"Airless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... barren of revelry. Happy art thou, O Man, happily free, Who wilt never see A thousand ages shed their life and light As petals fall at eventide. Thou shalt not see the radiant stars subside Into the frozen ocean of the Vast, Nor see thy world absorbed at last Into a nothingness, an airless void, Nor see the thoughts that Man has glorified Swept from the world, and with the world destroyed. This have I seen a thousand times repeated, Unhappy as I am, unhappy God! As many times as thou hast greeted The rising sun against the broad ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... sweated in the airless room. The powerful screws blunted the lips of his tool but would ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... realization of the picture that astronomers conjure to themselves when the moon is nearly full, and they look down into the great plain which is called the Ocean of Storms, and watch the shadows of sterile and airless peaks follow a slow procession across its silver surface."—Illustrated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart from these they would not exist—what is color in the dark? what sound in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without fire?—they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchangeable; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to see, but that airless, star-dusted sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... finest house in a Chinese town will be that of the resident missionary. In Yen-ping the mission buildings are imposing structures, and are placed upon a hill above and away from the rest of the city. Any white person who has traveled in the interior of China will remember the airless, lightless, native houses, opening, as they all do, on filthy streets and reeking sewers and he will understand that in order to exist at all a foreigner must be somewhat isolated and live ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... in the rear of a batch of a dozen, and had never been properly named. The wind was blowing from the stockyards on the dark hour when she arrived. It penetrated even to the small airless chamber where she struggled for her first breath—one of a "flat" in the poorest tenement in the worst slum in Chicago. Huddled in smelly rags by a hastily summoned neighbour from the floor above, the newcomer raised her untried voice in a frail, reedy ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... away at the ice. They fell to vigorously. After a while, they started to get somewhere. Alan grappled with a huge leg of meat while two fellow starmen helped him ease it into a crate. Their hammers pounded down as they nailed the crate together, but not a sound could be heard in the airless vault. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... from Heaven amid blinding lightning and deafening thunder, in enormous stones, cutting, bruising, breaking everything, mowing down the grain as if with a scythe. Then black, opaque, horrifying darkness, in which lights were extinguished as in the depths of the airless passages, spread its heavy clouds over the land of Egypt, so fair, so luminous, so golden under its azure sky, where the night is clearer than the daytime in other climes. The terrified people, believing themselves already shrouded in the impenetrable ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... was warm, the theatre crowded and airless, and the performance, it seemed to him, intolerably bad. He stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest, but politeness might have caused ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... jargon: but at the first glance he marked and judged the awkward childish German, who refused to let his bag out of his hands, and struggled hard to make himself understood in an incredible language. He took him up an evil-smelling staircase to an airless room which opened on to a closed court. He vaunted the quietness of the room, to which no noise from outside could penetrate: and he asked a good price for it. Christophe only half understood him; knowing nothing of the conditions ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... o'clock; the July night was airless, and the last of that season's great balls was taking ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... terrors, all belonged to that life. Only think of breaking open the door of a room which no living soul had entered before you for nearly a hundred years; think of the first step forward into a region of airless, awful stillness, where the light falls faint and sickly through closed windows and rotting curtains; think of the ghostly creaking of the old floor that cries out on you for treading on it, step ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... had he seen such disconcerting pallor. It was not the waxen hue of the convalescent, not the lifeless grey of the perfume-or snuff-maker, it was a prison pallor of a bloodless lividness unknown today, the ghastly complexion of a wretch of the Middle Ages shut up till death in a damp, airless, pitch-dark in-pace. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... into his boat, and rang our soldi on the gunwale. Then he arose and turned the ferro round, and stood across towards the Salute. Silently, insensibly, from the oppression of confinement in the airless streets to the liberty and immensity of the water and the night we passed. It was but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had opened our souls to everlasting ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... big, dreary, prison-like structure. The woman at the door did not in the least care to let me in. She was a fish-mouthed woman with a hard eye, and as I told my errand her mouth grew fishier and the eye harder. Finally she led me down a long, dark, airless stretch of corridor and departed in search of the matron, leaving me seated in the unfriendly reception room, with its straight-backed chairs placed stonily against the walls, beneath rows of red and blue and yellow ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... side Where now the South-Sea heaves its waste of tide, Rose on swift wheels the MOON'S refulgent car, 80 Circling the solar orb; a sister-star, Dimpled with vales, with shining hills emboss'd, And roll'd round Earth her airless realms of frost. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered through one or another of the great galleries, where, before ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... through, for there was a sense of heat and dirt, and smell, and crowd, and toil and sorrow throughout. It was probably no nicer to live in, and nothing proved it better than the overflow of the children therefrom into the little, hot, paved, airless angle. Here they could be found from five in the morning till twelve at night. Here, with guards set, to give notice of the approach of the children's joy-destroying Siva—otherwise the policeman—they played ball. Here "cat" and ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... of the men had a bundle of snipe and we had to return; but we had not many cartridges left, which consoled us. We went back pretty wet all over, for it was piping hot and airless under the palms, but on the fields outside the air was delicious and dry. We crossed the line to a beautiful lake with level grassy banks and found it alive with thousands of duck. They were very wary though, and kept ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... hydrogen; and as a consequence, although this gas is produced in small quantities by volcanoes and by decomposing vegetation, yet no trace of it is found in our atmosphere. The moon however, having only one-eightieth the mass of the earth, cannot retain any gas, hence its airless ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... protein is still subject to an undesirable form of consumption in the gut. Various bacteria make their home in our airless, warm intestines. Some of these live on protein. In the process of consuming undigested proteins, they release highly ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... ruins. But in one place among the rubble I saw the splintered top and a leg of a grand piano. Podgora hill, which was no doubt once neatly terraced and cultivated, is like a scrap of landscape from some airless, treeless planet. Still more desolate was the scene upon the Carso to the right (south) of Goritzia. Both San Martino and Doberdo are destroyed beyond the limits of ruination. The Carso itself is a waterless upland with but a few bushy trees; it must always have been ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... innermost and smallest of the planets, measuring only some 3400 miles in diameter, is, not unexpectedly, an airless wilderness. Small bodies are unable to retain the gases at their surface, on account of their feebler gravitation. We find, moreover, that Mercury always presents the same face to the sun, as it turns on its axis in the same period (eighty-eight days) ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... awake a long time that night, thinking, not of the bridge nor of the "crow's nest," not of the Captain nor of the supposed Hugh Dalton, but of the child in the steerage. How stifling it must be down there to-night! It was hot and airless enough here, where Blythe had a stateroom to herself,—separated from her mother's by a narrow passageway, and where the port-holes had been open all day. Now, to be sure, they were closed; for the sea was rising, and already the spray dashed against the thick glass. Oh, how must ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... place set apart for the worship of the Lord according to our pure faith?' 'Ah! Pastor, but the notes cannot contaminate,' Monsieur Gabriel would answer; 'Luther himself made use of the monk's melodies in his canticles.' And Pastor Mueller retired to his dirty, airless house, feeling rebuked himself where ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... and they made good time, reaching by dusk, as they had hoped to do, a farmer's house on the downward dip of the mountain to the east. Here, their story being told, they were hospitably received, and Ann Mary was clapped into the airless inner room and fed with gruel and dipped toast. But she had had fresh air and exercise all day, and a hearty meal of cold venison and corn bread at their noonday ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball slept insulated ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... they drove to Versailles, which they inspected in the same apathetic fashion; then they returned to the hotel, where they established themselves for the rest of the day in the airless salon, Mr. Ducksmith reading English newspapers and his wife knitting ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... of the earliest to employ the interplanetary theme. It is the first to portray a battle fought by space craft in the airless void; and possibly the first also to propose the use of sealed suits that enable men to traverse a vacuum. Of the more minor twists of plot initially found here that have since become parts of the "pulp" science-fiction writers' standard stock-in-trade, there are ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... evening—how different from the triumphant home-coming which fancy had painted so often during the weeks of absence! The house felt unbearably cramped and airless. It was dreadful to have no garden, after having practically lived out of doors; and oh, what a contrast the evening meal presented from the repast served nightly in the ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Grosvenor Square I told my parents that I must go home to Glen, as I felt suffocated by the pettiness and conventionality of my late experience. The moderate teaching and general atmosphere of Gloucester Crescent had depressed me, and London feels airless when one is out of spirits: in any case it can never be quite a home to any one ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... found himself back again before the house, and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. Where ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... it was someone signaling, but it was only a touch of sunlight on the shiny surface of the automatic tracking telescope, which was poked out of the open shutters of the airless observatory, still doing its automatic job of recording solar phenomena in the absence of ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent—the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. Leam, however—interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and saw what it brought—always remembered this early day as the ideal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... This room served as kitchen, dining-room, general reception, and the skipper's bed-room. A ladder led up to the loft from one corner. Of the remaining rooms on the ground floor one was where the grandmother slept, and the other one was kept spotless, musty and airless for the occasional occupation of good Father McQueen, the missionary priest, who visited Chance Along three times a year. ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... have been saved a deal of trouble, for he could simply have described its rocky wilds for his Inferno!" All blessed the fresher atmosphere and brisker breezes of the Indian Ocean, which, if warm, are bearable, and awoke from the lethargy of a sultriness which was like that of an overheated, airless room, to life and interest, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... into trenches in the firing-line are, if anything, less heroic than the army of cooks and Janies who descend to spend their lives in the basement "domestic offices" of Bloomsbury. Dark and ill-ventilated in summer, gas-lit and airless throughout the foggy winter. Flight upon flight of stairs up which Janie daily toiled a hundred times before she was suffered to seek the attic she shared with cook under the slates. Overwork, lack of fresh air and recreation—all these had ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... across narrow winding alleys, were an inevitable condition of life in sixteenth-century Europe before strong central government had made it safe to live outside the gates. Even the houses of the great were dark, airless, cramped, with tiny windows and dim, opaque glass; such as one may still see at Compton Castle in Devonshire or the Chateau des Comtes at Ghent. Communications moved slowly along unmetalled roads or up and down ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... afternoon in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... fell too softly to be heard in the garden; not a leaf stirred in the airless calm; the watch-dog was asleep, the cats were indoors; far or near, under the murky heaven, not a ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... not know how much blood he had lost, and he could not account for the way in which the lights swam before his eyes and his steps reeled, as he was taken down a dark ladder-like staircase and into a low long room with a swinging lamp suspended from the ceiling. It felt close and airless after the coldness of the night, and everything swam in a mist before his eyes; but he heard a voice not altogether unfamiliar say in authoritative accents: "Let him sit down, and give him a stoup of wine;" and ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... discovered what I had suspected before; that on so small a schooner the mate took rank with the men rather than the afterguard. Cabin accommodations were of course very limited. My own lurked in the waist of the ship—a tiny little airless hole. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... himself that it was the night wind caught in some cranny of the house, and striving to get free. He had thrown open his window and leaned out, and trembled, when he found that the hot night was breathless, airless, that no leaf danced in the elm that shaded his study, that the ivy climbing beneath the sill did not stir as he gazed down at ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... were found in their beloved temperance hotel near Bloomsbury—a clean, airless establishment much patronized by provincial England. They always perched there before crossing the great seas, and for a week or two would fidget gently over clothes, guide-books, mackintosh squares, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... and reddening berries, burned and sparkled beneath it. But in the dingy bedroom of a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, with a film of fog over everything outside, there was no sun to be seen; the plane trees beyond the windows were nearly leafless; and the dead leaves scudding and whirling along the dusty, airless streets, under a light wind, gave the last dreary touch to the scene that Nelly Sarratt was looking at. She was standing at a window, listlessly staring at some houses opposite, and the unlovely strip of garden which lay between her and the houses. Bridget Cookson was ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted. She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a figure of more than himself and his ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... with one warm cloudy finger breaks The frost and the heart's airless black soil shakes; Love grown a man uprises, serious, bright With mind remembering now things ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... week of June—a torrid, airless day—he came home reeling. For the moment a black fear fell on her that she would be too weak to wrestle with this attack; but she braced ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... inside the airless booth—he trickled all over. This was worse than being court-martialled. And still the voice did ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... and the first thing in the morning to see that "the powny" was safe, for they were very importunate on the subject of the "swop." I had before been offered 150 dollars for her. I was obliged to sleep with the mother and children, and the pedlars occupied a room within ours. It was hot and airless. The cabin was papered with the Phrenological Journal, and in the morning I opened my eyes on the very best portrait of Dr. Candlish I ever saw, and grieved truly that I should never see that massive brow and ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... honest and not illiberal. But as soon as the French entered, he, with true priestly baseness, sent away the women nurses, saying he had no longer money to pay them, transported the wounded into a miserable, airless basement, that had before been used as a granary, and appropriated the good apartments to the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... through a triple airlock—an outer lock, which would be evacuated outward after it was closed, a middle lock kept evacuated at all times, and an inner lock, evacuated into the interior of the vehicle before the middle lock could be opened. Niflheim was worse than airless, much worse. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... strange to him. And then he remained breathless, motionless, petrified for hours, suppressing every thought, all loud breathing, all motion,—for every thought seemed to him but madness, every motion—madness. Time was no more; it appeared transformed into space, airless and transparent, into an enormous square upon which all were there—the earth and life and people. He saw all that at one glance, all to the very end, to the mysterious abyss—Death. And he was tortured not by the fact that Death was visible, but that ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and gloom of London repelled me. The prospect of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most roundabout way I could take; ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone which seems its inevitable drawback," because "the mind of the reader always bent to pick up clews receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art." They hoped to find a new way of handling the old tale of mystery, so that they ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... hot work," said Morgan, wiping his face, for the heat in that airless chasm was terrific. "I don't think we shall ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the serpent hissed In impotent rage, "Depart! and how depart! Can flesh be carried down where spirits wonn? Or I, most miserable, hold my life Over the airless, bottomless gulf, and bide The buffetings of yonder shoreless sea? O death, thou terrible doom: O death, thou dread Of all that breathe." A spirit rose and spake; "Whereas in Heaven is power, is much to fear; For this admired ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... days of airless quiet and great heat; shell-gatherers were warned from the ocean beach, where sunstroke waited them from ten till four; the highest palm hung motionless, there was no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side. At last, about four ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... airless bunk, in the lowest of three tiers, Andrews lay awake a long time, listening to the snores and the heavy breathing about him. Thoughts fluttered restlessly in his head, but in his blank hopelessness he could only frown and bite his lips, and ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... poisonous air generated so close at hand, and in consequence they presented a gruesome appearance. The patients came from streets which often were foul with dirt, smoke, and disease, and were admitted to gloomy airless wards, where pyaemia or gangrene were firmly established. In such an environment certain death seemed ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... was gloomy, close, and airless. The row of iron-gated openings in the opposite wall, as you entered, reminded you of prison windows. Every passer-by could look in through the railings to see how the garden grew; the flowers in the little square borders never seemed ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Expedition! We had not thought of that as a reason for this summons. Johnny Grantline was a close friend to us both. He had organized an exploring expedition to the Moon. Uninhabited, with its bleak, forbidding, airless, waterless surface, the Moon—even though so close to the Earth—was seldom visited. No regular ship ever stopped there. A few exploring parties of recent years had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... and after a feverish half-hour of waiting he found himself with the secretary, the judge of the Inquisition, the surgeon, and another masked man in an underground vault faintly lit by hanging lamps. On one side were the massive doors studded with rusty knobs, of airless cells; on the rough, spider-webbed wall opposite, against which leaned an iron ladder, were fixed iron rings at varying heights. A thumbscrew stood in the corner, and in the centre was a small writing-table, at which ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
