"Amorphous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... diamond, graphite, amorphous carbon, coke, mineral coal.—Carbon a reducing agent, a ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... Austin's The Flock marks the author as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth supplied the information. Wentworth's own book, America's Sheep Trails, Iowa State College Press, Ames, 1948, is ponderous, amorphous, and in part, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... forms an amorphous mass with a bronze-like luster; it is sparingly soluble in water, freely so in alcohol, its alcoholic solution being strongly dichroic; its green colored solution in concentrated sulphuric acid becomes successively blue and violet on dilution with water; it dyes silk, wool, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... great and salient factor of which up to the present English politicians have taken no account. The party of Revolution is the party which under an Irish Parliament would be master of the situation. Leaders will not be lacking. But at present the party must from the necessity of the case be amorphous, and therefore, politically and as a power, practically non-existent. Pass the bill, and then you will see something. A new party, the party of Independence, or, as they will call it, of Freedom, will take shape and formidably influence events. The temptation to take the lead ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Amorphous substances, such as ferric hydroxide, aluminium hydroxide, or silicic acid, separate in a gelatinous form and are relatively difficult to filter and wash. Substances of this class also exhibit a tendency to form, with pure water, what are known as colloidal solutions. ...
— An Introductory Course of Quantitative Chemical Analysis - With Explanatory Notes • Henry P. Talbot
... know that the saliva contains a certain material called a ferment, which is the active agent in bringing about the change. This ferment is not alive, nor does it need any living environment for its action. It can be separated from the saliva in the form of a dry amorphous powder, and in this form can be preserved almost indefinitely, retaining its power to effect the change whenever put under proper conditions. The change of starch into sugar is thus a simple chemical ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... freedom, you can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd civilization ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... objects; old as the Prophet Ezechiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... deed. Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed,—been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass,—then a real success has been achieved, and the Alf of the day has done a great thing; but even the crushing of a poor Lady Carbury, if it be absolute, is effective. Such a review will not make all the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... to the house a ragged, poorly-dressed, grey- headed, awkward, amorphous—in short, a very strange-looking— little old man. At first glance it might have been thought that he was perpetually ashamed of something—that he had on his conscience something which always made him, as it were, bristle up and then shrink into himself. Such curious starts and grimaces ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the process would ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... the protagonist of chaos in these things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with the ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... the military situation in Europe was almost disheartening. Imperial Russia had disappeared and the Germans were preparing to carve up the vast amorphous Russian carcass. Having driven their way through the Balkans to Constantinople they were on the point of opening their boasted direct route from Berlin to Bagdad. England, France and Italy began to feel war-weary. The German submarines threatened ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early photographs may show, at ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... Sacculina—that it was a Sacculina when it might have been a Crustacean. Instead of being a free and independent organism high in structure, original in action, vital with energy, it deteriorated into a torpid and all but amorphous sac confined to perpetual imprisonment and doomed to a living death. "Any new set of conditions," says Ray Lankester, "occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to degeneration; just as ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... where we could look down into the twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash which the river had cut into the dark, crude-looking Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like a new day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray beds of the Cambrian were laid down upon the dark, amorphous, and twisted older granite! How carefully the level strata had been fitted to the shapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a master mason; apparently you could put the point of your knife where one ended and the other began. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... later letter has just arrived. I can only say that I understand. But withal, I am pained that I am not nearer to you. These intellectual phantasmagoria rise up like huge amorphous ghosts and hold me from you. I cannot get through the mists and glooms to press your hand and tell you how dear I hold you. Do, Dane, do let us cease from this. Let us discuss no further. Let me care for Hester in my own way so long ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of gravel is too well known to require description. The grains of quartz sand are either sharp cornered or else rounded pieces of stone of quartz, occasionally mixed with grains of other amorphous pieces of silica—such as horn stone, silicious slate, carnelian, etc.; again, with lustrous pieces of mica, or red and white pieces of feldspar. The gravel used for a tar paper roof must be of a special nature and be prepared for the purpose. The size of its grains must ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... visible portion may be entirely beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite another material. What we admire is not so much a facade as a triumphal gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world, wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home. This was not vanity in the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 'but mine are dreams within a dream.' He was beginning to grow quite communicative as he sat there with his big stick between his knees, and his amorphous felt hat pushed back from his broad ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... is a substance which is called amorphous or structureless, and a filling to be in harmony with this substance should be amorphous or structureless in its composition. The only materials we have which meet these conditions are gutta-percha and tin. ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... furnished with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an alcoholic, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... her travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she felt would have had its distinction in an older society. It was, moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the air of belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the old store-house. It loomed a black, amorphous pile heaved up against the stars, and the man's footsteps dragged as he came to the ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... animosity: "Where then is that celebrated, broad, beautiful Russian soul? So much was and is being said about it, but wherein does its breadth, might and beauty actively manifest itself? And is not our soul broad because it is amorphous? And it is probably owing to its amorphousness that we yield so readily to external pressure, which disfigures ...
— The Shield • Various
... of an amorphous Sansculottism taking form, ought we not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council of Ministers, Six in number, there is; but they, especially since Roland's retreat, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the conception of God through human history is presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce, yet long-suffering and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... chart and compass. It led Ralph Peden out into a cloudy June dawning. It was soft, amorphous, uncoloured night when he went out. Slate-coloured clouds were racing along the tops of the hills from the south. The wind blew in fitful gusts and veering flaws among the moorlands, making eddies and back-waters of the air, which ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... measurement the discharge occupied a fraction of a second. The electric strength for a homogeneous plate of crystalline sulphur is not less than 33,000 volts per centimetre, and probably a good deal more. If the sulphur is contaminated with up to 3 per cent of the amorphous variety, as is the case if it is cooled fairly quickly from a temperature of 170 deg. C. or over, the specific resistance falls to from 10^25 to 10^26 at ordinary temperatures; and the specific inductive capacity increases up to 3.75, according to the amount of insoluble ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was shown the various processes and stages of the taxidermist's art, the amorphous mass of skin and hair gradually taking shape and substance until it stood forth in all its glory of flaming eye and proud nostril and branching antlers; and he was highly pleased to be told that this head he had ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... late. This is how you become smart all at once in your New York atmosphere! But pray be seated; and here are cigarettes, if you will. No? Very well; but tell me; has that amorphous gill-slit—oh, no, the branchial lamella—has it behaved itself and proved to be the avenue which shall lead ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might, impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... a travelling house, is a composite and barbaric piece of work, a megalithic pile wherein art, retires in favor of amorphous strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so that we might imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders before our eyes, if frequent transitions did ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... applause he encountered, indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt—so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... with a winnowing-fan, the edge of which is plastered with ghi and supports a lighted wick; and as he steps up to the shrine, the relations and friends of the deceased again press forward and place offerings of fruit and flowers in the fan. There he stands, holding the gifts towards the amorphous simulacrum of the primeval Mother, while Rama the hierophant beseeches her to send the spirit of the dead Chandrabai ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go. It was willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the combination, the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not sense; it was disfigured by obscurity ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... crystalline and amorphous are also found in a particular stratum of dolomite at Bullatotte and Badulla, in which there is a peculiar copper-coloured mica with metallic lustre. Star rubies, the "asteria" of Pliny (so called from their containing a movable six-rayed star), are to be had at Ratnapoora and for ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... but gnomes; surely they are huge, undeveloped embryos of women, with neither head nor trunk. For this light is pitiless. It makes them even more a part of this earth, out of which they seem to have sprung, a strange amorphous growth. The bronzed skins are dyed in the gold as if to match with the hue of the mud; the wet skirts are shreds, gray and brown tatters, not so good in texture as the lichens, and the ragged jerseys seem only bits of the more distant weeds woven into tissues ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... saddleback, and the lay is west-east, curving round to the south. The formation is of the coarse grey granite general throughout the Province, and it is dyked and sliced by quartz veins of the amorphous type, crystals being everywhere rare in Midian (?) The filons and filets, varying in thickness from eight metres to a few lines, are so numerous that the whole surface appears to be quartz tarnished by atmospheric corrosion to a dull, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... amorphous house some three-quarters of a mile to the west of the campus. It was a construction in wood, with manifold "features" suggestive of the villa, the bungalow, the chateau, the palace; it united all tastes and contravened all conventions. In its upper story was the commodious ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... protoplasm itself into a molecular mechanism. If there is any truth in the received doctrines of physics, that contrast between living and inert matter, on which Bichat lays so much stress, does not exist. In nature, nothing is at rest, nothing is amorphous; the simplest particle of that which men in their blindness are pleased to call "brute matter" is a vast aggregate of molecular mechanisms performing complicated movements of immense rapidity, and sensitively adjusting themselves to every ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... is some approach, or at least some comparison to make between vegetables and animals, this can only be by opposing plants the most simply organized, like fungi and algae, to the most imperfect animals like the polyps, and especially the amorphous polyps, which ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... a billowy ocean of white foam in themselves, or a landscape covered with hills and valleys of snow. The rounded cloud contours could easily be likened to the domes of snow-covered mountains. It was really difficult to conceive that that amorphous expanse was not actually solid. Here and there flocculent towers and summits heaved up, piled like mighty snow dumps, toppling and crushing into one another, as ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... kind—without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher animals, we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... worlds, or from their deserts—also from aerial regions too indefinite or amorphous to be thought ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... German institution. The directors gleefully continued their course for a little while longer, though the handwriting on the wall had begun to blaze forth when all the canons of art and the fruit of years of serious effort were insulted by the production of the amorphous creation of one whose sole claim on popular attention as a composer was that he was a royal duke and the brother-in-law ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous body of the English community, one of forty-one million such corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines, this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line with me, under the same magnetic ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... value should be measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... cottages:—on the top of this Harlungsherg the Wends "set up their god Triglaph;" a three-headed Monster of which I have seen prints, beyond measure ugly. Something like three whale's-cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk (for the dull eyes are inexpressible, as well as the amorphous shape): ugliest and stupidest of all false gods. This these victorious Wends set up on the Harlungsberg, Year 1023; and worshipped after their sort, benighted mortals,—with joy, for a time. The Cathedral ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... readily recognized by the characters quoted. It may be added that the capillitial threads are always exceedingly delicate, probably tubular, but never filled with lime throughout; the peridium may be almost nude or encrusted with lime, which, where present, is always amorphous, never crystalline; the sporangia when distinct may be either sessile or stipitate, and the stipe in the latter case is often hollow and charged with lime. In capillitium intermediate between Leocarpus and Badhamia, since in the first the capillitium is unequally calcareous, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such pachydermata. He said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn't get apples. And he said that the emu was as big as an ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would eat bricks. Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the mass, and is to be regarded as a beneficent appointment, with such special view. That structure compels each mountain to assume the safest contour of which under the given circumstances of upheaval it is capable. If it were all composed of an amorphous mass of stone as at A, Fig. 19, a crack beginning from the top, as at x in A, might gradually extend downwards in the direction x y in B, until the whole mass, indicated by the shade, separated itself ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of sight altogether. He (and more particularly, she) might be posted behind some sort of screen, diaphanous in respect of the vocalists' view of the conductor, but opaque to the audience. When I think of some of the rather antique and amorphous prime donne of German, Italian and French opera, I know that any scheme which would render them invisible and permit their acting parts to be played by young and gracious figures would meet with my unqualified approval. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... they'd been merely an articulate minority without formal unity—an abstract, amorphous group akin to the "Liberals" of previous generations. A Naturalist could be a Catholic priest, a Unitarian layman, an atheist factory hand, a government employee, a housewife with strong prejudices against governmental controls, a wealthy man who deplored the dangers ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... instant it stood here, preening, testing itself like an athlete—a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric—under the darkening sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... a soft amorphous substance of the same composition as limestone. The main uses of chalk are as a filler in rubber, and as a component of paint and putty. It is also used for polishing. The principal producers of this commodity are England, Denmark, and France, and the chief consumer is the United States. The United ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... is very distinct from this; there are no shafts or bolts, but a steady blaze which fills the whole firmament with a white quivering light, lasting many seconds of time, and followed by long intervals of amorphous darkness. Such lightning is rarely accompanied by thunder, and rain is not always its concomitant, though it was this sort we now witnessed, and rain-drops ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charming piece of critical work in scholarly and graceful language. More affected and generally inferior in style, but also still on the whole scholarly and graceful in its language, is his Arcadia, an example of the indefinitely constructed amorphous Romances out of which in course of long time the novel was to be evolved. The dwellers in that Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... civilization and flung into the arms of Nature the most terrible thing is the sense of the amorphous, the feeling that there is no structure in this world where houses are not and laws are not and streets are not, no power to intervene between oneself and injury, no thread to cling to. The idea of a Providence to such a ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... time, into the large calcining furnace. Here it is roasted for a period ranging from twelve to twenty-four hours, after which it is drawn into the ash-pit, where it remains to cool. In this state, the ore is a black, amorphous substance, and is termed calcined ore. The object of this process is to oxidise the extraneous metals, and also to reduce the quantity of sulphur, by driving it off in the form of vapour. It is, therefore, in this and the analogous processes of roasting, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... had been licked out, the image crashed together, and fell in a shapeless, miserable heap. So when the tongue of criticism shall have eaten out the supernatural elements of the gospel narrative, the heroic figure will fall, as it has already in Renan's construction, into an amorphous mass of unhistoric rubbish. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... no final release, since he could not be liberated from himself. Strange and amorphous, she must go yearning on through the trouble, like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm. She felt so rich, in her warm vagueness, that her soul cried out on him, because he harried her and wanted ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... outside as the son of a leading merchant of the town. The merchant and his wife were both of old families which had lived in the community for several generations, and whose blood was presumably of the purest strain; yet the boy was sallow, with amorphous features, thin shanks, and stooping shoulders. The youth standing in the judge's office, on the contrary, was straight, shapely, and well-grown. His eye was clear, and he kept it fixed on the old gentleman with a look in which there was nothing of cringing. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the "kitchen-middens," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the earliest part of the age of stone as ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... corresponding images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... she declared. "You've found them both." He mounted to the porch, and shook her extended hand, cushioned with fat, and oddly damp and lifeless. He could see her countenance now—it was plaster white with insignificant features and rose like an amorphous column from a swollen throat, a nose like a dab of putty, eyes obscured ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the bark and isolated an amorphous resin of yellowish color and very bitter taste. It is soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, slightly soluble in sulphuret of carbon, insoluble in turpentine or benzin. He believes that it is the active principle of the root, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... were put out by it. It varied very much in shape as it spread or drew out, as a smoker's blue rings are varied by puffs of wind. Now it was a perfect round, now so long as to be less a hoop than a fine oblong. Sometimes it was pear-shaped, sometimes amorphous; bulbous here, hollow there. And there seemed movement; I thought now and again that it was spiral as well as circular, that it might, under some stress of speed, writhe upward like dust in a whirlwind. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... and the same elements are necessary for the personification of such types or idols. The three elements appear in their proper sequence even in the amorphous phantasms which these types first shadow forth, and which are subsequently perfected and embodied in human form. For the consciousness of the external form always exists in the first vague and nebulous conception of the phantasm which gradually appears and formulates itself in the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... poem lies not in words but in meaning; and if the author have any skill at all in recording thought through language, he will be able to refine the uncouth mass of spontaneous verbiage which first comes to him as representing his idea, but which in its original amorphous state may fail entirely to suggest the same idea to another brain. He will be able to preserve and perpetuate his idea in a style of language which the world may understand, and in a rhythm which may not offend the reader's sense of propriety with conspicuous harshness, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft |
