"Cryptical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Of which cryptic utterance Damaris, at the time, could—to quote her own phrase—"make no sense!"—Nor could she make sense of it, now, when counting her blessings, she rested, in happy idleness, upon the faded scarlet ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Cryptic words which, suddenly, for Beautrelet, shone bright with clearness! Was this not an exact statement of the reasons that determined Francis I. to create a town on this spot and was not the fate of the Havre-de-Grace linked with the ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... discover ... after all and all ... From what alembic issues forth the Spring, What cryptic finger, moving by a wall, Leaves tulip writs in tulip colouring; I shall have knowledge of the tug and grip Of tender roots where they are thrust and curled, And what frail doors are opened to let slip The hidden ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... was a person of many cryptic exclamations, this bride of his. Presently she said: "Indeed, Monsieur Bulmer, I entreat you to leave Poictesme. I have informed Louis of everything, and he ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... behind him he might have seen the sudden lighting of Rosamund's eyes, the sudden clutch at her bosom, which would have announced to him that his utterances were none so cryptic but that ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... homewards, her mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling. She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been the same; she expected nothing else of him, or of fathers generally. She knew that he lived most of his ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... my own natural intelligence again, the common sense that I was born with. Then I saw that the whole thing went wrong from the place where that Knox legal note came in. Congressmen in the backwoods quoted cryptic passages from it, thought they were saying something, and proceeded to make their audiences believe that somehow England had hit us with a club—or would have hit us but for Knox. That pure discourtesy kept us apart from English sympathy for something ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths certain pantheistic symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the gods were dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought their curiosity to the problem of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it a depraved version ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Angus's lantern disappeared behind the stable, the old man's voice was lowered, and he gave forth this cryptic utterance: ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... both Hunters of the heart, The Golden Archer and the Scarlet too? Then bitter anomalies annul her choir Of puissant and subtle instincts, rended through By gorgeous dualisms of vain-desire. For Love outrages Art's clear disciplines, And Art lures Love to guilt of cryptic treason: The spirit of imagination pines, Captive in webs of exquisite unreason. Alas for this translated soul of hers, The rose's, that ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the man, turned out to Lilly's High School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set, handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker, as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house." There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"—there is in the original, between each act, a mysterious "mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of somewhat cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs in the clouds, between an "Old Grey Man" and a "Chorus of Tyrants" in a desolate scene of snow and ice, between Choruses of Men, Women, and Children in a ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... to finger her gloves. They had been cleaned and the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the woman's dress, but ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... Between these orbs were dotted lines and arrow-heads of the oldest form pointing in all directions, while all the intervening spaces were filled up with woven characters half-way in appearance between Runes and Cryptic-Sanskrit. Round the borders these characters ran into a wild maze, a perfect jungle of an alphabet through which none but a wizard could have forced a way in ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... islanders had called for Italy. But the journalist had heard of the National Council and he asked, very naturally, whether it shared these sentiments. "Ha parlato da Italiano!" ("I have spoken as an Italian"), replied the delegate; and when the newspaper reached the island, this cryptic saying was interpreted in various ways, his critics pointing out that, as he had diverged from truthfulness, this was another little Song of Hate. The Bishop, Dr. Mahni['c],[12] did not go to Italy ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the shaded lamplight looked at me with a face clouded with displeasure. I, sitting on my spindly chair, very upright, heard the cryptic number three ringing in my brain. What was going to happen "at three"? At three to-morrow they would walk along the lane which wound around the town and down to the river. I thought of it now as "our lane," a sanctuary that would be desecrated by Boller's mere presence. The plausible ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... on the Drama." This cryptic passage refers, I imagine, to a translation by John Black, afterwards the editor of the Morning Chronicle, of August Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 2 vols., 1815. