"Unrecognizable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it not be, then, that many instances of morphological similarity between divergent languages of a restricted area are merely the last vestiges of a community of type and phonetic substance that the destructive work of diverging drifts has now made unrecognizable? There is probably still enough lexical and morphological resemblance between modern English and Irish to enable us to make out a fairly conclusive case for their genetic relationship on the basis of the present-day descriptive evidence alone. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... It is several years since we met. I dare say you find me unrecognizable," Hollister said bluntly. "Nevertheless I can ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... difficulty avoided capture by the barrier officials, he knelt down at the side of a brook to wash his face; when lo! his appearance was completely transformed. His complexion had become reddish-grey, and he was absolutely unrecognizable. He then presented himself with assurance before the officers, who asked him his name. "My name is Kuan," he replied. It was by that name that ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Big Shanty lay buried under tons of snow and ice. The broad bed of the stream became unrecognizable; its roar muffled. Along its wild course the boulders showed above the heavy drifts, capped with a sea of white domes, like some straggling city of sunken mosques. Along the bed of the brook open wounds gaped here and there, while at the bottom of these crevasses the treacherous black ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... she refuses, but when he doubles the sum, she submits, whereupon he throws away his disguise and confronts her with her guilt. Covered with shame, she flies. Afterward she cuts her hair like a man's, changes her clothes so as to be unrecognizable, and joins him in the chase. Being more successful than he, she promises to teach him on a certain condition; and on his assenting, she reveals her identity and accuses him of being just as bad as she was. Another version reads that after their reconciliation she suspected his fidelity on hearing ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... juvenile notion of making himself unrecognizable he turned up the collar of his coat and pulled down ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... dry during the droughts, and, higher up, the outlying dates springing from the arid sands, are fed by thin veins which damp the rocky base. Hence, probably, Dr. Beke identified the place with the "Elim" of the Exodus: his artist's sketch from the sea (p. 340) is, however, absolutely unrecognizable. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... didn't happen to be himself. It would be useless to attempt a description of how we finally managed, by the assistance of two more zaptiehs, to get back to Tifticjeeoghlou Effendi's, both myself and the zaptieh simply unrecognizable from dust and perspiration. The zaptieh, having first washed the streaks and tattooing off his face, now presents himself, with the broad, honest smile of one who knows he well deserves what he is asking for, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... next morning the poster was unrecognizable under a coating of dried reddish spots and was ignominiously removed, to the delight of Stover, whose illusions were thus preserved, as well ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save him. Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen every day, and probably does so.' He attacked his now unrecognizable mutton. ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... could no longer resist infantry charges. Walking on the top of the ridge was a continuous climb from one shell crater to another. Two surmounting knobs, known only on military maps as numbered hills, had attracted the fire of the heaviest British guns and had been shattered into unrecognizable ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... his voice muffled by the thick cloth and quite unrecognizable, "he isn't a fellow, Mrs. Townsend. He's just part of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thought delighted him and he hurried through the forest, anxious to pass through Salvan before Doctor Waram got there. He felt extraordinarily light and exhilarated now, intoxicated, vibrant. His spirit soared; almost he heard the rushing of his old self forward toward some unrecognizable ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... with all his horror of bloodshed and war, in the trenches while she was snug and sleeping in her bed at night? were some mangled and unrecognizable fragments of his body lying on the battle-fields of Flanders? Or, sadder than all, had he, like Freddy, never been in action? Had his life also ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the crushed and almost unrecognizable body of his wife he fled down the street shrieking at the top of ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... scratched carefully across this and then headed down on the snow, arriving at the hut all well. The old hut had changed tremendously since I last saw it, having been dug out and cleared of snow and ice. Two unrecognizable sweeps greeted us heartily, they were Bill and Meares; the dogs howled a chorus for our benefit; it was quite like coming home. Inside the hut, the cause of the blackness was apparent, they had a blubber fire going, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... to work hard day and night, till at length the most magnificent things were completed. When a ship had been laden with them the faithful John disguised himself as a merchant, and the King had to do the same, so that they should be quite unrecognizable. And so they crossed the seas and journeyed till they reached the town where the Princess ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... were alike. They seemed to be all sizes, shapes and materials. The only thing they really had in common was that they were unrecognizable. They looked, Forrester thought, as if a truckload of non-objective twentieth-century sculpture had collided with another truck full of old television-set innards. Then, in some way, the two trucks had fallen in love and ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to do it. Something that had not begun with any act or question of his had brought about the junction of the ideas, and he felt like a man in a dark room trying to make his way to the window, and meeting with unrecognizable obstacles. ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... throat. Then he thought of the big ship landing in the morning, settling down slowly after a lonely two-week voyage. He thought of a brown-haired girl crowding with the others to the gangway, eager to embrace the new planet, and the next instant a charred nothing, unrecognizable, the victim of a design error or a misplaced wire in a machine. "I have to try," he said aloud. "I have to try." He moved into ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... reviewed—as if he had caught her talking in her sleep. It frightened her to behold her heart and mind thus laid bare; but the chapter following would reassure her. Here would be a woman perfectly unrecognizable, strong, ruthless but just. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... the sculptor; "not that it shall be made evident to the universe, which can profit nothing by such knowledge, but that it shall insulate the sinner from all sweet society by rendering him impermeable to light, and, therefore, unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity and truth. Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ketchum's keen eyes, either, that although Sir Robert contributed a five-dollar bill to the offertory, he first rolled it up into a tiny, unrecognizable wad before dropping it into the alms-basin. The service over, Sir Robert and the eminent divine were made acquainted. The latter said he would call as soon as he could snatch a moment, and Sir Robert, his hands folded behind his back, holding his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... into his lab, the boys at Power Utilities would find themselves in trouble. The second they started to open the Converter, it would begin to fuse. If they were quick, whoever opened it should be able to get away from it before it melted down into an unrecognizable mass. ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... perished despite his splendid tomb in the Abbey. Johnson has only a cracked stone and a worn-out inscription (for the Hercules in St. Paul's is unrecognizable) but he dwells where he would wish to dwell—in the loving memory ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... and put it into my traveling-bag with the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks later, they were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper ashtray. In the interval other and bigger things had happened: the Bronson forgery case had shrunk beside the greater and more imminent mystery of the man in lower ten. And Alison West had come into the story ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... contemptuous of a man who had to stay in bed and have his clothes locked up to save him from getting drunk; at the same time she admired him for attempting so drastic a cure. It was a wholly delightful experience to her to have money and spend it on buying things for him; she would, at this time, have been unrecognizable to Dr. Angus and Wullie; they would never have seen their rather dreamy, very boy-like, almost unembodied Marcella of Lashnagar in the Marcella of Sydney, with her alternate brooding maternal tenderness that guarded him as a baby, or with the melting softness ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... his clothes torn, no collar, blood on his shirt, on his hands, on his face, blood everywhere, a wound in his neck, another on his lip, unrecognizable, horrible to look at, but magnificent in energy, heroic and triumphant: such was the ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... cool sort of a chap with little sense of humor, and the youth reflected that, in this neck of the woods, it was best not to trifle with men who were apt to end a quarrel by fighting over an acre of ground and mauling one another until one or both parties were utterly unrecognizable, ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... Eugenie Danglars was shrewder than that. Of course his scar disfigures his face so much as to make it almost unrecognizable. Who was it, Eugenie, who, in former years, had the audacity to ask your hand ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... his hand which he had just finished reading. It was a painful-looking document for all its neat, clear writing. It was stained with patches of dark red that were almost brown, and the envelope he held in his other hand was almost unrecognizable for the same hideous ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... our feet The horror of what we saw held us spellbound and speechless. We did not feel the icy air, the swirl of fine snowflakes that came driving into the room, for in the doorway stood Baptiste, his honest face almost unrecognizable with hot passion, and in each hand he thrust out a ghastly, gory, red-dripping thing of hair and flesh. They were human scalps, and we knew at once from whose heads they had ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... gowns as the dressmaker sent them home, neat little boots, and gray silk stockings, all of which were included in Valerie's bills, and paid for by the gentleman in possession. Thus furbished up, and wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, Lisbeth would have been unrecognizable by any one who had not ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... liberated spirit of the deceased. The loud cries uttered by the mourners were thought to frighten away the spirits. The change of dress, the covering of the head with ashes, and the shaving of the hair of the mourners were done with the purpose of making themselves unrecognizable to the spirits. Hence, the custom still prevails of wearing the mourning veil. The covering of mirrors when death occurs in the household may well be an attempt to prevent the spirit from lingering in the vicinity. Similarly, even today, the orthodox Jew, in case of grave illness in his ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... tight situation, and the boys were really alarmed for Ted's safety, when out of the woods ran an apparition—a woman so covered with blood as to be unrecognizable. But Stella uttered a scream. She had seen that it was Singing Bird, who had been terribly injured by her brute of a husband, who had evidently tortured her to get from her the information she ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... the nettles, cut off a few inches above the ground, served to give firmness to our footing. But l'Encuerado, always too confident, tripped up, and his right cheek was brushed by some of their leaves; it only needed this to render him perfectly unrecognizable. Although I pitied him, I could not help smiling at the grimaces produced on his sun-burnt visage by the painful stings. Even Sumichrast, when looking at ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... thereto meaningless words to prolong the effect. When a song is taught, the words are the chief and most important part, the musical rendering of a second person may be so different from that of the person from whom he learns it as to be unrecognizable without the words. Another fact which often presents itself is the absence of time and measure, which prevents any reduction to notation by full bars; e.g., one or two bars may appear to consist of four quarter notes or ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... clasped mine in kindly greeting. To whom they belonged I could not tell, for the dense shade shut out the moonlight, and seen by the light of the camp-fires, disguised as each one was in the rough garb of a soldier, my quondam city friends wore quite unrecognizable. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... already become an old woman whose movements were ever slow and sad. Her back was bent, from constantly kneeling beside her son's grave. Her black clothes reflected the deeper gloom of her expression. And to those who had seen her a few months before, she was almost unrecognizable. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... the truth of my visitor's assertion. That flaunting streamer of anarchy still made my neck infamous, and before me on the floor, an almost unrecognizable mass of shreds, lay my cherished cerulean tie. The revelation stunned me; tears came into my eyes, and trickling down over my cheeks, fairly hissed with the feverish heat of my flesh. My muscles relaxed, and I ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... and certainly no one could have seen me from the road. I felt fairly sure that no one saw me until it began to grow dark and I carried out the lamp. Even then, it was Scharnhoff who struck the match and lit it, so that I was in shadow all the time— probably unrecognizable. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... seen him," Bellamy admitted. "Either he has deceived us both, or the most unfortunate mistake in the world has happened. Listen. I met him where he appointed. He was there, disguised, almost unrecognizable. He was nervous and desperate; he had the air of a man who has cut himself adrift from the world. I gave him the money,—twenty thousand pounds in Bank of England notes, Louise,—and he gave me the papers, ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with some of his friends, Walker found the mission a heap of ruins,—blackened walls, charred rafters, and unrecognizable human remains. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ebbing away from it. The ambassador seems to intend some little state in his arrangements; but, no doubt, the establishment compares shabbily enough with those of the legations of other great countries, and with the houses of the English aristocracy. A servant, not in livery, or in a very unrecognizable one, opened the door for me, and gave my card to a sort of upper attendant, who took it in to Mr. ———. He had three gentlemen with him, so desired that I should be ushered into the office of the legation, until he should be able to receive me. Here I found a clerk or attache, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Swoope's depot. The by-roads were miry beyond description, rain having fallen almost incessantly since we left Winchester, but notwithstanding the down-pour the column pushed on, men and horses growing almost unrecognizable from the mud covering them ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 4 • P. H. Sheridan
... myself within might have been a hallway of the edifice, but it was hard to positively distinguish it as such, for the building in falling had placed things in an almost unrecognizable condition. Some of the great stones from above had passed through the ceiling and floor, while others had become wedged together before reaching the surface, thus forming a ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... longer reasoned beyond one thing. He must keep his body between Jeanne and the rocks. He would be crushed, beaten to pieces, made unrecognizable, but Jeanne would be only drowned. He fought to keep himself half under her, with his head and shoulders in advance. When he felt the floods sucking him under, he thrust her upward. He fought, and did not know what happened. Only there was the crashing of a thousand cannon in his ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... face the opening, while Mado stood with his great bulk hiding the now unrecognizable Nazu. The savage entered, proceeding directly to where Carr was standing. He bent over the fruit basket and then the Earth-man was ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... Schmidt, I. 246 (Dutard, May 18).—Gregoire, "Memoires," I. 387. The mental and moral decline of the party is well shown in the new composition of the Jacobin Club after September, 1792: "I went back there," says Gregoire in September, 1792 (after a year's absence), "and found it unrecognizable; no opinions could be expressed there other than those of the Paris section... I did not set foot there again; (it was) a factious disreputable drinking place."—Buchez et Roux, XXVI. 214 (session of April 30,1793, speech by Buzot). "Behold ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
