"Astonishingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... farther down he found them,—two astonishingly small bear-cubs. One whined pitifully and struggled to his feet as though in anticipation of supper, but the other was cold and stiff. It had evidently been dead for ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the Mysteries of Redemption"; another of the same age was "a dear lover of faithful ministers"; Anne Greenwich, who, we are not surprised to discover, died at the age of five, "discoursed most astonishingly of great mysteries"; Daniel Bradley, when three years old, had an "impression and inquisition of the state of souls after death"; Elizabeth Butcher, when only two and a half years old, would ask herself as she lay in her cradle, "What is my corrupt nature?" and would answer herself ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... capacity in Advena more importance than it had. But it was only a part of what was to them a new human demonstration, something to inspect very carefully and accept very cautiously—the product, like themselves, yet so suspiciously different, of these free airs and these astonishingly large ideas. In some ways, as she sat there in her graceful dress and careless attitude, asking them direct smiling questions about their voyage, she imposed herself as of the class whom both these ladies of Bross would acknowledge ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, more probably perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction; but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories are set, the background of human life and society upon which they are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance, and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... viewpoints, I have had some hope of clarifying The Leader's career by comparing it with that of Prime Minister Winston, in power in his country when The Leader ruled ours. His career is splendidly documented. There is astonishingly little documentation about The Leader as a person, however. That is one of the difficulties of my task. Even worse, those who should know him best lock their ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... It has destroyed every resource of the state which depends upon opinion and the good-will of individuals. The riches of convention disappear. The advantages of Nature in some measure remain; even these, I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what remains is complete and absolute. We go about asking when assignats will expire, and we laugh at the last price of them. But what signifies the fate of those tickets ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... you are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear; and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once momentary and astonishingly intimate—to be displayed before the eyes of a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them," was her reiterated comment on ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... his brow with a snowy handkerchief, which released into the office the scent of cologne. He was a stoutish man, and the morning, for autumn, was astonishingly warm. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a larger number may engage in manufacturing, and gradually the same principle of division of labor which has brought Western people to high standards of living, comfort, and earning power will produce much the same result in Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low as they are to-day to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to the general cheapening of money the world over, and partly also to the increased ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... possible, in the first place, to work out the order of succession of many of the great groups of animals, and this order is found to be the same as that established by the other bodies of evidence. Secondly, some fossil groups are astonishingly complete, so that the ancient history of a form like the horse can be written with something approaching fullness. Finally, the remains of certain animals have been found so situated in geological ways, and so constructed anatomically, that the zooelogist ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... our materials are vague with the vagueness of a dream. Later fancy has meddled with the truth of the saga. English readers, no doubt, best catch the charm of the adventure in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's astonishingly imaginative tale called 'The Best Story in the World.' For the account of Isandhlwana, and Rorke's Drift, 'an ower-true tale,' the editor has to thank his friend Mr. Rider Haggard, who was in South Africa at the time of the disaster, and who has generously given time and labour ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... This was such an astonishingly civil answer that Beauty's courage rose: but it sank again when the beast, addressing the merchant, desired him to leave the palace next morning, and never return to it again. "And so good night, merchant. And good ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... fragments of evidence as to his private life and more intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that environ written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that is not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of women than John Knox, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the truth of this matter. As far as I can tell now I do not believe that you have killed John Siders. But I must find some further proofs that will convince others as well as myself. If it is of any comfort to you, I can tell you that during a long career as police detective I have been most astonishingly fortunate in the cases I have undertaken. I am hoping that my usual good luck will follow me here also. I am ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... also. It is astonishingly distinct. The giant seems seated on the brow of the mountain, the different shades of the cloud appear to form a white robe that sweeps over its vast breast and limbs; it seems to gaze with a steady face upon the city below, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... at about that distance from us. But if you patiently gazed into the darkness a little while, there was a sure reward for you. Presently, a quarter of a mile away you would see a blinding splash or explosion of light on the water—a flash so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant that it would make you catch your breath; then that blotch of light would instantly extend itself and take the corkscrew shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent, with every curve of its body and the "break" spreading away from its head, and the wake following behind its tail ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the wand or a phial of elixir, change the coarsest features, the most unfavourable complexion, into a dazzling image of everything most lovely, most beautiful. Nor had she the good luck of certain young ladies of whom one reads quite often, who improve so astonishingly in personal appearance between fifteen and twenty—generally during the absence of the hero—that they are not to be recognized, and a second introduction becomes necessary. No; Elinor was no nearer to being a beauty when Harry returned from Brazil, than when he went to Paris; ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... of facts belonging to the class of negative or indifferent evidence. The great group of Lizards, which abound in the present world, extends through the whole series of formations as far back as the Permian, or latest Palaeozoic, epoch. These Permian lizards differ astonishingly little from the lizards which exist at the present day. Comparing the amount of the differences between them and modern lizards, with the prodigious lapse of time between the Permian epoch and the present ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... warmly the delightfully fantastic and inconsequent humour of the first half of the play. Often it was the things that Mr. AINLEY was given to say; but even more often, I think, it was the incomparable way he said them, with those astonishingly swift and unforeseen turns of gesture and glance and movement which are his peculiar gift. Now and then, to remind us of his versatility, he may turn to sentiment or even tragedy, but light comedy remains ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... astonishingly well received on Saturday night in Cato: I think it will not be many days before we ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... another; "no one must touch them but me," but the market-women taught them that they could not monopolize, but deal fairly. They are certainly clever traders, and keep each other in countenance, they stand by each other, and will not allow overreaching, and they give food astonishingly cheap: once in the market they have ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... smutty mineral, and had taken on talismanic qualities unguessed by the mere animal workman; and sugar, and coffee, and beans, and rice, and spices, each would open its own wonderful world before this young and fertile mind. As an heritage from his boyhood on the ranges Dave had astonishingly alert senses; his sight, his hearing, his sense of smell and of touch were vastly more acute than those of the average university graduate. . . And if that were true might it not fairly be said that Dave was already the better educated of the two, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... dyspareunia, or absence of sexual gratification, although gross disproportion in the size of the male and female organs, or disease in either party, may lead to the same result. Dyspareunia, Kisch adds, is astonishingly frequent, though sometimes women complain of it without justification in order to arouse sympathy for themselves as sacrifices on the altar of marriage; the constant sign is absence of ejaculation on the woman's part. Kisch also observes that wedding night deflorations are often really ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Tribune: "One of the cleverest musical novels we know, and it is particularly creditable in that it holds nothing of the hysterical gush with which the feminine writer usually fills fiction of this kind.... The study of the group of singers at the Royal Opera in a minor German city is astonishingly well done, and so is the portrait of the great tenor's peasant wife ... so unmistakably true that she must have been drawn from life ... an uncommonly attractive and ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... shall cover ourselves in the sand, and fire off our matchlocks. They will feel our bullets, and hear our report, and look about and see no person. We shall be covered up in the sand." This, the Souf Arab repeated several times, and the Ghadamsee traders thought it astonishingly clever and courageous. It is reported five hundred Touaricks are soon to pursue the Shânbah into the Algerian territory. It is said also, French Arabs will support the Shânbah bandits against both Touaricks ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... the table with light, and fearing she might be provoked into shrieks or some violent manifestation of temper, she went to bed as early as she could. But there her torments became still more intolerable. All sorts of ideas and hallucinations, magnified and distorted, filled her brain, rendered astonishingly clear by the effects of insomnia. She saw over again the murders she had read of in her novels, and her imagination supplied details the author had not dreamed of. The elopements, with all their paraphernalia of moonlight and roses, came back to her.... But if ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... of God in this city, but there is as much purpose in the desert. There is no astonishingly great purpose. The disease will work itself out. And I know God's whole truth to man was revealed long since, and any one of calm soul may know it. The hope of learning the purpose through the ages, the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly together. Their wives, it is said—horresco referens!—could not tell them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom he said he had discussed matrimony with and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... realisation. When the objectionable specimen of the obnoxious mass lifted a pair of suffering human eyes to her face, the ice thawed in a surprisingly sudden manner from the surface of her flinty heart, and the set lips relaxed into an astonishingly pitying expression. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... beautifully gray," she interrupted him, laughing, "and I am so astonishingly young, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... of this, or perhaps for this reason, the common ambition was to undertake Virgil, who was generally regarded as the greatest of epic poets, and attempts to translate at least a part of the Aeneid were astonishingly frequent. As early as 1658 the Fourth Book is described as "translated ... in our day at least ten times into English."[372] Horace came next in popularity; by the beginning of the eighteenth century, according to one translator, he had been "translated, paraphrased, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... "Astonishingly," said the second; "still quite a brilliant air, but art will do wonders. Upon my word, she looks better than she did at Paris five years ago. A beautiful woman still;—don't you think so, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... reduced. Whatever defects there might have been in the plan, the execution, though it miscarried in some essential points, was attended with surprising success. The same good fortune that prospered the British arms so remarkably in the conquest of Guadaloupe, seemed to interpose still more astonishingly in their favour at Quebec, the siege of which we shall record in its proper place. At present, we must attend the operations of general Amherst, whose separate army was first in motion, though such impediments were thrown in his way as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a little girl present me with a hair chain which she had just completed. Great order and decorum prevailed. Amongst the permanent scholars in the upper part of the institution, there are some who embroider astonishingly well—surplices, altar-hangings, in short, all the church vestments in gold or silk. In the room where these are kept are the confessionals for the pupils. The priests are in a separate room, and the penitents kneel before the grating which separates the two apartments. All the sleeping-rooms ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... any more; human strength is at an end. I will try to tell you about it. On September 5 the enemy were reported to be taking up a position near St. Prix, southeast of Paris. The Tenth Corps, which had made an astonishingly rapid advance of course, was ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... silhouettes; and what was more, he could draw the most charmingly fantastic arabesques for embroidery patterns, and he even dabbled in portrait and landscape painting. Whatever he turned his hand to, he did well, in fact, astonishingly well for a dilettante, and yet not well enough to claim the title of an artist. Nor did it ever occur to him to make such a claim. As one of his fellow-students remarked in a fit of jealousy, "Once when Nature had made three geniuses, a poet, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... who is bringing in the eggs is the under-under-nurse who is at the fire warming a towel. In the foreground we have the regulation midwife holding the regulation baby (who, by the way, was an astonishingly fine child for only five minutes old). Then comes the under-nurse—a good buxom creature, who, as usual, is feeling the water in the bath to see that it is of the right temperature. Next to her is the head-nurse, who is arranging the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... his suspicions, went home from the office early that day, and from his hiding place behind the window drapes in his drawing room he observed a taxicab draw up in front of his residence at six o'clock. From this vehicle Matt Peasley, astonishingly well tailored, alighted, handed out the heir to the Ricks millions, said good-by lingeringly and ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... life, following the shoulder of the mountain in the hope of meeting Schillingschen, munching uncooked corn he had in a little bag, hiding and running at intervals for a day and a night until he chanced on us. For an old man almost sick with fear he was astonishingly little affected by ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... had a cap," mused Mrs. Scoville thoughtfully. "It had an astonishingly broad peak in front. Have ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... of Braddock's Field, yonder terrain most astonishingly resembles it. What an ambuscade could Butler lay for our army yonder, within shot ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... years this President manifestly deemed himself chosen of Heaven to make an end of British rule from the Zambesi to the sea. "The Transvaal shall never be shut up in a kraal," said he. A Sovereign International State he declared it was, or should be, with free access to the ocean; and how astonishingly near he came to the accomplishment of these bold aims we now know to our exceeding cost. Nevertheless, to this persistent dreamer of dreams the two South African Republics owe their extinction; while the British Empire owes to him more than to any other ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... twigs will sometimes, for no special reason that one can see. The noise it made in that stilly wood was astonishing, and ere the twig had reached the earth there wasn't a bank-vole above ground. And yet so astonishingly quick and evasive are these little creatures that in less than thirty seconds there were the two disputants, each erect upon his haunches, with little hand-like forepaws held up and joined under the chin—as if they were actresses having their photographs taken—fighting, like little blunt-headed ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... on this subject than mere theoretical calculations, namely, the numerous recorded cases of the astonishingly rapid increase of various animals in a state of nature, when circumstances have been favorable to them during two or three following seasons. Still more striking is the evidence from our domestic animals of many kinds which have run wild in several parts of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Novels;—perhaps the highest cognizable fact to be met with in Devil-Diplomacy. And it may be a kind of comfort to readers, both to know it, and to discern gradually what the just gods make of it withal. Devil-Diplomatists do exist, at least have existed, never doubt it farther; and their astonishingly dexterous mendacities and enchanted spider-webs,—CAN these go any road ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... march singing through the town to the camps outside, whence they are sent to the front. There are two British hospitals near this hotel—one of them the Casino—and wounded are everywhere. The place is astonishingly calm, but everybody knows there is a war. The French have their teeth set and are confident of the final outcome. Women are in the custom house, drive the trams, collect the fares and do a hundred other things that are usually out ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... his parents from the central inland part of Norway to the rocky northern coast meant a change of natural setting, but not a human contact. The sea must have come into his life as a revelation, and yet it plays an astonishingly small part in his work. It is always present, but always in the distance. You hear of it, but you are ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... rest a day at Rotterdam while we took a little trip by water, to Gouda, famed for its cheeses. It is an unworldly sleepy place, though its commerce in cheeses is enormous. Its population, when it does travel, goes mostly by boat on the Maas. You pay an astonishingly small sum, and you ride nearly half a day, from Rotterdam to Gouda, amid a mixed freight of lovable fat little Dutch women with gold spiral trinkets in their ears, little calves and cows, pigs, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... for," he muttered to himself, as he rode away from the iron-foundry by the river. He put his horse to a trot and presently to a canter along the deserted, dusty road. The animal was astonishingly fresh and went off at a good pace, so that the man sent by Kosmaroff to follow him was soon breathless and forced to give up ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... and indefatigable tuition of this young damsel I made astonishingly rapid progress as a student of the language spoken by those around me, and was soon able to converse in it with a very fair amount of freedom. Meanwhile I had practically abandoned my attempts to effect my escape, for the time being ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... who had to live in the same house with a fuming bull. Even Fred agreed with me that Jack was being treated unfairly, and he never spoke about him at all if he could help it. When Jack and he had met during the last year at Oxford, as they had often, they were so astonishingly polite to each other that had I not known the reason I should have been very amused, but as it was, I thought they were making a great fuss ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... world is not quite infinite—but it is astonishingly full. All sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and different ways of action and different goals to which life may be directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards long, there ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... bred in them; also that the carcass formed a load for two horses. Wood says that these horns supply shoes for the Kirghiz horses, and also a good substitute for stirrup-irons. "We saw numbers of horns strewed about in every direction, the spoils of the Kirghiz hunter. Some of these were of an astonishingly large size, and belonged to an animal of a species between a goat and a sheep, inhabiting the steppes of Pamir. The ends of the horns projecting above the snow often indicated the direction of the road; and wherever they were heaped in large quantities and disposed in a semicircle, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... charming child Barry found her, old and young beyond her twenty years. Her wide-set blue eyes seemed to see horizons, and too often to be blind to foregrounds. She had a slow, deliberating habit of work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and quietly disregarded the rest. If he let her compose a letter, its wording would be quaint. Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that was saying a good deal. But she was thorough, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... languages differ, men (and above all early men) have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions. It is not that in which all races formally differ—their language—but that in which all early races are astonishingly the same—their ideas, fancies, habits, desires—that causes the amazing similarity of ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... Helen said. And she did. Picture this man, long of arm, unnaturally low of stature, and astonishingly—yes, quite astonishingly good-looking, moving about among these books and pictures, these trophies of war and of sport, these oriental jars, tall almost as himself, and all the other strange furnishings from out distant years and distant lands! Picture him emerging from ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... only the former determinism is truly fatalistic. This confusion is to be found equally central in Henry Oldenburg's inconsequential letters to Spinoza and in Bernard Shaw's shamelessly silly Preface to Back to Methuselah. Fundamental confusions remain astonishingly stable throughout ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... I really do not know why, inspire puerile repulsion, became astonishingly tame as soon as they found out that no harm was intended them. They allowed themselves to be petted just like cats, and would catch my finger in their ideally delicate little rosy hands, and lick it in the friendliest way. They used to be ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... and proud, selfish, self-indulgent, thoroughly insincere, utterly ill-mannered, shockingly ill-informed, astonishingly ill-educated (capable of speaking several languages but incapable of saying a sensible word in any of them), living and flourishing in the world without religion, without morality, and (if it is not a cant phrase ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Genie Linderbeck for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... on the veil. It was not of the kind that is a disguise. Still, diaphanous though it seemed, it concealed astonishingly the swelling in Susan's face. Obviously, then, it must at least haze the features, would do something toward blurring the marks that go to ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... naturalism which would possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of our society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the prelude to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity of this piece at our orchestral concerts ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... bear, for an animal of his huge bulk, is astonishingly agile and speedy, when once his fighting blood is aroused; and, if ever a grizzly was fighting mad, that grizzly was now El Feroz. The instant he saw that he had missed the horse and man, he whirled about and was after ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... I am astonishingly restored, and have not had a trace of heart trouble for months. But I am quite aware that I am, physically speaking, on good behaviour—and maintain my condition only by taking an amount of care which is ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... a week when Bloomah's family remained astonishingly quiet and self-sufficient, and it looked as if the Banner might once again adorn the dry, scholastic room and throw a halo of romance ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... to overcome a difference in level of fifty-nine feet, raises vessels of 1,000 tons capacity with a velocity of 0.3 to 0.7 foot per second, and has been constructed after a new and astonishingly simple system. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... and tear and general prevention. She could have told you tragic stories, could Mrs. Knowles, and sordid stories, and comic too; she knew how to deal with terror, and shame, and stubborn silence, and hopeless misery. Gray-haired and motherly? Not at all. An astonishingly young, pleasingly plumpish woman, with nothing remarkable about her except a certain splendid calm. Four years out of Vassar, and already she had learned that if you fold your hands in your lap and wait, quietly, asking no questions, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... and as he pressed forward, the animals with which he came in contact gladly made way at his approach, so that in a few seconds he stood in the front row of a large circle, the centre of which was occupied by a fat, overgrown pig, with an astonishingly long snout, and a couple of rings through it by way of ornament; two equally long ears, that had evidently been submitted to some curious operation, for they were slit in various places, and hung down from his head like uncombed locks of hair; and a pair of very sharp little eyes, which seemed to ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... odd mistake. The school-teacher, sitting there beside her, had taken off his spectacles, and the eyes she met when hers opened, were eyes she had known and trusted all her life; gleaming, kindly, quizzical eyes, astonishingly blue by contrast with a ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... like the bellows of a concertina, and when so compressed to heave it backward or in any direction, so that an immediate change of route is possible. The retraction and uplifting of the foreshortened part is astonishingly rapid in view of the methodic movements of the animal as a whole. It is also notable that when the retraction takes place the tentacles are entirely withdrawn, otherwise they are for ever anxiously exploring every inch of the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... noble: As his Roaming upon the Frontiers of the Creation between that Mass of Matter, which was wrought into a World, and that shapeless unformed Heap of Materials, which still lay in Chaos and Confusion, strikes the Imagination with something astonishingly great and wild. I have before spoken of the Limbo of Vanity, which the Poet places upon this outermost Surface of the Universe, and shall here explain my self more at large on that, and other Parts of the Poem, which are of the same ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... earls and seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and engrossing. He fits into no a priori theory of conduct or scheme of rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible. But in the end he seems ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... pace, and the detective, astonishingly active for one of his bulk, raced along at ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... reduce the presumptuous youth to utter confusion, by offering him a sovereign if he would fulfil his vaunt. The sermon was written, however; and though it was not admitted to be anywhere within reach of Mr. Gilfil's. It was yet so astonishingly like a sermon, having a text, three divisions, and a concluding exhortation beginning 'And now, my brethren', that the sovereign, though denied formally, was bestowed informally, and the sermon was pronounced, when Master Stokes's ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... esthetic effort in short poems of English verse until the time of the romantic movement. Then, both in France and England, many brief forms of poetry made their appearance. In France, Victor Hugo attempted composition in astonishingly varied forms of verse—some forms actually consisting of only two syllables to a line. With this surprisingly short measure begins one of Hugo's most remarkably early poems, "Les Djins," representing the coming of evil spirits with ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... which too often characterizes men who have been successful, as it is called, with the fair sex. His acquaintance with women had increased his persuasion that it is difficult to excite genuine love in the heart; and with respect to himself, he was upon this subject astonishingly incredulous. It was scarcely possible to convince him ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... region and nation of the world; especially to the Turks, Syrians, Arabians, Indians, and to divers regions of Africa, Ethiopia, and Arabia; and more especially vast abundance of silk and cotton, so that by means of this prodigious trade the sultan is astonishingly rich. The sultan of Cambay is almost continually at war with the king of Joga, whose realm is fifteen days journey from Cambay, and extends very far in all directions. This king of Joga[63] and all his people ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... the chemical laboratory, with the distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Dr. Hadley. Franklin suggested that temperature could be astonishingly reduced by evaporation. It was entirely a new idea to the Professor. They both with others repaired to Franklin's room. He had ether there, and a thermometer. To the astonishment of the Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge University, the printer from Philadelphia showed him that by dipping ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... church on his knees. But when {171} the Consistory thought necessary, it could invoke the aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom doubtful. Among the capital crimes were adultery, blasphemy, witchcraft, and heresy. Punishments for all offences were astonishingly and increasingly heavy. During the years 1542-6 there were, in this little town of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... eager questioning of a modest, affectionate boy who curbs his natural effervescence of greeting like a well-trained dog. The tone was astonishingly ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... same with the maps. Give the child an ordinary conventional map with dots and lines and green seas and tell him to revaluate that geographic scene in his or her own terms. The mountains will be a bit out of gear and the cities will look astonishingly mediaeval. The outlines will be often very imperfect, but the general effect will be quite as truthful as that of our conventional maps, which ever since the days of good Gerardus Mercator have told a strangely erroneous ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... It was astonishingly short. Records seemed to have slipped up on this occasion. A rare occurrence. He considered requesting the full dossier, then changed his mind. Instead he dialed the number of the Sun-Post and asked ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... where the force of gravitation is one-sixth as great as upon the earth, we had found ourselves astonishingly light. Five-sixths of our own weight, and of the weight of the air-tight suits in which we were incased, had magically dropped from us. It was therefore comparatively easy for us, encumbered as we were, to make our way ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... filled now; the time will come when yours is more filled than mine with the immediate matters of our life. For children become old, and the old become children, if their days are happy. After all, the immediate matters of our present life are of astonishingly small account, in relation to the long life—the importance only of one bead on the endless string. So I would have you know that the differences between us that have to do with this single life-adventure are of very slight moment—that we really are the sum of innumerable ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... mounted—to say he rides would convey far too equestrian a notion—he is mounted on a rough-coated, quiet, old, white shooting-pony; the saddle strangely girded on with many bands about the belly, the stirrups astonishingly short, and straps never called upon to diminish that long whity-brown interval between shoe and trowser: Mr. Jennings sits his steed with nose aloft, and a high perch in the general, somewhat loosely, and, had the pony been a Bucephalus rather than a Rozinante, not a little perilously. Simon ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... about two o'clock, passing under numberless bamboo arches, on an astonishingly good road, built by Padre Juan Villaverde. About two miles out we left the road, turning off east across rice-paddies, and then followed a stream, which we crossed near the foot of a large bare mountain facing south. Up this we zigzagged four ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... incredible that there will not be a sweeping revolution in the methods of building during the next century. The erection of a house-wall, come to think of it, is an astonishingly tedious and complex business; the final result exceedingly unsatisfactory. It has been my lot recently to follow in detail the process of building a private dwelling-house, and the solemn succession of deliberate, respectable, perfectly satisfied ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... sea power Crete reared an astonishingly advanced civilization. Until recent times, for instance, the Phoenicians had been credited with the invention of the alphabet. We know now that 1000 years before the Phoenicians began to write the Cretans had evolved a system of written characters—as ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... and parcels, and newspapers. Letters we may pass over. They are featureless things, except to their recipient. Parcels have more individuality. Ours are of all shapes and sizes, and most of them are astonishingly badly tied. It is quite heartrending to behold a kilted exile endeavouring to gather up a heterogeneous mess of socks, cigarettes, chocolate, soap, shortbread, and Edinburgh rock, from the ruins of what was once a flabby and unstable parcel, but is now ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... connect my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. Foremost among these is the perhaps somewhat imperfect and decidedly grotesque, but astonishingly powerful, naif and characteristic Lorenzo dei Medici by Niccolo real grandeur of whose conception of this coarse yet imaginative head may be profitably contrasted with the classicizing efforts after the demi-god or successor of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... sagacity and whose character enlisted for the administration in its struggles the countenance, the sympathy, and the support of the people. It is found, even, that his judgment on military matters was astonishingly acute, and that the advice and instructions he gave to the generals commanding in the field would not seldom have done honor to the ablest of them. History, therefore, without overlooking, or palliating, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... perversion of energy and emotion. This corrupts the purity of the stupor picture so that inconsistencies, such as empty giggling, atypical delusions and scattered speech, occur. Other impurities are to be found in the frequent orientation of the dementia praecox stupor patient which is discovered to be astonishingly good, or in free speech associated with apathy and inactivity. Such symptoms usually appear quite early and should enable one to make a positive diagnosis within a short time after patient comes under observation. As a matter of fact, in many if not most cases ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... interesting example, the symbol of the cross may be briefly considered. Why should a form so simple and so familiar have acquired an astonishingly wide range and be generally regarded as symbolic of life? Much has to be learnt before the problem is solved. One thing seems fairly certain—the choice has not been wholly arbitrary; there has been at work an intuitional, subconscious factor. Is it possible that the negativing ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... highest practicable magnifying power has been applied in the effort to separate them. But the spectroscope shows that the star is double and that its components are in rapid revolution around one another, completing their orbital swing in the astonishingly short period of four days! The combined mass of the two stars is estimated to be two and a half times the mass of the sun, and the distance between them, from center to center, ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Richard H. Lee from Virginia; and Edward and John Rutledge from South Carolina. Although the Congress was made up of these men and of others like them, the petitions adopted by it and the work done, not to mention the freshets of oratory, were astonishingly mild. Probably many of the delegates would have preferred to use fiery tongues. Samuel Adams, for instance, though "prematurely gray, palsied in hand, and trembling in voice," must have had difficulty in ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... were very rough, and, to Geoffrey, astonishingly dirty. The food consisted generally of bread and a miscellaneous olio or stew from a great pot constantly simmering over the fire, the flavour, whatever it might be, being entirely overpowered by that of the oil and garlic that were the most marked of its constituents. ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... toothpick, with his mind apparently far away on other matters. Morgan stolidly chewed tobacco and kept a wary eye on the bandit, Alvarez. Charlie sat pale, limp, gazing at nothing. The elder Menocal had lifted his eyes to Bryant, at whom he looked mistily; he appeared to have aged astonishingly, his cheeks having gone flabby, slack, and gray, while a ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... and almost rough, not caring for formulas or appearances, but proving itself by deeds. To these men the games of war are astonishingly like school games, and are spoken of as if they were nothing else. When a comrade has not come back, and dinner has to begin without him, no show of sorrow is tolerated: only these young men's hearts feel the absence of a friend, and the casual visitor, not knowing, might take ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... new life. Between the man I had been and that which I now became there was a very notable difference. In a single day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me. To instance only one point: till then I had cared very little about plants and flowers, but now I found myself eagerly ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... of me dressing my prettiest for a Yankee! and oh, Ken, I can't dress so astonishingly pretty, either. I'm really," and she sighed dejectedly, "down to ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... men such as he was; quiet, thoughtful men, residing in villages, who developed their artistic sense in solitude. I am quite sure that this man thought a great deal more of his work than of the money he earned by it. At all events he charged me astonishingly little. He refused a contract, evidently regarding it as implying suspicions of his honesty. 'I'll charge ye what's fair,' he said, 'and you and me'll not quarrel as to the price.' If my bill for labour was so moderate that it seems absurd ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... and skeptical Reverend Minot J. Savage has become astonishingly, and it may be prematurely, certain on one subject. In THE ARENA for August (p. 321) he declares that, "Nationalism, freely chosen, would be the murder of liberty, and social suicide." To which the usually impartial editor cries ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... was a cemetery of drift boulders. There! that is the hound. Does his voice come across the valley from the spur off against us, or is it on our side down under the mountain? After an interval, just as I am thinking the dog is going away from us along the opposite range, his voice comes up astonishingly near. A mass of snow falls from a branch, and makes one start; but it is not the fox. Then through the white vista below me I catch a glimpse of something red or yellow, yellowish red or reddish yellow; it emerges from the lower ground, and, with an easy, jaunty air, draws near. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... directions, is made in Fig. 4. The two playgrounds are separated by a broken group of bushes extending from the building to the rear boundary; but, in general, the spaces are kept open, and the heavy border-masses clothe the place and make it home-like. The lineal extent of the group margins is astonishingly large, and along all these margins flowers may ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... thought, in an astonishingly short time. Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... reluctantly, Peter began to show him. There were two or three oils by now; powerful sketches of country life, with its humor and pathos; heads of children and of negroes; bits of the River Swamp; all astonishingly well done. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... dark complexions of the natives. Some very slender, graceful brown lads are bathing with them,—lightly built as deer: these are probably creoles. Some of the black bathers are clumsy-looking, and have astonishingly long legs.... Then little boys come down, leading horses;—they strip, leap naked on the animals' backs, and ride into the sea,—yelling, screaming, splashing, in the morning light. Some are a fine brown color, like ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... chapter was so embarrassing to both that for several seconds they continued to stare at each other in silent amazement. Mary Darrell, her face alternately flushing and paling with confusion, seemed fascinated and incapable of motion. In spite of Peveril's astonishingly disreputable appearance, she at once recognized him as being the young stranger whom she had seen twice before, and had even helped out of an awkward predicament. She also knew that he had in some way aroused her father's enmity. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... had barely been maintained, and it was glaringly evident that the expenses, especially wages, had sensibly increased. He abandoned the figures not quite finished, partly from weary disgust, and partly because Big James most astonishingly walked into the shop, from the back. He was really quite glad to encounter ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... saw a pale-blue sky fretted with green leaves, striped with tree trunks astonishingly black; she heard steamers threshing through the water and giving out warning whistles, sounds to stir the heart with the thoughts of voyage, of danger, and of unknown lands; and as she walked up the long avenue of elms she found that all the people strolling ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... now, but sat by his game—sat upon his haunches, bringing first-aid cleansing to his shoulders and chest, where the pinned tusker had worn against him in the battle. . . . All in astonishingly few seconds—the blue beast still with an isolated ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... at the ghastly wound, the stranger astonishingly continued his swift pace. As we jumped in front ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Elsie? The account given by the Corporal had, of course, been perfectly true. It was Dick who had been the first to see the hunted stag about a quarter of a mile away, travelling along at that steady lurching gallop which seems so slow and is so astonishingly swift; and it had needed all the Corporal's firmness to keep the boy from galloping after him on the spot. And then after a time the hounds had come on upon the line of the deer, their great white ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts—namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me—his elder by ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... apparatus to the heavens, there is none more striking than that which declares, not only that the nebulae which Lord Rosse described as spirals, actually do possess the character so indicated, but that there are many others of the same description. He has even brought to light the astonishingly interesting fact that there are invisible objects of this class which have never been seen by human eye, but whose spiral character is visible to the peculiar delicacy ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... He was so astonishingly calm, so tremendously sure of himself, so well versed in his patriarchs, so practised in all logical disputes, so thoroughly at home in all the eaves and the alleys, the case-mates and the bastions of the citadel of his faith, that it seemed as though he might dare ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... old colonel, and Charley and Annie, who were there too! With his long gray hair, and eyes that still flashed, Colonel Beverly came to meet me—brave and smiling in 1867 as he had been in 1861. Then, with Annie's arm around me—that little sister had grown astonishingly!—I went ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... hurried off to Gomshott's in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night. All day he could do no work because of this astonishingly new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it miraculously ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... To prove how astonishingly our strength may be diminished by indolence, the Doctor tells us, that meeting a gentleman who had lately returned from India, to his inquiry after his health he replied, "Why, better—better, thank ye—I think I begin to feel some symptoms ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
