"Understandable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before the woman whom they called Catalina. She broke into speech. It was cacique to cacique. She was from Boriquen—she would return in a canoe if she were free! Better drown than live with the utterly un-understandable—only that they ate and drank and laid hold of women whether these would or would not, and were understandable that far! Gods! At first she thought them gods; now she doubted. They were magicians. If she were free—if she were free—if she were ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression, is very Russian. I knew her well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical forms of political liberty known to the western world. I suppose one must be a Russian to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the United States to associate herself with the stand taken against Germany's piratical submarine warfare, China has undoubtedly won for herself a new place in the world's esteem. Both in Europe and America the news of this development awakened well-understandable enthusiasm, and convinced men that the Republic at last stood for something vital and real. Until the 9th February, 1917, what China had been doing was not really to maintain her neutrality, since she had been unable to defend ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... follow the history. Perhaps, reported, it would not seem very lucid. There were blanks, unsaid things, twists of phrase, eloquent nothings which, wonderfully understandable in themselves, do not report well. Somehow he must have made it plain, for Esther understood it and understood him, too, in a way which we, who have never sailed with him under the moon, cannot hope to do. Faults of expression are no hindrance to this kind of understanding. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the apparatus in the other room, and had soon puzzled out the method of replacing the cylinders by others. As he did so, it came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He presently recognized what appeared to him to be an altered version ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign country or even to a class other than his own. His own kind he treated as complete and understandable human creatures. All others were merely objective. As we, to a certain extent, happened to fall in the former category, he was as pleasant to us as possible—that is, he was pleasant to us in his way, but had not insight ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... ago the pharaoh, Amenhotep IV. overturned the power of priests by establishing the faith in one god, Re Harmachis. It is understandable that in those conditions he took treasures from the temples of the other gods. And at that time neither the people, nor the army, nor the nobility took part with the priesthood. What would the case be today when the old faith is ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... princes out of their melancholy indifference, and tiger hunts which had, by their duration and magnificence, threatened to disrupt the efficiency of the British military service,—whimsical excesses, not understandable by his intimate acquaintances who cynically arraigned him as the fool and ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely preferred any prose to any ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... grinning. There was no sense in picking a quarrel. No man likes to discover that a perfect stranger has overheard his intimate confessions. His annoyance was understandable. But he hadn't nice manners. He knocked the cigarette case out of my hand and kicked it across the room. So I got into one of the deep armchairs and laughed at him in self- defense, to preserve my own temper from boiling up ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... thinking of Ann's pleasure in clothes. There were times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was understandable—lovable—after having been to Centralia, after knowing. So many things were understandable and lovable ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... all her thoughts, created pleasant places for her in what, to Elsie, seemed a desolate life; it made Millville not only a bearable but even a happy place to live in. Millville understood Patience and loved her; Elsie, being less understandable, was less popular. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... thermometer question has been most shamefully handled by the scientific world. It is made an exclusive matter; they keep it all to themselves; they talk about Fahrenheit with the utmost coolness; of Raumur in un-understandable jargon, and fire whole volleys of words concerning the centigrade scale, till one's head spins round with their inexplicable dissertations. What is the use of these interminable technicalities to the world at large? Do they enlighten the rheumatic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... separate, and of another time; we feel the ancient world to be a real thing; and one with the new; antiquity is no dream; it is rather the children playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is continuous; and the words "from generation to generation" understandable here." ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... plea can never give us more than a mere designer working on materials that already exist. Of necessity design implies two things, difficulties to be overcome, and skill or wisdom in overcoming them. Design is an understandable thing in connection with man, because man is always occupied in overcoming the resistance of forces that exist quite independently of him, and which operate without reference to his needs or desires. But it would be absurd to assume design on the part of one for ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... that. The truth is I was never clever at putting things on paper, and somehow, while the facts are clear enough in my mind, I feel a great difficulty in relating those facts in a way that is clear and understandable. You see I have lived an open-air life, and have spent more hours with the bridle-reins in my hands than the pen, and although I had a fair amount of schooling I was ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... them again—they are destroyed. They came from Satan. I saw the hell-brand on them, and I knew they were sent to betray me to sin." Then he fell to gabbling strange and dreadful things which were not clearly understandable, and which the doctor admonished them ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... and he shouted with laughter. The boys broke down, too, and in a moment the entire patronage of the coffee shop was staring at the three idiots who roared with unrestrained laughter in public. Such behavior in Americans was to be deplored, perhaps, but understandable. But a licensed ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... just as the English Gladstonians have a far more virulent dislike for the Liberal Unionists than for the rankest Tories. They say to the Protestants, 'We know why you uphold Unionism'—that is, as they believe, landlordism—'for the landlords are English and Protestant; your position is understandable.' But to the Catholic they say, 'You are not only an enemy, but a renegade, a traitor, and a deserter.' And whatever that man's position may be, the people can make ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... drifted downstream until it now stood almost opposite him, and only a few feet from shore. Thus it was that, as Mr. Fulton backed water with his left-hand oar and rammed the nose of the boat toward the shelving beach, he heard one complete sentence, distinct and understandable. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... light of their meaning sublime." In a word we are growing into the Good. The Bad is not the ultimate, but is none the less real. This is better than Manicheism, the Miltonian contest between the Good Spirit and the Bad, which Wells also in his Invisible King presents; a simple theory, understandable but not to my mind subject to careful scrutiny. There is but one God, one Force, one Principle, one Spirit, and it is working its way through, expressing itself as best it can. And Evil is a partial view, one phase of undevelopment, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... only reason that the people haven't risen up and demanded a reform along these lines is because so few of them really give a hang what the inscription says. If the American Antiquarian Turn-Verein doesn't care about stating in understandable figures the date on which the cornerstone of their building was laid, the average citizen is perfectly willing to let the matter drop ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... But I hope that you will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of your own grandfather. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... dared not give him time to think, she made her plea,—rapid, girlish, rather incoherent, but understandable enough. They would go away together and be married. She had it all planned and some of it arranged. And then they would hide somewhere, and—"And always be together," ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... here. They burst like lightning out of a clear sky. I would have done just that thing for Ruby.... Mad, you say? ... Why, man, she's not hopeless! There was something deep behind that impulse. Strange—not understandable! I'm at the mercy of every hour I spend here. Benton has got into my blood. And I see how Benton is a product of this great advance of progress—of civilization—the U. P. R. We're only atoms in a force no one can understand.... Look ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... spoke it but little. And so he stood quietly imbibing his bottle of beer whilst Bombastus Furiosis still held forth. His quiet attitude evidently misled the orator, whose guttural German became mixed with quite enough English to make his remarks perfectly understandable to the ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... always better to say something that is not quite the truth but is perfectly understandable than something which is true but bewildering. This is a cardinal rule in television. Never bewilder your audience! So Linda Beach did not bewilder her audience by accurate statement. She told them something they ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... and held out a welcoming hand, as he had seen the others do. Of course, he had no idea what the party went away for, nor did he comprehend the failure to bring the boat back. His education had not yet advanced to such a state as would have made an explanation of that kind understandable. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... blushed as Tom explained what had happened. Realizing Chow's embarrassment, Tom tried to make his mistake sound understandable. ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... in a few. Yet, with all their profound explanations of theories and their verbose defense of hopelessly unscientific methods, the stammerer would be disappointed indeed, should he attempt to find in the entire collection a practical and understandable discussion of his trouble. ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... Government department; and that in order to diminish the litigation under the gold law, and to make that fearful and wonderful agglomeration of erratic, experimental, crude, involved, contradictory and truly incomprehensible enactments at all understandable, the Chamber had to codify it at its own expense and on its own initiative, illustrate both the indispensable character of the organization, and the ignorance and ineptitude of ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... and other contrary cusses, in my time," he said, slowly, "but this feller Presby has 'em all lookin' as simple, and plain, and understandable, as ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... assessing Collado's use of Rodriguez' material is that perhaps his presentation of the most readily understandable material in the Arte is not so much an effort on his part to simplify the learning of Japanese for his students, as it is a reflection of his lack of adequate familiarity with the language he ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... a sweet illusion, this flashing fragment of rainbow; a beautiful vision to fade upon approach, typical of so much that is un-understandable in rook life? He made a dart forward and tapped it with his beak. No, it was real—as fine a lump of jagged green glass as any newly-married rook could desire, and to be had for the taking. SHE would be pleased ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... beautiful terrace that looked out upon the glowing quivering sea. And he became very anxious to tell them something about "Francesco"; they could not understand him until the doctor caught "Battaglia" and "Pavia" and had an inspiration. Francis the First, he explained in clumsy but understandable English, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the Emperor and all was lost but honour. They looked at the slender pillars and graceful archings ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and, on the whole, lived up to their reputation. But in Malvina, side by side with much that is commendable, there appears to have existed a most reprehensible spirit of mischief, displaying itself in pranks that, excusable, or at all events understandable, in, say, a pixy or a pigwidgeon, strike one as altogether unworthy of a well-principled White Lady, posing as the friend and benefactress of mankind. For merely refusing to dance with her—at midnight, by the shores of a mountain lake; neither the ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... yachts for their very cosiness and their quality of keeping people close together who wanted to be far apart. And as she watched the figure of Musa growing fainter she was more than ever impressed by the queerness of men. Women seemed to be so logical, so realistic, so understandable, so calculable, whereas men were enigmas of waywardness and unreason. At just that moment her feet reminded her that they had been wetted by the adventure in the punt, and she said to herself sagely that she must take precautions against ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... of untruth. That, for instance, of the ermine collar embroidered with emeralds. If an understandable reason be required for this, it would be to draw attention away from the green lights which were seen in the room, and especially in the well-hole. Any unprejudiced person would accept the green lights to be ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... menu, the Red Un repeated the words from McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... should not exclude Quoin, who still persisted, on every occasion, that there was a stowaway aboard. As for the Second Mate, I have very little doubt now, but that he was beginning to realise there was something deeper and less understandable than he had at first dreamed of. Yet, all the same, I know he had to keep his guesses and half-formed opinions pretty well to himself; for the Old Man and the First Mate chaffed him unmercifully about his "bogy." This, I got ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... millions, and that of the liver is about three or four parts to ten millions. Since the liver is the most complex and active chemical factory in the body, its appropriation of a greater amount of iodine for itself is understandable. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... fowls have each a language of their own, and as far as they go they are almost as clear-cut and understandable as the talk of human beings. Just how much more is behind the veil that limits our understanding we cannot say; but no doubt there ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... him. We are particularly glad to learn the truth about Mrs. Jackson, after so many years of slander and misunderstanding, and to find something really touching and noble, instead of ludicrous, in the grim General's devotion to his first and only love. We get also for the first time an understandable account of the Battle of New Orleans, made up with praiseworthy impartiality from the accounts of both sides. Nor is it only here that the author gives us new light. He enables us to judge fairly of the sad story of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and by the use of words and terms which may be understood by anyone. Our only fear is that its very simplicity may cause some to pass it by as unworthy of attention, while they pass on their way searching for something "deep," mysterious and non-understandable. However, the Western mind is eminently practical, and we know that it is only a question of a short time before it will recognize the practicability of ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... they've invented just to cause despair in decent people who ask for a little dinner! Why, in every country on earth, when you open your mouth, snap your jaws, smack your lips and teeth, isn't that the world's most understandable message? From Quebec to the Tuamotu Islands, from Paris to the Antipodes, doesn't it mean: I'm hungry, give ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... not the same thing to be young as to be old; that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm who came every year for a fortnight's fishing at St. Saviour's, was one which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of individual taste. She had been good friends with this young manager, who was only thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted to kiss her on saying good-bye one recent summer, she had said, "Oh, no, oh, no, that would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... me, I gazed from one to the ether, inquiringly, after the manner of one who hears a tongue not understandable. ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... to think," Mollie said impatiently. "Try and think. Your head might just as well be a football. What I think is that if two un-understandable things are discovered about the same time they must belong to each other. Don't ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... my possession, it was so clear and understandable, I really forgot for the moment he ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... of these is perfectly understandable," said Roger. "Here, where it says 329 ff. cf. W. W. That simply means 'pages 329 and following, compare Woodrow Wilson.' I remember jotting that down not long ago, because that passage in the book reminded me of some of Wilson's ideas. I generally note down in the back of a book the numbers ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... held the attention of a delighted audience in so charming a manner as he did. Like Faraday, he possessed the power of clearly unveiling his subject, and stripping it of all its complicated perplexities. His illustrations were simple, clear, and understandable. Technical words were avoided as much as possible. He threw the ordinary run of lecturers far into the shade. Intelligent boys and girls could understand him. Next to Faraday, no one filled the theatre of the Institution ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... escape, as the house is surrounded with water. What weapon would he choose? You would say the most silent in the world. Then he could hope when the deed was done to slip quickly from the window, to wade the moat, and to get away at his leisure. That's understandable. But is it understandable that he should go out of his way to bring with him the most noisy weapon he could select, knowing well that it will fetch every human being in the house to the spot as quick as ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blamed Tsz-ch'an for doing with the law: he popularized it. He also attempted with persistent study to master the Changes, to which incomprehensible work he added features of his own—very little more understandable than the original texts. As to the Odes, 3000 in number, he used the pruning knife much more vigorously, and nine-tenths of them were rejected as unsuitable for the purposes of good didactic lessons or conservative precedents. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... uncle, Laxart, "it is amazing to hear, and indeed not understandable. It is a stranger thing to hear her say she will stop the soldiering that it was to hear her say she would begin it; and I who speak to you can say in all truth that that was the strangest word that ever I had heard till ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... on Olive and the strange volte face in her feelings towards him. The change in her was scarcely understandable. Yet it was entirely a normal outcome of her essential character. Olive had never appreciated Clifford's value to herself until that day at Wiesbaden when she had realised his value to the woman who was ready to sacrifice her reputation and her happiness in order to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... very much the vocabulary you have used, and I can see how careful you have been in choosing understandable words."—MR. PHILIP E. HOWARD, ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... glad; as Nelda's husband, he would share in the higher price being paid for the collection. But when you realize that Rivers was buying the collection out of Dunmore's pocket, his reaction becomes quite understandable. I daresay I signed Arnold Rivers's ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,—that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaring beyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, but the result of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the story of the runaway marriage. Albert listened with interest and the almost incredulous amazement with which the young always receive tales of their parents' love affairs. Love, for people of his age or a trifle older, was a natural and understandable thing, but for his father, as he remembered him, to have behaved in this way ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to show her gratitude; if what he asked could bring any alleviation to his life, if her presence could bring any sort of comfort to his loneliness, was not even that more than she had ever dared to hope? That he should turn to her was understandable. He had men friends in plenty, but women he openly and undisguisedly avoided. He had grown used to her presence at the Towers, a marriage such as he proposed would call for no great alteration in the daily routine to which ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... never be found through delegacy. The only safe way is through direct legislation—through the referendum and initiative. The referendum and initiative does not mean more laws, but fewer, shorter, simpler, and more understandable ones."[599] "What is wanted is neither aristocracy, plutocracy, nor demagoguecracy, but democracy—the one governing system which never has been tried. The people must learn that the game of politics is not an unfathomable science, but a struggle ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... firmly believes that wealth accrues to every resident of New York by some mysterious process not understandable of the Briton. McEachern and his money were accepted by society without question. His solecisms, which at first were numerous, were passed over as so quaint and refreshing. People liked his rugged good humor. He ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... this direction. If you question a verdict of their courts you are a rogue, and that ends the matter. And yet when an Englishman undertakes to circumvent the law, there is no other man on earth who will go to greater lengths. An amazing people! Never understandable by the sane ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... this matter plainly, sir," he said, "in what I call an understandable, straightforward way. I'm a poor man—I've been a poor man all my life—and I've never seed a chance before of getting away from it. I ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to be content with that sum, and that Hank Rowan's cached gold would be an excellent bait for them, if it could be uncovered. Those steadily reiterated phrases, "raw gold—on the rock" might have some understandable meaning if one were on the spot, but MacRae had kept that to himself—and I wasn't running a bureau of information for Lessard's benefit. The Canadian government might trust him, but I wouldn't—not if he took oath on a stack of Bibles, ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... natives were telepathic, did the one called Throon go through the weary pretense of trying to learn a mutually understandable form of communication? ...
— Cry from a Far Planet • Tom Godwin
... house and England his grandmother's, France was peculiarly his own. Peter Champneys felt that he had come home, and even the fact that he couldn't speak understandable French didn't spoil the illusion. Nobody laughed at his barbarous jargon; people were patient, polite, helpful. He thought the French the pleasantest people in the world, and this opinion he never changed. Later, when he learned to know them better, he concluded that they ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... "It is not understandable," muttered the giant as he took up his new position and gazed with feelings of awe upon the grand scene. "I wonder if the pale-faced men in the floating islands think much about these things. Perhaps they dwell in a land which is still more wonderful ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... made him understandable, and gave him a certain popularity in Nigger-town. Black men fell into the habit of dropping in at the Siner cabin, where they would sit outdoors, with chairs propped against the wall, and philosophize on the desultory life of the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... assumed that the Imperial Government wished to limit Mr. Wilson's activity to bringing the belligerent parties to the conference table. We might also very well have gone on working with the President if the unrestricted submarine campaign had not intervened. It was, however, understandable that the Imperial Government, on grounds of domestic politics, should not want to name our peace terms at once. Accordingly the answer to the Wilson Note, which reached Berlin with extraordinary promptness on the 26th December, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... influence over M'tela was quite assured, Winkleman's arrival would probably turn the scale. She had not prevented Kingozi's arriving before the Bavarian; but she might hold the Englishman comparatively powerless. That was understandable. Kingozi felt he might even love her the more for this evidence of a faithful spirit. But the last few days! It must have become evident to her that her cause was lost; that M'tela's friendship had been gained for the English. If she had cared for him the least in the world would ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... also numerous signs, sounds and motions by which animals communicate with each other, though to man these symbols of language may not always be understandable. Dogs give barks indicating surprise, pleasure and all other emotions. Cows will bellow for days when mourning for their dead. The mother bear will bury her dead cub and silently guard its grave for weeks to prevent its ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... eagerness that contrasted strangely with his cynical composure, "that is the first thing, and the most understandable." And she went dancing off with him as gay as a lark, and leaning on him at an angle of forty-five; whilst he went erect and cold, like ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... newcomers they stopped. The leader said in quite understandable Amer-English, "I am Taller, Khan of all the People. Our legends tell of you. You must be from First Earth." He added with a simple dignity, a quiet gesture, "Welcome to the World. ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... relatives, and neither he nor she had any. "We have a friend—" he began and paused, and then rambled into a not very understandable story about a letter and a doll's house and some unknown man who had bought one of his pictures, or was supposed to have done so, in a curiously clandestine manner. I could not quite follow ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... restlessly back and forth, sometimes leaping upon a chair, sometimes trotting round and round, and again, wild-eyed and furtive, it stood motionless, as if listening. Death had entered the house; and death, to the beast, is not understandable. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... with an air of satisfaction that was not exactly understandable. "I presume you have something to go on—something ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... "That was understandable last night, but I fail to follow your reasoning for a policy of silence when we told you at Waterloo that Mrs. Lester ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... not Roscoe's fault; he could not help it. He had merely gone the way of all the men who learned navigation before him. By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and experienced the possession of power that was like unto that of a god. All his life Roscoe had lived on land, and therefore in sight of land. Being constantly in sight of land, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... rising in his face, but he forced himself to remain calm. After a moment of silence he said. "Your emotional feelings are understandable, but you must remember that the Index permits us to administer accurately the National Science Development Act. Without the scientific assurance of the Index there would be no way of determining where these precious funds could best ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... took a place beside her she would tenderly wipe the sweat from his forehead and look at him with perplexity. Work, yes, that, as the preacher said, was the curse of Adam; but this daily persistency was not understandable. Had not Faalelei plenty for them both? And if one taro sufficed, why be at the pains ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... had unearthed him here in the Northborough Hotel. He had meant to ask him—he had asked him actually, and the General had not explained. But it did not matter, after all. Some coincidence, some easily understandable explanation, of course, would account ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... selection, I have endeavoured to choose those which are most characteristic and best calculated to give an idea of the life and thought of the people. The clearest variants have been chosen, and vague or doubtful passages omitted, so as to render the narratives easily understandable for the ordinary reader. In many cases also, the extreme outspokenness of the primitive people concerned has necessitated further editing, in respect of which, I can confidently refer any inclined to protest, ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... the Commissioner's suggestion. It had been a lengthy job, requiring a couple of hours, but it was a complete one. Which was understandable, since it was the First Lady herself, Trigger gathered gradually from the noise, who had put Mantelish under the influence, back in his own garden on Maccadon, and within two weeks after his first return ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... Algol to Sirius. Aldebaran to Epsilon Ceti. You read the names, and the descriptions that went with them, and the whole thing—although breathtaking in concept, of course, when you really stopped to meditate on it—became rather ordinary and prosaic and somehow more understandable. ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... little difficulty in describing the quality of the old-world love-making so that it may be understandable now. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... afraid you are more slangy than understandable," returned Mrs. Havel. "Did you come for ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... and powerful in all this, which stirred the souls of men. It was understandable why people believed ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... his friends," he said in a soft musical voice. He gave the words a most curious accent and inflexion, yet they were quite understandable to his listeners. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... we do to make our tariff changes strengthen business instead of weakening business? Rival protective tariff nations have answered that question. Common sense has answered it. Next to our need to make the Sherman law modern, understandable and just, our greatest fiscal need is a genuine, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... is my duty to set down quite frankly that I believe the Urchin showed more enthusiasm over the stone and the robin than over any of the amazements that succeeded them. I suppose the reason for that is plain. These two objects had some understandable relation with his daily life. His small mind—we call a child's mind "small" simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours, for it can take in almost anything without effort—possessed well-known classifications into which the big stone and the robin fitted ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... ears. This language was more understandable. Entertainment meant playing with the prisoner—torture. And alkite, probably, and ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... the track, and here the foreman's badge of office and scepter was a pick-handle. Above all the clamor and the shoutings Virginia could hear the bull-bellow of this foreman roaring out his commands—in terms happily not understandable to her; and once she drew back with a little cry of womanly shrinking when the pick-handle thwacked upon the ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... hard to discuss the question of Japan for the benefit of an exclusively Western audience in a convincing way because Japanese policy has two distinct facets which seem utterly contradictory, and yet which are in a great measure understandable if the objects of that diplomacy are set down. Being endowed with an extraordinary capacity for taking detached views, the Statesmen of Tokio long ago discerned the necessity of having two independent policies—an Eastern policy for Eastern Asia and a Western policy for Western nations—because ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... to see why you take this man as your ideal," she said, one day, to Charles Osmond, "I can not, of course, accept a great deal that He is said to have taught. When He speaks of love to men, that is understandable, one can try to obey; but when he speaks about God, then, of course, I can only think that He was deluded. You may admire Joan of Arc, and see the great beauty of her character, yet at the same time believe ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... which leads to the disparagement of the practical doctor and medical layman, and then further to the disparagement of the craft of nature healers. The practical doctor and the nature healer on the one hand tend towards an understandable disparagement of medical science and analysis and, on the other hand, tend towards superficiality. The superficiality of the opponents of science is, however, as unhappy an affair as the pride of ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... sixteenth century. These have been stated, as briefly and as impartially as possible, because so much of future educational history arose out of the conditions resulting from these revolts. The early educational history of America is hardly understandable without some knowledge of the religious forces awakened by the work of the Protestants. To the educational significance and consequences of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... doctor saw that there had been no mistake. For, although the agent's subconscious mind had served to translate what was said into language understandable by the doctor, yet his eyes plainly told him that the professor's ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... English of George Meredith obscure; conceivably we might find a thousand words and phrases of the year 2000 strange and perplexing; but there is no reason why a time should ever come when what has been written well in English since Elizabethan days should no longer be understandable and fine. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... thought Jack was inclined to believe that it was merely a coincidence that placing together every fourth word of the jumbled message made a dispatch having a perfectly understandable bearing on the jewel theft. It was impossible to believe that Professor Dusenberry, mild and self-effacing, could have had a hand in the attack on the diamond merchant. Jack was ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... him was precisely an example of his "absolutely un-understandable" ways of looking at things that so desperately ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... that all sounds are in the form of letters, or are understandable as combinations of letters. The constituent letters of a word however cannot yield any meaning, and are thus to be regarded as elements of auditory perception which serve as a means for understanding ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... philosophy of art, trying to find some obscure foundation on which to build for themselves a theory of aesthetics. To such, and to all others who have any wish to reason connectedly on art matters, Mr. Marshall's little book will be interesting and instructive reading. It is remarkably clear and understandable even to a reader with no special training in metaphysical reasoning, and in point of literary style and carefully considered use of language it is a genuine treat. Its object is to explain, in as direct and simple ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various
... of bursting out laughing at this, when the doctor startled them considerably by saying in broken (but understandable) English— ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... refusal I began to think less unkindly of Miss Francis' idea of selling the stuff to farmers and to wonder what was wrong with my technique. After some understandable hesitation—for I don't make a practice of being odd or conspicuous—I sat down on the curb to think. Besides, the pump was getting wearisomely heavy. I couldnt decide exactly what was unsatisfactory ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... every ship he had sailed in men called him Scotty. He had a face like a harvest-moon, with a sorrowful expression of the eyes, a frame like a gladiator's, a brogue modified from its original consistency to an understandable dialect, and the soul of a Scotchman—which means that he was possessed by two dominant and conflicting passions, love of God and love of Mammon. Add to these attributes a masterful knowledge of seamanship and an acquaintance ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... which regard he was excessively unlike ninety per cent of the younger officers. Among them it was an uncommon thing in my experience to find one who did not know at least a smattering of English and considerably more than a smattering of understandable French. Even that marvelous organism, the German private soldier, was apt to astonish you at unexpected moments by answering in fair-enough English the questions you put to him ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... transportation and communication facilities were extremely limited, a generally self-sufficient and naturally self-reliant community developed as a matter of survival. The characteristics which this frontier nurtured, and the non-English—even anti-English—composition of its population make understandable the sentiment in this region for independence from Great Britain. This, of course, is supremely demonstrated in the separate declaration of independence drawn, according to the report, by the settlers of ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... a naive view?" Mr. Bennet asked, smiling. "As it happens, my associates and I are not undertakers. We took on the disguise in order to present an understandable motive if our plan to capture you had misfired. In that event, others would have believed exactly—and only—what you thought: that our purpose was to safeguard ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... sustaining surface, if expressed in understandable terms, would be equal to sixty pounds for every square foot ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... don't suppose we shall be disturbed before daylight, for the enemy got more than they expected, so I may just as well sit and rest. I can watch over him just the same, and—" Serge's next utterance was not understandable if treated as words, but perfectly plain if considered as a snore, for he had sunk sideways till his head rested on the hard edge of the car, while at regular intervals he gave vent to a series of deep gruff tones which sounded as if his neck were bent at such ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... seemed inseparable from his doings, Comus had always flung away a portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring and utterly profitless extravagance, which outraged all the canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of understandable satisfaction. Under these repeated discouragements it was not surprising that some small part of her affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park that morning with an unconfessed expectation ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... an admirably complete and explicit handbook for boys who fall under the spell of experimenting and "tinkering" with electrical apparatus. Simple explanations of the principles involved make the operation readily understandable." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... the actual instruction is taken into a further dimension where it is described as "this direction on the part of the chief executive for the destruction of 'irrelevant documents'". And one serious complaint made by the applicants about the Royal Commission Report is that what could be an understandable direction for the retention of one copy on a master file of all relevant documents has become an unacceptable instruction that irrelevant documents (related to the Antarctic flights nonetheless) should be destroyed. We ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... educational campaign in progress during the past few years through the technical training of men for conduct of the industry, by the example of reputable companies in regularly publishing the essential facts upon which the value of their mines is based, and through understandable nontechnical discussion in and by some sections of the financial and general press. The real investor is being educated to distinguish between reputable concerns and the counters of gamesters. Moreover, yearly, men of technical knowledge are taking a stronger and more influential part in mining ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... either. Perhaps elsewhere and under more suitable circumstances I may be able to put my thought into words, precise and understandable. It will take time, but that I shall do so some day ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... certainly first fill the spring and neighbouring pools. But the water in the spring would soon evaporate, whilst the depth and area of the lagoon would save its contents from diminishing from this cause, for a much longer period. So that after all it is easily understandable that we should find the lagoon full and the ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' {93} world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... asylum picture, from there to return in reverse order through the second half of the drama, thus symbolising life's continuous repetition of itself, Kierkegaard's Gentagelse. The first part of The Road to Damascus is the one most frequently produced on the stage. This is understandable, having regard to its firm structure and the consistency of its faith in a Providence directing the fortunes and misfortunes of man, whether the individual rages in revolt ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... slowly. "So," he said softly. "Your lack of caution and discretion is more understandable, then. You have been quite fortunate, I should say. Of course, extreme individualism is far from common now, and persons who combine extreme individualism with high empathic power are rare, but they do appear. And they are dangerous in the highest ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... Teachings regarding the Divine Incarnation of the Spirit in the mortal body of Jesus—a subject of the greatest importance to all who are troubled with this difficult point. We hope to be able to shed the Mystic light of Truth upon this corner which so many have found dark, non-understandable, and contrary to reason, natural law and science. The Mystic Teachings are the great ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and fight for them. Nor, if he is to succeed easily, must he be too idealistic; he must not seek too distant purposes; the group must understand him, and though he must keep them in some awe and fear of him, yet must they feel that he represents an understandable ideal. The leader who preaches things out of comprehension arouses the kind of opposition which ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... fictitious, but of a real, estate. The conversation with his host had made everything clear, had made the possibility of his acquiring riches manifest, had made the difficult art of estate management at once easy and understandable; until it would seem as though particularly was his nature adapted for mastering the art in question. All that he would need to do would be to mortgage the dead souls, and then to set up a genuine establishment. Already he ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Providence are, however, not unfrequently so interwoven with human events as that average intelligence may be able to understand portions of them, though much of mystery must always remain. And in no one particular do these understandable portions find a clearer illustration than in those interventions which assign individual men to given pursuits and responsibilities in life. Truly, "There is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... Minister of Justice, who was there to do what she could to make things run smoothly. She is rabid about the Germans, but is not for taking it out on these helpless people. And that seems to be the spirit of everybody, although it would be quite understandable if they showed these people some of their resentment. The Gardes were bestirring themselves to look after their charges. Some of them had contributed their pocket money and had bought chocolate and milk for the children and mineral waters and other odds and ends for ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... autobiography, since Balzac, like his mouthpiece, Louis, viewed everything from an inner sense—from intuition, or the soul faculties, rather than from the standard of mere intellectual observation, analysis and synthesis. This inner sense, so real and so thoroughly understandable to those possessing it, is almost, if not quite, impossible of description to the complete comprehension of those who have no intimate relationship with this inner vision. To the person who views life from the inner sense, the soul sense (which is the approach to, and is ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... differences. One man learns best through his eyes, another through his ears, and still another by his sense of touch. One man gets his facts most easily by reading about them, another must see the actual production, while the third forms the most definite and easily understandable mental picture of them as a result of hearing them described. One man, in buying machinery, wants to examine carefully every detail of its construction, another man wants only to see it in action and examine its product, while still another man ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... by which he had held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's eyes he read a curious questioning, a hint that they were finding something in his eyes which was new and not wholly understandable. He knew well enough what it was that she saw; and though she was sitting opposite him at the table for four, he looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself, for once in a way, resolutely to his ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... understandable from the physics of the condition of broken compensation that anything which improves the tone of the heart and makes it again compensatory removes all of these many disabilities, congestions and subacute inflammations. If, ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... vice-president, first, however, explaining exactly what he wished Gus to say. The ruse succeeded; then Gray returned to his own office. He drew a deep breath. Within him he felt a ferocious eagerness take fire, for it seemed to him that the day of reckoning had come. Henry's behavior was now easily understandable; the fellow was cringing, cowering in anticipation of a second blow. Well, the whip was in Gray's hands, and he proposed to use it ruthlessly—to sink the lash, to cut to the bone, to leave scars such as Henry had left upon him. Nor was that his only weapon. There was, for instance, Old Bell Nelson's ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... were not at all afraid, and prayed much in her heart." Presently a station was reached. The language spoken there was not her vernacular, but she understood enough to know something was being said about the baby. Then an official appeared, and there was a cry quite understandable to her: "A Brahman baby! That Christian there is kidnapping a Brahman baby!" The official stopped at the carriage door. She was pushed towards him amidst a confused chatter, a crowd gathered at the door in a moment, and someone shouted in Tamil, above the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... went up as it were to skies of brass, yet he knew a loving Savior stood ready to pour forth his healing love, a Divine Spirit waited only the means, to lay a healing touch on sore hearts. What was needed was a simple, practical, real way to make it understandable to men, to bring them into the right environment, to make their hearts and minds receptive, to point the way to peace, joy and eternal life. He brought to bear on this problem all the practical, trained ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... in favoring its pronounced and immediate success. Aknowledge of Sterne existed among the more intelligent lovers of English literature in Germany, the leaders of thought, whose voice compelled attention for the understandable, but was powerless to create appreciation for the unintelligible among the lower ranks of readers. This knowledge and appreciation of Yorick were immediately available for the furtherance of Sterne's fame as soon as a work of popular appeal ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... It was as if the tobacco pouch and the appraiser's receipt were in his own pocket; and broad rivers made capital graveyards. They two alone in the fog! He whirled round the deckhouse—and backed on his heels to get his balance. Directly in front, in a very understandable pose, was the intended victim, his jaw ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... all employers. And the young woman had left the cab, half-way up Trafalgar Road, with a delicious pink-and-white smile of adieu. And Hilda had thought how different all this was from Brighton, and how much better and more homely and understandable. And now she was in the garden of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... of his finger could connect that radio with one at Tri-Planet News Service, and within the hour anything he said into it would be heard by all Terra, Mars and Venus. In consequence, there existed around the Paratime Building a marked and understandable reluctance ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... and shook his head. A heavy hand with the truth, that Irishman; and about as understandable in these splendid, tender days of his idiocy and bliss, as March wind, comets or star-dust. His passion for truth was literally a passion, relentless and exact. He worked harder. His steadiness, as Jan said, was grim ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... cap with a word of comprehensive description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community there are two separate and distinct worlds—a black one and a white one—interrelated by necessities of civic coordination and in an economic ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... all right. It's a perfectly understandable way of looking at it, if it is rather far-fetched. But good-by to the hard-earned thousands. You won't have a smitch of ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... was no panic, but naturally, there was a considerable amount of excitement and rush and much confusion, and, as the increasing list rendered ineffective the lowering of the boats on the port side, the passengers, as is readily understandable, crowded over on the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... they shook hands, our host with an obvious reluctance that turned to a less understandable dismay as I also prepared to ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... values in the spiritual world. He used the material things in life to illustrate values in the realm of the ideal; He used the things that are seen to make understandable the eternal things that ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... and conversations between the characters portrayed, the most recent and reliable scientific information respecting the moon and Mars; together with other astronomical information: stating it in an interesting form, and in concise, clear, and understandable language. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... "Quite understandable, I should say," declared the professor. "Unable to cope with Von Ullrich themselves, they think perhaps we ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... fan-tan attraction. The service was in Chinese, but the reverend gentleman, not being fluent in the Chinese language, first gave a paragraph in English, and this was translated by his wife into Chinese, which made it more interesting and assuredly more understandable to us. The audience paid the closest attention, and to my surprise their faces revealed an animated response. The women were dressed in the long black coats and loose trousers seen everywhere, but their hair ornaments were of gold, set with jewels, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... a simple and understandable policy—without complicated or misleading clauses. You know exactly what every word means—and every word means ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... of the Battle of Sedgemoor is rendered singularly picturesque and understandable by the personal observation and local tradition which he has brought to bear upon it. Might not his account of the capture of Monmouth derive some few additional life-giving touches, from the same invaluable sources of information. It is extremely interesting, as every thing adorned by Mr. Macaulay's ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... country. Sociology sought a surer basis for the solution of the problems from a study of the facts of city life. Statistics of population by governmental departments provide figures upon conditions and tendencies. Community surveys have translated into understandable form a mass of information about the formal aspects of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sacrifices from a weary and exhausted people, that without such sacrifices these people would presently find themselves in even worse conditions, and that, to persuade them to make the effort necessary to save themselves, it was necessary to have a perfectly clear and easily understandable plan which could be dinned into the whole nation and silence the criticism of all possible opponents. Copies of his little book came to Moscow. Lenin read it and caused excruciating jealousy in the minds of several other Communists, who had also been ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... that every theater retains its own peculiar smell. The scientific investigation of the psychology of odors is too subtle to be understandable. The question of analyzing the exudations of a nervous crowd seems interesting, but the remembrance of an anxious humanity is always present. In former times the attendant placed a small bunch of herbs and aromatic flowers on the judge's desk, and glasses of the dried bouquets remained ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... central topic. While I have diverged occasionally from the thread of the narrative, my purpose has been merely to give where possible more background to the story, that the account as a whole might be more understandable in its relation to the general ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... accepted the supernatural quite readily and it is not to be wondered at, for all the world is new and therefore supernatural to them. Magic is done daily in children's eyes, and there is no line between what is understandable and what is not, until adults try ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... for all of us to rationalize what we want to believe, and to consider those leaders we like responsible and those we dislike irresponsible. And our task is not helped by stubborn partisanship, however understandable on the part ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... acacias murmured. The pines hush-hushed. The bronhaha of the cafes was like a considered counterpoint. Everywhere was harmony; beauty. And there would be no depression. It would last. There would be no ghosts. They were exorcised. For now there was Fenzile. How understandable everything was! It must have been under a moon like this, under these Syrian stars, to the hush-hush-hush of the pine and the rustle of willow branches, that Solomon the king sang his love-song. And it must ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... palingenetic from cenogenetic—a criterion which descriptive morphology was unable to find.[484] The introduction of a functional moment into the concept of heredity was a methodological advance of the first importance, for it linked up in an understandable way the problems of embryology, and indirectly of all morphology, with the problem of hereditary transmission, and gave form and substance to the conception of the organism as ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... became evident that Ts'ao Ts'ao with his troops had become the strongest of all the generals. His troops seem to have consisted not of Chinese soldiers alone, but also of Hsiung-nu. It is understandable that the annals say nothing about this, and it can only be inferred from the facts. It appears that in order to reinforce their armies the generals recruited not only Chinese but foreigners. The generals ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... you're already overwrought and eager to quit, and you've been badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it's pretty understandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story that they're just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. But I was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and when I saw those bodies it was ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... and understand GRAHAME.]—Mr. Grahame is both a very readable and understandable author. He has reason to be proud of his poem called the SABBATH: for it is one of the sweetest and one of the purest of modern times. His scene however is laid in the country, and not in the metropolis. The very opening ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the doctor. "It was a sudden shock. Yes; it's quite understandable—long weeks of suspense and agony, and then this on the top of it!" He did not ask any further questions, for Dr. White was a wise man. He knew the whole circumstances of Paul's arrest, and was therefore able ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... think it out for ourselves. If we are open to a simple, even primitive, conception of God, we may still repudiate the creeds and doctrines, but we are likely to become more tolerant of those who find them true and good. We shall be likely in time to find the religion of Christ understandable and acceptable—warm and quick with life. The man who ungrudgingly opens his heart to the God of nature will be religious in the simplest possible sense. He may worry because of the things he cannot altogether understand, and because he falls so far short of the implied ideal. But ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall |
