"Shapeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... magical early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the unfriendly sea, seized them if they were very young, ducked them, and returned them to the chilly machine, generally in the futile and superfluous saltness of tears. "Too much of ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... hollow-eyed, gray-lipped man, with the spots of scarlet flaming from his projecting cheekbones, and throwing the death-hue of the rest of the face into still more dreadful prominence? Joseph's, that clawlike hand, with the broken, stained and shapeless nails, which once had wielded a brush that created the laughing face of Irina Petrovna—the woman who had brought him down to death? A great shudder seized upon Ivan; and, for an instant, he was forced to turn away. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... those of persons bearing a heavy burden. She waited to see who and what it could be so late this Sunday night; and soon, under the flickering lamps, she caught sight of several men, carrying among them a hurdle, with a shapeless heap upon it. A sudden, vague panic seized her, and she hastily retreated inside her house, shutting and barring the door. She said to herself she did not wish to see what they were carrying past. But were they going past? She heard them ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... through the densest portion of the assaulting mass, marking the path traversed by the shot; but as the distance from the gun increased, and the grape scattered, this clearly defined line gave place to a prospect of the wildest confusion. One third of those who had entered the ditch lay there a shapeless, quivering mass. In many instances, the dead had fallen on the wounded, and as the latter struggled to extricate themselves, the scene resembled that depicted in old paintings of the final judgment, where fiends and men wrestle in horrible contortions. ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful—faces I can hardly call them, but rather—shapeless black collops of flesh, with little points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives grace to adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with characteristic ferocity ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... that it seemed as if some gigantic machine gun was in action. Shortly after this bombardment started, the German trenches were covered by a great cloud of smoke and dust and a pall of green lyddite fumes. The first line of German trenches, against which the fire was directed, became great shapeless furrows and craters filled ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... island, he formed here and there pyramids; and at their base he laid earth, and planted the roots of rose bushes, the Barbadoes flower fence, and other shrubs which love to climb the rocks. In a short time those gloomy shapeless pyramids were covered with verdure, or with the glowing tints of the most beautiful flowers. The hollow recesses of aged trees, which bent over the borders of the stream, formed vaulted caves impenetrable to the sun, and where you might enjoy coolness during ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... to the side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my horrified gaze no ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... we feel to be so much more real than our physical body, justifies us in making an experiment which to many minds will seem uncalled for and ridiculous. I mean the experiment of trying to visualize, by an arbitrary exercise of fancy, the sort of form or shape which this formless and shapeless thing may be ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... ones, the difference is the same in the two countries. In England theatres, towers, temples, all marks of Latin civilisation, had been erected, but not so numerous, massive, or strong that the invaders were unable to destroy them. At the present time only shapeless remnants exist above ground. In France, the barbarians came, plundered, burnt, razed to the ground all they possibly could; but the work of destruction was too great, the multitude of temples and palaces was more than their strength was equal to, and the torch ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... These observed facts transformed the list from a shapeless mass into something having definite characteristics, and the observed characteristics stuck in mind and ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... much your betters, Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters, Hae thought they had ensur'd their debtors, A' future ages: Now moths deform in shapeless tatters, Their unknown pages." ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... outstretched form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,—a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to another case. As she passed the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the "shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about literature. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... thin, crooked twig, or rather on an ugly likeness of a twig rested askew a blind, ugly, shapeless, outspread mass of something utterly and inconceivably distorted, a mad leap of wild and bizarre fragments, all feebly and vainly striving to part from one another. And, as if by chance, beneath one of the wildly-rent salients a butterfly was chiseled with divine skill, all airy loveliness, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... concerned her own attire—that was as perfect in its way as Rosalind's own—but with reference to the home-made dresses of the vicar's daughters, which seemed to have suddenly become clumsy and shapeless when viewed in the mirrors of this elegant bedroom. She was in arms at once on her friends' behalf, and when Peggy's dignity was hurt she was a formidable person to tackle. In this instance she fixed her eyes first on the maid, and then on Rosalind herself with a ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill. Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticos of Nero's palace: survey the other hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens. The forum of the Roman people, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... looked at her abode. Almost half of the room was filled up by the bed, which stretched the length of the whole wall and consisted of a dirty feather-bed, coarse grey pillows, a quilt, and nameless rags of various sorts. The bed was a shapeless ugly mass which suggested the shock of hair that always stood up on Savely's head whenever it occurred to him to oil it. From the bed to the door that led into the cold outer room stretched the dark stove surrounded by pots ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... some commotion outside, the sound of hurried footsteps and agitated voices. Then a terrible little procession appeared. Something—it seemed to be a shapeless heap of clothes—was carried in and laid upon the floor, in the little space between the revolving doors and the inner entrance. Two blue-liveried attendants kept back the horrified but curious crowd. Francis, vaguely recognised as being ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little uneasily in her chair. She, also, had once been pretty. Her hair was still an exquisite shade of red-gold, but her cheeks were thin and pinched, her complexion had gone, her clothes fell about her. She seemed somehow shapeless. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dizzy heights he spun, until he struck the ground far below, a shapeless, insensible mass, falling almost at the feet of the horror-bound Apaches, who thus saw the dreadful death of one of their most ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... There she kept three stunted little wall-flowers—no room for more—which she attended to every morning after breakfast. Cats destroyed them in the end. She laughed, as it were gleefully. Her laugh is her own; derisive, open-mouthed, shapeless, hardly sane—but she has a smile—a smile at nothing in particular, at her own thoughts—which is singularly sweet and pathetic. I cannot but think that the spirit which enables her to live on without despair, to love her little garden and to smile so sweetly, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... and the snow rose in clouds, torn up by the animals making for the sea, which was churned up into foam as first one and then another of the monstrous, shapeless creatures threw itself ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... he modelled hundreds of these raspberry pots, moulding them upon the wheel which turned like a sun beneath the pressure of his agile foot. The mass of shapeless clay, turning on the center of the disk, under the touch of his finger, suddenly raised itself like the petals of a lily, lengthened, broadened, swelled or shrank, submissive ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... last a long while:—there thou liest, my fosterer, As thou lay'st a while since ere that twilight of dawning; And I woke and looked forth, and the dark sea, long changeless, Was now at last barred by a dim wall that swallowed The red shapeless moon, and the whole sea was rolling, Unresting, unvaried, as grey as the void is, Toward that wall 'gainst the heavens as though rest were behind it. Still onward we fared and the moon was forgotten, And colder the sea grew and colder ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... thoughts that peer outside this narrow world cannot be else than dim and shapeless. The thoughts that we can clearly grasp are very little thoughts—that two and two make four-that when we are hungry it is pleasant to eat—that honesty is the best policy; all greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our poor childish brains. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Decay's shapeless hand extinguish us? Its foreflung and enervating shadow shall neither transform us into devils nor degrade us into beasts. That shadow indeed only falls in the valleys of ignoble fear and selfishness, leaving all the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... sea or fresh water, coated by gelatinous substance; either filiform or a number of filaments being connected together constituting gelatinous, definitely formed, or shapeless fronds or masses. Filaments jointed, bearing bristle-like processes. Fructification: zoospores produced from the cell contents of the filaments; resting spores formed from the contents of particular cells after impregnation by ciliated spermatozoids ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... that power of the mind by which it forms pictures or images within itself. Thought is but a shapeless, lifeless entity, until Imagination moulds it into form. We cannot bring what we know out into life until Imagination presents it to the Affections as a possible reality. Thought is an uncreative power, and gives form to nothing. Imagination is a more positive power, and can impart form to everything ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... brother's chaps, his spurs, sombrero, and other paraphernalia, to masquerade about the house in them. She had learned to imitate the long roll of the vaquero's stride, the mannerisms common to his class, and even the heavy voice of a man. More than once she had passed muster as a young man in the shapeless garments she was now wearing. She felt confident that the very audacity of the thing would carry it off. There would be a guard for the treasure box, of course, but if all worked well he could be taken by surprise. Her rifle was not loaded, but the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... water, blown by winds that had travelled the Atlantic, deluged the county; grey mists trailed mournful and shapeless along the edges of the domain woods, over the ridges of the tenants' holdings. 'Never more shall we be driven forth to die in the bogs and ditches,' was the cry that rang through the mist; and, guarded by policemen, in ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... confiding. She can never carry her own parcels, put on her own overshoes, or button her own gloves. A widow's shoe laces have never been known to stay tied for any length of time, unless she has shapeless ankles ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... here, morning comes, and evening, as they did. All else, how changed! What grim batteries crowd the burdened shores! What scenes have filled this air, and disturbed these waters! These shattered heaps of shapeless stone are all that is left of Fort Sumter. Desolation broods in yonder city—solemn retribution hath avenged our dishonored banner! You have come back with honor, who departed hence four years ago, leaving the air sultry with fanaticism. The surging crowds that rolled up their ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... known what it was meant for," said Raeburn, scrutinizing the rather shapeless furry quadruped. "How is it that you can't make them ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... floating swan-like, stately, and serene, A few light fleecy clouds, the drapery of heav'n, Throw their pale shadows o'er this witching scene, Deep'ning its mystic grandeur—and seem driven Round these all shapeless piles ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... younger brothers went peacefully to sleep, while the eldest brother kept watch. At a certain hour of the night the lake became agitated with a swaying motion which startled the watcher not a little. He soon observed a shapeless form arising out of the midst of the water and rushing straight toward him. It was a frightful monster of a Dragon, with two great flapping ears, which was rushing so fiercely upon him. The Prince bravely drew his sword, and seizing the Dragon, cut off his head. Then he sliced off the ears ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... tops sinking below our range of vision. We plunged into a sea of mist. It rolled and eddied, boiling beneath us. Through its mysterious pall we saw now a skeleton pine stretch out its dark pointing hand—now a rock, shapeless and uncouth, far below, like a behemoth petrified in mid ocean. Then an eddy would sweep a space for the sun to pour a flood of gold on this field far down at our feet, on that village, on this mountain ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... But in a winter or two, judging from its present degree of attenuation, and the yielding nature of its material, which resembles a damaged mass of arrow-root, consolidated by lying in the leaky hold of a vessel, its persevering courtesies will be over, and pier and archway must lie in shapeless fragments on the beach. Wherever the surf has broken into the upper surface of this sandstone bed, and worn it down to nearly the level of the shore, what seem a number of double ramparts, fronting each other, and separated by deep ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... cried, 'I, Metamnbogu! By my own name, I name myself. I tear away the veil. I would be served or perish. Hear me, slime of the fat swamp, blackness of the thunder, venom of the serpent's udder—hear or slay me! I would have two things, O shapeless one, O horror of emptiness—two things, or die! The blood of my white- faced husband; oh! give me that; he is the enemy of Hoodoo; give me his blood! And yet another, O racer of the blind winds, O germinator ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... What shapeless form, half lost on high, Half seen against the evening sky, Seems like a ghost to glide, And watch, from Babel's crumbling heap, Where in her shadow, fast asleep, Lies ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... diligently; and then looked for a while from the window, upon receding hedgerows and farmsteads, and the level and spacious landscape; and then he leaned back luxuriously, his newspaper listlessly on his knees, and began to read, instead, at his ease, the shapeless, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and sullenly out of the depths they beheld a horrible, dripping, shapeless something that eventually resolved itself into a human body—clothed in torn rags and ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... crater was a fortress. Around the circle of the entire rim, on the inner side of the rough crags, men of the 49th Field Artillery stood by their guns. Lookouts trailed their telephone wire to the higher peaks, where they perched as shapeless as huddled owls; and, like owls, their eyes swept the mountain's slopes and the desert at its base, where the searchlight crews played long fingers of ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... oxen—lowing in their hunger for a meal. They were beef for the army, and never again, I suppose, would it be allowed to them to fill their big maws and chew the patient cud. There, on the brown, ugly, undrained field, within easy sight of the President's house, stood the useless, shapeless, graceless pile of stones. It was as though I were looking on the genius of the city. It was vast, pretentious, bold, boastful with a loud voice, already taller by many heads than other obelisks, but nevertheless ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... doing anything else or expects them to sit elsewhere. William Pressley was one of these persons. In the next easiest chair, on the other side of the hearth, was his aunt, the widow Broadnax, whose short, broad, shapeless, inert figure was lying rather than sitting almost buried in a heap of cushions. This lady was the sister of the judge and the half-sister of the other lady, Miss Penelope Knox,—the thin, nervous, restless little old woman,—who was fidgeting back and forth ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... under the Empire; an oil portrait of my father, and a very pretty pastel of my sister Jeanne. I had not much jewellery, and all that was found of the bracelet given to me by the Emperor was a huge shapeless mass, which I still have. I had a very pretty diadem, set with diamonds and pearls, given to me by Kalil Bey after a performance at his house. The ashes of this had to be sifted in order to find the stones. The diamonds were there, but the pearls ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... that barks like a savage dog, day and night. She has twelve shapeless feet, and six heads set on long necks. Each of her mouths shows three rows of deadly teeth. Half of her body is hidden in the rock, but she thrusts out her heads and snatches her prey, fish, whales, dolphins, or men. No sailor escapes, or, indeed, ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... and the candle seemed to fall asleep too, for the wick grew long, and black, and cabbaged at the end, and dimmed the little light that remained in the chamber. The gloom that now prevailed was contagious. Around hung the shapeless, and almost spectral, box-coats of departed travellers, long since buried in deep sleep. I only heard the ticking of the clock, with the deep-drawn breathings of the sleeping topers, and the drippings of the rain, drop—drop—drop, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... response to each were made by individuals whom the Mayor designated or the company called for. None of them impressed me with a very high idea of English postprandial oratory. It is inconceivable, indeed, what ragged and shapeless utterances most Englishmen are satisfied to give vent to, without attempting anything like artistic shape, but clapping on a patch here and another there, and ultimately getting out what they want to say, and generally with a result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mutters so when he is alone. I will venture in; perhaps I can make something of him." So he stepped slowly to the door and listened again; then taking heart, he opened it suddenly. In the dimly-lighted room sat a stooping figure in a leathern chair, a shapeless hat on its head. The figure kept constantly nodding, and muttering unintelligible words. How changed was Hirsch Ehrenthal in the course of the past year! When he last drove over the baron's estate, he was a stout, respectable-looking man, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... places, and for the first time I saw these hewers of wood and drawers of water. A party of us went on shore to shoot; some distance in the wood we found two men, three women and two boys; there were twenty in all on this farm. The women were dressed in a rough, shapeless, coarse garment, buttoned at the back, with a sort of trousers of the same material, rough shoes and stockings, the upper garment reaching nearly to the ankle; a kind of cloth, like a dirty towel, was wound round the head. One of the women drove an ox-team; she had a large and powerful ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... sleeves, made of coarse brown woollen stuff, which is properly cut into strips of a hand's breath, and joined together by broad seams. Others wear trousers of brown stuff instead of white linen; they are, however, extremely ugly, as they are really nothing more than a wide shapeless sack with two holes, through which the feet are put. The coverings for the feet are either enormous shoes of coarsely woven white sheeps' wool, ornamented with three tassels, or short, very wide boots of red or yellow leather, reaching only just above the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... those trained to their work, to teach: quite as imperatively we then want the right kind of text-books, in the pupils' hands, with which to carry forward their common work. If mind is the animating spirit, and knowledge the shapeless matter, still method—and to the pupil largely the method of the books—is the organizing force or form under which the knowledge is to be organized, made available and valuable. We shall suffer quite as much from any lack of the best form, as through lack of the best matter, or of the most ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the great philosophical minds whom we have contemplated were remarkable for their harmony. As we now look back upon them we do not see shapeless and unfitting fragments, but a superstructure of rare symmetry and grace. Jacobi was the leaven of improvement, and it was the mission of that devout man to continue to some extent the habit of respectful regard ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... satisfaction. The night was star-light, though not very clear at that. Objects on the water, however, were more visible than those on the land, while those on the last could be seen well enough, even from the brig, though in confused and somewhat shapeless piles. When the Swash was brought close by the wind, she had just got into the last reach of the "river," or that which runs parallel with the Neck for near a mile, doubling where the Sound expands itself, gradually, to a breadth of ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... was forced to stop, blinded by a flood of tears. For a minute he beheld himself crushed, lying in fragments at the foot of a high mountain, his shapeless remains gathered up in a barrow, and brought back to Tarascon. Oh, the power of that Provencal imagination! he was present at his own funeral; he heard the lugubrious chants, and the talk above his grave: "Poor Tartarin, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... and made effective by the real boiling of the kettle on the crane, the ticking of a tall clock, and the appearance of a pair of blue worsted shoes which waved fitfully in the air to the soft babble of a baby's voice. Those shapeless little shoes won the first applause; and Mr Laurie, forgetting elegance in satisfaction, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the world. The actual incidents which occur are very trivial, and yet to the fresh minds and spirits of boyhood they seem all charged with an intense significance. Then again the talk of schoolboys is wholly immature and shapeless. They cannot express themselves, and moreover there is a very strict and peremptory convention which dictates what may be talked about and what may not. No society in the world is under so oppressive a taboo. They must not speak of anything ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lamp was filtering in past them, and her eyes were slowly growing accustomed to the gloom. There was something lying on the floor, in the middle of the room, that was bulky and shapeless and unfamiliar. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... pretend these revealed books, which I summarily examined in my preceding letter, do not include a single word that was not inspired by the Spirit of God. What I have already said to you is sufficient to show that in setting out with this supposition, the Divinity has formed a work the most shapeless, imperfect, contradictory, and unintelligible which ever existed; a work, in a word, of which any man of sense would blush with shame to be the author. If any prophecy hath verified itself for the Christians, it is that of Isaiah, which saith, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... on so long that there is scarce room for my quotation. But it shall come though in a shapeless manner, for the sake of room. Have you got in your Christian Poet, a poem by Sir H. Wotton—'How happy is he born or taught, that serveth not another's will'? It is very beautiful, and fit for a Paradise of any kind. Here are some lines from old Lily, which your ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... intended victims, who rode unconsciously onward, the light and graceful forms of the females waving among the trees, in the curvatures of their path, followed at each bend by the manly figure of Heyward, until, finally, the shapeless person of the singing master was concealed behind the numberless trunks of trees, that rose, in dark ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... King. Round the whole earth his dreaded Name shall sound. And reach to worlds that must not yet be found: The Southern clime him her sole Lord shall style, Him all the North, even Albion's stubborn isle. My fellow-servant, credit what I tell.' Straight into shapeless air ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... evidence that we were upon the right track. A little farther on, was a piece of marshy ground, and here we made a startling discovery. In the soft soil, several foot-prints could be plainly distinguished. Some were coarse, shapeless impressions, precisely such as would be made by the rude moccasins worn by Arthur and Johnny. Others were the prints of naked feet, and some of these were of far too large a size to be made by either of the three. This discovery affected us for the moment ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... what 'tis, Miss Null," said Isham, removing his shapeless felt hat, "dis yere place is gittin' wus an' wus on de careen, an' wat's gwine to happen if ole miss don' come back is more'n I kin tell. Dar's no groun' ploughed yit for wheat, an' dem two han's been 'gaged to come do it, an' dey put it off, an' put it off till ole miss got as mad as hot ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... in the back corner seat on the driver's side, the head lolling back sideways against the cushions and crushing into a shapeless mass the gray Homburg hat. The mouth and eyes were open and the features twisted as if from sudden pain. The face was long and oval, the hair and eyes dark, and there was a tiny black mustache with waxed ends. A khaki colored waterproof, open in ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... figure of a divinity carved in wood and painted. On the head of this figure rose a crescent symbolical of the moon, and round its neck hung a chain of wooden stars. It had four wings but no hands, and of these wings two were out-spread and two clasped a shapeless object to its breast, intended, apparently, to represent a child. By these symbols Aziel knew that before him was an effigy sacred to the goddess of the Phoenicians, who in different countries passed by the various names of Astarte, or Ashtoreth, or Baaltis, and who in their ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... cold stars like points of ice pierced the higher blue; carelessly, as though with studied indifference, flakes of snow fell, turning grey against the lamp-lit windows, then vanishing utterly. Maggie, going to the window, saw a dark shapeless figure beyond the glass. For an instant she was invaded by the terror of her surprised loneliness, then she remembered her father and the warm kitchen, then realised that this figure in the dark must be ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... doing? talking to other people, existing for others, laughing with others! There were miles between himself and Fenmarket. Life! what was life? A few moments of living and long, dreary gaps between. All this, however, is a vain attempt to delineate what was shapeless. It was an intolerable, unvanquishable oppression. This was Love; this was the blessing which the god with the ruddy wings had bestowed on him. It was a relief to him when the coach rattled through Islington, and in a few minutes had ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches! Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... working at his wheel; and it is wonderful to see the beautiful effects he can produce. He can take a lump of clay, and from that shapeless mass of matter he can make vessels and ornaments of rarest beauty. He has no machinery but that simple wheel, but by that and the skillful movements of his hand, he can evolve beauty out of chaos. It made me think of the way God evolved this beautiful world out of chaos at first. There is ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... down the quaint village street with a row of pollarded elms on each side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched, bearing upon their summits a shapeless something which had once been the rampant lion of Capus of Birlstone. A short walk along the winding drive with such sward and oaks around it as one only sees in rural England, then a sudden turn, and the long, low Jacobean house of dingy, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the taper waist, Shapeless grows the shapely limb, And although severely laced, Spreading is ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd, Implores the passing tribute of ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... briskly down the stairs from the second floor of the house of M. Gournay-Martin. He was an ordinary-looking man, almost insignificant, of between forty and fifty, and of rather more than middle height. He had an ordinary, rather shapeless mouth, an ordinary nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary forehead, rather low, and ordinary ears. He was wearing an ordinary top-hat, by no means new. His clothes were the ordinary clothes of a fairly well-to-do citizen; and his boots had been chosen less to ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... the Obdorsk struck to the three ships circling around her. They had suffered, but the battle-ship Argyll was reduced to a monitor. Her superstructure and the bow and stern above the water-line were shattered to a shapeless tangle of steel. What was left of her funnels and ventilators resembled nutmeg-graters, and she was perceptibly down by the head; for her bow leaked through its wrinkled plates, and the forward compartment below the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... I define Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness? Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine, Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express; But though we cannot thee to aught compare, A thousand things to thee may likened be, And though thou art with nobody nowhere, Yet half mankind devote themselves to ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... Range Excavator Rock-Crushing and Gold-Winning Company was born from the brain of Aurophilus Dobrown, Esq., of Smallchange Dell, in the county of Middlesex, between the hours of ten and eleven at night on the 14th of October 1851. It was at first a shapeless and unpromising bantling; but being introduced to the patronage of a conclave of experienced drynurses, it speedily became developed in form and proportion; and before it was ten days old, was formally introduced, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... We sit without our coats; Our cuffs are moist and shapeless, No collars binds our throats. We carry huge umbrellas On Broad Street and on Wall, Oh, how thermometers go up! And, oh, ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... the sound of the incoming tide breaking upon the rocks. Dimmer now, but even more majestic in the twilight, the great, immovable cliffs towered up to the sky. An owl floated up from the grove of trees beneath and with a strange cry circled round for a moment to drop on to the lawn, a shapeless, solemn mass of feathers. At the back of the hills a little rim of gold, no wider than a wedding ring, announced the rising of the moon. He felt a touch upon his sleeve, a very sweet, persuasive voice in his ear. Nora had left Miller in the background and was ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mortified, And with asperity replied. ("When," cry the botanists, and stare, "Did plants call'd Sensitive grow there?" No matter when—a poet's muse is To make them grow just where she chooses): "You shapeless nothing in a dish, You that are but almost a fish, I scorn your coarse insinuation, And have most plentiful occasion To wish myself the rock I view, Or such another dolt as you. For many a grave and learned clerk, And many a gay unlettered ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... he thrust stiff fingers deep within the shapeless coat pockets. He slowly withdrew his right hand holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He tore a three-cornered flap in the cover, looked at the brightly colored contents, replaced the flap and returned the parcel, his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the causes of the fall of Babylon. Her career was equally short and splendid; and although she has thus perished from the face of the earth, her ruins are still classic, indeed sacred, ground. The traveler visits, with no common emotion, those shapeless heaps, the scene of so many great and solemn events. In this plain, according to tradition, the primitive families of our race first found a resting place. Here Nebuchadnezzar boasted of the glories of his city, and was punished for his pride. To these deserted ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... ground round the house was almost entirely covered with cattle-dung. There was no attempt at cultivation when I came to live on the creek; but there were old furrow-marks amongst the stumps of another shapeless patch in the scrub near the hut. There was a wretched sapling cow-yard and calf-pen, and a cow-bail with one sheet of bark over it for shelter. There was no dairy to be seen, and I suppose the milk was ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... streets upheave, and sink again, like waves; And shattered piles and shapeless wrecks are strewn with human graves. Danger at every corner lurks. Destruction fills the air. Death-laden showers of mortar, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... steed. His other foot caught in the stirrup. This fact terribly frightened the horse. He bolted, dragging the rustler for a dozen jumps. Then Snecker's foot slipped loose. He lay limp and still and shapeless in the road. I did not need to go ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... a quite ordinary day nearly forty years ago, my eye caught the flash of the red roses amid the greenery of my verandah in the Australian bush. And this bowl of wall-flowers before me now—these old-fashioned, homely, shapeless, intimately fascinating flowers, with their faint ancient fragrance, their antique faded beauty, their symbolisation of the delicate and contented beauty of old age—seem to me fit for the altar of whatever ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... One day the machinery at the mill, being old and rotten, broke; the hands were at work in it, underneath the beams which fell. An hour after, just as Ellen and Joe had put the chairs about the supper-table, and sat waiting for their father and Jim, the door was pushed open, and two heaps, shapeless, and covered closely with a quilt, were brought in upon a door. Whatever was the pain or loss of the widow or Joe, they had no time to indulge it; Ellen needed all their care after that for a year or two. She was "troubled," was all the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the last horse was a shapeless thing, not compact and built up like a pack, but hanging low on either side, shrouded by a canvas. From under this cover a hand and arm dangled, swinging to and fro with each motion ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... Malbihn to the earth and kneeled upon him with the quickness of a cat. Then he gored the prostrate thing through and through with his mighty tusks, trumpeting and roaring in his rage, and at last, convinced that no slightest spark of life remained in the crushed and lacerated flesh, he lifted the shapeless clay that had been Sven Malbihn far aloft and hurled the bloody mass, still entangled in canopy and hammock, over the boma and ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... where a few trees were planted. The places looked to Felix like the Noah's Ark he used to play with when he was small—the tiny, toy trees, the square toy house, little toy animals set out on the bare, brown floor of the prairie. Even the gaunt women in shapeless garments who always came to the door to watch the wagon train go by were not unlike the stiff wooden figures of Mrs. Noah. At last, however, even the scattered houses came to an end and there was nothing before them ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the brain, } What art, that pleasure giv'st and pain? } Tyranny of fancy's reign! Mechanic fancy! that can build Vast labyrinths and mazes wild, With rude, disjointed, shapeless measure, Fill'd with horror, fill'd with pleasure! Shapes of horror, that would even Cast doubt of mercy upon Heaven; Shapes of pleasure, that but seen, Would split the shaking ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... lichen and mosses of beautiful variety, and some looking strangely like green ice-crystals. Presently we came to a little broken-down rude kind of chapel in the midst of the wood. It was built of stone; and masses of stone, shapeless and moss-grown, were lying scattered about on the ground around it. At a little rough-hewn altar within it stood a Christian priest, blessing the elements. Overhead, the great dark sprays of the larches and cone-laden firs swept its roof. I sat down to rest on one of the stones, and ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... potency of motion, the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod of ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... of Wagner's he would have thought it an advance in beauty or not—whether it would have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and even shapeless. Of course, one knows that there is going to be development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it, except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased perfection of technique. It is the same with painting. ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were sentient things writhing in agonies of pain, filled up one end of the room. A great book-case with glass doors extended over the whole of the opposite wall, and exhibited on its shelves long rows of glass jars, in which shapeless dead creatures of a dull white color floated in yellow liquid. Above the fireplace hung a collection of photographic portraits of men and women, inclosed in two large frames hanging side by side with a space between them. The ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... side street there darted past her a small, shapeless figure in crumpled cap and apron: evidently a member of that lazy, over-indulged class, the domestic servant. Judging from the talk of the drawing-rooms, the correspondence in the papers, a singularly unsatisfactory body. They toiled not, lived ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... the convicts' point in single file, came a long line of some thirty canoes, uncouth, shapeless things, each hewed out of a great cypress log. In the end of each an Indian stood erect plying a long pole which sent their clumsy looking crafts forward at surprising speed. Magnificent savages they were, not one less than ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... from me his feeling that I was probably a little insane. He had large expressive eyes, a flat nose, wide mouth, thin hair, long neck and sallow skin, while his body was so thin and scrawny that his clothes always hung upon him in shapeless folds. His age was five and his point of view that of fifty. As to his toilettes, there must have been a large clothes-bin in the room back of the shop and Jacob must have daily dressed himself from this, leaning over the side and plucking from ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... later, I find her preparing for her confinement. A silk network is first spun on the ground, covering an extent about equal to the palm of one's hand. It is coarse and shapeless, but firmly fixed. This is the floor on which the Spider ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... steam from their glossy coats mingling with the ever-thickening density of the fog. On the white stone steps of the residence before which they waited was an almost invisible bundle, apparently shapeless and immovable. Neither of the two gorgeous personages in livery observed it; it was too far back in a dim corner, too unobtrusive, for the casual regard of their lofty eyes. Suddenly the glass doors ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... was a mere shapeless mass he picked up the empty cup. It was a thick stone-china cup, with a bar meant to protect his mustache across the top, a birthday present from Letty's mother. The association of memories acted as a further stimulus. Smash! After the cup went the stone-china sugar ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... bundle of straw, was a bundle of clothes. It moved as I drew near; it thrust a boot out over the tail-board; it shook itself; it emitted a curious sound between a grunt and a yawn; it raised itself up and shook off a portion of the straw; it thrust a red night-cap out of the mass of shapeless rubbish; the night-cap contained a head and a matted shock of hair; there was a withered, old-fashioned little face on the front part of the head, underneath the shock of hair, which opened its mouth and eyes, and gazed at me vacantly; it was an old man or a boy, I could ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... rats dangling by his tail! Three hopeful families were destroyed; rooms, vaults, and cellars examined and cleared; and Petty declared the race to be exterminated, picturesque ruffian that he was, in his shapeless hat, rusty velveteen, long leggings, a live ferret in his pocket, and festoons of dead rats over ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Pacific Southwestern, climbed down from his cramped seat on the fireman's box and stood scowling at the retracting index of the steam-gauge. When he was on his feet beside the little Irishman, you saw that he was a young man, well-built, square-shouldered and athletic under the muffling of the shapeless fur greatcoat; also, that in spite of the scowl, his clean-shaven face was strong and manly ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde |
