"Limpness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arms with the limpness of one who is accustomed to such attentions, and then wheeled instantly upon the futile ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... superbly overcome. But if one considers in detail the different attitudes, the violent action of the arms and legs, the contorted positions of the bodies—every muscle either on the stretch or relaxed into a flaccid limpness,—the foreshortened limbs twisted into every kind of unnatural posture, and the complicated interweaving of the whole, one realises that it is indeed his masterpiece, not only for the mood of terror and awe it induces by its imaginative power, but for its marvellous rendering ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... closely we noticed a limpness about the smoke stack that seemed very inconsistent with the customary rigidity of cylindrical iron. Then the escape pipe seemed scarcely able to maintain itself upright. A few minutes later we discovered that our ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of the falling man dragged Lennon after. But the utter limpness of the body under him stayed his hand from a second blow. He thrust the revolver back into his pocket and grasped Slade under the armpits. The body remained flaccid even when dragged ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... just outside the door of the Agent's big marquee. He ran across the ground and discovered Captain Ballantyne sprawling, face downwards, in the smoking-suit which he had worn at dinner the night before. The sentry shook him gently by the shoulder, but the limpness of the body frightened him. Then he noticed that there was blood upon the ground, and calling loudly for help he ran to the guard-room tent. He returned with others of the native levies and they lifted Ballantyne up. He was dead and the body was cold. The levies carried ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Westover, with as much stiffness as he could command in his physical limpness. "I shouldn't have allowed you to look after me; and I want you to understand, now, that there can't be any sort of friendliness between us till you've accounted for your behavior with Lynde the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wrong" which gave Symes that weak feeling in his knees. To what did Mudge refer, to the stock and bondholders or to the project and himself? Must he go about for the four days which must intervene before a letter could reach him with that sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, that curious limpness of his spine? ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... was enough. The truant imagination of the unhappy butt went far afield in search of terrors; neither food, nor wine, nor the pleasures of the theatre could tempt him, and he remained in a state of limpness until the natural buoyancy of his spirits asserted itself. What a life! How much better would it have been for this rich man had he trained himself to preserve General Gordon's composure, even if he had bought that ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... uttered a child-like wail, staggering, swaying upon her feet, with arms drooping, without any attempt at defense whatever.... She reeled from side to side as though she were drunk. Her knees doubled under her, and she fell with the limpness of a bundle of clothes, her head first striking against the cushions of the divan. The rest of her body remained like a rag on ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... between,—nothing that they could dwell upon with the slightest satisfaction. Nor had their sleep entirely refreshed them. Their eyes were not quite right, and their hair, though it was brushed, showed fatigue of the nerves in a certain inclination to limpness ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... grandmother was sending me over there on some errand, telling me there was no special hurry about coming back. My father might set his foot down upon some plan of mine ever so firmly, but grandmother had only to smile at him and he was reduced to a degree of limpness that contributed to my escape. I have often wondered whether that smile on the face of grandmother did not remind him, of some of his ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... manner of my reception back in the capital of Atlantis, and some first glimpse at her new policies. I freely confess to my own inaction and limpness; but it was all deliberate. The old ties of duty seemed lost, or at least merged in one another. Beforetime, to serve the king was to serve the Clan of the Priests, from which he had been chosen, and whose ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... by an the gleam of old silver familiar to him from boyhood, the very invisible power, he snatched her up bodily out of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected metallic clatter on the floor, carried her off into the other room. The limpness of her body frightened him. Laying her down on the bed, he ran out again, seized a four-branched candlestick on the table, and ran back, tearing down with a furious jerk the curtain that swung stupidly in his way, but after putting the candlestick ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... edge of this he dragged a quantity of dry wood and built a fire. Then he made a thick couch of balsam boughs and went to his little companion. In the half hour he had been at work she had fallen asleep. Utter exhaustion was in the limpness of her slender body as he raised her gently in his arms. The handkerchief had slipped back over her shoulder and she was wonderfully sweet, and helpless, as she lay with her head on his breast. She was still asleep when he placed her on the balsams, and it was dark when he awakened her for supper. ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... he spoke slowly, as if he were very tired. His face looked badly, too,—pale, and with black rings under his eyes away below his glasses. And there was something in the way he lay there—a limpness and helplessness—that somehow frightened me, and made me feel right away as if I ought to call nurse or somebody. But I know Fee likes to have people do as he tells them, so first I shut the door tight, then I came back and knelt down by him again. "Hadn't I better help you up, Fee?" ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... took his hand she held it a minute. Her own was warm, and there was no limpness about it. The secret which had seemed to conceal itself behind her eyes had some difficulty in keeping itself wholly ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ornamenteth men with beards and women with long hair?' So, were not the beard even as the tresses in comeliness, it had not been coupled with them, O silly! How shall I spread-eagle myself under a boy, who will emit long before I can go off and forestall me in limpness of penis and clitoris; and leave a man who, when he taketh breath clippeth close and when he entereth goeth leisurely, and when he hath done, repeateth, and when he pusheth poketh hard, and as often as he withdraweth, returneth?' The boy's leman was edified by her speech and said, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... at that otherwise delightful picture "At last—Alone." Observe the ardor of the lover-husband; note the unresponsive droopiness of the charmingly attired bride, and defend the straight-up-and-down hang of that useless arm if you can. She might, at least, take the stiffness or limpness out of it by simply placing the little hand on his shoulder, and that is just what Marion did, until—until he himself seized and drew it around his neck. The question as to how he should greet her ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... for her answer. She heard him whistling cheerily as he went in the direction of the coach-house, and the ting of his bicycle-bell a moment after as he rode away. When that reached her ears, Olga sat down very suddenly on the edge of her bed with the limpness of relaxed tension, and realized that ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... rich selection of examples from the works of living English and American authors. From the inextensive volumes of an eminent and fastidious critic I have culled a dear phrase about an oasis of style in "a desert of literary limpness." But it were hardly courteous, and might be dangerous, to publish these exotic ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His way of shaking hands expressed his moral flabbiness in the general dampness, looseness and limpness of the act,—not that he often shook hands with his pupil, for though that pupil was only a boy made of ordinary flesh and blood like other boys, he was nevertheless heir to a Throne, and in strict etiquette even friendly liberties were not to be too frequently taken with such an Exalted ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... The corpse of a stranger is easier to lift than the corpse of a man you've known and liked. Harry and I lifted him together. Between us the dead weight didn't seem too intolerable—not at first. But it quickly became a terrible, heavy limpness that dragged at our arms like some soggy log dredged up from the ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... his sides with a limpness highly suggestive of desperate perplexity. Was not this a slave? And yet here was the fine feeling of a princess. He stood, for once in his life, at a loss what to do. He could not depart without the greatest awkwardness, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... an old man lying upon the bare rock, a great gash in his forehead from which the blood had flowed down over his face and breast, making him a most ghastly object to look upon; and there was about him a certain limpness that told of many broken bones. He turned his head at the sound of my footsteps, but it was plain that the blood flowing into his eyes had blinded him, and that he could not see me. He made a feeble motion to clear his eyes, but dropped ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... had reached one of the chairs and dropped into it with a limpness strangely inharmonious with her statuesque proportions. "Bea, they ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... on the March day when he first came downstairs and dropped into his old favourite place in a corner of the big blue couch, "whether any other fellow was ever so pampered as I. I look like thirty cents, but I feel, in spite of this abominable limpness, as if my stock were worth a hundred cents on the dollar. And when we get back from the ocean trip I expect to be ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... of gold spectacles reposed in magisterial dignity about half way down his nose, and a large silver-headed cane in the left hand balanced the umbrella in the right. By the side of the man with rare vestments stood another figure of even more limpness of general bearing, whose garb consisted of a soldier's uniform pantaloons and woolen shirt—none too clean—set off by a black dress-coat, and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... a silver plate half filled with salt, and I laid it on the corpse; 'and now,' I said, 'we must have rue and marjoram, run down and get me some;' and then I frightened her, poor fool as she was, by telling her that by the limpness of the hand of the corpse, I augured another death very soon in ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood] |
