"Airless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were found in their beloved temperance hotel near Bloomsbury—a clean, airless establishment much patronized by provincial England. They always perched there before crossing the great seas, and for a week or two would fidget gently over clothes, guide-books, mackintosh squares, digestive ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the origin of this epidemic, and imputed it, not to infected substances imported from the East or West, but to a morbid constitution of the atmosphere, owing wholly or in part to filthy streets, airless habitations, and ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... had suspected before; that on so small a schooner the mate took rank with the men rather than the afterguard. Cabin accommodations were of course very limited. My own lurked in the waist of the ship—a tiny little airless hole. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Then he had said to himself that it was the night wind caught in some cranny of the house, and striving to get free. He had thrown open his window and leaned out, and trembled, when he found that the hot night was breathless, airless, that no leaf danced in the elm that shaded his study, that the ivy climbing beneath the sill did not stir as he gazed down at ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and they made good time, reaching by dusk, as they had hoped to do, a farmer's house on the downward dip of the mountain to the east. Here, their story being told, they were hospitably received, and Ann Mary was clapped into the airless inner room and fed with gruel and dipped toast. But she had had fresh air and exercise all day, and a hearty meal of cold venison and corn bread at their noonday rest, so she ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... I will wear this dagger then; Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. 90 Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat: Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; 95 But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself. If I know this, know all the world besides, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... to be a teacher! After graduating from high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously inefficient workmen will take to do "a certain piece of work." Una was honest enough to ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... somewhere. Alan grappled with a huge leg of meat while two fellow starmen helped him ease it into a crate. Their hammers pounded down as they nailed the crate together, but not a sound could be heard in the airless vault. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... to bed!" he whispered very cautiously. Within a few feet of them was an airless kennel where Louisa, the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... this bank I lie, Beneath the drooping, airless leaves, And watch the long, low sunset die, On silent, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Gideon, or wielded the sword of the Maccabee.—I must stop again; my poor restless child is coming into the room at this moment, complaining of the chill, in one of the finest days of summer. She says that this villa has grown sunless, airless, and comfortless. Finding that I am writing to you, she sends her best wishes; and bids me ask, what is the fashionable colour for mantles in Paris, and also what is become of that 'wandering creature,' Lafontaine, if you should happen to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... at Friars' Holm, usually a coolly green oasis in the midst of the surrounding streets, seemed as airless as any back court or alley, and Coppertop, who had been romping ever more and more flaggingly with a fox-terrier puppy he had recently acquired, finally gave up the effort and flung himself down, red-faced and panting, on the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... equivalents. Of the space ship described, the Comet, no trace has been found. It must be buried under the rim of one of the hundreds of nearby Lunar craters—the result, as some astronomers have long suspected and as Dunal's story verifies, of a great swarm of meteors striking the unprotected, airless moon.] ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... time that night, thinking, not of the bridge nor of the "crow's nest," not of the Captain nor of the supposed Hugh Dalton, but of the child in the steerage. How stifling it must be down there to-night! It was hot and airless enough here, where Blythe had a stateroom to herself,—separated from her mother's by a narrow passageway, and where the port-holes had been open all day. Now, to be sure, they were closed; for the ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... one warm cloudy finger breaks The frost and the heart's airless black soil shakes; Love grown a man uprises, serious, bright With mind remembering now ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... been a terrific storm, lasting three days, but the hurricane shutters were put up, and proved a great protection, though the house was dark and airless. Trees went crashing all around us. There was a curious exhilaration in the air, and the natives shouted with glee whenever anything came down. The road was filled with debris from the storm, which had to be cleared away before any one could pass. In the evening ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... man. Love will give you a delicacy of perception, an ingenuity, a persuasiveness, which no heart shall be able to resist. Love will reconcile the accomplished scholar to a life among savages, and will carry the refined and cultured lady up to the sultry attic, or down to the damp and airless cellar. Love will bear all, believe all, hope all, endure all, if only it may win ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted. She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... of a batch of a dozen, and had never been properly named. The wind was blowing from the stockyards on the dark hour when she arrived. It penetrated even to the small airless chamber where she struggled for her first breath—one of a "flat" in the poorest tenement in the worst slum in Chicago. Huddled in smelly rags by a hastily summoned neighbour from the floor above, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... threatened to break last night still held off, but the spirit of the weather had changed. It was no longer bright and clear, but sunless, airless, heated, silent—the stillness which seems to presage as much sorrow to man as it heralds tumult to Nature. Leam, however—interpenetrated by her love, which gave what it felt and saw what it brought—always remembered this early day as the ideal of peace ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... long-necked vases swiftly, carrying each vase, when filled, to the drawing-room—a painful apartment, crowded with knick-knacks until it resembled a bazaar stall, with knobby and unsteady bamboo furniture and much drapery of a would-be artistic nature. It was stuffy and airless. Cecilia wrinkled her pretty nose as she entered. Mrs. Rainham held pronounced views on the subject of what she termed the "fresh-air fad," and declined to let London air—a smoky commodity at best—attack ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... when a cruising space vehicle communicates with another space vehicle or its orbiting station, it may use a beam of light instead of conventional radio. Not that radio will be inoperative under the airless conditions of space—rather the reverse—but there is reason to believe that communication by sunlight not only will be cheaper but will entail carrying much simpler and lighter equipment for certain specialized space applications. (The Air Force) is developing an experimental system that will ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... are a very ancient, very widespread race. The Croens came into our space-area recently, as time goes, only three centuries by your time. They were lost. There were only a few hundred in a great ship, and they settled upon a small uninhabited and airless satellite of our home planet, were there for many years before they were discovered. When the Jivros attacked them to destroy them, they found in spite of their innumerable ships and countless warriors they could not harm them. But their attacks angered the superior ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... again, as he entered the room. There was a close, faint, airless smell in it. Cobwebs, pendulous and brown with dirt, hung from the ceiling. The grimy window-panes saddened all the light that poured through them faintly. He looked round him, and saw no furniture anywhere; no sign that the room had ever been lived in, ever entered even, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... of filth, and the unpaved lanes, in wet weather, became deep pits of mud. We can understand why the townspeople wore overshoes when they went out, and why even the saints in the pictures were represented with them on. The living were crowded together in many-storied houses, airless and gloomy; the dead were buried close at hand in crowded churchyards. Such unsanitary conditions must have been responsible for much of the sickness that was prevalent. The high death rate could only be offset by a birth rate correspondingly ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... in summer or try to rapidly establish a cooling leaf canopy to shade raised beds. Except for a few microorganisms, soil animals breathe oxygen just like other living things and so are dependent on an adequate air supply. Where soil is airless due to compaction, poor drainage, or large proportions of very fine clay, soil animals are ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... simpler in a thatched cottage than in a dome on the airless Moon, easier to understand when the Villains are all pure black-hearted villains, and the Heroes are all pure White Souled Heroes. Just look how simple history is compared with science-fiction! It's simple—but ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... are, have been, or may be, equally ill served. Take the old-established Bull's Head with its old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established frouziness up-stairs and down-stairs, its old-established cookery, and its old-established principles of plunder. Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white poultices, of apothecaries' powders in rice for curry, of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... over Garth and a hot and swollen cloud was hanging over Morfe High Moor. Above the gray ramparts the very east was sultry. In the orchard under the low plum-trees it was as airless as ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... flitting over its surface; and neither tempest nor day that is radiant and calm is able to bring enfeeblement unto the life of our soul. Enfeeblement comes through our dwelling, by night and by day, in the airless room of our cold, self-satisfied, trivial, ungenerous thoughts, at a time when the sky all around our abode is reflecting the ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... both, and especially to Harry. His mother had begged him to stop at home and let the letter be sent over to Fairfield, but he wanted the gratification of telling Bessie his news himself; and the ride in the hot, airless weather had been too fatiguing. Bessie took up a piece of work and sat by the window, silent, soothing. He turned his chair to face her, and from his position he had a distant view of the sea—a dark blue line on the horizon. He had been fond of the sea and of boats from his first ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... degree a realization of the picture that astronomers conjure to themselves when the moon is nearly full, and they look down into the great plain which is called the Ocean of Storms, and watch the shadows of sterile and airless peaks follow a slow procession across its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... theatre crowded and airless, and the performance, it seemed to him, intolerably bad. He stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest, but politeness might have caused her to ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... notably the Via dei Condotti, at the far end of which the Trinity de' Monti, all golden in the glory of the sinking sun, appeared above that famous flight of steps, the triumphal Scala di Spagna—Pierre still and ever retained the impression of disillusion which the narrow, airless thoroughfare had conveyed to him: the "palaces" looked to him like mournful hospitals or barracks, the Piazza Colonna suffered terribly from a lack of trees, and the Trinity de' Monti alone took his fancy by ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... spent their holidays in Rue d'Isabelle. Besides themselves only six or eight boarders remained. All their friends were away holiday-making; but they worked hard, preparing their lessons for the masters who, holidayless as they, had stayed behind in white, dusty, blazing, airless Brussels, to give lectures to the scanty class at ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... blacked out, receiving some of the concussion of the exploding rocket. When his eyes snapped open he was floating like a feather in open, airless space. His rubberoid space suit, living up to its rigid tests, had inflated to its elastic limit. But it held and within its automatic units began feeding him oxygen, heat and radio-power. He had a chance, now, ...
— Shipwreck in the Sky • Eando Binder
... close, and airless. The row of iron-gated openings in the opposite wall, as you entered, reminded you of prison windows. Every passer-by could look in through the railings to see how the garden grew; the flowers in the little square borders never ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... knew that the men were feeling about overhead; while being able to think pretty clearly now, I came to the conclusion that we had been thrown down here, the hatches put on again, and the tarpaulin spread over them, and that was why it was so airless and hot. ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... to remember about this hunk of rock? Tiny, airless, mountainless—the most monotonous piece of matter we've ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... alarm-bell to direct intelligent attention to the cause of the pain. If pain does not force the elimination of its own cause, it is an added evil. The death of the innocent, through oppression, child labor, dirt diseases, or airless tenements, ought to arrest the attention of the community and put the social cause of their death in the limelight. In that case they have died a vicarious death which helps to redeem the rest from a social evil, and anyone who utilizes their ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... an old trotter who whirled them along so briskly that the pace created a little breeze; but when they reached Hepburn the full heat of the airless morning descended on them. At the railway station the platform was packed with a sweltering throng, and they took refuge in the waiting-room, where there was another throng, already dejected by the heat and the long waiting for retarded trains. Pale mothers were struggling with fretful ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... were presently to see, but that airless, star-dusted sky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... agony crept over Tamara; her brain grew confused in the hot, airless room. It seemed as if everything swam round her. All she saw clearly ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... story ready," he commented as the other three joined him by the hatch to don the suits which would enable them to cross the airless, heatless ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... could not account for the way in which the lights swam before his eyes and his steps reeled, as he was taken down a dark ladder-like staircase and into a low long room with a swinging lamp suspended from the ceiling. It felt close and airless after the coldness of the night, and everything swam in a mist before his eyes; but he heard a voice not altogether unfamiliar say in authoritative accents: "Let him sit down, and give him a stoup of wine;" and presently his vision cleared, and he found ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... amid blinding lightning and deafening thunder, in enormous stones, cutting, bruising, breaking everything, mowing down the grain as if with a scythe. Then black, opaque, horrifying darkness, in which lights were extinguished as in the depths of the airless passages, spread its heavy clouds over the land of Egypt, so fair, so luminous, so golden under its azure sky, where the night is clearer than the daytime in other climes. The terrified people, believing themselves already shrouded in the impenetrable ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... cheeks and burning eyes; but the slave-girls, who paid little attention to a guest who was no more than endured and looked on askance by their mistress, had neglected to open her window-shutters after sundown, as she had requested, and the room was oppressively sultry and airless. The wooden shutters felt hot to the touch, so did the linen sheets over the wool mattrasses. The water in her jug, and even the handkerchief she took up were warm. To an Egyptian all this would have been a matter of course; but the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hour when the bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur, when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning. M'Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier's drill on his lips, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... success, and was flying continuously, while men of the air service were trained in its manipulation and gunners received practice in three-dimensioned range finding and cruiser practice in the air. Above, in the airless space, they learned to operate the guns that were controlled from within the air-tight rooms. They were learning, and the ship performed the miracles that were now taken as matters ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... of its kind—a big, dreary, prison-like structure. The woman at the door did not in the least care to let me in. She was a fish-mouthed woman with a hard eye, and as I told my errand her mouth grew fishier and the eye harder. Finally she led me down a long, dark, airless stretch of corridor and departed in search of the matron, leaving me seated in the unfriendly reception room, with its straight-backed chairs placed stonily against the walls, beneath rows of red and blue and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... more terrified of her. His fear of the Devagas was due to the fact that he and an associate had provided the hierarchy with a very large quantity of contraband materials. The nature of the materials indicated the Devagas were constructing a major fortified outpost on a world either airless or with poisonous atmosphere. Pluly's associate had since been murdered. Pluly believed he was next in line to ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... afraid. With every step he took he seemed to climb farther and farther into the midst of fear. It was all around him—in the close, airless dark and in the deathly quiet light that came from the open doorway overhead. What was waiting for him there? His father, risen unimaginably loathsome from the grave? For he could never be in the dark without thinking of his father. Or something else? At least he knew that the never-really-believed-in ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... I hear the rustlings of the birth and death of pleasure; and the rattling of swift wheels. I hear the hungry oaths of men; and love kisses in the airless night. Without me, little soul, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... at last arrived on board the yacht again, at three o'clock, we found that the miseries of coaling were not yet over, and that there had been numerous visitors from the shore. Everything on deck looked black, while below all was pitch dark and airless, every opening and crevice having been closed and covered with tarpaulin, to keep out the coal dust. It took seven hours to complete the work, instead of two, as was hoped and promised, so our chance of starting to-day is over. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of an overhanging balcony built out on timber props over the river Maritza, whose turbid waters surged beneath with steady plash. Inside, the striped silken curtains were closely drawn. The atmosphere was stuffy and airless, filled ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... hot and airless. No breath of wind came from the sea. Drops of perspiration stood on the boy's forehead as he slept, with nothing over him but a sheet. He lay on his side, with his face towards the open window and one arm ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... into trenches in the firing-line are, if anything, less heroic than the army of cooks and Janies who descend to spend their lives in the basement "domestic offices" of Bloomsbury. Dark and ill-ventilated in summer, gas-lit and airless throughout the foggy winter. Flight upon flight of stairs up which Janie daily toiled a hundred times before she was suffered to seek the attic she shared with cook under the slates. Overwork, lack of fresh air and recreation—all ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... One particularly glaring, airless afternoon, the three sisters were toiling back to Dora's lodging, with the London pavement like heated iron under the feet of the crowds that trod it, and the cloudless sky, in which the sun blazed a ball of fire, like glowing brass ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... thought of her, thus finding the way in instantly, the church clock sounded midnight. She entered a room that was black as coal and unsweetened as an airless cellar. The fair rays that had been pouring out of her returned with a little shock upon themselves— repulsed. She felt herself reduced, and the sensation was so unpleasant at first that she almost gasped. It was like suffocation. She felt enclosed with Death. That her own ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... towards him. He could not go into the poky den, evil-smelling and airless, of the concierge. But with her help Margaret raised him to his feet, and together they brought him to the studio. He sank painfully ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... airless heat of the small square room the child Judith panted as she lay on her bed. Her father and mother slept near her, drowned in the heavy slumber of workers after their day's labour. Some people in the next ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a white ghost into the gathering darkness, Gabriel remained at the door and looked up to the fast clouding sky. It was now about nine o'clock, and the night was hot and thundery, and so airless that it was difficult to breathe. Overhead, masses of black cloud, heavy with storm, hung low down over the town, and the earth, panting and worn out with the heat, waited thirstily for the cool drench of the rain. Evidently a witch-tempest was ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... of the moon is, in this respect, especially interesting, on account of the change that has occurred in the opinions held concerning its physical condition. For a very long time our satellite was confidently, and almost universally, regarded as an airless, waterless, lifeless desert, a completely "dead world," a bare, desiccated skull of rock, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the night wears on; outside, an airless, misty moonlight lies over park and field. Hark! was that a sound upstairs, in one of those ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he saw a face at the window, and he caught up a stick, unchained the door, and rushed into the garden. It was no one; the town lay asleep; the night was all but airless; only the faintest breeze moved the leaves of the trees; there was no noise anywhere, except the measured beat of the sea in its everlasting coming ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... strange to him. And then he remained breathless, motionless, petrified for hours, suppressing every thought, all loud breathing, all motion,—for every thought seemed to him but madness, every motion—madness. Time was no more; it appeared transformed into space, airless and transparent, into an enormous square upon which all were there—the earth and life and people. He saw all that at one glance, all to the very end, to the mysterious abyss—Death. And he was tortured ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... Maulbow had taken down to an airless moon surface, loaded up with something and brought back to the Queen—were jammed awkwardly into a corner, in a manner which suggested they'd slid into it when the ship was being knocked around. One of them was open and appeared to be empty. Gefty wasn't sure of the other. ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... meaning!" he shouted violently. "Sit down—listen to me!" And as though he were afraid of seeing her take her departure, he pushed her down on the solitary chair in the room. Then he paced about in growing agitation. The little dressing room was airless and full of sunlight, and no sound from the outside world disturbed its pleasant, peaceful, dampish atmosphere. In the pauses of conversation the shrillings of the canary were alone audible and suggested the ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... The town is of white mud and stone, with wooden balconies painted a vivid blue, and flat roofs. A minaret rises behind it with a blue-tiled extremity supporting the upraised hand and crescent. The streets are narrow and airless. In the shops are a mass of articles of all descriptions: tinned stuff, tobacco, clocks, hair-oil, cheap jewellery, odd bottles of doubtful wine, scent, rugs, copper vessels, sweets, sauces, pickles. Innumerable flies surround everything. ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... narrow winding alleys, were an inevitable condition of life in sixteenth-century Europe before strong central government had made it safe to live outside the gates. Even the houses of the great were dark, airless, cramped, with tiny windows and dim, opaque glass; such as one may still see at Compton Castle in Devonshire or the Chateau des Comtes at Ghent. Communications moved slowly along unmetalled roads or ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... late when he found himself back again before the house, and an ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... poetry as these of ours—the act of composition is fatal as frost to their flow; yet composition there is at such solitary times going on among the moods of the mind, as among the clouds on a still but not airless sky, perpetual but imperceptible transformations of the beautiful, obedient to the bidding ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
