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Absorbing   Listen
adjective
Absorbing  adj.  Swallowing, engrossing; as, an absorbing pursuit.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Absorbing" Quotes from Famous Books



... to relate the romantic and absorbing story of his long struggle with the popes. They speedily discovered that he was bent upon establishing a powerful state to the south of them, and upon extending his control over the Lombard cities in such a manner that the papal possessions would be held as in a vise. This, they felt, should never ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... sun, with provident care, has made and given to us coal. This omnipotent worker has stored away in past ages an inexhaustible reservoir of his power which man may easily mine and direct, thus releasing himself from absorbing toil. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... great-grandmother had been a bona fide de la Rocheaimard, and who was enabled, at once, to point out to the poor deserted orphan some forty or fifty persons, who stood in the same degree of affinity to her. It is needless to say that this conversation was of absorbing interest to both; so much so, indeed, that Betts momentarily forgot his love, and by the time it had ended, Adrienne was disposed to overlook most of her over scrupulous objections to rewarding that very passion. But the hour admonished them of ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... The all-absorbing passion for fighting led to the invention of mimic warfare in the shape of jousts and tournaments. [14] These exercises formed the medieval equivalent of the Greek athletic games and the Roman gladiatorial shows. The joust was a contest between two ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... lifted and the green flag raised; and it was in furtherance of this object, on which the hearts of Irishmen are still set, that the men whose names shine through the pages on which the story of Ireland's struggles for national existence is written, suffered and died. To follow out that mournful but absorbing story is not, however, the object aimed at in the following pages. The history of Ireland is no longer a sealed volume to the people; more than one author has told it truthfully and well, and the list of books devoted to it is every day receiving ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... together in corners earnestly discussing, not the question whether Servia should have an outlet on the Adriatic, or the possibilities of a British success in international polo contests, but the more absorbing topic of the problematic Aztec or Nilotic origin ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... wondering but believing audience. He glibly narrated the events which took place in the Temple up to the removal of the miscreant Simon from his post; but this part of the tale possessed little attraction, for the cruelties of the shoemaker-tutor were well known; but the sequel was of absorbing interest. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... could have preached Thomas Adams's sermons. Judge Willis's profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served him here in good stead. The fact is it is simply impossible to exaggerate the quick-wittedness and light-heartedness of a great literary genius. The absorbing power, the lightning-like faculty of apprehension, the instant recognition of the uses to which any fact or fancy can be put, the infinite number and delicacy of the mental feelers, thrust out in all directions, which belong to the creative brain and keep it in tremulous and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... within the white frame of her sunbonnet, but its expression did not deepen. She did not pity the dead man because he died without the money he had had a chance to make. She evidently had not even scant knowledge of that most absorbing passion, the love of gain, and she ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... crime. Every one worships as he pleases. Only a few hours of work a day are necessary, and all find genuine pleasure in that. In Utopia life is given to be a joy. No advantage is taken of the weak or the unfortunate. Twentieth-century dreams of social justice are not more vivid and absorbing than Sir Thomas More's. It is pleasant to think that the Roman Catholic church in 1886 added to her list of saints this lovable man, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... average intelligence are to-day content to be breeding-machines, and their husbands support them in that attitude. With regard to domestic help, even were this, or nursing schools, or both, provided by the State, the responsibility for her children's well-being would be still all-absorbing, at least during the first four years of each one's growth. Students of child psychology are insistent that the pre-school period is the most important in the life of the individual and requires the most skilful attention. ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan

... abundance of contests answer one good end, does it even divert attention from the fact that it is absorbing the funds, if not strictly taking the place of the 1892 International Chess Tournament which we are under engagement to our own public and still more to foreign chess players to provide in return for Breslau, Amsterdam and ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... he and the fair Tabitha should not cross each other's path that evening. To run away he felt to be an undignified proceeding, and if Tabitha had set her mind on speaking to him, utterly useless. Accordingly, he kept his back carefully turned to her, and professed an absorbing ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt

... absorbing the gilt letters and their significance, communicated to her poised body a species of paralysis. She stood without motion and without strength. The books slid from her arms and fluttered to the floor. Presently repellance grew under the ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on, we fell apart—that is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled—my courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts, and fears; our long rides together; ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... centuries to come, to the all-absorbing authority of the State, the masses of the people made a formidable attempt at reconstructing society on the old basis of mutual aid and support. It is well known by this time that the great movement of the reform was not a mere revolt against the abuses of the Catholic ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... apprenticeship—in his case, a very brief one—as a pedagogue. In the autumn of 1878 he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and taught English for a year at the Boys' High School. But he presently found an occupation in this progressive city which proved far more absorbing. A few months before his arrival certain energetic spirits had founded a weekly paper, the Age, a journal which, they hoped, would fill the place in the Southern States which the very successful New York Nation, under the editorship of Godkin, was then occupying in the North. Page at ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... in the silent lobby, with the two men belted and booted on their tressels, the clock ticking gently by his side, like the soft quiet voice of a chatty but not tiresome friend, Frank read book after book with absorbing interest. History, poetry, travel, romance—all kinds were equally devoured. At the particular time of which we write, however, he read more of poetry than of ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... serious, and it sometimes happened that after he had arrived at some queer little island where the native prince and the English governor sat in judgment together, his interest in the intricacies of their laws would give way to the more absorbing occupation of chasing wild boar or shooting at tigers from the top of an elephant. And so he was not only regarded as an authority on many forms of government and of law, into which no one else had ever taken the trouble to look, but his books on big game were eagerly ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... itself, and which, at night, changes into a rich blue-black velvet, studded with silvery emblazonments, that dance and dazzle in the pellucid air; listening to the varied voices of Nature, each eager to give tongue to its joy; eating healthful, simple food with appetite and relish; absorbing the assurance that Nature means good and nothing but good to man, thus coming nearer to the heart of God; losing the fret and worry of money-getting and all other of Life's lower ambitions and strivings; ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... linger around thy grave till I die, and then the stranger shall lay me by thy side!" What could Naomi do but fold the beautiful being to her bosom and be silent, except as tears gave utterance to her emotions. Such a heart outweighs the treasures of the world, and such absorbing love, truth, and virtue, make all the accomplishments of life appear worthless ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley

... divinities were local in character, each tribe possessing its own group, each god having functions similar to those of other groups. Some, however, had or gained a more universal character, absorbing divinities with similar functions. Still this local character must be borne in mind. The numerous divinities of Gaul, with differing names—but, judging by their assimilation to the same Roman divinity, similar functions, are best understood as gods of local groups. This is probably true also ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... is too engrossing a subject, and one too deeply shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew. No wonder that the consideration at that country toward which mankind is ever being hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as contemplated earthly journeys proverbially are. Few people but have laid out skeleton tours through its ideal regions, and perhaps, as in the mapping beforehand of merely mundane travels, one element of attraction ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... an end must come to all the works, institutions, ordinances and covenants of men; none more portray the eternity of God's purpose—and, we may say, none have carried so mighty an influence, or had the power to stamp their divinity upon the mind by absorbing every feeling of the soul, to the extent of the one which has appeared ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... closely defined. It may include natural faculty, for Christ's gifts usually follow the line of that; and the larger the nature, the more of Him it can contain. But it also includes spiritual receptiveness and faithfulness, which increase the absorbing power. The capacity to receive will also be the capacity to administer, and it will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... buffetings by hard fortune suffers many hardships at the hands of a bargeman, his master, and runs away. The various adventures and experiences with which he meets on the road to success, the bear-hunt in which he takes part, and the battle at which he acts as war correspondent, form a story of absorbing interest and after a boy's ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, altered the relations between the English and Spanish courts. Elizabeth (1558-1603) was possessed of an imperious, haughty, energetic character; she had remarkable intelligence and an absorbing patriotism. She inspired confidence in her advisers and respect among her people, so that she was commonly called "Good Queen Bess" despite the fact that her habits of deceit and double-dealing gave color to the French king's remark that she was the greatest liar in Christendom. This was ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... AEgean peoples to migrate and seek new homes for themselves. Landing in Northern Syria, the sea-peoples quickly made themselves masters of the fragments of the once formidable Hittite confederacy, and, absorbing in their alliance the Hittites, who may indeed have been of their own kin, they moved southwards along the sea-coast, their fleet of war-galleys keeping pace with the advance of the land army. They established a central camp and place of arms in the land of Amor, ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... obliged to contend as a junior. The carnival given by the Semper Fidelis Club in which the Alice in Wonderland Circus was enacted, the important part which Jean, the old hunter of Oakdale fame, played in one Overton girl's life, the message Emma Dean forgot to deliver, and countless other absorbing incidents served to fill their ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower

... thought his sympathy for her revived. She became of absorbing interest to him as an escape from himself and an object about which his thwarted activities could cluster. He felt less drearily alone because of her being there, on the other side of the door, and in his gratitude to her for giving ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... that analogy fails to guide us towards any determination on several other points: for instance, whether cells, derived from the same parent-cell, may, in the regular course of growth, become developed into different structures, from absorbing peculiar kinds of nutriment, independently of their union with distinct gemmules. We shall appreciate this difficulty if we call to mind, what complex yet symmetrical growths the cells of plants yield when they are inoculated by the poison of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... the conversation for a time. Then there was a diversion, the new soprano having consented to sing. The murmur of voices subsided for the most part, save from a party of elderly people, hard of hearing, who continued their absorbing conversation throughout. Miss Trilling sang a love song with much expression, and responded to an encore with a humorous selection. The young people applauded loudly, and their elders smiled with indiligent pleasure. Hubert continued his ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock

... them. Then when you nurse sick people, and find them not as well as could be expected, why go into hysterics? MAR. Why not? DES. Because it's too jumpy for a sick-room. MAR. How strange! Oh, Master! Master!—how shall I express the all-absorbing gratitude that—(about to throw herself at his feet). DES. Now! (Warningly). MAR. Yes, I know, dear—it shan't occur again. (He is seated—she sits on the ground by him.) Shall I tell you one of poor Mad Margaret's odd thoughts? Well, then, when I ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... derided. Railway projects were set on foot in great numbers, and Manchester became a centre from which main lines and branches were started in all directions. The interest, however, which attaches to these later schemes is of a much less absorbing kind than that which belongs to the earlier history of the railway and the steps by which it was mainly established. We naturally sympathise more keenly with the early struggles of a great principle, its trials and its difficulties, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... Mrs. Strong, however, had never got farther than anti-vaccination, to her a holy cause, for she set down the skin disease with which she was constitutionally afflicted to the credit, or discredit, of vaccination practised upon her in her youth. Outside of this great and absorbing subject her mind occupied itself almost entirely with that well-known but most harmless of the crazes, the theory that we Anglo-Saxons are the progeny of the ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... promise not to wander off for long walks with any of your admirers. Not that I fear the admirers, but the thieves that are bound to get into that crowd one way or another. They have a way of unclasping necklaces even of the most circumspect wives in the company of not too absorbing men." ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... absorbing reflections were broken into by the turning of a key in the lock of his cell at an unusual hour. Through the half-opened door he heard the close of a conversation between his jailor and ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... had a faint remembrance of. She was lightly dressed; looked bold, and haggard, and flaunting, and poor; but seemed, for the time, to have given all that to the wind which was blowing, and to have nothing in her mind but going after them. As the dark distant level, absorbing their figures into itself, left but itself visible between us and the sea and clouds, her figure disappeared in like manner, still no nearer to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, Washington, 1881, an epoch-making book of rare and absorbing interest.] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... suddenly upon a box of toys; Phil following them around the room putting in a word here and there, reminding Adam of something he had forgotten, or calling her attention to some object hidden in a shadow that even her quick absorbing glance had overlooked. ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... Kennedy. Here, I felt instinctively, were the "new" woman and the "new" man, if there are such things. I wondered just how they would hit it off together. For the moment, at least, Clare Kendall was an absorbing study, as she greeted us with a frank, jerky ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... to people who are laboring under the illusion they are amusing themselves that the game, absorbing so much of their attention, is not as exciting as tennis nor as clever in combinations as croquet, that in fact it would be quite as amusing to roll an empty barrel several times around a plowed field, they laugh at you in derision and instantly put you down in their profound minds ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... for the development of organization among women workers, she was for years 'the practical director of a considerable social movement.' Her four volumes on Art in France in the Eighteenth Century, which occupied her from this time onwards, were not more absorbing to her than was the growth of the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... absorbing and transcendent introspections, he approached his now odious home upon Pig and Sow Point by way of the old meeting-house. There of a sudden he came upon his patron, Captain Obadiah, superintending the burial of the last of three victims of his odious commerce, ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... XIII appeared one Floche. No one knew too much of where he came from.. He married a Mahe, and from that time a phenomenon was brought forth; the Floches in their turn prospered and multiplied exceedingly, so that they ended little by little in absorbing the Mahes, whose numbers diminished until their fortune passed entirely into the hands of the newcomers. Without doubt, the Floches brought new blood, more vigorous physical organs, a temperament which adapted ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola

... deep and absorbing passion, there can be no doubt. Sir Dynas, the Seneschal, tells the Queen la Belle Isould that Sir Tristram is near: "Thenne for very pure joye la Beale Isould swouned, & whan she myghte speke, she ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... general cause others are combined in the Llanos of Venezuela; namely the action of the small grasses which impoverish the soil; the total absence of trees and brushwood; the sandy winds, the heat of which is increased by contact with a surface absorbing the rays of the sun during twelve hours, and unshaded except by the stalks of the aristides, chanchuses, and paspalums. The progress observable on the vegetation of large trees and the cultivation of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... about him? Why, he was captured long ago, and has since died of old age. I am surprised at your interrupting me with such questions. Pray ask for no more tales till we get to the really absorbing story ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... mean, dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral turpitude and anti-social conduct for which no amount of his ill-gotten gains, received by inheritance, can be an adequate compensation. Says Maudsley, "I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing the whole energies of a life, predisposes to mental degeneracy in the offspring, either to moral defect, or to intellectual deficiency, or to outbursts of positive insanity." And the same author says elsewhere: "The anti-social, egoistic ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde

... father's sake to forgive. She shrank away from the man's company, avoided him whenever possible, and at last when he seemed to be almost omnipresent, and growing every day more insistent in his attentions, she cast about her for some absorbing interest which would take her out ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... the week absorbing these reiterated facts, and trying, vaguely, to resolve them into some sort of order: to come to some sort of decision regarding his own course of action. Certain he was that he knew where to lay hands upon Ternoff's assassin. Certain also was he ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... with a degree of haughtiness which to certain persons became impertinence, "this is the reason that you trouble me in the midst of so many absorbing concerns! an affair for the police! Well, sir, you ought to know that we no longer have a police, since we are no longer ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... every morn his fevered lip would greet, From hers, who but with friendship his would meet: But to that gentle touch, through brain and breast Flashed the thrilled spirit's love-devouring heat; In that absorbing sigh perchance more blest, Than vulgar minds may be ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... distances between these Acadian settlements, large sugar plantations are found. These have been extending for years, and increasing, absorbing the habitats of these primitive and innocent people, who retire to some little ridge of land deeper in the swamp, a few inches higher than the plane of the swamp, where they surround their little mud-houses with an acre or so of open land, from the products of which, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... lessons, he sang some of Mendelssohn's Lieder very pleasingly, and knew most of the bass music from the Messiah by heart. He began to play a few scales on the piano, and hoped to surprise his sisters on his return to England by playing chants, but the Arabic and Hebrew studies proved too absorbing; he grudged the time, and thought the result disproportioned ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... breadth is a span of ten miles. She was looking across it now, and innocent enough that level plain of terror appeared at that moment. And yet it was the curse of the ranching district, for, annually, hundreds of cattle met an untimely death in its cruel, absorbing bosom. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid's mind usually gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the work of the author of the sonnets of The House of Life, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... from this little lecture to the Queen, honest and faithful though it be, to the all-absorbing subject of Gossip, the Royal Marriage—and first, and foremost, comes the Royal Wedding Cake, which weighed nearly 300lbs. It was three yards in circumference and about 14 inches deep. This was the cake itself, which, according to ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... cinched forty of the class. There should be some Latin saying that would just fit such a case, but I do not know it. It would start, "Exit ——," and the exit would refer to the exit of the loafer in large numbers from Carl's courses and the exit from the heart of the loafer of the absorbing love he had held for Carl. His troubles were largely over. Someone else could care for the maimed, the ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... listen with absorbing interest to the discussion about who should represent the different characters in wax-work, and she was allowed to be present at the rehearsals, but there was no question of such a little thing taking a part. She thought ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton

... interest in anything. She felt inclined to do something desperate—to throw the cushions at him, to do anything, in short, to rouse him from his calmness. Then he made that remark about government, and his voice deepened, and his gray eyes shone, and she was aware that he had a great and absorbing interest in life, and that he could be roused in one direction at least. To do her justice, she had quick perceptions, and the impression on her mind ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... the United States should not only be willing, but desirous to know, what is the matter-of-fact evidence on this all-absorbing question. It is but lately that any method existed, of coming at undisputed facts, which would throw light upon this subject. The Congress of the United States seeing this, thought proper to order that such facts as tend to demonstrate the relative prosperity ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... supervision and naval operation, has safely transported more than a million of our soldiers to France. When the history of the war finally comes to be written, our success in the handling of oversea transportation will not be the least bright among the pages of that absorbing history. ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... bows, on a third a bridle; a fourth was open and from it protruded a sheaf of those wooden swords which the Romans used for fencing-practice as we use foils. Commodus could never wholly free himself from his absorbing passion for ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... and allowed her, in supposed widowhood, to marry a de facto husband whom she adored. So you will see that the turning up again of Number One, unrecognised and surrounded by the trappings of god-head and the adoration of the Elect, creates for Nancy a very pretty and absorbing problem in social ethics. But Mr. HOWELLS has done more than this. Having shown Dylks as the arch-villain and impostor that he is, he proceeds to the subtler task of enlisting our sympathy for him. It is this that gives ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various

... flakes of light the dark wake our ship left behind her, as if the glory of the West was bidding good-bye to us, while the light of the East welcomed the newcomers from far-off lands. Brighter and bluer grew the sky, swiftly absorbing the remaining pale stars one after the other, and we felt something touching in the sweet dignity with which the Queen of Night resigned her rights to the powerful usurper. At last, descending lower ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... that Bud was only Buddy grown bigger, and he had never lacked the spirit to look out for himself. Remember, too, that he must have acquired something of a vocabulary, in the course of twenty-one years of absorbing everything that ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... it was reserved for Rembrandt, by his boldness and genius, to put a limit to its further application. Breadth, the constituent character of this mode of treatment, cannot be extended; indeed, it is said that Rembrandt himself extended it too far; for, absorbing seven-eighths in obscurity and softness, though it renders the remaining portion more brilliant, yet costs too much. This principle, however, contains the greatest poetry of the art, in contradistinction to the severe outline and harsh colouring ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet

... very absorbing and she and Chrystie had questions to ask. Fong's entrance for the tray prevented Lorry from joining in. As the Chinaman leaned down to take it, she whispered to him to open a window, the room was hot. Her eye, touching Mr. Mayer, had noticed that ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... it may be claimed that the older Americans and the finest types do not reproduce so freely as social well-being requires, there is much hope that movements of population, so much freer here than elsewhere among the educated and competent, will lead to better sex-adjustments and to the absorbing of more first-class women ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... canoes of Sioux warriors, bound against the Illinois; and not long after, five Canadians appeared, one of whom had been badly wounded in a recent encounter with a band of Outagamies, Sacs, and Winnebagoes bound against the Sioux. To take one another's scalps had been for ages the absorbing business and favorite recreation of all these Western tribes. At or near the expansion of the Mississippi called Lake Pepin, the voyagers found a fort called Fort Perrot, after its builder;[361] and on an island near ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... forth together, and Master Cale played cicerone, and showed Tom many strange and wonderful things, telling him absorbing stories the while. He showed him the limits of the ravages of the Great Fire, which he could remember well, as he was ten years old at the time. He took them into many of the churches afterwards built by Wren, ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green

... for twelve years, and he grieved for her deeply and sincerely. Yet the greatest and most absorbing passion of his life was for his daughter, Theodosia, who was named for her mother and was born in the first year of their marriage. When little Theodosia was first laid in her father's arms, all that was best in him answered to her mute plea for his affection, and later, all that was best ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... time all these schemes have weighed but little in the scale against the one absorbing ambition of his life. In a word, Michael is a hot Panslavist. Of this he makes no secret, and he has probably shared hitherto, in common with all Servians, very exaggerated notions of the importance which Servia would assume were the dismemberment of Turkey to take place. Their self-conceived ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... and let Lily lead her up and introduce her, as it might be called, to Cousin Bessie as Lily called her, a less formidable sound than "Aunt Elizabeth." They were both kissed, and she endured it. Angela was, as her brothers and sisters said, "very good," and scrupulously abstained from absorbing the child all the evening, letting Elizabeth show her pictures and tell her stories, to which, by Lily's example, she listened quietly ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... and went on to give him the latest tidings. Finding that the war was the absorbing topic in this little household, the boy developed new interest in it and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... of irresistible, rib-tickling fun, the Bad Boy, an incarnate but lovable imp of mischief, records his daily exploits, experiences, pranks and adventures, through all of which you follow him with an absorbing interest that never flags, stopping only when convulsions of laughter and aching sides force the mirth-swept body to take an involuntary respite from a feast of fun, ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... and with mingled laughter and tears she dreamed aloud of her life at Dubechnia and how absorbing it would be. And I envied her. March would soon be here. The days were drawing out, and in the bright sunny afternoons the snow dripped from the roofs, and the smell of spring was in the air. I too longed for ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... guilty of no folly, committed none while under the eye of Madam de Warrens. She was my conductor, and ever led me right; my attachment for her became my only passion, and what proves it was not a giddy one, my heart and understanding were in unison. It is true that a single sentiment, absorbing all my faculties, put me out of a capacity of learning even music: but this was not my fault, since to the strongest inclination, I added the utmost assiduity. I was attentive and thoughtful; what could I do? Nothing was wanting towards my progress that depended on me; meantime, it only required ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... circumstances it often happens that there forms upon the surface of the plaster a hard crust which, although it is of no importance as regards the outside of the mould, is prejudicial to the interior because it considerably diminishes its absorbing power. This trouble may be avoided by coating the surfaces that it is necessary to preserve with clear liquid paste; but Mr. Renard advises that the mould be closed hermetically, so that the interior shall be kept from contact with warm air. In this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... attained only by great, although not necessarily more than empiric, knowledge of anatomy, such perhaps as the artist pure would never be inclined to work out for himself, but just such as would be of absorbing interest to those scientists by temperament and artists by profession whom we have in Pollaiuolo and, to a less extent, in Verrocchio. We remember how Giotto contrived to render tactile values. Of all the possible outlines, of all the possible ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson

... and soul have reached the full development in a religious life so unusually intense and absorbing that it could not otherwise than utter itself in the grand sentences of his last address to the people. The knowledge had come, and the faith had come, and the charity had come, and with all had come the love of God which had put away ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... death which lay wide open for him. Yet, all at once, a sense of peace and trust almost ineffable came over him. Death seemed merely the going-out into the true open, the essence of the moonlight and the beauty. It seemed the tasting and absorbing the food for his own spiritual hunger, which had been upon him from birth, that which had always been just out of his reach. When Maria returned in her pink gingham school-gown, she found her father ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... responded listlessly. Almost at once the newcomers hurled questions at him... Why was he there? ... How long was he in for? ... What did he think were the chances of escape? Inevitably, every conversation turned upon this last absorbing topic. These men seemed eager for confidences, they wanted to share their experiences, their grievances, their hopes. But Fred Starratt recoiled. He had not yet reached the stage when a thin trickle of words fell gratefully upon his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... from the tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about eighteen inches in length, of the shoots of the mock orange, remarkable for their quality in absorbing the oil of tobacco, they are flexible without being weak. The French make elegant pipe-bowls of the root of the tree-heath, but their chief attention is directed, as far as concerns wood pipes, to those of brier-root, which are made by them in large quantities. The bowl and the short ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... she would ever fall in love or be married. It seemed so less than ever, now that she was at last actually on her way to look for Saidee. She was intensely excited, and there was room only for the one absorbing thought in mind and heart; yet she was not as anxious as most others would have been in her place. Now that Heaven had helped her so far, she was sure she would be helped to the end. It would be too bad to be true that anything dreadful should have happened to Saidee—anything ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... the photographer to snap off all sorts of what they called "mighty absorbing subjects," but Will wisely used his ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen

... inexpressibly sweet to any souls here on earth? Is it possible that any one should escape from a state of coldness, deadness, worldliness, and unwilling performance of his religious duties, and positively come to lose all taste for bodily and mere intellectual pleasures through the absorbing of his whole being into the love of Jesus and of Mary, and through a burning thirst for the beatific vision of ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton

... a new and absorbing play, invented by Bangs. As this interesting animal is not to be found in any Zoological Garden, unless Du Chaillu has recently brought one from the wilds of Africa, I will mention a few of its peculiar habits and traits, for the benefit of inquiring minds. The Brop is a ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... make—there would be short work for a long time to come, with many of those schemes, upon which you have set your heart. Do not dream, if any mishap of a certain kind were to come to pass in India that you can go on with that programme of social reforms, all costing money and absorbing attention, in the spirit in which you are now about to ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)

... opposites, but wholly and solely in the reconciliation of the two; it is, I say, a fact of science that every antagonism, whether in Nature or in ideas, is resolvable in a more general fact or in a complex formula, which harmonizes the opposing factors by absorbing them, so to speak, in each other. Can we not, then, men of common sense, while awaiting the solution which the future will undoubtedly bring forth, prepare ourselves for this great transition by an analysis ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... slight change over his spirit of philosophical and artistic experiment. The season comported with his early manhood, and the witching hour and the scenery were not conducive to cold philosophy. He who prided himself on his steady pulse and a devotion to art so absorbing that it even prompted his impulses and gave character to his recreation, was led to feel, on this occasion, that his mistress was vague and shadowy, and to half wish for that companionship which the most self-reliant natures have craved at ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... English part of the audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken. Yet so marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama. It was a new intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... who were then working the lobby, while it was splitting hairs over the Constitution and accepting the "stuff" that would do it "the most good." No class of property shows the justice, and therefore the need, of Confiscation as much as railroads. No class of property has done as much toward absorbing and transferring the whole country into the hands of a comparatively few men as railroads. But when Confiscation gets through with these monarchs of all they survey, the town or section through which these railroads run will not find themselves like a ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood

... was a Chinese restaurant. The Chinaman who kept it did an exceptionally good business; for chop-suey was a favorite dish among the frequenters of the place. It is a food that, somehow, has the power of absorbing alcoholic liquors that have been taken into the stomach. I have heard men claim that they could sober up on chop-suey. Perhaps that accounted, in some degree, for its popularity. On the main floor there were two large rooms: a parlor about ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... Latin language upon the Celtic dialects cannot be determined; it seems to have been slight, and, on the other hand, it may be safely assumed that the Celtic did not contribute much to the world-absorbing Latin. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... and sociables. These were never held in the new reading-room, the oriental rugs being much too fine to have doughnut crumbs and coffee spilled on them. After a time, however, the young ladies told her that they found themselves too busy getting the missionary barrels ready to continue absorbing information about Botticelli's ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... this on the fourth day of August, which is a day when memory grows bitter and reflective if we are not careful. The August sunshine lies rich and yellow on the fields, and almost perceptibly the pale green of the wheat is absorbing the golden hue of the air. The painted cup has faded from rosy pink to a dull, ashy color, and the few wild roses which are still to be seen in the shaded places have paled to a pastel shade. The purple and yellow of goldenrod, wild sage, gallardia, and coxcomb are to be seen everywhere—the ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... mistress of her own manner. She is not taught to think so much of those things which flurry and disturb the mind, and therefore she is seldom flurried and disturbed. To both of them, love,—the idea of love,— must be the thought of all the most absorbing; for is it not fated for them that the joys and sorrows of their future life must depend upon it? But the idea of the German girl is the more realistic, and the less romantic. Poetry and fiction she may have read, though of the latter sparingly; but they will not have imbued her with that hope for ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope

... a moment sooner she would have caught that mysterious person, Doctor Q, who had entered the house some time before, and, on overhearing heated words coming from the library, had remained with his ear glued to the keyhole, absorbing every word that was said until Balcom left. But he had shuffled away before she ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... listened, rocking himself back and forth in the hair-cloth arm-chair. Deacon Latham, passing his hand continually along the stove battlements, now and then let his fingers rest on the sheet-iron till he burnt them, and then jerked them suddenly away, to put them, back the next moment, in his absorbing interest. Miss Maria, amidst a murmur of admiration from the ladies, passed sponge-cake and coffee: she confessed afterwards that the evening had been so brilliant to her as to seem almost wicked; and the other ladies, who owned to having lain awake ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... game these Indians get is procured in this manner. I was lucky enough to secure a snap-shot of this man in the act of using his blow-gun. It proved to be the last photograph I took in the Brazilian jungles. Accidents and sickness subsequently set in, and the fight for life became too hard and all-absorbing even to think of photographing. He left us after an hour's conversation, and we resumed ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... mine Host the Tenor, and Nym the Bassus. The three former are all hard at work on their respective 'parts,' one in the kitchen, another in the taproom, the third in familiar converse outside the front door. But Nym has 'a minim rest,' and during that short respite takes advantage of the absorbing occupations of the other three 'singers' to lay hands on whatever portable property is within his reach. 'A minim rest' is not much—but the point remains. Any musician has had experience of what can be done during a short 'rest'—e.g., to resin his bow, or turn up the ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... with all that is saddening in the struggle and all that was misleading in the issue, it is because we see men struggling to come into the clear as to these two meanings of religion, that the contest has such absorbing interest. Men have been right in declining to call that religion in which a man saves himself. They have been wrong in esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened when one no ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... I don't think there was anything of the roue in me. I own I did feel towards this lady, who either was, or seemed to me, so singular, a mysterious interest just beginning—of that peculiar kind which becomes at last terribly absorbing. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... men—men who were a good deal more difficult to manage than chivalrous Americans, particularly as I was now married and the natural prey of the hunter. But it was several years before I could think of men without a shudder, little as I permitted them to suspect it. I learned to play the subtle and absorbing game of men and women as it is played to perfection in the bolder civilizations. It was all that gave vitality to the general game of society. I had no children; my establishment was run by a major domo; it bore little resemblance to a home. It was the brilliant artificial existence of a ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... were words that recurred to our aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there was an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only disgust him. As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning over it. "We shall have great ...
— The Pupil • Henry James

... of the great writers in the languages of the Continent upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of literature are so many ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... the rest. Next she laid the traced paper carefully over the space below, and taking her slate-pencil, went laboriously over each line with an absorbing zeal that left its mark in the soft drawing paper. Lastly she went over each indented line with a lead-pencil, carefully and frequently wetted in her ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin

... a dark-brown powder. It is used as an oxidizing agent and for absorbing sulphurous oxide. It can be prepared by digesting red lead with warm dilute nitric acid; washing and drying ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer

... hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality. Driving was the piece of skill she could not do. Her husband's mastery of the reins endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... my sister's grief for her mother becomes more and more calmed, her love for M. de la Feste begins to reassume its former absorbing command of her. She thinks of him incessantly, and writes whole treatises to him by way of letters. Her blank disappointment at his announcement of his inability to pay us a visit quite so soon as he had promised, was quite ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... jumble of barren rock and glacial cleft, now purpling and darkening as the sun mellowed in its decline, lay the kingdom of Jugendheit; and toward this the wayfarer gazed meditatively, absorbing little or nothing of the exquisite panorama. By and by his gaze wavered, and that particular patch in the valley, brown from the beating of many iron-shod horses, caught and chained his interest for a space. It was the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... he produced a small book and a pencil; these, with a heavy, gold-mounted gun, he laid on the table before the seat he manifestly meant to occupy. That done, he began a slow pacing up and down the room, his hands behind his back, his head bent in deep and absorbing thought. What a dark, sinister, plotting figure! Joan had seen many men in different attitudes of thought, but here was a man whose mind seemed to give forth intangible yet terrible manifestations of evil. The inside of that gloomy cabin took on another aspect; there was ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... useful for drying damp soils, because of its remarkable power of absorbing water; for which reason several acres of Sunflowers are now planted in the Thames Valley. Swampy districts in Holland have been made habitable by an extensive culture of the Sunflower, the malarial miasmata being absorbed and nullified, whilst ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... friends, a little evening reunion called "The Four Candles Society," the place of meeting happening to be lighted by four candles stuck in silver candlesticks placed at each corner of the table. Occasionally the conversation became so absorbing that I would forget the time, even at the risk of seeing, like Cinderella, my carriage turn into a pumpkin and my coachman into a big rat. Twice or thrice Pierrot sat up for me until two o'clock in the morning, but presently he took offence at my ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier

... that my training was broad, and not confined to those composers whose works appealed most to me. The result is that I now appreciate the works of all the composers for the piano. Beethoven I found very absorbing. I learned the Appassionata Sonata in one week's time, and longed for more. My teacher, however, insisted upon my going slowly, and ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore. But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, a propos of Scott, the expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was now master of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find one of the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of The Wild Duck that "never before had the poet displayed such an amazing power of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse



Words linked to "Absorbing" :   heat-absorbing, fascinating, gripping, interesting



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