"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gathered Wanda in his arms, calling her name, hoping for a twitch of life. Then he whipped out his knife and sawed through the cord and lowered the body upon the floor, felt for the heart, turned up the dropped eyelids, even shook the inanimate stiffening form of his pet. He knew it was in vain—that never again would she jump trustingly upon him, never again would she appear absurdly with one of his slippers in her wide mouth that always seemed to smile at the joke, coming down the drive to greet him; ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... triangular houses are not allowed, and for this reason. The angles of a Square (and still more those of an equilateral Triangle), being much more pointed than those of a Pentagon, and the lines of inanimate objects (such as houses) being dimmer than the lines of Men and Women, it follows that there is no little danger lest the points of a square or triangular house residence might do serious injury to an inconsiderate ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... person? art thou chaste and uncontaminated with evil? I will not believe thy boasts, attributing (as I must, if I do believe) to the Gods the folly of thinking evil. Now then vaunt, and with thy feeding on inanimate food retail your doctrines upon men, and having Orpheus[35] for your master, revel it, reverencing the emptiness of many letters; which avail you not; ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... could so affect another living being, can you suppose that a mesmerizer could also affect inanimate objects; ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... upon the slippery, blackened ladder, grasping the inanimate form of a little child. Loud cheers rent the air. But they pierced the hearts of those who bent over the senseless forms of the deliverer and the child. Most of their clothing, their hair, and eyebrows were burned, they were fearfully ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... artificial light is permitted) I noted that the canvas had mellowed with the years. The Monets are of rare quality. Altogether a magnificent object-lesson for young Germany, in which tender colour, an exquisite vision (poetic without being sloppy-sentimental) of the animate and inanimate world. What a lesson for those rough daubers who growl at the dandyism of the Frenchmen, whose landscapes look like diagrams, surveyors' maps, or what-not; painters who, if they were told that they are not knee-high to a grasshopper ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... large numbers to the house of their benefactor to obtain a last glance at his lifeless body. Parents brought their little ones to the house of mourning, and as they gazed upon the features of the departed, now inanimate in death, they taught their infant minds the impressive lesson, that before them were the mortal remains of one who had devoted his energies to the disenthralment of their race, and whose memory they should ever cherish with gratitude and reverence. When the day arrived for committing his ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... resentment or surprise, he turned back, stooped over the balustrade and looked down into the kitchen. Nothing there was visible but a narrow strip of the white table, on which lay a black cotton glove, and beyond, the glint of a copper pan. What made all these mute and inanimate ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... sources not known, and the translation is a paraphrase. (One or two alterations are here made on the authority of the second edition.) BOOK VI XIII. "Affected and qualified" (i4): exis, the power of cohesion shown in things inanimate; fusiz, power of growth seen in plants and ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... of them inclined to let mere description (in Pope's phrase) take the place of sense—i.e. of the life which it is the business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840), where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests with ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... out came the declaration of war. When I had read it, I drew my sword, and, as I ran my eye along its cold, sharp blade from hilt to point, I thought how strange was its power to let out a man's life, and turn him, in a moment, into a heap of inanimate carrion. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the rich presents made to the inanimate clay which yesterday influenced those who still trembled lest the spirit of the dead war-chief would haunt them. The richest cloth enrobed his body, and, a short distance from the village, he was placed upon ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... smoking-room in the house in Pemberton Square, three years after Maggie went to live there, on the very sofa where Andre Maggimore had lain, was stretched the inanimate form of another person, stricken down by the same malady. It was Mr. Checkynshaw. The two gentlemen with whom he had been conversing when attacked by the fit had placed him there, and Dr. Fisher had been sent for. From that sofa he was conveyed ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... inanimate in the gallery. It was the same with Grossetti. Andreoli alone remained conscious. After long efforts, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... after he was gone the other man remained as he stood, motionless as a bronze statue, as an inanimate thing. The kerosene lamp was burning low now and sputtered dismally; but he did not notice, did not hear. For the third time, tremulous against the background of night and of silence, came the wail of the lonely little captive. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... entering the principal cabin, the first object that attracted their attention was the dead body of a female, reclining on a bed in an attitude of deep interest and attention. Her countenance retained the freshness of life: but a contraction of the limbs showed that her form was inanimate. Seated on the floor was the corpse of an apparently young man, holding a steel in one hand and a flint in the other, as if in the act of striking fire upon some tinder which lay beside him. In the fore-part of the vessel several ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... emotion, that only so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill Garden' and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those bedrooms under ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... of praise being called for from inanimate things or irrational beings, we must remember that though unfitted, so far as we understand them, for conscious praise, their creation, maintenance, and usefulness give evidence of God's greatness and goodness. As ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... dress angrily and pushed it on over her head, giving a little impatient scream as she rumpled her hair. Then she reached up and back, straining her arms to push the top snap of the corsage into place. But with the quiet glee of inanimate things the snap immediately snapped out again. Flushing, Madame d'Avala repeated her performance, and the snap repeated its. Madame d'Avala stamped both feet and gave a little gasp of rage. She attacked ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... put into a pot three tablespoonfuls of finely ground coffee and two cups of fresh water. The pot was a percolator, and beside it I placed a frying-pan, and in it sliced bananas and a lump of tinned butter from New Zealand. Leaving these inanimate things to react under the dissolving effect of the blaze, I ran to the beach, where I watched the sunrise. There recurred to me the mornings and evenings in the Orient when I had seen the Parsees, the fire-worshippers ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... perceptual experience of their bodies. To this there corresponds in religion some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker. In more refined and highly developed religions ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. "Whatever you do, boy, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... in itself. Passages again such as 'Having created that he entered into it. Having entered it he became sat and tyat, defined and undefined,' &c. (Taitt. Up. II, 6), represent Brahman as having for its body the individual souls and inanimate nature. Hence, in the chapter under discussion also, this threefold view of Brahman is quite appropriate. Where to particular individual beings such as Hiranyagarbha, and so on, or to particular inanimate things such as prakriti, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one of the cemeteries of Pisa. The tombs are set in soil brought in ships from the Holy Land ages ago. To be buried in such ground was regarded by the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lives, in which all these things will be set out with tact and dignity. Horatio Blenker or Adolphus Blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. She will be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her relations with Sir Isaac will be rescued from reality. The book will be illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer's ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... hero, like Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, and Glooscap, the favourite of Micmac legends. The Manitou or Oki might even be a stone, a fish-bone, a bird's feather, or a serpent's skin, or some other thing in the animate or inanimate world, revealed to a young man in his dreams as his fetich or guardian through life. Dreams were respected as revelations from the spirit world. As Champlain tells us, during his first expedition to Lake Champlain, the Indians always questioned him as to his ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... her lap; while the mist itself was so dense that she seemed to be breathing water instead of air. There was no denying that to-morrow would do as well as to-night. But her impatient spirit fretted against delay; and this senseless obtrusion of inanimate things,—angering her, as only the inanimate can,—drowned the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... mean mind set him groping in the remotest and more subtle directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck's armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man's susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck's further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl's possession. It was then that the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... which had passed him by. He was a boy—a fine-looking, skillfully modeled youth—as beautiful a thing, doubtless, as God ever created in His sense of form; better than his sisters, better than the four-foots, or the fishes, or the birds, and he meant so much more than the inanimate things, in so far as we can see. He had the body given to him and he wanted to keep it, but there were the mysterious demons of the darkness, the wind and the flames; there were the monsters from the shadows, and from under the waters; ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... monstrous establishment to get an intelligible idea of it. It was a wonderful show, but the moving masses of people of all nations we saw there were a still more wonderful show. I discovered that if I were to stay there a month, I should still find myself looking at the people instead of the inanimate objects on exhibition. I got a little interested in some curious old tapestries of the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs came by, and their dusky faces and quaint costumes called my attention away at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... duller year by year. She had come here in an exploring mood sometimes when she was quite a child, but she never remembered the room having been put to any use; and as she had grown older it had come to have a haunted air, and she had touched the inanimate things with a sense of awe, wondering what her mother's life had been like in that room—trying to conjure up the living image of a lovely face, which was familiar to her from more than one picture ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... intermission. There was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka's, full of undeveloped artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty, animate and inanimate. The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had been vaguely aware before beginning the journey. None of these lacked reality, any more than Keyork ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... course, is Balzac's secret; his method would be nothing without the quality of his imagination. His use of the scene is another matter, and there it is possible to reckon how much of his general effect, the sense of the moral and social foundation of his story, is given by its inanimate setting. He has to picture a character and a train of life, and to a great extent he does so ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... 'Shaping so well?' With her glance she took in the little cheerless bedroom, and herself and George Cannon within it, overwhelmed. In imagination she saw all the other bedrooms, dark, forlorn, and inanimate, waiting through long nights and empty days until some human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon's bedroom—the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... day there persisted that sense of complete detachment from all but her whose body they had laid to rest on the windy hill overlooking the broad water. His father, Aunt Barbara, the cousins and relations who thronged the church were no more than inanimate shadows compared with her whose presence had come last night into his room, and had not left him since. The affairs of the world, drums and the torch of war, had passed for those hours from his knowledge, as at the centre of a cyclone there was a ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... by the wind, they spent another fearful night. The next day the fury of the storm seemed to have somewhat abated. The sea was still running high, and breaking over the almost unrecognizable hulk stranded on the beach. With the aid of a glass, sailors on the other ships could see the inanimate forms of the crew lashed to the rigging. It was determined to make a vigorous attempt to save them. The first boat sent out on the errand of mercy was watched eagerly from all the vessels. Now it would be seen raised high on the top of some tremendous wave, then, plunging into the trough, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... root, Motherhood. It is the one seed of the Universe. The planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron. What is the Great Centre of us all, life animate and inanimate—if any life be inanimate? Is the eternal universe one dim ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... cloth and a besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and there the red stains are dry, and clotted as with bloody glue; and the hairs of the besom start up, torn and ragged, as if the bristles had a sense of some horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds. If you passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... under gave this woman new strength. She raised the insensible girl, carried her through the vacant chamber, and laid her on the bed in her own room. She drew the bedclothes over her inanimate form ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... side were two similar berths, each containing as Anna-Felicitas whispered after peeping cautiously through their closed curtains,—for at first on coming in after dinner to go to bed the cabin seemed empty, except for inanimate things, like clothes hanging up and an immense smell,—its human freight. They were awed by this discovery, for the human freight was motionless and speechless, and yet made none ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... St. Guenole, "one might baptize in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by aspersion or immersion, not only a bird or a quadruped, but also an inanimate object, a statue, a table, a chair, etc. That animal would be Christian, that idol, that table would ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... be played without such keen rivalry, one player sitting in the midst of a great circle and answering questions in turn. There is also a game called "Man and Object," in which two players go out and decide upon a man (or woman) and something inanimate or not human with which he is associated or which he is known to have used, such as "Washington and his hatchet," "Whittington and his cat," "A druid and his mistletoe-knife." They then return and each player asks them each a question in turn until the ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... effect produced by the marshaling of details in their exactitude for the purpose of bringing out character. The fact that they may be ugly and vulgar the reverse, makes not the slightest difference. The modern realist contemplates the inanimate things which surround us with peculiar complaisance, and it is right that he should as these things exert upon us a constant and secret influence. The workings of the human mind, in complex civilizations, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... As to inanimate nature, certain lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains, are held in high reverence. In the Kalevala the oak is called Pun Jumalan (God's tree). The mountain-ash even to this day, and the birch-tree, are held sacred, and peasants plant them by ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... probably had a history before it became hers, for, as known to me, it was always old and black. If we studied them sufficiently we might discover that staves age perceptibly just as the hair turns grey. At the risk of being thought fanciful I dare to say that in inanimate objects, as in ourselves, there is honourable and shameful old age, and that to me Jess's staff was a symbol of the good, the true. It rested against her in the window, and she was so helpless without it when on her feet, that to those who saw much of her it was part of herself. ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of "irritable weakness" is not the first thing suggested ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... childishly absurd), so the savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men, surviving death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate universe. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the attempted assassination was related with palpable indifference. She stated the facts. "The woman seemed to gasp while she had her hand up; she struck with no force; and she has since been inanimate, I hear. The doctor says that a spasm of the heart seized her when she was about to strike. It has been shaken—I am not sure that he does not say displaced, or unseated—by some one of her black tempers. She shot Rinaldo Guidascarpi dead. Perhaps it was that. I am informed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... they leisurely cut open the pages of a new book or play with their ivory-handled dessert-knives after dinner, of the life that has once been the lot of that inanimate substance, so beautiful in its texture, so prized from time immemorial; still less do they think, for the majority do not know, of the enormous loss of life entailed in purveying this luxury for the market. An elephant ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... next century, in Van Helmont we meet with the Archaeus everywhere presiding, controlling and regulating the animate and inanimate bodies, working this time through agents, local ferments. The Rosicrucians had their direct inspiration from his writings, and such mystics as the English Rosicrucian Fludd were ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... stock, to the Dukes of Mandeville, whose present ducal descendant combines the elegance of an Esterhazy with the intellect of an Argyle. That a scion of such blood as this has reduced a fellow-being to a condition of inanimate protoplasm, is to be regretted for his sake; but more for that of a country in which the philosophy of COMTE finds in a corrupt radical pantarchy all-sufficient first-cause of whatsoever is rotten in the State of Denmark." The Times said: "We give no details of the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... the idealist, the dreamer. If one says it is sweet to look at the clouds, the answer is a warning against idleness. If one seeks to give ear to the winds, it shall be well with his soul, but they will seize upon his possessions. If all the world of the so-called inanimate delay one, calling with tenderness in sounds that seem to be too perfect to be less than understanding, it shall be ill with the body. The hands of the actual are forever reaching toward such as these—forever seizing greedily upon them. It is of such that the ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... sexual appetite gives rise to much conflict with human morality, for the simple reason that it looks upon human beings as objects of pleasure. Fetichism, in which the sexual appetite is directed toward inanimate objects, and sodomy, directed to animals, are by themselves almost incapable of entering into conflict with morality as ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... world away. What less can be the wretched wife's surprise When, stretching out her arms to fold thee fast, She found her useless bolster in her arms. [1] Think, think, on that.—Oh! think, think well on that. I do remember also to have read [2] In Dryden's Ovid's Metamorphoses, That Jove in form inanimate did lie With beauteous Danae: and, trust me, love, [3] I fear'd the bolster might ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... to the eve is given the pleasure we derive in looking upon the green fields and forests, the enumerable varieties of flowers, the glowing ruby, jasper, topaz, amethist, and emerald, the brilliant diamond, and all the rich and varied hues of nature, both animate and inanimate. ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... something which we listen to daily and never notice. I mean the sounds of the visible world, animate and inanimate. Winds blowing, waters flowing, trees stirring, insects whirring (dear me! I am quite unconsciously writing rhyme), with the various cries of birds and beasts,—lowing cattle, bleating sheep, grunting pigs, and cackling hens,—all the infinite ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... what my father would call 'the aggravation of inanimate things'! Those grapes knew that you wanted them, that I wanted to get them for you, and see how they act? But I'll have them yet. Don't fear. That old fellow I camped-out with this last summer told me it was ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Napoleon's great drama of invasion. His men and horses had succumbed to summer heats as rapidly and extensively as to winter frosts; he had brought ruin to his enterprise by miscalculating the proportions of inanimate nature and human strategy, and by fatal indecision at critical moments when the statesman's delay was the soldier's ruin. Russia, like Spain, had the strength of low organisms; her vigor was not centralized in one member, the destruction of which would be the destruction of the whole; Moscow ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... when a horseman, in a wild garb, and mounted on a coal black steed, lashed suddenly and at a furious pace, out of the trees on the right. He made towards the litter, over-turning Sir Thomas Wyat, and before any opposition could be offered him, seized the inanimate form of Mabel, and placing her before him on his steed, dashed off as swiftly as he came, and with a burst of loud, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... legs are very uneven, bearing heavy fringes of hair on the tibia and having the terminal joints slender. Its color is a soft wood-brown or gray, mottled with white. It has the habit of hanging motionless in the web for hours at a time, swaying in the wind like an inanimate object. The strands of its web are rough and inelastic, so that they are frequently broken; this gives it the appearance of one of those dilapidated and deserted webs in which bits of wind-blown rubbish ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... in. "All the world... You may wonder at my slowness in recognising the name. But you know that my memory is merely a mausoleum of proper names. There they lie inanimate, awaiting the magic touch—and not very prompt in arising when called, either. The name is the first thing I forget of a man. It is but just to add that frequently it is also the last, and this ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... blue eyes, gay and debonnaire. One could see that he played cricket and polo, and any other game that came along, and that not a muscle of his frame was out of condition. He had "soldier" written upon him—young, gallant, cavalry soldier. Verisschenzko appreciated him; nothing complete, human or inanimate, left him unconscious of its meaning. They knew one another very well—they had been at Oxford and later had shot bears together in the ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... conduct, it merely served to strengthen his resolve to advance still farther in her regard. There are natures which welcome strife; they require opposition, difficulty, to develop their real strength. Brant was of this breed. The very conception that some person, even some inanimate thing, might stand between him and the heart of this fair woman acted upon him like ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... chairs, and chimney-piece. An open warming-pan lay on the floor before the grate; a bath, still full of mineral water had not been taken away. The sense of coming dissolution pervaded all the details of an unsightly chaos. Signs of death appeared in things inanimate before the Destroyer came to the body on the bed. The Comte de Restaud could not bear the daylight, the Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... exclusive source from which we derive the idea, is our own voluntary agency. Here, and here only (it is said), we have direct evidence of causation. We know that we can move our bodies. Respecting the phenomena of inanimate nature, we have no other direct knowledge than that of antecedence and sequence. But in the case of our voluntary actions, it is affirmed that we are conscious of power before we have experience of results. An act of volition, whether followed by an effect or not, is accompanied by a consciousness ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Omens.—The folk-tales are filled with accounts of magical acts, performed by "the people of the first times." They annihilated time and space, commanded inanimate objects to do their will, created human beings from pieces of betel-nut, and caused the magical increase of food and drink. Those days have passed, yet magical acts still pervade all the ceremonies; nature is overcome, while the power to work evil by other than human means is a recognized ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... and horribly, ran hastily down the stairs, the figure's ugly feet hanging down and banging and rattling like wood against the steps. Nathanael was stupefied;—he had seen only too distinctly that in Olimpia's pallid waxed face there were no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet. Spalanzani was rolling on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head and breast and arm; the blood was escaping from him in streams. But he gathered his strength together by ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... occupied in caring for her mother, she sat hour after hour by the window, with a piece of crochet, which seemed a second Penelope's web, for it never was visibly larger one day than it had been the day before. Mrs. Costello gradually grew anxious as she perceived how dull and inanimate her daughter remained. She would almost have been glad of an excuse for giving her a gentle scolding, but Lucia's entire submission and sweetness of temper made it impossible. There seemed nothing to be done, ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... not stoop to the obvious retort. His pardner came round the pile and his eyes fell on their common sleeping-bag, the two Nulato rifles, and other "traps," that meant more to him than any objects inanimate in all ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... and roll up his eyes—perhaps it is a Virginia custom. He seems to think Miss Gerard [Julia, daughter of James W. Gerard] his belle ideal or beau ideal of everything lovely, etc. I told him that I thought her awful, that she had such an inanimate sickly expression, and I abused her at a great rate! I expect he thinks I am a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Greeks and Romans must not be considered as the highest forms even of the worship of idols or inanimate things. The gods and goddesses of these mythological systems were principally the powers that were supposed to preside over the different forces and elements of nature, and were invested with the celestial attributes of a higher order of beings. Neptune ruled the sea, Pluto was director ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Crucifixion of Jesus Christ? The soldiers would apply no polished mirror to the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under the circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could be pronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other dead bodies which they had probably observed closely; with ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... was declining, and Moscow continued dull, silent, and seemingly inanimate. The anxiety of the emperor increased, and the impatience of the soldiers could scarcely be repressed. Some officers ventured within the walls of the city. ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here, therefore, a man can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the other—that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... handmaid, as though she had been long trying to solve some problem and had suddenly and unexpectedly found the answer. Slowly she lifted up her dark-green druggit skirt, and out of a pocket of enormous size, which was swung about her waist like a captured leviathan heaving inanimate on a ship's cable, she extracted a sheet ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... in relation to the ends which they have in view. They are good or bad according as they are well or poorly adapted to social needs. Civilization in its highest sense means much more than the mere mastery of mind over inanimate nature; it implies a more or less effective social control over individual conduct. Certain impulses, instincts and tendencies must be repressed; others must be encouraged, ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... new united empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations—in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... crew of any passing vessel had caught sight of us as we lay still and inanimate upon our sail-cloth, they would scarcely, at first sight, have hesitated ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... called her proud and angry, which appears to be contrary to that which is here reasoned; and therefore I turn to the Song, and, under colour of teaching it how it is proper that it should excuse itself, I make an excuse for that which came before. And this, when one addresses inanimate things, is a figure which is called by rhetoricians, Prosopopoeia, and the Poets often use it. "My Song, it seems you speak this to oppose," The intention of which address, to make it more easy of understanding, it behoves ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... the imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings, through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter, through all living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and finds himself a changing being with physical reality, but he also perceives within him the forces from which the physical reality ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling a piece: so are the lions; and it would be a step nearer to reason to say it resided in them, for any inanimate metaphor is no more than a hat or a cap. We can all see the absurdity of worshipping Aaron's molten calf, or Nebuchadnezzar's golden image; but why do men continue to practise themselves the absurdities they despise ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... as this is the most unfavourable for a historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy." On the contrary, and Smollett might have discovered it, if he had been in the humour—the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novelist can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?—no life ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... still life is used in English for all sorts of pictures which represent groupings of inanimate objects except flowers. The French word for it is better than ours. They call it ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... a perfectly clear notion in the case of answers to questions, but in other cases it is much more obscure. We may say generally that an object whether animate or inanimate, is "sensitive" to a certain feature of the environment if it behaves differently according to the presence or absence of that feature. Thus iron is sensitive to anything magnetic. But sensitiveness does not constitute knowledge, and knowledge of a fact which is not sensible ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... are at the lowest ebb, commits a purposeless murder, and a "pope" who has been on the look-out no doubt for years, seizes the opportunity to rush into the murdered man's dwelling, and sing over his inanimate body a little thing of his own composition. Anyone who has been in Russia will immediately recognise this incident as absolutely true to life. Amongst my own acquaintance I know three priests who did precisely the same thing—they are ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... subscribed to much more often than believed in. In a certain poem of Mr. Browning's (I call it the Burial of the Book, since the Latin name he has given it is unpronounceable, even if it were possible to recollect it), charmingly humorous, and which is also remarkable for impersonating an inanimate object in verse as Dickens does in prose, there ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... commanded the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... a great friend of Mr. Fleet," she said, studying and sketching him as if he had been an inanimate object. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... plague,[873] the migrating birds coming in from the sea,[874] and many another tender touch, all show us the feeling of which I am speaking; for he who could so feel towards animals must needs have a soul of pity for man. So, too, with the inanimate nature of Italy; the land in which Virgil's shepherds and husbandmen live and work is one full of such detailed loveliness as might suggest a beneficent Power presiding over it all, inviting man to lift up his heart in gratitude ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... from his tailor and had nothing to find fault with. On the other hand, I have just come across a statement "that stern men, overpowered by the sight of it, have been known to burst into tears." It is this miracle of inanimate matter we are now to see. But here comes Vandy again. "Come on, Andrew; carriage waiting." I'm ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the inanimate form of poor Hillars into the inn and laid it on the sofa. I tore back his blood-wet shirt. The wound was slightly below the right lung. The bullet had severed an artery, for I could see that the blood gushed. We worked over ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... we shall begin to be afraid of leading careless, useless, and idle lives. We cannot watch the working of the fairy "life" in the primrose or the bee, without learning that living beings as well as inanimate things are governed by these same laws of nature; nor can we contemplate the mutual adaptation of bees and flowers without acknowledging that it teaches the truth that those succeed best in life who, whether consciously or unconsciously, do ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... intended for the same use as statues in other religions. They are not adored nor worshiped in any sense of the word. They are looked upon as inanimate representations of a deity, and tributes of honor and respect are paid not to them, but to the spirits that they represent. I have seen rice actually put to the lips of these images and bead necklaces hung ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of sympathy with the poor and the simple is infinite. He is full of pity and tenderness and enfolds in his heart and in his poetry, saint and sinner, man and beast, all that which is animate and inanimate. He is passionately religious with a profound and humble faith, but it has nothing in common with the sumptuous and decorative neo-catholicism of men like Huysmans or Paul Claudel. Rather one must seek his origins in the child-like faith of Saint Francis ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... striking his head against the marble of the fountain, and to Beryl's horror he did not rise again. He simply lay as he had fallen, with arms flung wide and face upturned, motionless, inanimate as a thing ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... development of personal morality, the hostility of inanimate nature, coupled with the urgency of inner needs, has also played its part in the socialization of man. The satisfying of hunger, protection against storm, flood, and other physical calamities, is greatly forwarded by cooperation. The rearing of a shelter, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore. 'A convenient thing enough,' said Dr. Abell to me, 'if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.' 'As if the axe should move itself against him that lifts it; something of that kind?' 'Well, I don't know that that was in my mind so much; but if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the American manner; he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic; he was one of the four fugitives who, with the general, carried out of the woods the inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died, exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat. He had survived that disastrous time to attend his general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked for him on the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... within him; for when Beatrice had spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love—a love of beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death, inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... driven through that gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the streams. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... was wet, and seemed as if it had just been plunged into the water. She appeared to be severely wounded in the face; and her garments, which were raised up, in spite of the cold and rainy weather, left the upper part of her knees almost entirely exposed. At the sight of this half-naked and inanimate body, all the spectators were affected. People said that the first duty to pay to a dying woman was, to preserve her from the cold, to cover her. A physician examined the body; he declared that all remedies were useless; that Madame ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the illusion, the effect. By its power and beauty it awakens ideas and sentiments within him. He does not even consider the part which his own mind plays, and as his fancy is quite free, he tends to personify inanimate things, as the ancients ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... was close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... glittering insignia of his new rank reached Canada, Sir Isaac Brock's eyes were closed in death. His inanimate body, from which one of the noblest souls of the century had fled, lay rigid in ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... infer that Jesus, as the Omniscient Lord of the inanimate creation, knew well that fruit there was none under that pretentious foliage. We dare not suppose that He went expecting to find Figs; far less, that in a moment of disappointed hope, He ventured on a capricious exercise of His power, uttered a hasty malediction, and condemned the insensate ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... details, or by emphasis on prominent or characteristic details? How often and how fully does he describe scenes of human activity (such as a street scene, a social gathering, a procession on the march)? 3. How frequent and how vivid are his descriptions of the inanimate background of human life—buildings, interiors of rooms, and the rest? 4. Does the author skilfully use description to create the general atmosphere in which he wishes to invest his work—an atmosphere of cheerfulness, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... too soon: voices and alarm bells sounded; watchmen here and there began to spring their rattles; it was plain the University of Cramond would soon be at blows with the police of Edinburgh! Byfield and I, running the semi-inanimate Rowley before us, made good despatch, and did not stop till we were several streets away, and the hubbub was ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with abundance of ease and pleasure; they walk upon a fine smooth pavement; defended by posts from the coaches and wheel- carriages; and though they are jostled sometimes in the throng, yet as this seldom happens out of design, few are offended at it; the variety of beautiful objects, animate and inanimate, he meets with in the streets and shops, inspires the passenger with joy, and makes him slight the trifling inconvenience of being crowded now and then. The lights also in the shops till eight or nine in the evening, especially ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... had come, what his name was, and several such questions. He raised his voice louder and louder, but he might as well have talked to the inanimate things about him. This one other human being who had entered his desolate scene took, it would seem, no cognisance of him at all. Just as we know that animals in some cases have senses for sights and sounds which make no impression on human eyes and ears, and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... my torch," went on Dick, and as Sam took the light, Dick knelt in the snow and raised up the inanimate form. It was Tom, true enough, with an ugly cut on his forehead, from which the blood had ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... colours and describe them so perfectly. Miss Mary also told her the names of the birds whose notes they heard as they walked about the grounds, and May in return described with a minuteness which surprised her blind friend a number of objects both animate and inanimate which she thought would interest her, while she asked a variety of questions which, though exhibiting her ignorance, showed a large amount of intelligence and desire to obtain information. The child was evidently natural and thoroughly unaffected, without either timidity or rustic ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... this branch of his subject, the Doctor observed that, interesting as were these proofs of the accuracy of their histories, and of the great revolutions of inanimate nature, there was another topic connected with St. Helena, which, he felt certain, would excite a lively emotion in the breasts of all who heard him. At the period of his visit, the island had been selected as a prison for a great conqueror and disturber ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... were, of a body falling on the sand, accompanied by a painful cry. I heard no more. Soon I saw the light of the torches of my servants, who being uneasy, had come to look for me. They found me, and also a half inanimate body, dripping with water. It was doubtless the person whose boat had foundered in the water, and I ordered him to be taken to the villa and carefully attended to. It was late, and I returned. A few hours had passed since the event, and I was sitting alone at the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Thomas scornfully, "Curios be blowed, put 'em in the beggars!" Of course, you can guess he did not exactly use those identical words, but they will do. Then having joined in the destruction of a monster hog, and obtained my share of his inanimate form, I, triumphant and perspiring, continued to follow ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... players wonder dumbly if the game is worth the candle. To-day Joel, one of a squad of unfortunates, was relearning the art of tackling. It was Joel's first experience with that marvelous contrivance, "the dummy." One after another the squad was sent at a sharp spurt to grapple the inanimate canvas-covered bag hanging inoffensively there, like a body from a ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... are mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases far more distinctly conceived than any of the people in Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle. In the second of ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Indian, who never failed to interpret the cries and gestures of animals according to his own fancy, and to give a sharp rejoinder to the imaginary provocations which, as he considered, were offered to him. Sometimes, even, he laid the blame on inanimate things, and then his conversations with them were most amusing. The old hunter had no doubt contracted this habit at a time when, living alone in the woods and feeling the need of talking, he conversed with himself, having no one else to address. However this might be, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... and thirst of knowledge had likewise received a new direction. Books and inanimate nature were cold and lifeless instructors. Men, and the works of men, were the objects of rational study, and our own eyes only could communicate just conceptions of human performances. The influence of manners, professions, and social institutions, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... certainly is not in the right place, or rather there is no concentration of effect; it possesses the glare of a coloured print, and that too of a meretricious sort—incidents there are, but no plot—less effect upon the animate than the inanimate. The toilet-table takes precedence of the lady—the couch before the sleeper—the shadow, in fact, before the substance; and as it is a sure mark of a vulgar mind to dwell upon the trifles, and lose the substantial—to scan ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... happy!' said Mrs. Finch, in a tone of keen regret, laying her hand on a toy of Johnnie's; but instantly changing her note, 'A cold, inanimate piece of wax! That is what you call peace! I would ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate object, and he glared at her in return, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... four or five pounds, and specimens that are larger may be worth many times that amount. Figures of men, horses, bears, dogs, and various animals, including dragons, are to be seen, as well as letters of the alphabet, triangles, or other inanimate objects, some trees being cleverly made to look like jugs, bottles, and bowls. Occasionally, a singular change has been made in a tree; thus, what was a boy with a rake, by a little alteration becomes a ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings. Never before, perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the spirit of the times. Fred found a superb placard, the work of Cheret, a pathetic scene in a mine, banners streaming in the air, with the words 'Bazar de Charite' in gold letters on a red ground, and the courtyard ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... village to village, from the river to the sea, with his nose in the wind, his ears pricked, trying to compel the inanimate things to surrender their deep meaning. Ought this hill-slope to be questioned? Or that forest? Or the houses of this hamlet? Or was it among the insignificant phrases spoken by that peasant yonder that he might hope to gather the one little ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud— Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... cheerful presence. But, now, the chambers were cold and gloomy, and when she left her own little room to while away the tedious hours, and sat in one of them, she was still and motionless as their inanimate occupants, and had no heart to startle the echoes—hoarse from their ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... his attention confined to the actions of men; he was an exact surveyor of the inanimate world; his descriptions have always some peculiarities, gathered by contemplating things as they really exist. It may be observed, that the oldest poets of many nations preserve their reputation, and that the following generations of wit, after a short celebrity, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... that, In things that differ specifically we find a twofold difference: the first causes the diversity of species, and is not to be found save in different species, e.g. "rational" and "irrational," "animate," and "inanimate": the other difference is consequent to specific diversity; and though, in some cases, it may [follow from the diversity of species], yet, in others, it may be found within the same species; thus "white" and "black" are consequent to the specific diversity of crow and swan, and yet this difference ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... ruins of a castle, its tower still intact. Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... rest in it; it tires. A man who plays with it must be on his guard every second. To spend a lifetime on it is ridiculous—a whole life of intelligent effort, against perpetual, brutal, inanimate resistance—one endless uninterrupted fight—a ceaseless human manoeuvre against senseless menace; and then the counter attack of the lifeless monster, the bellowing advance, the shock—and no battle won—nothing final, nothing ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... been carefully blacked, but a thin skin of mould had gathered over them. They looked like Lemuel Shackford. They had taken a position habitual with him. Richard was struck by the subtile irony which lay in these inanimate things. That a man's hat should outlast the man, and have a jaunty expression of triumph! That a dead man's ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... is the most human thing in inanimate nature. Even as the print of his thumb reveals the old offender to the detectives, so the path tells you the sort of feet that wore it. Like the human nature that created it, it starts out to go straight when strength and determination shape its course, and it goes crooked when weakness lays ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... shall ever get from, you, Bob," she said, impatiently; "but pray amuse yourself in your own way; loll in an easy-chair all day, with those two absurd dogs asleep on your knees; spoil my lady's window-curtains with your cigars and annoy everybody in the house with your stupid, inanimate countenance." ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinosa, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice: does this depend upon ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore |
