"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sleeping with her one Saturday night, that she found from the stoppage of certain things, she was in the family-way by this sad rogue of a fellow, taking my large though at the moment soft and inert instrument into ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... majority were energetic, and beyond all things despised dreaming faineans (such, for instance, as we find the politicians, or even the conspirators, of Italy, Spain, and Germany, whose whole power of action evaporates in talking, and histrionically gesticulating). Yet still the best of them seemed inert by comparison with my uncle, and to regard his standard of action and exertion as trespassing to a needless degree upon ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and soaked to the marrow, yet alive, stretched out at full length, inert, upon the warm sands of a virgin beach. There they lay, supine, above high tide, whither they had dragged themselves with terrible exertion. And the stars wheeled overhead; and down upon them the strange-featured moon wondered with her ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... have to put before you is that we geographers should regard the object of our science not as a magnified billiard-ball, but as a living being—as Mother-Earth. Not as hard, unimpressionable, dull, and inert, but as live, supple, sensitive, and active—active with an intensity of activity past all conceivability. Yet with no chaotic activity, but with activity having coherence and direction, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... arched quizzically, as he glanced over the circle of inert courtiers ranged about him. "Methinks I can count them out ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... awakening, which resembled a fall. She compared herself to the jelly-fish, whose transparent brilliancy in the coolness and constant movement of the waves, vanishes on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those intervals of idleness, when the absence of thought leaves the hand inert upon the modelling tool, Felicia, deprived of the sole moral nerve of her intellect, became savage, unapproachable, sullen beyond endurance,—the revenge of paltry human qualities upon great tired brains. After she had brought tears to the eyes of all those whom she loved, had striven ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... carried the body down, laid it prone in the corner he had occupied, snapped on the waistlock, and threw a ragged old blanket over the hairy legs. In the forthcoming disturbance, if anyone looked in, he would think the inert form a sleeping prisoner, and that the guard ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... the bulky forms of the armed soldiers seemed to draw closer together, as if to escape her individual censure. It was like a group of heavy water-fowl, when they close to avoid the stoop of the slight and beautiful merlin, dreading the superiority of its nature and breeding over their own inert physical strength.—"How now?" again she demanded of them; "is it a time, think ye, to mutiny, when your lord is absent, and his nephew and lieutenant lies stretched on a bed of sickness?—Is it thus you keep your oaths?—Thus ye merit your leader's bounty?—Shame on ye, craven hounds, that ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... towards that old solitary brick-tower. Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... talking. He protested against their intercourse congealing in that fashion. But he could find no opening. His conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost. Then ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... woman's head, then went racing up the stone steps she had rolled down, his quick eye catching and avoiding the bit of fruit on which she had slipped. He returned in a second with help. As the porter lifted the inert body, Mickey slid his hands under her head, and advised: "Keep her straight!" Into one of the big hospitals he helped carry a blue and white clad nurse, on and on, up elevators and into a white ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... precious metals, even as by art we can perfect those other operations of incubation, distillation, fermentation, and similar processes of an ordinary description, by which we extract life itself out of a senseless egg, summon purity and vitality out of muddy dregs, or call into vivacity the inert ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... that man should be created. First, man was made of earth, but his flesh had no cohesion; he was inert, could not turn his head, and had no mind, although he could speak; therefore he was consumed in the water. Next, men were made of wood, and these multiplied, but they had neither heart nor intellect, and could not worship, and so they withered up and disappeared ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... single efforts of the scholar. The package rolled to the gangway, and the German, frenzied with excitement, shouted aloud! The bark lurched, and the bale went over the side, as if the lifeless mass were suddenly possessed with the desire to perform the evolution which its inert weight had so long resisted. Maso recovered his footing, which had been deranged by the unexpected movement, with a seaman's dexterity, but his companion was no longer at his side. Kneeling on the gangway, he perceived the dark ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... on that other night, she came close up to him and smiled upon him, time and circumstance were instantly forgotten, and he fell into a state of enchantment in which will and thought were inert. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... was contemplating this inert mass, a dozen of these voracious beasts appeared round the boat; and, without noticing us, threw themselves upon the dead body and fought with ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... carry him," Thode directed, and as he slung the inert form gently over his shoulder he saw that the boy's shoulders ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... garden[543]. It was now somewhat obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he carried his point. He ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... owe their properties to certain invariable active principles, which chemistry has enabled us to separate from those ingredients which are either inert or common to it and other forms of vegetation. They are two in number,—a volatile alkali, and a volatile oil, called nicotin and nicotianin, respectively. A third powerful constituent is developed by combustion, which is named ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... on her bed inert, numbed, all but her mind, and that traversed section by section in swift, consecutive progress all the amazing turns of her life since she first came to Roaring Lake. There was neither method nor inquiry in this back-casting—merely ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... not have left them behind. From what source she had drawn a characterizing passionate, though silent, strength of mind and body, it would be difficult to explain. Her mind and her emotions had been left utterly unfed, but they were not of the inert order which scarcely needs feeding. Her feeling for the sparrows had held more than she could have expressed; her secret adoration of the "Lady Downstairs" was an intense thing. Her immediate surrender to the desire in the first pair of human eyes—child ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and, without waiting to see whether Colwyn was following him, raced across the room and caught the young man by the arm while he was yet some feet away from the clergyman's table. The young man struggled desperately in his grasp for some moments, then suddenly collapsed and fell inert in the other's arms. Colwyn walked over to the spot in time to see his portly companion lay the young man down on the carpet and bend over ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... obtained a few bills from her precious store, kissed the old man's haggard, wrinkled cheek, and the white forehead of the baby who lay on the bed, almost inert save for the restless moving of her head from side to side, and the low moans which came with almost every breath, and hurried out into ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... The Zygaena malleus, a strange, ugly shark. The eyes are situated at the extremities of the hammer-shaped head. They seldom take bait or annoy human beings. They are for the most part inert, live near the surf edge, and are frequently found washed up on sandy beaches. Chiefly found on the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... bodily indeed at St. Ronan's, but, so far as society was concerned, on the road towards the ancient city of Coventry; and his banishment thither, incurred by that most unpardonable offence in modern morality, a solecism in the code of honour. Though sluggish and inert when called to action, the Baronet was by no means an absolute coward; or, if so, he was of that class which fights when reduced to extremity. He manfully sent for Captain MacTurk, who waited upon him with a grave solemnity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... special efficacy either to defend the person who rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always provided the original Hebrew was made use of. In the hands of modern Cabalists every substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues, provided it be used in a proper state of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I look up now they'll BOTH be looking at me!" To avoid raising his eyes he made as though to lift the glass to his lips; but his hand sank inert, and he looked up. Mr. Lavington's glance was politely bent on him, but with a loosening of the strain about his heart he saw that the figure behind the chair still kept ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... inert laziness and ignorance of the people is their own and their country's bane. They are all totally unaware of the treasures at their feet. This dreadful sloth is in part engendered by the excessive bounty of the land in its natural state; by the little want of clothes or other ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... fashionable friends), the charge would have been scornfully repelled, and unanimous would have been her acquittal. "Hard-hearted! oh, no! she was only prudent and wise." Who could expect her to suffer her pampered, inert darling to meet and acknowledge as an equal the far less daintily fed and elegantly clad sister, whom God called to labor for her frugal meals? Ah, this fine-ladyism, this ignoring of labor, to which, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... present in protein and we get a sufficient supply from milk, meat and legumes. The element sulphur is quite inert and harmless, but some of its acids and salts are very poisonous. Sulphur dioxide is freely used in the process of drying fruits, as a bleacher. In this form it is poisonous, and for that reason it would be well to avoid bleached dried fruits. We need some sulphur, but not in the form of sulphur ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... new arrival, he would touch off his or her character and circumstances in a few words. On one occasion he said after breakfast to Barthrop and me: "Arrivals to-day, Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall—the man a retired coal-merchant, rather wealthy, interested in foreign missions; the woman inert; daughter prevented from coming, and they bring a niece, Phyllis by name, understood to be charming. I undertake the sole charge of Wetherall himself, Mrs. Wetherall requires no specific attentions—placid woman, writes innumerable ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quarters even from early days—there had been flowing through many places a current of talk about America. What was she going to do? Was she going to do anything at all? Would it be possible for her hugeness, her power, her wealth to remain inert in a world crisis? Would she be content tacitly to admit the truth of old accusations of commerciality by securing as her part in the superhuman conflict the simple and unadorned making of money through the dire necessities of the world? There was bitterness, ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between animate and inert things. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... advice, Cerizet was a very incapable hand in action; and, without the robust assistance of Mere Cardinal he could never have lifted what might almost be called the corpse of the former drum-major. Completely insensible, Toupillier was now an inert mass, a dead-weight, which could, fortunately, be handled without much precaution, and the athletic Madame Cardinal, gathering strength from her cupidity, contrived, notwithstanding Cerizet's insufficient assistance, ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... discovery was due entirely to scientific induction from some experiments made upon different specimens of dynamite, with a view to the determination of the effect on the explosive force of the various inert or at least slowly combustible substances with which nitro-glycerine is mixed to produce the dynamite of commerce. Of late, in place of the infusorial earth which formed the solid portion of Nobel's dynamite, such substances as sawdust, powdered bark, and even gunpowder, have been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... somnambulist—was living, without knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us—whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience than it ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... calling Rupert's dimples into action again. At the end of half an hour the boy had become quite tractable, and, getting ready to depart, approached his sleeping brother with something like resignation. But Johnny's nap seemed to have had the effect of transforming him into an inert jelly-like mass. It required the joint exertions of both the master and Rupert to transfer him bodily into the latter's arms, where, with a single limp elbow encircling his brother's neck, he lay with his unfinished slumber still visibly distending ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... situation arises," he broke out with a sudden inflection of wrath, "from inert, thick-skulled bigotry. Thought processes that are moral cramps and mental dyspepsia threaten to ruin ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of Paris reaches the towers of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... health to their pupils, and they invariably spoke of the improving health and vigor of their girls under school training. They come, often, miserable and sickly from the neglect or abuse of ignorant mothers. Many such were growing healthy. The inert were growing active and playful, the deformed, greatly improving. One teacher said that to see the girls under her care inclined to any active play, until they had been in school months, sometimes years, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... poet Ovid gives us a connected narrative of creation. Before the earth and sea and the all-covering heaven, one aspect, which we call Chaos, covered all the face of Nature,— a rough heap of inert weight and discordant beginnings of things clashing together. As yet no sun gave light to the world, nor did the moon renew her slender horn month by month,— neither did the earth hang in the surrounding air, poised by its own weight,— nor did the sea stretch ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Inert as a log, he was lifted up, dragged away, and finally dropped in a boat. His captor stood away from him, panting. Sam rolled over on his ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... and more personal. He told her of his father, the busy director of a lumber company, and of his mother, sickly and inert. ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... an inert mass, quite incapable of rendering any assistance. Fandor began by drawing himself up to the opening and taking a look around. The Place de la Concorde ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... profoundly at some future time, when it may have ceased to be remediable. If that were all, for us there would be no arrears of mortified sensibilities to apprehend. But what is ominous even in relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility of talking the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... what every earnest soul learns who has been baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,—that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the arm, the Lady Rochford took him by the other and they dragged him, inert and senseless, into the shadow of ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... new world opened to Ivy Geer. It was as if a corpse, cold, inert, lifeless, had suddenly sprung up, warm, invigorated, informed with a spirit which led her own spell-bound. Grammar,—Grammar, which had been a synonyme for all that was dry, irksome, useless,—a beating of the wind, the crackling of thorns under a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... few cases. Of creative artists, the composer is almost the only one who is dependent upon a multitude of intermediate agents between the public and himself; intermediate agents, either intelligent or stupid, devoted or hostile, active or inert, capable—from first to last—of contributing to the brilliancy of his work, or of disfiguring it, misrepresenting it, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... the inert mass and scooped several large pieces of meat from the cooking pot—enough to satisfy even his great hunger—then he raised the body of the feaster and shoved it into the vessel. When the other blacks awoke they would have something to think about! ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion, that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It had been a turning of the page of the book of life—as if a leaf long inert had moved at a touch and, eagerly reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of it—what was most wondrous of all—still more even in ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... his rage, unable to utter a single word. I saw him, after he had searched the dead man's pockets, raise the inert body with its awful featureless face and drag it to the bulwarks. Then I rushed forward and ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... be relieved next day. The men were so worn out that they could hardly move. Winn and Lionel found their own bodies difficult to control; they had become heavy and inert from want of sleep, but their minds were alive and worked with feverish swiftness, like the minds of people in a long illness, when consciousness creeps above ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... makes the Everyday of life seem worth the while; seem worth the laughter and the tears, the failures and the victories, the dull beginnings, and the even more tedious beginnings-over-again, which are, alas! inevitable, except in the Human Turnip, who, in parenthesis, is too pompously inert ever to make ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... there may be something which he knows not; he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty, is not to be admitted among reasonable beings. All that we know of matter is, that matter is inert, senseless, and lifeless; and if this conviction cannot he opposed but by referring us to something that we know not, we have all the evidence that human intellect can admit. If that which is known may ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... was so wild and outrageous in his talk, that it was all his mother could do to keep his state concealed from public observation. She had for this purpose given him a sleeping potion; and, while he lay heavy and inert under the influence of the poppy-tea, his mother bound him with cords to the ponderous, antique bed in which he slept. She looked broken-hearted while she did this office, and thus acknowledged the degradation of her first-born—him of whom she had ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... evening when Frank was leaning over the side gazing forward towards the land that they were soon to reach, and where they would give up the inert life they were leading for one of wild and stirring adventure, that the young man suddenly started out of his dreamy musings, for a ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... His mouth was open and his tongue hung out. Suddenly the lad's struggle relaxed and he became limp in the German's arms. The latter threw the boy's inert body from him roughly, and as he did so Antoinette fired. The German staggered as the bullet struck him in the side. As he turned to face ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... ladies had tried to whistle till their mouths ached, when the voice of Captain Willis was heard ordering the crew to trim sails. With alacrity they flew to their posts at the joyful sound; and those who but a minute before were so silent and inert, were now all life ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... way into the very heart of the column; and before the Russians could crush them with mere weight the other regiments of the same brigade hurled themselves on the right and on the left against the huge inert mass. The Russians broke and retreated in disorder before a quarter of their number, leaving to Scarlett and his men the glory of an action which ranks with the Prussian attack at Mars-la-Tour in 1870 as the most brilliant cavalry operation in modern warfare. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... defends, the pleading reached the judge too late. Her pressure became irksome, he thought of the devilfish tightening its rings till fatal, and, by an effort, irresistible while gentle, he disengaged himself from her arms. They dropped inert by her panting sides as if broken. But only for an instant ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... asseverations, declared aloud that they would not stay even where they were, but would go and leave Pontus undefended. Report of this being carried to the army of Lucullus effected the corruption of his soldiers also, who had been made inert towards military service by the wealth they had acquired and their luxurious living, and they wanted rest; and, when they heard of the bold words of the soldiers in Pontus, they said they were men, and their example ought to be followed, for they had done enough to entitle ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... age and diameter an inner portion of the sapwood becomes inactive and finally ceases to function. This inert or dead portion is called heartwood, deriving its name solely from its position and not from any vital importance to the tree, as is shown by the fact that a tree can thrive with its heart completely decayed. Some, species begin to form heartwood ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... every-day face, that it was not unknown to me. Three or four years earlier, staying in the country-house of one of her friends, I had seen her picture. The house was very dull,—as dull as placid content with the mere material enjoyments of life, and an inert gentleness of nature, could make its inhabitants. They were people to be loved, but loved without a thought. Their wings had never grown, nor their eyes coveted a wider prospect than could be seen from the parent nest. The friendly visitant could not discompose them ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... offered it in the modest form of a query, for the attention of other philosophers; little thinking that it would be made use of to explain phenomena which they did not understand. His query about a subtile elastic fluid pervading the universe, and giving motion and activity to inert masses of matter, and thereby causing the phenomena of attraction, gravitation, and many other appearances in nature, was immediately laid hold of by his followers, as a fact sufficiently supported, because it seemed to have the sanction of ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... and Tom Barnum swore softly, from the opposite side, in wondering admiration, the big fellow rose to his feet and with a mighty tug pulled an inert body clear through the hole. One look at the face was sufficient for identification despite the blood streaming from an ugly gash over the right temple. It was the man called Mike. His eyelids were fluttering. He ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... series of movements which one of Delmar's Mexicans had taught him. With the noose spread wide he kept it whirling in the air as if it were a hoop. He threw it into the air and sprang through it, he lowered it to the ground, and leaping into it, flung it far above his head. In his hand this inert thing developed snakelike action. It took on loops and scallops and retained them, apparently in defiance of all known laws of physics—controlled and governed by the easy, almost imperceptible motions of ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... my side, putting up a fierce, silent fight for his strength, and now slowly getting enough of it back to keep him at his job as a clerk in what had been his warehouse. Only once, coming suddenly into the room, I found him settled deep down in his chair, heavy, inert, his cigar gone out, staring vacantly out ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... beginning to despair. An icy dread was at her heart. He lay so lifeless, so terribly inert. She had attempted to lift him, but the dead weight was too much for her. She could only rest his head against her, and wipe away the blood that trickled persistently from that dreadful, sneering mouth. Would he ever speak again, she asked herself? ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... up, then arose—for he slowly drew her—breathless, the color gone, much of the capable practicality that was hers completely eliminated. She felt limp, inert. She pulled at her hand faintly, and then, lifting her eyes, was fixed by that hard, insatiable gaze of his. Her head swam—her eyes were filled with a ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of the earth as a compact body of matter, vast and inert; subject, indeed, to be upheaved and rent by volcanoes and earthquakes, but as quite insensible to slight influences which operate upon living beings and upon vegetation. This, however, is a great mistake; ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... farmer describes how they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings over the "cut-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to tremble and fall. Without his assistance ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... were assured, not long ago, that at Brussels a hen had brought forth half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does a germ come ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... was that materialism ended in the adoration of man. Let us endeavor to understand how the adoration of man turns again to materialism. The mind endowed with intelligence and will is more elevated in the scale of being than inert bodies. This is for us an evident truth. Could one demonstrate it by reasoning? I do not know; but in contesting it, we should contradict the plainest evidence. Reason is superior to matter. If, with the school which extends from Pythagoras to Saint Augustine, and from Saint Augustine ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... things differently. We went out with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... Arthur Schnitzler the Hebrew element predominates; it has quickened the somewhat inert Vienna blood and finds expression in analytical keenness and sharpness of vision, a wit of Gallic refinement and a language of sparkling brilliancy. Schnitzler's profession, too, has not been without some influence upon his poetical ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the relief which approached him: to be the object of care to a noble knight—to be defended, treated like a human creature was indeed a prodigy to him! The being, but an instant before stupified and inert, from whom insult and injury had drawn no cry nor tear, this evidence of humanity touched to the quick: he cast a long look of tenderness and gratitude on his deliverer; and large tears rolled down his bleeding cheeks. But the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to drag the two inert figures out of the anteroom. All de Hooch could do was grab them under the armpits, apply power, and drag them out. He went out the same way he had come in, traversing the separate chambers in reverse order. First came the decontamination chamber, where the radioactive dust that might have settled ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... business-like way, unwinding continuously, and made stridingly for the cabinet situated up against the stone wall which separated the promenading sexes—dragging behind it on the ground a tail of ever-increasing dimensions. The cabinet reached, tail and figure parted company; the former fell inert to the limitless mud, the latter disappeared into the contrivance with a Jack-in-the-box rapidity. From which contrivance ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Association three years ago. It also regulated the practice of pharmacy. Drugs were manufactured under the inspection of the government and there was a heavy penalty for substitution, or for the sale of old inert drugs, or improperly prepared pharmaceutical materials. If the government inspector violated his obligations as to the oversight of drug preparations the penalty was death. Nor was this law of the Emperor Frederick an exception. We have the charters ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... the nearly submerged hull, and watch with breathless anxiety the swoop of every giant wave as it surged down upon the wreck and buried her in a blinding smother of seething, milk-white foam. But, beaten down, inert, and waterlogged as was the brig, her cargo was evidently of such a character as to impart a considerable measure of buoyancy to her; for though every sea that broke over her completely buried her for ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... perspective would have seemed to me quite intolerable, when they actually came I endured without prostration. Yet I must confess that, in the time which has elapsed since Emily's death, there have been moments of solitary, deep, inert affliction, far harder to bear than those which immediately followed our loss. The crisis of bereavement has an acute pang which goads to exertion; the desolate after-feeling sometimes paralyses. I have learnt that we are not to find solace in our own strength; we must ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... breath of exhaustion was a groan as he floundered back and shook the inert figure with ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... up For hungry hands to stroke or lips to sup? Hath she then nothing of her own, no mirth In honesty, nor eyes to worship worth, Nor pride except in that which makes men dogs, Nor loathing for the vice wherein, like logs That float beneath the sun, lie fair women Submiss, inert receptacles for sin? Is this her all? Hath she no heart, nor care Therefor? No womb, nor hope therein to bear Fruit of her heart's insurgence? Is her face, Are these her breasts for fondling, not to grace ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... beaten and knew it. His body lay along the rocky road, inert and unresisting. He breathed in convulsive gasps, but apart from that, now that he was down, he never moved. He was as tired as a man well could be. Varney sitting closely upon him, holding him fast, felt that the reporter's clothes were ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... signs. If the confusing gleam of the fog enabled him to see, here and there, a crouching Chouan, he took him, no doubt, for a fragment of rock, for these human bodies had all the appearance of inert nature. This danger to the invaders was of short duration. Corentin's attention was diverted by a very distinct noise coming from the other end of the Promenade, where the rock wall ended and a steep ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... knowledge of men. From his birth till his entry at college, he lived in a region where he met with none whose minds might awaken his sympathies, and where life was altogether uneventful. On the other hand, that region abounded with the inert, striking, and most impressive objects of natural scenery. The elementary grandeur and beauty of external nature came thus to fill up his mind to the exclusion of human interests. To such a result his individual constitution powerfully ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... and groaned—partly because it was the proper place, partly with vexation. Here was a speech to thrill, yet she sat there inert, her face a stupid blank. He was not even sure ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... the breath of God, that a higher thing, human life, comes into being. Naturally, as the Bible is the history of man's redemption it does not dwell upon this phase of truth, but seemingly each new and higher impartation of the Spirit of God brings forth a higher order of being. First, inert matter; then motion; then light; then vegetable life; then animal life; then man; and, as we shall see later, then the new man; and then Jesus Christ, the supreme Man, the completion of God's thought of man, the Son of Man. This is the Biblical ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... nor have I ever understood what could be higher than these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert and merely material bodies. I cannot understand ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... leaning against the seat from which she had risen, one hand still grasping it while the other hung inert. Her lips parted but she did not speak. Her pallor troubled Odo and he went up to her and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... of groups are more complicated. The next simplest is that of the atom of helium. Helium is a gas of which small quantities are obtained from certain oil wells and there isn't very much of it to be obtained. It is an inert gas, as we call it, because it won't burn or combine with anything else. It doesn't care to enter into the larger games of molecular groups. It is satisfied to be as it is, so that it isn't much use in chemistry because you can't make anything else out of it. That's ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... microscope to Miss Gale's messenger with his compliments. Fanny wondered what she wanted with it. "Not to inspect our little characters, it is to be hoped," said Vizard. "Why not pay her a visit, you ladies? then she will tell you, perhaps." The ladies instantly wore that bland look of inert but rocky resistance I have already noted as a characteristic of "our girls." Vizard saw, and said, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... she stood there motionless as a statue, then suddenly she staggered, reeled, and collapsed, inert and senseless, ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... while the essence of Music is that its waves are rhythmic and follow each other in ordered swing. Rhythm is thus the primary manifestation of Music: but equally so it is the basic characteristic of everything in life. We learn that in Nature there is nothing still and inert, but that everything is in incessant motion. There is no such thing as solid matter. The man of Science resolved matter into atoms, and now these atoms themselves are found to be as miniature universes. Round a central sun, termed a Proton, whirl a number of electrons in rhythmic motion ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Herrick sat inert and silent. It was impossible after these months of hopeless want to smell the rough, high-spiced sea victuals without lust, and his mouth watered with desire of the champagne. It was no less impossible to have assisted at the scene between Huish ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it into a new life, as a principle suited to a new order of things. Accordingly, we have seen of late that this scriptural dictum—'The poor shall never cease out of the land'—has terminated its career as a truism (that is, as a truth, either obvious on one hand, or inert on the other), and has wakened into a polemic or controversial life. People arose who took upon them utterly to deny this scriptural doctrine. Peremptorily they challenged the assertion that poverty must always exist. The Bible said that it was an affection of human society which ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... methods, modern cookery, and modern methods of forced farming, have each contributed their share of rendering food inert and frequently deleterious. The miller has extracted the coarse cellulose from the various flours in the effort to manufacture a product suitable to the super-civilized public demand. This cellulose is absolutely essential to gastric and intestinal digestion, and if children are ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Felix had felt half asleep through the earlier days of his stay, and Lance seemed to be lulled into a continual doze whenever he was unoccupied, and that was almost always. It had grieved his elder brother to see this naturally vivacious being so inert and content with inaction, only strolling about a little in early morning and late evening, and languid and weary, if not actually suffering, during the heat and glare of the day. He was now, with his air-pillow and a railway ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the heroes of occult science. Persons of this kind, recovering their normal state, are usually just as they were before. They fulfil, in some sort, the chemical and physical functions of bodies which conduct electricity; at times inert metal, at other times a channel filled with a mysterious current. In their normal condition they are given to practices which bring them before the magistrate, yea, verily, like the notorious Balthazar, even unto the criminal court, and so to the hulks. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... works; but if the weather is dry, he ploughs deeply into the earth for worms. He fills his storehouse with earth-worms for winter use, and he finds it necessary to bite their heads off, which leaves them inert but not dead. This cannot be done in the summer months without the heads re-growing and the worms crawling away. The mole knows the exact temperature best suited for ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... interfered with our lines, sickened us even to look at them. They were always to be seen lying on a log or snag in the water. As you approached they either crawled down like an octopus, or dropped, in a boneless, inert mass, without a splash. Their slimy, scaleless skins were a muddy yellow, and in general they resembled an eel with legs. Even the blacks looked on them with disgust, though they are particularly fond of ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type—unmarried females were predominant for the most part—with school-festival ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... old mercer, propped up by pillows in a sitting posture, gazed vaguely before her with the eyes of an idiot. The death of her son had been like a blow on the head that had felled her senseless to the ground. For hours she remained tranquil and inert, absorbed in her despair; then she was at times seized with attacks of weeping, shrieking ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... sou was counted and grudged. Indeed, two weeks had not elapsed before I perceived that Blanche had no real affection for me, even though she dressed me in elegant clothes, and herself tied my tie each day. In short, she utterly despised me. But that caused me no concern. Blase and inert, I spent my evenings generally at the Chateau des Fleurs, where I would get fuddled and then dance the cancan (which, in that establishment, was a very indecent performance) with eclat. At length, the time came when Blanche had drained ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... farther. He ordered himself to be carried into the sun; they laid him upon his bed of moss, where he passed a full hour before he could recover his spirits. Nothing could be more natural than this weakness after the inert repose of the latter days. Athos took a bouillon, to give him strength, and bathed his dried lips in a glassful of the wine he loved the best—that old Anjou wine mentioned by Porthos in his admirable will. Then, refreshed, free in mind, he had his horse brought again; ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... of course my days are busy, and evenings somewhat taken up with the children. Still, I deny matter as being inert, having absolutely no power of itself, except what is delegated to it by the senses. I know it has no life, intelligence or causation of itself, but only as man in his ignorance allows it to have. This ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... clear that, in spite of its novel constitution, Russia is governed much as other countries are governed, the real directive power lying in the hands of a comparatively small body which is able by hook or crook to infect with its conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A visitor to Moscow to-day would find much of the constitutional machinery that was in full working order in the spring of 1919 now falling into rust and disrepair. He would not be able once a week or so to attend All-Russian Executive and ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... Purple spots. These attend fevers with great venous inirritability, and are probably formed by the inability of a single termination of a vein, whence the corresponding capillary becomes ruptured, and effuses the blood into the cellular membrane round the inert termination of the vein. This is generally esteemed a sign of the putrid state of the blood, or that state contrary to the inflammatory one. As it attends some inflammatory diseases which are attended with great inirritability, as in the confluent small pox. But it also attends the scurvy, where ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of the Railroad Journey was a dull, vague, conglomerate, cinder-scented babble of grinding wheels and shuddering window frames; but the voices of the Traveling Salesman and the Young Electrician were shrill, gruff, poignant, inert, eternally variant, after the manner of human voices which are discussing the affairs of ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Handicraft labour, in bone, stone, or wood, was the first stage in the development of man's power; and tools or machines, in iron or steel, are the last and most efficient method of economising it, and enabling him to intelligently direct the active and inert forces of nature. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... prolonged. Although I have never come across the Drilus, who is a stranger to my district, I conjecture a method of attack very similar to that of the Glow-worm. Like our own Snail-eater, the Algerian insect does not cut its victim into small pieces: it renders it inert, chloroforms it by means of a few tweaks which are easily distributed, if the lid but half-opens for a second. That will do. The besieger thereupon enters and, in perfect quiet, consumes a prey incapable of the least muscular effort. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... would see him rich. But now the hills were brown with the killing touch of frost; the white of the snowy range was creeping farther and farther over the mountains; the air was crisp with the hint of zero soon to come; the summer was dead, and Fairchild's hopes lay inert beside it. He was only working now because he had determined to work. He was only laboring because a great, strong, big-shouldered man had come from Cornwall to help him and was willing to fight it out to the end. October—and the announcement had said that a certain girl would be married ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... shadow-land between the natural and the supernatural,—ecstacy, trance, prophecy, miracles, spiritualism, the stigmata, etc. He was a devout Roman Catholic, and the so-called facts that he reasons on seem to me quite amazing; and yet the possibilities that lie between inert matter and man's living, all-powerful, immortal soul may make almost anything credible. The soul at times can do anything with matter. I have been busying myself with Sainte-Beuve's seven volumes on the Port Royal development. I like him (Sainte-Beuve). His capacity ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... relieve them, I began for the first time to realise fully the exceeding awkwardness of my situation, and to realise, too, that if deliverance was to come to me I must bestir myself and do what might be possible to meet it, for to remain passively lashed to that inert piece of drifting wreckage might very well mean a slow and agonising death by starvation. Yet, after all, what could I do? The land was my nearest refuge, and that, I considered, must be at least twenty miles distant, altogether too far ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... farms to devastate the poultry yards. When he is discovered he runs away, but is soon caught, and blows from sticks rain upon him. Seeing that he cannot escape correction he seeks at least to save his life. Letting his head fall and straightening his inert legs he receives the blows without flinching. Often he is considered dead, and abandoned. The cunning little beast, who desires nothing better, arises, shakes himself, and rather bruised, but at all events alive, takes his ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... him, blinking stupidly. Still he did not speak, but moistened his lips with a swollen tongue. He began to sink slowly back into the blankets, supine and inert. Nicodemus sat on the edge of the bunk and passed a long gorilla arm about his shoulders. He motioned to his wife, who stood watching, arms akimbo, her face expressive of lively sympathy. She went to the shelves where stood the jars of liquor, returning with a brimming ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... instincts of all living matter are self-preservation and the propagation of the species. The instinct for self-preservation causes a plant to turn away from cold and damaging winds toward the life-giving sun; the inert mussel to withdraw within its shell; the insect to take flight; the animal to fight or to flee; and man to procure food that he may oppose starvation, to shelter himself and to provide clothes that he may avoid ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile |
