"Immobile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... head buried in his hands. On a plate before him were the remnants of a frugal supper, and a small lamp with broken chimney threw a reddish sheen on his immobile figure. Against the wall, above his bed, were hung his sabre and its scabbard, crosswise. On a small wooden stool stood a bowl, in which he had performed his ablutions, and a soiled towel hung from it. The fire in the small stove had long ago died down, and ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... into immobile slumber Annie lay beside him, awake, marvelling how suddenly he had become a stranger, almost an ogre. Yet she loved him and yearned to him. The impulse that had made her finish the letter to Cousin Lorena in the same spirit in which she had begun it called her to pity and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... There was a wild new urgency. Quickly he searched and he found, across all the great ledge, sinews from the gorging which the sun had not yet touched. Some among the tribe stared with immobile contempt, thinking Gral the scavenger was yet hungry. But Gral gathered quickly, and departed, and was soon at the far place by the great bole, where he retrieved his stone and set ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... she had entered the compartment in New York. Throughout the thirty miles or more, she had sat alone and inert beside the snow-clogged window, peering through veil and frost into the night that whizzed past the pane, seeing nothing yet apparently intent on all that stretched beyond. As still, as immobile as death itself she had held herself from the moment of departure to the instant that brought the porter with the word that they were whistling for B—-. Without a word she arose and followed him to the vestibule, where she watched him as he ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... the glancing satin and stainless marble of the gorgeous apartment, I beheld Eleanore Leavenworth. Pale as the sculptured image of the Psyche that towered above her from the mellow dusk of the bow-window near which she sat, beautiful as it, and almost as immobile, she crouched with rigid hands frozen in forgotten entreaty before her, apparently insensible to sound, movement, or touch; a silent figure of despair in ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... seroit le seul et unique en la force de ses Problemes, si sa trop grande presomption ne l'avoit porte a avancer en cette Science une proposition aussi absurde, qu'elle est contre la Foy et raison, en faisant la circonference d'un Cercle fixe, immobile, et le centre mobile, sur lequel principe Geometrique, il a avance en son Traitte Astrologique le Soleil fixe, et la ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... in their sticky green embrace. The Guardians! He tried to cry out but one of the verdant fronds enveloped his throat so tightly he could not utter a sound. The innocent green things of the Grove were vigilant guardians indeed. They seemed to be merely holding him immobile, but Tyndall realized with sick horror that their pressure was increasing, so little at a ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... The immobile butler, as once before, presented a card for her inspection. Ridgway, with recollections of the previous occasion, ventured to murmur ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... stolid, immobile countenance, the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by the romances she had read ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... utterance to the mighty thoughts which crowd upon his mind. "Talma ne faisoit pas un geste, quelquefois seulement il remuoit la tete pour questioner la terre et le ciel sur ce que c'est que la mort! Immobile, la dignite de la meditation absorboit tout son etre."—De l'Allemagne, 1. c. We could wish to avoid any attempt to describe the acting of Talma in those passages which the eloquence of M. de Stael has rendered familiar throughout Europe; yet we feel that this account of the tragedy of Hamlet ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... slept, for her eyes were closed and the lines of pain had wholly disappeared from the smooth, white brow. Quinton Edge kept his place at the back, where he could see and not be seen; a statue could not have been more immobile. Constans, kneeling by the couch, still held his sister's hand in his, keeping watch upon the pulse that fluttered so delicately. Once or twice the heavy eyes had opened and she had smiled up at him—contentedly as a child resting ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... and goes to top of stage. The prisoners pass out double file; as DMITRI passes VERA he lets a piece of paper fall on the ground; she puts her foot on it and remains immobile.) ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... woman, with hair unkempt, and hat awry, maudlin tears in her swollen eyes, and swaying as she held the rail, looked shiftily up into the magistrate's immobile face. ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... a remarkably regular breathing, a very cool skin—in the forenoon a specific warmth of 32 deg. C. had been found—and slight mobility. The eyes remained closed. When I opened them, without violence, the pupil was seen to be immobile. It did not react in the least upon the direct light of the sun on either side. The left eye did not move at all, the right made rare, convulsive, lateral movements. The conjunctiva was very much reddened. The child did not react in ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... in the cabin of the E ship, confronted by E McGinnis, Junior E Gray, and Mrs. Gray. He sank down in a chair and sat frozen, immobile. Only his eyes were alive, darting frantically here and there as if expecting some hole to open up and swallow him—perhaps ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... have occasion to size up such a man, you should perceive that the movements of his muscles do not correspond with the rate of his mental activity, as a superficial observer might mistakenly conclude. If your prospect sits or stands immobile; or if his actions give no indication of what he is thinking, watch his eyes and his facial muscles of expression. Eyes that fairly dart from one object to another, expressions that flash on and off the face; prove swift mental activity, no matter ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... Bacillus, has been caught at last! The peculiarity about him, confound him, is said to be his "immobility." Ugh! the hard-hearted infinitesimally microscopic monster! No tears, short-breathings, sighs, no groans, no sufferings, nothing will move him. There he remains, untouched, immobile. But there was one hopeful sign mentioned in the Times of last Saturday—the Bacillus was found "in chains, and in strings." Let the chains be the heaviest possible till he can be tried by a Judge and Jury; and don't resort to "strings" till ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... day's alarms, Of boss and bell the very jinx, He gazed immobile as the Sphinx On pompous front ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... the sofa, crocheting. She is an elderly lady, of cold, distinguished appearance, with stiff carriage and immobile features. Her abundant hair is very grey. Delicate transparent hands. Dressed in a gown of heavy dark silk, which has originally been handsome, but is now somewhat worn and shabby. A woollen shawl over ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... Jasmine, watching closely, fascinated by Krool's taciturnity, revolted by his immobile face, thought she saw in his eyes a glint of malicious and furtive joy. A dark premonition suddenly flashed into her mind that this creature would one day, somehow, do her harm; that he was her foe, her primal foe, without present or past cause for which she was responsible; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from which he does not deviate. His emblem, again, is fixed and immovable for all time. He is, for these reasons, called Sthanu. He is also of multiform aspect. He is present, past, and future. He is mobile and immobile. For this he is called Vahurupa (of multiform aspect). The deities called Viswedevas reside in his body. He is, for this, called Viswarupa (of universal form). He is thousand-eyed; or, he is myriad-eyed; or, he has eyes on all sides and on every part of his ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... keenly, hoping that this reference to possible-ill-health might bring the girl to his feet, as it had often done before in the case of other women; but it did not seem to produce the least effect. She stood silent, immobile, with her eyes still fixed upon the floor. Silence and stillness were so unusual in one of Ethel's vivacious temperament, that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... a stand against the enemy, and, by his magnetic power over them, succeeded in inducing the majority to remain and oppose the British advance. His own fearlessness encouraged them, and when they saw their old leader standing in the midst of shell fire as immobile as if he were watching a holiday parade, they had not the heart to run. While he was watching the battle a shell fell within a short distance of where he stood, and all his companions fled from the spot. He walked slowly away, and when the men returned to him he chided them, and made a witty ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... restrict the movements and natural functions of the body, should be worn. It has been found that those who wear no corset nor tight band or bodice will suffer but little, if at all, from morning sickness. Corsets, by holding immobile the waist muscles, prevent their getting strong. Anyone who is accustomed to corsets, when she leaves them off for a day will complain of "such a tired feeling, as if she would break in two." This is ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... conversation just now was not of religion, or even dogma which in this room had so often been confused with religion. Eben Tollman was sitting in a stiff-backed chair across from his host. His face wore the immobile expression of a man who never forgets the oppressive fact that he is ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... to the trio, his usually immobile face transformed into an expression of scowling anxiety. "Hullo!" he boomed, his guttural bass sounding hoarse with passion, "You fellows didn't meet that d——d hobo on the trail, I suppose? . . . I'm looking for him—in ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... as I broke the news. Its effect upon them was different in both cases. Mr. Raven started a little; exclaimed a little: he was more wonder-struck than horrified. But Mr. Cazalette's mask-like countenance remained immobile; only, a gleam of sudden, almost pleased interest showed itself in his black, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... clearly. But now she loved. God alone knew what she felt for this man, and when she thought of him the very perils of her path were dwarfed. On returning home that night she had given her maid her cloak, and had stood for a long time immobile,—gazing at her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... necessarily and invariably considered as real events, and it could not have been otherwise, as primitive man would have been unable to conceive the abstract idea of a vision or fantasy. And since during dreams the body remained immobile and quiescent, it was thought that the spirit inside the body left it and travelled independently. Hence the reluctance often evinced to waking a sleeper suddenly from fear lest the absent spirit might not have ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... is to say, she told it in a monotone without evincing, and clearly without feeling, the slightest amusement in it, and at the end, continuing quite grave, watched for its effect on others with a curious, staring interest. Her immobile, investigatory expression made the doctor laugh, which seemed, of late, to be the object in life of all ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... receded, faded, became lost. The fresh boyish face was gone, the tenderness of the eyes, the sweetness of the mouth with its curves and pictured corners. It was a man's face she saw, a face of steel, tense and immobile; a mouth of steel, the lips like the jaws of a trap; eyes of steel, dilated, intent, and the light in them and the glitter were the light and glitter of steel. The face of a man, and she had known only his boy face. This face she did not know ...
— The Game • Jack London
... over the table before him. A savage, compressing pain, very different from the fiery touch of the nerve stimulators, which held him immobile, unable to cry out ...
— Oneness • James H. Schmitz
... Triangle.... Gothick Buttresses are all ill-favoured, and were avoided by the Ancients."[78] Such were the opinions of Wren; but how was he to procure stability? The answer is, by the curtain wall. By its dead weight pressing on the walls of the aisles it renders them stable and immobile, free from all danger of thrust, while it conceals the buttresses which render secure the clerestory stage of the building proper. To paraphrase his own words: "I do not add buttresses, but I build up the wall so high as by the addition ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... midnight Friday, when they came back along the road to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal trail, the ambulance wagons laden with the dead and dying, hay carts piled high with saddles and accoutrements, upon which lay, immobile like men already dead, the spent and exhausted soldiers, they passed through the crowds of silent people of Amiens, who only whispered as they stared at the procession. In the darkness a cuirassier, with head bent upon his chest, stumbled forward, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... house. Judah raised so loud an outcry that the walls of the city of Egypt tumbled down, the women brought forth untimely births, Joseph and Pharaoh both rolled down off their thrones, and Joseph's three hundred heroes lost their teeth, and their heads remained forever immobile, facing backward, as they had turned them to discover the cause of the tumult. Yet the brethren did not venture to approach close to Joseph, they were too greatly ashamed of their behavior toward ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... chieftain. His coming seemed planned for dramatic effect. He rarely appeared until the audience, settled into order by the opening prayer or by the transaction of business, might easily catch sight of him, and as he passed down the long aisle, moving steadily on with graceful stride and immobile face, a flush of pride tinged his cheeks as cheer after cheer, rolling from one end of the amphitheatre to the other, rent the air. He sat in the front row on the centre aisle, and about him clustered Chester A. Arthur, Levi P. Morton, Benjamin F. Tracy, Edwards Pierrepont, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... after deck, just in front of the helmsman. The wind tugged at his gold and crimson robe, carrying it away from his body, so that it rippled like a flag, and exposed the bright blue trousers and jacket. Dontor, chief priest of the Bordeklu, stood immobile, his arms folded, his feet braced against the sway of his vessel. As the trio below him stopped, he frowned down ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... low obeisance before the throne. Dom Pedro nods encouragement, Maria de Padilla smiles graciously, only Dona Blanca's pallid face remains immobile. The hoary bard ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... about by design dangled from the clustering foliage in its roof. Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition—a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... mortel expire; Son toile tombe l'instant. Entre amis que la joie inspire, Celui-ci buvait en chantant. Heureux, il s'endort immobile Auprs du vin qu'il clbrait.... —Encore une toile qui file, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... always be there on the threshold to receive her mistress. It was difficult to guess what Porter thought. There were impromptu jaunts to theaters and dances. Porter had seen many gay beginnings and tearful endings. Her face was immobile and respectful at whatever ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... is pathologically the victim of his own powers of inhibition is certainly the more unhappy sufferer; he remains immobile and silent; but internally he longs to move. A thousand impulses which can find no outlet torture the soul which aspires to art, to work; and eloquent speech on his own misfortunes would fain flow from his lips to implore help from a physician, or comfort from some lofty soul; but ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... from under her arm, drawing his head in like a turtle, and she without the least offence went to dance with Niura. Three other couples were also whirling about. In the dances all the girls tried to hold the waist as straight as possible, and the head as immobile as possible, with a complete unconcern in their faces, which constituted one of the conditions of the good taste of the establishment. Under cover of the slight noise the teacher walked up ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... hearth with his face set as unyielding and immobile as chiseled granite. Ruferton eyed the two bankers with a sidewise stare between drooping lids, and Hendricks, at the window, presented to view only his back. But the features of the bankers themselves were haggard and miserable; like the faces of men making a last desperate stand, yet fronting ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... His wife, a short thin woman with worried eyes, watched him while he sat before the kitchen table. He was thin, too, like his wife, but tall and tough-skinned. His face, with its leather look was immobile. ...
— Pipe of Peace • James McKimmey
... of that!" said Mr. May, peremptory. But Ciccio, stretching forward taut and immobile with rage, was quite unconscious. His hand was ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the peep slot at the immobile metal figure. Already the leady was beginning to stir. It was bent in several places, dented and twisted, and its finish was blackened and charred. It was a leady that had been up there a long time; it had seen war and destruction, ruin so vast that no human being could imagine the extent. ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... up, the muscles being much wasted. Towards the end of 1877, after some pain in the back of her neck and twitching of the muscles, she began to lose power in her left arm and in her neck, so that she lay absolutely immobile in bed, the only part of her body she was able to move at all being her right arm. Up to this time the pelvic abscess had continued to discharge through the vagina, and occasionally through the bladder, but it now ceased to do so, and there were no further ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... but though a dozen cowpunchers were close by no one heard his voice except the man at his side. One side of his face remained perfectly immobile and his eyes stared straight before him drearily while he whispered from a corner of his mouth: "How ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... for the hope that certain souls had been saved, that anything of the sort had happened. She conquered the Simpsons and their friends chiefly by the simple impossibility that they should conquer her, walking immobile among them even while she admired Mr. Simpson's cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs. Simpson's house linen. It must be confessed that nothing in her surroundings spoke to her more loudly or more subtly than these things. In view of what happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... little pale at the gills, immobile, ruminating these matters, a not very pleasant look about his nose-end, he ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... to the bedside and gazed with a solemn earnestness at the immobile, helpless form stretched out before her as though ready for burial. Her heart swelled with suppressed emotion,—she thought with anguish of the brilliant brain, the strong, self-sufficient nature brought to such ruin through ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... sat as immobile and dignified as a king in court. We soon learned that the Indian horse-and-bead traders are a different species from the high powers of the tribe sitting in council, making treaties. It was like appearing before a ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... reflected in his face. He might have been composing a hymn to the unhasting and unresting march of that divinity. He seemed to greet the lapse of minute after minute with stern acquiescence in the inevitable order. His expression was so severe, so serene, so immobile, that it seemed obvious that for him at least there was a grandeur in the departing hour which no petty irritation on his part was to mar, although the wasting time wasted also high private hopes of ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... collectively to the individual, the proof which he derives from our conscience, or rather from our feeling of divinity. It is not a proof strictly or specifically rational, but vital; it cannot be applied to the logical God, the ens summum, the essentially simple and abstract Being, the immobile and impassible prime mover, the God-Reason, in a word, but to the biotic God, to the Being essentially complex and concrete, to the suffering God who suffers and desires in us and with us, to the Father ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Salonika, he tells me that, so far, the occupation has been a travesty of any military operation. No plan; no administration; much confusion; troops immobile and likely to sit for weeks upon the beach. The Balkan States Intelligence Officers are on the spot and grasp the inferences. Until the troops landed they were not quite sure whether some serious factor was not about to be sprung upon them: now they are quite sure nothing ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... lay dismounted on a wooden stand, as if there were nothing further to discuss. Indeed, though his speech was rapid and incisive, and his every movement full of an allure that spoke of splendidly poised muscles, he was in face and manner alike the most singularly immobile man I had ever met. He gave the impression of employing neither words nor actions except in case ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... recovered from his shock of surprise sufficiently to realise that the enormous and immobile dwarf was Mr. Ferdinand, and that Mr. Ferdinand was not yet aware of his presence, the Prophet resolved to beat a rapid and noiseless retreat. He carried this resolve into execution by turning sharply round, knocking his head against a plate chest, firing the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... immobile. The hand that held the pistol was not raised nor lowered. The thumb did not draw back the hammer. But over her face came, gradually, a change; a desperate sorrow, an abandonment of hope. Even the ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... circulated in Brunai. When the Sultan first mooted the idea of obtaining his own coin from England, one of the Company's officers expostulated feelingly with him, and I was told by an onlooker that the contrast of the expressions of the countenances of the immobile Malay and of the mobile European was most amusing. All that the Sultan replied to the objections of the officer was "It does not signify, Sir, my coin can circulate in your country and yours can circulate in mine," knowing well all the time the ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... facts, with no palliation and no reference to Eleanor's subsequent change of heart or renunciation of one honor after another. Virtuous indignation and pained surprise struggled for expression upon her pasty, immobile face. ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instant he thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awkward gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing the real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good or evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the flash-light inner ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... had lost he seemed to regain mastery of his inexplicable emotion. His face became again composed, almost immobile, and stepping to the table he selected a cigarette and rolled it gently between his slim brown fingers. "I'm sorry to have alarmed you," he said, his tone a bit too even not to breed a doubt in the mind of his hearer. "It's nothing serious—a little trouble ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... borne in upon Martin's consciousness that he was in the presence of a personality. They were immobile yellow gargoyles, those two Japs who stood against the farther wall, they did not count. But this man who stood across the table from him—the air of the room was electric with his presence. A commanding and forceful personality, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... equal precision, moving his feet as though there were marked for them certain exact spots which he covered with infinite lightness and exactitude, he turned about and stood beside his partner in exquisite and immobile pose. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... more, so as to keep his legs out of Ishmael's reach, and the two strained to try and over-balance each other's body, using the ordinary arm and breast hold. Ishmael, after a few moments of this immobile straining, let go Doughty's arm to seize him by the back of the collar, and Doughty, profiting in a flash by the steeper angle of inclination, caught him square under the arms and raised ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... listen to me, Panek!" he hissed urgently, using all his fighting technique meanwhile to keep the other's threshing form immobile. "I'm trying to warn you that the bozo you're after carries one of those new needle-guns, and the needles are poison-tipped. Also, he's the fastest man on the draw I've ever seen—I watched him practice. Just one of those needles and you'd be kaput ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... faithfully obeyed orders. He sat immobile and silent, watching the daring young warrior making off not only with his private property, but with that which ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... long they listened to the reports that came through the radiovisor and watched that immobile, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... approvingly. There was good old Pinto after a hard day's run over the mesa. He had borne his beloved owner far ahead of the sheriff's posse, and was now securing a moment's much-needed rest. Merton undid the riata and for half an hour practised casting it at his immobile pet. Once the noose settled unerringly over the head of ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Moisse, "asleep, oblivious. Dead. All day he sits in the sun like a saint, immobile. Like one of the old Alexandrian ascetics, like a delicately carved image. He is awake in himself but dead to others. The waves cannot touch him. His thoughts, oh to know his thoughts ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... mount guard over this litter of prostrate forms. They are old men and old women seated on chairs. They sit upright and immobile, with their hands folded on their knees. Some of them have fallen asleep where they sit. They are all rigid in an attitude of resignation. They have the dignity of figures that will endure, like that, for ever. ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... smoking a pipe; he had a bolt-action rifle across his knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about thirty years old, and any bobby-soxer's idol of the screen would have envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features. As Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging his rifle, ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... out of the window, and he, too, forever afterward prided himself upon his swiftness of discernment. He was a romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen the genius of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading Saxon. The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did not by a hair's-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... improper. I can bear, on a single feather of mine, O Sakra, this Earth, with her mountains and forests and with the waters of the ocean, and with thee also stationed thereon. Know thou, my strength is such that I can bear without fatigue even all the worlds put together, with their mobile and immobile objects.' ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... silently promising especial forms of punishment to this one and that one whom he knew. Most of them had been to the ranch many times, and he could have called to a dozen of them by name. They had sat in his father's cabin or stood immobile just within the door, and had listened while his mother played and sang for them. She had fed them cakes—Buddy remembered the good things which mother had given these despicable ones who were looting and gobbling and destroying like a drove of hogs turned loose in a garden, and the thought of her ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... dreaded by Karl had come to pass. The elephant, finding it impossible to reach the shikaree with its trunk—and no doubt judging by the "feel" that the rock was not immobile—had at length dropped down on all fours and, placing its broad shoulder against it, backed by the enormous weight of its bulky body, had sent the column crashing among the tops of a chestnut tree growing ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... words, and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her head-shawl; but her face remained as immobile as features cast in metal. When one has wept out of the heart for years, as Sarah Newbolt had wept, the face is no longer a barometer over the tempests of ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... by a strange sensation. This morning he had been utterly alone; this morning the fair, cold face of Paris had been immobile and speculative. Now a miracle had come to pass; the coldness had been swept aside and the beauty, the warm, palpitating humanity had shone into his eyes, ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... who is on detector watch grows tense. He listens attentively and then stands immobile for a moment or so. Then he steps to a telephone and a bell rings in the chart-house where the captain and his navigating and watch officers are working out ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... the immobile-featured Celestial when they had jointly and severally inspected the house from top to bottom. Sam Foo gazed at them, listened to their account of themselves, and disappeared. He re-entered the room ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... descent. The belief that the spirit may leave the body and maintain a continued existence is very old. Mr. Herbert Spencer finds the genesis of this belief in dreams. Since primitive men believed themselves able, in their dreams, to wander about while the body remained immobile and since in their dreams they met and spoke with their dead, they conceived an immaterial existence. The spirit of a dead man, having left the body, would still go on about its business. They, therefore, set out food and drink upon his grave and ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... phantom-like, as if the blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint set there by the sun. He stayed quite still. The dark shadow cast by the towering mosque fell upon him, and his immobile figure suggested to her ranges of infinite melancholy. She sighed as one oppressed. There was an old man praying near them at the threshold of the door, with his face turned towards the interior. He was very thin, almost a skeleton, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... also a strain of melancholy to increase its tendency towards inaction. It is often easy to discern in a group of children the leading characteristics of these temperaments, the phlegmatic or lymphatic, hard or soft, not easily stirred, one stubborn and the other yielding, both somewhat immobile, generally straightforward and reliable, law abiding, accessible to reason, not exposed to great dangers nor likely to reach unusual heights. Next the sanguine, hard or soft, as hope or enjoyment have the upper hand in them; this is the richest group in attractive power. If hope ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... in the open plains, where they can be seen and avoided, but in the tall grass or the scrub they are a continuous anxiety. No cover seems small enough to reveal them. Often they will stand or lie absolutely immobile until you are within a very short distance, and then will outrageously break out. They are, in spite of their clumsy build, as quick and active as polo ponies, and are the only beasts I know of capable of leaping into full speed ahead ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... an immobile Indian, and shuffled off the platform with a stolid face. The women heaved a sigh of disappointment and turned to go. The show was out and they must return to the monotony of their lives. They wondered what it would be like to ride off like that into the sunshine with cheeks like ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... in the open doorway remained perfectly immobile for a few moments. Then wrinkles ran over his face like a wave and his forehead became smooth again, he bowed his head respectfully, closed his eyes, silently let Mack enter his room before him, and closed the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... than elsewhere. Thousands of lives have already been consumed by that bloody regime, yet the monster on the throne is not appeased. How is such a thing possible when ideas, culture, literature, when the deepest and finest emotions groan under the iron yoke? The majority, that compact, immobile, drowsy mass, the Russian peasant, after a century of struggle, of sacrifice, of untold misery, still believes that the rope which strangles "the man with the white ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... come to be, and what we have first and foremost to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it is or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We have learned that in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality—what lies outside and around us—is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled, something beyond the reach of time and change—static or stationary—but is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have learned also to be dissatisfied with the compromise which, while acknowledging ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character which I have just been describing. It is this: the Dark Ages were the point during which there very gradually germinated and came into outward existence things which still ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... involved any physical effort. Maggie now swung the back of a laundry bench up to form a table-top, and upon it proceeded to spread a cloth and arrange a medley of chipped dishes. As she moved swiftly and deftly about, the Duchess watching her with immobile features, these two made a strangely contrasting pair: one seemingly spent and at life's grayest end, the other electric with vitality and giving off the essence ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Immobile, ouvrant l'oeil a moitie sous ses voiles, Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l'eternel ete Avait, en s'en allant, negligemment jete Cette faucille d'or dans le ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... multiple proportions, introduce an evident discontinuity to which we find analogies in the law of electrolysis. The elements of bodies we are thus brought to regard might, as regards solids at all events, be considered as immobile; but this immobility could not explain the phenomena of heat, and, as it is entirely inadmissible for gases, it seems very improbable it can absolutely occur in any state. We are thus led to suppose that these elements are animated by very complicated ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... was open. A torrid heat entered along with the clouds of dust; the flames of the four candles were flickering in the direction of the immobile corpse, and upon the cloth which covered the face, the closed eyes, the two hands stretched out, small flies alighted, came, went, and careered up and down incessantly, being the only companions of the old woman ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... would have given a sufficient sauce to anything and as he ate in a sort of luxurious content he studied his captors with the advantage of the daylight. The full sunshine disclosed no more of softness and mercy than the night had shown. The features were immobile, the eyes fixed and hard, but when the gaze of any one of them, even the chief, met the boy's it was quickly turned. There was about them something furtive, something of the lower kingdom of the animals. That inherited primitive instinct, ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... indeed, immobile, rigid, the bride was standing before them, arrayed at last in the shimmering white of the sweeping satin, overrich of lace and orange flowers, and shrouded in the clouding waves of her veil. White as her robes, pale as death and as ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... but moderately fortified, that contain depots of stores, docks, and other conveniences, have the vice of all immobile establishments. When war does come, some of them almost certainly, and all of them possibly, may not be in the right place with regard to the critical area of operations. They cannot, however, be ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... been in our cabin. A great bustle of shore-going, of leave-taking had sprung up all over the ship. Carlos and Castro had entered with a tall, immobile, gold-spectacled Spaniard, dressed all in white, and with a certain air of noticing and attentive deference, bowing a little as he entered the cabin in earnest conference with Tomas Castro. Carlos had preceded them with a certain nonchalance, and the Spaniard—it was the Senor Ramon, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... took the chair Goree offered him. They who cast doubts upon Garvey's soundness of mind had a strong witness in the man's countenance. His face was too long, a dull saffron in hue, and immobile as a statue's. Pale-blue, unwinking round eyes without lashes added to the singularity of his gruesome visage. Goree was at a loss to account ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... roadside; and what sort of language he would use to an Englishman, to a Punjabi farmer going to a fair, and to a woman without a veil. Lurgan Sahib laughed immensely, and begged Kim to stay as he was, immobile for half an hour—cross-legged, ash-smeared, and wild-eyed, in the back room. At the end of that time entered a hulking, obese Babu whose stockinged legs shook with fat, and Kim opened on him with a shower of wayside ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... another, progress which is the movement itself. In our actions, which are systematized movements, what we fix our mind on is the end or meaning of the movement, its design as a whole—in a word, the immobile plan of its execution. That which really moves in action interests us only so far as the whole can be advanced, retarded, or stopped by any incident that may happen on the way. From mobility itself our intellect turns ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... altri e degna di racconto la mortificazione hauuta da vn peruerso, che fatto ardito, non so da quale spirito diabolico, volendo rubbare alcune di dette gioie, e forsi tutte, dalle mani della Beata Vergine fu reso immobile da vna guanciata della Vergine fin' a tanto, che la giustizia l' hebbe nella sua braccia; contempli ogn' vno questa Statua, che ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... her face, which he had once thought too immobile and passive for beauty, flamed with color, the dark eyes flashing beneath the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sockets. She turned to flee; and there was the monster's mate, not quite so huge, but equally appalling. Behind her was an impenetrable wall of thorn-acacia. There was only one refuge—a tree, all too small, but lofty enough to take her beyond the reach of those horrifying horned and immobile masks. Up the little tree she went, nimbly as a monkey, and crouched shivering in a crotch. The slender trunk swayed beneath her weight. She clutched the brown baby to her heart, and sent shriek after ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... body on the stone Of sightless thought adventuring the host That is mere spirit; these the bloom achieved By secret labour in the flowing wood Of rain and air and wind and continent sun ... His tiger, lithe, immobile in the stone, A swift destruction for a moment leashed, Sprang crying from the jealous stealth of men Opposed in cunning watch, with engines hid Of torment and calamitous desire. His leopard, swift on lean and paltry limbs, Was fear in flight before accusing faith. His bull, with eyes ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... with the later—a slowness of growth which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest civilization to this hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian civilization was especially immobile: its development into castes is but one among many evidences that it was the very opposite of a ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... long and immobile silence he dropped to his knees, remained so listening, then crept across the Pulpit's ferny floor. Of a sudden he sprang up and fired full into a man's face; and struck the distorted visage with doubled fist, hurling it below, crashing down ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... any body speaking of its birth or nature. Nobody knoweth who its father or mother is. It is said, O Matali, that when the end of the world cometh, mighty fire burst forth from within it, and spreading consumeth the three worlds with all their mobile and immobile objects.' Hearing those words of Narada, Matali answered him, saying, 'No one here seems to me to be eligible. Let us ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the idiot and his goats. He mowed and grinned at us, but uttered no word. We saw no other human figure till we had passed the entrance to Villa Vedia and felt safer. Nor did we pass anyone between that cross-road and the foot of my road, save only the same immobile horseman on the same knoll, in the same position, and, apparently, at precisely the same spot, as if he were indeed an equestrian statue. His salutation was ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... his sister's lead, rose, kicked the tired clock like a ball across the lawn, and exclaimed in a tone of challenge to the universe: "But where did everything come from before that—before the East, I mean?" And he glared at his immobile Uncle through the paper with an air of fearful accusation, as though he distinctly held he was to blame. If that didn't let the cat out of the bag, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... I would contrast the reposeful, somewhat immobile countenance, the dreaming eye, the almost womanly softness of his smile, with the picture, and find the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... two fingers, and helped her gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair |
