"Impossibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the world." To this view I adhere firmly. Let us take it for granted that the most extravagant hopes of our most reckless dreamers are fulfilled, that England is crowded out of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and is involved in a long-lasting war with the native Indians. An impossibly large dose of political naivete is needed in order to make us believe that England would take this loss quietly for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... personally to both parties—to leave her with this impression and keep the pair as much as possible apart, until the actual wedding; and then to leave her awakening to Tristram—was his plan. A woman would be impossibly difficult to please, if, in the end, she failed to respond to such a lover as Tristram! He counted upon what he had called her moral antennae to make no mistakes. It would not eventually prejudice matters if the family did find her a little stiff, ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... of the Old World have not heretofore erred conspicuously in this respect; and as the "Balance of Power" was the word-juggle with which to conjure up wars and armaments in the eighteenth century, so the "Division of Trade" may not impossibly prove the similar conjuring word-juggle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, "isolation" is not compatible with the policy of a Great Nation under a call to assert itself as a World Power. Then ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... would otherwise have been eaten up with rust. A portion of his facts, by the by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable, hereafter; or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... company's Personal Service and said to the impossibly cheerful blonde who answered, "Where can I find Professor Peter Voss who teaches over at the University in Baltimore? I don't want to talk with him, just want to know where he'll be an hour ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... against his will from the yacht to the town, where all his business was neatly arranged for his doing. Certainly it appeared as if the hand of intelligent destiny must have been in it somewhere. No mere blind luck could have driven him half a mile into the country to the one spot in all Hunston—impossibly unlikely as it was—where he could become acquainted with Uncle Elbert's daughter without the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... present antiquated system, sir,"—Dubberley rather prides himself on preserving the courtly fashions of address of a bygone age,—"an impossibly long time. The average speed of a canal-boat at the present day under the ministrations of that overburdened and inadequate quadruped, the—er—horse, is three miles ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... say it as shouldn't, that they are good 'uns—both to look at and to go. I roared out this morning, as soon as I was awake, "Next month," which we have been longing to be able to say ever since we have been here. I really do not know how we shall ever knock at the door, when that slowest of all impossibly slow hackney-coaches shall pull ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... fruitless chase towards the head of the valley, continuing to neutralize a force many times larger than his own, and which could and ought to have been at this very time doing fatal work against the Confederacy. Presumably he had saved Richmond, and therewith also, not impossibly, the chief army of the South. The chagrin of the Union commanders, who had in vain explained the situation with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... dashing in anything charming or outre which they happened to think of at the moment, and jumbling together an extravagant whole too good to be true. But there were only a few miles of it left after Delft: and we hadn't reveled in impossibly delicious farm-yards and supernaturally bowery gardens half long enough, when we ran into the outskirts of The Hague—"S. Gravenhage," as I love ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... impetuously as if it had been wanted for instant use in the recovery of some person apparently drowned, the single gentleman made Kit's mother swallow a bumper of it at such a high temperature that the tears ran down her face, and then hustled her off to the chaise again, where—not impossibly from the effects of this agreeable sedative—she soon became insensible to his restlessness, and fell fast asleep. Nor were the happy effects of this prescription of a transitory nature, as, notwithstanding that the distance ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... a good young fellow, better than many, and when he went on to think of himself, he saw, in his vision of his own future, nothing worse than an almost impossibly pretty girl as his bride, one with whom he was to take a specially long and agreeable wedding tour; and some time after that he supposed himself to see two or three jolly little boys rolling about on the grass, the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... and was thankfully convinced. In my efforts not to aim too high, my standard had fallen impossibly low, and Bridget's keen common sense had been right in prophesying that I was more likely to find a congenial type of people in a neighbourhood which appealed ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... "it is she who is the pearl of this great ocean, for it was upon its surface that we first saw her, and she has proved herself far above the worth of pearls or diamonds or rubies. To her, under heaven, my life, and not impossibly yours, is owing. The greatest pleasure of this voyage has come from her companionship, and all that I ask now is that we shall be able to preserve this wealth for her, and that the opportunity may be ours to do our ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... melancholy voice, still to be heard behind the paper partition, was evidently the proper way for them to sing—these musicians I had so often seen painted in amazing colors on rice-paper, half closing their dreamy eyes among impossibly large flowers. Long before I arrived there, I had perfectly pictured Japan to myself. Nevertheless, in the reality it almost seems to be smaller, more finicking than I had imagined it, and also much more mournful, no doubt ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... out immense possibilities for producers and writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spectators, now with the improvement in the stories of serial pictures has come an increase in the spectators who follow them up, and a consequent introduction of serials ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... behind, which made Hiram's kingdom, could not grow enough for his people's wants. His country was 'nourished' by Palestine, long centuries after this time (Acts xii. 20), and the same was the case in Solomon's period. In verse 11, the quantity of oil is impossibly small as compared with that of wheat. 2 Chronicles reads 'twenty thousand' instead of 'twenty,' and the Septuagint inserts 'thousand' in verse 11, which is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... about 1524, but that is an impossibly early date, as even in far less remote places such classical columns were not used till at least ten years later. Yet the cloister must probably have been built some time before 1550. An upper unarched cloister, with an architrave resting on simple Doric columns, was added, sede vacante, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... the crystal platform appeared to be about half a square mile, he decided that he would now have sufficient space to spiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long to start, the distance would become impossibly great. ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... advanced descendants, the Reptile. Probably the giant salamander of modern Japan affords the best suggestion of the large and primitive salamanders of the Coal-forest, while the Caecilia—snake-like Amphibia with scaly skins, which live underground in South America—may not impossibly be degenerate ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Charleston was very rapid. I certainly was in no hurry to have it over, when I had so disagreeable a prospect before me as a trial, and not impossibly an execution. I was treated with less harshness than the rest of the prisoners—perhaps on account of my youth—perhaps because some believed me innocent. I fain ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... all life was a spiritual mystery, veiled from his clear knowledge by the density of flesh. Since he knew his own body to be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... duplicates. So Joe had improvised a method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't have done the ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... disadvantage in existence. Robert, hating himself, condemning himself, was conscious, in spite of himself, that Brigit's affection for him was not love in the full human sense of the word. He had exchanged an ordinary self-restraint for an impossibly false position. She could inspire his life, but could she enter into it, be it, live it with him daily? Would there not have to be great reservations, half statements, and, worst of all, a subtle kind ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Impossibly strange! I walked toward one of the trees, stopped at a reddish boulder to examine it. And surprise caught at my throat. It was an artifact—a crumbling ruin, the remnant of an ancient structure whose original appearance I could ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... to that—just as soon as you realize and admit that a minute difference of degree can produce a marked difference of kind. You might say that a single, impossibly tiny, neutron is the difference between an atom bomb and a slowly cooling pile of inert uranium isotopes. Does ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... has its inherent drawback, which not impossibly more than compensates for its advantages. The fact that young Americans grow up so much of a class involves the essential fact that the enormous majority of them are educated at the Public Schools, that is at the Board Schools ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to the town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outre and grotesque. We cut a dash in impossibly narrow trousers and in such short jackets that we always felt quite abashed in the presence ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... palaces, there was but little that was appropriate for intimate domestic life. The early Renaissance furniture was palatial, architectural in outline and, one might almost say, in proportions. The tables were impossibly high, the chairs were stiff, and the cabinets immense and formal in outline. It had, however, much stately beauty, and very lovely are certain old pieces of carved and gilded wood where the gilt, put on over a red preparation ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... It was an impossibly strange sentence. Brion had never realized before how much of the content of speech was made up of emotion. If the man had given it a positive emphasis, perhaps said it with enthusiasm, it would have meant, "Success! The enemy is going to ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... plain enough. These people are used to breathing an atmosphere surcharged with oxygen and twice as dense as that of the earth. It doesn't trouble our breathing, simply giving us more energy; but we can live where they would gasp for breath. Air impossibly rare for them is all right for us, and that's what I am in search of, and we shall find it if ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... fountains played, and the Queen's Guard in white and scarlet, and armour that shone like gold, stood by twos lining the way up the stairs; and a great body of them was massed by the vast door of the palace itself, where it stood glittering like an impossibly radiant peacock in the ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... them; the man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it. The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse, like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and need not have been dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers' wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have seen an Oxford agricultural ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... copper-bottomed, that they all carry surgeons of experience, and that they are all A1 at Lloyds', and anywhere else. Still glancing over the shoulder of my friend the newsman, I find I am offered all kinds of house-lodging, clerks, servants, and situations, which I can possibly or impossibly want. I learn, to my intense gratification, that I need never grow old, that I may always preserve the juvenile bloom of my complexion; that if ever I turn ill it is entirely my own fault; that if I have any complaint, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... amphitheatre at the distant Great Smoky Mountains shimmering in the hazy September sunlight—so ineffably beautiful, so delicately blue, that they might have seemed the ideal scenery of some impossibly lovely ideal world. Perhaps she was wondering what the unconscious Becky Stiles, far away in those dark woods about Pine Lick, had secured in this life besides her freckled face. Was this the sylvan deity ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the truth seemed the most important task in life. The first step, though you think it impossibly difficult, did not dismay him. He had no doubt of discovering his father. That Colonel Boyce should have been killed or even caught was incredible. He was not the man so to oblige his enemies. It was incredible, too, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... going to the forest to have tea. It is impossibly hot indoors, but it will be delightful under the trees. Mr Judge has sent for a fiacre, and Miss Benson has asked to come too. Put on your blue muslin and your big hat. Be quick, darling! I'll fasten ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... impossibly innocent shopgirl who—in the story—just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young man who heroically "marries the girl"; the adventures of the debonaire actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure gold, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... said quickly, 'please don't think me impossibly rude if I turn you out. Some—some people are coming to see me. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... truths may have been embodied in act through the existence of the globe and its inhabitants," rejoined my companion. "Perhaps it may be revealed to us after the fall of the curtain over our catastrophe; or not impossibly, the whole drama, in which we are involuntary actors, may have been performed for the instruction of another set of spectators. I cannot perceive that our own comprehension of it is at all essential to the matter. At any rate, while our view is so ridiculously ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their task, but the return journey was disastrous. Short rations soon began to tell, for they had taken longer than they had calculated, and no food was to be found by the way. Gray was the first to fail and to die. Heavy rains made the ground impossibly heavy, and the camels sank to the ground exhausted. Finally they had to be killed and eaten. Then the horses went. At long last the three weary men and two utterly worn-out camels dragged themselves to Cooper's Creek, hoping to find their ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... of Charles I. Supposed to be a copy by Sir Peter Lely from the original, which was painted about 1636, and destroyed in the fire at Whitehall in 1697. Not impossibly, however, the original painting itself, given by the king to the Prince Palatine. In the Dresden Gallery. Size: 4 ft. by 3 ft. 2 in. Cust, ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... could feel the difference created by the water's powerful density—despite my heavy clothing, copper headpiece, and metal soles, I climbed the most impossibly steep gradients with all the nimbleness, I swear it, of a chamois or ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... drawing-room, misted in far antiquity. Threadbare? By heaven, its mere survival was magnificent! I say that it was a miraculous drawing-room. Its chairs were humanised. Its little cottage piano that nobody ever opened now unless Tom had gone mad on something for two pianos, because it was so impossibly tinny—the cottage piano could humanly recall the touch of a perfect baby when Marian the wife sat down to it. Marian was one of your silly sentimental nice things; on account of its associations, she really preferred the cottage ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... outraged, but simply shaken. What in the name of Juno could Jane see in Aguilar? Jane, to whom every man was the hereditary enemy! Aguilar, who had no use for either man or woman! Aguilar, a man without a Christian name, one of those men in connection with whom a Christian name is impossibly ridiculous. How should she, Audrey, address Aguilar in future? Would he have to be asked to tea? These vital questions naturally transcended all others in Audrey's mind.... Still (she veered round), it was perhaps after all just the union that might ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... most celebrated tale, but nobody has bellowed "Plagiarist!" Some people may not look over a fence: Mr. Stevenson, if he liked, might steal a horse,—the animal in this case is only a skeleton. A very sober student might add that the hero is impossibly clever; but, then, the hero is a boy, and this is a boy's book. For the rest, the characters live. Only genius could have invented John Silver, that terribly smooth-spoken mariner. Nothing but genius could have drawn that simple yokel on the island, with his craving for cheese ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... way was four or five miles long, allowing for its curvature, and it ascended at a slope that would have made it almost impossibly steep on earth, but which one strode up easily under lunar conditions. We saw only two Selenites during all that portion of our flight, and directly they became aware of us they ran headlong. It ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Street and the confluent streets flowed on up Paradise Street, and gradually only the maimed and the aged, or the impossibly youthful, were left behind, to hear of the wonders afterwards at secondhand, a secondhand likely to add rather than detract from what actually took place. Even the Colonnade was empty and silent. Shiraz had gone with the crowd ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... subject dragged out into the light of day. Even men who have been chaste themselves—good fathers of families like the major—cannot be unaware of the complications incidental to frightening their women-folk, and setting up an impossibly high standard in sons-in-law. But Sylvia stood by her guns; at last she brought her father to his knees by the threat that if he could not bring himself to talk with Roger Peyton, she, Sylvia ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... them, and they were taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington. "Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to 'break ground' by talking to himself day ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... infusion of that local color which is lavishly employed in decorating its externals. The pomp and pageantry of the drama are Egyptian and ancient; the play's natural and artificial environment is Egyptian and ancient; two bits of its music are Oriental, possibly Egyptian, and not impossibly ancient. But in everything else "Aida" is an Italian opera. The story plays in ancient Egypt, and its inventor was an archaeologist deeply versed in Egyptian antiquities, but I have yet to hear that Mariette ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... omission of some important elements in the history of the theory of translation, in that it ignores the discrepancies between precept and practice, and the influence which practice has exerted upon theory; on the other hand, however, it confines a subject, otherwise impossibly large, within measurable limits. The chief emphasis has been laid upon the sixteenth century, the period of the most enthusiastic experimentation, when, though it was still possible for the translator ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... training extending for over a month or more prior to the actual event. It should be your aim to work yourself into such a condition that you can go for three nights without sleep, talk for hours to the most impossibly stupid of young women, and consume an unending amount of alcohol. You are then prepared for the bachelor dinner, the bridal dinner, the bridesmaids, the wedding, and the ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... naked truth. You, on the other hand, are vacillating and ill at your ease. You shrink from the hards of life which I steer happily through. But you have no delusions with yourself, and the odds are that when the time comes you may choose the "high that proved too high" and achieve the impossibly heroic. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... appointments, and little intrigues, and bonfires, and College rows. I want to live here, and walk on the Downs and write my book. I don't want to be stuffy, as Jack said. But it will be all right, when I have taken the plunge; and after I have been back a week, this will all fade into a sort of impossibly pleasant dream." ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you're not playing quite fairly. You see "reticence" cannot suggest "audacity." The First Player's word not impossibly might. Could it be that you were still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... in Padua now, doubtless dreaming of fresh conquests, and not impossibly speculating on a world whose gullibility is indeed infinite, and which actually seems to take the same pleasure in being cheated in Fact as it does in being deceived in Fiction. Who knows if the time is ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed. The whole world resembled Nantbrook—a place of universal condemnation, forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had honestly ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... for me. I shall be impossibly difficult myself if I meet Mr. Carruthers again, as he has no mother to play these tricks ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... may not impossibly be laid to the author by some, because he has drawn two or three of the characters from unusual quarters and described them freely; the many who know him will limit any phrases to the several characters ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... Christine and create romance; and he had come to this very flat. More, there had been two flats to let in the block. He had declined them—the better one because of the furniture, the worse because it was impossibly small, and both because of the propinquity of the garage. But supposing that he had taken one and Concepcion the other! He recoiled ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... by-the-by, did me good service in the preparation of the article entitled "MAIN STREET," included in the present volume. The remainder may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or not impossibly may be worked up, so far as they go, into a regular history of Salem, should my veneration for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of any gentleman, inclined and competent, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... followed the children with her look as they silently left the room. She knew not how to enter upon what she had to say. To talk of the law and use threats in this atmosphere of serene domesticity seemed impossibly harsh. But the necessity of broaching the ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated with the mud, their eyes ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... and then hurling it away, was a naked man whose head towered impossibly a hundred and fifty feet into the air. Trembling, awestruck, Glaudot looked up at the great savage face. Wild hair streaming, filthy beard matted with dirt and tree-branches, it was the most ferocious ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... lightning, and she tumbles into the abyss. She is saved by Hoel in some inexplicable way, and, still more inexplicably, regains her reason. The music is bright and tuneful, and the reaper's and hunter's songs (which are introduced for no apparent reason) are delightful; but the libretto is so impossibly foolish that the opera has fallen into disrepute, although the brilliant music of the heroine should make it a favourite role ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... independent, nor are they all exclusive one of the others. Thus (a) excludes all the rest, or, better, implies (b), (c), and (d), and excludes (a) and (f); (b) and (c) between them are not independent, since a qualified retention may pass into a protectorate. Neutralization not impossibly may ultimately call for a protectorate. Future, independence, so long as unaccomplished, implies (a), (b), (c), and (d), while (f) is completely exclusive. It may, however, not prevent foreign absorption, if, once out, we ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... so mingled fact and fancy, what did occur and what might have been, that any attempt to disentangle the twain would be idle indeed. The passages where she is most insistent upon the due sequence of events, most detailed in observation are not impossibly purely fictional, the incidents related without stress or emphatic assertions are probably enough the plain unvarnished happenings as she witnessed them. That the history is mainly true admits of little question; ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... its background merging with the pastel blue of the slanted ceiling.... Almost as they had blended together that first day when she was twelve. Yet not the same, she corrected her thoughts, frowning. Sometimes, as today, the design seemed faded and changed. The gay little bridges and the flowered, impossibly blue trees seemed to change ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells
... rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning over the rusty leaves, ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" broke forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The negro chorus swelled louder and louder—"Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... a dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard. He could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. But, unfortunately, he was only a human being—a man who was ready to give ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... to the baker and the grocer, and however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor supplied something undreamed of by the ...
— Progress and History • Various
... promised. "It isn't a thing, but a duty, a privilege, a responsibility. He shall stay here, where he is. He really won't crowd us too impossibly, and that ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... which plainly said it was about time, and reached over to press down the emergency key. He held it down. Eleven light-years away, if one had to depend upon impossibly slow three-dimensional space time, a siren which could be heard for ten miles in Eden's ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment that the job-holder ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... from the Society of a number of spiritualists. Messrs. Stainton Moses and A. R. Wallace, among others, thought that no experiences based on mere eyesight could ever have a chance to be admitted as true, if such an impossibly exacting standard of proof were insisted on in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... quite impossibly lovely in a frock of the cheapest kind of material, "run up" by the local dressmaker, and very evidently with no other thought "at the back of her mind" than of the ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Deacon process cannot be treated in this manner, as chambers of impossibly large dimensions would be required. Originally the absorption of the Deacon chlorine took place in a set of chambers, constructed of large slabs of stone, containing a great many horizontal shelves superposed over one another. About sixteen such chambers were combined in such manner that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... especially "learned" in "Mother Goose her ways" by their quick responsiveness to the facts of verbal rhythm and rhythmical structure in more sophisticated products. "If we have no love for poetry to-day, it may not impossibly be due to the fact that we have ceased to prize the old, old tales which have been the delight of the child and the child-man since the foundations of the world. If you want your child to love Homer, do ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... horse, again the stern ride together; saw again the Dark Tower, and all the love and sweet pleasure that they made. The bride in the church turning her proud shy head, the bride in his arm, clinging as they flew, the bride in the tower, the crowned Countess, the nestling mate—oh, impossibly lost! Inconceivably put away! ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... though to leap, then settled back. Plainly it longed to spring. Equally plainly it was afraid of the being that so impossibly was revealed to its nostrils but not to its eyes. Meanwhile, one tearing sweep of blunt claws or sharp fangs—and a fatal rent would appear in Thorn's ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... minute, overcome, while a procession of ideas crowded after each other through the flaxen head. It was her birthday; grandpa couldn't get the boat under the tablecloth. This beautiful dog—this impossibly beautiful dog, was a surprise present. He was for her, to love and to play with; to see his tricks every day, to teach him to know her and to run to her when she called. If she was given the choice of the Whole world on this sweet birthday morning, ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... rather have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the Governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterwards. However, as it couldn't be, he went into the Governor's plans, and the Governor set off for York ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... come upon him. It is said of Paul at his conversion, that when conviction of his bad life took fast hold of his conscience, he trembled, and was astonished. (Acts 9:6) And although we read not of any particular circumstance of his behaviour under his conviction outwardly, yet it is almost impossibly but he must have some, and those of the most solid sort. For there is such a sympathy betwixt the soul and the body, that the one cannot be in distress or comfort, but the other must partake of, and also signify the same. If it be comfort, then 'tis shewn; If comfort of mind, then by leaping, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a vicious and ephemeral popularity; and any book, however trashy, with his name to it, would have been sure to sell. This "Life in Paris" was very probably the work of some obscure hack, who, when he was describing the "eccentric characters in the French metropolis," may not impossibly have been vegetating in the Rules of the King's Bench Prison. But crafty Mr. Cumberland, to insure the success of his enterprise, secured the services of George Cruikshank as illustrator. George had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Miss Smellie was tall, thin, and flat. Most exceedingly and incredibly flat. Impossibly flat. Her figure, teeth, voice, hair, manner, hats, clothes, and whole life and conduct were flat as ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held a revolver and ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the flooring, and dropped the framework from its place in the right-hand wall. It was clamped, I observed, by an arrangement in the floor just in front of the door. If I could get rid of that catch it would be easy to free myself, for to a man of my strength the weight would not be impossibly heavy. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Scandal" creates for his comedies an atmosphere of superheated wit and intellectualism, which, whilst inevitably pleasing, is beyond probability. Certain novelists vaunt and revel in the creation of impossibly vivacious wits. Nature has a finer grace; its faithful reflection is purer art. Those true to natural humour and the spontaneous rather than the fabricated repartee represent a small minority. Amongst the novelists Goldsmith and Jane Austen have few to follow them, and with the dramatists ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... she felt a pardonable pride. What feats could she relate of wonderful dresses got out of impossibly small patterns of silk! what marvels of silks turned that could not be told from new! what reclaimings of waists that other dress-makers had hopelessly spoiled! Had not Mrs. General Wilcox once been obliged to call ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... at a glance, was now far behind. Almost directly above—it is necessary to resort to these unscientific terms to make my meaning clear—was the tiny world Elon, home of the friendly but impossibly dull winged people, the only ones in the known Universe. I was there but once, and found them almost laughably like our common dragon-flies on Earth; dragon-flies that grow some seven feet long, and with gauzy wings ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... her attention centered upon a horseman who was negotiating the descent of what looked like an impossibly steep ridge. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... the advice might be mistaken, it was absolutely impossible that it could be anything else but honest and sincere. It was not for them to see into the future, nor yet to solve those impossibly intricate problems of human passion, of human strength and weakness, which, in defiance of all laws human and divine, break through the traditions of ages, make a mockery of all commonplace laws, and finally solve themselves with an accuracy ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... exuberant approval. For weren't we ourselves, each and all of us, mightily in love with art and with the human scene? And hadn't we, listening thus breathlessly to our amazing master, the enchanting assurance that we were on the track of a masterpiece? Not impossibly a whole gallery of masterpieces, since Heber Pogson had barely touched middle age as yet. For him there still was time. Fiction, we gathered to be the selected medium. He not only meant to write, but was actually now engaged in writing, a novel during those withdrawn and sacred ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... rapture out of a shielded port. There were impossibly jagged stones, preposterously steep cliffs. There had been no weather to remove the sharp edge of anything in a hundred million years. The awkward-seeming vehicle trundled over the lava sea toward ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... officers of the Basileus [84] of Britain. There were to be seen camararius and pincerna, chamberlain and cupbearer; disc thegn and hors thegn [85]; the thegn of the dishes, and the thegn of the stud; with many more, whose state offices may not impossibly have been borrowed from the ceremonial pomp of the Byzantine court; for Edgar, King of England, had in the old time styled himself the Heir of Constantine. Next to these sat the clerks of the chapel, with the King's confessor at their head. Officers were they of higher note than their ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pledged to grant a large measure of Reform; but the Duke found the task impracticable, and then, as the only means of averting farther insurrectionary tumults, which bore no slight resemblance to civil war, and might not impossibly end in it, the King did at last consent to permit the creation of a sufficient number of peers to insure the passing of the bill. But he could not overcome his repugnance to the measure as a severe blow to the ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... him the best part of his music. You can trace echoes of him in Mr. Yeats. What is it that gives him this hold on his peers? Well, in the first place his defects do not detract from his purely poetic qualities. The story is impossibly told, but that will only worry those who are looking for a story. The allegory is hopelessly difficult; but as Hazlitt said "the allegory will not bite you"; you can let it alone. The crudeness and bigotry of Spenser's dealings with Catholicism, which are ridiculous when he pictures the monster ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... frank rollicking gait, his hail-good-fellow-well-met shake of the hand, the other hand clapped upon the shoulder, the noisy greeting, and that unfailing smile, not merely disarmed suspicion, but made the mere fancy of it impossibly absurd. But young Mr. Barter had accustomed himself to associate with people whose experiences had forced them to be observant, and to these the dexterous caressing fingers with which he manipulated all instruments employed in games of chance seemed to justify ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray |
