"Mystifying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied: "The leaf which you yourself have brought me has told me everything. Moreover, you reached my friend's house at such an hour and you left it at such another." In this way our people amuse themselves by mystifying these poor islanders, who think they are gods, with power to make the very leaves reveal what they believe to be secret. Thus the news spread through the island that the leaves speak in response to a sign ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... was sitting in the same place in which I had seen her last, in the same position, with the same mystifying bandage over her eyes. her welcome was to turn her almost invisible face to me and show me that while she sat silent she saw me clearly. I made no motion to shake hands with her; I felt too well on this occasion that that was out of place forever. ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... excitement in their faces and in their actions. White uniformed policemen were flocking into the corridors; soldiers, coatless and hatless, fresh from their beds, came dashing upon the scene. There were excited cries, angry shouts and, snore mystifying than ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fortune in meeting with a man of the highest distinction, but I may perhaps have the satisfaction of helping him on the road to it. Five years hence let us meet in Paris and see! I believe we shall succeed in mystifying you. You will tell me then that I was quite mistaken, and that M. de l'Estorade is a ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... them, above all things, consent to be intelligible to the plainest capacity; for though speech, according to the averment of a wily Frenchman, was given to us to conceal our thoughts, no one has yet ventured to extend the same mystifying definition to the art ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... rained every day without exception since it delayed me over Sunday at Bela Palanka, and this morning it begins while I am eating breakfast, and continues a drenching downpour for over an hour. While waiting to see what the weather is coming to, I wander around the crooked and mystifying streets, watching the animated scenes about the bazaars, and try my best to pick up some knowledge of the value of the different coins, for I have had to deal with a bewildering mixture of late, and once again there is a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... subject. After all, there was something in him so different from other men, even from Arthur Campbell. There was always some deep, happy meaning to his simplest words, and his most commonplace conceptions of things were flavored with this mystifying ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... stood back to watch the result of his bomb. But what he saw was far more mystifying than satisfying. It was Mr. McGowan who drew back as the girl threw her arms about his neck. Elizabeth entreated him not to believe one word which her father had just uttered. Mr. Fox stood dumbfounded. Mr. McGowan did nothing but stare ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... she makes a lure of her body; with cunning artifice she makes temptation of her hands and face and weaves it with her hair. She flatters, pleads, cajoles; denies only that she may yield, sets free in order to summon back, and calls, so that when he has answered she may preserve a mystifying silence. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... he was not mystifying me, I do not know, but Lady Caroline Lamb and others told me that he said the same both before and after he knew me,) was founded upon 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' He told me that he did not care about poetry, (or about mine—at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... moves in the dark. Women were born to mystify. Some of us do it one way—some in another. If you wear mannish clothes and a Bath-bun, it is because they become you extraordinarily well and because they form a disguise more complete and mystifying than anything else you ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... all his sense, was mystifying himself, because he was departing from right, the only true 'good sense.' His right judgment in all things was becoming obscured, so he talked metaphysical jargon, instead of plain practical truth, and ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bag. Was it Gwendolen's idea, taking a hint from him, to liberate this animal only on the basis of the renewal of such a relation? Was the figure in the carpet traceable or describable only for husbands and wives—for lovers supremely united? It came back to me in a mystifying manner that in Kensington Square, when I mentioned that Corvick would have told the girl he loved, some word had dropped from Vereker that gave colour to this possibility. There might be little in it, but there ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... in India, Meggie was exceedingly ignorant of customs and things in her new home, and was continually making laughable mistakes, and asking the most absurd questions. This "greenness," as he called it, gave Archie immense delight, and he was never tired of mystifying and hoaxing the sweet-tempered little girl, who never resented his quizzings and practical jokes. Of course it never occurred to the silly boy that he was just as ignorant about India as Meggie was ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... was mystifying and oppressive. They saw before them the beautiful country, the hills and valleys, the forest and the blue loom of the mountains, so much that appealed to the eye, and yet the horizon, looking so peaceful in the distance, was barbed with spears. Jackson was there! ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... advantage of the position. Should the Indians pursue me, and I could succeed in reaching the timber before them, a volley from my comrades would check the pursuers, however numerous. The nine rifles would be enough, with a few shots from the revolvers. The savages would fancy nine hundred under the mystifying shadows of that ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... after this Thor seemed to have no object in life at all. There was nothing in the canyon to eat, and he wandered about among the rocks, smelling and listening and deporting himself generally in a fashion that was altogether mystifying to Muskwa. In the afternoon of the second day Thor stopped in a dump of jackpines under which the ground was strewn with fallen needles. He began to eat these needles. They did not look good to Muskwa, but something told the cub that ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... audacity to fling at us another resuscitation—that of the Countess Wanda, Albert's mother, who appears to have transmitted to him her abominable habit of catalepsy. So ends, unsatisfactorily enough—unless anybody is satisfied by the fact that two solid children result from the still mystifying married life of the pair—the story which had begun so well in the first volume of Consuelo, and which in the major part of Consuelo itself, though not throughout, maintains ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... puzzled and alarmed me. The more I think of it, the more mystifying it all becomes. I must see you, and you must tell me the truth—the whole truth. We love each other, dear heart, and no one shall force you to lie again to me as you did in that letter you wrote from Glencardine. You wish to see me, darling. You ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... am not, as I pretend to be, in the secret which he hitherto supposed to be shared by no one but the Countess and himself, or else that I am cruelly mystifying him. That I am in her confidence, I swear by all that is dear in a whispered farewell. By the last companion of this flower!" and she took for a moment in her fingers the nodding head of a white rosebud ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... not both been born and brought up right there on Kettle. Everything about the house had the mark of a cultured taste, yet the cushioned chairs, the rugs, the soft-toned hangings were worn to shabbiness. And most mystifying of all was Miss Jerry herself, who had appeared at the supper table in a much faded but spotless gingham dress, black shoes and cotton stockings replacing the elkskins and woolen socks, very much a spirited little girl, with a fearlessness of expression that amused John Westley while ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... parting, his breath coming quickly. If his imagination had ever attempted to picture heaven, its wildest flight would have resembled but fallen short of that living beauty before him. It was mystifying, exalting. It was worth the dangers and discomforts of the past month multiplied by twelve, just to have one moment's glimpse of such perfection. And it was Los Angeles! A city of the Californias, built by Indian hands! No wonder his family had been careful to leave its wonders ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... nearer. It had a grosbeak-like quality, I fancied, and I hoped to find either the pine or the evening grosbeak, for both of which I had been making anxious search. The shifting of the song from point to point struck me as odd, and it was very mystifying. ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... read this letter over and over again, it was very mystifying. Much depends in this world upon the humour people are in at the time; Mynheer Krause was, at that time, full of Cato-like devotion and Roman virtue, and he took the contents of the letter in true ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of these, which is decidedly more complex and mystifying, refers to a rectory in Co. Donegal. It is sent as the personal experience of one of the percipients, who does not wish to have his name disclosed. He says: "My wife, children, and myself will have lived here four ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... not interrupted for two or three days. The insects on which are observed this remarkable circumstance, were the Cantharis oclemero, and some others. Spanish flies, you will say? That accounts for it; but at present we are not mystifying our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... afterward his lady of dreams, his fair unreachable moon! And Joe, seeing her to-day, changed color; that was all! He had passed Mamie in the street only a week before, and she had seemed all that she had always seemed; to-day an incomprehensible and subtle change had befallen her—a change so mystifying to him that for a moment he almost doubted that she was Mamie Pike. It came to him with a breath-taking shock that her face lacked a certain vivacity of meaning; that its sweetness was perhaps too placid; that there would have been a deeper goodness in it had there ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... moving element! It was a highly appropriate motto for this underwater machine, so long as the preposition in is translated as within and not upon. The letter N was no doubt the initial of the name of that mystifying individual in command ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... not forsake the amusement of kite-flying even when arrived at maturity. His artistic imitations of birds and dragons float over our housetops. To these are often affixed contrivances for producing hollow, mournful, buzzing sounds, mystifying whole neighborhoods. His game of shuttlecock is to keep a cork, one end being stuck with feathers, flying in the air as long as possible, the impelling member being the foot, the players standing in a circle and numbering from four to twenty. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... for him. He returned to the perfect boarding house just at supper time. During the meal he realized that Mr. Bangs seemed to be trying to attract his attention. Whenever he glanced in that gentleman's direction his glance was met by winks and mystifying shakes of the head. Losing patience at last, he demanded to know what ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... occurred to me that you may have the conceit of your own mystery, that you may take rather too much pleasure in mystifying ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... honest enough," corrected Embury; "he owns right up that it was a trick. Why, good heavens, man! if it hadn't been, he couldn't have done it at all. I'm rather keen to know just how he managed, though, for the yarn of Eunice and Aunt Abby is a bit mystifying." ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... answered her, the way in which Mr. Linden bent down and said, "How do you know, Miss Faith?" were slightly mystifying ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... a word, but no doubt his feelings were just as strong as those of his companion. And so they had now embarked on what seemed to be the last leg of the strange chase, with the future lying before them as mystifying as that fog bank lying ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... Clark sat, its unapproachable center. The telegram compiled by Birch and signed by Wimperley, as president, was on his desk, just as the secretary had laid it before he went silently out, unable to meet the mystifying glance of those gray eyes. Clark had never moved nor looked up, nor did he till half an hour later, when he dictated a notice to be posted throughout the works. "All operations will temporarily cease this night at six o'clock. Employees will be notified ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... of his own type. The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens's lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... chill of disappointment, but as he passed along the street his name was called by Juliet Burwell, and she fluttered across to him in all her mystifying flounces and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... Jack never had the slightest doubt as to what all this mystifying activity must be—the two extremes of the smuggling fraternity were exchanging signals—each and every movement had a meaning of its own and conveyed such information as was most valuable to the business in hand—in Jack's mind it was as though the conversation might be running something ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... presence, they discovered, with that cautious perception which is an instinct with rustic minds, that before them stood a man completely ignorant of the customs of the country, and very poorly informed on Claude de Buxieres's affairs. They made no scruple of mystifying this "city gentleman," by means of ambiguous statements and cunning reticence. The young man could get no enlightenment from them; all he clearly understood was, that they were making fun of him, and that he was not able to cope with these country bumpkins, whose shrewdness would have done honor ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... period of almost utter unconsciousness, since we were both conscious of only one thing while it lasted; but the reaction came at last while she was still relaxed in my embrace, and while yet the mystifying magic induced by contact with her, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... special term for what we know as ultra-violet light. To him, blue was ultra-violet, and exceedingly dangerous to red-sensitive eyes. To him, our ultra-violet was a long X-ray, and was designated by a special term. And to him—the explosion of the atostor reservoirs was a terrible and mystifying calamity. ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... she could judge of the value of a thing till she had looked at it ten minutes; indeed modest little Biddy was compelled privately to add "And often not even then." She was mystified, as I say—Nick was often mystifying, it was his only fault—but one thing was definite: her brother had high ability. It was the consciousness of this that made her bring out at last: "I don't so much care whether or no I please mamma, if ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... mystifying story dealing with unexpected results of a wealthy M.P.'s experiment with ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... long distance they stumbled mechanically through trenches and a labyrinth of mystifying communications, until the head of the column reached a light railway, where a train of open trucks ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... skepticism concerning all problems of human activity not susceptible to measurement with the foot-rule, or analysis with the test tube, with the result that the newer Science of Psychology was invented to supply a reasonable and material explanation for the subtle and mystifying phenomena ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... Shakespeare is a queer man.' At times seeming irresponsible, he does not always seem reliable. There appears to be a certain—what shall I call it?—hidden sun, say, about him, at once enlightening and mystifying. Now, I should be afraid to say what I have sometimes thought that hidden sun ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... uneasiness; but none was prepared for what followed. Before peace was actually concluded, Russia approached China with a proposition for her permanent occupancy of—not the peninsula alone, but all of Manchuria. A mystifying proposition when we reflect that Japan was forced out of the southern littoral of Manchuria because her presence there threatened Korea, China, and the peace of the world. Port Arthur was no farther from Pekin and Seoul than it was five years before, and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... into that mystifying tangle had been as sudden as it was unexpected. And yet, knowing Blunt as he did, Merry wondered that he had not thought of the ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... Le Queux, who has been styled "The Master of Mysteries," has here woven one of his most mystifying tales. It is like a Chinese puzzle in its ingenuity, and holds the reader breathless from the first line to ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... forming on his forehead, for it was beginning to look remarkably as though there was but one entrance to the vault—that through which they had come—and that all these other passages were either natural, or had been cut simply with the idea of mystifying and misleading possible intruders. ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... and doctors of the Middle Ages, and not less those of higher name who merely sought to make the monkish philosophy more plausible, or so to disguise it as to mystify the mob of small thinkers.' He seems himself to have succeeded in mystifying many of those whom he intended to convert. Admiral Smyth gives the following account of an interview he had with Phillips: 'This pseudo-mathematical knight once called upon me at Bedford, without any previous acquaintance, to discuss "those errors of Newton, which he ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... so too, but had some faith in Preston's and Mrs. Sandford's powers of transforming and mystifying the present very natural appearance of the performers. ]However, she was beginning to be of the opinion that it was good fun ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... mystifying several great personages, and two or three ladies whom the Emperor designated to me with such minute details that it was impossible to mistake them, and told me some singular things in regard to them, which were not generally known, and were well calculated to embarrass ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths, so I handed him the shorthand diary. He took it with a grateful bow, and said, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... mother, who took a strong dislike to him, and constantly led the conversation to topics which he detested, such as foreign news and politics. He revenged himself by writing to the newspapers accounts of events which never happened, for the sole purpose of mystifying her; and probably not a few of his mischievous fictions have passed current for history. They made up their differences before her death, and a Latin epitaph of the most eulogistic order from his pen is inscribed ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Narkom began, opening fire without further parley, "the major has come to ask your aid in a case of singular and mystifying interest. You may or may not have heard of a music-hall artiste—a sort of conjuror and impersonator—called 'Zyco the Magician,' who was assisted in his illusions by a veiled but reputedly beautiful Turkish lady who was billed on ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... till he reached the huge shelving cliffs. Here he lost the trail; there was none; but he remembered the shapes, the points, the notches of rock above. Before he reached the ruins of splintered ramparts and jumbles of broken walls the moon topped the eastern slope of the mountain, and the mystifying blackness he had dreaded changed to magic silver light. It seemed as light as day, only soft, mellow, and the air held a transparent sheen. He ran up the bare ridges and down the smooth slopes, and, like a ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Chaussee de Antin. But this you may not know perhaps. The Government, that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bankers who represent the country to-day, just as the priests used to do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the necessity of mystifying the worthy people of France with a few new words and old ideas, like philosophers of every school, and all strong intellects ever since time began. So now Royalist-national ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it is far better to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... gradually gained an accurate idea of the perilous situation of the pioneers who were on their way to the block-house to escape the storm that was already bursting from the sky. The information, however, that he filtered through the brain of Jethro Juggens could not fail to be mystifying ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... wooden shoe might have worn without trouble Cinderella's magic slipper. Her clothes, coarse and homespun, were clean and variously mended. Her hair, in a thick braid, was the tone of the heart of a chestnut-bur, and her eyes were of that mystifying hazel, sometimes brown, sometimes gray, according to whether the sky was clear or overcast. And there was something above and beyond all these things, a modesty, a gentleness and a purity; none of the bold, rollicking, knowing manner so common in handsome peasant girls. He contemplated her through ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... "I hadn't noticed anything specially mysterious in her manner. She always did love to be mystifying." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... the other, stimulated her romantic fancy and made her eager as a girl to have the plot carried into effect. What was to be accomplished by it, she did not trouble herself to define; it only gave her a kind of confused satisfaction to think that she was mystifying somebody who had for a long time been mystifying her. Roeschen was exactly of Miss Jones's height and their figures closely resembled each other. So when they were masked a microscope would be required to tell ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... morning, first to Dick Blaine up at the gold mine, because he was a friend and needed good news of his wife; then across the bridge to Samson, straightening out the crumpled letter from Yasmini as he rode, and chuckling to himself at the thought of mystifying the commissioner. And it all worked out the way he hoped, even to the offer of a ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... had entered and left caused me considerable curiosity. Kemsley was one of those free, bluff, open-hearted, open-handed, men. He was never secretive, never elusive. I could only account for his curious, mystifying actions by the fact that the reputation of a woman was at stake—that he was acting ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... examination of the papers and books intrusted to my care by my departed friend. And oh, the stuff I found there! If I was depressed at starting in, I was stupefied when it was all over, for the collection was mystifying to the point that ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... editions had gone to press, and I had given up in despair, determined to go up to the laboratory and sit around idly watching Kennedy with his mystifying experiments, in preference to waiting for him to ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... back again—grim, reticent, and non-approachable. When Christmas approached he would not promise to go to Gray's nor to John Burnham's, and he rarely went now even to his mother. In Mavis Hawn, Gray found the same mystifying change, for when the morbidly sensitive spirit of the mountaineer is wounded, healing is slow and cure difficult. One day, however, each pair met. Passing the mouth of the lane, Gray saw Mavis walking slowly along ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... the few intermediate years not at least violently disturbed. She had been lovely at that moment, delightful to HER, full of responsive emotion, of amused recognitions and amusing reminders, and then once more, much later, after a long interval, equally but differently charming—touching and rather mystifying for the five minutes of an encounter at a railway-station en province, during which it had come out that her life was all changed. Miss Gostrey had understood enough to see, essentially, what had happened, and yet had beautifully dreamed that she was herself faultless. There were doubtless depths ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... over my "bock" watching the tide of Florentine life pass and repass across the great piazza, I began to laugh at myself, and felt half inclined to abandon the inquiry. Still it was all most mysterious and mystifying. Why had I been marked down as a tool to further the millionaire's ends? And who, after all, was ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux |
