"Oblivion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her strength for a final effort. She tore the letter into very small pieces, and then, clinging to a chair, strove to grasp the rail of the bed; but the bed rolled worse than any ship. Making a supreme effort, she got in; and then, neither dreams nor waking thoughts, but oblivion complete. Hours and hours passed, and when she opened her eyes her maid stood over the bed, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... work have been, to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming up from the depths of oblivion! Wherever three or four are grouped together, we find an exquisite little picture—an old woman and two young women in a doorway, for example, telling no story, but touching us with simple harmony of form. Nothing further is ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... his head nodded sympathetically to the music; his eyelids closed in sleep; and as the last verse concluded, a full-drawn snore announced that Monsoon, if not in the land of dreams, was at least in a happy oblivion of all terrestrial concerns, and caring as little for the woes of green Erin and the altered fortunes of the Free family as any Saxon that ever ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... privation and dreadful sufferings, and we began to remember what had passed rather as a frightful dream from which we had been happily awakened, than as events which had taken place in sober and naked reality. I have since found that this species of partial oblivion is usually brought about by sudden transition, whether from joy to sorrow or from sorrow to joy—the degree of forgetfulness being proportioned to the degree of difference in the exchange. Thus, in my own case, I now feel it impossible to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... air, individualized by thinnest skin of slightly glutinous water! Does not swift comfort and ready substitution show first love rather, the passion between man and woman than between a man and a woman? How speedily is even a Romeo consoled to oblivion for the loss of a Rosaline by the gain of a Juliet! And yet I mourn over even such evanishment; mourn although I know that the bubble of paradise, swift revolving to annihilation, is never a wasted thing: its influence, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... with carbuncles. Here, in deep bays and harbors, lies many a spell-bound ship, long given up as lost by the ruined merchant. Here, too, its crew, long bewailed as swallowed up in ocean, lie sleeping in mossy grottoes, from age to age, or wander about enchanted shores and groves, in pleasing oblivion of all things. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... he had awakened in the morning before the memory of the adventure of yesterday recurred to David's mind. His sleep had been as deep as that of an infant, and his rest in the great ocean of oblivion had purified him, so that when he did at last recall the experience which had affected him so deeply, it was with indifference. The charm had vanished. Even the gypsy's beauty paled in the light of the Holy Sabbath morning. He could think of her with ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... then! But it shall not depart into oblivion unchronicled. One who has sat under its roof-tree, one who remembers well its rambling rooms and wild garden, will take the pen to write down a page of its story. It is only an episode, one of many; but the others are fading away, or already buried in dead memories under the sod. It was a quaint, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... over Paul—he asked nothing better than to rest there in the perfumed shade, near enough to his loved one to be able to stretch out his arm and touch her hair. And soon a sweet sleep claimed him, and all was oblivion and peace. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... placed upon record. In intimate connection with the career of Cabot, Cartier, Roberval, Ribaut, Laudonniere, Gosnold, Pring, and Smith, there were vast domains of personal incident and interesting fact over which the waves of oblivion have passed forever. Nor has Champlain been more fortunate than the rest. In studying his life and character, we are constantly finding ourselves longing to know much where we are permitted to know but little. His ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... imagination was able to fill the gaps; and though it failed, no doubt, to reproduce Margery Schopper's memoirs phrase for phrase and word for word, I have on the whole succeeded in transcribing with considerable exactitude all that she herself had thought worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Moreover I have avoided the repetition of the mode of talk in the fifteenth century, when German was barely commencing to be used as a written language, since scholars, writers, and men of letters always chose the Latin tongue for any great or elegant intellectual work. The narrator's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... about to go before my Maker or to obliteration and oblivion. If the former, I am prepared to say to Him: "You made me a man. I have played the man. I look to you for justice, and that is—compensation and not 'forgiveness'. Much less is it punishment. You have treated me ill and given me no ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... potatoes not, Could grateful Ireland e'er forget thy claim?[37] 'Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot,' Which blend thy memory with Eliza's fame; Could England's annals in oblivion rot, Tobacco would enshrine and consecrate ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... encumbered her in order to lie down on the sofa: she took a cornelian pin out of her cape, and before she laid it down on the table she showed it to me, and desired me to read a motto engraved upon it round a stalk of lilies. The words were, "Oblivion of injuries; pardon for offences."—"I much fear," added that virtuous Princess, "this maxim has but little influence among our enemies; but it ought not to be less dear to us on ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... on my feet stirred me from oblivion. At first, when only half awake, I could not realize what had fallen on my bed, then hearing a deep groan I knew Moze had come back. I was dropping off again when a strange, low sound caused my eyes to open wide. The black night had faded to the gray of dawn. The sound I recognized at ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... must have contained startling and humiliating revelations which laid bare the absurdity of claims subsequently advanced. These unwelcome witnesses were, therefore, quietly permitted to pass into oblivion. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... de Gonaville, the great visitor of France, Hugues de Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to determine on their fate. The King and the Pope were now equally interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So long as these men lived, uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not extinct. A commission was named: the Cardinal-Archbishop of Albi, with two other cardinals, two monks, the Cistercian Arnold ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... banks of the stream wandered a countless multitude, numerous as insects in the summer air. AEneas, with surprise, inquired who were these. Anchises answered, "They are souls to which bodies are to be given in due time. Meanwhile they dwell on Lethe's bank, and drink oblivion of their former lives." "Oh, father!" said AEneas, "is it possible that any can be so in love with life, as to wish to leave these tranquil seats for the upper world?" Anchises replied by explaining the plan of creation. The Creator, he told him, originally made the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... empty of an individual and his atmosphere represent the intervals between his lives which he spends in sleep, or in states of existence with which this world is not concerned, but of such gulfs of oblivion and states ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... adopted, to raise any objections, disposed though they may have been to try and bring forward other arguments. Their sole alternative therefore was to suppress their resentment, to refrain from further importunities and let the matter drop into oblivion. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the clean fresh outside air; she was within three paces of the line of snow. Then there was a sudden noise; Gratton, inching off backward, had stumbled over a dead stick. The men by the fire were startled out of their oblivion. Steve Jarrold, the one nearest Gloria, swung about, saw her, dropped what was in his hands, and lunged towards her. She made a dash for the exit. In two great strides Jarrold was upon her and had caught her by the shoulders, dragging her back. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... extraordinary tale, told with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human motives—could teach an awful moral lesson in the guise of fascinating fiction, but he could ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... knows how great is the crime he must make amends for: not merely Morold's death, but the winning of Isolda's heart, the desertion, the cruel coming to claim her as his uncle's bride; he says he will drink—only in oblivion can he find refuge from the toils in which he has involved himself; he lifts the cup to his lips, drinks, and as he drinks Isolda, crying "Betrayed, even here," snatches the cup ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose, in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was. Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived, except myself—the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's race—could find a grave! I, alone, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... smashing advance by taking the ball on downs! Even this sudden flare-up of spirited defense was lightly regarded by the stands who saw in Elliott's improved play but the last spent effort of a dying ember whose light is always brightest before it fades into oblivion. And Tim Mooney's fifty yard punt, putting Elliott out of danger for the time being, was the ember at full glow. Delmar would soon get going once more and Elliott would be beaten back until the team, burning itself ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... unchanged, though most people learn from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence which is not oblivion. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... these days treated to 'demonstrations' which scarcely rise to the level of presumptions, but, rather, of presumption. There is an accumulation of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a century to be swept into the same oblivion with the 'Christian Astrology,' of William Lilly and the 'Ars Magna' of Raymond Lully—a mass of rubbish that is waiting for another Caliph Omar ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... incorporate an intricate pattern of tastefully selected letters. Thus it is with the following sentence of Sir Thomas Browne's, wherein it is difficult to decide whether the rhythm or the literation contributes the larger share to its symmetry of sound:—"But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity." Thus it is, again, with this sentence from Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture":—"They are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is to its far happier, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... mansions of England—the "Halls" and "old Places"—Mr. Baylis saw the tangible records of the history of his country; and, desirous of upholding such memorials, he gleaned a rich harvest from the lumber of brokers' shops, and saved from oblivion articles illustrative of various tastes and periods, that were daily in the course of macadamisation or of ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... that have fretted us had not some art for retiring into secret oblivion, what a hell would life become! Now, understand how in some nervous derangements this horror really takes place. Some things that had sunk into utter forgetfulness, others that had faded into visionary power, all rise as gray phantoms from the dust; the field of our earthly combats that ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... so mean a soul was on him still, was rooted in him; but suddenly, in the silent, searching night, some spirit whispered in his ear that this was the price which he must pay for his life saved to the world, a compromise with the Inexorable Thing. On the verge of oblivion and the end, he had been snatched back by relenting Fate, which requires something for something given when laws are overriden and doom defeated. Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... Jacobite nonsense with which they have inoculated those lads who were not inoculated with it before—Scott's novels. Jacobitism and Laudism, a kind of half Popery, had at one time been very prevalent at Oxford, but both had been long consigned to oblivion there, and people at Oxford cared as little about Laud as they did about the Pretender. Both were dead and buried there, as everywhere else, till Scott called them out of their graves, when the pedants of Oxford hailed both—ay, and the Pope, too, as soon ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... descended on Nigel's spirit, and he lay for some time in peaceful oblivion, when a rattling crash awoke him. Sitting up he listened, and came to the conclusion that the professor had upset some piece of furniture, for he could hear him distinctly moving about in a stealthy manner, as if on tip-toe, giving vent to a grumble of dissatisfaction every ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... he replied. "The name of Philothea was too deeply engraven to be washed away by the waters of oblivion. He seldom speaks; but when he does, you are ever in his visions. The sound of a female voice accompanying the lyre is the only thing that makes him smile; and nothing moves him to tears save the farewell song of Orpheus to Eurydice. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... faculties thou hast dazed, act again. There is more than Fate's caprice in Challoner's interest in a man he never saw. Ghosts of old memories rise and demand a hearing. Facts, trivial and commonplace enough to have been lost in oblivion with the day which gave them birth, throng again from the past, proving that nought dies without a possibility of resurrection. Their power over this brooding man is shown by the force with which his fingers crush against his bowed forehead. Oswald and Challoner! Had he found the connecting link? ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... it became desirable to ascertain and to indicate the nature of the sea-bottom, since this circumstance greatly affects its goodness as holding ground for anchors. Some ingenious tar, whose name deserves a better fate than the oblivion into which it has fallen, attained this object by "arming" the bottom of the lead with a lump of grease, to which more or less of the sand or mud, or broken shells, as the case might be, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But, however well adapted ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... suppliant nations in thy temple wait; No prophet bards, thy glittering courts among, Wake the full lyre, and swell the tide of song: But lawless force and meagre want are there, And the quick-darting eye of restless fear, While cold oblivion, 'mid thy ruins laid, Folds its dank wing beneath the ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... by Ovid, which arose amidst the freer manners of the Roman patricians, had little resemblance to the refined sentiments, the bequest of the age of chivalry; the one was founded on the subjugation of mind by the senses, the other on the oblivion of the senses in the mind. What a vast addition to the range and interest of the drama has the refining and spiritualizing of this master-passion of the human breast, by the influence of Christianity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... a questionable mercy, restoring the mother just then from the bliss of oblivion, but she came gradually back through a fog of daze to the full glare of fact. Her thoughts did not run forward upon the scandal, the horror of the public, the outcry of all the press; she had but one thought, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... enough; vanity of a very weak and futile kind. He would stamp the last traces of it out of his being. Happily it was but vanity, and no deeper feeling. Of this he was assured by the reposeful sigh with which he turned his head upon the pillow, drowsing to oblivion. ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, &c.; though it does not appear that the Presbyters and Deacons of those Churches were honored with any similar notice." In like manner, catalogues of temporal Rulers are preserved, when the names of officers subordinate to them are suffered to pass into oblivion. It is easy to trace back the line of Bishops, by name, from our own day, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... by taking on our sins he hath fully abolished the power and plea of them, as the goat that was sent to the wilderness out of all men's sight was not to be seen again. Truly, this is the way how our sins are buried in the grave of oblivion and removed as a cloud, and cast into the depths of the sea, and sent away as far as the east is from the west that they may never come into judgment against us to condemn us because Christ, by appeasing wrath and satisfying justice by the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... need of life lies in the tracing-out and paying heed to these extrinsic values, these after effects of conduct. The drinking of alcoholic liquors, for example, not only stills a craving that arises in a man's mind, not only brings pleasure of taste and comfort of oblivion, not only brings the quick revulsion of emotional staleness and headache, but has its gradual and inevitable effects in undermining the constitution, lessening the power of resistance to disease, and decreasing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... achieved his undeniable victories by means and procedures which have not fitted him for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force, either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy, deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy with the former ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... works of useful and ornamental art discovered in the sepulchres of nations long since fallen into oblivion, were of no other value, at the present day, than merely to be applied to the purposes which they were originally intended to subserve; if they did not elucidate the manners, customs, and progressional refinement of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... confiding, rather drowsy, child. Or was it that the fierceness of those past moments had killed his power of feeling? An almost dreamy hour—with the sun going down, the lamps being lighted one by one—and a sort of sweet oblivion over everything! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... creep close up to him, and try to warm myself; and this I did, clinging closely to him and Bob Chowne; and then, as I crouched shivering and cramped in the bottom of the boat, I felt as if all the cold and darkness had suddenly sunk away and I was in oblivion. ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... to the ocean- wildernesses over which Prince Humphry's home-returning vessel must be now on its way—while that other solitary barque, unhelmed and unmanned, whose sail bore the name of 'Lotys' was also voyaging, but in a darker direction, down to death and oblivion, carrying with it, as he feared, all the love and heart of a King! Suddenly a loud knocking at the door startled them; and as Ronsard rose from his chair, amazed at the noise and Von Glauben did the same with more alacrity, a man with wind ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of the weather held it at its will; the deep oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances; it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it willed. It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that ghastly conflict ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... books. When the Caliph Omar commanded the Alexandrian library to be destroyed, which the pride and the learning of the Ptolemy family had collected from every part of the world, literature sustained an irreparable loss; but, although the tyrant had the power to consign to eternal oblivion the works of science, yet he had no power over the principles upon which these works were constructed. These principles had spread themselves wide over the world. The expedition of Alexander carried the learning of the Egyptians and the Greeks into various countries of Asia, where ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... that your Lordship would not approve of such an occurrence being thrown into oblivion without an attempt at explanation, and I am persuaded that any backwardness under such circumstances would only serve to confirm the Porte in her present infatuated course of policy. I have, therefore, communicated upon the subject with my colleagues of Austria, France, ...
— Correspondence Relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostacy from Islamism • Various
... held Burrow's Lone Elm hat, and it was at its white roses, hated by her, that she wept. For her friends were telling her, with the ecstatic joy of true friends, that cart-wheels could not be worn, being three seasons passed into oblivion. ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... at intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation as rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the momentary trance—this fugitive beguilement of my wo—had been conceded by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing the pang, by thus forcing it into a stronger ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... towards prophesying the hope of the future. His favorite companions of the atelier at this time were Eugene Delacroix and Gericault. Delacroix ranks among the greatest living French artists; and if death early closed the brilliant career of Gericault, it has not yet shrouded his name in oblivion. The trio made their first appearance together in the Saloon of 1819. Gericault sent his "Wreck of the Medusa," Delacroix "The Barque of Dante," and Ary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... as "applause," "cheers," "cat-calls," and "groans," and as these words were enclosed within parentheses he insisted that they did not count, and made a very fair plea that he ought not to be punished for words which slipped in by mistake, and which he had officially obliterated by what he called oblivion marks. ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... more precious ones cast it into oblivion," observed Althea. "Let me see, Hermon: ivy and roses. The former is lasting, but the roses—" She shook her finger in roguish menace at the sculptor ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... down boldly, openly, and as a fact for general publication the things of one's own doing, saying, and thinking is an impertinence whose only justification can be found in the public approval. If Pepys had written his Diary for publication he would have been left to oblivion as a driveller. But we surprise the man's secret, we see what he never meant to show us, the peering jackdaw instinct is satisfied; and we feel, besides, a certain sense of humorous pity and affectionate disdain which the man himself, had we known ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... refused another effort; after a few minutes' feeble search he simply took the name of the chief female character, Margaret Home. That must do for the book. Already, with the penning of the last word, all its scenes, personages, dialogues had slipped away into oblivion; he knew and ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... to walk to and from the basin appeared to have sufficed the carousers to drink themselves well on toward a condition of oblivion; for when I again reached the beach opposite the ship, the singing had subsided into an occasional maudlin howl that, in its turn, soon afterwards yielded to the stupefying effects of the liquor, and a dead silence fell upon ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... organized, and mostly in vain. He is prone in life's very gutter; bloated, reeking and polluted with the doggery's slops and filth. He can fall but a few feet lower, and not until he stumbles into an unmarked, unhonored grave, where kind mother earth and the merciful mantle of oblivion will cover and conceal the awful wreck he made of God's own image. To the casual observer, the large majority of the community, these three phases, at whose vagaries many laugh, and over whose consequences millions ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... from the black oblivion stretching out my hand, my hand flung like a drowned man's hand on a rock, I touched her flank and knew I was carried by the current in death over to the new world, and was climbing out on the shore, risen, ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... perceptible hath lifted thee." Never was heart in such devotion bound, And with complacency so absolute Dispos'd to render up itself to God, As mine was at those words: and so entire The love for Him, that held me, it eclips'd Beatrice in oblivion. Naught displeas'd Was she, but smil'd thereat so joyously, That of her laughing eyes the radiance brake And scatter'd my collected mind abroad. Then saw I a bright band, in liveliness Surpassing, who themselves ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... in 1858. But Macaulay passes lightly in his Introduction over the sixteenth century, and the reign of Henry VIII., or at least the latter part of it, had never been so copiously illustrated before. The Oxford Movement, which treated the Reformation as a discreditable incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence with the laity. Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... called Isaac was huddled and nodding in a chair, before the bluish blaze of a wreck-wood fire. He met me with an incurious stare, and began to doze again. He was clearly in the last decline of manhood, the stage of utter childishness and mere oblivion; and sat there with his faculties ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fancy, to my childhood; I am foolishly fond of it. But it seems to me that then only did I truly experience sensations or impressions; the smallest trifles I saw or heard then were full of deep and hidden meaning, recalling past images out of oblivion, and reawakening memories of prior existences; or else they were presentiments of existences to come, future incarnations in the land of dreams, expectations of wondrous marvels that life and the world held in store for me-for a later period, no doubt, when I should be grown up. Well, I have ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... the Rose, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly aesthetic or on historical principles of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the deeper stratum of oblivion that had to be reached, without dynamite if possible. "I see," Gwen said. "Your own house ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... association may freshen faded memories and wake a dormant conscience. An apparently trivial circumstance, like some hooked pole pushed at random into the sea, may bring up by the locks some pale and drowned memory long plunged in an ocean of oblivion. Here, in Herod's case, a report reaches him of a new Rabbi who bears but a very faint resemblance to John, and that is enough to bring his crime back in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... take command of the troops in the field. The feeling of the government towards me, I am sure, is kind and trusting. I hope, with God's blessing, to justify the great confidence they now repose in me, and will bury the past in oblivion." O. S., p. 567.] The consolidation of the armies under him was, in fact, a promotion, since it enlarged his authority and committed to him the task that properly belonged to Halleck as general-in-chief. For ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... his proposal, you ought not to have been so much alarmed; and give me leave to tell you, you took his advice in a different light from what you ought to have done. But no more of this; it serves only to renew the occasion of our sorrow and complaint, which we and you ought to bury forever in oblivion; give us now an account of all that has happened to you since we saw you last, and of your present situation, but especially let us ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... countries where the Roman Church reigned supreme in early times, it did its best to consign all popular religious poetry to oblivion. But about the seventeenth century it determined to turn such fragments as had survived this procedure to its own profit. Accordingly they were written over in conformity with its particular tenets, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... is—THE CHARITY OF ITS SILENCE. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace; and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... a thing of the past. It is now a page in Canadian history. When a few generations shall come and go; our sad story of the "Frog Lake Massacre," may be totally forgotten, and the actors therein consigned to oblivion; but, these few papers, should they by any chance, survive the hand of time, will tell to the children of the future Canada, what those of your day experienced and suffered; and when those who are yet to be learn the extent of the troubles undergone, and the sacrifices ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... and brought her enchantments. The weary din of day lost itself in oblivion. The clear, tranquil, anaemic moon encircled herself with her own radiance, basked in her own light. She looked at the earth and did not dissipate the mist—it was as if she had taken to herself all the brightness and ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... is nothing to prescribe but oblivion in a case like this.' He ordered narcotics. Two weeks later I was told that I had been dangerously ill. In that darkened room I had suspected my jeopardy. Surely there is a special place in heaven for mothers ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... of oblivion he first dreamed that he was alternately swimming through a rough sea and rocking in a wave-tossed boat—— A gush of water dashed into his face—then the sea appeared to solidify into dry sand. He became conscious that Carmena was violently rolling him from side to side and slapping ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... earth, sea, and night and day, what then? Let my soul be but a product, what then? I say it is nothing to me; this only I know, that while I have lived—now, this moment, while I live—I think immortality, I lift my mind to a Fourth Idea. If I pass into utter oblivion, yet I have ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... oblivion then! On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide! On for your time, ye ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... little dried-up man, whose ceremonious bow put Violet in mind of the Mayor of Wrangerton. Bending low, he politely gave her a chair, and then subsided into oblivion; while Miss Gardner came forward, as usual, the same trim, quiet, easy-mannered person, and began to talk to Violet, while Mrs. Finch ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... blood and is glutted. Millions mourn for myriads slain, or, envying the dead, pray for oblivion. Towns and villages have been razed. Fruitful fields have been turned back to wilderness. It came to pass as the prophet had said: 'The sun was turned to darkness and the moon to blood.' The course of the law was ended. The sword sat chief magistrate in ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to speak, and only three names can be attributed to the age of the republic. The favorite of Justinian (it has been fiercely urged) was fearful of encountering the light of freedom and the gravity of Roman sages. Tribonian condemned to oblivion the genuine and native wisdom of Cato, the Scaevolas, and Sulpicius; while he invoked spirits more congenial to his own, the Syrians, Greeks, and Africans, who flocked to the imperial court to study Latin as a foreign tongue ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,—deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... dire threat Uncle Sheba groaned aloud, feeling that his sin had overtaken him swiftly indeed. His supper was meagre, and to his plaintive remarks Aun' Sheba made no reply, but maintained an ominous silence until sleep again brought the relief of oblivion. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... leaders whose lives and actions have so completely fallen into oblivion as those of the Earl of Peterborough. This is largely due to the fact that they were overshadowed by the glory and successes of Marlborough. His career as General extended over little more than a year, and yet, in that time, he showed a genius for warfare which ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... opinion that gentler arts were to be used, and that even a victory over such enemies would be worse than a defeat. At length, it was resolved to send a messenger, entreating the people to return home, and declare their grievances; promising, at the same time, an oblivion of all that ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... two wretched wooden cabins, a tumbling kiosk, five or six old men and women squatting on the ground amid a flock of dogs and cats. This was the Catholic mission, tumbledown and decayed, unpainted for years, overgrown by weeds, marshy and muddy, passing to oblivion like the race to ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... not dissolve by expansion, nor be broken by internal strains. She will not suffer that loss of unity which would be for all her members death, and for her history and meaning and self an utter oblivion. She ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... suffers strain, and the equilibrium of the whole system is disturbed. Ill health follows, the mind is centred upon the suffering body, spiritual aspiration ceases, and the neglected soul folds its wings and falls into the sleep of oblivion. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... his feet, forgotten now, fell the envelope which he had flaunted vainly before the eyes of the transgressors. They had escaped, not scourged or harrowed according to their deserts, but smiling like sleepy children, through the door of unconsciousness and oblivion. Gropingly his fingers went again into his pocket and came out holding the envelope out of which he had taken the death tablets. They, too, had betrayed him. Instead of torture they had brought the ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... hunt and has to find. And she finds and carries off her prey beforehand and watches over it for the appointed number of days, until the moment when, crazily, through the hole which she digs with a hatchet in the middle of the skull, she absorbs the sleep which stupefies her and grants her oblivion for a given period. And here again we see absurdity and madness. Why does she fix that period at so many days? Why should one victim ensure her a hundred and twenty days of sleep and another a hundred and twenty-five? What insanity! The calculation ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... paths. Take my advice. Don't be content with anything less than success. If you fail, strip off your clothes, and swim out to sea on a sunny day, swim out until your strength fails and you must sink. It is the pleasantest form of oblivion I know of. Don't live on. You are only a nuisance to yourself, and a bad influence to the rest of the world. Succeed, or make your little bow, my young friend. It is the best advice I can give you. Remember that the men who have failed, and ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to bring back from oblivion the works of so elegant a poet as Thomas Watson, of whose renown in his own age Francis Meres thus testifies in his Palladis ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... the son's reception represents the complete reconciliation of the Gospel—the total oblivion of the prodigal's past sins, and his admission into the favour and the family of God, as a dear child. Even the details at this point have been framed after the pattern of spiritual privileges as they are elsewhere represented ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... with an immoderate feeling of faintness and sickness, with no more remembrance of things past than has a man bereft of reason. And for some time I swung between sense and oblivion before an overpowering stench forced itself upon my nostrils, accompanied by a creaking, straining sound and sweeping motion. I could see nothing for the pitchy blackness. Then I recalled what had befallen me, and cried aloud to God in my anguish, for I well knew I had been carried aboard ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and saw how like to death her face was, I thought how well it were for both of us, should we be resting there so together; not leaving the acre of the dead, but entering it as rightful heirs of its oblivion. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... joy and grief and hope and fear, Alternate triumphed in his breast; His bliss and woe—a smile, a tear! Oblivion hides the rest. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... introduced on January 15th. It went to the Assembly Committee on Fish and Game. Like the Walker bill, the Rutherford bill was lost in committee oblivion. ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... occupied with them whilst awake; in this case we are right in saying that the dream carries on the chief interest of our waking life. More usually, however, when the dream contains anything relating to the impressions of the day, it is so trivial, unimportant, and so deserving of oblivion, that we can only recall it with an effort. The dream content appears, then, even when coherent and intelligible, to be concerned with those indifferent trifles of thought undeserving of our waking interest. The depreciation of dreams ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... brittle beauties of a year, See their frail names, and lovers vows writ here; Who sings thy solid worth and spotless fame, On purest adamant should cut thy name: Then would thy fame be from oblivion sav'd; On thy own heart my ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... now lost in oblivion, and who was known as "Bertie Crocks" for purposes of identification, standing at the corner of the "Horse Repository," saw Miss Keith entering the doctor's office, and wondered again how any one ever thought a small ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... to observe that Kippis, who classifies with the pomp of enumeration his heap of pamphlets, imagines that, as Blackmore's Epic is consigned to oblivion, so likewise must be the criticism, which, however, he confesses he could never meet with. An odd fate attends Dennis's works: his criticism on a bad work ought to survive it, as good works have survived ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the life she was leading, in which she suffered the horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from Adele's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. From that day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morning draughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunk with this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came to breakfast ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... presentiment and blank amaze and stricken consciousness left him in the lightning-flash of divination that was recognition as well. A shuddering cataclysm enveloped him, a passion so stupendous that it almost brought oblivion. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... elbow, as on a battlefield, and look once more on the beings whom the scenes and happenings of the times have rolled up all together. I look at them all, plunged in the abyss of passive oblivion, some of them seeming still to be absorbed in their pitiful anxieties, their childish instincts, and ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... deny ourselves the solace of remembering the mercies which may, perhaps, have gone from us. Memory may be like the calm radiance that fills the western sky from a sun that has set, sad and yet sweet, melancholy and lovely. But he means that we should so forget as, by the oblivion, to strengthen ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this decree between [the contending parties], he exhorted the Aedui to bury in oblivion their disputes and dissensions, and, laying aside all these things, devote themselves to the war, and expect from him, on the conquest of Gaul, those rewards which they should have earned, and send speedily to him all their cavalry and ten thousand infantry, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... nothing of the society about us, that we were ignorant as Arabs of the state of feeling and prejudice in America against such as we, who carried any trace of negro blood. Our treatment in England did but increase this oblivion. ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... or punishing him before the world, as he had feared that she would do. She was so quiet, so gentle to him, that, with all a man's obtuseness where women are concerned, he congratulated himself on being let off so easily, and thought that the matter was to be buried in oblivion. He even wondered a little at Nan's savoir-faire, and felt a vague sense of disappointment mingling with his relief. Was he to hear no more about it, although she had been struck down and brought almost to death's door by the discovery of his ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... go of the ropes and ran like scared cats, and the car tottered back in its original place. Redway had shut off steam and was slowing down under ordinary air, when all at once there was a dull deafening roar, and then for me—oblivion. I was only stunned and when I regained consciousness looked around and saw the men slowly regaining their feet. Redway was not killed, but the shock and concussion of the detonation of the dynamite made him lose his speech and he was bleeding profusely at the nose and ears. The cowcatcher, headlight ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... in my belief," the Steyne emissary cried, "ought to be buried in the most profound oblivion. A word concerning it should never pass these doors. I speak in the interest of my friend, as well as of Colonel Crawley, who persists in considering me ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an hour ago, and the sun, the heat, the dust, the contemplation of errands to be done in the great metropolis of Milltown, had lulled Mr. Cobb's never active mind into complete oblivion as to his promise of keeping ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the Pale, directing them to obtain information concerning all local ritual murder cases in past years. The effect of these inquiries was to revive the Grodno affair of 1818 which had been "left to oblivion." A certain convert by the name of Gradlnski from the townlet of Bobovnya, in the government of Minsk, declared before the Commission of Inquiry that he was ready to point out the description of the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man he had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before the momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "—saw the hammer fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up. He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the then firmament are gone out. Forgotten altogether; or recognized, like Rollin and others, for polished dullards, university big-wigs, and long-winded commonplace persons, deserving nothing but oblivion. To Montesquieu,—not yet called "Baron de Montesquieu" with ESPRIT DES LOIS, but "M. de Secondat" with (Anonymous) LETTRES PERSANES, and already known to the world for a person of sharp audacious eyesight,—it does not appear that Friedrich addressed any Letter, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... From early morning, when the bell rang out at 5 o'clock, the hours of the day were mapped out for different kinds of work. The girls' schools were well cared for by Mrs. Williams—a lady whose literary gift has rescued from oblivion much of the life of those far-off days. A part of each day was devoted by the missionaries to their own acquisition of the Maori language, and to the translation of the Bible and Prayer Book. At this work William Williams excelled. He was an ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... by my second officer, I threw myself on my couch and for some three hours or so I really found oblivion. It was so perfect that on waking up I wondered where I was. Then came the immense relief of the thought: on board my ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... to oblivion, death we must meet; let us make the dissolution easy." Perceiving that it was his intent to serve it out to the few undismayed members of the ship's crew, John rushed on him, seized the liquor and hurled it over ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... the soul of a seer and a singer, wherein as a scroll unfurled Lies open the scripture of light and of darkness, the word of the world, So, shapeless and measureless, lurid as anguish and haggard as crime, Pale as the front of oblivion and dark as the heart of time, The wild wan heaven at its height was assailed and subdued and made More fair than the skies that know not of storm and endure not shade. The grim sea-swell, grey, sleepless, and sad as a soul estranged, Shone, ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... among them that fully deserved the stigma intended for them. But most are innocent enough, and many of them as dull as the authors of their condemnation; whilst others, again, are so sparkling and well written that I wish it were possible to rescue them from the oblivion that enshrouds them even more thickly than the dust of centuries. The English books of this sort naturally stand apart from their foreign rivals, and may be roughly classified according as they deal with the affairs of State or Church. The original flavour has gone ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... speaking, he felt her slight young body suddenly become a dead weight on his arm. She crumpled up against him, and sank into the blessed oblivion of unconsciousness. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... recall the sullen faces of unfriendly gaolers. One of these gaolers he remembered had thrust a mug of wine into his hand and bade him drink surlily, and he had drunk greedily, as was his way when free drink was offered to him, and drinking, drank oblivion ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... this doctrine of the indispensable duty of change, I could bring the example of the wisest wives in all ages, who by these means have preserved their husband's families from ruin and oblivion by want of posterity; but what has been said is a sufficient ground ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... wonder ceased, and Mr Sharnall passed into the great oblivion of middle-class dead. His successor was not immediately appointed. Canon Parkyn arranged that the second master at the National School, who had a pretty notion of music, and was a pupil of Mr Sharnall, should be spared to fill the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... tone inspired Eleanor with confidence. She drank, submitted to being partially undressed, and lay down. Sleep overcame her immediately: she suffered a sensation of dropping plummet-wise into a great pit of oblivion.... ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... irrelevant to him, that the natural sciences will solve all his problems. He would be wise to recall that the great Roman republic in which Polybius lived more than 2200 years ago, did indeed become transformed into tyranny and, in the end, into anarchy and oblivion. No wonder that the makers of the American constitution keenly studied Polybius. Not only has Taine's comments and factual description of the cyclic French political history much to teach us about ourselves and the dangers ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the reins to Chunk, who stood near with a droll assumption of soldier-like stiffness and oblivion to all the well-known faces. Mounting the steps, cap in hand, the young officer approached Mr. Baron, who was becoming a little assured that the orders thus far heard had not included a general ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... if it would save his life. Oh, how we long to hear eight bells strike! At length they do strike, and the watch below are bid to 'tumble up, Beauties, and have a look at the lovely scenery!' We are then relieved at the wheel, and go below with our watch, hoping to enjoy four hours of blessed oblivion. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... fled away?—that more than twenty long, long years are spread between me and that happy night? And is it possible that all the dear old faces —Oh, quit it! quit it! Gather the old scraps up and wad 'em back into oblivion, where ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Arabs on the scene of history, human thought turned to the additive concept of number, and the original distributive concept receded gradually into oblivion. The acceptance of the new concept made it possible for the first time to conceive the zero. It is clear that by a continuous division of unity one is carried to a constantly growing number of constantly diminishing parts, but without ever reaching the nothing represented ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... they fall below the ambition of men of real talents—for the best part of the reward of literary labour consists in the lasting admiration of posterity; and as some new fastidiousness will consign to oblivion, in a short time, every comic production, it is plain that such a reward cannot be reasonably anticipated. We are more completely, than any other nation, the victims of fashion. Everything here must either be in the last and newest fashion, or it must ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... is glooming upward out of the corners of the room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were, that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without; it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time, will possess itself of everything. The Judge's face, indeed, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... apart from his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the last degree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and by other men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal of oblivion upon all that he ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... hearts, Shane. I once escaped to light, where they escape to oblivion.... Once I had you, and all my life I'll remember it.... All my life I'll remember: I once knew a man.... And it will be a help, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the Mexican face. How and when such prehistoric immigrants came, whether by the approaching shores of Behring Straits, whether in that geological time when land connection between North America and Asia was intact, is buried in oblivion. Beyond these theories there still remains that of an autochthonous origin; and who shall yet affirm that both the people and their civilisation may not have sprung and evolved upon the soil of the world which ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... able and willing to give them the sympathy and interest as well as the practical help they needed, where was any use for her? There was none—nobody needed her, she told herself, desperately, and the sooner she lost herself in the oblivion of ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship. The book that perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky garrets ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Henry had shown real affection, she would have understood, for affection explains everything. But he seemed without sentiment. The "thundering good sort" might at any moment become "a fellow for whom I never did have much use, and have less now," and be shaken off cheerily into oblivion. Margaret had done the same as a schoolgirl. Now she never forgot anyone for whom she had once cared; she connected, though the connection might be bitter, and she hoped that some day Henry would do ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... family the sense of loss was overwhelming, and I cannot perhaps express it better than in the words of her grandson, Austin Strong: "To say that I miss her means nothing. Why, it is as if an Era had passed into oblivion. She was so much the Chief of us all, the Ruling Power. God ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... about him, and threw himself under a large spreading oak to rest, and, if possible, to sleep. An hour passed on: still he lay looking up to the brilliant sky above. Perfect quiet reigned around, and he felt soothed inexpressibly. Overcome with fatigue, sleep stole on, and momentary oblivion of the past was granted. He was startled from his slumber by the neighing of his horse; and rising lightly, drew forth his pistols, cocked one, and turned in the direction whence came the sound of approaching hoofs. The neighing was answered by the advancing ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... great notoriety by writing against Christianity, was at this time received into the bosom of the infallible Church, a fact which, as may easily be supposed, the divines with whom he was subsequently engaged in controversy did not suffer to sink into oblivion. [229] A still more infamous apostate was Joseph Haines, whose name is now almost forgotten, but who was well known in his own time as an adventurer of versatile parts, sharper, coiner, false witness, sham bail, dancing master, buffoon, poet, comedian. Some of his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "wilt thou not tremble beneath the glance of those who seek the secret of thy life? Yes; study well thy part; have ready thy mask; go on bravely with thy cowardly farce! And now begone; thy nightly task is done;—beg, beg from sleep the oblivion of what thou art and of thy threatening future! Sleep! I tremble at the very thought of it! Father in heaven, have ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... interruptions prevented the completion of my work at that time. More recently, after despairing of the hope that some more capable member of my old command, the Rockbridge Artillery, would not allow its history to pass into oblivion, I resumed the task, and now present this volume as the only published record of that company, celebrated as it was even in that matchless body of men, the ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... decline of might and dignity into decrepitude and oblivion described in that luminous passage is less pathetic than the conversion of the glorious Bellerophon, with her untarnished traditions of historic victories, into a hulk for the punishment of rascals, and the changing of her unsullied name to an alias ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... often be at their wits' end for some new sensation with which to advertise themselves. Mr. TWAIN, for instance, having gone through Fenianism and France, seems to have collapsed for the present; and here now comes Mr. WEMYSS JOBSON, who subsided into oblivion years ago, but has just emerged again into the light of The Sun. The efforts of both these gentlemen to keep themselves prominently before the public, however, are very inadequate and feeble. They should suffer more and be stronger. Let TRAIN do a ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... fancies had gone to and fro, between his uncle and his bewitching cousin, until his heart grew softened and satisfied, not less with the native pleasures which they revived in his memory, than of the sweet oblivion which they brought of the many painful and perilous prospects with which he had more recently become familiar. He had no thought of the present, and the pictures of the past were all rich and ravishing. To his wandering ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... riding across the desert at dawn? At dawn, when to your right and to your left march phalanxes of ghostly shapes, which maybe are the shadows of the night, or maybe, as says the legend, the ghosts of the many long-dead kingdoms buried in oblivion and the relentless sands; when the whistling of the wind is as the shouting of men and the thunder of your horse's hoofs as the rolling of many drums, calling you through the power of past centuries and the ecstasy of the solitude in ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... be Orestes, the Furies howling in his ears, than one called to by a heavenly soul from whom he is for ever outcast. He has not the oblivion of madness. Clothed in the lights of his first passion, robed in the splendour of old skies, she meets him everywhere; morning, evening, night, she shines above him; waylays him suddenly in forest depths; drops palpably on his heart. At moments he forgets; he rushes to embrace her; calls ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... flies." But when the peculiar kind of folly keeps the wing no longer, it is reckoned but waste of powder to pour a discharge of ridicule on what has ceased to exist; and the pieces in which such forgotten absurdities are made the subject of ridicule, fall quietly into oblivion with the follies which gave them fashion, or only continue to exist on the scene, because they contain some other more permanent interest than that which connects them with manners and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... "Relaxing all my muscles" was rather awkward, as one hand was filling the pillow with hops and the other was "holding a wet sponge," which would drip water on the sheets. Another difficulty was "wafting myself in an imaginary aeroplane" to bring about "a state of oblivion and coma," which I might perhaps have done more easily by putting the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... the dark river with her pale, sickly lamp. It refuses to burn—the damps of Lethe dim and quench it. Philosophy tries to discourse on death as a "stern necessity"—of the duty of passing heroically into this mysterious, oblivion-world—taking with bold heart "the leap in the dark," and confronting, as we best can, blended ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... yet uttered a single word; they dared not speak, even in a low voice. This deep silence, this deep grief, this profound oblivion in which everything had disappeared except one thing, produced upon them the effect of the grand altar at Christmas or Easter. They remained silent, they meditated, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they were ready to enter ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo |
