"Self-contained" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for Mysa, she seems to think only of her father. The Hebrew girl is a great comfort to her, for while the example of their mistress and the shouts of the populace have terribly scared the other maids, and they go about the house in fear and trembling, Ruth is quiet and self-contained as if she were again in her quiet cottage with her grandfather. She greatly comforts and sustains Mysa, and Ameres said to me only this morning that Mysa was fortunate indeed in that Chebron had ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... left the room he was apparently, in every respect, his usual self-contained self. However, it was not until the following morning that he so much as thought of the sheaf of papers lying unread in the ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... passed placidly away, among her birds and her flowers. Mrs. Carrington had none of the vivacity about her which is so general an attribute of French women. She liked her quiet life, and had little sympathy with her son's restless ambition and devouring discontent. A cold, silent, self-contained woman, she shut herself up in her own occupations, and cared for nothing beyond them. She had the French national taste and talent for needlework, and generally listened to her son, as he talked or read to her, with a piece of elaborate ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... soliloquy was cut short by the dull glint of steel within a few inches of his chest—even in the darkness all bayonets seem to possess self-contained luminosity—and a voice hissed, ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... been, he was a lonely man. Whenever I want a type of perfect human isolation, I shall think of him, as he was in those days, moving remote, self-contained, and alone in the midst ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... they are present, nor desireth them when they are absent,[277] who, seated as one unconcerned, is not shaken by those qualities; who sitteth and moveth not, thinking that it is the qualities (and not he) that are engaged (in their respective functions); to whom pain and pleasure are alike, who is self-contained, and to whom a sod of earth, a stone, and gold are alike; to whom the agreeable and the disagreeable are the same; who hath discernment; to whom censure and praise are the same; to whom honour and dishonour ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... calculated for success, and was now one of the richest women in the colony. One son only had blessed her union with Henry Talbot, and Hilary Talbot was a young man just turned twenty-five years of age, and the idol of her soul. Too self-contained and too proud to display the depth of her feelings, except in rare instances, and too sensible to allow them to interfere in the training of the child, she had spared neither her heart nor her purse in his education, with such happy results that he was regarded by all who knew him as one ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... before the Major's ship arrived, his son's whole life should change. Even Lynwood was thrust into the background. As for me, I was nowhere. For Derrick, the quiet, the self-contained, had fallen passionately in love with a certain ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... mulatto woman, with whom he lived in this part of his extraordinary dual existence, nursed and cared for him with such rude attentions as the surroundings afforded. In the wanderings of his mind the same duality of life followed him. Now and then he would appear the calm, sober, self-contained, well-ordered member of a peaceful society that his friends in his far-away home knew him to be; at other times the nether part of his nature would leap up into life like a wild beast, furious and gnashing. At the one time he ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... forward, and darting his eyes about as if selecting a victim for his weapon. A stranger touched Richling from behind, spoke a hurried word in Italian, and handed him a huge dirk. But in that same moment the affair was over. There stood Ristofalo, gentle, self-contained, with just a perceptible smile turned upon the crowd, no knife in his hand, and beside him the slender, sinewy, form, and keen gray eye ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... had the self-contained and rather detached manner of the old courtier, mingled with the straight-forward self-possession of the old soldier thoroughly accustomed to dealing with men in difficult moments, threw in a word or two occasionally. Although a grave, even a rather sad-looking ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Fields, will disappoint those who have anticipated an abundance of interesting personal details in the biography of its illustrious subject. It is the history of his mind, not of his external life. The incidents of his peculiar career were the successive births of his poems. No man ever led a more self-contained, interior, subjective life than Wordsworth, and hence the development of thought takes the place in his biography which is usually occupied by the flow of events. Every object was valued by him in proportion as it furnished the materials of poetry. The aspects of the glorious ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... But apart from them nobody ever seems to leave Ashbridge (though a stroll to the station about the time that the evening train arrives is a recognised diversion) or, in consequence, ever to come back. Ashbridge, in fact, is self-contained, and desires neither to meddle with others ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... almost speechless with excitement: Jacinth, though wound up to a tremendous pitch, was too proud and too self-contained by habit to show what she ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... cut face on the darkness, as he had looked when he walked past her with that other man—both of them solid, self-contained, out of her reach! And with that the cold wave of anger swept over her again, overwhelming her. "I can't stand it! I aren't going to stand it. He'd no right to treat me like that, as if I were dirt beneath his feet. I'm as ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology. My friend, Captain Bowden, who was the nephew of the eldest of this group, regarded them with deference; but he did not belong to their ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... churchyard. The buxom girl had grown into a bulky matron, but she was a colourless personage, and her existence made hardly any difference in James Steadman's life. She had brought him no children, and their fireside was lonely; but Steadman seemed to be one of those self-contained personages to whom a solitary life is ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... hand—carried conviction even to the most disorderly. Ecclesiastical radicals, boiling over with new schemes, and boasting to admiring circles of MacWheeps that they would not be brow-beaten by red tape officials, became ungrammatical before that firm gaze, and ended in abject surrender. Self-contained and self-sufficing, the clerk took no part in debate, save at critical moments to lay down the law, but wrote his minutes unmoved through torrents of speech on every subject, from the Sustentation Fund to the Union between England and Scotland, and even under the picturesque ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... reservation, should have accepted the services of this unpromising specimen as "striker." It was a seven-weeks' wonder that Downs kept the pact, and sober as a judge, from the hour he joined the Bugologist to the night that self-contained young officer was sent crashing into his beetle show under the impact of Wren's furious fist. Then came the last pound that broke the back of Downs' wavering resolution, and now had come—what? The sergeant and party rode back from Dick's ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... have his meals with Paulus and had built a small kitchen apart for himself, under one of the big willows. On this occasion Hansie did not feel pleased at "Jim's" appearance either, for it was one thing to teach the self-contained and reverent Sesuto, and quite another to instruct the flippant ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... alert, self-contained, and menacing. For this dreamer, this bereaved man, this scornful philosopher of riches had disappeared with that midnight trespass upon the sacred treasure. The movement of the blanket ceased; the soft, swishing sound ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... had the self-contained heart of the young girl so framed itself in words; certainly never had Mr. Burroughs so fully read it: and when she finished, and, neither turning from him nor toward him, steadfastly set her eyes forward, as one who sees mapped out before him the path he is to tread through all the ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... London. Sometimes called away to give evidence in a county court; at other times taking a look in at his own home to kiss his wife or dandle his child before dashing off per express to follow up a clue to John O'Groats or the Land's End. Here, and there, and everywhere—calm, self-possessed, and self-contained, making notes in trains, writing reports in his office, making discoveries and convictions, and sometimes making prisoners with his own hands by night and day, with no fixed hours for work, or rest, or meals, and no certainty in anything concerning him, save in the uncertainty of his movements, ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... acquainted with Marcia, her manner of commencing her letter would be a revelation. To one so cold, so self-contained, the weaker symptoms of affection are disallowed; yet this is ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... diver, had never before felt such a sense of ease and freedom under water. He was moving, light and self-contained, in a green, magical world. With no air tanks chafing his back, he felt akin to the ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... York markets know not many things familiar to those of the Crescent City. Notwithstanding, she was a liberal education in blended flavors, in the delights, the surprises of the Creole kitchen. Tall and slim, of a golden-brown complexion, neat to the point of austerity, trim and self-contained, sight of her somehow gave an added piquancy to her dishes. She did not make friends readily, but the comradery of cooking induced her to more than tolerate me. "I don't say I kin cook—but my mother can," she often told me—smiling proudly the while, with the buzzing praises ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... cannot have this woman! What is most terrible and yet sweetest in my condition is that I feel that I understand her but that she will never understand me; not because she is inferior: on the contrary she ought not to understand me. She is happy, she is like nature: consistent, calm, and self-contained; and I, a weak distorted being, want her to understand my deformity and my torments! I have not slept at night, but have aimlessly passed under her windows not rendering account to myself of what was happening to me. On the 18th our company started on a raid, and I spent three ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... my brother Abraham (soon to become an apostle of the Mormon Church), who had himself been in prison and was still in danger of arrest. And there is something typical of those days in the recollection I have of him in the carriage: silent, self-contained, and—when he talked—discussing trivialities in the most calm way in the world. The whole district was picketed with deputy marshals; we did not know that we were not being followed; we had always the sense of evading patrols in an enemy's country. But this feeling was so old with us that it ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... childhood; he had been bred among men who regarded his very existence as a danger to the State; his words had been watched, his looks noted, his friends jealously withdrawn. In such an atmosphere the boy grew up silent, wary, self-contained, grave in temper, cold in demeanour, blunt and even repulsive in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, and manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which shook his frame with a constant cough; his ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... As a poet, he expresses the moods of the meditative spirit in view of nature and our mortal existence; and he represents life, not lyrically by its changeful moments, nor tragically by its conflict in great characters, but philosophically by a self-contained and unvarying monologue, deeper or less deep in feeling and with cadences of tone, but always with the same grave and serious effect. He is constantly thinking, whatever his subject or his mood; his attitude is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying, and would ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... upon another England than that which was struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation, it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada, Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater Britain, while the subject lands and islands dot the globe. The problem which ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... suddenly his self control which had been so great was broken. His strong shoulders began to shake with sobs, silent, hard sobs of a man who knows he has sinned, and tears, scalding tears from the depths of his self-contained nature. ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... have that feeling about Mannering, I must admit, especially during the last two years. He seems to have drawn away from all of us, to live altogether too absorbed and self-contained a life for a man who has great ambitions to realize, or who is in ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... or norm, and the actual contents of love. In holiness there is combined the Divine self-existence as a perfection of life, and the Divine self-exertion in the realizing a Godlike perfection of life in the world. Holiness as an attribute of the Divine Being is His pure and inviolably self-contained personality in its absolute perfection. Hence it is that in holiness, as the absolute unity and purity of the Divine Being and working, all the attributes of Divine revelation centre. And so holiness, as expressive of the Being of God, qualifies ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... toy had been a rope with which, as a toddler, he had practised on the dogs and chickens about the ranch-yard. He could not remember when he could not ride. Days on the round-up, hours of watching the sleeping herd in the night-watch, had made him quiet and self-contained in his dealings with men. His eyes looked out fearlessly on the world. All of his life he had handled cattle. Daily facing dangers on the long drives or in the corral, he schooled himself to face ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... persistency. It did not seem in character. For the first time in his life, Rankin felt the need of words. The moral perplexity was too great for him to deal with; he was reaching out for something to take hold of, a thing which his self-contained, crudely disciplined nature had never ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... there was no longer a bridge to hold. It was as fine a piece of quiet heroism as I shall ever see, and it was typical of the Belgian soldier wherever we saw him. They never made any fuss about it, they were always quiet and self-contained, and always cheerful. But if they were given a position to hold, they held it. And that is the secret of the wonderful losing battle they have fought across Belgium. Some day they will advance and not retreat, and then I ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... of campaign life, Washington was ever the same dignified and self-contained gentleman. At one time, the headquarters were in an old log {66} house, in which there was only one bed. He alone occupied this, while the fourteen members of his staff slept on the floor in the same room. Food, except mush and milk, was scarce. At this ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... brother in appearance, but his face was sterner and his eyes keener. He had been made a bold, determined man by the pressure of harsher circumstances. He shook his brother by the hand in self-contained fashion. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... was a mail in. I had a letter, too," he added after a little hesitation, due to the fact that he had intended telling Miss Welland about that letter first. Thus do confidences, once begun, inspire even the self-contained ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Lieutenant Mueller. Those who did not know him could have guessed from his stiff, self-contained mien that he must be the regimental adjutant. Housewives dreaded him, for his appetite was Gargantuan. With stoic defiance of all warning glances he was in the habit of demolishing thrice the quantity of the daintiest ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... The founding of Massachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that life ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... the communists are trying to maintain and modernize huge military forces. And simultaneously, they are endeavoring to weld their whole vast area and population into a completely self-contained, advanced industrial society. They aim, some day, to equal or better the production levels of Western Europe and North America combined—thus shifting the balance of world economic power, and war ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... to screen the lamp from those aching eyes that are bearing it like a martyr! There! Well, maybe he will just stand the knowing that I know, provided I don't say a word; but I wish people would not be so "self-contained!"' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scoffed the manager in disgust. "If these Herringport tabbies had the toothache they would register only polite anguish—in public. They are the most insular and self-contained and self-suppressed women I ever saw. These Down-Easters! They could walk over fiery ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... right," she echoed. Everything was right now. She seemed to awaken from a horrible nightmare. Harboro's presence put to flight an army of fears. She could scarcely understand why she had been so greatly disturbed. No harm could come to him, or to her. He was too strong, too self-contained, to be menaced by little creatures. The bigness of him, the penetrating, kindly candor of his eyes, would paralyze base minds and violent hands seeking to do him an injury. The law had sanctioned their union, too—and the law ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... front of you, and behold the white gate! There is no lodge—the house is just too small for that, as you can now see for yourself, for there it is, under the protection of the wood that rises behind it, so quiet and self-contained that you almost gasp. ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... thinking about them. I may say that I had decided that I should be obliged to lead a single life, and that the less I thought about matters of sex, the more easy I should find life. Later on I had religious ideas which helped me considerably in my ideals of a decent, orderly, self-contained life. I do not lay stress on these; they were not at all emotional, and my physical and psychical development do not appear to have run much on parallel lines. I had a strong moral sense before I had a religious ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... reserved, more self-contained than she had ever been, but again, as Martin said to Doris, she must be judged by what she did, not by what she suggested, and she had accomplished marvels not only at the old place, but in her cabin across ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... mere agony of wish to change something, or rather of the felt want that something should be changed. O that she were at peace like him! O that she had like him a sure home and possession beyond the reach of sickness and death! O that she were that rectified, self-contained, pure, strong spirit, that he was! — The utmost of passionate wish was in the tears that wept out these yearnings of heart — petitions they half were, — for her mind in giving them form, had a half look to the only possible power that could give them fruition. But ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... the gaily-painted houses, the flowers and flute-playing of North Africa, are found in her Mediterranean ports, in contact with European influences. The farther west she extends, the more she becomes self-contained, sombre, uninfluenced, a gloomy fanatic with her back to the walls of the Atlantic and the Atlas. Color and laughter lie mostly along the trade-routes, where the peoples of the world come and go in curiosity and rivalry. This ashen crowd swarming gloomily through ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... appalled by the result for which she was principally responsible. The tall Diantha in a dress to her shoe-tops was disconcertingly unlike the little girl she had known. She looked older than her years, stately, self-contained and beautiful. It was not till Persis had fortified herself by the reflection that she might as well be hung for an old sheep as for a lamb, that she ventured ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Washington, United States. In this honorable office he had spent one year, but the work did not suit his strenuous nature, and he returned home and soon afterward received an appointment in this detective service. Job was known in the force as quiet, self-contained, observant, patient, and was possessed of an extraordinarily retentive memory. Rarely was it necessary for him ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... alive with that suggestion of eternal life that art alone in its highest expression can give. Card's smile was enigmatical; his eyes were sad. His imagination pictured to him Mrs. Marteen as she had sat before him in her self-contained stateliness and announced with indifferent calm that the Vandyke had been but a ruse to gain his ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary's shop, a blacksmith's and shoemaker's shop, a caffe more or less brilliant, a greengrocer's ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... very interesting character as it appears in the Memoirs—sincere, intelligent, self-contained, and yet dependent; methodical, observant. Sometimes as one reads of her in early life one is reminded of some of the personal characteristics of the writer who perhaps of all writers least resembles ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... Harthouse,' she returned, after some indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained manner; 'you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know, it is not by way of complaint or regret. I would never complain of anything, and what I have done I do not ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... in the conversation, Onoye announced a visitor who proved to be a detective. He was a quiet, self-contained young Japanese who spoke excellent English. He had been sent out in a motor car by the Chief of Police to find out all he could from the ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured. He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow things of the counting-room; ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... That is ethical which is at once personal and universal. Perhaps the simplest way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals, each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race. The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they are personal: they are reflected ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... men talked down to Knightsbridge together, and Lingen did most of the talking. He chose to expand upon Macartney, the nearest he dared get to the subject of his thoughts. "Now Macartney, you know, is a very self-contained man. No doubt you've noticed how he shies at expression. Chilling at times. Good in a lawyer, no doubt. You get the idea of large reserves. But perhaps as a—well, as a father, for instance— That bright boy of theirs now. You may have noticed how little there is between ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... entitled to share with Britain the spoils of victory; even in the position of an independent power which could refuse the military allegiance of subjects. English judges would have found abundant treason in this insubordinate document. It may soothe common men to see the wise, the serene, the self-contained Dr. Franklin, the philosopher and diplomatist, for once lose his head in a gust of uncontrollable passion. Walpole, though a loyal Englishman, was fortunately his true friend, and wrote him, with a brevity more impressive than argument, ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... wear and tear, while the process is equally applicable to linseed, cottonseed, rapeseed, or similar seeds. In addition to these improvements in the system, the "Colonial" mill has been specially designed in structural arrangement to meet the requirements of exporters. The machinery and engine are self-contained on an iron foundation, so that there is no need of skilled mechanics to erect the mill, nor of expensive stone foundations, while the building covering the mill can, if desired, be of the lightest possible description, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... cantered along the high-road, finding an inexpressible relief in motion. He was doing something in the interest of helplessness and of HER. He had no doubt of his right to interfere. He did not bother himself with the rights of others. Like all self-contained men, he had no plan of action, except what ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... orator had his audience with him. He was a small man, but his voice was magnificent, and his oratory powerful, self-contained, full ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club is valued ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... There was a time when Roman farmers and craftsmen did their own work. That time ended with the enslavement of war captives who swamped the labor market. Like any parasitic growth, slavery and forced labor destroyed the fabric of a largely self-contained economy based ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... God! no sister!— Has grown and grown, and with her mellow shade Has blanched my thornless thoughts to her own hue, And even now is budding into blossom, Which never shall bear fruit, but inward still Resorb its vital nectar, self-contained, And leave no living copies of its beauty To after ages. Ah! be less, sweet maid, Less than thyself! Yet no—my wife thou might'st be, If less than thus—but not the saint thou art. What! shall my selfish longings ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained; I stand and look at them sometimes an hour at a stretch. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... one; in his words, he looks as if he belonged to the "Yeomandry." It is wonderful how all our fellows get on with our professional brethren. Take for instance one of our men, a 'Varsity man, hight Pember, he is a dry, self-contained beggar, and lives his own life. Into this life has come a man of the Northumberland Fusiliers. They both hail from the same county. After the day's march, when the Infantry not on picket are in camp, a dark figure often slouches up our lines, and a voice inquires, "Is Pem 'ere?" and Pember ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... and Susan was attached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the sake of this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement, and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, which happened in the great world outside, and went so independently ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... it?' we all shouted confusedly, as we rushed up to him and looked round in expectation of encountering a tiger—a cobra—we hardly knew what, but assuredly something terrible, since it had been sufficient to cause such evident emotion in our usually self-contained comrade. But neither tiger nor cobra was visible—nothing but Cameron pointing with ghastly, haggard face and starting eyeballs at ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... his eyes. Could this passionate, thoroughly aroused woman be his cold, self-contained daughter? He could not understand, as so many cannot, that such natures when aroused are tenfold more intense than those whom little things excite. A long and peculiar train of circumstances, a morbid and overwrought physical condition, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... no friends, for he has no weaknesses. While others fall to the simple follies of humanity He walks ever upright and self-contained, devout and dignified, And ill-treats his child ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke
... conventionally social 'slip' in his protest against smoking women;— but there the trifles stopped. Maryllia knew well enough that only the very strongest feeling, the very deepest and most intense emotion could have made the quiet, self-contained 'man o' God' as Mrs. Spruce called him, speak to her as he had done,—and she also knew that only the most bitter malice and cruel under-intent to do mischief could have roused Roxmouth, usually so coldly self-centred, to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... self-contained and stern exterior dwelt a very tender heart, the girl was sure. For the absent Cap'n Abe he appeared to feel a strong man's good-natured scorn for a weak one; but Louise saw him stand often before Jerry's cage, chirping to the bird and playing with him. And at such times there was moisture in ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... of the outer rampart; its tapering sickle of sand directly commanded the eastern breach; it must be connected with the defence of this breach. No more admirable base could be imagined; self-contained and isolated, yet sheltered, accessible—better than Juist and Borkum. And supposing it were desired to shroud the nature of the work in absolute secrecy, what a pretext lay to hand in the wreck and its buried bullion, which lay ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... strange fascinations, the idol of the jeunesse doree of West London clubdom, and he remembered only the fact that she was a lonely orphan with a most womanly light in her soft, dark eyes, and that he had failed in his duty towards her. Paul was essentially a "manly" man, self-contained, and with all his feelings very much at his control; but at that moment he felt something like a rush of tenderness towards this strange, dark-eyed girl who lay coiled up at his feet. Involuntarily he stretched out ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the polished and sable space to which he had directed their attention. Suddenly the surface assumed a new and singular appearance. It no longer simply reflected the objects placed before it, but, as if it had self-contained scenery of its own, objects began to appear within it, at first in a disorderly, indistinct, and miscellaneous manner, like form arranging itself out of chaos; at length, in distinct and defined shape and symmetry. It was ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... which he saw about him; I have noted his unconcern toward the merely material advances of society, his penetrative insight into its intellectual and moral developments. A mind so capacious and open, a nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and manifold as those which have transformed society since the days of the great Athenian; but even he could not be quite unmoved if brought face to face with a life so unlike ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of those deep, self-contained, undemonstrative, and by no means showy natures which are too rarely understood, because, in the noisy bustle of life, we have not the time and do not take the pains to analyze them. Only a sister or a mother is in a position to comprehend and ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... open. Then his gaze will travel back, up the long shiny black piano, with a volume of the Well Tempered Clavichord open on its desk, to where CANTELUPE is perched uncomfortably on the bench; paler than ever; more self-contained than ever, looking, to one who knows him as well as Horsham does, a little dangerous. So he returns to contemplation of the ceiling or the carpet. They wait there as men wait who have said all they want to say upon an unpleasant subject and yet cannot dismiss it. At last FARRANT ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... answer, but which, on the other hand, it has no occasion to ask: time, its one independent variable, extends indefinitely without hint of either beginning or end. Such a system of knowledge, once we are inside it, so to say, is entirely self-contained and complete." ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... to the camp before the commander, a dark, self-contained looking man with a piercing eye and a close mouth, and there closely questioned as to the roads, and he gave the same account he had already given. The negro guide was brought up and his information tallied with the new comer's as far as he knew it, though he knew ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... and "keeping a gawdy-day", but this only once in three weeks or a month, with "two gentlemen of Gray's Inn." He had, therefore, known what it was to be sociable. But the general tenour of his life was other; proud, reserved, self-contained, repellent; brooding over his own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the ideas of others. It is indeed an erroneous estimate of Milton to attribute to him a hard or austere nature. He had all the quick sensibility which belongs to the poetic temperament, and ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... ground. One would have been seventeen now, and had stayed with them five years, dying the night her sister was born. He had believed it was little Lois come in a new baby body. And after three brief years she, too, had gone to the other country. His mother had been graver ever since; more self-contained, more spiritual, the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... middle age the good things of life, with well-fed and rounded symmetry; and the oak that suggests decrepitude, with rough exterior, and a life-experience of hardship; the sturdy oak, the ambitious oak, the self-contained oak, and so on, through every phase of character. No other tree is so human or so expressive, and no other tree bespeaks such fortitude and endurance. To say that a well-grown oak typifies the reserve and strength of the ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... threaded her dark hair with silver, and on her brow there were traces of a sorrow patiently borne, but none the less deeply felt. She had never recovered from the loss of her son. Her daughter Mary had inherited something of her father's self-contained, undemonstrative manner; but Ben had been impulsive and affectionate, and had always been very near his mother's heart. To feel that he had passed from her sight was a great sorrow; but it was a greater still not to know where he was. He might be suffering pain or privation; ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... was mistress of myself, strong and self-contained. Instead of being confused when all eyes were bent upon me, I had a new feeling of glad self-command. I felt the rhythm of my flawless beauty, my pure harmonies of face and form, and found it natural that fine toilets should be foils to my cheap white dress, and that I should be the centre around ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... begin a work of great importance, and therefore begs that in reference to calls and correspondence you will consider him dead for the next two months." A similar notice is reproduced in "Arrows of the Chace," and this one thing, I think, illustrates as forcibly as anything in Mr. Ruskin's work the self-contained characteristics ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... her own fulfilment of the life of Mrs. Hardy. And the Brangwen wife of the Marsh aspired beyond herself, towards the further life of the finer woman, towards the extended being she revealed, as a traveller in his self-contained manner reveals far-off countries present in himself. But why should a knowledge of far-off countries make a man's life a different thing, finer, bigger? And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve him? It ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... performance of the Ajax of Sophocles by a troupe of modern Greek players went with amazing and incredible rapidity and vivacity. It is all of a piece. We must inevitably associate vivid temperament with the sons of the Mediterranean in all ages. Yet we have just seen that the Greeks of old were too self-contained for their Italian brethren. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... and self-contained, had been the centre of much curious wonder among his fellow passengers. Much apart he had been, unmingled with the ship's social life, despite all allurement. The children called him blessed, for he had entered with their own relish into all their games, ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... connected with important events throughout his life, and especially during the Great Conflict, but he was a singularly virile and independent character who exerted great influence over all with whom he came in contact. He was strong, self-contained and deliberate in speech, and having been an industrious student and an acute thinker all his life, his opinions always commanded attention and respect. It so happened that his services brought him into the very focus of events on more than one occasion. It so ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... flash of lightning that she was on the road that leadeth to destruction, and not content with that, was bearing her young nieces along with her. She loved those girls as if she had been their own mother. Grave, self-contained, and undemonstrative as she was, she would almost have given her life for either, but especially for Pandora, who in face, and to some extent in character, resembled her dead mother, the sister who had been ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... self-contained and steadfast Francis—the future Admiral of the Fleet; who was born in April 1774, and divided in age from Henry by their sister Cassandra. He must have spent some time at home with his sisters, after their return from ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... no more till we reached the self-contained flat at the top of the house; then I begged Raffles to be quiet in a lower ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... would have been notched, if not broken. The character of immutability which science gives to zoological species is found in Breton human nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830, Guerande is still a town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic, silent, self-contained,—a place where modern ideas have ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... I think, one of the strangest little "banquets" I ever sat down to. Every one travels more or less "self-contained" in the Saloniki area, and whenever a party is thrown together the joint supplies are commandeered for the common good. The mess menu was a simple one of soup, tinned salmon, rice, and cheese, but by the time M. Venizelos's hamper had ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge; a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old Sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait.... He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... understood that the circulation of the mother and of her child are each complete and self-contained. They come into relation in the double organ called the placenta, and it has been exhaustively proved that this organ is so constituted as in large measure to protect the child from injurious influences acting upon and in the mother. We may therefore speak of the placenta as a filter. Its ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... to argue, and how could I refuse? For the first time, and greatly to my amazement, I saw that self-contained and sweetly reasonable young woman deaf to reason, and in that strange condition which, for lack of power to understand, we ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... J. Rawlinson, Dogma, Fact and Experience, p. 16. "All the virtues in the Aristotelian canon are self-contained states of the virtuous man himself .... In the last resort they are entirely self-centred adornments or accomplishments of the good man; and it is significant of this self-centredness of the entire conception that the qualities of display (megaloprepeia) and highmindedness, or proper ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... of the hot-air war balloon suggest great possibilities in the near future. One takes the form of a small captive, carrying aloft a photographic camera directed and operated electrically from the ground. The other is a self-contained passenger balloon of large dimensions, carrying in complete safety a special petroleum burner of great power. These new and important departures are mainly due to the mechanical genius of Mr. J. N. Maskelyne, ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon |
