"Focused" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... diaphragm, and the sounds are conveyed to the ear through a rubber hearing tube, c. The wire passes through the perforated handle, D, and is exposed only at the extremity. When the point, A, was rested against the center of a diaphragm upon which was focused an intermittent beam of sunlight, a clear musical tone was perceived by applying the ear to the hearing tube, c. The surface of the diaphragm was then explored with the point of the microphone, and sounds were obtained in all parts of the illuminated area and in the corresponding ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... was the vision of dear old Hubbard as I so often saw him during our struggle through that rugged northland wilderness, wasted in form and ragged in dress, but always hopeful and eager, his undying spirit and indomitable will focused in his words to me, and I can still see him as he looked when ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... men is focused on the contests, they are not worth while. To make them successful the firm under consideration utilized the ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... wondered. He was not thinking of the crystallization reaction; he knew the timing of that to the fraction of a second. His dark thoughts were focused ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the eternal against the temporal and grew younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood par excellence. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... spirit to this world and focused her gaze on the girl as if to try and recall where she had ever met her. Bonnie's abundant hair was spread out over the pillow, as the nurse had just prepared to brush it. It fell in long, rich waves of brightness and fascinating little rings of gold about her face. Gila stared ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... bitter imprecation Costigan flashed on the powerful ultra-beam projector of the speedster and focused the plate upon Bradley's prison; careless now of detection, since the Nevians were already warned. Upon that plate he watched the Nevians carry the helpless body of the captain into a small boat, and continued to watch as they bore ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... insanity which had made the world mad, and kept silent, hiding their thoughts and brooding over them. The leaders of the nations continued to use mob-passion as their argument and justification, excited it anew when its fires burned low, focused it upon definite objectives, and gave it a sense of righteousness by the high-sounding watchwords of liberty, justice, honor, and retribution. Each side proclaimed Christ as its captain and invoked the blessing and aid of the God of Christendom, though Germans were allied with ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... them up and focused them upon the boundary of the wood, finding that I could distinguish ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... one makes them—they seem to come from lower down: for the middle and higher tones, you feel the vibrations in facial muscles and about the eyes, always focused forward, just at the base of the forehead, between the eyes. It is something very difficult to put into words; the sensations have to be experienced, when making the tones. The singer must judge so much from sensation, for she cannot very well hear herself. I do not really ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... of August, 1869, he had noted the passage, across his telescope, of several bright flakes resembling thistleblows, floating in the sunlight. But the telescope was so focused that, if these things were distinct, they must have been so far away from this earth that the difficulties of orthodoxy remain as great, one way or another, no matter what we think ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... specify what, if any, means had been taken to guard against fraud, its only reference in this connection being a statement that "Mr. D. D. Home frequently urged us to hold his hands and feet." But it none the less created a tremendous sensation, public attention being focused on the fact that an awkward, callow, country lad had successfully sustained the scrutiny of men of learning, intelligence, and high repute. No longer, it would seem, could there be doubt of the validity of his ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... a rich and sumptuously decorated apartment, but under the spell of the Mariposa's "woven paces and weaving hands," Mrs. Hampton appeared a mere Dresden statuette, the tapestried and frescoed walls became a pale and evanescent background, and Ydo alone, dancing, focused in herself all light and beauty; nay, she herself was the pride of life, the rhythm of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the top of the wavelike ridge, and presently three heads, uncovered, were peering over into the valley beyond. Then the arm of one of them was outstretched, pointing. Then the field-glasses of two others were unslung, fixed and focused on some distant object; and then back, still crouching, came one of the number, signalling to Sergeant Drum to come on. Whereupon, without a word of command, simply following the example of their foremost ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... demanded. Singers taught in nature's way should be able to sing so long as strength lasts, and, like Adelaide Phillips, Carl Formes, and Sims Reeves, sing their sweetest songs in the declining years of life. Martel, at seventy years of age, had a full, rich voice. He focused all his tones alike, and employed ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... Egypt to Italy and Greece, and hence drew to itself the trade and people of the whole Mediterranean basin.[863] The northwestern Indian Ocean had a similar emporium in the ancient Dioscoridis, (Sokotra) which focused on itself the trade between Arabia ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... eyes rolling from side to side focused themselves on a low opening near the foot of his shakedown bed. Beyond this opening, and at some little distance, he saw a sunbonneted woman of a plump and comfortable presence. She was leaning against a tub which rested on a rude bench. At her back was another bark ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Ferguson, observing that Kent's glance remained focused on the blood-stained, raised letter "B" and the carving back of it. "In fact, don't touch any part of the casket, I'm trying ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... line of development here sketched, the inquiry has of necessity been focused on two main points: Sophistic and the Hellenistic Age. Now it is of peculiar interest to note what small traces of pure atheism can after all be found here, in spite of all criticism of the popular faith. We have ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... My eyes focused upon an object a little more than a foot away; my neck grew rigid, my scalp prickled while I stared, unbelieving. And that at which I stared was—a skeleton hand. Every bone a grayish black, sharply silhouetted, clean as some master ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... tin cup as he raised it to his lips; the three naked Oneidas, in their glistening scarlet paint, eagerly raising their rifles, while the merciless weapons of Murphy and Elerson slowly fell to the same level, focused on that kneeling figure across the dark ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... fabulous as Hercules'; or else, those being true, what was thrown in about his geniality is but garnish. In short, if ever there was such a man as Moredock, he, in my way of thinking, was either misanthrope or nothing; and his misanthropy the more intense from being focused on one race of men. Though, like suicide, man-hatred would seem peculiarly a Roman and a Grecian passion—that is, Pagan; yet, the annals of neither Rome nor Greece can produce the equal in man-hatred of Colonel Moredock, as the judge and ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the man on the bed, and, in that instant, both men forgot their differences and became physicians again, as they focused their attention on ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... at last to the perceptive limitations of our own earthly five senses. Just stop and consider how limited we are! Only five senses—why, even insects have six. Then consider that all matter, when we get to the bottom of it, is differentiated and condensed ether, focused into various mathematical arrangements, as numberless as the particles of the universe. Of these our five senses pick out a very small ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... while Chet aimed an instrument of gleaming chromium and glass, whose cable connections vanished in the phone panel recess. He focused it upon an artificially darkened screen above and behind the grouped figures on ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... not answer him. Her eyes were fixed, unseeing. They focused their gaze upon the fire as he led her to it. She sat down in the chair he placed for her and then very suddenly she began to shiver as if with ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... note ... that night, I say, as I sat on the forward deck alone, I heard, far off and faint as though indeed it were the lute of Andalusia, the low, slow, deep throb of a guitar!... My whole heart stopped. I was no more than a focused demand of life. Reason was gone from me, not intellect but emotion—that is its basic thing after all, emotion born on earth but reaching to the stars.... I listened, not hearing.... It was the air we had heard long ago, a love song of old Spain, written, perhaps, before DeSoto and his men perished ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... brood of kingfishers the less," I thought, with my glasses focused on the hole. But scarcely was the thought formed, when a fierce rumbling clatter sounded in the bank. The mink shot out, a streak of red showing plainly across his brown face. After him came a kingfisher clattering out a storm of invective ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... contribute their separate talents to the production of a single work of art. It follows that a nice adjustment of parts, a discriminating subordination of minor elements to major, is absolutely necessary in order that the attention of the audience may be focused at every moment upon the central meaning of the scene. If the spectator looks at scenery when he should be listening to lines, if his attention is startled by some unexpected device of stage-management ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... but even the footmen waiting at table seemed to feel this, and they forgot their duties as they looked at the beautiful Helene with her radiant face and at the red, broad, and happy though uneasy face of Pierre. It seemed as if the very light of the candles was focused on those ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... luck, and in the dill you need luck." Warren grunted in sour memory. "Had the Telly cameras been focused on Joe Mauser, there at the Little Big Horn, he would have been a month long sensation to the Telly buffs, with all that means." He grunted again. "There wasn't a Telly ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... possible that had Concha awaited Rezanov in St. Petersburg her attraction would have focused his desires irresistibly; but his mind had resigned itself to the prospect of separation for a definite period, and while it had not relegated her image to the background, her part in his life had been settled there among many future possibilities, and all the foreground was crowded with the impatient ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... whole, the note of the Chicago trip, all the dazzling lights and reflections of which focused, for Sylvia, upon Aunt Victoria's radiant person. At times, the resultant beam was almost too much for the young eyes; as, for example, on the next day when the two made a momentous shopping expedition to the largest and finest department store in the city. "I've a curiosity to see," Aunt ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... consists of a narrow box. On one side is a handle, and there is a lens that can be adjusted or focused. Inside is varied machinery, but I will not tire you with a description of it. Sufficient to say that there are two wheels, or reels. On one—the upper—is wound the unexposed film. One end of this film is fastened to the empty, or lower, reel. The film is passed back of lens, which ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... dying and fancying strange things! He looked from one to the other of the stern, pale faces of those who were gathered around her bedside. Seven of them there were—the same seven. At that moment their eyes were all focused upon him. Peter Ruff ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the crystal mirror of whose mind the universal harmony is focused and reflected, this secret of the cause and source of rhythm—that it dwells in a correlation of parts based on an ultimate simplicity—is instinctively apprehended. A knowledge of it formed part of the equipment of the painters who ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... speaking here of historians, but may appropriately give a little space to an account of that wonderful acre or two of ground at Westminster, where for so many centuries the history of the English-speaking race has been to such an extent focused. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The scope focused first on a bulging, monster, antiquated freighter of a design that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was of a passenger liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past generations was considered suitable for space. There was a bulk-cargo ship, ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... contemptuously. "Just wait till you see her. She will be focused by every eye-glass in Brighton when she takes the ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... As he focused his attention, the crystal expanded, then became a huge window through which he could see the shores of the inland sea, then the lands to the east of the large island on which he had caused his Residence to be ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... occurs in connection with that which the child desires to imitate. At first, definite acts focused the most of his interest and aroused imitation, now, interest begins to attach itself to the actor as well, and the child not only desires to imitate the deed but also to emulate the doer. Out of this a little later comes real hero worship, an ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... he demanded, staring blindly—with eyes not yet focused to the change from light to gloom—at the young man, who was sitting with the guide open on his knees, a tightly clenched fist resting on the transom ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... The sun had set, and the yellow sky was turning gray. Hogey was too tired to go on, and his legs would no longer hold him. He blinked around at the land, got his eyes focused, and found what looked like Hauptman's place on a distant hillside. It was a big frame house surrounded by a wheatfield, and a few scrawny trees. Having located it, he stretched out in the tall grass beyond the ditch ...
— The Hoofer • Walter M. Miller
... he thought out the procedure to use at the remote control panels. Turning on the screen above one of them produced a cross-haired image of the bulkhead directly in front of the near torpedo. He tried various manipulations until he had focused the view and caused it to sweep all around the interior of the turret. After idly watching himself and Truesdale appear on the screen, he returned the view to dead ahead, switched it off, and turned to ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... Malone said. He let go of the post with one hand, keeping a precarious grip with the other. He stared at his watch. The hands danced back and forth, but he focused on them after a while. It was 1:05. "Happened just—a few minutes ago," he said. "Maybe ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... grasp of house-life, of modern civilisation, of those minutiae which occupy the moment. The grey stone made me feel as if I had existed from then till now, so strongly did I enter into and see my own life as if reflected. My own existence was focused back on me; I saw its joy, its unhappiness, its birth, its death, its possibilities among the infinite, above all its yearning Question. Why? Seeing it thus clearly, and lifted out of the moment by the force ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... vegetable gardening these days, assumed the availability of plenty of water. The varieties I recommended in [i]Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades[i] were largely modern ones, and the seed companies I praised most highly focused on top-quality commercial varieties. But, looking at gardening through the filter of limited irrigation, other, less modern varieties are often far better adapted and other seed companies ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... clearly treating itself to a sensation, and upon Philip were focused the eyes of all. From now he was a marked man. The President, stirred by the wishes of a large part of the people, expressed by them in divers ways, offered him reinstatement in the Army with the rank of Major, and indicated, through the Secretary ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... He focused the exit terminal in Diana's apartment. There was no way of knowing whether the focus worked or not until ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... all eyes are now focused on General Lechitsky's rapid advance on Zaleszcyky and Czernowitz. As the official reports show, the Austrians have already blown up a bridge across the Pruth at Mahala, thus indicating that they entertain scant hope of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... president had stated the motion was not satisfactory to most of the members, who preserved a silence of indecision, with the single exception of Ruth, who uttered an enthusiastic affirmative vote, as a matter of course, only to shrink back perplexedly when she found angry eyes focused on her from every side. But Cicily nonchalantly announced the motion as having been carried, without troubling to ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... conformation of the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him by surprise. Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another long, dun fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost his balance over a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange sickness. He went off a little way to the side of the road and sat ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... double, you scurried into the fire area of a mitrailleuse or perhaps a Maxim; the Telly cameras which swung in your direction speedily, avidly, when a blast of fire threw you back and to the ground; the Telly cameras with their zoom lenses which focused full into your face as life leaked away. The Spanish aficionados never had it so good. The close-up expression of the dying ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... The American gentleman was the Special Correspondent of the "New York Herald." It is tolerably well known that except beneath his searching eye no considerable event can occur—and his whole attention was focused ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... warning and were debating in their minds whether they should do so or not, when Hopalong interrupted their thoughts by laughing. They looked up and he nodded toward the front, where they saw that anxious eyes from all parts of the room were focused on the open door. Then they noticed that it had ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... seminarian in Plautus little satisfaction has been vouchsafed. We are often greeted by the enthusiastic comments of German critics, which run riot in elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we are reading Meisterwerke of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?" Second: "How was it done? What was the technique of acting employed to represent in particular the ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... sound of her own name, Clare took her eyes from Farvel and turned them upon Mrs. Milo—turned them slowly, as a sick person might—with effort, and an almost feeble lifting of the head. Her look once focused, she began, little by little, to straighten, to stand more firmly on her feet; she even reached to flatten the starched collar, which had ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... I'm not avoiding it," the engineer proceeded, for this was the critical minute, and he sought to have all eyes focused upon him instead of upon the activity at his back. "The sheriff represents the law here in San Mateo, and I give you plain warning that every man who attempts violence to-night will be called upon to pay the account. By to-morrow the Governor may ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the Advisory Committee has focused attention on preparation of a draft of a proposed interstate-federal compact which has been submitted to the governments and the people within the Potomac River Basin for comment. We believe that an interstate-federal agency for the planning, development and management of the Potomac, envisaged ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... acquired at the cost of so much money and such incessant toil and experiment. During the first few years in which the business of the introduction of the light was carried on with such strenuous and concentrated effort, the attention of Edison and his original associates was constantly focused upon the commercial exploitation and the further development of the system at home and abroad. The difficult and perplexing situation at that time is thus described by Major S. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... spoke, her heavy jaw dropped and she stood staring. Miss Ethel swerved quickly round in the same direction, and her pale eyes focused. Neither of them uttered a sound as they looked at the square board which rose slowly above the privet hedge. They could not see the pole on which it was supported from that position in the garden, and so it appeared to them like a banner ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... of white on the bulkhead behind the spacemonk. He didn't remember that. He got up and walked over to it, peering to see in the dimness. Then he remembered his flashlight and focused the beam ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... textbook, but not studying; not even reading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eye was shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve, flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed page upon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doing something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished except by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he was doing really nothing at all. He was merely a ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... crushed in. Right in the middle of the forehead, pasted there, a gray-colored, diamond shaped paper seal flaunted itself—the device of the Gray Seal. In Jimmie Dale' hand, hidden as he turned his back, the tiny combination of powerful lenses was focused ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... radiation-pattern of her contragravity-field showed clearly, and there was a speck that marked her position on the radar-screen. The same position was marked with a pin-point of light on the vision-screen—some device on the Sky-Spy, synchronized with the detectors, kept it focused there. The Company ships and contragravity vehicles all were carrying topside lights, visible only from above, which flashed alternate red ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... the nations and the centuries influenced by that one woman's mental concentration! The geography of the world was changed by her power of focused thought. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mate for mate, and mother for offspring. Already her mind had leaped forward to the moment when this cunning, powerful plotter would be at death-grips with her husband and she not there to help. With intensity of purpose and relentlessness of determination she focused the powers of her forceful and practical mind upon the ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... house, and half the pay of a teacher. Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered she had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three years old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. She focused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out of her situation was to earn some money—an impossible thing at her age. Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, and sat frowning into space for a ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... faded from his face, and a look of rapt wonder took its place, as of a lover listening to the voice of his beloved. His mouth parted slightly, showing the white line of teeth, and his eyes looked out and out till they seemed to Darcy to be focused on things beyond the vision of man. Then something perhaps startled the bird, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... inside. She breathed upon her fingers, rubbing the circulation back into them, and began to shuffle the cards. Slipping them into the box, the girl settled herself in her chair and looked up into a circle of grinning faces. Before her level gaze eyes that had been focused queerly upon her fell. The case-keeper's lips were twitching, but he bit down upon them. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... searchlight, others would concentrate at once on it, whereupon the archies immediately opened fire. Then far above a light would twinkle out several times, which was a sign for the anti-aircraft batteries to cease fire. Everything remained still for a while, the searchlights always focused on their prey, which endeavoured to dodge out of the brilliant light, but in vain, owing to its unwieldiness. Then suddenly from out of the darkness a little object shot alongside the giant plane and spat tracer bullets into it, whereupon it instantly caught fire, and slowly heeling ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... done in a room dimly lighted with ruby light. The plates are dried, packed in sealed boxes, and thus sent to photographers. The artist opens them in his dark room, similarly lighted, inserts the plates in holders, film side out, covers with a slide, adjusts to the camera, previously focused, and makes the exposure to light. The time of exposure varies with the kind of plate, the lens, and the light, from several seconds, minutes, or hours, to 1/250 part of a second in some instantaneous work. In the dark room the plates are removed and can be ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... an uneasy, far-focused look into his eyes; came hours on end when he would sit, every debonaire effort at lightness abandoned, staring moodily into the fire, motionless save for his nervous hands which never seemed to rest. Joe found it harder to entice him with the ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never for an instant doubted what ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... was having trouble with the solar furnace. Three of the nine banks of mirrors would not respond to the electric controls, and one bank moved so jerkily that it could not be focused, and it threatened to tear ...
— All Day September • Roger Kuykendall
... torn and tangled forest. The road was narrow and overgrown, and several times I had to dodge hand grenades that lay in the grassy ruts. The Ford ploughed bravely through deep mud, skidded, recovered, fell into holes, and kept on. My attention was so focused upon driving that I saw little else but the road ahead, though once at an exclamation from Mademoiselle Froissart, out of the corner of my eye I saw a machine gun mounted and apparently intact. The motor was toiling, but in my soul I blessed its regular noise that told ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... in which to leave one's mother. My thoughts focused upon her very vividly for a moment. Down there, under that afternoon light, she was going to and fro, unaware as yet that she had lost me, bent and poking about in the darkling underground kitchen, perhaps carrying a lamp into the scullery to trim, or sitting patiently, staring into ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... without reference to the issues and evidence at the inquiry. We are very conscious that we have not had the advantage of seeing and hearing the witnesses. It can be very real, as all lawyers know. It is true that the kind of analytical argument we heard from counsel, with concentration focused on the passages of major importance in the report and the transcript of evidence, can bring matters into better perspective than long immersion in the details of a case. Necessarily this Court is more detached from the ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... Ali arose and left the cabin. He came back with a microfilm roll. Fitting it into the large projector he focused it on the wall ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Malone blinked and focused on the hand again. It still had five fingers. "Sure they are," he said. "They're spies, all right. And they're caught, and that's that. Except I don't think they're causing ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... twenty years following the Civil War were years of agitation for reform. People were at last recognizing the folly of using the multiplying public offices for party spoils. The quarrel between Congress and President Johnson over removals, and the Tenure of Office Act, focused popular attention on the constitutional question of appointment and removal, and the recklessness of the political manager during Grant's two terms disgusted the ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... have become crazy over material things. We are looking only at the structure above ground. We are trying to get more smoke from the chimney. We are looking at space instead of service, at profits instead of volume. With our eyes focused on the structure above ground, we have lost sight of those human resources, thrift, imagination, integrity, vision and faith which make the structure possible. I feel that only by the business men can this foundation be strengthened ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... I warned him, but in vain! quick as lightning flash meets lightning flash, the two invisible Immortal Forces within us sprang into instant opposition,—with this difference, that while he was ignorant and unconscious of HIS power, I was cognizant and fully conscious of MINE. Mine was focused, as it were, upon him,— his was untrained and. scattered,—the result was that mine won the victory: yet understand me well, Hilarion,—if I could have held myself in, I would have done so. It was he,—he who ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... gathered by his men and himself since that night when he had been called from his sleep to find Harry Goldenburg dead. Was there some point he had overlooked? He knew how fatal it was in the work of criminal investigation to take anything for granted. Although the main work of the explorer was now focused on Grell, it was not entirely certain that he was the murderer. Indeed, strange as his proceedings had been, there might be some explanation that would account for them. It might be that after Grell was found the whole investigation would ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... not moonlight illuminating the weird tumulus, but the glare of a battery of searchlights, suggesting, as Gootes irreverently remarked, the opening of a new supermarket. During my absence the National Guard had arrived and focused the great incandescent beams on the mound which now covered five houses and whose threat had driven the inhabitants from as many more. The powdery blue lights gave the grass an uncanny yellowish look, as though it had been stricken by ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... comprehend. The fractional entities of vitality are embraced in the oneness of the unitary Ego. Life," she added, "is the garnered condensation of objective impressions; and as the objective is the remote father of the subjective, so must individuality, which is but focused subjectivity, suffer and fade when the sensation lenses, by which the rays of impression are condensed, become destroyed." I am not quite clear that I fully understood her, but I think she appreciated my ideas, and I felt grateful for ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... quick to scent a story. He was not sure, of course, but the situation appeared to him at least suggestive. With the end of the play he wandered out with the crowd, edging his way close to the man and girl who had focused Gregory's attention, and following them into the street. He saw only a tall man with a certain quiet distinction of bearing, and a young and pretty girl, still flushed and excited, who went up the street a short distance and got ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pairs of eyes sought her pew and focused themselves upon the pretty young woman sitting there, red, angry, and shamefaced. Mr. Black was visibly amused and could ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... no sugar. And bring a second cup as soon as I've finished with the first." Only a part of his attention was given to the waiter; the rest was focused on the instructions he was receiving. The instructions kept coming until after the coffee had been brought. Then ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fell as she focused her gaze upon the bit of high, green bank on which the sun was now shining again so brilliantly. She remembered how badly she had been treated by Bess Lavine ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... amusing. The spectacle of the faces wilting into maudlin abstractions under the caress of the music brought a grin to him. The sounds had drugged the polite little masks and left them poised morosely in a sleepy dream. The lavender stocking crept tenderly into evidence. The owlish glasses focused with noncommittal stoicism in its direction. The blue sash looked worried and the raised eyebrows of the elderly youth asked unhappy questions. Music made people sad and caused sighs to trickle from their ludicrously inanimate features. Melting hearts under lacquered skins, dissolving little ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended—at any rate, among the later novels—is The Ambassador. There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not the master, of the theme. And the climax—which ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it, George?" she exclaimed, before she had even time to get her eyes focused upon ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... "I focused it before it got over the trees," said he. "I won't undertake to say what it was, but I'll risk my reputation as a sportsman that it wasn't any bird that ever I clapped eyes ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in no way remarkable. It was a motor lorry of about five tons capacity, a heavy thing, travelling slowly. Merriman's attention at first focused itself on the driver. He was a man of about thirty, good-looking, with thin, clear-cut features, an aquiline nose, and dark, clever-looking eyes. Dressed though he was in rough working clothes, there was a something in his appearance, ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... hint in these youthful effusions, except inasmuch as this unrelieved gloom, this ignorance of "values," so to speak, is a sign of youth, common especially among gifted persons of acute and premature sensibilities, whose imagination, not yet focused by reality, overreached the mark. With Emma Lazarus, however, this sombre streak has a deeper root; something of birth and temperament is in it—the stamp and heritage of a race born to suffer. But dominant and fundamental though it was, Hebraism was only latent thus far. It was classic ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... that he was ready to begin. Reddy wigwagged back O. K., and then the first heliographic message was sent from the ledge to the island. It was a rather mixed-up message, and kept Jim and Reddy wigwagging back and forth very strenuously to straighten matters out. It was my duty to keep the mirror focused. As the sun moved across the sky the shadow spot would move off the disk, and I had to keep shifting the mirror to bring the spot back where it belonged. We used the International Telegraph Code, which we had been studying every evening for a week, but it was ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... scenery; to the outburst of spring, or the bloom of flowers, or the splendours of storms and sunsets. The indifference to nature of the Pope school was, so far, the temporary complacency of the new population focused in the metropolitan area in their own enlightenment and their contempt for the outside rustic. The love of field-sports was as strong as ever in the squire, and as soon as he began to receive some of the ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... horizon suddenly expanded to take in the city and the vague picture of the reservation to the north. She realized that the eyes of the whole community were focused on her dearest friend. Up on the quiet, shaded college campus—the newspapers told her—they spoke of him contemptuously. He was a cheap politician, full of unsound economic principles, with a history ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... of feeling, of seeing. I lit a match, and her eyes focused on the flame. But the size of her pupils did ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... for his faith, with love for science; ruled by the loftiest moral principles; full of disinterested love and the milk of human kindness in his intercourse with those of other faiths and other views; an eagle-eyed thinker, in whom were focused and harmoniously blended the last rays of the declining sun ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... looking silently on the shifting grays. In ten seconds his sight blurred; he experienced a slight giddiness as though the substantial ground were shifting beneath him in masses, slowly, as in a dream. It gave him a curious feeling of instability. By an effort he focused his eyes; but almost immediately he caught himself growing fuzzy-minded again, exactly as though he had been gazing absently for a considerable period at a very ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the subtle, penetrating, and not wholly unpleasing scent which Furneaux had attributed to the burning of a joss stick, but his mind was focused on the detective's words, which suggested a queer discrepancy between certain vague possibilities already flitting through his brain and the terrible drama as it presented itself ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... many. When I was a very small boy possessed of a 32-20 rifle and large ambitions, I followed the advantage my father's footsteps made me in the deep snow of an unused logging-road. His attention was focused on some very interesting fresh tracks. I, being a small boy, cared not at all for tracks, and so saw a big doe emerge from the bushes not ten yards away, lope leisurely across the road, and disappear, wagging earnestly her tail. When I had ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... credulity which clings to imaginative people through life. I had accepted the blue man and the woman with floating hair in the way which they chose to present themselves. But I began to feel like one who sees a distinctly focused picture shimmering to a dissolving view. The intrusion of an accident to a stranger at another hotel continued this morning, for as I took the long way around the bay before turning back to Clementine's alley I met the open island hearse, looking like a relic of provincial ...
— The Blue Man - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... more fondly; yea, e'en nestle and abide In that covert from the storm-blast, in the haven of His Side. That deep wound speaks man's great hatred, but His love surpassing great: There were focused, at one spear-point, all God's ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... than was their wont. Here the great cape with which the spur ends marks the division of the whole trend of the land north from that which runs more directly south toward Katatallik. There the whole force of the south-going polar streams, focused on the ice, keeps open water long after all the rest of the coast is locked in the grim grip of winter. The walrus herds seem, in the evolution of ages, to have got an appreciation of this fact through their adamantine skulls. Therefore, from time immemorial, it has been ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... scientific fact. Through the operation of our thought forces we have creative power. The spoken word is nothing more nor less than the outward expression of the workings of these interior forces. The spoken word is then, in a sense, the means whereby the thought forces are focused and directed along any particular line; and this concentration, this giving them direction, is necessary before any outward or material manifestation of their power can ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... itself; but it is not, and must not be treated as, an isolated personality impervious to the mind of others. At each stage of its evolution it is the focus and expression of a larger world. A man does not value himself as a detached subject, but as the {114} inheritor of gifts which are focused in him. Man, in short, is a trustee for the world; and suffering and privation are among his opportunities. The question for each is, How much can he make of them? Something above us there must be to make us do and dare and hope, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... West, on reaching some Eastern land, finds it difficult at first to distinguish between the faces of different individuals, his mind being focused on the likeness pervading them all, so the Occidental student of Oriental thought is impressed with the remarkable similarity that pervades the entire Oriental civilization, modes of thought, and philosophy, finding it difficult to discover the differences which distinguish the various Oriental ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... to form an image, the light waves spreading out from the object must be brought together, or focused. Focusing means literally the bringing of light to a point, but it is evident in the formation of an image that all the waves are not brought to a single point. If they were, there would be no image. In the example of the candle given above, ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... a microscope. He examined the dried glass plates from the vacuum drier. The fractionator turned itself off and he focused on and studied the slide it yielded. He inspected a sample of the dust he'd gotten from the garments that had been sprayed at the south gate. The dust contained common dust particles and pollen particles and thread particles and all sorts of microscopic debris. But throughout all the sample ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins |
