"Unstirred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... candle off the table, he signed Mr. Wilkins to close the door. And Mr. Wilkins obeyed, and looked with an intensity of eagerness almost amounting to faintness on the experiment, and yet he could not hope. The flame was steady—steady and pitilessly unstirred, even when it was adjusted close to mouth and nostril; the head was raised up by one of Dixon's stalwart arms, while he held the candle in the other hand. Ellinor fancied that there was some trembling on Dixon's part, and grasped his wrist tightly in order ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ring, Two children with nought, as gayly they sing Of burdensome care, their hearts as the bird To mountains oft' soar in freedom, unstirred By future, and what it furtively brings Of pleasures, or grief, or life's bitter stings. The shadowed cross e'er failing to see, Thoughts flitting as bubbles on oft' ...
— Poems - A Message of Hope • Mary Alice Walton
... was the sifting sunshine in her hair and there were her white, rounded arms reaching up to pull down a fruit-laden branch. Perhaps the girl on the gatepost felt the slight of Dickie's unappreciative glance, perhaps not. At any rate, she was unstirred. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... beloved Roqueta, still possessed a living soul, the soul of former centuries, filled with odium and prejudice. The people were such as they were born, such as their fathers had been, and thus they must continue to be here in this calm atmosphere of the island which was unstirred by new thoughts slowly wafted from ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fallen down in the street, needed fetching, supporting, exhorting; a bully come home with a broken head. But it seemed as though Ben were, in reality, for all his air of appeal, sufficient to himself, moving like a steady light through the darkness; unstirred by so much as a breath ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... neither truth nor gentleness is matter of course. You must bind them like shields about your necks; you must write them on the tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all things—for no other memory will be so protective of you—that the highest ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... They were sitting out on the lawn, he and his father; a small table beside them, with glass coffee-machine and chocolates in a silver dish; the smoke of their cigars hovering, drifting, unstirred by any breeze. No Terry at his feet. The faithful creature—vision of abject misery—had been carried off to eat his heart out in quarantine. Tangled among tree-tops hung the ghost of a moon, almost full. Somewhere, in the far quiet of the shrubberies, a ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... treated like blackamoor slaves in the Indies; honest folk driven out of house and home; such was the burthen of the cries that assailed the grim representative carried aloft, while the real man stood unmoved as a statue, his tall, powerful figure unstirred, his long driving-whip resting against his shoulder without betraying the slightest motion, neither firm lip nor steady eye changing. Genevieve, with tears in her eyes, exclaimed, 'Oh! this is madness! Will no one tell them how ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... careless, mindless, regardless; inattentive &c 458; neglectful &c 460; disregarding. unconcerned, nonchalant, pococurante^, insouciant, sans souci [Fr.]; unambitious &c 866. unaffected, unruffled, unimpressed, uninspired, unexcited, unmoved, unstirred, untouched, unshocked^, unstruck^; unblushing &c (shameless) 885; unanimated; vegetative. callous, thick-skinned, hard-nosed, pachydermatous, impervious; hardened; inured, casehardened; steeled against, proof against; imperturbable &c (inexcitable) 826 [Obs.]; unfelt. Adv. insensibly ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of sin, shame for sin, amendment of life, restitution for cozening, cheating, defrauding, beguiling thy neighbour,—where shall these fruits of repentance be found? Repentance is the bitter pill, without the sound working of which, base and sinful humour rest unstirred, unpurged, undriven out of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... SMITH show that he has the heart of the matter in him; every page of these reminiscences of nursery life proclaims a genuine memory, not a make-believe childhood faked up for literary ends. Who that has once been young can read unstirred by envy the chapter on "Devices and Contrivances," with its entrancing triumph of the chain of mirrors arranged (during the providential absence of those in authority) from the night nursery, down two flights of stairs, to the store-room in the basement? I know a reviewer whom ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... accustomed stillness. But the Indians sat more still than any of them. They seemed strangely at home in the silence, these wild men of the woods. Motionless they sat, as a group of trees on a windless day, or as a tranquil pool unstirred by the smallest breeze; silent, as if they were themselves a part of Nature's own silence rather than of the family of her ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... careless about her own fame, she took no steps to assert her claims, her legal position having, indeed, grown hateful to her in her horror at the tragedy. And Sir William Byrt, the curate who had married her to her husband, being an old man and feeble, was not disinclined to leave the embers unstirred of such a fiery matter as this, and to assist her in letting established things stand. Therefore, Edith retired with the nurse, her only companion and friend, to her native town, where she lived in ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... nor Hetty could have told. For years Nathan had sat at his end of the young men's bench at the family or the public meeting, with Hetty exactly opposite him at the end of the girls' row, and for years they had looked across the dividing space at each other with unstirred pulses. The rows of Sisters sat in serene dignity, one bench behind another, and each Sister was like unto every other in Nathan's vague, dreamy, boyishly indifferent eyes. Some of them were seventy and some seventeen, but each modest figure sat in its place with quiet folded hands. ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... moon was shining, touching up the trees that skirted the bank with a flood of silvery-azure light, that brought out each twig and particle of foliage in strong relief, and cast their trunks in shade; while, the surface of the water, unstirred by the slightest ripple, gleamed like a mirror of burnished steel, winding in and out, in its serpentine course, between masses of dense shadow—until it was lost to sight in the distance, behind a sudden bend, and a dark projecting clump of ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... leaving it. It was the winter of 1881-82, a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day succeeded day without a cloud. Night followed night with steady stars, gliding across clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines unstirred by wind. I could not hope for a more prosperous season; and indeed I made such use of it, that between the months of January and March I crossed six passes of the Alps in open sleighs—the Fluela Bernina, Spluegen, Julier, Maloja, and Albula—with less ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... ear the summons stung As if a battle-trump had rung; The slumbering instincts long unstirred Start at the old familiar word; It thrills like flame through every limb,— What mean his twenty years to him? The savage blow his rider dealt Fell on his hollow flanks unfelt; The spur that pricked his staring hide Unheeded tore ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... soared. Honor drew closer to Jimsy and he put his arm about her and held her hard. "Yes," he whispered. "I know." The man who had asked for Golondrina sat with bent head and his cigar went out. Only Carter Van Meter, as once long ago in Los Angeles, seemed unmoved, unstirred, scatheless. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... into embarrassment, in which I was combating a native irritability with the placid philosophical acceptance of the unstirred Tao, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... she chose. And there was the best of tea to be made out of the china caddy, and rich cake in the parlor crock. After one such glad deliberation, she caught her sewing guiltily up from her lap and began to set compensating stitches. But even then her conscience slept unstirred. Old lady Knowles was in no hurry for the work, she knew, and she would make up for her dreaming in the account of ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... wife. They planned a tour of the States, which they had not visited in seven years, and more particularly, as his forerunning letter said, they meant to investigate certain mining properties which Hardress had acquired in Montana. So, not unstirred by trepidations, I met them at ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... vases low Stand unquickened and unstirred, And we trace upon the snow Starred footsteps of ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... thereon who wend, They shall achieve the end; But they who wander or to left or right Are sinners in his sight. Take to thy heart this one, this soothfast word— Of wantonness impiety is sire; Only from calm control and sanity unstirred Cometh true weal, the goal of every ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... effort are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. Let things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle everlastingly to make them better. Leave the pool of politics unstirred by putting into it ever new individual thought and ideal, and how quickly it becomes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. Leave a church unvitalized, by ever fresh personal consecration, and how quickly it becomes a dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. Leave a university ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... one a meeting promised me * And eye expectant waxed and heart unstirred: His eyelids bade me hold his word as true; * But, in their languish,[FN275] can he keep ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... moment the vision of the meaning of the evolution of his race, of the Prodigal turning to responsibility—of which he once had had a glimpse—had risen before his eyes in its completeness—the guiding hand of God in history! The Spirit in these complacent souls, as yet unstirred . ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... course, there was no studying to be done at home, but even in later years he never knew what it was to "plug." In fact, he could not do it. Either his interest was aroused, and then he absorbed the matter at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind, sucking up what fitted it ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... ocean. Thou art the Barabanala Mare's head that ranges within the ocean, ceaselessly vomitting fire and drinking the saline waters as if they were sacrificial butter. Thou art Wind, the friend of Agni. Thou art of tranquil soul like the ocean when at rest and unstirred by the mildest breeze. Thou art Agni that drinks the libations of clarified butter poured in sacrifices with the aid of Mantras. Thou art he whom it is difficult to approach. Thou art he whose effulgence spreads over the infinite universe. Thou art ever skilful in battle. Thou art well ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... for a kiss that never reached them. The man was seized from behind, a dark hand covered his mouth; and Lieutenant Henry Crewe, his sword unstirred in its scabbard, found himself pinioned hand and foot, ere he had time to realize that other arms were about him than those of the woman he loved. With her it fared in like fashion, save that before they covered her mouth she found time for one long ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... heard Again his master's woful word Sound sorrow through the calm unstirred By fluttering wind or flickering bird, Thus: "Ah, fair lady and faithless, why Break thy pledged faith to meet me? soon An hour beyond thy trothplight noon Shall strike my death-bell, and thy boon Is this, that here ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... have played chess, or written love-letters on his back, so smoothly did he tread the rough, stony road. All its pits and crags and jags, the pony made them all a straight line for his rider, whose unstirred figure and even speech made this quite discernible. For when a friend talks to you on the trot, much gulping doth impede his conversation,—and there is even a good deal of wallop in a young lady's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... tragic condition of the world leaves us unstirred, if we draw no lessons from it, if there is no fiery stirring of will in Ireland to make it a better place to live in, then indeed we may lose hope for our country. Let us remember the most scornful condemnation in Scripture was not given to the evil ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... admiration in his uncertain gaze. He saw, for one thing, that his effort to reach her had failed and that she remained completely the mistress of herself. She reclined at ease in her comfortable chair, quite unstirred by his derision, his jubilation. He became aware, also, of the fact that she presented an extremely attractive picture, for the soft white fur of the loose robe she wore exposed an alluring glimpse of snowy throat and bosom; one wide sleeve had ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... are the feet and forehead of the earth, Temperate his bosom and his knees, But huge and hot the midriff of his girth, Where heaves the laughter of the belted seas, Where rolls the heavy thunder of his mirth Around the still unstirred Hesperides. ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... living wine and bread. Come, let us praise him: here is nought to hide. Make bare the poor dead secrets of his heart, Strip the stark-naked soul, that all may peer, Spy, smirk, sniff, snap, snort, snivel, snarl, and sneer: Let none so sad, let none so sacred part Lie still for pity, rest unstirred for shame, But all be scanned of all ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... walks—the bowers Where, through long summer hours, Young Love first proved his powers To win the prize; Where every tree has heard Some vows of love preferred, And, with his leaves unstirred, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... that feminine aristocracy of perfect pureness! Ah, she was no wife for your dance-haunting young millionaire. The man who won her must fight for her, fight like a tiger for its young, fight even the girl herself, because in her unstirred nature was all the virginal resistance to surrender that belongs to a wild creature ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... my listening soul Hath trembled to the roll Of thunders that Jove wreaks— And calm Minerva's oracles hath heard All more than now unstirred! ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... amount of stock was brought into a country which, three years before, only resounded to the war-cry of the naked savage; and the soil of which, hardened, baked, and unstirred for centuries, nursed not within its bosom seeds from which a plenteous harvest might spring, but, as if irritated by neglect and indifference, gave forth unwillingly only ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... Perhaps it was to this that I was moving? There might be a new life waiting for me, but it could not well be as intolerable as this. Perhaps nothing but silence and unconsciousness awaited me, a sleep unstirred by any dream. Even Maud, I thought, in her sorrow, would understand. How long I stood there I do not know, but the air darkened about me and the mist rose in long veils about the pasture with a deadly chill. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the Free State, as a rule, was most unsatisfactory. Marching in the wake of an army of about 50,000 men, however, one would scarcely expect water to remain unstirred or unpolluted. I always found my tea or coffee more enjoyable when the water for it was drawn by somebody else. Even though that comrade would jestingly call it "Bovril," and unnecessarily explain that the pool it came from contained two dead ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... through the ante-chamber to the dressing-room. But when they opened the door, all was quiet—no one behind the curtain, no one in the room—they searched under the sofas, everywhere; there was no closet or hiding-place in which any one could be concealed. The window fastenings were unstirred. But the door into the gallery was unlocked, and the simple thing appeared—that Helen, in her confusion, had thought only of fastening the door into the ante-chamber, which also opened on the gallery, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... might count ten; surely if there were any one inside the cave—if the one whose presence he suspected were there—such a noise would have brought him forth. But a great banner of trumpet-creeper, which hid the opening till one was almost upon it, waved its torches unstirred except by the wind; the sand in the doorway was ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... could have said would have been so effectual. Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He knew then that he had left her unstirred. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... here to hearts intense, A spirit-force, transcending sense, In heights unscaled, in deeps unstirred, Beneath the calm, above the storm, She waits the incorporating word To bid her tremble into form. Already, like divining-rods, men's souls Bend down to where the unseen ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... that its object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination. (86) If the Bible were to describe the destruction of an empire in the style of political historians, the masses would remain unstirred, whereas the contrary is the case when it adopts the method of poetic description, and refers all things immediately to God. (87) When, therefore, the Bible says that the earth is barren because of men's sins, or that the blind were ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... same subtle difference in the expression. Hope's nod was accompanied by a blithe glance, keen, yet inviting, Faith's with a softly-inquiring, yet half-indifferent look, as if some undercurrent of thought were still unstirred. She felt that Hope appropriated her friendliness as a matter of course, while Faith, though not repelling it, maintained a fine reserve which might, or might not, vanish like hoar-frost in the first sun-ray of affection. She ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... inherited opinions. A certain stimulus no doubt is given to his mental activity by setting him mathematical problems to solve and passages in the classical authors to construe; but his thought on political and social questions remains a thing apart, unstirred, atrophied. What else is this but political propaganda? And when it is reinforced by a thousand subtle hints in and out of the classroom, hints suggesting that, of course, there can be no two opinions ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... and still under their unshed canopy of October leaves. Against a grey, transparent sky the oaks and beeches towered, unstirred by any wind; in the subdued light among the trees, ferns, startlingly green, spread delicate plumed fronds; there was no sound except the soft crash of his own footsteps through shriveling patches of brake; no movement save when a yellow leaf fluttered down from above or one of ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... fumbling the shadows, checkering the underbrush with silver spots. Once a caravan passed, and once from the hillside came the bark of a dog, caught up and repeated in some farm beyond; otherwise the night was unstirred; and as Mary stared into the immensities where lightning wearies and subsides, a lethargy beset her, her body was imprisoned; but her soul was free, and in a moment it mounted sheerly to a fringe of the ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... cruet—and we—alas! the stranger, stepping in to take pot-luck—we, poor old Christopher North, thanklessly volunteering to help the cock-y-leekie, that otherwise would continue to smoke and steam unstirred in its truly classical utensil! What looking of inutterable things! As impossible to break the silence with your tongue, as to break pond-ice ten inches thick with your knuckle. In comes the cock that made the cock-y-leekie, boiled down in his tough antiquity to a tatter. He disappears among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... The rooms of the house were large and high-pitched; draw to the shutters, and they became as cool as caverns. Around the place the heat lay in wait: heat of wide, shadowless fields, where Haward's slaves toiled from morn to eve; heat of the great river, unstirred by any wind, hot and sleeping beneath the blazing sun; heat of sluggish creeks and of the marshes, shadeless as the fields. Once reach the mighty trees drawn like a cordon around house and garden, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... already clear both of Loveday and the elegant company in which he had been taking tea. He was, above all things, a philosopher, and that means that, though his imagination was easily touched, his heart remained unstirred, He had serious thoughts of ordering a new cabriolet, and on arriving at the market place, he turned into the coachbuilder's to renew the discussion as to whether red or canary yellow were the more fashionable ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... was quick to link and compare. It leaped so swiftly and so subtilely along connecting lines of thought that a hint alone sufficed to set in motion a hundred latent memories and inherited aptitudes. Her father had been a man of native refinement, and she possessed unstirred deeps of character, as Alice now well understood. And from her end of the table she glanced often at the sweetly smiling girl-wife whose beauty abashed Haney. At last she said to him: "Your wife is very ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... about his family which showed more self-mastery than anything else about him. That he was the black sheep of an honorable flock became increasingly evident. He had been the kind of lad who finds in the West a fine field for daredevil adventure. And yet there were unstirred deeps in the man. He was curious about a small book which Alice kept upon her bed, and which she read from time to time with serene meditation on ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... that so long he had looked for. Apparently she was as unconscious as Dorothea, and yet too many men had loved her for her not to understand. Not by the subtlest sign had she shown, however. Indifference or dislike would have been more encouraging, but her cordial frankness had been that of unstirred depths. ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... hear Syllables more simple and intimately clear To earth-taught sense, than the heaven-singing word Of that intemperate wisdom which the sky Shakes down upon each unregarding century, There lying like snow unstirred, Unmelting, on the loftiest peak Above our human and green valley ways. Lowlier and friendlier your beechen branches speak To men of mortal days With hearts too fond, too weak For solitude or converse with that starry race. Their shaken lights, Their lonely splendours and uncomprehended ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... heaven than hers, and they, in far Thibet, had seen the very beginnings of the race which, after six thousand years, had not yet penetrated Colorado. Islanded in a cruel brown ocean of sand, she hid her treasures of gold and silver in her virgin bosom and dreamed, unstirred by any echoes of civilization. When she woke at last it was to the sound of an anvil chorus—to the ring of the mallet and drill, and the hoarse voices of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... murmured, "nears its close. Lo! how they swarm in slumber, friends and foes, Kindred and utter strangers, The millions of this Babylon, stretched beneath The shroud of night, and drawing peaceful breath, Unstirred ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... eager voice stopped. He bent and laid his hand on the older man's and stared at his face, half hidden now in the shadows of the lowering fire. There was no response. The heavy head did not lift and the attitude was unstirred, hopeless. As if struck by a blow he sprang erect and his fingers shut hard. He spoke ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... which blow with blust'ring blast, Shall cease their course, and not the air move, But still unstirred it doth stand, it chanceth at the last To be infect, the truth hereof even day by day we prove; For deep within the caves of earth of force it doth behove, Sith that no winds do come thereto, the air out to beat, By standing still the closed air ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... said. She raised her eyes in a triumphant thrill Of sudden rapture, and of gratitude, And saw herself enwrapped by a long look That came from deeper depths than she had known, And reached a depth in her as yet unstirred. She stood enspelled by his long silent gaze Of subtle power. His unswerving eyes Quelled her by steadfast calm, yet kindled her By lavish love ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... are frank women; they laughed at my excitement—themselves not unstirred. It's so long since we've had ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... must be born with a man, growing with his growth, and strengthening with his strength, until developed by the first great impulse that agitates his being, and generally that is love. There are versifiers innumerable who are not poets, but there are no poets whose hearts remain unstirred by the exciting passion of irrepressible love, when song becomes the written testimony of the inner life. Whether it was so with Charles Mackay we have not ascertained, nor have we cared to inquire. His love-songs, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various |
