"Incoherent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Horace, he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he might), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of Apuleius. His curiosity extends to the later Christian poets—from the coloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of the incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite printing, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable Baudelaire (edition tiree a un exemplaire), a unique Mallarme. Catholicism being the adopted religion ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully pathetic document he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and stained and badly expressed as if the writer—this girl—this Effie Bright—was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every sentence calling it 'a little baby'—never a child, or just a baby, but always 'a little ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... that might overlook that sisterly barrier, but could not overleap it. If his eyes had said less, or if she could have compelled her lips to say more! But her usually active tongue seemed to lack for words and she found herself talking in a reckless and somewhat incoherent manner upon all sorts of topics, which she dragged forward in order to keep in check the words which the look in his eyes heralded ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... qualities of the very highest order. He could sit down before a mass of incoherent statements, and figures that would drive most men insane, and elucidate them by the most painstaking investigation, and feel a pleasure in the work. Indeed, an intimate friend of his assures us that ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... should let him have his wife. But Henry replied that the council had forbidden that he should see the queen. This exasperated the king more than ever. He walked to and fro across the apartment, wringing his hands, and uttering wild and incoherent ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... eleventh year of her age she was attacked with a fever, and among other symptoms vomited for twenty days. Then she became speechless and so continued for twenty-four days. Then she talked, but her speech was raving and incoherent. Finally she lost all power of motion and of sensibility in the parts below the head and could not swallow. From thenceforth she could not be persuaded to take food. Six months afterwards she regained the use of her limbs, but the ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... was from Alicia, and it was dated at Denver, three days gone. It was not very explicit; on the contrary, it was rather incoherent. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... chariot would be thrown off the track, so to speak, by the stupidity of those thrice accursed musicians. Each time, Marija would emit a howl and fly at them, shaking her fists in their faces, stamping upon the floor, purple and incoherent with rage. In vain the frightened Tamoszius would attempt to speak, to plead the limitations of the flesh; in vain would the puffing and breathless ponas Jokubas insist, in vain would Teta Elzbieta implore. "Szalin!" Marija would scream. "Palauk! isz kelio! What are ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... and shivering into the rooty thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where, without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... face purple, and with blood streaming from his nostrils, had sunk into a chair. He rose now, and his first words were incoherent, raging gasps. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... was haunted by painful, incoherent dreams. With the curious freakishness of a disordered mind, he was beset by a vision of the dark, ferret face of Victor Gagnon. The trader seemed to be hovering threateningly over his rude couch, and, behind him, less distinct, but always recognizable, was the fair Aim-sa. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... opened window, had guttered into coffin handles and shrouds, and, choked by their long black wicks for want of snuffing, gave out a smoky yellow light. One of the young men might possibly have been in a maudlin state, for he had his arm round the neck of his next neighbour. Another was making an incoherent speech to which nobody was listening. Some of their faces were red, some were sallow; some were sleepy, some wide awake. The only one among them who appeared in his usual frame of mind was Festus, whose huge, burly form rose at the head of the table, enjoying with a serene and triumphant ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... from the houses, and a large proportion of the inhabitants and guests appear on the road in various degrees of intoxication. Some of these vow eternal affection to their friends, or with flaccid gestures and in incoherent tones harangue invisible audiences; others stagger about aimlessly in besotted self-contentment, till they drop down in a state of complete unconsciousness. There they will lie tranquilly till they are picked up by their less intoxicated friends, or more probably till they awake ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... joy, and this time woke Dolly, who thought it was a calamity, and wept. Fully five minutes of incoherent rejoicing followed, and then details might be rounded off. The fireman had to stand by his engine on the night-shift in an hour's time, but he saw his way to a ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... ear to von Kerber's settlement with the cocher. The latter was now volubly indignant in the assessment of damages to his vehicle, hoping to obtain a louis as compensation. When he was given a hundred francs his gratitude became almost incoherent. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... be impossible to convey to my reader, by description, an adequate conception of the scene that followed my landing on the beach, as we stood embracing each other indiscriminately in our dripping garments, and giving utterance to incoherent rhapsodies, mingled with wild shouts. It can be more easily imagined than described, so I will draw a curtain over this part of my history, and carry the reader forward over ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... his hopeless position overcame the wretched man, and his skill began to leave him. He became thick and confused of speech; his periods tripped; his thought moved backward. Then his supple tongue failed him utterly, and, in cries and incoherent groans, he pleaded for the right ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats. I choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work (which a modern critic has classed with the Faery Queen!), although undoubtedly there blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent, as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The poem of Isabella, then, is a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images: almost in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... musical, vigorous, and peculiar, and hardly in any part can he be justly charged with prolonging an echo. He is not one of the many mocking-birds that infest the groves at the foot of Parnassus. Though portions of his songs be wild, fitful, and incoherent, they gush with the force and feeling of a heart loyal to its intuitions, and thus many strains captivate and keep the tuneful ear. Yet such charming lines make conspicuous the want of that high appreciation of form and proportion without which any felicity of touch in the treatment of details ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... engine and the sighing of the trees, which bent down at the approach, he murmured incoherent words. The recollection of the two lovers clasped in each other's arms made him cry aloud with jealousy. He wanted to be revenged. For the first time in his life, the longing, the feverish craving to kill set ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of our new surroundings, the strangeness of our sudden removal from America, the long distances travelled, awoke in me new thoughts and I readily surrendered myself at times to the incoherent struggles of my nature, to find someone, something, more responsive to my young feelings than essays on magnetism, and a man, father though he was, immersed in demonstrations and problems. It was then that this distant picture in the days of the fragrant ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... the individual thus addressed, returning Harry's gripe and stare with interest, "is it possible? no—it cannot—Harry Somerville, my old, dear, unexpected friend!"—and pouring out broken sentences, abrupt ejaculations, and incoherent questions, to which neither vouchsafed replies, the two friends gazed at and walked round each other, shook hands, partially embraced, and committed sundry other extravagances, utterly unconscious of or indifferent ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... indisposed, but is better, thanks to a draught "composed of laudanum, nitre and other savoury drugs." When their letters do not arrive promptly they are in despair. "Stage after stage without a line!" complains Theodosia the mother, in one feverishly incoherent note. And Theodosia the daughter, even at nine years old, had her ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... outworn—to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against mere rude bulk. It desired to introduce depth of purpose in the place of chaotic moral disorder, originality in place of a frenzied and incoherent eccentricity, and to found a solid structure upon a ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... a few spoonfuls of tea down her throat, feeding her like a child: and, when she had taken it, she tried to thank her, but choked in the middle, and, flinging her arm round Jael's neck, burst into a passion of weeping, and incoherent cries of love, and pity, and despair. "Oh, my darling! so great! so noble! so brave! so gentle! And I have destroyed us both! he forgave me as soon as he SAW me! So terrible, so gentle! What will be the next calamity? Ah, Jael! ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... side of this campaign. Men who have not learned the elementary principles of the science of political economy, who have not mastered the definitions, as we say, in geometry, could say nothing intelligible to the finite understanding. The speeches were as "incoherent" as the New York World proved the platform to be. They all contained doctrines, however, in perpendicular antagonism to the financial doctrines of the St. Louis convention. When the inflationists learn what money is—what its office, its function is—they may ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... made happy. The disagreements of the two preceding nights were like bad dreams, which they were anxious to forget, or at least to avoid thinking of. Her painful, unreasonable treatment of him, the evening before, had not been touched on between them; after his incoherent attempts to justify himself, after his bitter self-reproaches, when she lay sobbing in his arms, they had both, with one accord, been silent. Neither of them felt any desire for open-hearted explanations; they were careful not to stir up the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... not arranged in consistent chronological order, nor is it supplied with an index. The work, printed seventy-three years ago, is not within easy reach of every reader; and of those who have access to it not all are patient enough to read steadily through so large a mass of somewhat incoherent matter. Should any such readers be tempted to examine the record closely, it is hoped that this sketch will do something to make their task easier. An attempt is made here to picture the man as he was, full of fortitude, yet not exempt from human ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... followed he was very incoherent; but it seems that the Blackfaces departed, leaving him with his wife and children nearly frightened to death, and with the top of ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... the letter and slowly read it through. It was a rambling, incoherent epistle, full of smudges where words had been scratched out and rewritten, but a pitiful appeal nevertheless. Jedediah Cahoon had evidently had a hard time since the day when, after declaring his intention never to return until "loaded ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... cried, "You are a prosperous and affected pseudo-litterateur!" and all the mummies spoke sepulchrally the word of derision, which is "Tee-Hee": and many said also, "The scavenger has never meddled with us, and we never heard of you," and there was much other incoherent foolishness. ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... that he was Pete's friend would almost substantiate that. Had not the papers said that Peter Annersley was a hired gunman of The Spider's? And although this man had not given his name, she knew that he was The Spider of Pete's incoherent mutterings. And The Spider, glancing about the room, gazed curiously at the metal oxygen tank and then at the ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... is a pained listener of this incoherent talk of his son. "I am afraid,—I am afraid," he murmurs to himself, "that he has no clear views of the great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... standing-place, even in the abyss: and that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, due neither to reasoning nor to study, that the billows are God's billows; and that though we go down to hell, He is there also;— the belief that not we, but He, is educating us; that these seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries, storm following earthquake, and earthquake fire, as if the caprice of all the demons were let loose against us, have in His Mind a spiritual coherence, an organic unity and purpose (though we see it ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... plainly to me that an effort was being made to disturb, if not destroy, my reason. I began to find my ideas becoming incoherent in spite of hugest effort. I called my friend, and said to him, through set teeth, but as coolly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... "She says she won't stay with me; she says——" He threw out his hands agitatedly. "It wasn't my fault; I swear to you that it wasn't my fault, Sangster. Things were going swimmingly, and then the letter came—and that finished it." He was incoherent—stammering; but Sangster ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... presented the volume, folded her hands, as I always require her to do, and commenced the repetition of that short thing by Chenier, 'La Jeune Captive.' If you had heard the manner in which she went through this, and in which she uttered a few incoherent comments when she had done, you would have known what I meant by the phrase 'unsettled hurry.' One would have thought Chenier was more moving than all Racine and all Corneille. You, brother, who have so much sagacity, will discern that this disproportionate preference argues an ill-regulated ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fool, and the trapper who was wily enough to ensnare him had achieved something notable. Augustus, when he realized that his fate was sealed, and his night's lodging settled, wisely made the best of things, and listened, with a languorous air of complete comprehension, to the incoherent babble concerning pigs and heroes, moles and bonfires, which served Harold for a self-sung lullaby. Yet it may be doubted whether Augustus was one of those rare ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... South-west Bay and frantically waving a lighted torch in his hand, under the influence of such violent excitement that when we dropped work, and ran to him to learn what was the matter, we found him to all intents and purposes incoherent for the moment. ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... some incoherent threat, in which such words as "downright robbery" and "justice" could be distinguished, and then abruptly walked back into the street, slamming ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... on the ground, and burying her face in her arms, rocked herself to and fro. Dr. Bryant had listened to her rambling, incoherent language, like one in a dream, till the name of Mary passed her lips, and then his head sank upon his chest, and he groaned in the anguish of ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... summing up his conclusions. He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing himself too much impressed. Claudia's own sensations were too complex, too overwhelming, to be readily classified. Lacking the craftsman's instinct to steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions. One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison of her husband's work with what they were daily seeing. Art, she inwardly argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations of feeling and environment, to allow of its being ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... appears to suggest some fanciful and sorrowful notion; but in other cases an effort of any kind excites weeping, independently of any sorrowful idea. Patients suffering from acute mania likewise have paroxysms of violent crying or blubbering, in the midst of their incoherent ravings. We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping. Weeping is common ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... world!" she added hysterically. "If you've interfered between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly any one had any duty, you've done a very unwarrantable thing." She was aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words themselves, but she hurried on: "I am going with him. He was here last night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the mills; and I shall not care ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... matter of surprise that, notwithstanding his sprightly wit, he never exposed by his raillery those vague, incoherent, and noisy discourses, those rash censures, ignorant decisions, coarse jests, and all that empty jingle of words which at Babylon went by the name of conversation. He had learned, in the first book of Zoroaster, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... getting well on in the afternoon, I suppose, that Tom Jecks' fever came to a height. He muttered, and then began to talk angrily, but in an incoherent way, and his voice grew so loud that at last I roused myself and went up to the look-out, to watch ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... The lady writes upon scraps of paper, which she tears, and throws under the table. Copies of ten of these rambling papers; and of a letter to him most affectingly incoherent. He attempts farther to extenuate his villany. Tries to resume his usual levity; and forms a scheme to decoy the people at Hampstead to the infamous woman's in town. The ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... that inconstancy and want of changing from one place to another, that desire to read useless and frivolous books, novels, weeklies and magazines, which for the most part enervate the mind by their futilities, trouble and darken it by a multitude of incoherent images and contradictory thoughts, and poison the heart by foul and filthy images that will constantly torment ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... doctor. "Our historians divide the entire revolutionary epoch—from the close of the war, or the beginning of the seventies, to the establishment of the present order early in the twentieth century—into two periods, the incoherent and the rational. The first of these is the period of which we have been talking, and with which Storiot deals with in the paragraphs I have read—the period with which you were, for the most part, contemporary. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... things, the bloom of which has not been rubbed away by the rough touch of the world. It is only when that shyness is prolonged beyond the appropriate years, when it leaves a well-grown and hard-featured man gasping and incoherent, jerky and ungracious, that it is a painful and disconcerting deformity. The only real shadow of early shyness is the quite disproportionate amount of unhappiness that conscious gaucherie brings with it. Two incidents connected ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... neither liked or esteemed her. She would shorten her visit at Clarendon Park—make it as short as his heart could desire,—she would never be the cause of any disagreement—poor, dear, kind Cecilia! She would write directly to Mrs. Collingwood." At the close of these last incoherent sentences, Helen was awe-struck by the absolute composed immovability and silence of Lady Davenant. Helen stood ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... seemed to behold once more the multitudes of Palestine, the landscapes of England, the dainty splendours of France, and the tranquil homes of Germany. Gradually, however, his reflections became less incoherent, and the meaning of the vision appeared to evolve itself before him, in inductions fraught at once with reproach and consolation. Coupling together the truths enunciated by the Voice of his unseen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare is the only one of that age. Marlowe had a rare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Code's hard, strong hands closed upon his arms in a grip that brought a bellow of pain. In deadly fear of his life, he babbled protests, apologies, and pleadings in an incoherent medley that would have satisfied the most toughened ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Herbert Spencer's principle, that development proceeds from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is certainly true of the religions of the world; but his other principle, that development proceeds from the incoherent to the coherent, does not apply. Incoherency and moral chaos mark the trend of all man-made faiths. The universal tendency to deterioration is well summed up ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the dramas from which these grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... incoherent speech, he tried to force a smile; but Marsa, taking no notice of him, turned slowly to the doctor, who had not removed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hand her hurriedly to her carriage,—a magnificent state-carriage. He had invited some twenty people, former friends of his, to a great wedding- breakfast; but he seemed to have forgotten them. And once in his carriage, alone with Mrs. Brian, M. Elgin, and the young countess, he broke forth in incoherent imprecations and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... with a confused memory of having listened to a great deal of incoherent conversation from Jellicoe, and a painfully vivid recollection of handing over the bulk of his worldly wealth to him. The thought depressed him, though it seemed to please Jellicoe, for the latter carolled in a gay undertone as he dressed, till Psmith, who had a sensitive ear, asked as a favour ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... possible that she had never, even in her heyday, been otherwise than moderately plain. Now, at the age of fifty-one and a half, she was a faithful creature with a thin, pendulous nose, a pale, hysteric eye, a tendency to cold in the head and chilblains in the autumn of the year, and a somewhat incoherent and occasionally frenzied turn of mind. Argument could never at any time have had much effect upon her nature, and as she grew towards maturity its power over her most markedly decreased. This fact ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... to Rome I saw similar inconsistencies in their behavior. They never so much as entered Fidentia, but marched round it, acquiescent to the gentle suggestion of a trembling and incoherent alderman, quaking with fear and barely able to enunciate some disjointed sentences. At Parma they emptied two ergastula and never so much as approached the others, repeating this inconsistency at Mutina and Bononia. Outside of Faventia something, I never learned what, enraged ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... who had obeyed the knight and risen, bowed respectfully; and Helen, uttering some incoherent words of thanks, to hide her agitation turned away. The hermit exclaimed, "Again, my son, I beseech ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... addressed immediately to themselves. But though the author gain this advantage, and thereby compel the reader to think of the personages of the novel and not of the writer, yet the practice, especially pushed to the extent we have noticed, is a principal cause of the flimsiness and incoherent texture of which his greatest admirers are compelled to complain. Few can wish his success more sincerely than we do, and yet without more attention on his own part, we have great doubts of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... business letters which are written should never be written at all, and of the other half so many are incomplete or incoherent that a transaction which could be finished and filed away in two letters frequently requires six ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the student's monotonous and secluded life. Enclosed in this letter were bills of a large amount, contracted at college, of whose existence the father was perfectly unconscious. No reference was made to these, save in the postscript, most incoherent in expression, and written evidently with an unsteady hand. He begged his father to forgive him for having forgotten—the word forgotten was partially erased, and neglected substituted in its place—ah! Louis, Louis, you should have ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... their gripping weight, and I can see the zigzags of the candle held by a kneeling man whose other arm engirdles the mutilated maniac, who shouts so fiercely that he wakes up the sleepers and dispels the drowsiness of the rest. On all sides they turn towards him; half rising, they listen to the incoherent lamentations which end by dying in the dark. At the same moment, in another corner, two prostrate wounded, crucified on the ground, so curse each other that one of them has to be removed before the frantic ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... forcing an imitation of incoherent laughter, 'I am but trifling with you. I am not mad. I sought but to rouse some passion in you—either of fear or of anger. But, alas! I have not sufficient power over you even for that. Sit down. I have something to relate. When I ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spectator as Bert it presented itself as a series of incidents, some immense, some trivial, but collectively incoherent. He never had a sense of any plain issue joined, of any point struggled for and won or lost. He saw tremendous things happen and in the end his world darkened ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly. At the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who had come out, without their ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... press and kiss her hand; then press and kiss, and so on to her lips and cheeks: then talk as much as you can about hearts, darts, flames, nectar, and ambrosia—the more incoherent the better. ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... intention, to follow this author, through all the mazes and windings of his reasoning upon this subject, which (in truth) seem such incoherent shreds, that it is impossible to tie them together; and therefore, what I purpose is, to answer such objections to the Test, as are advanced either by this author, or any other which have any appearance of reason, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... soon be over with him: Poor, poor fellow! He has given me some hints of what he wanted to say; but all incoherent, interrupted by dying ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... poor psychologist. But Le Mansel's pride was too subtle to strike one at once. It had no concrete shape, but seemed to embrace remote phantasms. And yet it influenced all his feelings and gave to his ideas, uncouth and incoherent though they ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... they set to, and the monarch falls under the terrible arm of the man whom he has injured. He dies, uttering a few incoherent words of repentance, and Carpezan, leaning upon his murderous mace, utters a heartbroken soliloquy over the royal corpse. The Turkish warriors have gathered meanwhile: the dreadful day is their own. Yonder stands the dark Vizier, surrounded by his Janissaries, whose bows and swords are tired ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in jail, and glad to be in a solitary cell because he was handwriting a full confession. The knowledge of what Clarens had done during his few hours of freedom had scared the hypno-tech into almost incoherent co-operation. ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... had walked some little distance across the plain to meet and welcome the expected guest. She stood quietly waiting while her husband stammered over his incoherent sentences, and ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... and she was clasped to his heart!—a real woman and no dream, no vision. What the wind could only faintly shadow forth upon her cheek, sprang into life under the touch of his fevered lips, and color flooded them like a wave. Laughing, crying, sobbing, she clung to him, kissed him with little incoherent murmurs, gazed at him, wept over him, kissed him again. All the troubles of the intervening days of sadness and privation faded away from her like a disused chrysalis, and she sparkled with life and love like a butterfly ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... amazed, and was also exceedingly terrified at this communication. He trembled and turned pale, then looked wild and excited, and began to make inquiries in an incoherent and distracted manner. Calpurnia called in Cleopatra to confirm her story. Cleopatra did confirm it, of course, in the fullest and most unqualified manner. The effect which was produced upon the mind of the emperor ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... by storm, and are unspeakably relieved when the assembly is over. As company is held in fashionable society now, the talk is not tenaciously kept to important themes, for ends of conviction, culture, light, or joy, but is a hodge-podge of trifles, an incoherent succession of unconsidered remarks. Each one speaks with his neighbor, regardless of all the rest of the guests, as if it were an evil to be silent, or an absurdity to expect that anybody could say any thing worth ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... is a Failing that has its Root in Nature, but is not worth laughing at, till it has received the finishing strokes of Art. A man thro' natural Defects may do abundance of incoherent foolish Actions, yet deserves compassion and Advice rather than derision. But to see Men spending their Fortunes, as well as lives, in a Course of regular Folly, and with an industrious as well as expensive idleness ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... impulse, urged him to strangle with his own hands the woman he had loved so dearly, had at one time adored on his knees. The count rushed out of the room with gestures of desperation, muttering incoherent words; and as he shewed plain signs of mental aberration, his father, Charles of Artois, took him away, and they went that same evening to their palace of St. Agatha, and there prepared a defence in ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the other room. I have no notion how long he talked, or what about. Whiskey and soda-water became the order of the hour. I scarcely touched it, but he drank copiously, and before eleven I left him incoherent. And the last train for Esher was the ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... a letter from Strasburg, from Berlin, Munich—letters about once a fortnight. From Bella also came an occasional note, a pretty contrast to the incoherent enthusiasm of her husband's compositions. Midway in September she announced their departure from ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... what I've been trying to tell you? I wonder if you will? Or if I am too incoherent. I feel that perhaps I am. I started out to say things that were bubbling within me, and I am oddly reluctant to say them. I am like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. I am an explorer setting out upon a momentous journey. I am making an experiment that fascinates me. Yet I have regrets. I am ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... true poet in the first rank in English literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives, unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener, he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could (unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all down, so that his argument ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... the door, Mad Sal having just before left him; but the information she had given had been in such incoherent language, that not till Harry and his friend arrived did he comprehend what ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... in at the usual hour, and was surprised and alarmed to find her young mistress still in bed, with cheeks burning and eyes sparkling with fever, and talking in a wild, incoherent manner. ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... into a chair, and in an agitated, nearly incoherent manner, related the circumstances that led to the arrest of Thurston Willcoxen for the murder of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... as the trembling man was murmuring his incoherent thanks. Owen waved his hand; Cytherea smiled back to him as if it were unknown to her that ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... you must own her behaviour has warranted them—has it not been in this particular incoherent ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... cried, "Indios!" and what followed of his speech was only incoherent savage babblings. He would have darted alone into the thick of the band had not Franklin and Curly caught him each by ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... not be strong enough to return to her duties for a year or more. If some member of her family could come out to take care of her, it would relieve the school authorities of great anxiety. There was also a letter from a fellow teacher, and a rather incoherent one from Caroline herself. After Claude finished reading them, Mr. Royce pushed a box of cigars toward him and began to ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... his eyes flashing, his hat cocked over his ear, and addressing the most respectable people with unheard-of rudeness, he attempted to force his way past the sentry, and thrust himself, for what purpose God only knows, into the presence of the Sovereign. During his incoherent ejaculations, the following words were distinguished: 'bravery, Vendome column, fidelity, the dial-plate of time, the tablets of history.' When he was arrested by one of the detective watch, and taken before the police commissioner of the Tuilleries section, he was recognized as the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... cultivated woman was now the great object of Hagar's life; and, fearing lest by some inadvertent word or action the secret should be disclosed, she wished to live by herself, where naught but the winds of heaven could listen to the incoherent whisperings which made her fellow-servants ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... measure of the author's progress in his craft during the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie," at bottom, is no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and ideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as I have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In "Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... a few hours shade would be needed. Then with the rest he scrambled to the Nile for water and brought it back. As he poured it down Feversham's throat, Feversham seemed for a moment to recognise him. But it was only for a moment, and the incoherent tale of his adventures began again. Thus, after five years, and for the first time since Trench had dined as Feversham's guest in the high rooms overlooking St. James's Park, the two men met in the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... upper part of her deadly pale face, through which her wild sparkling black eyes, protruding from their sockets, glanced and glared with the fire of a maniac's, while her blue lips kept gibbering an incoherent prayer one moment, and the next imploring mercy, as if she had still been in the hands of those who knew not the name; and anon, a low hysterical laugh made our very blood freeze in our bosoms, which soon ended in a long dismal yell, as she rolled off the couch upon the hard deck, and ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying, with a fitful aversion of her face, 'I am only frightened. Put me down, do ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... It was with a slight shock, then, that he realized how completely she had grown up. He remembered her in so many phases of childhood and little girlhood, ranging up from a time when her speech was incoherent, and she had sat on his knee and played with his watch, to the more recent occasions when he had met her riding in the Park with her brother; and she had waved her little whip to him, looking particularly slim and pretty ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... These incoherent cries came from her lips while Modeste, in alarm, picked up the newspaper and adjusted her silver spectacles upon her nose to read the paragraph. "Monsieur Fred wounded! Holy Virgin! His poor mother! That is a new trouble fallen on her, to be sure. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... general term for the land along the edge of a water course; it may also denote a raised portion of the bed of a river, lake, or ocean; as, the Banks of Newfoundland. A beach is a strip or expanse of incoherent wave-worn sand, which is often pebbly or full of boulders; we speak of the beach of a lake or ocean; a beach is sometimes found in the bend of a river. Strand is a more poetic term for a wave-washed shore, especially as a place for landing ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... anecdotes, however, of this splendid man, often trivial, often incoherent, often unauthenticated, there is one which strikes us as both true and interesting; and we are grateful to Mr Gillman for preserving it. We find it introduced, and partially authenticated, by the following sentence from Coleridge himself:—"From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... With an incoherent exclamation and eyes afire the Russian sat forward. Unconsciously the others imitated his action. Only the man in evening dress made ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... came Julia's mother and Nell, in the light carriage; and kisses, and tears, and little laughy sobs, and words that ran out with little freshets of tears, and unanswered questions, and unasked answers, broken and incoherent; yet all were happy, and all thankful and grateful to their Father in Heaven; and blessings and thanks—many of them ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... like a child. Seeing the Major so well advanced, and no retreat possible, I made a fair wind of a foul one, keeping his glass full, pushing him with toasts; and sooner than I could have dared to hope, he became drowsy and incoherent. With the wrong-headedness of all such sots, he would not be persuaded to lie down upon one of the mattresses until I had stretched myself upon another. But the comedy was soon over; soon he slept the sleep of the just, and snored like a military music; and I might get up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keeping him with her, talked of herself, pouring out an incoherent story of misfortune: how she had fainted on the stage one night and incurred the ill-will of the director; how the company went on and left her without friends and without money; how matters had gone from bad to worse until she couldn't stand it any longer. She painted a picture ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... less incoherent, it appeared that on coming out on the bit of common above the wood, as she and Clarence were halting on the brow of the hill to admire the view, they heard a call for help, and hurrying down in the direction whence it proceeded they saw a stunted ash-tree, beneath which were a ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of similar caliber, was the leading spirit in the New Haven settlement, assisted by the Reverend Mr. Davenport; many of the colonists were Second-Adventists, and they called the Bible their Statute-Book. The date of their establishment was 1638. The incoherent population of Rhode Island caused it to be excluded from the federation; but Williams, journeying to London, obtained a patent from the exiled but now powerful Vane, and took as the motto of his government, "Amor Vincet Omnia." New ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... international arrangements concerning Post Offices, shipping, banking, codes, sanctions of law, criminal research, and the rest, on which so much of our civilized life depends. This world State is unorganized, incoherent. It has neither a centre nor a capital, nor a meeting place. The shipowners gather in Paris, the world's bankers in Madrid or Berne, and what is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in the smoking ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... too great for her already overstrained intellect. A giddiness seized upon her; every thing seemed to whirl before her eyes; she gasped some incoherent words, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... intervals between his tears since he was married were never long. At these words Shaphan lifted his face from his hands and dashed some tears from his eyelids. He will tell us now, the brethren said to themselves, but he only uttered a few incoherent words, and his face ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... paused at a Mollah preaching the Jehad, in doubt whether he too wasn't a German pastor, and then at an Anglican clergyman still lying abed and thinking out a great mission of Repentance and Hope that should restore the authority of the established church—by incoherent missioning—without any definite sin indicated for repentance nor any clear hope for anything in particular arising out of such activities. The bishop's hand went seeking to and fro, but nowhere could he ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... This was my broad-browed, frank-faced, golden-haired, bright, smiling, incoherent, inconsistent, inconsequential, light-hearted, hilarious Jack—the Jack who was once the joy of every company, rollicking, reckless, and without a care. To this complexion had he come at last. Oh, what a moral ruin was here, my countrymen! ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... abasement, and he wrote a long, incoherent letter to her, telling her that he had resolved that he would not go into the Army. "Because I'm a coward, Mary. I've thought the thing over from beginning to end, thought about it until I became dizzy with thinking, and this is the end of it all: I'm a coward. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... acquired reappears, it is followed by the thought which accompanied it when it was acquired. In a conversation a traitor is spoken of. Someone asks what was the value of a piece of silver in ancient times. This appears incoherent; really it is a natural and simple association of ideas in which there are few intermediate steps. The person who listened as the traitor was mentioned thought of Judas, who was the first traitor of whom he had heard, and of the thirty pieces ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... of their mirth was tossing on a bed of sickness. Disease, which had been slowly sapping the foundations of his strength, burned in every vein; his eyes rolled and flashed in delirium; his lips, usually so silent, muttered wild and incoherent words. In his days of health, poor Duhobret had his dreams, as all artists, rich or poor, will sometimes have. He had thought that the fruit of many years' labor, disposed of to advantage, might procure him enough to live, in an economical way, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... which we shut our eyes to because it does not interest us, or which we evade by denying the second order in its turn—that is, at bottom, by re-establishing the first. How can we speak, then, of an incoherent diversity which an understanding organizes? It is no use for us to say that no one supposes this incoherence to be realized or realizable: when we speak of it, we believe we are thinking of it; now, in analyzing the idea actually present, we find, as we said before, only ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent facade of the Brood-huis, now the last earthly resting-place of the two distinguished victims, while grouped around these principal buildings rose the fantastic palaces of the Archers, Mariners, and of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... then grinned faintly, and nodded at Russell as the latter lifted his hat in salutation. Alice uttered an incoherent syllable of exclamation, and, as she began to walk faster, she bit her lip hard, not in order to look wistful, this time, but to help her keep tears of anger ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... again sent me back and forth in that awful tramp from wall to wall. I perceived that the strain of that horrible haunted silence was driving me mad. There was no escape, no hope, no peace. Again and again did I break from incoherent ravings to sink upon my knees, beseeching God for mercy. Yet I arose without rest, without peace. At last I sank weakly down against the wall and lay trembling in every limb, staring ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... place," she began timidly, and then continuing with a nervous incoherent rush of words, "he will be simply delighted that you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would consent to see at all—the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he doesn't know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He pretends with me that it's just a nervous ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... me the most incoherent of all systems, but to Christianity I feel no objection but its want ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... up and down the room, he frankly unfolded his troubles—the approaching marriage of his mother (this was no news), and, in an agitated and incoherent manner, his desperate predicament with regard ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... down on his knees and murmured some incoherent words of thanksgiving. Surely his virtue in restoring his wife to life had been rewarded! But, as if the impulse struck uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed the dust from his trousers and set himself to think of his next movements. He could not start for London for some hours; and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was condemned almost as universally as his Iago was praised. For once I find myself with the majority. He screamed and ranted and raved—lost his voice, was slow where he should have been swift, incoherent where he should have been strong. I could not bear to see him in the part. It was painful to me. Yet night after night he achieved in the speech to the Senate one of the most superb and beautiful bits of acting of his life. It was wonderful. He spoke ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... seat, it was the wife that took the office of consoler. She took his trembling hand, and kissed it, and put it round her neck: she called him her John—her dear John—her old man—her kind old man; she poured out a hundred words of incoherent love and tenderness; her faithful voice and simple caresses wrought this sad heart up to an inexpressible delight and anguish, and cheered and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... been accustomed to wear had been removed whilst I slept, and in their stead, suits of the very deepest mourning appeared. I dressed myself in one of these, and upon asking Servilius and his wife the meaning of this change, was answered by Andrea with so wild a burst of grief, and incoherent lamentation, that I durst inquire no further. After they had gone forth to their daily employment I also quitted the cottage for a stroll, and detected a woman pointing me out to her children as "a poor, little boy, who had probably lost both his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... I could understand the incoherent statement which she addressed to me, she had been the object of admiration (while visiting Maplesworth) of two gentlemen, who both desired to marry her. Hesitating between them and perfectly inexperienced in such ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... wearing a tailor-made dress that fitted her to perfection, and on her head she had a large hat, from under which tiny tendrils of dark hair had escaped; her skin was of the whiteness of rose petals except where the blood flushed, her eyes had the look of wet violets in spring. My lips murmured incoherent thanks and welcome. I could not force my mind away from the waiting ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... They could see the Fairfields clearly now, but not being within hearing distance, they could only express their welcome by frantic wavings of hands, handkerchiefs, and flags. But at last the gangplank was put in place, and at last the Fairfields crossed it, and then an enthusiastic and somewhat incoherent ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... suspense, became dangerously ill. When she recovered, her parents were more indulgent to her, and were gratified by finding her former passionate resistance replaced by sulky obedience. Five years elapsed, and Elinor began to write fiction. The beginning of a novel, and many incoherent verses imitated from Lara, were discovered by her mother, and burnt by her father. This outrage she never forgave. She was unable to make her resentment felt, for she no longer cared to break glass and china. She feared even to remonstrate lest she should humiliate herself by ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... that he must not at any cost see de Spain, Nan stepped quickly into the hall and faced the messenger. "I was over at the doctor's office just now," continued her visitor evenly, "he asked me to bring this down for your uncle." She took the package with an incoherent acknowledgment. Without letting her eyes meet his, she was conscious of how fresh and clean and strong he looked, dressed in a livelier manner than usual—a partly cowboy effect, with a broader Stetson and a gayer tie than he ordinarily affected. De Spain kept on speaking: "The telephone ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home;—nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting armful of newly-cut sheaves. But I should misinform you grossly if I left you to infer that his collections were a heap of incoherent 'miscellanea'. No! the very contrary. Their variety, conjoined with the too great coherency, the too great both desire and power of referring them in systematic, nay, genetic subordination, was that which rendered his schemes gigantic and impracticable, as an author, and his conversation ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... that early training that a good many of us have never yet been able to work up much enthusiasm over the Old Masters. Mind you, we have no quarrel with those who become incoherent and babbling with joy in the presence of an Old Master, but—doggone 'em!—they insist on quarreling with us because we think differently. We fail to see anything ravishingly beautiful in a faded, blistered, cracked, ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the Daily Post, showing that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the Miscellanies, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's indisposition last Winter, and a train ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... monkey, and squeezed it to his breast, and kissed it— yes, he actually kissed its nose in the height of his glee, and continued to utter incoherent exclamations, and to perpetrate incongruous absurdities, until long after they had descended the river and left the muddy Portuguese and ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... with an introverted expression—"recueillement d'esprit," he thought to himself, bitterly. Brushing her hair in passing lightly with his lips, he left the room and presently the house. When she discovered that he had gone without again seeing her, she flew to the telephone and held a long incoherent talk with some one she not infrequently called "Ben, dear," to whom she confided certain undefined fears about her husband and her future. A suggestion of a trip to Europe from the other end of the telephone met with her unbounded ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various |
