"Indistinct" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from my poor Mrs. Delany, written with her own hand, and with a pencil, as she is now too indistinct of sight to see even a word. She writes therefore only by memory, and, if with pen and ink, cannot find her place again when she leaves it, to dip the pen ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... him, which were beginning to grow fainter and more indistinct, as he went on, swam before his eyes, flickered, reappeared again, and finally went out. He rubbed his eyes and gazed around him. The cabin was deserted. On the hearth the red embers of his fire were fading away in the bright beams of the morning sun, that looked aslant through the open window. ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... old, worn, trodden roads suffice Only those who will return again Seeking shelter in their homes from Paradise. Oh! let us find some solitary, green Forgotten garden, where the sunrays fall All blind and blurred and indistinct between Cypresses lofty as earth's boundary wall; Beneath whose shade shall glimmer forth half seen Your face through the soft darkness ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... be changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, "wie eine feine Violine," were audible among the big, empty drum-notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and childish hope. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he listened. He could hear the murmur of voices beyond one of the doors. His heart leaped, for there were probably the plotters. He crept to the door, and listened, but could make out nothing of what was being said. Only an indistinct murmur reached his ears. ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... on what she is, sir,' replied Strang, as he put up his binoculars and focused them on the indistinct patch on ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... inspired Mr Dorrit with the mistrust that the brigand moment was come for twisting him into a ditch and robbing him; until, letting down the glass again and looking out, he perceived himself assailed by nothing worse than a funeral procession, which came mechanically chaunting by, with an indistinct show of dirty vestments, lurid torches, swinging censers, and a great cross borne before a priest. He was an ugly priest by torchlight; of a lowering aspect, with an overhanging brow; and as his eyes met those of Mr Dorrit, looking bareheaded out of the carriage, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... was hidden again. He seemed to be fighting with himself. His voice came at length, muffled and indistinct. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... about him differed materially from those of Alec; so that a great many of the replies and utterances met like unskilful tilters, whose staves passed wide. In neither was the admiration much more than an uneasy delight in the vivid though indistinct images of pleasure raised by the magic of that "physical force of words" in which Byron excels all other English poets, and in virtue of which, I presume, the French persist in regarding Byron as our greatest poet, and in supposing that we agree ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... greater difference betwixt a ciuill and brutish vtteraunce then cleare distinction of voices: and the most laudable languages are alwaies most plaine and distinct, and the barbarous most confuse and indistinct: it is therefore requisit that leasure be taken in pronuntiation, such as may make our wordes plaine & most audible and agreable to the eare: also the breath asketh to be now and then releeued with some pause or stay more or lesse: besides ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... to modulate my voice, so that it should be just heard and no more, preferring to be indistinct rather than speak too loudly; and confined all my person to express as much as possible, gravity, modesty, and simple gratitude. M. le Duc maliciously made signs to me in smiling, that I had spoken well. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In this state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning, waking to the reality of a stifling September day in New York. The heat-withered ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... general form, but one that is completely opposed to the foregoing. It consists of vaguely-outlined, indistinct images that are evoked and joined according to the least rigorous modes of association. It presents, then, two things for our consideration—the nature of the images ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... revolver down, but he raised it without shooting and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly, below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged at the feet ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... turned from him, and half veiled by the headdress she had assumed, strange feelings, ominous and startling, like those remembrances of the Past which sometimes come in the guise of prophecies of the Future, thronged, indistinct and dim, upon his breast. The unconscious and exquisite grace of her form, its touching youth, an air of innocence diffused around it, a something helpless, and pleading to man's protection, in the very slightness of ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... carvings upon the walls had taken life—they had descended. It was a gathering of the dreams men have dreamed here of the Gods, yet most real and actual. They watched in a serenity that set them apart in an atmosphere of their own—forms of indistinct majesty and august beauty, absolute, simple, and everlasting. I saw them as one sees reflections in rippled water—no more. But all faces turned to the place where now a green and flowering leafage enshrined and partly ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... of 1843. It was a severe winter to the cottage. The bow of promise that had spanned it seemed to have withdrawn to such a vast height above it that its outlines were indistinct—its ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... An American naval commander who sailed the seas during the Revolution, with indistinct notions about gold lace or what he should fly at the main. He was fond of fighting. He would frequently break off in the middle of a dinner to go on deck and whip a British frigate. Perhaps he didn't care much about his meals. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... and that at the Swan—otherwise the Blue Lion—the Pickwick fellowship shared the conviviality of the rival teams, until Mr. Snodgrass's notes of the evening's transactions faded away into a blur in which there was an indistinct reference to "broiled bones" and "cold without". The stately ruins of a Benedictine Abbey, founded by Bishop Gundulf, give to the town an attraction of ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... were middle-aged gentlemen belonging to that large, but indistinct, division of the human family whom the hand of Nature has painted in unobtrusive neutral tint. They had absorbed the ideas of their time with such receptive capacity as they possessed; and they occupied much the same place ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... her tearful eyes imploringly to the stern face of her brother, and said, in a voice rendered indistinct ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... his eyesight was dimming, and he shuddered, for the faces of his fellow-sufferers appeared to him to be strangely distorted and indistinct; but he grasped the reason, and knew now that in a few minutes more they would pass on ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... back to a rock, his knees drawn up and clasped within fingers nervously interlocked. His eyes were fixed upon the great stretch of landscape below, shadowy now, and indistinct, like a rolling plain of patchwork woven by mysterious fingers. Gray mists were floating over the meadows and low-lying lands. Away in the distance they marked the circuitous course of the river, which only an hour ago had shone like a belt of silver in the light of the setting ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... its ground, perhaps from not having the means of escaping, I saw a small gun glitter for a moment, then there was a sharp report, and a bullet had nearly sent Quesada to his long account, passing so near to the countenance of the general as to graze his hat. I had an indistinct view for a moment of a well- known foraging cap just about the spot from whence the gun had been discharged, then there was a rush of the crowd, and the shooter, whoever he was, escaped discovery ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... mischievous-looking piece of property had been put to, it was certainly very odd that Dick should have such a thing at the bottom of his trunk. The Doctor remembered reading or hearing something about the lasso and the lariat and the bolas, and had an indistinct idea that they had been sometimes used as weapons of warfare or private revenge; but they were essentially a huntsman's implements, after all, and it was not very strange that this young man had brought one of them with him. Not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine. Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... convexity exists in the plate, the focal plane is disturbed, and the eyepiece must be moved out. If the plate is concave, it must be moved in to obtain a sharp image. Irregular errors in the plate or surface will produce a blurred or indistinct image, and, as in the first instance, no amount of focusing will help matters. These methods are both good, but are not satisfactory in the highest degree, and two or three important factors bar the way to the very best results. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... but as the lad strained his eyesight, he fancied that in one part the canes were swaying slightly here and there, as if the wind was pressing them on one side. Then as he turned his head a little he started and his heart began to beat with excitement, for what had been for a time indistinct now grew plainer and plainer and shaped itself into what looked to be quite a strong body of men, evidently rough sailors, creeping slowly through a plantation of sugar-cane and making for some definite place. One minute they would be quite indistinct and faint; the next they ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... republication of the law written on men's hearts. Though the one agrees with the other, yet the area which they cover is not the same. The precepts of the one, like some rock-hewn inscriptions by forgotten kings, are weathered and indistinct, often illegible, often misread, often neglected. The other is written in living characters in a perfect life. It includes all that the former attempts to enjoin, and much more besides. It alters the perspective, so to speak, of heathen morals, and brings ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... country was little more than a skeleton, till the magic wand of Scott it filled it with flesh and blood, and gave it new life and animation. "Up to the era of Sir Walter," says an eminent Scotchman, "living people had some vague, general, indistinct notions about dead people mouldering away to nothing, centuries ago, in regular kirk-yards and chance burial-places, 'mang muirs and mosses many O,' somewhere or other in that difficultly distinguished and very debatable district called the Borders. All at once he touched their ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... would be on the opposite side farthest away. As soon as I got near enough to see the hounds when they passed, I stopped. When they got on the opposite side, I then kept a bright lookout for the fox. Sometimes when the brush was thick, the sight of him would be indistinct. The shooting had to be quick. As soon as the report of the gun was heard, the hounds ceased to bay, and made for the spot. If the fox was dead, they enjoyed the scent of his blood. If only wounded, they went after him ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... thoughtful silence: until at length, after advancing in this way for about a mile and a half,—suddenly Bertram missed her; and looking round he saw the outline of a figure stealing away in the dusk and muttering some indistinct sounds of complaint. He felt considerable perplexity at being thus suddenly abandoned by his guide: but from this he was relieved by now distinguishing a group of towers and turrets close to him—which at first had escaped his eye from the dark background of ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... declined, with comedy the case was different, for its changes were progressive. Most writers divide Greek comedy into the Old, the Middle, and the New; and although the boundary lines between the three orders are very indistinct, each has certain well-defined characteristics. It is asserted, as we have elsewhere noted, that the chief subjects of the first were the politics of the day and the characters and deeds of leading persons; that the chief peculiarity of the second, in which the action of the chorus ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... of the lake were almost lost in the vapors, only spots of forest green appearing now and then, a veil of silver being over the eastern waters. The island on which St. Luc lay encamped was growing indistinct, and the fires there shone through ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... especially on the nerves and more so on the central one. The second glume is slightly longer than the third, green or purple, ovate, acuminate, generally 7-nerved and sometimes also with two more indistinct marginal nerves, i.e., 9-nerved, scaberulous on the nerves. The third glume is pale green or yellow, ovate-oblong, acute or subacute, obscurely scaberulous, 9-nerved (two of the nerves in the middle sometimes not ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... consoling homesickness of the infinite. Although it was nearly eleven o'clock, a yellowish twilight brimmed the nave like the oil of a sacred cruet. From on high and from a great distance came strange gleams, the sombre purple of a window, a red pool on violet ones, indistinct figures encircled by their black settings. Against the high wall of night the blood-like gleam ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... the sunlight and pale against their shadow appeared a multitude of soaring forms that Mr. Cave regarded as birds. A vast range of buildings spread below him; he seemed to be looking down upon them; and, as they approached the blurred and refracted edge of the picture, they became indistinct. There were also trees curious in shape, and in colouring, a deep mossy green and an exquisite grey, beside a wide and shining canal. And something great and brilliantly coloured flew across the picture. But the first time Mr. Cave ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... concerning the nature of its contents, I drained at a draught. Either the spirits taken in such a manner acted more suddenly than usual on my brain, or else there was some drug mixed with the beverage. I remember little after drinking it off, only that the appearance of things around me became indistinct; that the woman's form seemed to multiply itself, and to flit in various figures around me, bearing the same lineaments as she herself did. I remember also that the discordant noises and cries of those without the cottage seemed to die away in a hum like that with ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... breaths he turned at times to glance over his shoulder and correct his course. And now, as he drew near, he saw though indistinct the unmistakable, snakelike weaving of horrible tenuous fingers, rolling ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... which he had not seen for a long time, wafted into his soul sweet and, at the same time, painful sensations, weighed on his breast with a certain agreeable oppression. His thoughts slowly roved about; their outlines were as indistinct and confused as the outlines of those lofty cloudlets, which, also, seemed to be roving. He recalled his childhood, his mother; he remembered how she died, how they had carried him to her, and how she, pressing his head to her bosom, had begun to sing ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... was your debt of honor!" Foster began unsteadily; the words caught in his throat, and for an instant her face grew indistinct through the mist he could not keep back from his eyes. "You knew you were traveling on thin ice; the break-up was almost on you, yet you handicapped yourself with those foundlings. And you never told me. I could have taken over that subscription, I should have been glad of the ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... of astronomical phenomena so absorbed my attention that I watched the satellite and shadow during their whole course, though the former, passing after a time on to a light band, became comparatively indistinct. The moment, however, that the outer edge passed off the disc of Jupiter, its outline became perfectly visible against the black background of sky. What was still more novel was the occultation for some little time of a star, apparently of the tenth ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... sorry to find that the clearer the lay of the land and water became, the more indistinct grew Old Jacob's remembrance of where his father had told him that the schooner used ...
— Our Pirate Hoard - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... the night, the silence and solitude of the place, the indistinct images of the trees that appeared on every side, stretching their extravagant arms athwart the gloom, conspired, with the dejection of spirits occasioned by his loss, to disturb his fancy and raise strange phantoms in his imagination. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... upturned and the depression deeper, so that eventually it is more or less broadly funnel-form. The color varies from white to flesh color, tinged with yellow sometimes in spots, and marked usually with faint zones of brighter yellow. The zones are sometimes very indistinct or entirely wanting. The gills are crowded, white then yellow, where bruised becoming yellowish, then dull reddish. The stem is equal or tapering below, hollow or stuffed, paler than the pileus, smooth (sometimes pitted as shown ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... rolling magnificently along, swollen with the waters of the melting snows. It was in strong and refreshing contrast with the parched country from which we had just issued; and when, at night, the broad expanse of water grew indistinct, it almost seemed that we had pitched our tents on the shore of ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... repeatedly went to the buffet and got glasses of punch (dear simple Germany! 'tis with rum-punch and egg-flip thy children strengthen themselves for the dance!) I went into the ball-room and looked—the couples bounded before me, the music clashed and rung in my ears—all was fiery, feverish, indistinct. The gleaming white columns, the polished oaken floors in which the innumerable tapers were reflected—all together swam before my eyes, and I was in a pitch of madness almost when the fourth waltz at length came. "WILL YOU ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I have an indistinct remembrance of a dark night, and of being led over ground seamed with deep furrows, and made hideous with dead bodies. I had a fancy, too, that the sky was lit up with star shells, and that there was a continuous booming of guns. But ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... minarets; the Seven Towers, with their fancy-pictured terrors, fade gradually from my sight, as the steam-boat rapidly ploughs the glassy wave. The eye, straining itself for a last glimpse of the beautiful city, beholds it resting, like a phantom, on the indistinct verge where heaven and the waters meet, until it sinks into the bosom of the ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... criticisms which apply to this last experiment apply to that with the dumb-bell and have already been answered. There is one however which, while applying to that other, more particularly applies here. It would be, that these after-images are too brief and indistinct to be carefully observed, so that judgments as to their shape, size, and color are not valid evidence. This is a perfectly sensible criticism, and a person thoroughly convinced of its force should repeat the experiments and decide for himself what reliance he will place on the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... dream, were regarding him. Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct—until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder. He dropped her arms. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is one species of charity, which needs especial consideration. It is that, which induces us to refrain from judging of the means and the relative charities of other persons. There have been such indistinct notions, and so many different standards of duty, on this subject, that it is rare for two persons to think exactly alike, in regard to the rule of duty. Each person is bound to inquire and judge for himself, as to his own duty or deficiencies; but as both the resources, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... before replying. Memory seemed to hold up against an indistinct photograph of towering fir-crested heights, where through a broken ridge of rock a shower of silvery threads cascaded musically down, down, down, until they lost themselves in the mighty Fraser, that hurled itself through the yawning canyon ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Bakh[s.][a]l[i] Manuscript[188] probably antedates this, using the point or dot as a zero symbol. Bayley mentions a grant of Jaika Rashtrakuta of Bharuj, found at Okamandel, of date 738 A.D., which contains a zero, and also a coin with indistinct Gupta date 707 (897 A.D.), but the reliability of Bayley's work is questioned. As has been noted, the appearance of the numerals in inscriptions and on coins would be of much later occurrence than the origin and written exposition of the system. From the period mentioned ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... foremost reveals the features of Gerald Bereford casting fond glances towards the kneeling figure in the foreground. Duty wears a smile as she beckons his approach with tokens of deep appreciation. There still lingers another form. Whose can it be? Can we not recognize that face, though indistinct, in the dim outline? Duty steps between and intercepts our view. This is the picture from which Lady Rosamond vainly tried to withdraw her thoughts, repeating the consoling words with saddened emphasis: "Everything ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... as a bed-fellow; also that these two kinds of concubinage differ as much from each other as dirty linen from clean, may be seen by those who take a clear and distinct view of things, but not by those whose view of things is confused and indistinct: yea, it may be seen by those who are in conjugial love, but not by those who are in the love of adultery. The latter are in obscurity respecting all the derivations of the love of the sex, whereas the former are enlightened ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... large. The interior grooves, or furrows, are indistinct, or quite wanting: the exterior grooves are ten in number, and well defined. Along the summit of these furrows are produced numerous, small, pedicelled tubercles, quite similar to those of some species ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... again started, their course leading steeply up the gorge in which they had rested. Although the pathway became more and more indistinct, Ghamba appeared never to be at a loss. Langley several times shuddered, when they passed by the very edge of some immense precipice, or clambered along some steep mountain-side, where a false step would have meant destruction. He began to show signs ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... she said, in a hurried and indistinct tone; "forgive me! I would speak, but cannot, not now at least; we have been long away, too long; our absence will be remarked to-night; to-night we must give up to the gratification of others, but I will speak. For yours, for my own sake, let us, let us go. You know that we ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... said St. Clare, "a time in my life when I had plans and hopes of doing something in this world, more than to float and drift. I had vague, indistinct yearnings to be a sort of emancipator,—to free my native land from this spot and stain. All young men have had such fever-fits, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... racing by him in an indistinct blur of green. The fences were thin, wavering lines—the road a white-gray ribbon, ironed by the terrific speed to smooth unwrinkledness. He could not take his eyes from the business of steering ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... through which a dissipated stockman thundered thickly for a song. Miss Bouverie averted her eyes from Sir Julian (ensconced like Royalty in the centre of the first row) as she descended from the platform. She had not the hardihood to glance toward the great man until the indistinct stockman had had his wish, and Mrs. Clarkson, in her fine new raiment, had both sung and acted a coy ditty of the previous decade, wherein every line began with the word "somebody." It was an immediate ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... for the man with the snake to go on down into the canon bed. The other Indians were already unsaddling the dead burro. Slade muttered a command to them in the thick indistinct intonations of their language. They at once started to flay ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... stump-dotted clearing, indistinct in the sullen dimness of the overcast dawn, rotted the buildings of the abandoned log-camp. From one of these smoke rose. Wabishke decided to investigate, for in the Northland no smallest detail may pass unaccounted for. Swiftly he descended ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs: They are black vesper's pageants. Eros. Ay, my lord. Ant. That which is now a horse, even with a thought, The rack dislimns; and makes it indistinct, As water is in water. Eros. It does, my lord. Ant. My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body: here I am Antony; Yet cannot hold this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... "might enjoy all the happiness that even he could desire." Not that he was sure of, but that he could desire. But Trundle, the cypher, no one thought of him, no one cared about his speech. Most likely, in his "nervousness," he mumbled forth some indistinct words which no one could hear, so it was best and most charitable to pass him by altogether in the report. At the dance at night, where he surely would have led off the movements, still not a word of him. And at last, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... try,' replied Tibb, looking as if she began to have an indistinct idea that her new friend meant to do ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... by the time the little party from "the Moorings" reached the wreck, and things were beginning to get indistinct a little distance off; but, soon after their arrival on the spot, the silvery moon rising at the full, passing through occasional strata of dark cloud that veiled her light at intervals, illumined the sky with her weird beams, making it bright as day, but with a ghostly ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Author has received is, that God is indeed inscrutable and incomprehensible to us from the infinity of His attributes, so that our minds can, as it were, only take in, in a most fragmentary and indistinct manner (as through a glass darkly), dim conceptions of infinitesimal portions of His inconceivable perfection. In this way the partial glimpses obtained by us in different modes differ from each other; not that God ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... 'full'; u, as the medial vowels in 'fool'; o, or o, as in 'bone'; ai, or ai, as 'eye' or 'aye', respectively; and au, as the medial sound in 'fowl'. Short a, with stress, is pronounced like the u in 'but'; and if without stress, as an indistinct vowel, like ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... motionless during the discussion that followed, while Philip paced up and down, sometimes pausing before his brother for a moment, and then turning again to resume his walk. His voice was muffled always, and was hard to hear; now and then it became thick and indistinct with rage, and he cleared his throat roughly, as if he were angry with it, too. At first he maintained the outward forms of courtesy in words if not in tone, but long before his wrath had reached its final climax ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... at first. And then, as I was going to leave the oriel, I saw the sun glance on something that moved, and looked like a dark square, and I heard the horn ring out again a little nearer. I watched the square thing grow—from dark to red, from an indistinct mass to a compact body of marching men, with mounted officers at their head; and then, forgetting Dame Hilda and every thing else except the startling news I brought, I rushed back into ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... quail, pooh-poohing the suggestion. Then somehow rocks and forest and tents seemed less indistinct in shape; outlines peeped where masses ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... heard the indistinct muttering of the voice of some one, so low that he could not catch what words were uttered; but he fancied that, in the deep tones, he recognised, without any doubt, the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... should occupy the one room of the suite while Grace and Anne were to share the other, which had two beds. The long journey by rail had tired the travelers far more than they would admit. For a few moments, after retiring, conversation flourished between the two rooms, then died away in indistinct murmurs, and the prospective Overton freshmen slept peacefully as though safe in their ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror, miles away, and eventually ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Little Frenchman by other boys on Ealing Green. He soon learnt to speak English perfectly, and to forget some of his French: children forget easily. Some earlier and fainter recollections the child had of a different country; and a town with tall white houses: and a ship. But these were quite indistinct in the boy's mind, as indeed the memory of Ealing soon became, at least of ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... proceeds from a vague and indistinct idea of a new presentation to a clear and defined idea of it. The process is always analytic-synthetic. In a literature lesson the order of procedure must be: (1) Let the pupil get that somewhat indistinct grasp of the thought and feeling which comes ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... absently. In truth, he, too, was conscious of a sensation of regret. He felt ashamed of himself for it, but there it was; he was sorry to leave the place. For the last week or so he had been living in a dream, and everything outside that dream was blurred, indistinct as a landscape in a fog. He knew the objects were there, but he could not quite appreciate their relative size and position. The only real thing was his dream; all else was as vague as those far-off people and events that we lose in infancy ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... I have thought of this incident, as an illustration of a certain spiritual condition. When a person gets somewhat cold spiritually, the doctrines of the church become indistinct, and, spiritually speaking, his head begins to swim. At such a time he is likely to think that those who are endeavoring to help him out of his difficulties are trying to drown him; that they are in spiritual trouble themselves and that they are ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... gazed away across the dark Nithsdale, where, in the distant gloom, the black line of wood loomed up against the stormy sky. The stars were no longer shining and the rain clouds had gathered. I stood with my face turned to the dark indistinct spot that held the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... promise to produce much. But even when these difficulties were surmounted, there still remained a fruitful source of mistake, I mean, inaccuracy in catching exactly the true sound of a word, to which our ears had never been accustomed, from persons whose mode of pronunciation was, in general, so indistinct, that it seldom happened that any two of us, in writing down the fame word, from the same mouth, made use of the same vowels in representing it. Nay, we even, very commonly, differed about consonants, the sounds of which are least liable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... many disquisitions which I have read on some of the Cartoons and other pictures of Raffaelle, where the critics have described their own imaginations; or indeed where the excellent master himself may have attempted this expression of passions above the powers of the art, and has, therefore, by an indistinct and imperfect marking, left room for every imagination with equal probability to find a passion of his own. What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently difficult: we need not be mortified or discouraged at not being able to ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... certainly bore some resemblance to the hull of a ship, lying submerged upon the sandy bottom of the lagoon, about fifty fathoms from the inner edge of the reef. They were too far away from it, however, to distinguish it clearly, the light reflected from the surface of the water rendering their view of it indistinct; Leslie therefore this time wore the catamaran round, and, lowering her sails, allowed her to drift gently forward with the way that she still had on her. And this time they passed right over the object, when, as soon as the catamaran was fairly clear of it, he let go his anchor ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... height of forty or fifty feet, and growing either singly or in clumps form a striking feature amongst the thin sparse scrub. . . . The younger ones resemble nothing so much as large funeral plumes. Their outlines seen under a blazing sun are indistinct, and they give to the whole scene a curious effect of being 'out ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... "The Bible is indistinct and indefinite as to the future state—so much so that theologians differ on the possibilities of recognition in heaven," said Mr. Dempster. "Now, eternal existence without complete identity is not to me desirable. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... beautiful; but the diction is elaborately intricate, rhetorically indistinct. We find the same stylistic involution in these lines ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that they are matters upon which you will much oftener have occasion to speak than to write; and that, consequently, it is full as necessary to speak gracefully and distinctly upon them as to write clearly and elegantly. I find no authority among the ancients, nor indeed among the moderns, for indistinct and unintelligible utterance. The Oracles indeed meant to be obscure; but then it was by the ambiguity of the expression, and not by the inarticulation of the words. For if people had not thought, at least, they understood them, they ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... as he lay back in the padded seat between the sheltering partitions, watching the sickly yellow dregs of oil surging dismally to and fro with the motion in the lamp overhead, or the black indistinct forms flitting past through the misty blue outside, the pathos of his situation became all at once ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... from the rest of the sentence; or words are aggregated in a manner which fails to show their relation to one another; or the connecting particles are omitted at the beginning of sentences; the uses of the relative and antecedent are more indistinct, the changes of person and number more frequent, examples of pleonasm, tautology, and periphrasis, antitheses of positive and negative, false emphasis, and other affectations, are more numerous than in the other writings of Plato; there is ...
— Laws • Plato
... heart, France had been suddenly thrown into the broadest lustre of European sovereignty. The world was changed; and the limits of that change offered only a more resistless lure to the popular passion, for their being still indistinct to the keenest eye ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... vapour streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, half-way up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle. The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to me; or rather, I was revealed to myself, and I felt for the first time what belief meant. The truth which had long slumbered in my soul belonged to me, but it was the word of the unknown teacher which filled me with light, illuminated my inner vision, and brought out my indistinct presentiments in fuller clearness before my soul. When I had thus experienced for the first time how the human soul can believe, I read the Gospels as if they, too, had been written by an Unknown man, and banished the thought as well as I could that they were an inspiration from ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... left the graveyard the shades of evening had fallen, and the objects around me grown dim and indistinct. As I passed the gateway, I turned to take a parting look. I could distinguish only the chapel on the summit of the hill, and here and there a lofty obelisk of snow-white marble, rising from the black and heavy mass ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... becoming obsolete, and my motive for this publication has been an endeavour to preserve marks of the past which would of themselves soon become obliterated, and to supply the rising generation with pictures of social life, faded and indistinct to their eyes, but the strong lines of which an older race still remember. By thus coming forward at a favourable moment, no doubt many beautiful specimens of SCOTTISH MINSTRELSY have in this manner been preserved from oblivion by the timely exertions ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... morning before Christmas, when the first dawn had passed into day, a thin dry veil was spread over the whole sky so that one could see the low and distant sun only as an indistinct red spot; moreover, the air that day was mild, almost genial, and absolute calm reigned in the entire valley as well as in the heavens, as was indicated by the unchanging and immobile forms of the clouds. So the shoemaker's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... great men by paths which inferior minds either never enter upon or never finish, raised him above the influence of the doubts which a cold and narrow prudence would oppose to his views; and, without being able to convince his generals, he felt the correctness of his calculations in a conviction indistinct, indeed, but not on that account less indubitable. A succession of fortunate results had raised his confidence, and the sight of his army, unequalled in Europe for discipline, experience, and valor, and commanded by a chosen body ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was to sit on a rock overlooking the waves, and to remain there whole hours lost in admiration of sky and sea, "absorbed," says Moore, "in that sort of vague reverie, which, however formless and indistinct at the moment, settled afterward on his pages into those clear, bright pictures ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... drank the warm mixture. The change from the cold damp air outside, to the warm atmosphere of the hut, aided the effects of the spirits; he was first conscious of a warm glow all over him, and then the voices of the men seemed to grow indistinct. ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... before. Accordingly he calculated out their proper curves, just as Descartes had also done, and then proceeded to grind them as near as he could to those figures. But the images did not please him; they were always blurred and rather indistinct. ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the door after her, took her accustomed rocking-chair and needle on the stair-landing, and being quite as human as if she had been white, listened. Fair's words were very indistinct, but March's came through the thin door-panels as clean as rifle-balls. "O! yes," was one of his replies, "I know that with even nothing left but the experiences, I'm a whole world richer, in things that make a real manhood ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... lying on his tummy on the dining-room floor, trying to draw things on a bit of slate or paper, he liked to turn his head and watch the cloth moving swiftly under the jigging needle, and the wheel turning so fast that it made an indistinct blur, and sang with a droning hum. He could see, too, a corner of his mother's bed with the patchwork quilt on it. The colors of the quilt were pleasantly subdued in their old age, and the calico star set in a ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... spake anew, by turns shrill, stifled, bleating, stammering, yelling, fearsome. It uttered indistinct words, broken syllables. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... figures slipped away, became indistinct, and then disappeared. The night was hot, the mosquitoes hummed dismally and settled in clouds upon the waiting pair, maddening them with their poison. After a time a horse ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... were gory too; and red And fiercely flamed their eyes: And they were muttering indistinct ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... not now in a position to do so, and to my further enquiry by whom, in his opinion, the executive power was at present represented in France, his Majesty referred me to the Government in Paris. When this point, which was indistinct in the Emperor's letter to your Majesty yesterday, was cleared up, I recognized, and did not conceal the fact from the Emperor, that the situation today, as yesterday, was still a purely military one, and emphasized the necessity arising from it for us to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... I need hardly say it did not reach its destination. She passed the next day in a state of feverish impatience; and no answer returning, wrote again, her words this time conveying an evident though indistinct threat. I refrained from visiting her till two days had thus passed, and found her, as I expected, eaten up with fury. She glared at me as I entered the cell ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... he guided him along the bank a sound of disturbed water brought Terry's head up sharply: heavy ripples circled away from a spot near the opposite shore just under the ford. As he peered keenly he discerned the indistinct outline of something that looked like a heavy log sink slowly into the dark depths. The pony fretted until they left the river-bank to follow an old trail ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson |
