"Elusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... days later, and his bold step seemed justified. The directors were an elusive body, and even when got together they found it hard to act with anything like unanimity and despatch; but one afternoon Stephen Giles encountered Mr. Holbrook in the office of one of the hotels and was told that the plan was receiving favourable consideration and was ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... work with children is indicated in the next article by the fact that "the subjects on which children seek information are as varied as those brought by older people, and the material is equally elusive." Miss Abby L. Sargent contributed this article to the Library ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... face the fact that Esteban's months of prison fare, the abuse, the neglect he had suffered in Spanish hands, had left him little more than a living corpse. It seemed as if fever had burned him out, or else some dregs of disease still lingered in his system and had all but quenched that elusive spark which for want of a ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... She did not explain that elusive answer. "But it don't matter about how I feel. When he comes back I've got to do ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... have dozed five minutes or fifteen—long enough at least to leave its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive, almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... that she must be No part of earth, but merely this— The fair, elusive thing we miss In Nature, that we dream we see Yet never see: that goldenly Beckons; that, limbed with rose and pearl, The Greek made a divinity:— A nymph, a god, a glimmering girl, That haunts the ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open sea. We'll slip our moorings to-night, and send word after! I must have you, and at once. I know what it means to see you escaping my hold. Flame-spirits are elusive." ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... were almost a reality. But the money would not be quite sufficient; or the contractors could not be secured; or prices of building material would rise and the cost would prove to be double that originally estimated; it seemed as if the wing were too elusive ever to materialize. On her return to Kiukiang work on the new wing was commenced, and it was finished the following autumn. This addition practically doubled the hospital work, and Miss Hughes wrote ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... youth and training, her ambitions, her disappointments. Quite unconsciously her cynicism crept to the fore, until in word and tone she had almost scoffed at many things that Alwyn held true and dear. The touch was too light, the meaning too elusive, for Alwyn to grasp always the point of attack; but somehow he got the distant impression that Miss Wynn had little faith in Truth and Goodness and Love. Vaguely shocked he grew so silent that she noticed it and concluded she had said too much. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... morning came to him. These sounds—he realized now how he loved them. Verily they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive, indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant so much to him—could ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... leaving Prouty, it was not more than two o'clock before Wallie began to wonder what they would have for supper. They were not making fast time, for his horse stumbled badly and the pack-horses, both old and stiff, travelled slowly, so at three o'clock the elusive mountains seemed as far away ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the Creator, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... half-melted snow. Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed places. Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the freshness of it after the murky city. A sweet and delicate odour was abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open. The young man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine, of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured lumber standing in ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... white bed, in a low ceilinged room, white painted. There were other beds, vacant. A uniformed male nurse puttered around. There was an elusive green tinge to the light that poured ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... and tantalisingly elusive," suggests a Professor of Literature, who has been recently criticising the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... not the quality of posters to be elusive. Their appeal is to the multitude, and it must be instantaneous. It is easily conceivable that a person of an educated artistic sense might stand before a poster and find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing portrayed might be something ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Rastignac, the 'English system' at my finger-ends, and I very soon saw myself without a penny. I fell at once into that precarious way of life which industriously hides cold and miserable depths beneath an elusive surface of luxury; I was a coxcomb without conquests, a penniless fop, a nameless gallant. The old sufferings were renewed, but less sharply; no doubt I was growing used to the painful crisis. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty provision of cakes ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... few in number, only a couple of Mexican miners who had been prospecting, an irritable old Mexican woman, and a German doctor, who was agreeable but elusive. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... that the colyumist is likely to begin his job with the conception that it is to be a perpetual uproar of mirth and high spirits. This lasts about a week. He then learns, in secret, to take it rather seriously. He has to deal with the most elusive and grotesque material he knows—his own mind; and the unhappy creature, everlastingly probing himself in the hope of discovering what is so rare in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a ferment of bitterness. The happiest times in life ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... A day, a week, a month, a year—it is an elusive search I follow, my young friends. May I call ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... of Nature so often made in the history of ethical speculation has furnished but a vague and elusive norm. He who makes it is apt to fall back upon the moral intuitions with which he is furnished, and to pack a greater or less number of them into his notion of Natural Law. [Footnote: See SIR HENRY MAINE'S fascinating chapters ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Income taxes have been used widely in European countries, but not so much in the United States. Numerous attempts have been made by the states to tax incomes, but with small results. Personal incomes, when sought by local assessors, proved to be most elusive. There are (in 1913) but seven states with anything resembling a personal income tax.[7] These are Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. Of these states Wisconsin has the most recent law, and one the widest in its application ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... promises with no fulfillment, added to limited private correspondence with foreign capitals, begat mistrust in elusive theories, which was rudely ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... lies large before us—complicated, abstruse even, yet—suitably to the subject—a delicate one! To hunt down an elusive word, and a more elusive notion! It is to find a set of determinings which, laid together, shall form a circle fitted to confine that inconfinable spirit—a Fairy; or, if you better like plain English, to find the terms needed for signifying, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... little books, too, appeared from time to time, and the volumes had overflowed their original home; and from that fact Christopher gathered that the priest, though he had left the external life of Religion, still followed after the elusive spirit ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... result that in most instances the same thing in the two volumes, English and American, appears under the same name. There are still differences; these result in most cases from different points of view, different estimates or emphasis of characteristics in these ever elusive objects. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... really did make her look like five out of any six women one meets in the street. Fur coats are very levelling things. Later on when I get her to London we'll see what can be done. Jean needs careful dressing to bring out that very real but elusive beauty of hers. I persuaded her in the meantime to get a soft cloth coat made with a skunk collar and cuffs.... She was so funny about under-things. I wanted her to get some sets of crepe-de-Chine things, but she was adamant. She didn't at all approve of them, and said she liked under-things ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... he assured himself that the place was empty. The roar of the water was deafening, seeming to numb the senses. He never knew afterwards whether a light suddenly kindled as he drew near behind the canvas that screened the hut-window, or if it had been there all along and the leaping elusive lightning had blinded him to it. But the light was there before him as he reached the place, and in a moment the knowledge flashed upon him beyond all questioning that he had not ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... am to make a guess, I should suppose that you are that distinguished and elusive person whom the outside world refers to as ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... regarded her across the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City Mouse, but that was gone ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... tall autumnal flowers. The eupatoriums, with their purple crowns, stood like young trees, with an undergrowth of aster and blue spikes of lobelia, tangled in a golden mesh of dodder. A strong, mature odor, mixed alike of leaves and flowers, and very different from the faint, elusive sweetness of spring, filled the air. The creek, with a few faded leaves dropped upon its bosom, and films of gossamer streaming from its bushy fringe, gurgled over the pebbles in its bed. Here and there, on its banks, shone the ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... could not join the group that congregated to listen to Beekstein—Secretary of Education—straighten out the involved syntax or track an elusive x to its secret lair. In the afternoon he could not practice on the diamond with them, learning the trick of holding elusive flies or teaching himself to face thunderous outshoots at ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... perfect moment, when the serene austerity of his face had given the lie to that of which he was accused, lingered with her, a faint elusive thread of hope which would not leave her, urging, suggesting, combating the hard facts to which he himself ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary instincts of our nature—instincts and desires that will remain in us so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver. There are probably not half ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... end of the long living-room, "I must say that Brandon has succeeded in catching that lovely little something that makes her so—what shall I say?—so mysterious? Is that what I want? The word is as elusive as the expression." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... elusive kind of bargain is that set forth in alluring advertisements as a small lot, perhaps three, four, or two dozen articles of a kind, offered at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... in studying up on Avalon, going over and over again anything known about the elusive Tommy Paine, and playing Battle Chess and bickering ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the moment he crossed the threshold of the room, that he had entered an atmosphere charged with elusive emotion. He was not sure of himself or of her as she turned slowly to greet him. Only he was at once conscious that something of that change in her which he had prophetically imagined was already shining out of her eyes. She was at once more natural ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits. In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope. And thus the fair form, which has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... the way has been long and lonely until that elusive goal was reached; and, even now, in the heat of the controversy which ensues, we find ourselves sometimes in a somewhat parlous position, placed, as it were, between two fires; on the one side are those who, though not without ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... valley—Tim—even Tim—all of them were forgotten. I had found the woman of my firelight, the woman of my cloudland, the woman of my sunset country down in the mountains to the west. She, had always been a vague, undefined creature to me—just a woman, and so elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who ofttimes ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... regarded as a moral and individual act, important perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has profoundly..." here he paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said "modified," and let it go—"has profoundly Modified our view of death. In superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often surrounded ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... by a really tragic series of circumstances, at the most critical moment of the contest, Lupin was turning his back on the battlefield and going away, at haphazard, to seek, he knew not where, and beat, he knew not how, the most formidable and elusive enemy ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... with it the exhilaration that had produced the letter to Cynthia and the resentment which had helped me to reason calmly with myself on the intrinsic nature of fascination in woman. Once more Audrey became the centre of my world. But our friendship, that elusive thing which had contrived to exist side by side with my love, had vanished. There was a breach between us which widened daily. Soon we ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... elusive as the point of a half-formed epigram, and at the end of the five minutes he was no ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... attributes to offset those nature has given him, but he can always reduce, eradicate, or change those which interfere with his reception by others. Education and training will work wonders for people who are not blessed with that elusive quality, charm, or that winner of consideration, impressiveness. Self-examination, self-restraint, self-development, are prime elements in such a process. Great men have not been beyond criticism for such qualities. Great men have recognized their value and striven to rid ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Could up toward God through all its darkness grope, And find within its deadened heart to sing These songs of sorrow, love, and faith, and hope? How did it catch that subtle undertone, That note in music heard not with the ears? How sound the elusive reed so seldom blown, Which stirs the soul or melts the heart ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... However, I suppose you'll tell me, as I did you, once, that a right of way in such a case doesn't mean a thoroughfare for the party interested. If my memory serves me, I gave you right of way in Paris to win the affections of a certain elusive Miss Billy here in Boston, if you could. But I see you didn't seem to improve your opportunities," ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... the chain of forces established between Krasnovodsk and India. An end was thus put to Germany's dreams of a Teutonic-Turco-Turanian avenue into the heart of Asia, but the search for an eastern front in Russia against the Central Empires was elusive. For the Bolsheviks, in spite of the murder of Count Mirbach the German ambassador at Moscow on 6 July, grew ever more friendly to the Prussians, and the Entente had to go to Vladivostock for a basis of operations, and rely largely upon ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... is often elusive, for it is frequently difficult to appraise the effects of early environment in determining a man's bent. That ability can be transmitted there is no doubt, for this is borne out by general experience, as well as by the numerous cases of able ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... billow, which once perhaps raised itself there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, as if it were a reflection cast by some mirror hidden in the moon. . . . And behind this monster face, far away in the rear, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... attempt to flatter me. I have no fancy for handling befouled spider webs. Besides, if I had—if such elusive filaments fascinated me—how could I, well-known in person and name, enter upon such a scene without prejudice to ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... face with a glance of grave and unapproachable dignity. He did not even notice, at first, how pretty she was. He saw only those serious eyes. They were wonderful eyes, too; deep, and of a strange, elusive amber, like the water at her feet. They held the mystery of its deep brown pools, and the light of the golden flecks upon its surface. There were the same brown shadows and golden lights repeated in the masses of bronze hair piled like a crown on the ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... in finding him," decided Ralph, as No. 999 started up. "I'm sorry." Dave had been pretty positive as to the identity of his cousin, and the elusive actions of his relative seemed ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... for the Beloved Mother! The linking of their names together, under this Spray of Kentucky Pine—culled by a hand most loving—is like unto finding the other half of a broken Chord, in some Prelude Elusive: for James Whitcomb Riley, deeply endeared himself, to the Dear Lady Here, while he and her son were a long while away, on their Reading Tour. Out of sheer Kindliness, out of Goodness of Heart, he often wrote to her, delightful Letters ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... I have come to believe that I was somewhat mistaken in that boy in Yokohama. He lacked something that this chap has—an elusive quality that is hard to put a name to but which is one of the big essentials that ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... refer to Clyde's wish for a photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of confused wonder. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the master's thought, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... determined this time to outdo Yorke, who followed her every motion, and whom she again began to tease and laugh at. But to Yorke anything was better than her scorn or displeasure, and when, by a lucky stroke and a quick turn of her skates, Betty bent down and captured the elusive ball, he was the first to raise a shout of triumph, in which the merry party joined with the heartiness of good-fellowship ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... gazed, that darkness seemed to become diluted, as it were, with the advancing light that we could almost see sliding along the surface of the water, until suddenly, as though emerging from an invisible mist, a ghostly object appeared, grey and elusive, against the background of darkness, and with one ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... the peculiar feeling that they were somehow familiar, as though related to something he already knew, even though they were so alien. But, strain as he might, he could not at first bring that elusive thought into recognition. ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the Assarbanipal frieze. One wondered a little, seeing whose work he was; but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... taken it easily, as I asked," complained Dave, "we might have gotten hold of that elusive chap. To me he looked hungry. I thought he was eyeing our camp longingly, as though he'd like to stroll down and ask us for food. But that startling charge of the light brigade must have bewildered or frightened him—-and so he went up in smoke, ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... them invisible fingers of death were sweeping back and forth where men and women ran shrieking in terror or waited calmly and dry-eyed for the end. Above them a slender rounded thing wove its pattern of destruction back and forth ... back and forth. A spectral ship—a pale phantom, elusive and dimly seen until it came against the black of rolling ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... American mine, rich beyond dreams, and of a New York maiden, beyond dreams beautiful—both known as the Silver Butterfly. Well named is The Silver Butterfly! There could not be a better symbol of the darting swiftness, the eager love plot, the elusive mystery and the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... too, what merry tunes He would bow at nights or noons That chanced to find him bent to lute a measure, When he made you speak his heart As in dream, Without book or music-chart, On some theme Elusive as a jack-o'-lanthorn's gleam, And the psalm of duty shelved for trill ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... Why? Because he was dumb. He merely sat and looked at them solemnly, as the dumb look. It was not the Dauphin at all. He was hidden in the loft above. The visit of the Conventionals was not satisfactory. The rumours were not stilled by it. There is nothing so elusive or so vital as a rumour. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... sermon, wrestled mentally with the parable. It seemed to her it was a very slippery parable! She would no sooner highly resolve to hold it till she had wrenched its moral from it, and reduced that moral to terms which the youngest babe could surely comprehend, than she would find that the elusive subject had slipped from her grasp, and her whole mind would be fixed upon the problem of how long it would take a fly to crawl all the way across the expansive back of Mrs. Graham, who sat in the pew ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... fling to the winds, set at naught, nullify, declare null and void; cancel &c. (wipe off) 552. retract, go back from, be off, forfeit, go from one's word, palter; stretch a point, strain a point. Adj. violating &c. v.; lawless, transgressive; elusive, evasive. unfulfilled ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the narrow streets, staring around him, trying to get some idea of what his new home was like. The winding, unpaved roads and dark, weatherbeaten houses stirred an elusive tag-end of memory in him. He had seen a place like this on Earth, but he couldn't remember anything about it. The recollection was as tantalizing as an itch; but he ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... something that rendered negligible the occasionally creaking mechanism and crudeness of stage business and rendition; something compounded of dew and sun and wind, such as could only be found in a veritable Forest of Arden; something elusive, exquisite, iridescent; something he had supposed had vanished from the world about the time they put Pan out of business and stopped up the Pipes of Arcady. It was enchanting, elemental, genuine Elizabethan, had the spirit of Master ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... long before the latter sees him. A hunt after bongo means long hours or even days of hunting the forests, with hardships of travel so disheartening that comparatively few white sportsmen attempt to go in after the elusive antelope. Kermit Roosevelt, however, with the good fortune that has followed his hunting adventures, succeeded in killing a cow and calf bongo after only a few hours of ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... Not that so elusive a thing as personal charm can be neatly plotted by the card. We love certain people because we love them; and since that is so, everything they do is interesting to us. A great writer lives in his books, to be sure, but we want to know what he actually did in the flesh. ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... problem of art. I am deeply indebted to him for this insight. Quite aside from their intrinsic interest, linguistic forms and historical processes have the greatest possible diagnostic value for the understanding of some of the more difficult and elusive problems in the psychology of thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit that we call history or progress or evolution. This value depends chiefly on the unconscious and unrationalized nature ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... literature, the emotional element predominates, and it should be one to which all mankind, to a greater or less degree, are subject. It is the predominance of these emotional and artistic elements which makes literature a difficult subject to teach. The element of feeling is elusive and can best be taught by the influence of contagion. There is usually less difficulty about the intellectual element, that is, about the meaning of words and phrases, the general thought of the lesson, and the relation of the thoughts to ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... where I'd seen the name Eltwiss. It was on the financial page, not far away from the elusive quotation on Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates for which I'd been idly searching. "Eltwiss Explosives Cut Melon." Funny how things come back to you as soon as you put them out ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Chauvigny, situated some twenty miles higher up the Vienne. Edward at once started in pursuit, only to find that the French had retired before him to Poitiers, eighteen miles due west of Chauvigny. Careless of his convoy, he hurried across country in the hope of catching the elusive enemy, but was only in time to fight a rear-guard skirmish at a manor named La Chaboterie, on the road from Chauvigny to Poitiers, on September, 17. That night the English lay in a wood hard by the scene of action, suffering terribly from want of water. Next day, Sunday, September ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... elusive mental dews that might awaken something definite concerning her hazy impression of the man beside her, she spoke pleasantly, conventionally, touching idly any topic that might have a bearing; and, under a self-possession so detached as to ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Yes, instantly he was aware of a change, in the eyes, at the mouth. An elusive, vague, distant kind of disturbance—he could not say trouble—had stolen into her eyes, had taken possession of the corners of the mouth; and he was conscious of something exotic, self-indulgent, and "emancipated." She had always ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... solitary state. During the meal I heard a couple of shots, but paid no attention to them, as rifles were constantly being fired off in the neighbourhood of the camp. Later in the evening, I went out as usual to watch for our elusive foes, and took up my position in a crib made of sleepers which I had built on a big girder close to a camp which I thought was likely to be attacked. Soon after settling down at my post, I was surprised to hear the man-eaters growling ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... herself and her hostels seriously, and think that it mattered how she worked for them and what they became. She tried to give all the attention her children's upbringing, her husband's ailments and the general demands of her household left free, to this complex, elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. Instead of thinking that these hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and put in a Mrs. Pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away, she had come to realize partly by dint of her own conscientious ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... youth in a deathless world than anything else in a temporary earth. It was a day on which even the jaded heart is in the mood to begin all over again, in renewed pursuit of the happiness which up to now has been elusive. To Derek, whose heart was by no means jaded, it was a day on which the instinctive hope of youth, which he supposed he had outlived, proved itself of one essence with ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... events which his sight could not take in. Thus he hoped to find in the historic recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was conscious. Few single careers could satisfy this longing, being only incomplete parts of the elusive whole of the history of the world; one was a quarter, as it were, the other a half of the proof; imagination did the rest and completed them. From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... twenty years. In fact, long before our wells came into being, and I can honestly say that, though I am not by any means an unintelligent man, I know just as little about the Russian to-day as I did when I went there. He's the most elusive creature. You think you know him two days after you have met him. Two days later you find that you have changed all your opinions about him; and by the end of the first year, if you have kept a careful note of your observations and impressions ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... resplendent smile upon me—and I failed to recognise its divine countenance. Or did it really visit me, sit at my bedside, and is forgotten by me, like a dream? Like a dream, I repeated disconsolately. Elusive images flitted over my soul, awakening in it something between pity and bewilderment ... you too, I thought, dear, familiar, lost faces, you, thronging about me in this deadly solitude, why are you so profoundly and mournfully silent? From what abyss have you arisen? How am I to interpret your enigmatic ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... attracted attention anywhere; together they were doubly striking-looking. Arnold, tall and slight, carrying his head high, fair of complexion as a peachy-cheeked girl, was a peculiarly distinguished-looking man. The delicate pince-nez he wore emphasized slightly the elusive air of supercilious courtliness he always conveyed. Now, as he spoke to Ruth, who, although a tall girl, was some inches shorter than he, he maintained a strict perpendicular from the crown of his head to his heels, only looking down with his eyes. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... answered, again with that elusive shadow of a smile, "It doesn't matter," and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias, senor," and he turned again ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... far beyond the point to which his methods had previously led him. It was, for all who heard it or came to know it, a revelation of the possibilities of tonal effect—this dim and wavering and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... autopsical research revealed absolutely nothing but a general disorganisation of the blood-corpuscles, a most peculiar thing, but one the significance of which none of us here can fathom. If it was poison that he took or that had been given to him, it was the most subtle, intangible, elusive, that ever came to my knowledge. Why, there is absolutely no trace ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... called, and men were polite, but when Estelle began those delicate personal conversations which led the way to deeper spiritual contacts she discovered that nothing followed. She could not say that she found the men elusive; stone walls are not elusive, but they do not lend themselves to an easy way across country. As to women, theoretically Estelle desired their friendship just as much as that of men; but in practice she generally found them unsympathetic, ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... 1932-33) in which over 8 million died. In World War II, German and Soviet armies were responsible for some 7 to 8 million more deaths. Although final independence for Ukraine was achieved in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, democracy remained elusive as the legacy of state control and endemic corruption stalled efforts at economic reform, privatization, and civil liberties. A peaceful mass protest "Orange Revolution" in the closing months of 2004 forced the authorites to overturn a rigged presidential election and to ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... blew, a rather raucous, strident blast. There was moment's stillness . . . and then from the woods over the river came a multitude of fairy echoes, sweet, elusive, silvery, as if all the "horns of elfland" were blowing against the sunset. Anne ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into the joke of the thing, co-operated with great heartiness, and for the remainder of the voyage there was no more elusive person on board than Rumple Plumstead; so the old lady and her daughter were forced to lavish on the rest of the family the tenderness they felt solely for the boy, ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... no wind and the frost was not keen. Gray clouds trailed across the sky that was touched with yellow in the west, and soft, elusive lights played about the dale. Patches of snow on the fellsides gleamed and faded; mossy belts glowed vivid green, red berries in the hedgerows shone among withered leaves and fern, and then the light passed on and left the valley dim. Something in its calm beauty reacted on the girl ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... the arts, music is practised most and thought about least. Why this should be the case may be explained on several grounds. A sweet mystery enshrouds the nature of music. Its material part is subtle and elusive. To master it on its technical side alone costs a vast expenditure of time, patience, and industry. But since it is, in one manifestation or another, the most popular of the arts, and one the enjoyment ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is difficult, but too great effusiveness is as disgusting as too great abruptness is unsatisfactory. The elusive but happy medium is the work of the ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... remains," said Kew, "that I must leave you by the ten something. I must leave you to sniff without my help, like bloodhounds, along the trail of the elusive Jay. But I won't bid any one a fervent good-bye, because I daresay I shall be back again on leave for lack of anything else to do in three weeks' time, if we can't get across the Channel. In that case I'll meet you one day ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... eyes so delicately charming as the daguerrotypes of the sixties. As we tipped the old picture this way and that, to catch the right light on the image under the glass, the very uncertainty of effect seemed to give it an elusive fascination. To my mind the birds in the bush have always brighter plumage than any in the hand, and one of these early photographs leaves ever, no matter from what angle you look upon it, much to the imagination. So Geoff ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... but the detective's hypothesis. Open-minded, gifted with an alert intelligence, Fuselier had carefully followed the investigations of Juve and Fandor. He knew every detail, every vicissitude connected with the tracking of this elusive bandit. Since then the magistrate had taken the deepest interest in the pursuit of the criminal. Thanks to his support, Juve had been enabled to take various measures, otherwise almost impossible, avoid the many obstacles offered by legal procedure, risk the striking of many a blow he could ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Jack Reddin's horse in every direction but the right one. Edward went to Hunter's Spinney every day. He began to find a new world among the budding hyacinths on the soft leafy soil, breaking up on every side with the push of eager lives coming through, and full of those elusive, stimulating scents ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... ethnic and civil strife since independence in 1991, Georgia began to stabilize in 1994. Separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been dormant for more than two years, although political settlements remain elusive. Russian peacekeepers are deployed in both regions and a UN Observer Mission is operating in Abkhazia. As a result of these conflicts, Georgia still has about 250,000 internally displaced people. In November 1995, Georgia held peaceful, generally free and fair nationwide presidential ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... aware of his life's flow And bears its winding murmur, and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze; And there arrives a lull in the hot race, Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest." ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... comprehending none of these things which lay before him as in a panorama. Instead, his memory was conjuring up a pair of subtle, blue-gray eyes, now pleading, now coquettish, now frankly defiant; two slim, white, wonderful hands; the echo of a pleasant, throaty laugh; a splendid, elusive, radiant-haired phantom. Truly, a woman of mystery! Who was this Isabel Thorne who, for months past, had been the storm-center and directing mind of a vast international intrigue which threatened the world with war? Who, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies it. If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his violin, spent three days without practising, he lost what he called the stops of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden frame, the strings, the bow, and himself; ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... about as heavy as the average lady would care to lift, and worth something like $1250 each. Two or four of these were tied on the back of a donkey and a train of them driven under guard to the town office, whence they were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles for the vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by revolutionists. On this same ground the old colonial Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled patio, treat it with mercury, and drive mules round and round in it for ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... those airs of lassitude. She exasperated me by the provocation of her nonchalance, by something elusive and defiant in her very form which I wanted to seize. I ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of large blue eyes, cold as the waters of the Tiber and like unto them mysterious and elusive, were turned fully on ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... head with a cunning leer. Let them go and seek it as he had to do, he said. And forthwith his advice was acted upon by no less than a dozen men, who promptly abandoned profitable billets for the pursuit of the elusive yellow ore. ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... plainly through the tumult of his emotions was what Jan had come to know as the picture in his brain. Shadowy and indistinct at first, in pale, elusive lines of mental fabric, he saw the picture growing; and in its growth he saw first the soft, sweet outlines of a woman's face, and then great luring eyes, dark like his own—and before these eyes, which gazed upon him with overwhelming ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... the man who is just awakening to a consciousness of that elusive entity the mind should confuse it with that breath which is the most striking outward and visible sign that distinguishes a living man ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... meant to buttress Spencer's contention in its weakest place and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced attendance in that thought. He looked about him with genuine and candid interest. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a moment to the elusive question of motive, which was not without influence on Rumania's conduct. Were the action and inaction of the plenipotentiaries merely the result of a lack of cohesion among their ideas? Or was it that they were thinking mainly of the fleeting ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... by telling how the individual looked and what she wore. No pen-portraits of Clara Schumann have come down to us, for the reason that she was too great, too elusive in spirit, for any snapshot artist to attempt her. She never looked twice the same. In feature she was commonplace, her form lacked the classic touch, and her raiment was as plain as the plumage of a brown thrush in an autumn hedgerow. She was as homely as George ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... said, that Thackeray went in for truth, and Dickens for mere caricature. There is a huge accumulation of truth, down to the smallest detail, in Dickens: he seems sometimes a mere mountain of facts. Thackeray, in comparison, often seems quite careless and elusive; almost as if he did not quite know where all his characters were. There is a truth behind the popular distinction; but it lies much deeper. Perhaps the best way of stating it is this: that Dickens used reality, while aiming at an effect of romance; while ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... conquering sleep, descending on mine eyes, First smites the brow with unresisted blow; Unseen, elusive, like old age, she tries To gather strength by ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... took him so long to kindle his blaze. He found a place sheltered from the wind, whittled many shavings from dead wood, and used his flint and steel until his hands ached, coaxing forth the elusive sparks and trying to make them ignite the wood. They died by hundreds, but, after infinite industry and patience, they took hold, and he sheltered the tiny and timid blaze with his body, lest it change its mind and go away after all. Though it sank several times, it concluded ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... vivid as the hours passed; and there was an elusive but sinister significance about it that engrossed her, but which she couldn't name or understand. She didn't mention the matter to Bill. She couldn't have told why, for the plain reason that in her simplicity ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... men who love Flip, and whose lives are ruined by her, are easier to understand. About Sir Timothy Swift, for example, there is a touch of the Harlequin, or rather Pierrot, that betrays his origin. I will not tell you the story, for one reason because its charm is too elusive to retrieve. I content myself by saying that it seems to me the best work we have yet had from Mr. CALTHROP, combining his special and expected graces with ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... is as good as another, even although they are greatly influenced by the fact of success and the amassing of money. But the inwardness of the word Aristocracy has little or no meaning to them; it is too elusive, too intangible. But at that moment Paul realised something of what it meant. This girl belonged to a class of which he knew nothing. She created an atmosphere utterly different from that breathed in a Lancashire manufacturing town. He could not put it into words, but he knew it was ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... experienced the joys of the sugar camp while "stirring off" the lively, creeping maple sugar? Both had been thumped upon the bare head by the falling hickory nuts in windy weather; had hunted the black walnuts half hidden in the leaves; had scraped the ground for the elusive beechnuts. They had ventured to apple parings together when not ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... interpreter dealt them out rapidly, and his rendering gave token that the Filipinos have already had lessons in diplomacy—even in the Spanish style of polite prevarication—or, if that may be a shade too strong, let us say elusive reservation—the use of language that is more shady than silence, the framing of phrases that may be interpreted so as not to close but to continue discussion and leave wide fields for controversy. The General did not refer to his counselors, or the congress that is in the background ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... gathered on the porch at 126 East Centre was the same as it had been on the day that Josie had tracked the elusive Dink to her lair. The young men were tilted back in their chairs at the same angle, and the young women were equally taken up with their ear puffs and frizzes. The clientele of 126 was an ever-changing one, but ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson |
