cheery Gurkhas solacing themselves with rum; the Pathans with opium; the Scot with rare nips of brandy, on the bitterest nights. Still more rarely,—at wider and wider ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at then; work—not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion. Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... recognizable features. We have reached the time when we will not suffer anybody to turn our great ones into gods or demigods, and to remove them far from us to dwell, like absentee deities, on a remote Olympus, or in an unimaginable Paradise; we must have them near, intimates whom our souls can converse with, and our hearts love. Such an intimate was Roosevelt living, and such an intimate will he be dead. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt—those ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... thinking of the ten dollars he had handed to the driver of the run-about. It had given them twenty minutes of pleasure, and it seemed unimaginable that anyone should be able to buy amusement at that rate. With ten dollars he might have bought her an engagement ring; she knew that Mrs. Tom Fry's, which came from Springfield, and had a diamond in it, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance. "Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say!—boundless wealth!—unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,—the memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius, gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous pile,—a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from its moral ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... immense sums. The lords and rich men erect pyramids over these treasures, and for their greater security place them in charge of the talapoins!"6 When, for some reason or other, either as a matter of neatness and convenience, or as a preventive of mutual clawing, or for some to us unimaginable end, the authoritative Skald wished to induce the Northmen to keep their nails close cut, he devised the awful myth of the ship Nagelfra, and made his raw minded people swallow it as truth. The same ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... the idea of a new edition is frightful to him, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a 'Sartor.' In his whole wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers, Conservative younger brothers, Regent-street lawyers, Crockford gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom water and much soap will not ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and have been constructed in various modes and forms never before conceived. The tent, the cot, the chest, the chair, the knife and fork, the stove and bakeoven, each and every one of them, have been touched by the transforming hand of homely genius, and have assumed a thousand unimaginable forms of usefulness and convenience. India rubber and every other available material have been made to perform new and appropriate parts in the general work. The result of all this unexampled activity and ingenuity has not yet been ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... interested him more and more as a character. He was an unusual man, a new type, this senator from Fraser, with his alternating candor and disingenuousness, his prompt solutions of perplexing problems. It was unimaginable that a man so strong and so sure of himself, and so shrewd in extricating others from their entanglements, could ever be ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... who was doomed, that already behind the curtains of life destiny was staging his death—and what a death!—he could no more foresee than he foresaw the Paliser Case, which, to the parties subsequently involved, was then unimaginable, yet which, at that very hour, a court of ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... against us, (sons of Britons,) that most unrighteous edict, TAXATION without REPRESENTATION! and then, because in the spirit of our gallant fathers, we bravely opposed him, he broke up the very fountains of his malice, and let loose upon us every indescribable, unimaginable curse of CIVIL WAR; when British armies, with their Hessian, and Indian, and tory allies, overran my afflicted country, swallowing up its fruits and filling every part with consternation; when no thing was to be seen but flying crowds, burning houses, and young ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... certainty, that whole formations containing the records of vast geological periods are entirely buried beneath the ocean, and for ever beyond our reach. Most of the gaps in the geological series may thus be filled up, and vast numbers of unknown and unimaginable animals, which might help to elucidate the affinities of the numerous isolated groups which are a perpetual puzzle to the zoologist, may there be buried, till future revolutions may raise them in their ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... difficulties in her path were great. For not only was it an almost unimaginable thing in those days for a woman of means to make her own way in the world and to live in independence, but the particular profession for which Florence was clearly marked out both by her instincts and her capacities was at that ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... attended him, prophetic of Earthquake, that universal breaking forth of Bedlams, now fallen so extinct, no reader can imagine. Bedlams totally extinct to everybody; but which were then very real, and raged wide as the world, high as the stars, to a hideous degree among the then sons of men;—unimaginable now ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a shape of unimaginable glory. Its face was that of a man in its first youth, but solemn, as with the consciousness of eternity and the tranquillity of wisdom; light, like starbeams, flowed through its transparent veins; light made its limbs ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was found in his training of Judaism; which to those whose hearts were hearts of flesh, not stony and charmed against hearing, had already anticipated the first outlines of Christian ideas. Sin, purity, holiness unimaginable, these had already been inoculated into the Jewish mind. And amongst the race inoculated Christ found enough for a central nucleus to His future Church. But the natural tendency under the fever-mist of strife and passion, evoked by the present position in the world ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... my nostrils. And, again, all this would pass; and I would feel that it was not hell but heaven that waited; and that all was but as a thin veil, a little shadow of death, that hung between me and the unimaginable glories; and that at a word all would dissolve away and Christ come and this world be ended. So, then, the minutes passed for me: I said my Paternoster and Ave and Credo and De Profundis, over and over again; praying that the passage of those men might be easy, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Ideas of God uncrystallised into any form. They penetrate the soul—she flashes to them, she becomes them, she reaches unimaginable heights of bliss by "becoming." This form of joy is incomprehensible until experienced: it is stupendous living, if it may be so expressed it is happiness at lightning velocity; but it is a lightning happiness which must flash to God. When it ceases ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... with that mixture of the interrogation and exclamation points for which we have no symbol. She tried to look surprised at the unimaginable suggestion of Cheever's being in her environs. She succeeded as well as Dyckman did in pretending that his errand ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... found him, On high with fire all round him,— Who moved along the molten west, And over the round hill's crest That seemed half ready with him to go down, Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,— As if there were to be no last thing left Of a nameless unimaginable town,— Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken Down to the perils of a depth not known, From death defended though by men forsaken, The bread that every man must eat alone; He may have walked while others ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... with the life of the worlds, understands and governs it. We are persuaded that all this will not affect us, will give us no pleasure, will not happen to ourselves, unless that memory of a few almost always insignificant facts accompany us and witness those unimaginable joys. ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Unimaginable horrors would come to pass upon the earth were Power as well as Knowledge put into the hands of ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... then, that the syllabuses which the Department issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have few merits and many defects. Yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle, they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the teachers in England had to work by them would have made them potent agencies for evil. To be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for a teacher, and a misfortune ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... misery. The great unwashed mood is upon me. Then I go out from luxury. The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the Park sometimes, but sometimes they go slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. They rest in unimaginable dens seeking contrast, and they like the ruffians whom they meet there, and they hate the notion of policemen keeping order. The mind governs the body. I never know how I shall spend an evening till the evening has come. I wait for ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... that, and if in the end she had saved him she would have counted the price of her name as very little to set against his salvation from himself. She would have given that and much more, for her love, as she would freely give all for him and even for his memory, if he were dead, and if by some unimaginable circumstances her ruin before the world could keep his name spotless, and his glory unsullied. For there is nothing that a true-hearted loving woman will not give and do for him she loves and believes and trusts; and though she will give the greatest thing last ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... Smith's personal appearance—I have a kind of melancholy satisfaction in being minute. His head of hair would have done honor to a Brutus;—nothing could be more richly flowing, or possess a brighter gloss. It was of a jetty black;—which was also the color, or more properly the no color of his unimaginable whiskers. You perceive I cannot speak of these latter without enthusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun. At all events, they encircled, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... strange horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,— particular ideas. The whole thing is a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response. The ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... shot out a huge paw like a shoulder of mutton, and grabbed my hand with as much fervour as though I had saved his life, or done him some other unimaginable kindness. And, as he did so, his old broad sweet smile came back again. He ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... necessity for human happiness. Or if indeed it be a blessing, however much in disguise, why not boldly pray to have the full benefit of it in our time, instead of passing it on, like unearned increment, for the advantage of posterity? Such a thing is unimaginable. A prayer for war would make people jump; it would empty a church quicker than the collection. Nevertheless, it is probable that the great majority of every congregation does in its heart share the Territorial's opinion, and, if there were no possibility of war ever again anywhere in the world, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... impossible, unimaginable Prue, triumphed home safely with several thousands of dollars in her satchel. Orton bought a revolver to guard it with, and nearly shot one of his priceless feet off with it. They dumped the money upon the shelf of the banker who had refused to lend ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... latter proposition has been defended by drawing a distinction between the principle, and its possibly wrong application to facts, e.g. to Antipodes; but how can we ever know that it has been rightly applied? Coleridge, again, has distinguished between the unimaginable, which he thinks may possibly be true, and the inconceivable, which he thinks cannot be; but Antipodes were imaginable at the same period when they were inconceivable. In fact, as even to Newton it seemed inconceivable, that a thing should act where it is not (e.g. that ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... wide berth to the drinkers, and shrinking from their glances. Once a girl appeared in a doorway, and smiled and nodded to him; he started and hurried out, shuddering. Her wanton black eyes haunted him, hinting unimaginable things. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the masters of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... it became purely ecclesiastical, and even now one occasionally finds in Germany, and less often in England, bits of ecclesiastical embroidery of unimaginable fineness, commemorating Christ's miracles and other incidents of Bible history. I know of one small specimen of ancient English art, covering a space of five by seven inches, where the whole Garden of Eden with its weighty tragedy is represented by inch-long figures of Adam ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... They take no limit of possibility into their doubts and fears. They do not think of character or nature. Now, in a moment the scales fell from Lucy's eyes. Was her husband a man to treat her with such unimaginable insult? Was the Contessa, with all her triumphant designs, her mendacities, her mendicities, her thirst for pleasure, such a woman? Whoever said it, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... here," said the lady; but the little girl pressed before her mother, and jabbering very earnestly in unimaginable English, seemed determined to give Fred her wax doll, in which, she evidently thought, resided ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... bread? One's heart and soul are becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It is white-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. It is scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festering grave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and all uncleanness," ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in an open place in the cool of evening. A grey-blue sky above, with the faintest glitter of first stars! I was alone. The past was a mystery; my future unexplored, full of the unimaginable; the ultimate future of ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... ever elsewhere saw in Italy; some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their dark massy foliage, and formed groups which still haunt my memory, as then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene was indeed of unimaginable beauty. The blue extent of waters, the almost landlocked bay, the near castle of Lerici shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west; the varied forms of the precipitous rocks that bound in the beach, over which there was only a winding ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... whose nature is fundamentally antagonistic to all evil and essentially composed of infinite knowledge and bliss—whereby it differs from all other souls—possesses an infinite number of qualities of unimaginable excellence, and, analogously, a divine form suitable to its nature and intentions, i.e. adorned with infinite, supremely excellent and wonderful qualities— splendour, beauty, fragrance, tenderness, loveliness, youthfulness, and so on. And in order to gratify his devotees he individualises that form ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... preposterous than ever. Two hours before it would have been unimaginable; one hour ago I had merely been offering aid to a young woman in distress; now she was occupying my rooms and I was hurrying along Tenth Street, careless as to my destination, and feeling as though the whole ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... It was some child, passing on an unimaginable errand through the deep woods, frightened by his ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... their disposal. The camp was formed near the town, on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard time of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... looked like plain Hell to Madeleine, or worse. The Hell of the Bible and Dante had a lively accompaniment of writhing flames and was presumably clean. This might be an underground race condemned to a sordid filthy and living death for unimaginable crimes of a previous existence. Even the children looked as if they had come back to Earth with the sins of threescore and ten stamped upon their weary wicked faces. Madeleine's strong soul faltered, and she ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven! Oh, under that hideous covelet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying,—on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... still the unimaginable lodge For solitary thinkings; such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven, Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... shabby muff and smiled her moonlight smile. She was giddy with the intoxicating, heady air, with the brilliant sunset light, with Babe's loud cordiality. She wanted desperately to like Babe; she wanted even more desperately to be liked. She was in an unimaginable panic, now. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... one! He felt within him sources of suffering so numerous, diverse, and complicated, such an afflux of miseries, such inevitable tortures, he felt so lost, so far overwhelmed, from this moment, by a wave of unimaginable agony that he could not suppose anyone ever had suffered as he did. And he suddenly thought of the puerility of poets who have invented the useless labor of Sisyphus, the material thirst of Tantalus, the devoured heart of Prometheus! Oh, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant |
