"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... so far carried, to be a fact, you are right. And you would infer from this that a mesmeriser might produce the extraordinary effects you and others have witnessed over inanimate objects—fill the air with sights ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... already slithered half way over the back of the chair when Judy forestalled him and had her hand upon the door-knob. He encouraged her with various instructions about the proper way to beat the gong, and was just beginning a scuffle with the inanimate Maria, who now managed to occupy the entire chair, when he was aware of a new phenomenon that made him stop abruptly. He saw Judy's face hanging in mid-air, six feet above the level of the floor. Her face ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... it not; for her eyes were closed, and her marble cheek was stained with blood. The young officer, tenderly interested in her fate, bent over her, and raised the inanimate form. He bore it in his arms to a green spot, away from the scattered fragments of the train, and laid it gently down upon the bosom of mother earth. By all the means within his power, he endeavored to convince ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... invitation there entered a tall, thin, grave man, with a sunburned complexion, who at a single glance took in everything in the room, animate and inanimate. The chevalier recognized the ambassador of their Catholic majesties, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... plaintive long-drawn lowing. The strident cocks crowed to each other from farm to farm. There came up the irregular beat of the flails in the barns. The fevered life of myriads of creatures swelled and flowed through the peace of inanimate Nature. Uneasily Olivier would watch the ever hurrying columns of the ants, and the bees big with their booty, buzzing like organ-pipes, and the superb and stupid wasps who know not what they want—the whole world of busy little creatures, all seemingly ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... on the surface, is now thought capable of yielding a second crop; and when I was at Lima, they were actually turning it up, and milling it over again with great success. This is a proof that these minerals generate in the earth like all other inanimate things;[3] and it likewise appears, from all the accounts of the Spaniards, that gold, silver, and other metals are continually growing and forming in the earth. This opinion is verified by experience in the mountain of Potosi, where several mines had fallen in, burying the workmen and their tools; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... dullest may contribute most to our genius; what is most gloomy may soften the seeds and relax the fibres of gaiety. We enjoy the solemnity of the spreading oak above us: perhaps we owe to it in part the mood of our minds at this instant; perhaps an inanimate thing supplies me, while I am speaking, with whatever I possess of animation. Do you imagine that any contest of shepherds can afford them the same pleasure as I receive from the description of it; or that even in their ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... frequent opportunities for reflection) that I was perhaps only too anxious to preserve the harmony of heaven. My sense of decorum—may it not have been excessive? From below, as I imagine, from the stations occupied—I will not say by the inanimate or half-animate creation, such as insects, or men, or minerals—but by the demi-gods, I take it that the dignity and orbic beauty of our court appeared sublimely immaculate. In the inner circle, alas! no one knows ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... objective knowledge comes first Physics, including the whole body of the relations of inanimate unorganised bodies; secondly, Physiology. Including the structure and functions of animal bodies, including language and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... The dog must have accounted for the eccentric behaviour of the parasol by endowing it with an uncanny spirit. The horse that shies at inanimate objects by the roadside, and will sometimes dash itself against a tree or a wall, is actuated by a similar superstition. Is there any essential difference between this belief of the dog or horse and the belief of primitive man? I maintain that an intuitive animistic ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell me what ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... is radar. This poor inanimate piece of electronic equipment has taken a beating when UFO proof is being offered. "Radar is not subject to the frailties of the human mind," is the outcry of every saucer fan, "and radar ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature would stand still, and not be able to acquire any force by the impulse of which it might be first set in motion. Seeing, then, that it is clear that whatever moves itself is eternal, can there be any doubt that the soul is so? For everything is inanimate which is moved by an external force; but everything which is animate is moved by an interior force, which also belongs to itself. For this is the peculiar nature and power of the soul; and if the soul be the only thing in the whole world which has the power of self-motion, then certainly ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... sometimes covered with ranges of temples, sometimes stretching away in rugged solitudes, where some shepherd wanders astray with his flock, or from time to time, enlivened with a historical scene (Andromeda and Perseus). Then come little pictures of inanimate nature,—baskets of fruit, vases of flowers, household utensils, bunches of vegetables, the collection of office-furniture painted in the house of Lucretius (the inkstand, the stylus, the paper-knife, the tablets, and a letter folded in the shape of a napkin with ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... may make dead and lifeless things move and walk as orderly as things that have life. But the principle of this motion makes a huge difference:—the one is moved from without, the other from itself. The most part of us act as irrational and brute beasts in religion: nay, we walk as inanimate and senseless creatures. It is some one or other consideration without us moves us,—custom, censure, education, and such like. Ah! these are the principles of our religion. How many would have no religion, no form of it, if they ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... defined limits. This is a hypothesis which will account for all that we have learnt from the works of Nature. It admits an intelligent Being as the Author of all the works of creation, animate as well as inanimate; it leaves no mysteries in the animate world unaccounted for. There is one thing which the animate, as well as the inanimate world declares to man, one thing everywhere plainly recorded, if we will only read it, and that is the impress of design, the design of infinite wisdom. ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... seemed as if it had just been plunged into the water. She appeared to be severely wounded in the face; and her garments, which were raised up, in spite of the cold and rainy weather, left the upper part of her knees almost entirely exposed. At the sight of this half-naked and inanimate body, all the spectators were affected. People said that the first duty to pay to a dying woman was, to preserve her from the cold, to cover her. A physician examined the body; he declared that all remedies were useless; that Madame Peytel was ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the room as he spoke to open the door for her. His fingers were on the handle, but he did not turn it, awaiting her answer. She did not look at him, but past him towards the shaded lamp with that desire to fix her attention upon some inanimate object which ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... not brook it;— So seeing a huge brick-bat, up he took it; And aiming, like a marksman at a crow, Plump on the breast he hit his deadly foe; Who fell, like Pedants' periods, to the ground,— Very inanimate, and very round. ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... way. He was perhaps the first—though priority in such matters is trivial beside pre-eminence—who painted effects instead of things. Light and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpassed. But, superficially, his scheme wore the classic aspect, and neither his contemporaries nor his successors, for over two hundred years, discovered the immense value ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... enough for to-night?" he muttered; "put it away—I'll come—I'll do it—put it away." So I dropped the weapon back into my pocket while the Postilion, shivering violently, stooped with me above the inanimate figure, and, with our limp burden between us, we staggered and stumbled up the path, and along the lane to where stood a light ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... that time and the present it had managed to flop itself over; the holster was now lying back-up. Intrigued by such a remarkable accomplishment in an inanimate object, Rand crossed the room in the dress-of-nature in which he slept and looked more closely at it, receiving a second and considerably more severe surprise. The revolver in the holster ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... in the wildest terror and in helpless agony, while Philibert rushed without hesitation into the water, swam out to the spot, and dived with the agility of a beaver. He presently reappeared, bearing the inanimate body of her brother to the shore. Help was soon obtained, and, after long efforts to restore Le Gardeur to consciousness,—efforts which seemed to last an age to the despairing girl,—they at last succeeded, and Le Gardeur was restored to the arms of his family. Amelie, in a delirium of joy and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... are mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases far more distinctly conceived than ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... duty. All that day she revolved it. Mrs. Brigg attacked her again. Food was lacking. Cuckoo's case became desperate. She turned over carefully all her few remaining possessions to see if there was any inanimate thing that she had omitted to turn into money. Jessie, poor innocent, assisted with animation at the forlorn inventory, nestling among the tumbled garments, leaping on and off the bed. Her ingenuous nature supposed some odd game to be ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... to think and to speak of gravitation as a law of matter; while every quality of matter, in and of itself, is inert, inanimate, and non-intelligent. The assertion that matter is a law, or a lawgiver, is [25] anomalous. Wherever law is, Mind is; ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... but not to see, all that was going on in the room. "Why don't you add, he speculates, he whittles, he chews tobacco, he is six feet two in his stockings, he knows the market value of every article and object, animate and inanimate, on the face of the earth, and is a living illustration of the truth of the proverb, that the cents being cared for, no apprehension need be entertained as to the ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... classical theatre might have been formed in England. This opinion only proves that Pope (who, however, passes for a perfect judge of poetry,) had not even an idea of the first elements of Dramatic Art. Nothing can be more spiritless and inanimate, nor more drawling and monotonous in the language and the versification, than this Ferrex and Porrex; and although the Unities of Place and Time are in no way observed, and a number of events are crowded into it, yet the scene is wholly destitute of movement: all ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... atomic energy, the discovery of radioactivity, and the recognition of potential and latent energies stored in inanimate matter, throw a brilliant illumination upon the whole problem of sex and the inner energies of mankind. Speaking of the discovery of radium, Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret for which a thousand telescopes might have swept the sky forever ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Inanimate machinery, when it runs sweetly, gives forth a definite tone, the bee-song of work happily consummated. So this great human mechanism seemed, to Harrington Surtaine as he entered the realm of its activities, moving to music personal to itself. Through its wide halls he wandered, past humming ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... do, Nannie," said the poor woman, wildly, as the accumulated drops streamed like a rivulet down the steps of their cellar; "we must manage to arouse your father, or the morning'll never see him alive!" and she pushed and shook the inanimate clog that lay in the corner, while the torrent still flowed on, until fear for the child's safety made her quit her efforts with its father, and snatching the infant from the cradle, and bidding Nannie follow her, she rushed ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... feeling that responded to this announcement was a deadly paleness and a slight, nervous crushing of the paper in her hands. Moveless as a thing inanimate, she sat with fixed, dreamy eyes for ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the streams. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... each strange flower and plant he had seen in its native clime. He became eloquent and genial as he described the strange habits and peculiarities of his floral companions, which he seemed to regard as a species of humanity; to him they were not inanimate existences—creations—but objects endowed ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... an earlier faith in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human chain, like those in the animate and inanimate worlds above and below it, is predestined to a specific function for the better ordering of the whole. Lewis Maidwell, for instance, still employs the medieval and Renaissance analogy of the correspondence between the human body and the social ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... windows followed; it was a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about him; he was either buried in deep ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully from the wall beside Him. And with my habit, formed during the long years of solitude, of addressing inanimate things aloud, I ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... self-government was a right thing in itself. It was not merely a means of ridding ourselves of our difficulties, not merely a boon yielded because long demanded. It was a return to broad and deep principles, a conformity to those natural laws which govern human society as well as the inanimate world—an effort to enlist the better and higher feelings of mankind in the creation of a truer union between the two nations than had ever yet existed. When we perceived this, hope returned. It is strong with us now, for, though we see troubles, perhaps even dangers, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... stages of primitive culture. In introductions to Perrault and Grimm and elsewhere, Andrew Lang pointed out the similarity of some of the incidents of folk tales—speaking of animals, transference of human feeling to inanimate objects and the like—with the mental processes of contemporary savages. He drew the conclusion that the original composers of fairy tales were themselves in a savage state of mind and, by inference, explained the similarities found in folk ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... river. The affair seemed to be considered as a huge joke, and the chief amusement now consisted in hanging over the broken side and contemplating the gruesome spectacle of a half-submerged motor, and four human bodies lying inanimate on some rocks, rapidly swelling, thanks ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... turn from inanimate to living objects; since I penned the last line I have been sitting with Mme. de Stael.... By appointment we called at 12.[41] For a few moments we waited in a gaudy drawing-room; the door then opened and an elderly form dressed a la jeunesse appeared; she is not ugly; she is not vulgar ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... have been equally well trained to discover a moral in almost everything, animate or inanimate. I have tried them with a hundred subjects—Japanese subjects—for composition; I have never found them to fail in discovering a moral when the theme was a native one. If I suggested 'Fire-flies,' they at once approved the topic, and wrote for me the story of that Chinese ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... obligations towards you. You will have to look upon my favors as pure benevolence. You no longer have any rights, and no longer can lay claim to any. There can be no limit to my power over you. Remember, that you won't be much better than a dog, or some inanimate object. You will be mine, my plaything, which I can break to pieces, whenever I want an hour's amusement. You are nothing, I am everything. Do you understand?" She laughed and kissed me again, and yet a sort of cold ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... now that the same laws regulate the formation of chemical compounds in both animate and inanimate nature, and the chemist only asked for a knowledge of the constitution of any definite chemical compounds found in the organic world in order to be able to promise to prepare it artificially. Seventeen years elapsed between Wohler's discovery of the artificial production of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... here, flushing a little as she spoke: "Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—'nature,' as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make 'nature' their slave, since they thought 'nature' was ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... and serk, shirt or coat of mail. The berserk was an unarmed warrior that went to battle in a frenzy and possessed with preternatural strength. In their fury the berserks would attack indiscriminately friend or foe or even inanimate objects. They were looked ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is far greater. Indeed, it is 'life atoms' that a man in a blind passion throws off unconsciously. Let any man give way to any intense feeling such as anger, grief, &c., under or near a tree, or in direct contact with a stone, and many thousands of years after ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... our capture. We left him with the lantern, stowing away the decoys, live and inanimate, in the Invigorator. Within fifteen minutes thereafter I was sleeping the sleep of the moderately tired and the ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... Accordingly, small images of labourers were buried with the dead, and it was supposed that their "doubles" or shadows would assist him in his labours. The supposition rested on a theory which ascribed to all things, whether animate or inanimate, a double or reflection which corresponded to the thing itself in every particular. It was like a shadow, except that it was invisible to mortal eyes, and did not perish with the object ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... low-trimmed lamp in a chamber empty of all life. He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, a sewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze rested upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousers and dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the pale light. It ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Florestan's existence, and he orders Rocco to dig a grave in the prisoner's cell. Leonore obtains leave to help the gaoler in his task, and together they descend to the dungeon, where the unfortunate Florestan is lying in a half inanimate condition. When their task is finished Pizarro himself comes down, and is on the point of stabbing Florestan, when Leonore throws herself between him and his victim, a pistol in her hand, and threatens the assassin with instant death if he advance a step. At ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... dim idea was at work in Martin's mind; not yet clear cut, not yet a reasoned plan. It concerned Ichi. If only the little wretch were not dead, or badly injured, as he feared. The man had lain there so motionless; he seemed such an inanimate lump as Martin rolled ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... extension of cotton[7:3] culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... voice of the accused. The Marchioness de Boiscoran is overcome by a nervous attack. She is carried out stiff and inanimate; and Dr. Seignebos and Miss Chandore hasten ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... success is a competent stage manager. His artistic taste should be beyond all question, and his will should be law among the members of his corps. The essentials of a "living picture" are very much the same as those of a picture of the inanimate description, viz., form, color and arrangement. If, therefore, you can secure for the office of stage manager a gentleman of some artistic skill, by all means do so, as his technical knowledge will be found ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... fold thee fast, She found her useless bolster in her arms. [1] Think, think, on that.—Oh! think, think well on that. I do remember also to have read [2] In Dryden's Ovid's Metamorphoses, That Jove in form inanimate did lie With beauteous Danae: and, trust me, love, [3] I fear'd the bolster might have been ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... suddenly stopping, and turning round on the pivot of the music stool till she commanded a full view of the drawing-room. "I thought you would all be dancing by this time. There is no use in playing to such inanimate mortals. And you," said she, suddenly turning to Ernest, "you remind me of the prince, the enchanted prince in the Arabian Nights, only he was half marble, you are a whole statue. You do not like music. I ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... animated conversation, so much in contrast with the bored air with which Spencer had listened to Dr. Lith that even I noticed that the connoisseur was completely obliterated in the man, whose love of beauty was by no means confined to the inanimate. I wondered if it was merely his interest in her story that impelled Spencer. The more I watched the girl the more I was convinced that she knew that she was interesting ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... an inanimate object (here a window) is highly idiomatic and must be cultivated by the practical Arabist. In the H. V. the unfinished part is the four-and-twentieth door of the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... are confined to the portrayal of the inanimate face before me, I often pause to take mental as well as pictorial notes of the surroundings. I observe that the defunct is attired in a suit of black, which has doubtless been provided by the undertakers; for the clothes are much too wide for his wasted ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... Brooklyn; Mrs. Allen E. Donnan, of Richmond; and Mrs. Clarence Wycoff and Miss Talmage, were gathered in the chamber of death. Dr. G.L. Magruder, the principal physician, was also in attendance at the last. At 9.25 o'clock p.m., the soul took flight from the inanimate clay, and the spirit of the world's greatest ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... head bending slowly forward beneath the resistless force of the other's huge muscles, she heard the crack that announced the parting of the vertebrae and saw the limp thing which had but a moment before been a man, pulsing with life and vigor, roll helplessly aside—a harmless and inanimate ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Devenish was well aware whether she were not in a dream herself, her husband had lifted into the house the apparently inanimate form of Paul Stukely, and had laid him down upon the oak settle near to the ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... instants cat, serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life had set with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became for him an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him and the inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There is the rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his last period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He wrote for it as one of two persons ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... do I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... slate-colored, casting those gloomy shadows that oppress soul and mind. The clouds slowly crept over one another, sometimes melting in one, sometimes dispersing each other; they mingled their forms and colors, dissolving or reappearing with new contours, majestic and mournful. This slow moving of inanimate masses had something fatal about it. It seemed as though yonder at the confines of the sea, there was an innumerable quantity of them always crawling indifferently over the sky, with the wicked and stupid intention of never allowing it to illumine the ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... the superstitions of the Santee Sioux to treat disease from the standpoint of some animal or inanimate thing. That person who, according to their belief, had been commissioned to become a medicine man or a war chief, must not disobey the bear or other creature or thing which gave him his commission. If he ever ventured to do so, the offender must pay for his ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... who created thee I adjure thee that thou remain in the spot where thou art, whether it be thy will to do so or otherwise. And I curse thee with the curse wherewith the Lord hath cursed thee."] and are able to set up a connection between inanimate material objects and organic beings. [He instances the wasting of an enemy by melting a representation of him fashioned in wax.] But such magic, even when malevolent, need not be greatly feared by Christian men living in grace: its physical or psychical ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... have beaten time to the gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting, breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the allies man had devised,—the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the solid shot, grape, canister, shrapnel, minie balls. The shells were fearful, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... profoundly impress us, less because of the curious standard they supply by which to gauge the intellectual level of that age than as the symbols chosen by the poet to express the identity and nothingness of all things living and inanimate. Before God, all creatures think, reason, speak, like man, because all are equal to him and he is but a breath. The stars, which are relatives of the Satan and of God's own children, wax enthusiastic and shout for joy; the lightning hearkens to the voice of its Creator ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Marlow struck in. "All the world... You may wonder at my slowness in recognising the name. But you know that my memory is merely a mausoleum of proper names. There they lie inanimate, awaiting the magic touch—and not very prompt in arising when called, either. The name is the first thing I forget of a man. It is but just to add that frequently it is also the last, and this accounts for my possession of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... manner instantly changed; she became eager and alert. Pausing only a second to make sure of her attack, she bit the snake sharply near the neck, then, withdrawing her head and limbs into the shelter of her spines, rolled over, an inanimate ball. The viper, mad with pain, thrust back its head from its sinuous coils, rose, and struck with open jaws at its assailant. Its fangs closed strongly, but failed to get a grip, and the smooth underside ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... division of Leon Hebreus, dial. 2. betwixt Sophia and Philo, where he speaks of natural, sensible, and rational love, and handleth each apart. Natural love or hatred, is that sympathy or antipathy which is to be seen in animate and inanimate creatures, in the four elements, metals, stones, gravia tendunt deorsum, as a stone to his centre, fire upward, and rivers to the sea. The sun, moon, and stars go still around, [4489]Amantes naturae, debita exercere, for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... has refreshed the earth, is a favourite topic in Indian poetry. The Cloud Messenger, so gracefully translated by Mr. Wilson, is full of allusions to the grateful progress of the cloud, welcomed as it passes along by the joy of animate and inanimate beings. Quote 61-70, 131-142. Compare, in the Hindu Drama, the Toy ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... along the rough floor a little distance and overturned with a crash. Calumet cursed. He was minded to take the chair up and hurl it down again, so vengeful was the temper he was in, but his second sober sense urged upon him the futility of attacking inanimate things and he contented himself with snarling at it. He stood silent for a moment, a hope in his heart that his father, alarmed over the sudden commotion, would come to investigate, and a wave of sardonic satisfaction ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the spot where H.M.S. Uruguay with her crew of hundreds and all her complement of officers (largely R.N.R. and R.N.V.R. men like myself) had lain, stood that gigantic pillar of smoke. Then all at once I realised that everything living in that ship and most of her inanimate self was represented now only ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... "giudicioso, bello, e stupendo," with regard to this power. He generalized by colour, and by execution. "In his colouring, he was large and general." By these epithets, we think Sir Joshua has admitted that the great style comprehends colouring. "Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius." He condemns that high finish which softens off. "This extreme softening, instead ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... redemption, the great atonement that man has made for his shameful life's history; and standing amid the orange and almond trees, amid a profusion of bloom that the world seems to have brought for thank-offering, amid an apparent and glorious victory of inanimate nature, he falls down in worship of his race that had freely surrendered all, knowing it to be nothing, and in surrender had ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... were now of little moment in my regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... struggled to interpret it in this book, seems to present itself as an unfathomable universe entirely made up of personalities. What we call inanimate substances are all of them the bodies, or portions of the bodies, of living personalities. The immense gulf, popularly made between the animate and the inanimate, thus turns out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole universe reveals itself as an unfathomable ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... his private conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with all that sorrow could To ease her woes give utterance, loud had wail'd In wild lament; all spark of reason fled, Her bosom tearing, through the world she roam'd. And now his limbs inanimate she sought; Then for his whiten'd bones: his bones she found, On banks far distant from his home inhum'd. Prone on his tomb her form she flung, and pour'd Her tears in floods upon the graven lines: And with her bosom bar'd, the cold stone warm'd. His sisters' love their fruitless ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... hastened toward the village. The mist soon became a fog, which crept up the hillside, and, before she had crossed the plank over the river, it had blotted out everything but near objects. There seemed a weight over everything, animate and inanimate. The cows in the meadow to the right of the bridge stood with bent heads and depressed tails. They looked unnaturally large, seen through the thick atmosphere; and the melancholy caw of some belated rooks above Lucy's head, as they winged their homeward way, deepened the depression which she ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... here: a good straw bed, a large table, carpet, washstand, book-case, stove, chairs, looking-glass—all, all that is needful. And this for seventy-five cents a week, including lights; wood is extra pay. This is the inanimate about me. The lady of the house, Mrs. Thoreau, is a woman. The only fear I have about her is that she is too much like dear mother—she will take too much care of me. She has told me how she used to sit up nights, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... there is naught without sensation; consciousness, it is true, is lacking in the lower creatures, but they do not lack life, feeling, and desire, for it is impossible for the animate to come from the inanimate. Everything loves and hates, desires and avoids. Plants are motionless animals, and their roots, mouths. Corporeal motion springs from an obscure, unconscious impulse of self-preservation; the heavenly bodies circle about the sun as the center of sympathy; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... hastily down the stairs, the figure's ugly feet hanging down and banging and rattling like wood against the steps. Nathanael was stupefied;—he had seen only too distinctly that in Olimpia's pallid waxed face there were no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet. Spalanzani was rolling on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head and breast and arm; the blood was escaping from him in streams. But he gathered his ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... use during the first third of the century, were now getting to be somewhat in fashion again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps, the house door was opened and a ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... painter, orator, and man of letters, all have their niche in the temple of fame—all have had their worshippers and admirers; but who among them has celebrated in song and tale the grand creative power which can make inanimate metals move, and act, and almost live, in the wondrous machinery of the present day! It is the mind that conceived, the hand that reduced to practical usefulness these miraculous instruments, with all their complicated works moving in harmony, and performing ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... capable of being contained within, or attached to, almost any small object, living or inert. It would seem, then, that after death the visible ghost or shade of a man incorporates and is animated by the soul; and that the visible shade of inert objects is, like themselves, inert and inanimate. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... repose, not to mention the grateful idea of coolness derived from a knowledge of its temperature. Thus also the evening cloud, exhibiting a fleeting representation of successive objects, is, perhaps, justly appropriated to Autumn, as in that Season the general decay of inanimate nature leads the mind to turn upon itself, and without effort to apply almost every image of sense or vision of the imagination,* to ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... fetish, any material object, such as an animal or inanimate thing, regarded as representative of godship, to which worship is paid and from ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... mingled horror and anger as he began to recognise the character and purpose of the several objects that met his gaze; and then he turned to its occupants; for although, in order to present a clear and unconfused picture of the chamber, only its inanimate contents have thus far been referred to, the room was by no means empty of human occupants. On the contrary, in addition to those who had already entered, immediately inside the door, one on either side of it, stood two of Basset's men-at- arms, with drawn swords ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... self-possession and equanimity as to be able to make the best possible use of his eyes; and, being a very shrewd fellow, he was not long in arriving at the conclusion that the gigantic monster on whose back he stood was, after all, nothing more nor less than an inanimate, though unquestionably wonderful, vehicle of some sort; and that the fair-skinned beings to whom he was talking, though they claimed to be the four Spirits of the Winds, were very similar in many respects to certain white men whom he had seen only a few moons ago. The wily savage accordingly ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... earth cannot for a moment be doubted. Recent discoveries are every day revealing more and more that her strange magnetic influence has a power almost beyond belief in its effect upon the growth of vegetables, and even inanimate things. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... Spinoza placed at the heart of his philosophy because of the inestimable advantages man could derive from it, people loudly objected to on the ground that it robbed man's life of all moral and religious value. Determinism, they exclaimed, reduces man to the rank of inanimate Nature; without "free-will" man is no better than a slave, his life doomed by an inexorable fate. True enough, nothing is more abhorrent or more deadly to the striving soul of man than to be bound in a fatalistic doctrine. But the anti-determinists wildly confuse ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... exertion of Force by one body on another, the transfer of motion and energy from one body to another, any kind of effect, no matter what, which can be produced in one body by means of another, whether the bodies be animate or inanimate." ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... this boy to shoot up to the height we have mentioned, without the ordinary interruptions of field labor, wood-chopping, and such other toils as were imposed on his brothers. Elnathan was indebted for this exemption from labor in some measure to his extraordinary growth, which, leaving him pale, inanimate, and listless, induced his tender mother to pronounce him a sickly boy, and one that was not equal to work, but who might earn a living comfortably enough by taking to pleading law, or turning minister, or doctoring, or some such like easy calling. Still, there was ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... intellectual sight became overclouded, these gay visions became obscure, like the dying hues of sunset, until they were at last lost in total oblivion; and Sir Kenneth lay extended at the feet of El Hakim, to all appearance, but for his deep respiration, as inanimate a corpse as if life ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Not a particle of her courage deserted her as she mounted the steps and pushed the bell. When Patty was genuinely roused in anger she was afraid of little or nothing, animate or inanimate. A maid answered the bell. As she recognized the caller she swung back the door ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... Matter is inert, inanimate, and sensationless,—considered apart from Mind. Lives there a man who has ever found Soul in the body or in matter, who has ever seen spiritual substance with the eye, who has found sight in matter, hearing in the material ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be weary, any more than the inanimate wheel." ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... banner unfolding, expanding, and trailing far away from her smoke-stacks. There is a surging, hissing, and smothered screaming of the pent-up steam in her boilers, as if they had put on all energy for the moment. They had;—flesh, blood, bones, iron, brass, steel,—animate and inanimate,—were nerved up for the trial of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... with such pleasure, will probably be scattered abroad, and find their resting places not in gilded salons, but in the dingy coffers of the wily brocanteur, whose exorbitant demands will preclude their finding purchasers. Even these inanimate and puerile objects have their moral, if people would but seek it; but what has not, to a reflecting mind?—complained bitterly to-day, of having been attacked by an anonymous scribbler. I was surprised to see ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... is a difficulty, it seems, about laws—natural laws: we are not to suppose that they will ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, i.e., that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its leaps, yea, the grasshopper ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hair on the tibia and having the terminal joints slender. Its color is a soft wood-brown or gray, mottled with white. It has the habit of hanging motionless in the web for hours at a time, swaying in the wind like an inanimate object. The strands of its web are rough and inelastic, so that they are frequently broken; this gives it the appearance of one of those dilapidated and deserted webs in which bits of wind-blown rubbish are ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... closed upon Royal Maillot I returned at once to the house of tragedy, whose evil genius was promising to play havoc with the lives of so many of the living; and as I approached the bleak, austere old mansion something in its silent and inanimate exterior seemed to repulse my advance up the gravel walk. My steps lagged, and at last I ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... the Weaver in this pattern of life were two green stones called the drums of jeopardy, inanimate objects, but perfect tools in the hands of Destiny. But for these stones Hawksley would not have tarried too long on a certain red night; Cutty would not now be stumbling about the labyrinths into which his looting instincts ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... expression of the priest's countenance; but there I lost my identity. Though I was the recipient of these impressions, yet I was not myself separately and distinctively existent and sentient; but my entity was confounded with that of not only the two figures before me, but of the inanimate objects surrounding them. This state of compound existence I can no further describe. While in this state I composed the "Fratricide's Death," or rather it composed itself and forced itself upon my memory without any activity or ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... fondness and pride with which I have noticed English gentlemen, of generous temperaments, and high aristocratic feelings, contemplating those magnificent trees, which rise like towers and pyramids, from the midst of their paternal lands. There is an affinity between all nature, animate and inanimate: the oak, in the pride and lustihood of its growth, seems to me to take its range with the lion and the eagle, and to assimilate, in the grandeur of its attributes, to heroic and intellectual man. With its mighty pillar rising straight and direct towards heaven, bearing up ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... man of singularly clear and penetrative intellect. In A Paradox of the Natural and Supernatural States of Bodies, Especially of the Air, Boyle says:—"I know that not only in living, but even in inanimate, bodies, of which alone I here discourse, men have universally admitted the famous distinction between the natural and preternatural, or violent state of bodies, and do daily, without the least scruple, found upon it hypotheses and ratiocinations, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... dishonour her. It was enough. There was no trait in her nature to lead her to repine; it was entirely controlled by a dominant desire to punish the traitor. Hal could scarcely believe that this stern, resolute woman was the same woe-begone inanimate girl he had interviewed. She examined the letter carefully, noting its date and post-mark, and putting it into her ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... opposed either by a bolt drawn, or, as he rather conceived, by somebody from within resisting his attempt. He was induced to believe the latter, because the resistance slackened and was renewed, like that of human strength, instead of presenting the permanent opposition of an inanimate obstacle. Though Everard was a strong and active young man, he exhausted his strength in the vain attempt to open the door; and having paused to take breath, was about to renew his efforts with foot and shoulder, and to call at the same time for assistance, when to his surprise, on again attempting ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... you trundle down to light the fire. Turn the encumbering shadows tumbling out. And fill the chambers with a new desire. Life is no good, unless the morning brings White happiness and quick delight of day. These half-inanimate domestic things Must all be useful, or must go away. Coffee, be fragrant. Porridge in my plate, Increase the vigour ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities—the sky, the rock, and the ocean—the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... in pictures without action there should be little suggestion of attention or of direction of movement. What is less evident is the reason for the high percentage of I. Of course, figures do appear in many examples, and in most pictures some inanimate object is emphasized—as, for instance, the mill in our second example. But the most remarkable point of difference in these tables from the preceding is the presence of V. in practically every example. It is, of course, natural ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... days. After a time she became so exhausted that the first physicians of the city declared that there was no more hope. It was not long, in fact, before she was observed to rise in her bed and fall back as if struck with death. "For four hours she appeared to me," says Dr. Pfendler, "completely inanimate. With Messrs. Franck and Schaeffer, I made every possible effort to rekindle the spark of life. Neither mirror, nor burned feather, nor ammonia, nor pricking succeeded in giving us a sign of sensibility. Galvanism was tried without the patient showing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... this view it may be pointed out that beating or scourging is inflicted on inanimate objects expressly for the purpose indicated in the text. Thus the Indians of Costa Rica hold that there are two kinds of ceremonial uncleanness, nya and bu-ku-ru. Anything that has been connected with a death is nya. But bu-ku-ru is much more virulent. It can ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... time, to giving his attention to Dorothea. She, too, bore the impress of Diane; and as she bore it more markedly than the inanimate things around, it caused him the greater pain. He could forbid her to hold intercourse with Diane, and to speak of her; but he could not control the blending of French and Irish intonations her voice had caught, or the gestures into which she slipped through ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... returned, as having become a part of the elemental wealth of the world—I would rather think of them as unconscious dust—I would rather think of them as gurgling in the stream, floating in the clouds, bursting in the foam of light upon the shores of worlds—I would rather think of them as the inanimate and eternally unconscious, that to have even a suspicion that their naked souls had been clutched by an ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... adjective. Adjectives possessing thus a two-fold form, must necessarily have appeared under one or other of these forms, with whatever noun they happened to be conjoined. Even nouns significant of inanimate objects came thus to possess one mark of nouns discriminative of Sex, as they happened to be accompanied by an adjective of the masculine or by one of the feminine gender. If any noun was observed to be usually coupled with an adjective ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... cautiously to crawl away, feeling for a corpse to hide behind should another lot of stars go up and expose him there; yet when his fingers touched a cold, bearded face he nearly cried aloud. A sudden loathing for this inanimate thing almost sent him running;—the next second, answering a silent command, he stretched beside it as though he and it were bunkies in a cantonment. But his heart was beating unmercifully, confusing his ears which strained for every sound. ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... imagination: which we admit if associated with sex. Otherwise, we cannot understand how an unfelt distinction of this sort could be mentally seen. But Dr. Farrar means more than imagination, for he says, "from this source is derived the whole system of genders for inanimate things, which was perhaps inevitable at that early childish stage of the human intelligence, when the actively working soul attributed to everything around it some portion of its own life. Hence, well-nigh everything ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... at Susy d'Orsel's apartment in company with the young companion he had picked up at Raxim's and the subsequent supper, and then he broke into a cold sweat as his mind flashed to the picture of Fandor's return with the inanimate body of his mistress in his arms—dead. Yes, ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... eye and brain and hand had been thirty years in service, lay under his engine, a mangled, inanimate mass of flesh; His fireman, who had looked forward to a place on the engineer's side of a cab as a young soldier dreams of sword and shoulder straps, lay still beside his chief. From the wrecked coaches, above the sound of hissing steam and crackling flames, came groans and shrieks ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... necessary to step over Rachel's prostrate form. He got one foot across, when she, crazed with fear, emitted a piercing shriek and arose so abruptly that he was caught unawares. What with the start the shriek gave him and the uprising of a supposedly inanimate mass, his personal equilibrium was put to the severest test. Indeed, he quite lost it, going first into the air with all the sprawl of a bronco buster, and then landing solidly on his left ear where ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... meadows and savannas of the interior, where such existed, he could find room for expansion and further growth only by the removal of a portion of the forest that hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then, was man's first geographical conquest, his first violation of the harmonies of inanimate nature. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... human life is visible, unless, perchance, the joyful passengers catch sight of a dug-out canoe, with a blanket for a sail, in which an Indian fisherman sits solitary and motionless, as though he too were one of the inanimate features of the scene. On drawing near this most unexpected structure, the curiosity of the travellers is changed into wild wonder. It is a storehouse with all the modern improvements, and over the door is a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... the very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride: inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded spirituality of touch all its own, is ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... led to a differentiation between their supposed functions.[69] As the heart and the blood were obviously present in the dead body they could no longer be regarded as the "life". The breath was clearly the "element" the lack of which rendered the body inanimate. It was therefore regarded as necessary to set the heart working. The heart then came to be looked upon as the seat of knowledge, the organ that feels and wills during waking life. All the pulsating motions of the body seem to have been regarded, like the act of respiration, as expressions ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... He observed that her bundle of shawls moved of its own accord, and, for one whole minute after the train had left, he stood motionless, meditating on that curious phenomenon. He had often heard of table-turning, but never until now had he seen inanimate matter move of its own accord. Can we feel surprised that he was both astonished and perplexed? Proceeding to the booking-office he held a brief conversation with the clerks there; then he sauntered into the telegraph-office and delivered ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... Thus to the eve is given the pleasure we derive in looking upon the green fields and forests, the enumerable varieties of flowers, the glowing ruby, jasper, topaz, amethist, and emerald, the brilliant diamond, and all the rich and varied hues of nature, both animate and inanimate. ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturning brave—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which, now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various |
