"Disentangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consequence, in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes the least to the composition may contribute most of the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other. In this wide sense, not only during the years of our married life, but during many of the years of confidential friendship which preceded, all my published writings were as much her work as mine, her ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... perplexity, Fate forces you—at least once in your life—to bow the head. It makes us wonder if we should believe all the evidences of Immortality we do—were Immortality really a state of Punishment and not of Happiness unspeakable. It is so hard, so very hard, to disentangle our own desires from our own beliefs; so easy to confuse what we ought to believe with what, beyond all else, we want to believe. It sometimes makes one chary of believing anything—in questions Human as well as Eternal. The ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... straight ahead, even for a few rods, and then turn short round and return to him, you will find it next to impossible to do so. So many paths come in at acute angles; they look so much alike; and the light of a lamp reveals them so imperfectly, that none but the practised eye of a guide can disentangle their windings. A gentleman who retraced a few steps, near the entrance of the cave, to find his hat, lost his way so completely, that he was not found for forty-eight hours, though twenty or thirty people were in search of him. Parties are occasionally mustered and counted, to see that none ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... she did not wish him to be a sea-faring man he must study for another career. He must live as did the other youths of his age with whom he mingled in the lecture halls of the Institute. At sixteen he set sail for the Peninsula. His mother wished that he should be a lawyer in order that he might disentangle the family fortune, burdened and oppressed ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... she answered, trying to disentangle her high heels from his rug. "I've had my nap, thank you. Think I'll go down and get ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... stopped; and, counterfeiting pain, exclaimed, 'My foot is wounded by this prickly grass,' Then, glancing at me tenderly, she feigned Another charming pretext for delay, Pretending that a bush had caught her robe And turned as if to disentangle it. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... and Jean sat on over the fire. But his troubled eyes watched the curious figure as it passed over to its outfit. He saw the man stoop over the litter of his goods. He saw him disentangle some garment from the rest. When he came back the furs he had been clad in were either abandoned or hidden under fresh raiment. The man towered an awesome figure in the firelight. He was clad in black from head to foot, and his garment possessed ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had also more than once frustrated her designs. This time frustration was not possible. She was about to revenge the infliction of that little scar! And, at the same time the intellectual part of her was agreeably intrigued, trying to disentangle the why and wherefore of Richard's late action and utterances. While self-love was gratified to the highest height of its ambition by the knowledge that not only in his heart had she long reigned, but that he had dedicated time and wealth and refined ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... beautiful and spirited girl I think Father might have loved me, but I was neither. At first I did not think or care about my lack of beauty; then one day I was alone in the beech wood; I was trying to disentangle my skirt which had caught on some thorny underbrush. A young man came around the curve of the path and, seeing my predicament, bent with murmured apology to help me. He had to kneel to do it, and I saw a ray of sunshine falling through the beeches ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to the net to examine my prize. Indeed, I had not instantly resolution enough to survey it, and when at length I assumed courage enough to do so, I could not perfectly distinguish the parts, they were so discomposed; but taking hold of one end of the net, I endeavoured to disentangle the thing, and then drawing the net away, a most surprising sight presented itself: the creature reared upright, about three feet high, covered all over with long, black shaggy hair, like a bear, which hung down from his head and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... of Matisse. His career has been a series of discoveries, each of which he has rapidly developed. A highly original and extremely happy conception enters his head, suggested, probably, by some odd thing he has seen. Forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those principles that account for its peculiar happiness. He proceeds by experiment, applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely places. The significant elements of negro sculpture are found to repeat their success in the drawing of a lemon. Before long ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... of time to indulge in these reflections; for the sack had been tied with a cord, which had been knotted in a most complicated way, and it required all her patience and skill to disentangle it. She emptied out everything that was in the sack and said with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the string band twanging an accompaniment, until the gauze scarf of the middle lady catching in the hanging chandelier put an end to their rhythmical swayings, while like hens with a suspended cherry they hopped in turn off the ground in their effort to disentangle their one and ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... them. Your little child comes to you with a tangled cord. It gives it over into your hands, but holds to one end. Now, you know that in order to get the tangle out, you must have both ends. O weary one, Jesus will disentangle all the cares of life, but you must let him have both ends. He does not want your help. You hinder him if you attempt to help him. Cares will come; things that are of a trying nature will assail us as long as we live; but we have ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... the flowers disguised does fold, With wreaths of fame and interest. Ah, foolish man that wouldst debase with them And mortal glory, heaven's diadem! But thou who only couldst the serpent tame, Either his slippery knots at once untie, And disentangle all his winding snare, Or shatter too with him my curious frame,[142] And let these wither, that so he may die, Though set with skill, and chosen out with care; That they, while thou on both their spoils dost tread, May crown thy feet that could ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... by different causes; many of our visual sensations likewise lend themselves to the most varied interpretations; by the side of the efficient cause of an event we find a thousand entangled contingencies which appear so important that to disentangle them we are as much perplexed as the savage, who, unable to discriminate between causes and coincidences, returns to drink at the well which has cured him, carefully keeping to the same hour, the same gestures, and the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... such variety as causes us already to foresee that the Necrophorus cannot employ fixed methods in performing his task. Exposed to fortuitous hazards, he must be able to modify his tactics within the limits of his modest discernment. To saw, to break, to disentangle, to lift, to shake, to displace: these are so many means which are indispensable to the grave-digger in a predicament. Deprived of these resources, reduced to uniformity of procedure, the insect would be incapable of ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... "They disentangle from the puzzled skein In which obscurity has wrapped them up, The threads of politic and shrewd design That ran through all his purposes, and charge His mind with meanings that he never ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... was; by dint of questioning, Zerkow would surely get the information from her. Some day, if only he was persistent, he would hit upon the right combination of questions, the right suggestion that would disentangle Maria's confused recollections. Maria would tell him where the thing was kept, was concealed, was buried, and he would go to that place and secure it, and all that wonderful gold would be his forever and forever. This service of plate had ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... upon his victims. Now Pearse seized the opening; but when he arose, stumblingly, there was a different expression on his face, a horror-stricken realization of Tomlin's treachery. Venner lay, still unable to disentangle himself, but slightly hurt, and he, too, regarded Tomlin with a look of sorrow ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... lowest order of workers at all points, the first aim of any effort intended for their benefit is to disentangle the individual from the mass. It is not charity that is to do this. "Homes" of every variety open their doors; but in all of them still lurks the suspicion of charity; and even when this has no active formulation in the worker's mind, there is still the underlying sense of the essential ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... account floated before me in an unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology. Yet I brought away an impression that here was a rightness that earthly economists have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have been able to disentangle themselves from patriotisms and politics, and their obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... horse; each Moor leading his slight and fiery steed by the bridle, and leaping on it as he issued from the wood into the plain. Cased in complete mail, his visor down, his lance in its rest, Villena (accompanied by such of his knights as could disentangle themselves from the Moorish foot) charged upon the foe. A moment of fierce shock passed: on the ground lay many a Moor, pierced through by the Christian lance; and on the other side of the foe was heard the ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with mirror and sword, escaping from the sinister power of Darkness, Falsehood shrinking from its image in the mirror of Truth, and Vice struggling in the coils of a serpent. It is not easy to read either series, or to disentangle one ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the moral situation and the demands of religion; now the influence on the feministic movement, and now on art and social life; now the situation in the educated middle classes, and now in the life of the millions. We ought to disentangle the various threads in this confusing social tissue and follow each by itself. We shall see soon enough that not only the various elements of the situation awake very different demands, but that often any single feature may lead to social postulates which interfere with each other. Any regulation ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... always contain the minutes of Committees and other documentary material embodying the story of the past, but this dry chronicle is never likely to see the light except when unearthed by law courts or legislative committees. It seems worth while, therefore, to disentangle the essential thread of the tale of 1914 from the mass of unreadable detail in the minute books, and put it in a shape where those who are ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... with the effort to disentangle it, resolved the Princess into an attentive auditor. The advantages in the conversation were consequently with the Sheik; and he availed himself of them to lead as ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of each custom or belief and of its separate parts in this way enables us, in the first place, to disentangle it from the particular personal or social stratum in which it happens to have been preserved. It may have become attached to a place, an object, a season, a class of persons, a rule of life, and may have been preserved by means of this attachment. But because every item of folklore ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... tempting Providence by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind friends charitably trying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was evident, but perhaps that would not have been the case in a rigidly parabolical course. This was a fresh problem which tormented Barbicane's brain, veritably imprisoned as it was in a web of the unknown which he could not disentangle. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... killed by America. It was a fantastic thought, and he attempted to dismiss it, waiting for more secure knowledge, but it persisted. She had been killed by unfamiliar circumstances, tradition, emotions. In some manner, but how he was unable to disentangle from the pressures of mere curiosity and conjecture, Nettie Vollar—or rather Gerrit's old passing affair with Nettie—had entered into the unhappy occurrence. After an hour's vain search he gave up all ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... extemporaneous controversies, the dull will be subtle, and the acute absurd; how often stupidity will elude the force of argument, by involving itself in its own gloom; and mistaken ingenuity will weave artful fallacies, which reason can scarcely find means to disentangle. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... sparing / hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of / thought and diction. This latter fault however had insinuated itself / into my Religious Musings with such intricacy of union, that sometimes / I have omitted to disentangle the weed from the fear of snapping the / flower. A third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that / of obscurity; but not, I think, with equal justice. An Author is obscure / when his conceptions are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... other to the heart like Cora and the Doctor, they stood there for a long while, till they heard the rumble of wheels on the bridge and knew they must disentangle. ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... light-house had no means of communicating to the frigate, that if she would only stand on a little further, she would disentangle herself from the cloud, in which, like Jupiter Olympus of old, she was wasting her thunder. At last, the captain, hopeless of its clearing up, gave orders to pipe to dinner; but as the weather, in all respects except this abominable haze, was quite fine, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... solitary one. But soon after Gabrielle had completed her sixteenth year we noted a sickly youth, who patiently pursued his quiet sport by the hour together, and never looked round as we passed and repassed him. Some trifling "chance" (as it is called) led to his thanking Gabrielle for assisting to disentangle his line, which had caught amid the willow-branches overhanging the water; the same "chance" caused him to observe his beautiful assistant, and I saw his start of surprise and admiration. He was a silly-looking lad, we thought, dressed like a gentleman, and behaving as one; and he was never ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... with its first toys, and with the collection of rudimentary sense impressions, it is also developing a remarkable variety of noises and babblements from which it will presently disentangle speech. Day by day it will show a stronger and stronger bias to associate definite sounds with definite objects and ideas, a bias so comparatively powerful in the mind of man as to distinguish him from all other living creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort of concrete way, come almost ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... said lightly; 'and perhaps if I disentangle your mystery I shall find it to cover—indifference. I hope ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... contrived to pick them all up—I don't know how!—and what would happen if he put them all down. I always knew exactly which one I wanted, and it was generally on a very inside string and took a long time to disentangle. And how maddening it was if the grown-ups grew tired of waiting, and walked on with the penny. Only I would rather have had none, than not have the one on which I had ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... with. And here it is, having to deal with alien powers, that his special temperament comes into play, and may work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on the road. A man may be able to disentangle intricate problems, be able to recall the past, and yet be cozened by an ordinary knave. The finest expression will not liquidate a butcher's account. If Apollo puts his name to a bill, he must meet ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... never be brave," she mourned; "I shall always be wanting to be happy." And, kneeling down, she began to disentangle a fly, imprisoned in a cobweb. A plant of hemlock had sprung up in the long grass by her feet. Greta thought, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... went to the window and tried to disentangle the window cord. The others looked on in breathless silence, when suddenly a big lad, in sailor's clothes, who had just come home on the ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... purpose. "And how about Moggs?" said Neefit, putting his hands into his breeches-pocket, pulling down the corners of his mouth, and fixing his saucer eyes full upon the young man's face. So he stood for some seconds, and then came the words of which Waddle had spoken. Neefit could not disentangle the intricacies of Ralph's somewhat fictitious story; but he had wit enough to know what it meant. "You ain't on the square, Captain. That's what you ain't," he said at last. It must be owned that the accusation was just, and it was made so loudly that Waddle did not ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... Leonora with the gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs Maidan's hair just before dinner. There was not a single word spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale, with a red mark down her left cheek, and the key would not come out of her black hair. It was Florence who had to disentangle it, for Leonora was in such a state that she could not have brought herself to touch ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... answer—as I suppose my friend the Rev. R.J. Campbell would answer—that what confuses me is the overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories and superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will in effect ask me to disentangle the Christ I need from the accumulated material, choosing and rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does, I know, so present Him as a man inspired, and strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting a dream of human brotherhood and the immediate ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... real. Wearied of her own efforts to disentangle herself from the meshes of her plight, she was ready to challenge chance. Had her father been sitting up for her, she would have led her husband into his presence, prepared to take the consequences. But as chance decided otherwise, she accepted the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... which they frequented, and he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he heard the crack of the Indian's rifle, and the bullet hissed close to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... I have given the historical outline of the story; but if we look into Victor Hugo's "Histoire d'un Crime," and disentangle its facts from its hysterics, we may receive from his personal narrative a vivid idea of what passed in Paris from the night of Dec. 1, 1851, to the evening of December 4, ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... it, and seemed to avoid him. Nejdanov took up a pen to write to his friend Silin, but he did not know what to say to him. There were so many conflicting thoughts and sensations crowding in upon him that he did not attempt to disentangle them, and put them ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... this way the lower part of the wall was made to harmonize sufficiently with the upper portion, which was wholly colored, but chiefly with pale hues. At the same time a greater distinctness was given to the scenes represented upon the sculptured slabs, the color being judiciously applied to disentangle human from animal figures, dress from flesh, or human ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... identical on both sides of the canyon. That the colors seem confused is because, viewing the spectacle from an elevation, we see the enormous indentations of the opposite rim in broken and disorganized perspective. Few minds are patient and orderly enough to fully disentangle the kaleidoscopic disarray, but, if we can identify the strata by form as well as color, we can at least comprehend without trouble our principal outline; and comprehension is ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... to disentangle the truth and the error in this view. The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. Nevertheless there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... the sphere of morals any more satisfactory from the point of view of the class which is responsible for them. It very soon begins to be felt that, as Hagen puts it, "the formulas of penal law are stiff and clumsy instruments which can only in the rarest instance serve to disentangle the delicate and manifoldly interwoven threads of the human soul, and decide what is just and what unjust. Formulas are adopted for simple, uncomplicated, rough everyday cases. Only in such cases do they achieve the conquest of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Indeed, I could not have done less—considering the very liberal loan that you have made to my poor niece to enable her to return quickly to her helpless babe. As I hardly need tell you, that loan will be returned promptly—as soon as Mrs. Captain Chiswick gets East and is able to disentangle her affairs." ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... one certainly was, and the other, whom Sultan had attacked, was scarce likely to look again upon the light of day. The leader of the band had fallen again to the earth, and was enveloped in the folds of the heavy cloak, from which he appeared to be feebly struggling to disentangle himself. The girl followed the direction of the youth's glance, and explained the matter in a ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of the adversaries nearly always upsets the other, perhaps far off, perhaps a little nearer. Were this "a little nearer," face to face, one of the two troops would be already defeated before the first saber cut and would disentangle itself for flight. With actual shock, all would be thrown into confusion. A real charge on the one part or the other would cause mutual extermination. In practice the ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... to record what might happen. I auditioned it, but I can't disentangle it from what he told me. For example, in his words: Multiply distances by five, heights by ten, and slickness by twenty. And in the playback: Thirty chin-high ledges loaded with soft lard, and only finger holds and toe holds. And you did it on stilts that began, ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... future I shall have less and less chance against him. What shall we ever get out of her as a married woman? What would Mark Winnington—to whom she will give herself, body and soul,—allow us to get out of her? Better break with her now, and disentangle my own life!" ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should be willing of themselves to communicate them to him (which is what those who esteem them secrets will never do), the experiments are, for the most part, accompanied with so many circumstances and superfluous elements, as to make it exceedingly difficult to disentangle the truth from its adjuncts—besides, he will find almost all of them so ill described, or even so false (because those who made them have wished to see in them only such facts as they deemed conformable to their principles), that, if in the entire number there ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... thorn or prickly stem Will take a prisoner her long garments' hem; To disentangle it I kneel, Oft wounding more than I can heal; It makes her laugh, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... Thaddeus Perkins, ex-candidate, and Mayor of Dumfries Corners only by courtesy of those who honor defeated candidates with titles for which they have striven unsuccessfully, was strolling through the country along the line of the Croton Aqueduct, trying to disentangle, with the aid of the fresh sweet air of an early summer afternoon, an idea for a sonnet from the mazes of his brain. Stopping for a moment to look down upon the glorious Hudson stretching its shimmering length like a bimetallic serpent to the north and south, he suddenly ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... its vast limits the personal thoughts and passions of its creator, even although they are for the most part absorbed past recognition in the mighty mass, and no critical chemistry can with confidence disentangle them. At any rate, there are in the plays many utterances—ethical utterances, or observations conceived in the spirit of "a natural philosopher"—which are repeated to much the same effect at different ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... dilemma to solve—at so inconvenient a moment, when we were as busy as busy could be, trying to disentangle the canoe—was rather tiresome. The strange man, having laid his gun upon the ground, helped us with all his might in our work. When the canoe got off, the strange man, gun and all, jumped clumsily ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, we must take a survey, wide but minute, sometimes to all appearance diffuse, yet in reality vitally related to the main theme. In order to simplify the narrative, I have sought to disentangle the strands of war policy and to follow them severally, connecting them, however, in the chapter entitled "Pitt as War Minister," which will sum up the results of these studies on the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of antique sculpture a glimpse into the life of antiquity, and that glimpse served to correct the vulgarism and distortion of the mediaeval life of the fifteenth century. In the perfection of Italian painting, the union of antique and modern being consummated, it is perhaps difficult to disentangle what really is antique from what is modern; but in the earlier times, when the two elements were still separate, we can see them opposite each other and compare them in the works of the greatest ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Liebermann's work from Amsterdam to Vienna, and out of the variety of styles set forth I endeavoured to disentangle several leading characteristics. The son of a well-known Berlin family, his father a comfortably situated manufacturer, the young Max was brought up in an atmosphere of culture and family affection. His love for art was so pronounced ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... laughed. "How disobliging!" he sympathized. "And how modest!" he added—which the reader may disentangle; Bessie did not. ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... wait, without interrupting, or trying to help her disentangle her thought, of which he had in truth ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... able to employ his mind in study, or amuse it with pleasing imaginations; and seldom appeared to be melancholy, but when some sudden misfortune had just fallen upon him, and even then, in a few moments, he would disentangle himself from his perplexity, adopt the subject of conversation, and apply his mind wholly to the objects that others presented ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... it removes any danger that the lady may be crushed between her own horse and her escort's, but who protects her from any passing car or carriage, and in case of a runaway what can her escort, his left hand occupied with his own reins, do to aid her with hers, or to disentangle her foot from the stirrup or her habit from the pommels in case she is thrown? Can he snatch her from the saddle, after the matter of one of Joaquin Miller's young men? The truth is that since the rule of ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... walked less quickly toward his house, on the deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other things, of the luminous "other places", of the splendors or of the terrors foreign to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying to disentangle itself—But no, all this, being indistinct and incomprehensible, remained formless ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... answered she. And then the king thought he would like to ask Imani too; so he sent a messenger to find out what sort of a present she wanted. The man happened to arrive just as she was trying to disentangle a knot in her loom, and bowing ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... pack, and to reach it Marks was compelled to step over the traces of some of the other dogs. One of them, in fear of the whip handle, sprang away as Marks approached, and in the movement wrapped its trace around the man's foot. Marks stooped to disentangle his foot, and as he did the dog swung in another direction ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... signalled to him to stop. Every school-boy knows the story of how Lord Nelson put the glass to his blind eye and, remarking that he could see no signal, kept right on. In the end he had to resort to stratagem to force a truce so that he might disentangle some of his ships that were drifting into great danger in the narrow channel. The ruse succeeded. Crown Prince Frederik, moved by compassion for the wounded whom Nelson threatened to burn with the captured hulks if firing did not stop, ordered hostilities to cease ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... of cheating! when the happy company thought they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back and disentangle it from the ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... it—vulgar soft-heartedness, and declared there was not room to move for the cats and dogs in the house. 'Lenotchka,' he would shout to her, 'come quickly, here's a spider eating a fly; come and save the poor wretch!' And Lenotchka, all excitement, would run up, set the fly free, and disentangle its legs. 'Well, now let it bite you a little, since you are so kind,' her father would say ironically; but she did not hear him. At ten years old Elena made friends with a little beggar-girl, Katya, and used to go secretly to meet her in the garden, took her nice things to eat, and ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... fruitless attempts to get past, followed by ignominious retreats; how at last we outmanoeuvred him by throwing a tablecloth over his head, and then rushing by him, gained the top of the stairs before he could disentangle himself. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... risen above the far off eastern horizon, and was struggling to disentangle itself from the drifting tresses of fog hanging in massy banks over the river. Slowly but surely it slipped away from each misty, tremulous embrace, and then like a giant refreshed by the encounter assumed ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... to disentangle Mr. J. C. Symons, but failed. Mr. Airy[175] can correct the error of a ship's compasses, because he can put her head which way he pleases: but this he cannot do ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had, Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But—not to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of her neck, that extraordinary ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... in which the boy learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part of the matters themselves. He cannot disentangle what is conventional from what is original, because he has not yet a first-hand acquaintance with ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... not enter the present species also as a lycogala. But the stemonitis relationship this time impressed them rather than the aethalial; besides they were misled by the S. fasciculata of Gmelin and Persoon, a composite which the genius of Fries hardly availed to disentangle twenty-five years later. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... thing happened. A black, soft surface suddenly fell over his face and was pulled back with a brisk tug. Mary Trevert, standing up in the back seat of the car, had flung her fur over the secretary's head from behind and caught him in a noose. Before Mr. Jeekes could disentangle himself, Robin was at his throat and had borne him to the ground. The pistol was knocked skilfully from his hand and fell clattering on the flags. Robin pounced down on it. Then for the first time he smiled, a sunny smile that lit ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... mercy's sake what for? You surely aren't thinking of pelting the fire out with them!" she gasped, hurrying downstairs and struggling to disentangle her eyeglasses from her bonnet strings; a complication that was always happening at crucial moments, such as picking out change in an elevated railway station, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... smallest. It had been brought across country on a wagon. Some one had bought it at an auction for a lark; and a huge lark was its year on the waters of the Nibs River. The whole town took a sail in it by turns, always with one aft whose business it was to disentangle the rudder from the mass of seaweed which with brief intervals suspended progress, and all hands ready to get out and lift the steamer off when it ran ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... tails?' where'er we be. Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, 95 Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,—disentangle them who may. Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. Near those a most inexplicable thing, 100 With lead in the middle—I'm conjecturing How to make Henry understand; but no— I'll leave, as Spenser says, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... reckoned a poet, I do not in the least regret the years I gave to it. In the first place it was an intense pleasure to write. The cadences, the metres, the language, the rhymes, all gave me a rapturous delight. It trained minute observation—my poems were mostly nature-poems—and helped me to disentangle the salient points and beauties of landscapes, hills, trees, flowers, and even insects. Then too it is a very real training in the use of words; it teaches one what words are musical, sonorous, effective; while the necessity of having to fit words ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and heavy hearts we crept back to the skerm, and sat down to wait for the dawn, which now could not be much more than an hour off. It was absolutely useless to try even to disentangle the oxen till then, so all that was left for us to do was to sit and wonder how it came to pass that the one should be taken and the other left, and to hope against hope that our poor servant might have been mercifully delivered from the ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... vessel away, and he now duns us at every post for between four and five thousand pounds sterling, to disengage him in Holland, where he has purchased arms for you. With the same view of saving your credit, Mr Ross was furnished with twenty thousand pounds sterling, to disentangle him. All the captains of your armed vessels come to us for their supplies, and we have not received a farthing of the produce of their prizes, as they are ordered into other hands. Mr Hodge has had large ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... the rich confluence often thousand tongues, To tell of joy and to inspire it. Who Could hear such concert, and not join in chorus? Not I;—sometimes entranced, I seem'd to float Upon a buoyant sea of sounds: again With curious ear I tried to disentangle The maze of voices, and with eye as nice To single out each minstrel, and pursue His little song through all its labyrinth, Till my soul enter'd into him, and felt Every vibration of his thrilling throat, Pulse of his heart, and flutter of his pinions. Often, as one among the multitude, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... why I made exclamation! Just the old, dull earthy surprise! Wait for me a moment, Alexander." She put her hands before her eyes, then, dropping them, sat with her gaze upon the great tree shot through with light from the clearing sky. "I see her now. At first I could not disentangle her and Gilian, for they were always together. I have not seen them often—just three or four times to remember, perhaps. But in April I chanced for some reason to go to White Farm.... I see her now! Yes, she has beauty, though it would ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... reason. He did not trouble over little barriers of this sort in the face of so much loveliness. He would accept the situation with all its difficulties; he would not try to answer the objections which cold truth thrust upon him. He would promise anything, everything, and trust to fortune to disentangle him. He would make a try for Paradise, whatever might be the result. He would be happy, by the Lord, if it cost all honesty of statement, all abandonment ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... The first to disentangle himself from the rest and come and speak to me was Frau Bornsted's father, Pastor Wienicke. He came and stood in front of me, his legs apart and a cigar in his mouth, and he took the cigar out to tell me, what I already knew, that I was English. "Sie ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... existence of which the King and the Government had expressly acknowledged after the outbreak of war, was still alive, Italian statesmen had long before engaged themselves so deeply with the Triple Entente that they could not disentangle themselves. There were indications of fluctuations in the Rome Cabinet as far back as December. To have two irons in the fire is always useful. Before this Italy had shown her predilection for extra dances. [Cheers and laughter.] But this is no ballroom. This is a bloody battlefield upon which ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—a rigor that accepts no excuse—and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... to Conquer' were considerable; but by this time his affairs had reached a stage of complication which nothing short of a miracle could disentangle; and there is reason for supposing that his involved circumstances preyed upon his mind. During the few months of life that remained to him he published nothing, being doubtless sufficiently occupied by the undertakings to which he was already committed. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... respects the plot is, it is true, altogether different. However this may be, in Calderon the ingenious boldness of an extravagant invention is always preserved in due keeping by a deeper magic colouring of the poetry; whereas in Corneille, after our head has become giddy in endeavouring to disentangle a complicated and ill-contrived intrigue, we are recompensed by a succession of mere tragical epigrams, without the slightest recreation ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... embarrassments which Deane had brought about by his indiscretion, Franklin arrived at Paris; but he wisely left Deane to disentangle the affairs of the supposed mercantile house, until this unfortunate agent was recalled by Congress,—a broken-down man, who soon after died in England, poor and dishonored. Deane had also embarrassed Franklin, and still more the military authorities at ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... been much debated, whether the influence of Persian and Indian thought can be traced in Neoplatonism, or whether that system was purely Greek.[151] It is a quite hopeless task to try to disentangle the various strands of thought which make up the web of Alexandrianism. But there is no doubt that the philosophers of Asia were held in reverence at this period. Origen, in justifying an esoteric mystery-religion ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... a fragment of low arbor-vitae hedge, poor outpost of a neighboring plantation, is so covered and packed with solid drift, inside and out, that it seems as if no power of sunshine could ever steal in among its twigs and disentangle it. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... tending, bears no trace Of human semblance, nor of aught beside That my foil'd sight can guess." He answering thus: "So courb'd to earth, beneath their heavy teems Of torment stoop they, that mine eye at first Struggled as thine. But look intently thither, An disentangle with thy lab'ring view, What underneath those stones approacheth: now, E'en now, mayst thou discern the pangs of each." Christians and proud! O poor and wretched ones! That feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust Upon unstaid perverseness! Know ye not That we are worms, yet made at last ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the more instructed Daughters of the North, accustomed herself to that delicious Confessional, the transfusion of thought to writing. Now, suddenly, her heart felt an impulse; a new-born instinct, that bade it commune with itself, bade it disentangle its web of golden fancies,—made her wish to look upon her inmost self as in a glass. Upsprung from the embrace of Love and Soul—the Eros and the Psyche—their beautiful offspring, Genius! She blushed, she sighed, she ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all other elementary truths. It is in dealing with the complex combinations that the experimental methods are for the most part illusory, and the deductive mode of investigation must be invoked to disentangle the complexity. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... had never cared mach for his own poems, he says, Byron had outdone him in popularity, and the Muse—"the Good Demon" who once deserted Herrick—came now less eagerly to his call. It is curiously difficult to disentangle the statements about the composition of "Waverley." Our first authority, of course, is Scott's own account, given in the General Preface to the Edition of 1829. Lockhart, however, remarks on the haste with which Sir Walter wrote the Introductions to the magnum opus; and the lapse of fifteen ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... cares whether he commits the rhetorical blunder of mixing up metaphors or not. That matters very little, except to a pedant and a rhetorician. In his impetuous way he blends three here, and has no time to stop to disentangle them. They all mean substantially the same thing which I have stated in the words that conduct here determines the possession of life hereafter; but they put it in three different figurative fashions which we may separate and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shall come to no conclusion by thinking about it. All rights are alike to the understanding, and it is always easy to throw extra weight into the ascending scale. Do you makeup your mind, my friend, to act, and act promptly, for me and for yourself. Disentangle and untie the knots, and tie them up again. Do not be deterred from it by nice respects. We have already given the world something to say about us. It will talk about us once more; and when we have ceased to be a nine days' wonder, it will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... which, coming suddenly, God knows whence or why, cut his face, drove masses of snow into it, filled out his cloak-collar like a sail, or suddenly blew it over his head with supernatural force, and thus caused him constant trouble to disentangle himself. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... like a drunken man, is occasionally drowned, and more frequently is ducked. You have to cast painfully, with steep precipitous banks behind you, all overgrown with trees, with bracken, with bramble. It is a boy's work to disentangle the fly from the branches of ash and elm and pine. There is no delicacy, and there is a great deal of exertion in all this. You do not cast subtilely over a fish which you know is there, but you swish, swish, all across the current, with a strong reluctance to lift the line after each venture and ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... the serpents. Thousands of heads were reared, and tongues were stretched out to sting the intruder to death, but happily for him their bodies were so closely entwined one in the other that they could not disentangle themselves quickly. Like lightning he seized a bit of bread, dipped it in the bowl, and put it in his mouth, then dashed away as if fire was pursuing him. On he flew as if a whole army of foes were at his heels, and he seemed to hear the noise of their approach growing nearer and nearer. At ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... not necessary here to attempt to disentangle or explain away the numerous amours in which he was engaged through the greater part of his life. It is evident that Burns was a man of extremely passionate nature and fond of conviviality; and the misfortunes of his lot combined with his natural tendencies to drive ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... some newspapers, and I have become rather good at it—I have a book that explains the way cyphers are usually constructed. I have found out a good many at one time and another, but this one took me rather a long time to disentangle. I can tell you, Mike, that when I found it concerned ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... nothing. But to his sensitive little nerves came a feeling that something was there. Gradually his eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom, began to disentangle substance and shadow. Then suddenly he detected the form of a gray crouching animal. He saw its tufted ears, its big round face, with mouth half open grinningly. Its great, round, pale, yellow green eyes were staring ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... even their vainest flights of patriotic prophecy. They may never have sufficiently realized that this better future, just in so far as it is better, will have to be planned and constructed rather than fulfilled of its own momentum; but at any rate, in seeking to disentangle and emphasize the ideal implications of the American national Promise, I am not wholly false to the accepted American tradition. Even if Americans have neglected these ideal implications, even if they have conceived the better future as containing chiefly a larger ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... quarter-back and caught the ball when it was thrown backwards. Now or never! The lad felt that he would sacrifice anything to pass the three men who stood between him and the English goal. He passed Evans like the wind before the half-back could disentangle himself from Tookey. There were but two now to oppose him. The first was the other English half-back, a broad-shouldered, powerful fellow, who rushed at him; but Tom, without attempting to avoid him, lowered his head and drove at him full tilt with such violence that both men reeled ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... our past lives has led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off, relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us more deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a process of redemption, its various phases ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Rip was, with a violent scramble, to disentangle himself from his covering, emerging from which he again barked with shrill and piercing vehemence, at the same time leaping to the floor. By the sound, which he could locate, Valentine felt certain that the dog had gone over ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to take a part in the great event. In compliance with the conditions imposed, we gave as much publicity as we could to Mrs. Boyce. Lieutenant Colonel Boyce, V.C., and Mrs. Boyce were officially associated in the programme of the reception. How to disentangle them afterwards, when the presentation of the address, engrossed on velluni and enclosed in a casket, should be made to the Colonel, was the subject of heated and confused discussion. Then the feminine elements in town and county desired to rally to the side of Mrs. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... knew that he had risen there too lightly, and that the tangles of lower realities must be unravelled before he could be free to mount again—Helen with him. He knew, at last, that he had made Helen very angry and that it might take some time to disentangle things; but the radiance of the heights was with him still, and if, to Helen's eye, he looked fatuous, to Franklin, seeing his face now, for the first ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was so astonished that it took his breath away. When he recovered he spoke learnedly about its clothes as evidence of its heathen origin. Never saw such a thing before, he said. They were like they were sewn on; it was impossible to disentangle that child by any way short of ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... propose to set forth the philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly developed age has surrounded it and discover the true raison d'etre of that doctrine which "the Bible Christian" confesses under the aspect of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... part of the long struggle between good and evil does not appeal more to my mind. We are just here in it, and whatever we suffer and whatever we lose, it is for the right we are standing.... It is all terrible and awful, and I don't believe we can disentangle it all in our minds just now. The only thing is just to go on doing one's bit.... Miss Henderson is taking home with her to-day a Serb officer, quite blind, shot right through behind his eyes, to place him somewhere where ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... But in no reign is the distortion of the earlier statements more serious, indeed one can hardly recognize the earlier documents in their later and "corrected" form. Accordingly, in no reign is it more imperative that we should disentangle the various sources and give the proper value to each. When we have discovered which document is our earliest and most authentic source for any given event, we have already solved some of the most stubborn problems in the history of the reign. The various conflicting ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... about this land, we cannot afford to ignore and disregard. Nothing is easier than to discredit such a truth by raising the cry of Popery. It is one of the penalties which those have to pay who seek to disentangle the truth which He has in His Church revealed from the untruth which has ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... upright at once and tried to disentangle her drama from her story. Muffie slid comfortably down from her perch. But Max was ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome |
