"Unthinkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out what I have already mentioned; that, together with the ring, the Rhamda offered our only clues to the Blind Spot. Destroy the man and we would destroy one of our two hopes of rescuing our friends from the unthinkable fate ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... exclaimed. "I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces. James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more articulate than the thin whirring of the locusts. He went quickly into the house, to the warm glow of his lamp, the memories ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the harmonising sense of safety and repose which that earlier passion had. This was altogether different in character, and made quite other demands on mind and heart. For it was fierce, watchful, anxious, violent with primitive instinct; the roots of it planted far back in that unthinkable remoteness of time, when the fertile womb of the great earth mother began to bring forth the first blind, simple forms of those countless generations of living creatures which, slowly differentiating themselves, slowly developing, have peopled this planet from that immeasurable past ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... might be, she would see him again before leaving Vienna, although not that day perhaps. Indeed, anything else was quite unthinkable. Why, then, was she a prey to this dreadful agitation, as though all were over between them? But why was his answer so long in coming?... He had, in any case, gone out to dinner—of course, he had no one to keep ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... enough, but it commends itself to every thought of justice and mercy; for sin must be cleansed from a perfect universe. But the unscriptural view of everlasting conscious torment that never reaches the point of full punishment, is unthinkable. Yet it is urged as a doctrine, and contended ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... startled. A ground-floor bedroom would have been unthinkable at Bedford Park. Still, in a flat.... Moreover, the idea had piquancy. The bedroom was sparsely furnished. Instead of a wardrobe it had a ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... against us and Austria. Such a development would gravely prejudice the lasting interests of Italy, for she would forfeit her political independence by so doing, and incur the risk of sinking to a sort of vassal state of France. Such a contingency is not unthinkable, for, in judging the policy of Italy, we must not disregard her relations with England as well as ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... be unthinkable; on Aditya, everybody respects authority. Whether it's respectable ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... see for yourself, now that you are face to face with the thing, that it is impossible. It's quite unthinkable that you can wander for the next month all alone in the desert with those damned niggers. Though my legal guardianship over you terminated last September I still have some moral obligations towards you. Though ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... succeeded cleric, only the garb and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters, yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... grimly to overthrow the new work at the school because somewhere down beneath his heart a pity and a wonder were stirring; pity at the perfectly useless struggle to raise the unraisable, a wonder at certain signs of rising. But it was impossible—and unthinkable, even if possible. So he squared his jaw and cheated Zora deliberately in the matter of the cut timber. He placed every obstacle in the way of getting tenants for the school land. Here Johnson, the "faithful nigger," was of incalculable assistance. He was among the first to hear ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... laws are bad, improve them. If the public is uneducated, educate it. If our system gives us poor lawmakers, change the system. But to give up the attempt at legal control, to leave things as they are or rather, to leave them to go from bad to worse, is unthinkable. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (Ai giovani d'ltalia), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word—that is to say, with His thought—and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... in his heart, perfectly aware of this, John Bull (for the reasons given by Richard Cox), is quite determined that nothing shall get him out of the house. "Separation is unthinkable," say English Ministers. The task of Ireland is to-day what it always has been—to get the stranger out of the house. It is no shame to Ireland or her sons, that up to this they have failed in each attempt. Those attempts are pillars of fire in her history, beacons of light in the desert of sin, ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... to do. She would sit down and try her courage in the dark. Possibly, under cover of night, she would come in closer to his camp-fire and sit there on her slicker. Or maybe there would be two men! But at present it was all undecidable, almost unthinkable; she must take this little respite from being lost and try to ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge, to turn my discreet way of life into ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... him; twelve hundred and fifty was unthinkable. Nightmares were coming to life before ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... all the worlds were made it is at least not unthinkable that in all the worlds of which our own atom is one, there has ruled a Force illimitable, unconquerable and inexplicable and whichsoever its world and whatsoever the sign denoting or the name given it, the Force—the Thing has been the same. Upon our own ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shrugging his shoulders. Plainly, Warde had discovered the fact of the debt. Probably that fool Beaumont-Greene had applied to his father, and the father had written to Warde. It was unthinkable that Warde knew more than this. Having reached this conclusion, Lovell turned over in his mind two or three specious lies ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Eucharist is deeply rooted in the tradition of the Church, and is the origin of the Christian Sunday, The Christians met together week by week to keep on the day of the Lord's rising that memorial of the crucified yet risen Christ which is also Christ's gift of Himself to men. It would have seemed unthinkable in the early days of Christianity for any baptized Christian, who was not prevented by unavoidable circumstances from being present, to be absent on the Lord's Day from the Lord's Table. It ought to be ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... and there was but this one bakery, hitherto sufficient, for the baker and his wife had been strong and industrious. The inn was in despair. The village was in despair. A Frenchman will go without meat, but life without bread is unthinkable. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... lawfulness of re-marriage for an innocent divorcee is, like the rest of their religious beliefs, a matter of opinion, the scruple of a character like Madge Riversdale is unthinkable and incredible. Such women do not trouble their heads about theological points; still less, make heroic sacrifices for their private and peculiar convictions. But those for whom the Church is a definite concrete reality—almost a person—governing and teaching ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... go along the next week end—or the next, either. The suggestion simply is unthinkable. Such digressions may be all right for the leisure class or for invalids; but for adults, live ones, strong and playing the game? A shrug and a tolerant smile end the discussion, as, hands still in his pockets, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... words were coming more rapidly now, though the man's thoughts and tone were still under control; and Carse, sitting there silently, felt that the climax was being reached; that soon something unthinkable, something of dread, would be ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... It is an accident; you never know when it is coming. I might have tried as much as a year to think of such a strange thing as an all-around left-handed man and I could not have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the more it eludes you; but it can't elude inspiration; you have only to bait with inspiration and you will get it every time. Look at Botticelli's "Spring." Those snaky women were unthinkable, but inspiration ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of possibility, beyond the realm of possibility; from which reason recoils; visionary; inconceivable &c (improbable) 473; prodigious &c (wonderful) 870; unimaginable, inimaginable^; unthinkable. impracticable unachievable; unfeasible, infeasible; insuperable; unsurmountable^, insurmountable; unattainable, unobtainable; out of reach, out of the question; not to be had, not to be thought of; beyond control; desperate &c (hopeless) 859; incompatible &c 24; inaccessible, uncomeatable^, impassable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... things; he observed with a smile how easy it was to take for granted embroidered bed and table linen, and mural paintings, and private cars, and gold plate. At first it had seemed to him strange to be waited upon by a white woman, and by a white man quite unthinkable; but he was becoming accustomed to having silent and expressionless lackeys everywhere about him, attending to his slightest want. So he presumed that if he waited long enough, he might even get used ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... done for him—that's flat!" declared Raymonde. "You don't suppose we can allow him to be taken to the workhouse? It's unthinkable! He'd break his poor old heart. And we'd miss him so, too. Won't the landlord change his mind ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: "Enslave, but feed us!" That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the greatest individualist in the whole history of art, and everything that he did grips the memory in a vice; but Florence without Michelangelo would still be very nearly Florence, whereas Florence without Brunelleschi is unthinkable. No dome to the cathedral, first of all; no S. Lorenzo church or cloisters; no S. Croce cloisters or Pazzi chapel; no Badia of Fiesole. Honour where honour is due. We should be singing the praises of Filippo Brunelleschi in every quarter of ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... there. If her doors stood open to him, they stood open to Bella and to Rodney Lanyon too. What else had she been trying for, if it were not to break down in all three of them the barriers of flesh and blood and to transmit the Power? In the unthinkable sacrament to which she called them they had all three partaken. And since the holy thing could suffer her to be thus permeated, saturated with Harding Powell, was it to be supposed that she could keep him to herself, that she would not pass him ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... adherence of only a minority of the population, but in the Middle Ages, religion was not only the most important and pervasive thing, it was a moral obligation on every man, woman and child, and rejection or even indifference was unthinkable. If once we grasp this fact," continues Cram, "we can understand how in the eleventh century, the whole world should cover itself with ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... figured out of this thing before now, but I can't. With that zone of force the Skylark would have everything imaginable—without it, we're exactly where we were before. That zone is immense, man—terrific—its possibilities are unthinkable—and I'm so cussed dumb that I can't find out how to use it intelligently—can't use it at all, for that matter. By its very nature it is impenetrable to any form of matter, however applied; and this calc here," slapping viciously the sheaf of papers containing his calculations, "shows ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... and loved her all the more for her helplessness and dependence. But Aunt Harriet, so strong and determined and capable, the oracle of the family, and the very epitome of all the cardinal virtues, surely she could not want any one to lean upon? The idea was unthinkable. Yet again and again it returned to her, and the consciousness of it ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... attention of the Chinese people from the simple worship of God and of the powers of nature. The philosophy associated with the name of Lao Tzu, who lived nobody knows when,—probably about B.C. 600—which is popularly known as Taoism, from Tao, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and unthinkable principle on which it is based, operated with Confucianism, though in an opposite direction, in dislimning the old faith while putting nothing satisfactory in its place. Confucianism, with its shadowy monotheistic background, was ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... lost. Death was inevitable. Of this there could be no doubt, but to die beneath the rending fangs of the carnivore, congenital terror of her kind—it was unthinkable. But there was an alternative. The lion was almost upon her—another instant and he would seize her. Pan-at-lee turned sharply to her left. Just a few steps she took in the new direction before she disappeared ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... not stop again until they had cantered up through the awakening bazaar, where unclean-looking merchants and their underlings rinsed out their teeth noisily above the gutters, and the pariah dogs had started nosing in among the muck for things unthinkable to eat. The sun had shortened up the shadows and begun to beat down through the gaps; the advance-guard of the shrivelling hot wind had raised foul dust eddies, and the city was ahum when she halted at last beside the big brick arch of the caravansary, where Mahommed ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she insisted. "That day at the Fulmers'—have you forgotten? When you said it would be sheer madness ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... you felt as I did how nice it would be to give Jean all the things that she has never had and which money can buy. I admit I am horribly disappointed about it, but I'm not at all sure that this odd trick of fortune's won't help you. Her attitude was that marriage with you was unthinkable; you had so much and she had so little. Well, this evens things up. Don't come. Don't write. Leave her alone to try her wings. She will want to try all sorts of schemes for helping people, and I'm afraid the poor child will get many bad falls. So long as she remains in Priorsford ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... unselfconscious girl he had ever met, almost as old-fashioned as his great grandmother must have been. Not that he set forth her virtues to bolster his determination to marry a girl of no family even in her own country; he was madly in love, and life without her was unthinkable; but he tabulated the thousand points to her credit for the benefit of ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... yourself the pains of such unprofitable lying. That Marian Heleigh should have been guilty of a vulgar liaison with, an actor is to me, who know her, unthinkable. No, madam! It was fear, not love, which drove you hither to-night, and now a baser terror urges you to screen yourself by vilifying her. The woman of whom you speak is yourself. The letters were written ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... build on it a wilder fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is. Those who think Bacon wrote Hamlet, and those who think several poets wrote the Iliad, can make out a deal of ingenious evidence for their doctrines. But it is all useless, because the first assumption in each case is unthinkable. It is psychologically impossible that the mind of Bacon should have produced Hamlet; but the impossibility is even more clamant when it comes to supposing that several poets, not in collaboration, but in haphazard succession, could produce a poem of vast sweeping unity and superbly ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... newspaper. With us the newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. A community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper—and we found that this community never had supported a newspaper—was unthinkable to us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they know about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told us that the churches recorded those things. How do they know about the scandal? And we remembered ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... his life (notably at the time when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he had breakfasted on bird-seed), he had been in uncommonly tight corners, but his luck had always extricated him. It struck him that it would be an unthinkable piece of bad sportsmanship on Fate's part to see him through so much, and then to abandon him just as he had arrived in sight of what was by far the biggest thing of his life. Of course, his view of what constituted ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... be greatly extended are sufficient to prove that a strong feeling existed in favor of a Pacific Republic standing wholly aloof from the coming struggle. It is unthinkable that a Senator and a Congressman, and especially the Governor of the State, should have voiced such sentiments had there not been at least a probability that this might be the course adopted in case the Union was ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... utmost powers of persuasion on Mr. Marchmont which I should certainly have done on my own account, being now on the very tiptoe of curiosity to hear Thorndyke's explanation of the unthinkable conclusion at which he had arrived—and the subject dropped completely; nor could I, during the rest of the evening, induce my colleague to reopen it even in the most indirect or ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... same time, we may apparently dismiss belief in a great personal power of evil and in his realm of everlasting torture. The independent origin of such a power of evil is unthinkable; so is the struggle between the two powers and its end. There is no absolutely distinct line between good and evil. The shades of ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... he said. "This is a quarrel, Sabina—our first and last, I hope. Never, never let anything come between us. That's unthinkable and I won't have it. You must give and take, my precious girl. And so must I. But look at it. What on earth happens to us if Daniel fires me out ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... but it was pardonable because of Sally's partiality for Joe. He went groggily into the special shower arrangement in the Platform. In orbit, there would be no gravity, so a tub bath was unthinkable. The shower cabinet was a cubbyhole with handgrips on all four sides and straps into which one could slip his feet. When Joe turned handles, needle sprays sprang at him from all sides, and simultaneously a ventilator fan began to run. When in space that fan could ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... almost every error of the ancient thinkers on their neglecting to verify their opinions, announces that there are two kinds of verification, the Real and the Ideal, the ideal test of truth being that its negative is unthinkable, and by the application of that test judges that gravitation must be universal even in the stellar regions, because in the absence of proof to the contrary, "the idea of matter without gravity is unthinkable;"—when those from whom it was least to be expected thus set up acquired necessities of thought ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... which he told me that his right leg had been amputated, and that he was lucky to get off so easily. That made me rebellious and very, very bitter. And it was against God that I felt worst—God who had allowed this unthinkable thing to be. ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... Immense populations of peace and unpreparedness were growing up who would discourage a world war—would not permit it. There were increasing millions of people who had never seen a soldier, never seen a battleship. Would they want to pay the cost in blood and billions of treasure? It was unthinkable. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... unthinkable, intolerable. He flung the evil suggestion from him, but it left a burning wound behind. There was no escape from the fact that she was on terms of intimacy with the man with whom that woman's name had been shamefully associated. And—remembering the discomfiture she had betrayed at their meeting—he ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... her go, and she heard him laugh as she broke away. But she did not wait for more. To linger was unthinkable. Urged by that imperative, inner prompting she turned and fled, not pausing for ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... which was ominous, because Sadie had generally an object. Of course, if Bob were free and content to marry a girl from the settlement, Sadie would not be a bad choice. She certainly had some virtues. But Bob was not free, and it was unthinkable that a man who had won the love of the girl whose portrait Festing knew should be satisfied with another ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... won't be able to bear any of those things, least of all the last. You will have some involuntary shudder of horror at him, or you will obey your heart and run to comfort Daisy, and give it all away. Yours is one of the schemes that don't come off, because they are unthinkable." ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... it was intolerable to the land-hungry statesmen of Downing Street and the Quai d'Orsay. That a small and defenseless Oriental nation should be permitted to block the colonial expansion of two powerful and acquisitive European nations was unthinkable. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... to remain inactive while there was a chance to save her father's life was unthinkable. And so, for his sake, she kept on and the ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... became very simple then. She wanted to go to Manon. The Federation—or something else, something quite unthinkable at the moment but comparable to the Federation in power and influence—wanted to keep ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... of nothing more honest and more sensible than to undo the wrong that ignorance and inexperience has accomplished. No woman's moral or spiritual salvation is dependent upon her wearing the fetters of a marriage abhorred. Such a stupid sacrifice is unthinkable to modesty and decency, and is repulsive to common sense. And any god who is supposed to demand that of humanity is not the true God, but is as grotesque and false as any African idol or any deity ever worshipped by Puritan or Pagan or ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... effeminizing process occurs in mind and character. As a result of this, he maintains, our men increasingly fear hardships and seek to avoid them; and life and even personal appearance are given a value which is absurd, considering the inevitableness of death in any event, the perfectly unthinkable number of myriads of human beings who exist, have existed, and will ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... street between the two raised walks were rushing back and forth the strange vehicles I had seen from the window. There was no animal pulling or pushing any one of them, yet they never halted their swift rush, and carried many people at unthinkable speed. Sometimes those who walked stepped before the rushing vehicles, and then from them came terrible warning snarls or moans that made the walkers ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... turned on Miela and her affairs? Why, think of it—this little woman sent to Washington, questioned, photographed, written about, made sport of, perhaps, in the newspapers! And all for nothing. It is unthinkable." ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... age. To her mind, one fusty old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college, the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... of the best thing we can originate with it? There is a great variety of opinion as to what is desirable; and it is only natural and right that it should be so, for otherwise we should be without any individuality, which means that we should have no real life in us—in fact such a world is unthinkable; it would be a world that had ceased to move, it would be a dead world. So it is the varied conception of "the Good" that makes the world go on. Uniformity means reducing things to one dead level. But on the other hand there must be Unity—unity of action resulting from unity of ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... had not gone into society, and women to him were simply undeveloped men, to be treated kindly and indulgently. As mental companions, the idea was unthinkable. And love was entirely out of his orbit—all of his energies had been worked up into great thoughts. Doctor Bain says that at twenty-five John Stuart Mill was as ignorant of sex as a girl ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... hell of the spirit. It is here and now. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine a God of Love devising hideous tortures hereafter, for the punishment of the pigmies who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable—it's almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we can understand and thank God for. But the other—oh, the other is sheer imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the whale. It just doesn't go." Again she paused, then very frankly held out her hand ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... just solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning the truth—that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... deadly, equine duels. The Kentucky horse had no fighting experience, and his greater bulk and height would mean little against the wily cunning of the murderer who had already tasted blood too many times. To allow Shiloh to be ripped to pieces was utterly unthinkable. ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... lonelier, to which she and Tess could be abducted. Tess might be left, perhaps, to make her own way back and give her own explanation of flight with a maharajah's daughter; but for Yasmini abduction to the hills could only mean one of two things: unthinkable surrender, or sure death by any of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... course. A ham, surely. Bacon, no doubt. Yellow butter, crusty new bread, and beer. Indeed, let the rest go, so long as there was beer. But beer, of course, was beyond any question; an inn without beer was unthinkable. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... than to see the difficulties. He sees that such a league might mean, in theory at least, the giving over in some possible crisis the command of the British Fleet to an officer of some other nationality. That's unthinkable to any red-blooded son of these islands. Seeing a theoretical possibility even of raising such a question, the British mind stops and refuses to go further—refuses in most cases even to inquire seriously whether any such contingency ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... leaving everything that was comfort in a bleak world, everything that was safe and tried and known in a world of unthinkable perils and mysteries. Only this he knew, still a child, still on the inside of his mother's house.... He knew now how terrible, how deep, how human were the cords that bound him to his mother, how fierce the love, by the fear and deadly helplessness he felt.... ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the kingdom itself seems to have quite slipped away, and the church is in its place. Such a situation must have been very puzzling to any Jew. His horizon was full of a kingdom—a Jew kingdom. Anything else was unthinkable. These intense Orientals could not conceive of anything else. It had taken a set of visions to swing Peter and the other church leaders into line even on letting outsiders ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... play off one part of it against another—the Gospels against the Epistles, or the Epistles against the Gospels—is to be sternly resented and resisted. To St. Paul himself any such rivalry would have been impossible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was no claim which he made with more passionate vehemence than that the message which he delivered was not his, but Christ's. "As touching the gospel which was preached by me," he says, "neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... "And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but look upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her. It was the real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got only madder. I reformed. Think of that! Think of what a slip of a woman can do ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... a sudden death. Was it a murder? It was recorded as an accidental death in the inquest. If it was a murder then who did it? There is one possibility, but it is unthinkable. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... go among people and see every standard I set up, ignored. I go to the theatre and see plays that embody everything I supposed was unthinkable, let alone unutterable. But the actors utter everything, and the audience thinks everything—and sometimes laughs. I can't do that—yet. But ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... and a little spate of energy, and I shall try conclusions with him yet. But who and what is he? Ah! there is the question which stands between me and my sleep. How many theories do I form, only to discard each in turn! It is all so utterly unthinkable. And yet the cry, the footmark, the tread in the cavern—no reasoning can get past these I think of the old-world legends of dragons and of other monsters. Were they, perhaps, not such fairy-tales as we have thought? Can it be that there is some fact which underlies them, and am ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is unthinkable, Captain, that he should command the "Speedwell." The jealous gods have not ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to consider getting whipped in a war that was forced on us. One way and another, no matter what we privately think of our politicians and industrial barons and our institutions generally, it is becoming unthinkable to the Anglo-Saxon that the German shall stalk rough-shod over us. We are beginning—we common people—to hate him and his works. Look at you and me. We were aloof at first. We are intelligent. We have learned to saddle feeling with logic. We have not been stampeded by ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Hebrides, and kindred spots with all their savage, bestial orgies of alternate unbridled lust and unnamable cruelty. Let it be so. For my part, I rejoice that I have no tale of weeks of drunkenness, of brutal rape, treacherous murder, and almost unthinkable torture to tell. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... aside from all your companions and sit very quietly, and if you sit long enough and quiet enough it may come to you; but this thing alone of all things you cannot steal, nor can it be given to you by the County Council. It cannot be communicated, and yet you may get it. It is unspeakable but not unthinkable, and it is born as certainly and unaccountably as you were yourself, and is of just as little immediate consequence. Long, long ago in the dim beginnings of the world there was a careless and gay young man who said—"Let truth go to hell"—and it went there. It was his misfortune that he had ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... a real prayer from person to person. To pray to the Cosmic Spirit, to the Higher Being, to the Kantian, Hegelian, quintessential, formless God is impossible and unthinkable. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... allow feeling to unduly influence their thinking. The sentimental nurse, for instance, may find it very difficult to give an ordered hypodermic. The patient dreads the pain and the nurse fears hurting her. Suppose she were to fail to give it on such grounds. This is an almost unthinkable case. But the very nurse who agrees that such an emotional weakling should not be allowed to train, will help her patient, even when recuperating nicely, to grow inexcusably self-centered, by sympathizing with every complaint, warning her at every turn, by allowing her and even ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... significant, perhaps, was the transformation of the former conceptions of the nature and meaning of the world and life, through the discoveries of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually compelled all thinking people to realize the unthinkable duration of the cosmic processes and the comparative littleness of our earth in the vast extent of the universe. Absolutely revolutionary for almost all lines if thought was the gradual adoption by almost all ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... was at pains to accompany this query with a broadside that rendered such a supposition most unthinkable. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... that was good in Elodie. She took the war and its obligations, as she had taken her professional work. Through all her flabbiness ran the rod of steel. She suffered, looking forward with terror to the unthinkable future. Already one of her friends, Jeanne Duval, comedienne, was a widow ... What would life be without Andre? She trembled before the illimitable blankness. The habit of him was the habit of her life, like eating and drinking; his direction ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Urquhart and tragedy; Urquhart and death. It was that which blackened the radiant morning, not the mercifully abrupt cessation of a worn-out life. For Peter death had two sharply differentiated aspects—one of release to the tired and old, for whom the grasshopper was a burden; the other of an unthinkable blackness of tragedy—sheer sharp loss that knew no compensation. It was not with this bitter face that death had stepped into their lives on this clear morning. One could imagine that weary figure glad to end his ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... was a logical one; the absolutely self-existent could not be thought in conjunction with attributes which either admitted any external influencing Him, or any external influenced by Him. The prevailing dualism he considered to be, as an ultimate theory of the universe, unthinkable and therefore false. Outside the Self-existent there could be no second self-existent, otherwise each would be conditioned by the existence of the other, and the Self-existent would be gone. Anything different from the Self-existent must be of the non-existent, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... valued at many thousands? The wisest professor of geology and expert of mines cannot explain it. This, I say, is the gold and silver from ornaments employed in temples of the idols of ancient races, who lived unthinkable thousands of years ago. The very stones of their temples have crumbled and been decomposed, but the precious metal has been formed into nuggets, according to the natural laws of molecular attraction, and under the impulse of gravity and in obedience to the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... form an alternative Government. But they were deplorably led, they could agree on no policy, and their warmest supporters in the Press and in the country were the first to admit that the formation of an alternative Conservative Administration was unthinkable. Nevertheless, there could be no rival for the leadership. Mr. Balfour, aloof, indifferent, without enthusiasm, and without convictions, although discredited in the country and harassed in his attempts to save his party from Protection, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... suggests that, as they now know the exact force of their opponent and are satisfied they cannot overcome him by force, they damage the new world which the Almighty has recently created, for submission is unthinkable weakness. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... It was a mighty thing. From its construction Carthoris could but dimly speculate upon its unthinkable antiquity. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "You plannin' a trip! Where in the world do you want to go?" Such a thing as Mary going on a trip, and, above all, unaccompanied by himself, was unheard of and unthinkable. ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... the receipts with half the payments, and yields double the profit per acre and four times the profit on capital. The moral of all this is clear. Unless the nation is willing to go back to protection for agriculture, which I am glad to believe in the general interest unthinkable, and unless it is willing to guarantee the farmer against loss from that method of agriculture which means most production and most employment, we must let the farmer set the tune and farm in the way it best suits him to farm. ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... his family are. Of course I don't agree with them—perhaps I have broader views—(with a shrug) but I understand how they feel. They consider that any union without a church marriage is—well, to put it mildly, unthinkable. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... down at his drawing-table, and, his head buried in his hands, tried to think out this latest complication. Fakrash had transformed Professor Futvoye into a one-eyed mule. It would have seemed incredible, almost unthinkable, once, but so many impossibilities had happened to Horace of late that one more made little or no ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable—Linda realized now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life—and, of course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced enmity ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... this time was a certain quality which those who like it would call "uniqueness of aspect," and those who do not like it "not quite coming off." I mean the thing meant something from one standpoint; but its mark was that the smallest change of standpoint made it unmeaning and unthinkable—a foolish joke. A beggar painted by Rembrandt is as solid as a statue, however roughly he is sketched in; the soul can walk all round him like a public monument. We see he would have other aspects; and that they would all be the aspects of a beggar. Even if one did not admit ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... eye. All of a sudden I saw what he really meant. He really meant that this would be a splendid place to pick out another white horse. He knew no more than I did why it was done; but he was in some unthinkable prehistoric tradition, because he wanted to do it. He became so acute in sensibility that he could not bear to pass any broad breezy hill of grass on which there was not a white horse. He could hardly ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... human machine, which after all propels the machinery of the world and is the great dynamic force that lies back of all industry and progress. Return to the old standards of wage and industry in employment are unthinkable. The terrible tragedy of war which has just ended and which has brought the world to the verge of chaos and disaster would be in vain if there should ensue a return to the conditions of the past. Europe itself, whence has come the unrest which now holds the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... never directly asked himself that question, knowing beforehand that he would have to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only with his feelings but with the very possibility of life. Life without Princess Mary, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. "And why should she marry?" he thought. "To be unhappy for certain. There's Lise, married to Andrew—a better husband one would think could hardly be found nowadays—but is she contented with her lot? And who would marry Marie for love? Plain ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness, coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the news ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... strained excitement. Things were too big to grasp. It was just the other day that 'The Blue Book,' most respectable of Oxford magazines, had published an article showing that a war between Great Britain and Germany was almost unthinkable. It had been written by an undergraduate who had actually been at a German university. Had the multitudinous Anglo-German societies at Oxford worked in vain? The world came crashing round our ears. Naymier was urgent for an ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... I thought you would come back to your old self by and by. In my poor proud soul I thought I was punishing you. How little, dear, I dreamed of this! The thought of really losing you never once entered my heart. It was unthinkable. I do not believe it yet. Such love as ours, such tenderness and devotion as you gave to me once, the delirium of love's joy that found itself in my motherhood and wrought itself in the forms of our babies—no, Frank, it cannot die, unless God dies! And I shall not lose you at last, ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... unthinkable to conceive of a star existing in so-called space, and constantly radiating out its light and heat for no purpose at all. All Nature teaches us that there is not a single thing in existence but what ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... The total loss of their yawl and all its precious contents, the wreck of their expedition almost at its very start, the fact that Beatrice and he were now alone upon a narrow ledge of granite in the midst of a stupendous cataract that drained the ocean down to unknown, unthinkable depths, the knowledge that she and he now were without arms, ammunition, food, shelter, fire, anything at all, defenseless in a wilderness such as no humans ever yet had faced—all this ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... with them, and Dartmouth was sensible that they produced a somewhat uncanny but strangely responsive effect upon himself. But what did it mean? That in some occult way she had been granted a glimpse into the depths of his nature was unthinkable. He was not averse to indulging a belief in affinity; and that this girl was his was not a disagreeable idea; but his belief by no means embraced a second, to the effect that the soul of one's antitype is as an open book to the other. Could her mind be affected? ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the nerve: the occasion passed: and nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness, half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue—a performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office. The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or by any of their friends, but by Rudyard Kipling. The case had meant a great deal to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... unthinkable. You don't know what you're suggesting. Abandon one of my clubs that my father put me up for when I was a boy! I'd as soon join a Trade Union. No! My innocent but gluttonous children ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... it states sober historical fact, is scarcely credible to those who only know twentieth-century Japan. The spread of superstition has gone pari passu with the spread of education, and a revolt against the Mikado is now unthinkable. Time and again, in the midst of political strife, the Mikado has been induced to intervene, and instantly the hottest combatants have submitted abjectly. Although there is a Diet, the Mikado is an absolute ruler—as absolute as ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... No. Oh, no." The woman's instant denial was horrified. "Not the McDonald lot. They're all revolutionaries. All of them. It's—it's unthinkable. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... of harmony with them. It was a mere falsification of the law of aerial perspective, but it startled, almost terrified me. We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a warning of unthinkable calamity. So now the apparently causeless movement of the herbage and the slow, undeviating approach of the line of disturbance were distinctly disquieting. My companion appeared actually frightened, and I could ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin remember. It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had gained to attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... this had taken place ten years ago, and the French Commandant had been an English Major? The situation, of course, simply could not have arisen; it would have been unthinkable. But if it had arisen the train would certainly have stopped for good; probably the world would have come to an end. As it was, what did happen? Let me say at once that both the Corporal and the Commandant behaved with a generosity which was entirely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... double-edged, and that the wielding of it must be fraught with as much danger for Richard as for their common enemy. For to betray Mr. Wilding and the plot would scarce be possible without betraying young Westmacott, and that was unthinkable, since to ruin Richard—a thing he would have done with a light heart so far as Richard was himself concerned—would be to ruin his ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... satisfied with its own boring existence. Not only is there no change—but no one wants change. My father was a farmer, so I should have been a farmer too—if I had listened to the advice of my betters. It was unthinkable, as well as forbidden for me to do anything else. And everything I wanted to do was against the law. I was fifteen before I learned to read—out of a book stolen from a noble school. After that there was no turning back. By the time I stowed ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... never expected anything like this. That Belgium, peace-loving Belgium, with her neutrality guaranteed by practically all the great civilized Powers, should, in spite of it, be about to be forced into a great European war had seemed unthinkable. Yet so it was, and it seemed that war was inevitable, for Max did not believe Belgium would ever allow foreign troops to cross her territory to attack a country with which she was at peace. With Belgium, then, on the verge of war, it behoved him to look to his own safety; for it was ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... the sort of a girl who never means to marry, you—your attitude seems to take away the possibility of my changing my mind; it dictates to me, giving me no choice, no liberty, no personal freedom in the matter. . . . It's as though you considered me somehow utterly out of the question—radically unthinkable as a woman. And you assume to take for granted that I also regard you as—as hors de concours. . . . Those are my grievances, Captain Selwyn. . . . And I don't regard you so. And I—and it troubles me to be ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... pure, sensitive, mean little soul away to Fremantle or somewhere in that direction. And of course the little girl went away with her too. What could poor Davidson have done with a little girl on his hands, even if she had consented to leave her with him—which is unthinkable. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... of her time, the greatest intellect of her generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures around her,—it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay. This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the sweet old ballad, singing it in a clear, bell-like voice to a pantomime of clasped hands and rolling eyes. "It would be bad enough in an ordinary year, but to rend us apart from the Vernons—oh, no, it's unthinkable!" ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mixed with the crop was a large proportion of barley or bearded wheat, which took a truly fiendish delight in slowly but relentlessly making its way up my sleeves or down my back. In this predicament it seemed almost unthinkable that I should ever have been so foolish in my schooldays as to pick barley heads and deliberately put them a little way up my coat-sleeves, the barbs downwards, expressly for the pleasure of feeling them crawling up my ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... with widening eyes. This woman with the false hair, the false teeth, the false murderous smile—what was she offering her but immunity from some unthinkable crime? Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood. She had come to this dreadful place because she knew of no ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... be one of their happiest effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the far recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other of his odd ways to their influence. He might not always be, at any rate on first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, but there was in any case one reflection he could always cause you to ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Three Indians, Clark decided regretfully, would make a tame showing on the warpath, however much they might lend themselves to the spirit of the joke. He did not quite know how he was going to manage it, but he was hopeful still. It was unthinkable that real live Indians should be permitted to come and go upon the ranch without giving Evadna Ramsey, straight from New Jersey, ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... navy of the United States and unquestioned fidelity to duty justly entitle them to the command of a vessel of this character, instead of utilizing the services of men of questioned loyalty and doubtful allegiance to command our naval vessels? For such an act of base and unpardonable treachery is unthinkable to a Negro. Rather would he most willingly have seen his last drop of rich loyal blood flow in torrents of effusion than to leave to his progeny such a ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... essential nature. For Ranny's mother, such reference would have been the last profanity, a sacrilege committed against the divinities of the hearth and of the marriage bed. But for that phrase Mr. Ransome's weakness must have been passed in silence as the unspeakable, incredible, unthinkable ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... extinction of those least fit, that what is available may be reserved to those who can make best use of it. Astronomers tell us there are probably dead worlds whose spectrums tell us that they are of the same material as our own planet and presumably once the abode of sentient beings, for it is unthinkable that of all the worlds which occupy space which has no confines, the small planet which we inhabit alone supports sentient life. What tragedies darkened the last centuries of life in those dying worlds or what may happen to our own remote ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... artisans actually meant to take up arms, shoot off guns and hack at the bodies of their fellow-men with swords and spears. This thing, at the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed incredible. To politicians it was simply unthinkable. For politics are a game played in strict accordance with a set of rules. For several centuries nobody in these islands had broken the rules. It had come to be regarded as impossible that any one could break them. No one expects his opponent ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... brother, M. Goldberg, she explained, had determined upon remarriage. She, Sarah, felt that henceforth she would be in the way of everybody; she would have no home. Leah married to Rochez; a new and young Mme. Goldberg ruling in the old house of the Rue des Medecins! Ah, it was unthinkable! ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... "It's unthinkable, isn't it? And yet, I'm proud to say, it's true. I may add that many Americans feel humiliated when they offer a tip to a man—it's like branding him with ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... mental content of life. This implies a different literature, a different philosophy, and a different history, and so soon as I come to talk to him I find that though it remains unavoidable that we should assume the correspondence of the two populations, man for man—unless we would face unthinkable complications—we must assume also that a great succession of persons of extraordinary character and mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... westward asserting sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations reasserted their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... out of all official attitude. Such a thing as Allenwood's resignation from the force had never for a moment entered his thoughts. It would have been simply unthinkable. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... attended, one round of cheers was given him as "the President of the United States" another as "Roosevelt," and a third as "Teddy." Had McKinley been in his place a corresponding variation would have been unthinkable. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... only is it capable, but the whole trend of society is in that direction. All the social forces are driving man on to a time when the old selective law will be annulled. There is no escaping it, save by the intervention of catastrophes and cataclysms quite unthinkable. It is inexorable. It is inexorable because the common man demands it. The twentieth century, the common man says, is his day; the common man's day, or, rather, the dawning of the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... for her, and I couldn't even go across for some time yet, but her father's folks have died off, and there's nothing to be expected from her mother's relatives. Any way, she can't be left to face the blow alone. It's unthinkable. Well, there's only one course open to me, and that's to raise as many dollars on a mortgage as I can, fit the place out with fixings brought from Winnipeg, and sow a double acreage with borrowed capital. I'll send for her as soon as I can get the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... declared disgust, they are always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors, lawyers or doctors—they are all tarred with the same brush. Their common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home, because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily, and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge of life on a large ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of resentment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence—was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side—a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... flesh and blood. Life spread before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for him to conceive of it ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... she would speak," he cried. "I knew, but the telegraph gave us good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting—children of unspeakable shame—are we here for the look of the thing?" It was two feet of wire rope frayed at the ends, and it did wonders as Peroo leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the language of ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... be more galling," said he, after reflecting, "than what people would say if we lived off your grandmother. No, going there is unthinkable. I like her, and we'd get on ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... for? What are you waiting for? What is the hot, plumb weight of your desire on me? You have a hot, unthinkable desire of ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence |
