"Sense of direction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... right out into the thoroughfare—a vast muffled blackness, where a man could not see six paces before him; where, all around, voices or whistles mocked the sense of direction; and sudden shapes came rolling slow upon them; and now and then a light showed like a dim island ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... no sense of direction, but he was presently conscious of the river close at his side, and then the car, with warning blasts, curved up to a much lighted building and halted. A large man in uniform came solicitously to help him descend and gave him a ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Ali, but the Indian shrugged his shoulders and declared that he had not kept the sense of direction, supposing that the sahibs had done so. As neither boy had followed the compass, the instruments were ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... an unmistakable whistle of bullets too close to be comfortable. At least one or two perforated his wings. Then Erwin pointed higher at the same time trying to keep his sense of direction, imparted by a momentary sight of the western sun. More gun shots: still more whistling of balls, and all ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... blocks to the westward of the Citadel Square, and it seemed then that the seat of the mystery lay almost due south. A week later he happened to be in the same locality. Once more, those deep-toned vibrations smote upon his ears; now the sound-waves were all about him and the sense of direction was lost; again, and they plainly proceeded from somewhere to the eastward. It was perplexing, but the varying quarter and strength of the wind might be sufficient to account for the difference, and in one curious particular the two observations corresponded. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ran blindly on, resorting at intervals to his old trick of doubling back, to confuse his pursuers. He did this so well that before long he had lost his sense of direction, and the sun having gone from the sight of man behind a mass of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... snow that he inhaled with each breath stung his lungs and he tied his heavy woolen muffler across his mouth. He stumbled frequently and floundered about to regain his balance. He lost all sense of direction and fought blindly on, each bend of the river bringing him blunderingly against one or the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... He lost all sense of direction after a moment, though he did not forget to count, and by his rough reckoning he was driven through the streets for about nine minutes at a fast trot. Then the carriage stopped, and he was carried out again, up almost endless stairs, across a floor that seemed ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... fact, that if you curl yourself up, with two or three preliminary twirls, after the fashion of a dog going to bed, in a perfectly circular shell-hole, on a night as black as the inside of the dog in question, you are extremely likely to lose your sense of direction. This is what happened to Private Nigg. He and his infernal machines lay uneasily in their appointed shell-hole for some ten minutes, surrounded by Verey lights which shot suddenly into the sky with a disconcerting ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... The sense of direction and location of these primitive Pellucidarians is little short of uncanny, as I have had occasion to remark in the past. You may take one of them to the uttermost ends of his world, to places of which ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he rode over the blackened and burned forest floor, some trees still ablaze and smoking. Every step he took, for all he knew, might be leading him on into a fire-encircled place from which he would have difficulty in escaping, but on he went. There was no trail, he only had a vague sense of direction, and on both sides of him was fire. Probably fire was also in front, and if so he was riding into it, but he had his orders and on he must go. The mine, he knew, was lower down on the gully, and so roughly he followed it. Twice he had ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... was not so well lighted as the others had been and she had no idea where it led to. She knew Dorfield pretty well, having once resided there for three years, but in her agitated haste she had now lost all sense of direction. Feeling, however, that she was now safe from pursuit, she walked on more slowly, trying to discover her whereabouts, and presently passed a dimly-lighted bakery before which a man stood looking abstractedly into the window at ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... water forts on the Range. And the second time they had chanced three hours' sleep and a hot meal. But the rest of the time it was ride, chew on jerky and cold tortillas, and depend on Teodoro's sense of direction to take them eventually to their goal—the outlaws' gate into Mexico. Drew had long since stopped looking over his shoulder for any thundering advance of cavalry. If Bayliss was hunting the fugitives, he was not pushing the pace ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... Grayrock had made a close but unavailing search for the mortal part of the intruder at whom he had fired, and whom he had a marksman's intuitive sense of having hit; for he was one of those born experts who shoot without aim by an instinctive sense of direction, and are nearly as dangerous by night as by day. During a full half of his twenty-four years he had been a terror to the targets of all the shooting-galleries in three cities. Unable now to produce his dead game he had the discretion ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... may not see which way you go, nor what is by the path as you ride. Soon, with your eyes covered you will lose the sense of direction and you will not be able to tell whether you go north or south or ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... instinct or faculty that the animals have far more fully developed than we have—the homing instinct, which seems to imply a sense of direction that we have not. We have lost it because we have other faculties to take its place, just as we have lost that acute sense of smell that is so marvelously developed in many of the four-footed creatures. It has long been a contention of mine that the animals all possess ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... disappointed, and yet in the din of the shattering glass he was able to escape again. He had lost all sense of direction. Even his touch on the furniture didn't help him, since everything was now displaced. Nevertheless, he continued to duck and dodge, to wriggle and creep and elude. Once Thor's clutch was actually upon him, but he managed to tear himself free with nothing ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... of agreement or dissent arose, otherwise the enemy must have heard the whispering of the little party, which now retreated steadily, but with the result that Oliver grew confused, for he felt that he had entirely lost all sense of direction, and letting Panton come up abreast ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... the bases of the cliffs. The canyons that break through the margins of these mesas often have a remarkable similarity of appearance, and the consequent monotony is extremely embarrassing to the traveler, the absence of running water and clearly defined drainage confusing his sense of direction. ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... lost all sense of direction. He realized that he could not hope to find his way out of these worst of bad lands without a guide. He must put off his plans to escape until the return to the trail. He began to surmise that Cripple Sim's inability to ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... came from the far side of the trench, and we peered at the newcomer. It was one of the Brigade orderlies, who also had lost his way trying to find an infantry battalion headquarters. I examined him on his sense of direction, but all I got from him was that if he could reach the road and see the fifth telegraph pole from the wood, he would know that Brigade Headquarters lay on a line ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... realizing the dangers to which he was subjecting himself, Houston sought to regain his lost sense of direction. Once faintly, in the far-away, as the storm lifted for a moment, he thought that he glimpsed a pole and hurried toward it with new hope, only to find it a stalwart trunk of a dead tree, rearing itself ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... before them. Far away was the thin outline of the range which enclosed the valley. The riders held their course by means of that trained sixth sense of direction their ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... Reeger said. He waited for Muldoon to make himself comfortable on the sofa, then continued: "First time we've ever been out here during the day. But Evin's sense of direction is unfailing." He shook his head, smiled brightly. "Ah, well, we must each have some factor to make ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... spirited discussion of the absorbing "mystery" and so occupied his attention that he paid no heed to the direction they had taken. The back seat was hemmed in by side curtains and the canopy, so it would be no wonder if he lost all sense of direction, even had not the remarks of the girl at his ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... went. Just as he struck the level it began to rain, gently at first, then hard, and despite the shelter of the full-leaved forest trees, he was soon wet through to his skin and dripped water as he lurched along without sense of direction or, indeed, without any active realization of what he ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... to have somebody pilot me," Uncle Rufus declared, his eyes twinkling as he followed after his wife, who leaned on Richard's arm. "A man must have a pretty good sense of direction to keep his bearings in a house ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... he cried. "I believe you've hit on something new to psychiatry. This young man may have some unknown faculty of mind—an instinctive perception of the fourth dimension. Just as some people have an unerring sense of direction, so perhaps Harper has a sense of—of a fourth direction—the fourth dimension! I should like to examine some of ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as peas in the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... colt. I wish she could begin to get a sense of direction as you are. Maybe she will, now she can get a bird's-eye view of you. You've always lived too close to each other to understand each other. You'll learn a lot about Jude and she about you, now you've moved a ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... tympanum, or ear drum, a membrane diaphragm. The uses of the rolls or convolutions of the outer ear are not conclusively known, but it is observed that when they are filled up evenly with a wax or its equivalent, the sense of direction of sound is impaired, and usually of ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... is this: they have such small psychic powers. The over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers, or dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some day, than its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once innate sense of direction. It will lose its gifts of natural intuition, premonition, and rest, by encouraging its use of the mind to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... has tried this, it would be difficult to realize how thoroughly the sense of direction and the power to guide one's movements are lost while running in such a position. It is one of the jolliest possible games for ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... is an engineer and miner who seems to have a strange sense of direction practically unknown to many other animals. How he manages to form tunnels and burrows in lines of such unusual straightness is unknown; he always works in darkness, unless it is that he can see in the dark. His little hills are not deliberate structures; they are only shaft ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... wilder. On the third day windfall and precipice drove the riders back from the river bed into the heavy hemlock forest, where festoons of Spanish moss overhead almost shut out the light of the sun and all sense of direction. And when they came back to the bank of the stream they saw a {72} wild cataract cutting its way through a dark canyon. There was no mistake. This was the Fraser, and it was living up ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... in her daily life that one can best measure the delicacy of her senses and her manual skill. She seems to have very little sense of direction. She gropes her way without much certainty in rooms where she is quite familiar. Most blind people are aided by the sense of sound, so that a fair comparison is hard to make, except with other deaf-blind persons. Her dexterity is not notable either in comparison with the normal person, whose ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... the dry bed of a little stream; but a careful search showed no signs of any person having been over it, and it seemed to me, in my upset sense of direction, that it should lead the other way. But, remembering that I had left the bed of the creek to follow Long Jim and Petrak, I came to the conclusion that the pirates had abandoned the creek, or had turned off from it ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... winter more than is generally supposed. As he must breathe after every chase he must needs know all the air-holes and dens in the whole lake. No matter how much he turns and doubles in the chase after a trout, he never loses his sense of direction, never forgets where the breathing places are. When his fish is seized he makes a bee line under the ice for the nearest place where he can breathe and eat. Sometimes this lands him, out of breath, in the beaver's tunnel; ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... excitement of the chase he outstripped his followers, his quarry disappeared, and, overtaken by night, his surroundings, in the dim light, took on such an unfamiliar aspect that he completely lost all sense of direction. Up and down he paced in unrestrained yet impotent anger, feeling that he was under some evil spell. Maddened by this idea, he endeavoured to hack his way through the thick undergrowth, but the matted boughs and dense foliage were as effectual as prison bars. He was trapped, he told ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... their plaids round them, and to tie on their bonnets. For the thrilling details of the dangerous undertaking one must refer to Hogg's own account, but it may here be noted that no sooner was the kitchen door closed on the men than they lost each other, and lost also all sense of direction; it was only by the sound of their voices that the little party succeeded in keeping in each other's neighbourhood. And such was the fury of the wind and the confusion of the drift that frequently, in order to draw breath, they were compelled to bend till their faces were between their knees. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... name is a sense of direction? The phrase explains nothing. However incoherent the mind of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data. I've been all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business, and after you eliminate the clues ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... thinking it useless to haunt the known spots any longer, I turned southwards and penetrated into a denser part of the forest, where the undergrowth made progress difficult. I was not afraid of losing myself; the sun above and my sense of direction, which was always good, would enable me to return ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... British public. We must forgive him, because he has for a long time been doing far worse than that to the Huns; but it is undeniable that in following the winding trail of his beloved guns we are in no small danger of losing our sense of direction. This is because along with imaginary tales, some of them written before August, 1914, when of course he could not fix precisely the chronology and locality of his fights, he has mixed almost indiscriminately the record of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... he was dead, and the rage which filled me drove me on and on with the strength of madness. I had lost the sense of direction. I only knew that I had burst through the ring of my assailants, and that I was running my headlong course with the whole pack of them yelling at my heels. Now and again a cry from right or left would divert one or another of my pursuers, but some of them held resolutely ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... times we found ourselves in a dense forest where the trees were ancient monarchs, whose solitudes had never been disturbed by stroke of ax, or grate of saw. Clumps of dogwood and chaparral of a dozen kinds confuse the tyro, and he loses all sense of direction. Only the instinct that makes a real mountain and forest guide could enable one successfully to navigate these overgrown wilds, for we were now wandering up a region where trails had been abandoned for years. Here and there, when ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... bewildered for the moment that he lost his sense of direction, and made a dash toward the porch where ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... High road down from his detour. He cut across below the Crossroads, over rough ground, among the underbrush, and parting the low growing trees was lost in the gloom of the woods. But he knew every inch of ground within twenty miles around, and darkness did not take away his sense of direction. He crashed along among the branches, making steady headway toward the spot where he had left his bicycle, puffing and panting, his face streaked with dirt, his eyes bleared and haggard, his whole lithe young body straining forward and fighting against the dire weariness that was upon him, for ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... incredible old woman ten minutes in which to reappear. And when that tedious ten minutes had ticked by I could scarcely distinguish its hands. I determined to wait no longer, drew open the door, and, trusting to my sense of direction, groped my way through the corridor that I vaguely remembered led to the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... of his muddled state the fellow appeared to possess a sense of direction, for the boy soon found that he had come upon a narrow path leading along the cliff at a safe ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... be, the sense of direction must be most perceptible in those houses whose principal walls are at right angles to the true direction of the earthquake-motion, and we should therefore expect to find the observations of direction most ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... and when dawn broke all was well. True, the first light revealed the fact that I had got us all with our backs to the enemy, so that if there had been a battle it would have been between ourselves and Mr. Jones's platoon. But you can't have everything; and sense of direction never was my strong point. Never shall I forget our first breakfast in the trenches. It consisted of bacon and eggs, marmalade and tea. How strange and novel an experience it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... had ridden a thousand times in places far more bewildering and less known to them. Like all true denizens of the mountain-desert, they had a sense of direction as uncanny as that of an Eskimo. Now they struck off confidently through the dark and trailed up and down through the mountains until they reached a hollow in the center of which shone a group of dim lights. It was the schoolhouse near the Barnes ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... done their best to keep track of where they were going, and now they turned in what they thought was the direction of Haven Point. But, as my young readers may have heard, it is an easy matter to lose one's sense of direction in the woods, and before they knew it, they found themselves in a locality that was ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer
... minutes I became conscious that my eyes were leering—leering in one fixed direction: and instantly, the mere fact that I had a sense of direction proved to me that I must, in truth, have heard something! I strove—I managed—to raise myself: and as I stood upright, feebly swaying there, not the terrors of death alone were in my breast, but the authority of the monarch was on ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel |
