"Bodiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turn away? Too long I've guessed at some dread mystery I may not hear: and in my restless dreams, Night after night, sweeps by a frantic rout Of grinning fiends, fierce horses, bodiless hands, Which clutch at one to whom my spirit yearns As to a mother. There's some fearful tie Between me and that spirit-world, which God Brands with his terrors on my troubled mind. Speak! tell me, nurse! is ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... may be seen that the kingdom of Satan is a host of bodiless spirits. Although their origin cannot be definitely traced, it is probable that they were created as subjects of Satan in the primal glory, as he, also, was created as their prince and king. Satan, being in authority over these beings, doubtless ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... descending into some deep and oblivious tide; then a current of misery would mingle with his dreams, a sense of unutterable depression; and then he would suddenly wake in the grip of fear, formless and bodiless fear. The smallest sound in the house, the creaking of a door, a footfall, would set his heart beating with fierce hammer strokes. He would light his candles, wander restlessly about, gaze out from his window into ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... asks me For Gormflaith, then for Gormflaith, then for Gormflaith, And I ask everybody else for her; But she is nowhere, and the King will foam. Send me no more; I am old with running about After a bodiless name. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... and, as it were, to release her mind from the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... even beauty, into dark nooks where before all was mist, not merely by his intimate acquaintance with the facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of human character, and of woman's even more than of man's. For the first time the actors in this long tragedy appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names, but as beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, organic, even in their inconsistencies. Catherine of Arragon is still the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many parts of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... I said. Alone as the corpse in unshrouded grave! I was in a charnel-house. Men who were sinless as you hung dead upon the wall, hung dying there. Darkness covered all things at a distance, sighs crept up from far corners, chains clanked, or imprecations or prayer uttered themselves,—bodiless voices in the night. I did not know what untold horror there might yet be hid. I heard the drip of water from the black vaults; I heard the short, fierce pants and deadly groans. Oh, worst infliction of Hell's armory it is to see another suffer! Why was it allowed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... more apropos to wear a full-blown rose, quite ripe, and ready to drop off the stalk for want of being pulled—heigh-ho!" "But pray, my lady," said I, "how do you like the concert?" "Alas!" said she, languishingly, while she laid her hand upon my shoulder, "what are these bodiless sounds and vibration to me? and yet what an exquisite sweetness in the songs of the northern part of our island:—'Thou art gone awa' from me, Mary!' How pathetic and divine the little airs of Scotland ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... roll-call was proceeding. A resounding and mysterious voice called out names, and at each name a man stepped briskly from the crowds and saluted and walked away. But there was no visible person to receive the salute; the voice was bodiless. George became increasingly apprehensive; he feared a disaster, yet he could not believe that it would occur. It did occur. Before it arrived he knew that it was arriving. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... in the very centre of the black interwoven trunks. Or, rather, he saw the sparkle of some bright stones on her neck, and the whiteness of her brow; but for the rest, only a suggestion of lovely lines; as it were, a Spirit of the Wood, almost bodiless. ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the dusk beneath the solitary night, through the empty dwellings and bodiless realm of Dis; even as one walks in the forest beneath the jealous light of a doubtful moon, when Jupiter shrouds the sky in shadow and black night blots out the world. Right in front of the doorway and in ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True, substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in still maintaining ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... for the man than for the soul in pain. At the back of his words some torment burned at red heat, remorselessly. He sought relief. Perhaps he sought it from me because I was as apart as a woman from his physical splendour, a kind of bodiless creature with just a brain and a human heart, the ghost of an old soldier, far away from the sphere of poor ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... it be right— This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, Laughingly through the lattice drop— The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully—so fearfully— Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring sould lies hid, That o'er the floor and down the wall, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and ceaseless still, forever swift descend The waters in their headlong course, then turning, heavenward wend: Now, disenthralled, their essence hath its spirit-shape resumed; Bright, bodiless and pure, its fright to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... admitted he suffered, let us rather say he claimed to suffer the heated torments of a passionate nature, but he perceived like fresh air and sunrise coming by blind updrawn and opened window into a foetid chamber, that also he loved her with a clean and bodiless love, was anxious to help her, was anxious now—it was a new thing—to understand her, to reassure her, to give unrequited what once he had sought rather to seem to give in view of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... apprehension in order to be consoled. And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,—philosophically bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation, a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest mystic stood helpless. Just ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... warmer. Her husband, he would be loyal to his last breath. Community of life would establish that intimate alliance of heart and soul which every year makes more enduring. Were they not young flesh and blood, he and she? And could a bodiless ghost come between them, a mere voice of long-vanished time, insubstantial, unseizable, as the murmur in ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think——Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... facts with regard to this triad of plays are briefly these. Thomas Lord Cromwell is a piece of such utterly shapeless, spiritless, bodiless, soulless, senseless, helpless, worthless rubbish, that there is no known writer of Shakespeare's age to whom it could be ascribed without the infliction of an unwarrantable insult on that writer's memory. Sir John Oldcastle is the compound piecework of four minor playwrights, one of them ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... quite a superfluity as regarded the whole of the stories in which it appeared; but its presence there and the tricks that had to be played with it prevented the development of the historical novel proper—that, as it has been ticketed, "bodiless childful of life," which waited two thousand years in the ante-natal gloom before it could get itself born. Here, indeed, one may claim—and I suppose no sensible Frenchmen would for a moment hesitate to admit it—that even more than in the case of Richardson's influence ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Celtic legends there may be found a lovely belief that our thoughts are independent realities, that they go about in the void seeking creatures to control. They are as bodiless souls. When they descend into a human being they possess ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Valmont? Thank God, thank God! I thought I was going insane. I saw a hand, a bodiless hand, holding a white sheet ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... voice, said she— 'Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! 205 I have power to bid thee flee.' Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? And why with hollow voice cries she, 210 'Off, woman, off! this hour is mine— Though thou her guardian spirit be, Off, woman, off! 'tis ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... answered Marget. "Folks should not be on the road when the bodiless walk. They might be in their way, and ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... she takes! By this odious crew beset,[8] I began to rage and fret, And resolved to break their pates, Ere we enter'd at the gates; Had not Clio in the nick[9] Whisper'd me, "Lay down your stick." What! said I, is this a mad-house? These, she answer'd, are but shadows, Phantoms bodiless and vain, Empty visions of the brain. In the porch Briareus stands,[10] Shows a bribe in all his hands; Briareus the secretary, But we mortals call him Carey.[11] When the rogues their country fleece, They ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world; for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... she held him, a bloodless spirit, a bodiless essence, in the fount of healing. She said to herself, "He will sleep now. He will sleep. He will sleep." And as she slid into her own sleep she held and ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... be," muttered Seguin. "There are no others here. Indians! No! There never were such as them. See! they are not men! Look! their huge horses, their long guns; they are giants! By Heaven!" continued he, after a moment's pause, "they are bodiless! They ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... bright! can it be right, This window open to the night? The wanton airs from the tree-top Laughingly through the lattice drop; The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully, so fearfully, Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid, That, o'er the floor and down ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... fair! 'Twas a joyful yielding, Like some soul heroic, rare, That leaps bodiless forth in air ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... aware of a face staring at him: a mere face vaguely limned on the darkness, as if a bodiless head were held ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... pitiful cant of policy, the living bursts of passion are reduced to a defunct common-place, and all true imagination is buried under the dust and rubbish of learned models and imposing authorities. If the one is a bodiless phantom, the other is a lifeless skeleton: if the one in its feverish and hectic extravagance resembles a sick man's dream, the other is akin to the sleep of death—cold, stiff, unfeeling, monumental! Upon the whole, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the tower they paused while one opened the gate and then they passed within the enclosure, which, to the girl's horror, she found filled with headless bodies. The creature who carried the bodiless head now set its burden upon the ground and the latter immediately crawled toward one of the bodies that was lying near by. Some wandered stupidly to and fro, but this one lay still. It was a female. The head crawled to it and made its way to the shoulders ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... philosophy to deny,—namely, nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or fiendlike shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodiless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood,—still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... company thronging the rooms that no one wot of: those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the embodied—the Guests ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... perfect example of what I have conceived of his bodiless admiration of beauty, and objectless enthusiasm of love. The sentiment itself is unquestionably in the highest mood of the intellectual sense of beauty; the simile is, however, anything but such an image as the beauty of woman would suggest. It is only the remembrance of some impression ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... thought and all we have to Him, and giving Him the will go out to do His work. And He will do the rest. We may fall in battle; we may sow the seed and die; but it will fall into the ground and God will give the harvest. When we reach the other home— not a place of bodiless shades; not a confused throng of nameless spirits, but a home of brothers in our Father's house—next to seeing the Saviour, next to having the old times re-united, will be the comfort of meeting some one that we ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... the last day. Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living: All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness; Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembrance Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit,—the trouble Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created,— And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion, Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness. ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... his wings, our faces yearn Together, as his fullgrown feet now range The grove, and his warm hands our couch prepare: Till to his song our bodiless souls in turn Be born his children, when Death's nuptial change Leaves us for light the halo of ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... her, and the mere bodiless idea of her became a torment to his body as it had been ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... succeed in getting rid of earthly cares and desires before the death of the body is weighed down by its sins, and, instead of reincarnating in some new form, according to the laws of metempsychosis, it will remain bodiless, doomed to wander on earth. It will become a bhuta, and by its own sufferings will cause unutterable sufferings to its kinsmen. That is why the Hindu fears above all things to remain bodiless after ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... Bliss, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Existence. Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there ... in the centre, the reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to everyone ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... distance. Julia stood on deck and listened while the little Dutch boat crept up; she found something fascinating in this strange, shrouded river, haunted, like a stream of the nether world, with lamentable bodiless voices. The fog had delayed them, of course; the afternoon was now far advanced; they had been compelled to wait some long time while the tide was down, and even now that it was coming up, they could go but slowly. The last through ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Jerusalem Buildings had bought none of them. In short, Tetterby's had tried so hard to get a livelihood out of Jerusalem Buildings in one way or other, and appeared to have done so indifferently in all, that the best position in the firm was too evidently Co.'s; Co., as a bodiless creation, being untroubled with the vulgar inconveniences of hunger and thirst, being chargeable neither to the poor's-rates nor the assessed taxes, and having no young family ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... imagination is, in small, And with the making-difference that must be, Mirror of God's creating mirror; all That shows itself therein, that formeth he, And there is Christ, no bodiless vanity, Though, face to face, the mighty perfectness With glory blurs the ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... would never see one another again, this helpless father and daughter—never, till they met bodiless, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the supernatural traditions of a former one, that the belief in them was still extant, and in full force and visible operation among the vulgar (to say no more) in the time of our authors. The appalling and wild chimeras of superstition and ignorance, "those bodiless creations that ecstacy is very cunning in," were inwoven with existing manners and opinions, and all their effects on the passions of terror or pity might be gathered from common and actual observation—might be ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the door— Love's Hour—till she and I shall meet; With bodiless form and unapparent feet That cast no shadow yet before, Though round its head the dawn begins to pour The breath that ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... the moment that I have, though thou art of my kin, and I have loved thee—on that moment, I say, I will doom those delicate limbs, which thou lovest so much to show, to the kite and the jackal, and the soul within thee to all the tortures of the Gods! Unburied shalt thou lie, and bodiless and accursed shalt thou wander in ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... In the Tempest, again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet far as the poles from the spiritualities of religion! Ariel in antithesis to Caliban! What is most ethereal to what is most animal! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote: 25] In the Midsummer-Night's ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Bodiless Numbers! When there was none to explore Your winding labyrinths occult, None to delve your ore Of strange virtue, or do Your magical business, you Were there, never old nor new, Veined in the world and alive:— Before the Planets, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... forest. All his senses were concentrated on the close warmth of her misty lips, the curve of her young shoulder, her woman sweetness and longing. Then his senses forgot even her lips, and floated off into a blurred trance of bodiless happiness—the kiss of Nirvana. No foreign thought of trains or people or the future came now to drag him to earth. It was the most devoted, most ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... For the heroes behind him, to follow its light! True wife of a soldier!—If doubt or dismay Had ever, within me, one instant held sway, Your words wield a spell that would bid them be gone, Like bodiless ghosts at the touch ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston |
