"Disconnected" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that I have ever told you much about my life in Scotland," he went on. "It has always seemed to me so remote and—disconnected with everything here. I could not suppose it would interest anyone. I was cared for and educated by my father's only sister, a good woman. It was as if she had whole charge of the part of my life that was not absorbed in work. I don't know that I can make ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... very disconnected notices are all that can be collected of matter properly biographical in relation to the quarter century during which Marco ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... He learns to feel that he is merely an instrument of Almighty power. It was the sacredness of a great cause that shed such a lustre on the character of Washington. How unimpressible the victories of Charlemagne, disconnected with that work of civilization which he was sent into the world to reconstruct! How devoid of interest and grandeur were the battles of Marston Moor and Worcester, without reference to those principles of religious liberty which warmed the soul of Cromwell! The conflicts of Bunker Hill ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... history appear what it is, i.e., a ceaseless development, a unity, or does she leave the impression among the pupils that history is a mass of disconnected dead facts? ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... exercising. Their uniforms were exquisitely clean, but I asked myself of what earthly use they were. Their commander ordered them to charge, when every horse butted against the one next to him. I believe a heavy gale of wind would have disconnected all these warriors from their chargers. I fully recognise the fact that the leaders of the ouvriers talk a great deal of nonsense, and that they are actuated as much by personal ambition as by patriotism; but it is certain that the individual working man is the only reality in ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... urgency one has frequently an inspiration —instantaneous, disconnected, unbidden—which no amount of quiet, peaceful thought would suggest. Such extraordinary flashes are the result of reasoning too rapid for consciousness to note. The Indian had already laid bare his right arm to ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... A small boy disconnected the doorbell batteries from the wires that ran to them, and when he wanted to put the wires back, he could not remember how they had been connected. He tried fastening both wires to the carbon part of the battery, connecting ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... Creek, a small tributary of that river, about sixty miles north-east of Washington. There, on September 17, 1862, McClellan ordered an attack, to which he did not attempt to give his personal direction. His corps commanders led assaults on Lee's position at different times and in so disconnected a manner that each was repulsed singly. But on the following morning Lee found himself in a situation which ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... On the telephone I learned that the last two sections were waiting the arrival of mounted orderlies to tell them to pull out. Right! I disconnected the wires, told the signallers to report to B Battery where I would pick them up, and not to waste time getting there. Then I sought a copse on the other side of the bridge, where I knew my horses ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... disconnected expressions, Hans Vanderbum understood that a war-party of Shawnees had brought in a prisoner who was a friend of the Huron's. It was for the purpose of learning something regarding her that he had signaled the fisherman to leave his hook ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and disconnected gestures betrayed the weakness at the root. And now, when he was thus surprisingly received in that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was the customary haunt of silence, his hands went up into the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the spring equinox. For days prior to it joyous throngs of workers helped assemble old vehicles, machine tools and computers in the public squares, crowning each pile with used, disconnected robots. In the evening of the Day they proudly made their private heaps on the neat green lawns of their homes. These traditionally consisted of household utensils, electric heaters, air conditioners and ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... that Congress with great unanimity had declared that "by the act of the Republic of Mexico, a state of war exists between that government and the United States," when the same journals that informed him of this also informed him that when that declaration stood disconnected from the question of supplies sixty-seven in the House, and not fourteen merely, voted against it; besides this open attempt to prove by telling the truth what he could not prove by telling the whole truth-demanding of all who will not submit to be misrepresented, in justice to themselves, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... produced the bone, now fittingly wrapped in clean mericani cloth, and still more reluctantly undid it and handed it to Winkleman. The latter seized it and began minutely to examine it, muttering short, disconnected sentences to ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... placed me in front of it, was a picture of another sort. It was a good photograph, and had beauty enough besides to hold my eyes. It showed a group of three or four. A boy and girl in front, handsome, careless, and well-to-do, passing along, with wandering eyes. Behind them and disconnected from them by her dress and expression, a tall woman in black robes with a baby on her breast. The hand of the woman was stretched out with a coin which she was about dropping into an iron-bound coffer which stood at the side of the picture. It ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... their natural relations to each other, that it is not easy to reconstruct the parts and give them coherence and completeness again. But within the last half-century this work has been accomplished in many parts of the world with an amazing degree of accuracy, considering the disconnected character of the phenomena to be studied; and I think I shall be able to convince my readers that the modern results of geological investigation are perfectly sound logical inferences from well-established facts. In this, as in so many other things, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... observances were published and republished in fifty books; but in his early days he had not read them, and there was not a German, from Basel to Koenigsberg, who could have faced a viva voce in the Directorium or the Arsenale, or who had ever read Percin or Paramo. If Lacordaire disconnected St. Dominic from the practice of persecution, Doellinger had done the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... source of the trouble, and further amazement waited upon him. The explanation of the mystery lay before his eyes. There at the triangular junction, where the connecting rod linked with the down-haul of the semaphore, the bolt had fallen out, and the whole thing was disconnected. The bolt with its screw nut and washer were lying on the ground, where, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... I believe that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to the labours and researches of a single man. Never have such vast masses of widely scattered and hitherto utterly disconnected facts been combined into a system, and brought to bear upon the establishment of such a grand and new and simple philosophy!...—In ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... quite understood the American Party System. It would perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were called 'Democrat' and 'Republican.' It does not ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of events become complex; fighting, advancing and retreating occurred over a widespread area. Apparently disconnected movements by the Austro-Germans or the Russians fall into their proper places in accordance with the general scheme or objective either side may have in view. It is necessary to follow the scattered operations separately. We will therefore return now to the Tarnow-Tucho sector, where we left ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... appears to have been the external part of the door-latch, attached by day thereto by means of a leathern thong, which at night was disconnected with the latch to prevent any unbidden guest from entering. Thus any one 'tirling at the pin' does not attempt to open the door, but signifies ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form, entitled, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind"; but it is his disconnected thoughts and observations chiefly that continue to preserve ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... manager, which lasted twenty-five years, the first five of which are amusingly described in his book "Crotchets and Quavers." More than twenty years later he attempted to continue the story in a musical journal, and gathering the disconnected chapters together, issued them in an unattractive form under the title "Flats and Sharps." The first book is, to some extent, a contribution to musical history, though its strong personal equation and its effort to be entertaining ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... thought, touch the heart, give a hint of the ominous sequence of days. It appeared to us a land without memories, regrets, and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... screw terminals for connecting the keys with the lines and buzzers. These cost only a penny each, and, if strict economy is the order of the day, can be dispensed with should the apparatus not have to be disconnected frequently. ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... to his host again, but the charm was broken. His talk was disconnected, owing probably to the fact that he was racking his brain for facts relative to the seamy side of shipbroking. And Hardy, without any encouragement whatever, was interrupting with puerile anecdotes concerning the late lamented Joe Banks. The ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... had succeeded in finding the nearest drug store I spent a wild ten minutes telephoning the surprised little probation officer, then Frau Nirlanger, and finally Blackie, for no particular reason. I shrieked my story over the wire in disconnected, incoherent sentences. Then I rushed back to the little cottage where Alma Pflugel and I waited with what ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... and Sam, walked back along the road, while Blake and Joe went to where they had dropped their motor cycle. They repaired the disconnected gasoline pipe, and rode on ahead to tell Mr. Baker of the coming of the others. The farmer readily agreed to lend his horse and carriage so that the unfortunate ones would not have to walk into town, ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... been asserted that Gordon was very hard on the clergy, and that he did not believe in a divinely appointed order of ministry. This has probably arisen from certain statements of his that have appeared in a disconnected form. Take the following passages from letters written at different ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... which we have enumerated are for the most part as spectres, so dimly seen as to be probably delusions—invoked to please a fanciful curiosity, but without an object to satisfy the reason or excuse the apparition. If I am blamed for not imitating those who have sought, by weaving together disconnected hints and subtle conjectures, to make a history from legends, to overturn what has been popularly believed, by systems equally contradictory, though more learnedly fabricated;—if I am told that I might have made the chronicle ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... racing to Judd's head. The entire game had been thus far like a disconnected dream to him. It had been difficult to actually ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... to L10 per hundredweight. The blanks are cut out of the shells by a steel tubular cutter, similar to that used in cutting the vegetable ivory. As the cutter works its way through a shell, small cylinders of pearl are disconnected, which are reduced in thickness by splitting into discs, a little thicker than the button is required to be when finished. These blanks are finished singly in a turning lathe, by being placed in a suitable chuck, and having a steel tool applied to its face for producing ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... upon his informer. The terrified Elisha struggled to free himself, gasping disconnected protests. "'Twasn't ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... Friends." And the subject of slavery was considered too exciting for Friends to engage in, by many Friends of that day. I began to query whether it would not be a relief to me, and also to my friends, to become disconnected with that body, as I saw clearly my path of duty would not be in accordance with the generality of our Society. After making it a subject of earnest prayer, I became settled as to the course to pursue, and concluded to unburden my ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... wider significance to Banneker's attainments than is implied in a merely personal achievement is shown in his statement that he considered "this negro as a fresh proof that the powers of the mind are disconnected with the color of the skin, or, in other words, a striking contradiction to Mr. Hume's doctrine, that the negroes are naturally inferior to the whites, and unsusceptible of attainments in arts and sciences?" "In every civilized ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... ourselves so on those that have launched on us an absurd or false argument, it will be enough to dislodge the notion before it gets fixed in us." Then said I, "Which of his words has moved you most? For the fellow seemed to rampage about, in his anger and abusive language, with a long disconnected and rambling rhapsody drawn from all sources, and at the same ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... this suggestion of a homestead policy. On the contrary, the desire to locate towns to create continuous lines of settlement along the roads between the disconnected frontiers and to protect boundary claims by granting tiers of towns in the disputed tract, as well, no doubt, as pressure from financial interests, led the General Court between 1715 and 1762 to dispose of the remaining public domain of Massachusetts under ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as "mad") in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and "run about stark naked" (48), bear an odd resemblance to "The King's Cameleopard" in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... gazing after the ascending bubble that she seemed to forget even the presence of the sage. As the airy globule ascended, she began pouring forth a stream of disconnected nonsense, seeming to speak merely for her own pleasure, as her words could certainly not be intended for the information ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... is over and the automatic writing has ceased, Mrs Piper begins to return gradually to her normal state. She then utters with more or less distinctness some apparently disconnected phrases which it is sometimes difficult to catch. She is like a person talking in sleep. Dr Hodgson and Professor Hyslop have collected as many of these broken sentences as they could, keeping them separately under a different heading from the record of the rest ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... the story of the Wisconsin farm, sleeping heavily in the warm sun among the little lakes; of the crude fervor that went on under the trees of the quiet seminary hill; of the little chapel with its churchyard to the west, commanding the lakes, the woods, the rising bosom of hills. The story was disconnected, lapsing into mere exclamations, rising to animated description as one memory wakened another in the chain of human associations. Bovine, heavy, and animal, yet peaceful, was that picture of Wisconsin farm lands, saturated with a few strong impressions,—the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... success of the Company depends. Illogically, and perhaps unfortunately, there are many persons in every community who hold the employer answerable for the public advocacy of the views of the persons in his employment, even when disconnected with the business of the employer. This ought not to be the case, but as undeniably it is the case, it follows that the usefulness of an employee is with certainty diminished, and perhaps destroyed, when he gives much of his attention and some of his ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... of narration, the purposeful irrelation of parts, the use of anecdote and episode, which to the stumbling reader reduce his books to collections of disconnected essays and instances, gave to German mediocrity a sanction to publish a mass of multifarious, unrelated, and nondescript thought and incident. It is to be noted that the spurious books such as the Koran, which Germany never clearly sundered from the original, were ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... breath returned, hesitatingly, like some timid Prodigal Son trying to muster up courage to enter the old home, I do not know; but it cannot have been many minutes, for the house was only just beginning to disgorge its occupants as I sat up. Disconnected cries and questions filled the air. Dim forms moved ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... instructed to go to Chicago when they were up in Duluth and they had chosen to come down by water, and were having a most delightful trip on the Huronic when it was so rudely ended by the storm. Her tale was somewhat disconnected, for she was constantly being interrupted by outbursts of delight at seeing her again and anxious inquiries as to whether she was cold, all more ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... mercy, to spare us the prolonged horrors of starvation. What a multitude of incoherent thoughts and recollections crowded upon my mind in that moment of time! A thousand little incidents of my past life, disconnected and trivial—a shadowy throng of familiar scenes and faces, surged up before me, vividly as objects revealed for an instant by the glare of the lightning, in the gloom of a stormy night. Closing my eyes, I silently commended my soul to God, and was endeavouring ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... volunteering their aid to the chief conspirators of the age. We have earls, we have marquesses, coming forward as Corn-League agents; we have magistrates by scores angling for popularity as Repealers. But these have been private parties, insulated, disconnected, disowned. When we hear of Christianity prostituted to the service of Jacobinism—of divinity becoming the handmaid to insurrection—and of clergymen in masses offering themselves as promoters of anarchy, we go back in thought to that ominous organization of irreligion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... short disconnected phrases, often pausing to gather voice, but forced to resume, by her inquiring looks and pressure ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and the disease hinted by implication in the form assumed by the passionate sympathy of the Galatians, are therefore identified; and thus, the whole paragraph, from the 12th to the 15th verse, instead of presenting an agglomeration of abrupt transitions and disconnected thoughts, evolves a close, natural, and continuous ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... embraces, as if quite alienated or mortally offended. I asked what it could mean? What had I done in her absence to have incurred her displeasure? Why had she not written to me? I could get only short, sullen, disconnected answers, as if there was something labouring in her mind which she either could not or would not impart. I hardly knew how to bear this first reception after so long an absence, and so different from the one my sentiments ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... moral being was given the capability of being influenced and controlled by the Spirit of the Lord. By sin this electric current from God's presence to man's soul, like the separation of the Atlantic cable, was divided. Man becoming thus disconnected from God's power and impressive guidance was left to be operated by the influences of a wicked world. Through the redemptive power of Jesus' blood man is again brought into union with God. The divided cable is taken up and united, and man's soul wondrously animated ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... first two or three nights he is rarely singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the pause at the end of the line throughout long passages makes them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which consists of the endless repetition of one short musical ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... uncongenial, badly-planned, disconnected, or purposeless effort fatigues, worries, and weakens both body and mind: is it difficult to believe the converse—that thorough, methodical, and helpful activity stimulates ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... all right as soon as she warms up now," says our savior. "The gas was disconnected—coupling jolted off evidently—and one of the cylinders was missing. Must have given you trouble on hills, what?" he yawns some more. "Nice little bus," he says, "and, now, I wonder if you'd do a favor ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... Spirit," says Davis, "have heretofore been supposed to constitute two distinct and independent substances, the latter not having any material origin." ... "Instead of making material and spiritual existence totally disconnected, the object and intention of the foregoing has been to prove, by acknowledged laws and principles of matter, the production of intelligence, the perfection of which is spirit;" to show that "the Organizer uses Nature and all things therein as an effect, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... worked in the testing-room like Trojans. They connected and disconnected; they put in stops and took them out; they intensified currents to the extent of their anxieties they reduced them to the measure of their despair—nothing would do. The cable was apparently dead. In these circumstances picking-up was the only resource, and the ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... he had such a profound scheme of thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form very seriously. Now Pippa Passes is, among other things, eminently remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had credit. And just ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Hume's scheme were correct, it would seem that nothing could be stable or fixed; mind would be destitute of energy to move within its own sphere, or to bind matter in its orbit. All things would seem to be in a loose, disconnected, and fluctuating state. But this is not the view which he had of the matter. Though he denied that there is any connecting link among events, yet he insisted that the connexion subsisting among them is fixed and unalterable. "Let any one define ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... blows, but never a continuous, uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A] that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... with their backs to the storm, hurried homewards; the former exulting in the grand—though somewhat disconnected—thoughts infused into his fiery soul by the fire-water he had imbibed, and dreaming of what he would have dared and done had he only been a sea-king of the olden time; the latter meditating somewhat anxiously on the probable ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of mankind. I know I am too dissatisfied with the beings around me; but I cannot help occasionally exclaiming, "Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Meshech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar." I know I am noways ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Bluenose, whose son I was generally accounted to be. Gradually and slowly I gathered my thoughts together, and tried to reflect upon my previous life, but what I have told you, old dame, is all that I can remember of it, and that consists only of certain individual disconnected pictures. Oh! this miserable being-alone-in-the-world! I can't be gay and happy, no matter what may happen!" "Tonino, my dear Tonino," said the old woman, "be contented with what the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... sarcode and swimming gives place to creeping, while the flagella violently lash. In this condition two forms meet by apparent accident, the protrusions touch, and instant fusion supervenes. In the course of a few seconds there is no disconnected sarcode visible, and in five to seven minutes the organism is a union of two of the organisms, the swimming being again resumed, the flagella acting in apparent concert. This may continue for a short time, when movement begins to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... only be called purposive, such as moving to recover its balance when the board on which it stands is inclined, or scratching where it is made uncomfortable, or croaking when pressed in a particular spot. If its spinal cord be severed, the lower limbs, disconnected from the brain, will also perform actions of this kind. The question arises, Is the frog entirely a soulless automaton, performing all its actions directly in response to external stimuli, only more perfectly and with more delicate adjustment when its brain remains ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... little breath. It was, after all, a hard task, this, that lay before him. Last night in his mind lay far enough back now, a tangled web of disconnected episodes, linked together by a strangely sweet emotional thread of sentiment. And the girl was watching his face with every sense strained to catch his words and the meaning of them. Vaguely he felt his ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kept them all up that night was one totally disconnected with the Demarests or any one else in the house. A large outstanding obligation was coming due which Quimby lacked the money to meet. Something must be done with the stolen notes and jewelry which they had accumulated in times past and had never found the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... enliven the journey with a story-telling contest (two stories from each pilgrim during each half of the journey) for the prize of a dinner at his inn on their return. Next morning, therefore, the Knight begins the series of tales and the others follow in order. This literary form—a collection of disconnected stories bound together in a fictitious framework—goes back almost to the beginning of literature itself; but Chaucer may well have been directly influenced by Boccaccio's famous book of prose tales, 'The Decameron' (Ten Days of Story-Telling). Between the two works, however, there is a striking ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... changed; and so he kept on for quite an hour, with the result that his brother's mutterings grew less rapid and loud, so that now and then the boy was able to catch a word here and a word there. All disconnected, but suggestive of the trouble that was on the sick man's mind, for they were connected with the birds, and his ill-luck, his voice taking quite a despairing ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... bead of gas burned on a bracket somewhere behind the counter. The light slid, pale as water, over the glass and mahogany of the show-cases, wherein white objects appeared as confused and disconnected patches. The darkness effaced every object in the shop that was not white, with the queer effect that rows upon rows of white jars showed as if hanging on it unsupported by their shelves. Very close, turned up to him out of the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... gentle with his wife, tender, polite, and more than willing to wait on her. From their talk and chit-chat, James could detect nothing. There were still elisions, questions answered with a half-phrase, comments added with a disconnected word and replied in another word that—in cold print—would appear to have no bearing on the original subject. This sort of thing told James nothing. Judge Carter and his wife did the same; if there were any difference ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... machine a lathe may be employed. The disc is, of course, mounted on the mandrel, and the work on the slide-rest. The latter must be disconnected from its feed screws, and a weight arranged over a pulley so as to keep the work pressed against the wheel by a ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... spoken by Miss Plympton in a broken, disconnected, and almost incoherent manner. She stopped abruptly, and seemed overcome by strong agitation. Edith, on her part, looked at her in equal agitation, wondering at her display of emotion, and terrified at the dark significance of her words. For ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... definite plan and it is Buddhist. It consists of three courts[348] surrounded by walls and entered by massive porticoes. In the third there are about twenty buildings and perhaps it did not escape the fault common to Cham architecture of presenting a collection of disconnected and unrelated edifices, but still there is clearly an attempt to lead up from the outermost portico through halls and gateways to the principal shrine. From an inscription dated 875 A.D. we learn that the ruins are those of a temple and vihara erected by King ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... said, "I am the state," he expressed the essence of the doctrine of unlimited power. By the rules of that system, the people are disconnected from the state; they are its subjects; it is their lord. These ideas, founded in the love of power, and long supported by the excess and the abuse of it, are yielding, in our age, to other opinions; and the civilized world seems at last to be proceeding to the conviction ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... accustomed to a one point five gravity and can withstand much higher degrees of acceleration than Gerns or any other race from a one gravity world. To enable us to take advantage of that fact we have had the acceleration limitator on this cruiser disconnected." ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... appetite, and put our head in the loin's mouth for a piece of bread. Sometimes, to minimise the risk, we would all dismount before we came in view of the house, straggle in severally, and give what orders we pleased, like disconnected strangers. In like manner we departed, to find the cart at an appointed place, some half a mile beyond. The Colonel and the Major had each a word or two of English—God help their pronunciation! But they did well ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... concern &c. 9; have no business there, have nothing to do with, intrude &c. 24. bring in head and shoulders, drag in head and shoulders, lug in head and shoulders. Adj. irrelative[obs3], irrespective, unrelated; arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c. 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not to the, purpose; impertinent, inapposite, beside the mark, a propos de bottes[Fr]; aside ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... behind her came a man, my cousin Gotz, whose newly-married wife's daring leap was indeed after his own heart. One more plunge, and their horses were on the highroad, and I had lifted Margery out of her saddle and we held each other clasped, stammering out foolish disconnected words, while we first laughed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man, a very handsome man, if the truth must be told, but it did not seem to be this fact which made half the people there crane their heads to catch a glimpse of him. Something else, something entirely disconnected with his appearance there as a witness, appeared to hold the people enthralled and waken a subdued enthusiasm which showed itself not only in smiles, but in whispers and significant nudges, chiefly among the women, though I noticed that the jurymen stared when somebody obliged them with ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... volume were delivered in Cincinnati, in 1858. Replying to different, and discordant systems of error, whose only bond is opposition to the gospel, they are necessarily somewhat disconnected. No attempt was made to mold them into a suit of royal armor, but merely to select a few smooth pebbles from the brook of truth, which any Christian lad might sling at the giant defiers of the armies ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... various means in order to deceive the people on the immorality resulting from auricular confession. One of their favorite stratagems is to quote some disconnected passages from theologians, recommending caution on the part of the priest in questioning his penitents on delicate subjects, should he see or apprehend any danger for the latter of being shocked by his questions. True, there are such prudent theologians, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... meeting behind were bare of a hedge, save such as was formed by disconnected tufts of furze, standing upon stems along the top, like impaled heads above a city wall. A white mast, fitted up with spars and other nautical tackle, could be seen rising against the dark clouds whenever the flames played brightly enough to reach it. Altogether the scene had ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... brokers whom I employ. The other three are ordinary telephones—two for long distance calls and one for the city. When you came in I touched this knob on the floor beneath my foot. All the telephones were at once disconnected here and connected with my secretaries' room. I can sit here at this table and shake the money-markets of the world. I can send stocks up or down at my will. I can ruin if I like, or I can enrich. It is the fashion nowadays to speak lightly of the mere man of money, ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... against which they feel bound to bear testimony, are slavery and war; and it is alleged as the main reason why many of them have disconnected themselves from the professedly Christian denominations to which they belonged, that those bodies gave their sanction to those anti-Christian practices. They believe slaveholding to be sinful under all circumstances, and that, therefore, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... pray in public I was very awkward, never could make any but what one would call a disconnected prayer, that never seems to ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... last night, and the operator said your phone has been temporarily disconnected. I presume these letters will be forwarded, so please let me know where you are. I'm usually at home between 1800 and 2300, so call me collect within the next ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... almost equally advantageous. The stampers and the projecting pieces on the axis are removed, and a barrel of wood or metal, surrounding part of the axis, and capable, at pleasure, of being connected with, or disconnected from the axis itself, is substituted. The rope which hitherto fastened the boat, is now fixed to this barrel; and if the barrel is loose upon the axis, the paddle-wheel makes the axis only revolve, and the boat remains in its place: ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... says the Earl. He is not giving close attention to the convalescent's disconnected chatter. He has been one himself, and knows how returning life sets ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... mining camp from actual experience. This she did in the form of letters written on the spot to her own sister, and collected for publication some two or three years later. Once for all, allowing for the artistic defects inevitable in a disconnected series of private letters, these "Shirley" letters form the best account of an early mining camp that is known to me. For our real insight into the mining life as it was, they are, of course, infinitely ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... ideas we wish to remember with the objects in the various places, by which means they are readily remembered, and can be gone over in any order. In this way, one may learn to repeat several hundred disconnected words or ideas in any order, after ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... place in Baker Street where at a hungry hour she had sat down with him to tea and buns—he brought out a question disconnected from previous talk. "I say, you know, what do you suppose ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... So, in short, incoherent, disconnected sentences, this incomprehensible letter began and ended. She stood stunned, bewildered, dazed, holding it, gazing at it blankly. Was she asleep? Was this a dream? Was Sir Victor playing some ghastly kind of practical joke, or—had ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... thought, stubborn yet disconnected, is to my mind the principal literary merit of the book; more so even than its ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... persons in the world who have such incessant trials of temper, and temptations to be fretful, as American housekeepers. For a housekeeper's business is not, like that of the other sex, limited to a particular department, for which previous preparation is made. It consists of ten thousand little disconnected items, which can never be so systematically arranged that there is no daily jostling somewhere. And in the best-regulated families, it is not unfrequently the case that some act of forgetfulness or carelessness, from some member, will disarrange the business ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had disconnected from the television projector the wire which led back through the ventilating slit in the wall, and now was holding its end with one hand while with the other he twisted out the screw which held in the knob. "Anyway, won't ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... degenerate state, that her empire was an unreal empire, and that it would collapse before the first serious attack. It would break up because it was not based upon force, because it lacked organisation, because it was a medley of disconnected and discordant fragments, worshipping an undisciplined freedom. That it should ever have come into being was one of the paradoxes of history; for it was manifestly not due to straightforward brute force, like the German ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... three or four weeks, will you let me know? A line to my club will always be forwarded. If there were any uncertainty about seeing you again, I—" his voice lost its level tone, and became husky and disconnected. "These visits don't matter.—I could put them off.—I am making myself go, because..." His fingers tightened over hers in involuntary appeal, "Cornelia! I wonder if you understand what ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... material used. Then the interpretation of the mythical tales, so freely intermingled everywhere, is often strained—prompted by a poetic imagination which snatches at every kind of allegory. Often the views expressed are inconsistent with each other, the arguments and proofs are disconnected, while many of the details are hopelessly obscure and confused. Yet it seems to me possible to recognise the idea which brings into unity the mass of his work—the spirit, as it were, that breathes into it its life. It may be found in the clear ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the electrical switch was disconnected. If it was left on, in "contact" as it is called, and the mechanician turned the propeller blades, there might have been a sudden starting of the engine that would have instantly kill the man. But with the switch off there could be no ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... sleeping uneasily in constrained attitudes, but some sat at the open windows staring at the moon-lit mountains and forests. The dull oil lights in the car were dim, so dim that I could see white sleeping faces hanging over the seats disconnected from any discoverable body. Some looked like death masks, and then next to them would be the elevated feet of some far-stretching person who had tried all ways for ease. It was a blessing to come to the divide and run down into the daylight and the plains. Yet even there, there ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... certain that such an interpretation is peculiar to abolitionists. "Men," says Mr. Sumner, "are prone to find in uncertain, disconnected texts, a confirmation of their own personal prejudices or prepossessions. And I,"—he continues, "who am no divine, but only a simple layman—make bold to say, that whosoever finds in the gospel any sanction of slavery, finds there merely a reflection ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... trip, he would shut himself up in his berth with them: the thump of the toiling engines pulsated in his ear; and he would weary his brain poring over the rows of disconnected figures, bewildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of destiny itself. He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic lurking somewhere in the results of chance. He thought he had seen its very form. His head swam; ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... and delirious; he stammered out disconnected words, in which only the name of Marguerite ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... blue sapphires and purple amethysts playing ghostly over the rest. He dropped into the chair and the tall, black-clothed figure fell into lax lines; his long fingers, the fingers of an artist, a musician, lay on the arms of the chair limply as if disconnected from any central power; there was surely despair, hopelessness, in the man's attitude. His gray eyes glowed from under the straight black brows with much of the hidden flame, the smouldering intensity of the coals at which he gazed. He sat so perhaps half an hour, staring moodily at the ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... water have disappeared from beside the gates. But the old flowers and herbs are gone, or linger neglected in corners, and somehow the gentle touch of time has been effaced. The house has got a good deal away from farming. It is on the farm, but disconnected. It is a residence, not a farmhouse. Then you must consider that it is more healthy, sweeter, and better for those who live in it. From a little distance the old effect is obtainable. One thing only I must protest against, and that is the replacing of tiles with slates. ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... on arising, Sunday morning, September 3rd, that we were in the Bay of Biscay and two cruisers were circling around and gradually escorting us into the port of Bordeaux. We were told subsequently that the wireless apparatus has been disconnected and we had been chased by ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... without a word, filled a flask of spirit, handed it to his friend, and silently led the way through the slowly falling rain and the now settled darkness. The mustang was quickly secured and saddled; a heavy poncho afforded Tucker a disguise as well as a protection from the rain. With a few hurried, disconnected words, and an abstracted air, he once more shook his friend's hand and issued cautiously from the corral. When out of earshot from the house he put spurs to the mustang, and dashed ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... outline, would lose nothing in the telling. An Englishman to begin with, which name of itself, and at all times, is a passport into German favor, but much more since the late memorable wars that but for Englishmen would have drooped into disconnected efforts—next, an Englishman of rank and of the haute noblesse—then a soldier covered with brilliant distinctions, and in the most brilliant arm of the service; young, moreover, and yet a veteran by his experience—fresh from the most awful battle of this planet since the day of Pharsalia,—radiant ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... guns, and the enemy could make no opposition except with artillery. Moreover, the army would get on its line of railway and could 'advance along the railroad.' This last was a purely imaginary advantage, to be sure, because the railway had no rolling-stock, and was disconnected from the rest of the line by the destruction of the Tugela bridge. But what weighed with the Commander-in-Chief much more than the representations of his lieutenant was the accumulating evidence that the enemy were in full retreat. The Intelligence reports all pointed to this situation. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... ingeniously consistent in argument. They isolate some one fixed idea, and round that they build up a world that is fiercely and tremendously complete. Every detail fits in, and the world in which they live is not, as is commonly supposed, a world of disconnected and fantastic imaginations, but one of iron-bound and remorseless logic. No task is more humiliating, nor more likely to shake one's sense of security in fundamental convictions, than that of arguing out ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... sooner have expected to see the sun and the moon fall out of the sky," Lingard continued with repressed fire. Next moment it seemed to have gone out of him and Mrs. Travers heard him mutter a disconnected phrase. . . . "The world ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... full of water in hand, others a blanket over their arm, all in exact line, and ready to help if required; and after a few minutes' display of the hose-pipes, the boatswain's whistle ends this drill for this voyage, and the hose-pipes are disconnected, rolled up, and hung up, to be ready at any moment if required. There are plenty of amusements on board, such as single-stick, glove-boxing, wrestling, etc. But the game of the "Man in the Chair," is one of the most laughable. A piece of board, 12 inches by 18 ...
— The Stoker's Catechism • W. J. Connor
... demonstrable. Specific attention should be given to any hesitancy in form or movement in tracing which is manifest in angularity or change of direction of lines, changed relations and proportions of letters, slant of the writing, its mechanical arrangement, disconnected lines, retouched ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... even dead mice, cockroaches, &c., being allowed to contaminate the water; also by permitting the overflow pipe to be connected with the soil pipe, or drain, whence the water absorbs poisonous gases. The overflow pipes should in all cases be entirely disconnected with, all drains, and the cisterns should, if possible have a cover. The cisterns should invariably be cleaned out thoroughly ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... twelve odd nodes; therefore six distinct and disconnected routes will be needful if we are not to go over any lines twice. Let us therefore find the greatest distance that we may so ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... had his doubts. Why shouldn't he have? The coincidence of finding this mourner if not avenger of Edith Challoner, in his own direct radius again, at a spot so distant, so obscure and so disconnected with any apparent business reason, was certainly startling enough unless the tie could be found in his brother's name and ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... fall here and there a troubled and disconnected word. In his dream he was far from Paris—walking after his sheep among the heathery slopes of the Scout, climbing towards the grey smithy among the old mill-stones, watching the Red Brook slide by over ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... western side of the continents (Western highlands, or Cordilleras, of North America; Andean Cordilleras of South America) of geologically modern deformation and upheaval, with enclosed basins and abundant volcanic action, but each a system in itself, disconnected and not standing in alignment; (4) confluent lower lands between the highlands, giving river drainage to the north (Mackenzie, Orinoco), east (St Lawrence, Amazon), and south (Mississippi, La Plata). Differences of dimension and detail are numerous, but they do not suffice to mask what ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the battery takes an electron away from the positive plate and gives it to the negative plate there is added to the negative plate an atom of silver. If the negative plate is weighed before the battery is connected and again after the battery is disconnected we can tell how much silver has been added to it. Suppose the current has been perfectly steady, that is, the same number of electrons streaming through the circuit each second. Then if we know how long the current ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... of the suspended rod. I could not detach it by pulling or jerking, and could only alter its position so as to cause the annular space to become eccentric instead of concentric. The instant the battery was disconnected, the rod fell to the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... appearance of consciousness. The corners of her lips were bent firmly downward. Her eyes, fixed and exalted, gazed beyond the fire, beyond the dancing shadows, beyond the world. After a long interval she began to speak, low-voiced, in short disconnected sentences. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... fault with some of the plays for not being worthy of the actor. Too many of them were little more than disconnected incidents, strung together to provide opportunities for effects, but with no more plot than the doings of the paladins in the marionette theatres. They were like the Pietro Longo play, which I had told him about, and he said that, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Infuriating creatures! It was useless talking to them anyway. No, there was only one thing to do. Round them up and send them to Cybernetics Lab and have their memory paths erased and their telepathic circuits located and disconnected. I tried to stifle the thought, ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... side, which by degrees became their central theme. The moral purpose of the performance was forgotten; and the Church disowned its evil changeling. To none of these early plays can the term "drama" be accurately applied; for each and all of them lack plot. They are merely a series of disconnected scenes, pictures having small connection and less development. The idea of pursuing a single, slowly developing story to its climax and conclusion dawns upon the modern stage only with the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... 64 inches stretch (see Fig. 27), certain rods, levers, wheels and springs are so actuated that the parts which draw out the carriage and cause the rollers to revolve are disconnected, so that both are brought to a ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... previous Existence in which the Dripped Absinthe was a Breakfast and the Cigarette a Luncheon and Elphye was trotting in her Glads and he had a Swell Bet down on Tin Bucket Preferred. The whole Lay-Out seemed unreal and remote and entirely disconnected ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... she was, living still in the house behind the shop; for he thought within himself that she might have exaggerated the effect of her words upon Philip; that, after all, it might have been some cause totally disconnected with them, which had blotted out her husband's place among the men of Monkshaven; and that it would be so much easier for both to resume their natural relations, both towards each other and towards the world, if Sylvia remained ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... upon Piotr, as if he did not see him; he moved quickly, almost automatically, like a mechanical doll. He held a hat in the hand that hung loose at his side—his face was pale—he had a wild look—his eyes were aflame. He uttered disconnected words. He walked so impetuously that Piotr had no time to turn aside. They came face to face, almost colliding with one another. Trirodov gave a start when he saw that he was not alone. His face had an expression of fright. Piotr got out of his way awkwardly, but Trirodov ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... action that after the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the method of the novelist, ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... questions to freshen up in the minds of the pupils the points related to the coming lesson. Not only will this insure that the lessons themselves shall be better understood, but the entire subject will in this way come to possess a unity instead of consisting of a series of more or less disconnected lessons in the ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... that a critic may consider too much that has been set down here is disconnected, yet if he will let a gramophone record an animated conversation, he will find that it ebbs and flows with the uncertain babbling of a brook—and so it has been with me. Only the other day, in the preface to Camden's History of the British Islands, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Meredith, Hardy and Stevenson, little may be said here, as they are much too near us to judge of their true place in the long perspective of English literature. Meredith, with the analytical temper and the disconnected style of Browning, is for mature readers, not for young people. Hardy has decided power, but is too hopelessly pessimistic for anybody's comfort,—except in his earlier works, which have a romantic charm that brightens the obscurity ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... near to Him, for, disconnected, the wire cannot carry the current, and is only a bit of copper, with no virtue in it, no power. Attach it once more to the battery and the mysterious energy flashes through it immediately. 'To Whom coming,' because He lives, 'ye shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... describe the wonders of the sea. And all that we drag from the bottom, all that we admire in the aquarium, are but a few disconnected specimens of that infinite whole which makes up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... these disconnected sentences rather abruptly, with his eyes alternately upon the moon and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... poles of personality and perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and stronger and possesses increased technical power and more artistic vision, one might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and scattered threads, into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first a boy's mere gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field and flower, in sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... has failed to disclose the existence of an authentic and comprehensive narrative of a pioneer journey across the plains. With the exception of some improbable yarns and disconnected incidents relating to the earlier experiences, the subject has been treated mainly from the standpoint of people who traveled westward at a time when the real hardships and perils of the trip were much less than ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell |
