"Complicating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... because he was another mouth to feed—Simeon Holly was not worrying about that part any longer. Crops showed good promise, and all ready in the bank even now was the necessary money to cover the dreaded note, due the last of August. The complicating elements in regard to David ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... rid of a taskmaster and the pangs which slavery brought. During the last four years women have been silent about their "rights" in the several States, because pressed by severe duties. Desirous to establish a reputation for discretion, we have refrained from complicating the perplexities of any Senator; but now that a constitutional amendment is pending we must be careful, even if we gain no franchise, to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... nominated rather than elected. This damned it right away from the democratic standpoint, and the defence of The Times that "the system of delegations would probably have the advantage of being the simplest inasmuch as it would avoid complicating the electoral machinery" was not very forceful. The supreme test to be applied to any plan of Irish Government is whether it provides, beyond yea or nay, for the absolute unity of Ireland as one distinct nation. Unless this essential unity is ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... green over which, without the cut, the ball would have to travel. But most frequently will the accomplished putter find the cut of use to him when there is a pronounced slope of the green from the right-hand side of the line of the putt. In applying cut to the ball in a case of this kind, we are complicating the problem by the introduction of a fourth factor to the other three I have named, but at the same time we are diminishing the weight of these others, since we shall enable ourselves to putt more directly ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... similar in nature to the problems that have been presented to our predecessors. Because always, in dealing with the problems of our own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondary issues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largely clouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catch sight of the underlying principle and study it apart from any difficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... The progress of knowledge is not general: it is confined to a chosen few of every age. How far these are better than their neighbours, we may examine by and bye. The mass of mankind is composed of beasts of burden, mere clods, and tools of their superiors. By enlarging and complicating your machines, you degrade, not exalt, the human animals you employ to direct them. When the boatswain of a seventy-four pipes all hands to the main tack, and flourishes his rope's end over the shoulders of the poor fellows who are tugging at the ropes, do you perceive so dignified, so gratifying ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness and each satisfied when he had done this. In 'Love's Labor's Lost,' Shakspere is trying to amuse by inventive wit and youthful gaiety and ingenuity of device, just as Moliere in the 'Etourdi' is enjoying his own complicating of comic imbroglios, not yet having anything of importance to say on the stage, but practising against the time when he should want to say something. Neither in the English comedy nor in the French is there any purpose other than the desire ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... his brigade. Indeed, he commended himself to Fremont, who, in his capacity as major-general of volunteers and in charge of the Western Military District, assigned him to duty in Kansas, thus greatly complicating an already delicate situation and immeasurably heaping up difficulties, embarrassments, and ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Sieveking, "that it results either from fullness or emptiness, or, to use more modern terms, from hyperaemia or anaemia, applies equally to headache; but, to embrace all the causes of this affection we must add a third element, which, though most commonly complicating one of the above circumstances, is not necessarily included in them, namely a change in the constitution of the blood." While I agree with Dr. Sieveking as regards the importance to be ascribed to the first two factors—cerebral hyperaemia and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... and tortuous policy of the powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the greatest change of all, the substitution for the ambitious Churchman of old, with a coat of mail under ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at the hotel, when whom should we meet but "Auntie," the patrician relative of the Gilded Youth. She recognized us in our civilian clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating our formal greetings with gaiety. Auntie's troubled face would have caught Henry's quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed aside ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... best they should. I am afraid I'll have to explain to my wife, because she saw your apprehension. But nobody else need know. Except—I must tell Dr. Lavendar, of course; but not until after the funeral. There is no use complicating things. But other people can just think it was an accident. It was, in one way. He was insane. Everybody is, who does—that. Poor Samuel! Poor Mrs. Wright! I could not leave them; but I thought you had gone home, or I would ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... girder? Or what will happen if we take two girders away? Will the stone fall or not? These questions belong to the domain of practical reasoning because to take a girder away, or else introduce fresh ones, lies within the power of the disputants. But no practical men would think of complicating the discussion by calculating what would happen if they suspended the action of gravitation, in which case the stone would need no support whatever; for to suspend the action of gravitation is within the power of nobody. If two men are debating in the middle of the night ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... wistfully about joining the Insurrectos, and O'Reilly would have been glad to put him in the way of realizing his fantastic ambition to "taste the salt of life" had it been in his power; but, since he himself depended upon friends unknown to him, he did not dare to risk complicating matters. In fact, he did not even tell Branch of his ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... you will," Val invited. "Ricky and I discovered him for you just as we promised we would. But then you've given us Rod in return. I am not," Val told his cousin, "going to call you Rick even though there is a tradition for it. There are too many 'Ricks' complicating the family history now. I think you had ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast of his knowledge of the girl's existence. Finally he concluded he wouldn't. The enterprise was difficult enough without complicating it with an upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman with whom he had the honour of being associated. Let the discovery come of itself, he thought, and then he could swear that he had known nothing ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... generations just preceding. Physically and nervously, the woman of to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother and her mother's mother. The high tension of modern life and the complicating of woman's everyday existence have doubtless contributed to this result. And who of us can say, until a careful scientific investigation is made, how much the rapid development of tuberculosis and other grave diseases, even among the well-nurtured, may be due ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... now, tell me why you invented all this tricky yarn, complicating it by bringing in the sham journey to Italy and ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... somewhat inadequate interpretation of Aristotle and of the practise of the Greek tragedians. These principles concentrated the interest of the play upon a single central situation, in order to emphasize which, subordinate characters and complicating under-plots were avoided as much as possible. There was little or no action upon the stage, and the events of the plot were narrated by messengers, or by the main characters in conversation with confidantes. Further, the "dramatic ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... for a long time but we didn't come to anything in the end. There's something mystical about the proud man, in your sense. Perhaps you are right from your point of view, but if you take the matter simply, without complicating it, then what pride can there be, what sense can there be in it, if a man is imperfectly made, physiologically speaking, if in the vast majority of cases he is coarse and stupid and deeply unhappy? We must stop admiring one another. We must ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... tension, indicated by the short whispered sentences of all the speakers except Caesar, is only increased by his imperial utterances, which show utter unconsciousness of the impending doom. In the assassination all the complicating forces—the self-confidence of Caesar, the unworldly patriotism of Brutus, the political chicanery of Cassius, the unscrupulousness of Casca, and the fickleness of the mob—bring about an event which changes the lives of all the characters concerned and threatens ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... and bezique half the night—(another sign of the times; women no longer "play for love," but "love to play!")—to say nothing of the constant strain on one's nerves as to what the weather was going to do to one's gowns, I have had a severe attack of overwork, with complicating symptoms of my old enemy, idleness!—so that, on my return to town, my Doctor—(he's a dear man, and prescribes just what I suggest)—insisted that I should at once run down to the Seaside to recuperate. Hence my retirement to the little fishing village of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... they were preserved, for the sake of the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling about ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... times their acceleration and had started from the same place, we would of course overtake them in just the number of days they had the start of us, since the distance covered at any constant positive acceleration is proportional to the square of the time elapsed. However, there are several complicating factors in the actual situation. We started out not only twenty-nine days behind them, but also a matter of five hundred thousand light-years of distance. It will take us quite a while to get to their starting-point. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... quacks, and cheating traders, who disgrace the American name. This is not an anomaly. It is but the inexorable result of a pseudo-religion. Outward observance, worship, Sabbath-keeping, and the various forms, are engrafted in the mind; and thus, by complicating the true duties which man owes to his fellow-man, obscure or take precedence of them. The latter grow to be esteemed as only of secondary importance, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... only justification for an attack when it is possible to concentrate more forces on the strategic point than can be mustered by the defence. However, one very important point must not be neglected, though I did not touch upon it when discussing elementary combinations for fear of complicating matters for beginners: the balance between the contending forces is by no means established by their numerical equality. A paramount factor is the mobility of such forces, and as soon as it is ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... County Limerick, received the letter with her early cup of tea, and, as she read it, felt her soul disquieted within her. The conjunction of the stars of Love and Politics presaged, she felt, disaster—as if the question of religion had not been complicating enough! Even had her gift of envisaging a situation by the light of reason failed her, that spiritual aneroid, which, sensitive to soul-pressure, warned her intuitively of coming joy or sorrow, ill luck or good fortune, had fallen ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... everything, and somehow this seemed to him a point to his advantage. By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... a wee." If the sun went down that once upon my anger, he arose upon cold brands and gray ashes. I had not changed my intellectual belief as to my correspondent's behavior, but the impropriety of complicating an awkward business by placing myself in the wrong to the extent of losing my temper was so obvious that I blushed in recalling the bombastic periods ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... for a moment at what a good many people deem a superfluous appendage, the uvula. A patient comes into my office with a badly swollen uvula. The upper tones of the voice are gone. He has no complicating quinsy, and in that case I can say without hesitation that he has outrageously misused his voice. I ask him where he was the previous afternoon, and find he was jubilantly "rooting" for the New York Giants in an exciting baseball contest. Now, it in ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... his troops; but there was a good deal of smuggling to the revolutionary armies in the north. Of the interventionists some wanted intervention against Huerta and some wanted intervention for Huerta; and the pressure of economic interests in Mexico was complicating all phases of ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... Selby's sympathetic ears the story of his romance. Encouraged by the other's kindly receptiveness, he had told him all—his love for Jill, his hopes that some day it might be returned, the difficulties complicating the situation owing to the known prejudices of Mrs Waddesleigh Peagrim concerning girls who formed the personnel of musical comedy ensembles. To all these outpourings Major Selby had listened with keen attention, and finally had made one of those luminous suggestions, so simple yet so shrewd, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can flatter. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the least. He had supposed all the time that Hilma took his meaning. His old suspicion that she was trying to get a hold on him stirred again for a moment. There was no good of such talk as that. Always these feemale girls seemed crazy to get married, bent on complicating ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... thanksgiving, and followed our guide. I cannot say that we trod in his footsteps, for, too far gone to lift his feet bravely, he merely shuffled along the pavement. With one hand he supported the luggage on his shoulder; with the other he carried a candle, ostensibly to light our pathway, in reality only complicating matters and the darkness. As we turned round by the hotel, the clocks struck the witching hour. H.C. shivered and looked about for ghosts. It was really a very ghostly scene and atmosphere. In spite of the occasion of the fair, the town was in repose. The theatre was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... 1899, and now no one in the country speaks of the impracticability of proportional representation. Count Goblet d'Alviella states that "all the objections that were brought against the system before its introduction have been set at naught. The proportional method instead of complicating, as was foretold, both the voting and the counting, has worked with greater ease than the old one. The electors understood at once what they were to do, and the counters made fewer mistakes than before." Wurtemberg furnishes another instance of the ease with which the new system can be introduced. ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... this not without singularly complicating matters, that the ions which were in the midst of material molecules produce, as the result of collisions, new divisions in these last. Other ions are thus born, and this production is in part ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... in the study of languages, together with the imperfect material and the complicating conditions that have arisen by the spread of civilization over the country, combine to make the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... Complicating any military solution to the western fighting were the old rivalries among the states for control of the western lands. Virginia had to establish county government in Kentucky in order to head off North Carolinian Richard ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the arms and chest well protected by a long-sleeved coat of warm texture, should help in preventing this serious complication. Pneumonia complicating labor is usually the result ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... my lords, have found out a method of complicating errours which none of their predecessors, however stigmatized for ignorance and absurdity, have hitherto been able to attain; they have been able to reconcile the extremes of folly, and to endanger the publick interest at the same time, by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... This entry is the total natural gas consumed in cubic meters (cu m). The discrepancy between the amount of natural gas produced and/or imported and the amount consumed and/or exported is due to the omission of stock changes and other complicating factors. ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the square, was nearly empty. He found her hand and drew it through his arm. "Would you mind so very much," he said, "if those silly things were true?" He spoke as if to a child. His passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all complicating and non-essential impressions of her. "I would give all I possess to have it so," he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase that ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... caress. His immobility repelled these pleadings. Freya had traveled much through the world, had gone through shameful adventures, and would know how to free herself by her own efforts without the necessity of complicating him again in her net. The story that she had just told was nothing to him but ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... expressed in Addison's essays on the ballads were part of the general patriotic archaism which at that time was moving in rapport with cyclic theories of the robust and the effete, as in Temple's essays, and was complicating the issue of the classical ancients versus the moderns. Again, these feelings were in harmony with the new Longinianism of boldness and bigness, cultivated in one way by Dennis and in another by Addison himself in later Spectators. The tribute to the old writers in Rowe's Prologue ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... telecommunications, and medicines and medical equipment; most of these advances take place in OECD nations; only a small portion of non-OECD countries have succeeded in rapidly adjusting to these technological forces; the accelerated development of new industrial (and agricultural) technology is complicating ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Acute laryngeal stenosis complicating typhoid fever is frequently overlooked and often fatal, for the asthenic patient makes no fight for air, and hoarseness, if present, is very slight. The laryngeal lesion may be due to cordal immobility from either paralysis or inflammatory arytenoid fixation, in the absence of edema. ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... you must understand; things happened to me and desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... at the heart of the nation. By 1855-6 the old question was up again in much the same form. The atmosphere was clouded, the black shroud of the approaching storm already discernible on the horizon. A hundred minor problems united in complicating the discussion of the one all-important thing. Another leader was wanted to set the battle in array, to mark out the lines of conflict. Webster and Calhoun were gone, but another was to come to preserve "liberty and union, one and inseparable." This man was Abraham ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Lieutenant Waxel, second in command, George William Steller, the famous scientist, Bering's friend, on board. On the St. Paul, under the stanch, level-headed Russian lieutenant, Alexei Chirikoff, were seventy-six men, with La Croyere d'Isle as astronomer. Not the least {21} complicating feature of the case was the personnel of the crews. For the most part, they were branded criminals and malcontents. From the first they had regarded the Bering expedition with horror. They had joined it under compulsion for only six years; ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... had the effect of seriously complicating the study of Socialism from the historical point of view. Much that one finds bearing the name of Socialism in the literature of the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, is not at all related to Socialism as that ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... each needle repeats on a scale of one-twentieth the design over which the tracer is moved step by step between each stitch. Thus two hundred and twelve embroideries according to a prescribed pattern are made by each needle; and, in fact, though it was not stated, to avoid complicating the description, a second row of a similar number of needles is carried by the same carriages and operates upon a second web stretched between another pair of rollers in the same floating frame. The object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... marry each other. In complete but blissful ignorance that the other existed, the young legatees fell in love with persons unmentioned in the will and performed the highly commendable but exceedingly complicating act of matrimony. This emergency, it is humane to suspect, had not revealed itself ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... not go to make the town uncomfortable for him, to the probable prejudice of their mission. Clearly, here was a risk which he, as Mr. Carstairs's emissary, had no right to incur. The Cypriani was in no position to stand the fire of vindictive yellow journalism. Besides, there was the complicating matter of his own curious resemblance to somebody whom, it seemed, Hunston knew, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Hypothesis complicating thought, it simplifies by synthesis and co-ordination in a manner analogous to that by which plane geometry is simplified when solid geometry becomes a subject of study. By immersing the mind in the idea of many dimensions, we emancipate it from the idea of dimensionality. ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... which is sufficiently surprising without the introduction of complicating contradictions, becomes quite mysterious when compared with the accounts given by Lieutenant Louis de Freycinet and Francois Peron, the joint authors of the official history of the French voyage. It is astonishing in itself, because a vessel sent out on a voyage of exploration would not be expected ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... been so ungratefully betrayed. Marie and her counsellors were, however, by no means a match for the astute and far-reaching Richelieu, who had, by encouraging the belligerent tastes of the King, and still more by so complicating the affairs of the kingdom as to render them beyond the comprehension and grasp of the weak monarch, and to reduce him to utter helplessness, succeeded in making himself altogether independent of his benefactress, none ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the ground, the state of the soil in reference to the all-important question of whether it carries or not, the temperature of the air, and last, but not by any means least, the condition of the quarry, be it fox, stag, or hare, are all questions of vital importance, complicating matters and preventing a solution of ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... came a distaste for sexual relations, and here was a complicating factor of a decisive kind. She developed a disgust that brought about hysterical symptoms and finally she took refuge in refusal to live as a wife. This aroused her husband's anger and suspicions; he accused her of infidelity and had her watched. The disunion ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Nothing is to be seen but hills of sand, on which there is scarcely a blade of verdure; and a vast sea, impelled by the westerly winds, breaking upon it in a dreadful surf, renders it not only forlorn, but frightful; complicating the idea of danger with desolation, and impressing the mind at once with a sense of misery and death. From this place I steered to the northward, resolving never more to come within the same distance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... her head at him with a laugh, and went on playing the hardest piece of music she could think of, complicating herself in difficult chords and sudden accidentals. If there had been anybody there to hear who could have understood, Phoebe's performance would, no doubt, have appeared a masterpiece of brilliant execution, as it was; but the two others were paying ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant |