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... unhealthy greeny-grey. But you've none of you any colour, you gentlemen—not you nor your brother nor that pasty Vyvian. None of you but the little curate; he had a nice little pink face. I'm sure I wish some gals cared more for looks, and then they wouldn't go after some as are as well let alone." This cryptic remark was illuminated by a sigh. Mrs. Johnson, now that she saw Peter improving in complexion, reverted to her ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... slowly and in silence—thinking. And that evening, by the light of her coal-oil lamp she puzzled over the roughly sketched map with its cryptic signs and notations. There were a half-dozen samples, too—chips of rough, heavy rock that didn't look a bit like gold. "High grade," her daddy had called them as he babbled incessantly upon his death-bed. But they looked dull and unpromising to the girl as they lay ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Cecil muttered, pondering. "Let her, anyhow!" With which cryptic remarks he moved towards ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... supernaturalisms are distasteful to me; I cling to the known world of common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out to find, this morning, a cabbalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB—what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... nearest cross street; but I must confess the direction still seemed somewhat cryptic. Puzzled, I stood under the lamp, shielding the face of the note under my cloak to keep off the rain, as ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... rather a cryptic utterance, but he asked for no explanation. These two were full of little jokes, of allusions, of reminiscences, interesting to them, in which he had no part, close friends ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... down again. She wondered drowsily how long Herr Van de Greutz's visitor would stay. He was a German, a very great scientist; the chemist looked upon him as a friend and an equal, a brother in arms; they talked together freely in the cryptic language of science, and in German, which is the tongue best fitted to help out the other. Julia heard them when she went to and from with the dishes at dinner time. She did not understand chemistry, a fact she much regretted; had she known even half as much as Rawson-Clew, the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... common mark of all refinement, aesthetic as well as moral. In studying the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa,' for instance, one will find that it is this interior insight that explains the so-called "cryptic smile." In the case of aesthetic refinement, the secret discloses itself as at bottom delicacy, the delicacy which prevents intrusion on the personality of others; which abhors a prying curiosity; which ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... held the big refractor, and it was a matter of only a few seconds and some cryptic instructions from Sykes until the eye-piece showed the image of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... that there were persons who could fathom the destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman slipped into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of degradation ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... she gave me that arrow she used to wear in her hair to hand over to you as a keepsake and also to prevent you, she said, from dreaming of her. This message sounds rather cryptic." ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... something insincere in her tone, in the lift of her eyes, in her cryptic smile. But he smothered such unworthy promptings. It was fresh proof of his own unreasonable conceit. He turned away from his wife in silence, but he was sure that his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... wholly cryptic to Sylvia, but she was glad that Mrs. Owen was not disappointed. As they loitered in a long shady lane Mrs. Owen made it possible for Sylvia to talk of herself. Sally Owen was a wise woman, who was considered a little rough and peculiar by some of her townspeople, chiefly those later comers who ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel and in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each, they become very definite. In 1856, we find ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... mystified by Merkle's cryptic message, for she could imagine no possible way in which she or the writer himself could be connected discreditably with Jarvis Hammon's affair. She gained some light, however, when that evening she read the note ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... anything may be accidentally (in the philosophic sense of "accident") a cause of pleasure, pain, or desire seems to explain the essence of all the particular variations of the psychological phenomena known now by all who have been aroused to the significance of their vagrant cryptic slumbers, as the phenomena of symbolism, sublimation, and fetich worship. Spinoza's proposition explains all the phenomena adequately because among the fundamental human emotions, Spinoza like Freud—if we discount the recent attempt to go beyond the pleasure-principle—reckons only three: ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... crept back to her seat. "I don't see any sense to it," she pondered, studying the cryptic message with puzzled eyes. "It must be right, or Grandpa wouldn't have said so. Sounds like 'pickle,' but it's spelled with a 't.' It ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... his coat and vest, he turned to the leather bundle that he had placed on a table, untied the thongs, and carefully opened it out to its full length—and again that curious, cryptic smile tinged his lips. Rolled the opposite away from that in which it had been tied up, the leather strip made a wide belt that went on somewhat after the fashion of a life preserver, the thongs being used for shoulder straps—a belt that, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... sat impassive—apparently without thought—while the heavy breathing of the men in the room marked off the seconds of time. Finally abruptly Galen Albret's cavernous voice boomed forth. Something there was strangely mysterious, cryptic, in the virile tones issuing from a bulk so massive and inert. Galen Albret did not move, did not even raise the heavy-lidded, dull stare of his eyes to the young man who stood before him; hardly did his broad arched chest seem to rise and fall with the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... dry hot air of the stove-heated room in winter as from the natural ambition of the mercury in summer. The habit so easily formed was as easily unlearned when I returned to civilisation. On the whole, it may be philosophic to conclude that a universal habit in any country has some solid if cryptic reason for its existence, and to surmise that the drinking of ice-water is not so deadly in the States as it might be elsewhere. It certainly is universal enough. When you ring a bell or look at a waiter, ice-water is immediately brought to you. Each meal is started with ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Staff officer's cap bearing down upon us. It was the Sirdar, quite rested and looking twenty years younger. He was going to the War Minister's, and promised to arrange at once for our visit to Scutari. He looked at our cryptic drawings of road scavengers, threw up his hands and ejaculating "Kako"—strode out ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... Orleans was awaited by friends and foes, with bated breath. The conspirators had as yet no intimation of his intentions: Governor Claiborne was torn by suspicion of this would-be savior, for at the very time he was reading Wilkinson's gasconade he received a cryptic letter from Andrew Jackson which ran, "keep a watchful eye on our General and beware of an attack as well from your own country as Spain!" If Claiborne could not trust "our General," whom could ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... he rode thus at a hand-pace, puzzling over these cryptic words, he was presently aroused by a voice, somewhat harsh and discordant, singing at no great distance; and the words of ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever. The father and daughter would have been quite content, apparently, to eat their dinner in silence, or with a few cryptic remarks expressed in a shorthand which could not be understood by the servants. But silence depressed Mrs. Hilbery, and far from minding the presence of maids, she would often address herself to them, and was never altogether unconscious ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... forth this cryptic information, Holmes arose, brushed off his trousers, and added that we'd better be getting back to the castle, or the Earl would be sending out a general alarm for us. And that's all I could possibly get ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... of the following morning Duperre and Rayne were closeted together, while afterwards I drove Duperre into York, where from the telegraph office in the railway station he sent several cryptic messages abroad, of course posing to the telegraph clerk as a passing railway passenger. Rayne never sent important telegrams from the village post-office at Overstow, or even from Thirsk. They were all dispatched from places ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... both know," came his cryptic answer. "She is your one great, good friend. She thinks a great deal of you, and you have done several things to cause that admiration. Now, Mr. Fairchild, coming to the point, suppose she should point a way ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... board with buttons on it. It might be a control-board, but it didn't look like it. There was a metal box with a transparent plastic front. One could see cryptic shapes of metal inside. Two bright-metal balls mounted on a side-wall. They had holes in them, about the right size for the hands of children like these to enter. There was a two-foot, carefully machined spiral of metal, intruding into ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... cryptic. "That is for father Folco to settle," he said. "And father Folco is a man that loves his fellow-men, but would have his children obey him even to the death, like ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 'I see,' was the cryptic answer. 'And yet, Herbert,' Lawford solemnly began again, 'it has changed me; even in my way of thinking. When I shut my eyes now—I only discovered it by chance—I see immediately faces quite strange to me; or places, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Aftenbladet[19] has a long and interesting review. Most of it is given over to a criticism of Isaachson's Hamlet. First of all, says the reviewer, Isaachson labors under the delusion that every line is cryptic, embodying a secret. This leads him to forget the volume of the part and to invent all sorts of fanciful interpretations for details. Thus he loses the unity of the character. Things are hurried through to a conclusion and the fine transitions are lost. For example, "Oh, that this too, too solid ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... and the twins, their eyes bright with the unholy light of mischief, never looked at her. They sometimes looked heavenward with a sublime contentment that drove Connie nearly frantic. Occasionally they uttered cryptic words about the morrow,—and the older members of the family smiled pleasantly, but Connie shuddered. She remembered so many ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... This cryptic remark was not encouraging, but Shorthouse did not pause to decipher it. He paid the man, and then pushed open the rickety old gate swinging on a single hinge, and proceeded to walk up the drive that lay dark ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... above all, boxes; pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencilings on one end; cryptic, that, is to anyone except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long slim box. Another stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents under "Slp Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... so that the mothers may not be hampered in their duties at the farm; they have only to carry the babies there in the morning, and fetch them away again in the evening, and can feel that they are safe and well looked after. But many of them, for some reason too cryptic to fathom, prefer to lock them up in their room, exposed to all the perils that surround an inquiring child just able to walk, and last winter one little creature was burnt to death, sacrificed to her mother's stupidity. This mother, a fair type of the intelligence prevailing in ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... find him leaving the actual handling of the troops to Hunter-Weston as I am bound to do. Old Oyama cooled his brain during the battle of the Shaho by shooting pigeons sitting on Chinese chimneys. King Richard before Bosworth saw ghosts. My own dark hours pass more easily as I make my cryptic jottings in pedlar's French. The detachment of the writer comes over me; calms down the tumult of the mind and paves a path towards the refuge of sleep. No order is to be issued until I get reports and requests. I can't think now of anything left undone that I ought ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... archaic spelling of "breeze." Shakespeare knew all about farming, as about nearly everything else, and a year on a farm would illustrate many of his allusions which the ordinary reader finds somewhat cryptic; anyone who has seen the terrified stampede of cattle with their tails erect when attacked by the gad-fly, will recognize the force of the simile. The gad-fly pierces the skin of the animal, laying its eggs beneath, just as the ichneumon makes use of a caterpillar to provide ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew nearer from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and tremulous with sudden resolve of daring. She waved the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Calvin died and his son, in 1532, published his first work, a commentary on Seneca's de Clementia. His purpose has been construed by the light of his late career; and some have seen in the book a veiled defence of the Huguenot martyrs, others a cryptic censure of Francis I, and yet others a prophetic dissociation of himself from Stoicism. But there is no mystery in the matter; the work is that of a scholar who has no special interest in either theology or the Bible. This may be statistically illustrated: Calvin cites twenty-two ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... very different about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose, fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the one soft touch in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make up the doctor's life ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... 'married' couple who stayed for some time; he was an insignificant, ugly, little, crosseyed commercial traveler; she was a pretty, little creature who looked as innocent and was as merry as a child; we all vied in paying her attentions and waiting on her like slaves, the husband always smiling a cryptic smile. After they had left it was hinted they were not married at all; the oldest hands had been taken in.... One afternoon I met Dolly, the commercial traveler's wife, and she stopped and spoke to me. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... far," he cried. "That was not the exact reason. No, my dear Miss Maxwell, I begin to exercise a new-born discretion. I shall not elucidate that cryptic remark until after New Year's Day. But I don't mind telling you why I have hit on a definite date. If all goes well with us—and we have had so many escapes that Providence may well send us a few more—the Kansas should steam out of our little bay of Good Hope about that period. Then I shall ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... for Jefferson Creede! Deep and devious as was his knowledge of men in the rough, the ways of a woman in love were as cryptic to him as the poems of Browning. The first day that Miss Kitty rode forth to be a cowboy it was the rodeo boss, indulgent, but aware of the tenderfoot's ability to make trouble, who soberly assigned his fair disciple to guard a pass over which no cow ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... stared before him—his thoughts were on Val. "He's got to look after his mother," he said, "he's got no time for drilling and that, with that father of his." This cryptic saying produced silence, until ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... relief. "Perhaps, then, it was the way the light fell on your face." He peered closely at his client. Mr. Britt's color was coming back. Orne's cryptic speeches and his haste to collect had warmed the banker's wrath. "It'll be ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... the Impressionists, with their scientific equipment, their astonishing technique, and their intellectualism, mark the end of one era, do they not rumour the coming of another? Certainly to-day there is stress in the cryptic laboratory of Time. A great thing is dead; but, as that ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... But whatever cryptic signal she flashed slipped unseen from Maria Angelina's vision. Johnny Byrd was nice, but it was a gay, cheery, everyday sort of niceness, she thought, with none of the quicksilver charm of the young man at the ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... through the dimensoscope. Evelyn was struggling helplessly while two Ragged Men held her arms, grinning as only devils could have grinned, and others squabbled and watched with a fascinated attention some cryptic process which could only be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... saying, which seemed to her cryptic and sinister, Lady Valleys did not know what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... am, Auntie," replied the little nuisance, as she now approached the door of our cabin; and he brushed past me and started not aft but toward the bows. "An' there you are!" he shouted over his shoulder in cryptic speech, whether to me or to his Auntie Helen I ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... ante-room should cringe like a cold monkey, more or less, as soon as he was out of his private jungle. "Oh, Tallerman," cried the Sunday editor, "here's this Arctic man come to arrange about his illustration. I wish you'd go and talk it over with him." By chance he picked up the scrap of paper with its cryptic word. " Oh," he said, scowling at the office boy. "Pity you can't remember that fellow. If you can't remember faces any better than that you should be a detective. Get out now and tell him to go to the devil." ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... and twenty minutes. There was still at least an hour before it would be possible for her to plead weariness and escape. And opposite, in the shadows of the distant box, the mock Prince Shan seemed always to be gazing at her with that cryptic ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... torters be frightful, Though the words that thou took'st unawares Be as serpiants that twine and are spiteful, O thou best of good creeturs, who cares? For the curse hath recoiled, and the stigma Thou hast turned to her sorrer and shame, While thy cryptic and sombre Enigma Is ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... a pale-green booklet from the desk and opened it before her. She saw the cryptic characters for the first time. And she saw them with his glowing eyes. In their mysterious strokes and curves and dots she saw romance, and the key of the future; she saw the philosopher's stone. She saw a new religion that had already ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... that note and it piqued his curiosity, so with mountain secretiveness he became cryptic in his response. "Wa'al, mebby we hain't tellin' all we knows—jest yit. Mebby we're kinderly bidin' our time ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... learned at school; and to them I would venture to recommend the little copy of the Latin text with Conington's version attached, in "Bell's Pocket Classics." Latinless readers of course must read him in English or not at all. No translation can quite convey the cryptic charm of any original, whether poetry or prose. "Only a bishop," said Lord Chesterfield, "is improved by translation." But prose is far easier to render faithfully than verse; and I have said that ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... if I felt I must go he couldn't keep me by main force. And it was arranged that I should be paid off the next morning. As I was going out of his cabin he added suddenly, in a peculiar wistful tone, that he hoped I would find what I was so anxious to go and look for. A soft, cryptic utterance which seemed to reach deeper than any diamond-hard tool could have done. I do ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... knowledge of his words, he gestured with a dignity that conveyed all the meaning of Lying Bill's relation of the incident. In the expression and motion of the dramatic mute the aged uncle had the sublimity of Lear. For Vava, in a mask and an attitude, by some cryptic understanding encompassed the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... that as soon as the music ceases, handclapping should begin; whereas a complete silence is often the very means the composer employs for intensifying what has been said and preparing for what is to come. Let us ponder the cryptic remark attributed to Mozart that "the rests in music are more important ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... namely, about the middle of the seventh week, one of Willie Kerr's cryptic messages lay beside Mrs. Heth's breakfast plate ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... seems to have been for him a real physical sensation, a bodily condition induced by the adventure of the spirit. This is not unusual in mystical states, and possibly the cryptic notes made by Pascal record a similar experience.[57] He continued in this warmth for nine months, when suddenly he felt and heard the "canor," the "spiritual music," the "invisible melody" of heaven. Here is his description of his change from "burning love" ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... you mean?" Millicent asked. But even as she spoke, her face paled a little. "Your language has become quite cryptic—the result, I suppose, of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... so," asseverated he. "Cryptic, enigmatic, esoteric to the last degree. To begin with, how does the Signora Brandi, being an Austrian, come by so characteristically un-Austrian a name? Is that mysterious? And in the next place, why does an Austrian Signora Brandi so far forget ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... was being cryptic, but I fooled her. "Alice in Wonderland?" I asked. She nodded, and gave me a little smile, not at all like one of the EAT ME smiles ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the upper division of the first column of type. There were the usual requests for the return of absent friends, and several cryptic messages understood only by the advertiser and the person to whom ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... 77W—about thirty miles from Pierre. It seemed more real now. The hotel proprietor promised to find us a claim locator to whom that cryptic number made sense. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages. I thought: Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours—the nitrogenic—why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root and runner—but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested. His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow, then on to mine. And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate. "Unstable as water," he said (I am sure he did)—"unstable ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Allies and Dominions during the war period, because they are not included in the weekly financial statements. The amount that we borrow abroad is set out week by week—at least, that is believed to be the meaning of the cryptic item "Other Debt"—but the amount that we lend to Allies and Dominions is hidden away in the Supply Services or somewhere, and we only get occasional information about it from the Chancellor in the ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... must be done about Helen. She must be assured that it is not a criminal offence to love at first sight. A telegram to this effect would be cold and cryptic, a personal visit seemed each moment more impossible. Now the doctor arrived, and said that Tibby was quite bad. Might it really be best to accept Aunt Juley's kind offer, and to send her down to Howards End with a ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... wife's eyes. They were opened very wide. Her mouth had opened a little, too. She understood vaguely that he was using a kind of shorthand really. These cryptic sentences expressed in emotional stenography mere odds and ends that later would drop into their proper places, translated into the sequence of acts that are the scaffolding of a definite story. This ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... days she waited for an answer. Then she wired the personal again. Still there was no reply and no hint of reply. Had they captured him? Or was he so closely pursued that he did not dare to reply even in the cryptic manner on ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... reading this?" He handed Jack a slip of paper which contained such cryptic sentences as: "Grape Shot gone wrong, though he will run. Pocket Book is the tip. If you're on Grape Shot, hedge on best terms ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... of the great artist, had appeared and performed his customary and cryptic function. "Why do they always screw up the piano-stool at the last moment!" Betty Jardine murmured. "Is it to pepper our tongues with anguish before the claret?—Oh, she must be coming now! She always keeps one ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... at this cryptic utterance. "That sure beats me. I always said I got out of my depth with women, and you've got me out of my depth now. Why you want me to lose everything, seeing as you ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... uncertain melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness, pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from the highest heaven of the spirit. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... lucky to start off running directly the cuckoo is heard for the first time in the year, and thirty or forty years ago, if a girl obeyed this tradition, anyone near her would laugh and say: 'Run, run! and don't let no Tiverton man catch you!' The other saying is cryptic: 'He must go to Tiverton and ask Mr Able.' An interpretation suggested is that this was originally said to a questioner who asked for unattainable information, and that 'Mr Able' meant anyone able to furnish it. It is not exactly a satisfactory solution, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... me when, upon his first introduction as a secret servant, he modestly disclaimed the thrills and excitements commonly attributed to his trade. I knew that many pages would not be turned before he would land us in the middle of some crimson intrigue; mysterious strangers, disguises, cryptic and invaluable manuscripts, urgent telegrams, codes, Italian hidden hands, Scotland Yard, pseudo-taxicabs, clues and things. But let others beware of Mr. JOHN FOSTER, a most ingenious manipulator of the old stock-in-trade and possessing a rare sense of humour. For the reader to pit his wits against ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... the situation," he confessed. "The Clermont finances are now on a sound basis, but it might after all prove advantageous to raise further capital; although in such a case we would, perhaps, lie open to attack. Nairn's inclined to be cryptic in his remarks; but he seems to hint that it would be advisable to make Horsfield some concession—in other words, to buy ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... I replied in a cryptic way that our suspicions had been verified, and that the person of whom we were in search we had discovered. We were only now waiting for the appointment to be kept at the Hotel de ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... which bore the illustrations. The perforations were liberally scattered. Most, though not all of them, transfixed certain letters. Accepting this as indicative, Bertram had copied out all the letters thus distinguished, with the following cryptic result: ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... space, Beyond the sunlight and the storm, Appears that lightning-laden form, That toothful smile, that cryptic face. ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... Stone," I said, smiling, "you talk like a real story-book detective. Cryptic utterances of that sort are impressive ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... leisure for wondering how Cynthia's mother came to be in the grounds of Sanstead House, for her companion, almost before the car had stopped, jumped out and clutched me by the arm, at the same time uttering this cryptic speech: 'Whatever he offers ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... opera- tions of individual and single essences: this we call fortune; that serpentine and crooked line, whereby he draws those actions his wisdom intends in a more un- known and secret way; this cryptic and involved method of his providence have I ever admired; nor can I relate the history of my life, the occurrences of my days, the escapes, or dangers, and hits of chance, with a bezo las manos to Fortune, or a bare gramercy to my good stars. Abraham might have ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... the reports on the social setup and not one word of them made sense. They were a solid maze of unknown symbols and cryptic charts. "Please continue, Doctor," he insisted. "The societics reports are valueless so far. There are factors missing. You are the only one I have talked to so far who can give me ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... neck. Yet did you ever see anything so graceful as those two girls and that magnificent dog when they went over? I tell you, girls, we've got something worth while in this school now, believe me. And just you wait!" and with this cryptic ending Juno jockeyed ahead of ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Miss Theodosia's cryptic little smile lingered on her lips and in the clear windows of her eyes, as she gazed past the voluble wife of Andrew, through her vines, at the little House of Children next door. She imagined she heard Stefana singing, high up and sweet, over her work. Wait!—that was not ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... have applied Our shopman's test of age and worth, Was elemental when he died, As he was ancient at his birth: The saddest among kings of earth, Bowed with a galling crown, this man Met rancor with a cryptic mirth, ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... in my memory outside the English Club. Yes, I've got that. Well, if it will, I work—I think you said 'work'—round until I can reach the down-pipe. The drain—down-pipe will enable me to get my feet into the gutter. Sounds all right, doesn't it? 'The drain-pipe will enable.' A cryptic phrase. Quite the Brigade-Office touch. Where were we? Oh, yes. The drain-pipe having enabled me, etc., I just fall forward on to the tiles, when my hands will encounter and grasp the balustrade. Then I climb over and pat Nobby. Yes, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... shouting mood, and shocking the air behind him with profane monosyllables as he departed. Mrs. Adams would be left quiet and troubled; and when Alice, sympathizing with the goaded man, inquired of her mother why these tiresome bickerings had been renewed, she always got the brooding and cryptic answer, "He COULD do it—if he wanted to." Alice failed to comprehend the desirability of a glue factory—to her mind a father engaged in a glue factory lacked impressiveness; had no advantage over a father employed by Lamb and Company; and she supposed ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... she gives health to those who must needs waste all their splendid strength on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking sticks ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... reached the rock he'd placed as a marker. He did cryptic things, facing away from Jill. From time to time there was a golden glitter ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... whole has a very pleasant time of it. Once he has mastered the mysteries of the Semaphore and Morse codes, the most laborious part of his education is over. Henceforth he spends his days upon some sheltered hillside, in company with one or two congenial spirits, flapping cryptic messages out of a blue-and-white flag at a similar party across ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... arrest the French police received additional evidence against him in the form of a cryptic telegram addressed to the Chateau, an infamous and easily deciphered message which, no doubt, had been sent with the distinct purpose of strengthening the amazing charge against him. He protested entire ignorance of the sender and of the meaning of the message, but his ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... France and a sabre, The outcry of old beauty Whored by pimping merchants To submission before wine and chatter. Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men, Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light Into their woof, their lives; The rug of an honest bear Under the feet of a cryptic slave Who speaks always of baubles, Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state, Champing and mouthing of hats, Making ratful squeak ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... upon her submarines by President Wilson caused the eyes of Washington to be fixed anxiously on the uncertain situation. It was solely a psychological and mental condition, but of a character that seemed premonitory of an outbreak on Germany's part. Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, in a cryptic remark to the Reichstag on September 28, 1916, succeeded in aggravating American concern, though he may not have so intended. "A German statesman," he said, "who would hesitate to use against Britain every available instrument ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... in the mood of the early Allegro; a wistful melody of the clarinet plays more slowly between cryptic reminders of the first theme of the symphony. In sudden Allegro risoluto over rumbling bass of strings, a mystic call of horns, harking far back, spreads its echoing ripples all about till it rises in united tones, with a clear, descending ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... art—something that is created by and appeals to peculiar faculties, something rare and personal, something not to be had simply by taking thought and pains, something as utterly unlike honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the cryptic mutterings of boozy mountebanks: subject, however, to this assumption, his theories are severely practical. They have to do solely with the art of painting; they are born of his own experience; and he makes visible use of them. That is ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... over ten light-minutes of distance traversed twice—186,000 miles for every second, spanned by slender threads of radio energy which were of low-power but of low-loss low-dispersal, too, explaining their tremendous range—Art Kuzak's warning was carefully cryptic, yet plain to Nelsen and ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... where, in a shop that apparently sold everything, from pickles to picture postcards, two British soldiers were buying a pair of braces from a smiling, haggard-eyed woman, and being extremely polite about it in cryptic Anglo-French; and here I foregathered with my companions. Our way led us through the railway station, a much-battered ruin, its clock tower half gone, its platforms cracked and splintered, the iron girders of its great, domed roof bent and twisted, and with never a ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... Mirliton (penny trumpet). His allusions to Mirliton and to the Bishop frequently mystified Madame Novikoff's guests. For he loved to talk in cypher. Canon Warburton, kindly searching on my behalf his brother Eliot's journals, tells me that he and Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquialisms, inexplicable to ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... girl had not awakened. But something in John B. Marche had. He looked in horrified surprise at the decoys, then looked at Molly Herold; then he gazed in profound astonishment at Uncle Dudley, who made a cryptic remark to the wife of his bosom, and ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... of his tepid-minded, painlessly married tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the empire of the passions would have made a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... of insanity which was his contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of his own day) and the dark and mysterious ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong," said the cryptic Mr. Searle. "But if you think you'd like to buy or rent her place I'm fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car standing outside—take you right on out there in a jiffy if ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of killing a cat than by choking it with cream," was his cryptic remark. "What would you say if I told you that in an hour's time we, will have every drop of water out of the yacht, and that following that we will have ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the story with me. We looked over the papers together. There was a rude cryptic sort of map; I have it. It meant nothing without a key. We searched everywhere for that key. Marc pretending to aid me, had it all of the time in his hand. When he had had time to carry it away and place it where I could ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... following note: 'This is the expression, I am told, which had nearly prov'd fatal to the Comedy. I should not have printed it, but from the resolution I have religiously kept, of restoring every thing that was objected to.' Imagination and ingenuity fail to fathom the cryptic indecency. The School for Greybeards is, in fine, a modest and mediocre comedy ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... agreed, falls victim in practice to the fascinations of the dream-book cipher method which he has condemned. The adjective Freudian is now justly a by-word, among psychopathologists, for a stereotyped habit of reducing each item of a dream to some cryptic allusion or roundabout reference to the primitive demands of the infantile and sexual life. Freud's fertility in such interpretations has led one of our best-known experimental psychologists to say, in mingled admiration and impatience: ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the highest possible valuation upon us. It is only when we are underrated that we object. So this dear, deluded old gentleman, having failed to secure a 'rune' in Java brought back something equally cryptic—a woman? Was the lady of his choice a native or merely an inhabitant ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... town Henry Fenn's bibulous habits became accepted matters to a wider and wider circle and Tom Van Dorn still had his way with the girls while the town grinned at the two young men in gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn, cryptic messages for the young men—from Tom's mother and Henry's father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages with incidental admonitions of his own—kind, gentle and gorgeously ineffective. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... I marveled at these cryptic utterances. They shadowed a modern Black Art, of which I had had no conception—a recrudescence in other language of the age-old dualism of good and evil. It was ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... in mild surprise. Doubtless he would have asked the meaning of this cryptic utterance; but at this moment the two seamen from the Milo issued forth from the gateway up the road; and, descending a few paces, turned to call back farewell to Mrs. Treacher, who, having escorted them so far, halted under the arch and stood, with hands on hips, ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... sensation of fatigue. He had not liked himself for accepting the orders that had brought him here. They had been issued in bland confidence that he had no personal affairs which could not be abandoned to obey cryptic orders from the secretary of a boss he had actually never seen. He felt a sort of self-contempt which it would have been restful to forget in three-gravity sleep. But he grimaced and held ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a resonant phrase needing interpretation. The rulers of Japan to-day, if they were interrogated on the subject, would probably reply that the record of Japan for over thirty-eight years past is the practical interpretation of the Emperor's cryptic utterance. Be that as it may, the ink was hardly dry on the Imperial edict before Japan laid herself out with earnestness, not to say enthusiasm, to carry into effect the principles enunciated in the edict. The whole country was ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... my colleague in amazement, and was about to ask for some elucidation of this cryptic reply, when he held up his finger ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... those cryptic headlines and the business-like letter broke in on Alaric. All the Chichester blood ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... of life are written in script so cryptic and obscure that none but the wise and greatly skilled may decipher it, and they only, when aided by the special equipment which science supplies. In this case the firm but facile miracle is recorded in words that he that runs may read. Independent of microscope the unskilled observer may ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the sway, in old Japan, Of silent cryptic trees, There is a shrine the worldliest Would near ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper name, I think, is the launce) a silverling. The "coasting reader" is the courteous reader when walking along the coast, and what he sees are silver fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty of their scales. The Song to David is cryptic to a very high degree, but I think there are no lines in it which patient reflection will not solve. On every page are stanzas the verbal splendour of which no lover of poetry will question, and lines ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... patriarch of the Gnosis has selected the former." It is possibly showing gratitude for small mercies, because our friend has saved his reason, but is blood-guilty in the matter of common sense. Meanwhile, the widowed Gnosis illuminates its Ichabod in the cryptic quartiers of Paris, Lyons, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... The waters of talk spread a little, and Maggie presently contributed an idea in saying: "What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered." He accepted equally, for the time, this somewhat cryptic remark; he still failed to challenge her even when she added that it wouldn't so much matter if he hadn't been so terribly young. He uttered a sound of protest only when she went to declare that she ought as a daughter, in common decency, to have waited. Yet by that time ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... there were persons who could fathom the destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... his ward to marry you, but Miss Brandt made her own choice, which she had a perfect right to do, and, ma foi—" leaning back in his chair and regarding the two faces in front of him, he did not finish his sentence in words, but contented himself with cryptic nods whose meaning, we may hope, was lost ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... marquis, properly regarded, is not so much a nascent duke as a magnified earl. A shrewd observer of the world once said to me: "When an earl gets a marquisate, it is worth a hundred thousand pounds in hard money to his family." The explanation of this cryptic utterance is that, whereas an earl's younger sons are "misters," a marquis's younger sons are "lords." Each "my lord" can make a "my lady," and therefore commands a distinctly higher price in the marriage-market of a wholesomely-minded community. Miss Higgs, with her fifty thousand pounds, might ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... is, that bound up with despatches received are the outlines of those sent, and generally not merely a sketch, but the first draft with all annotations and corrections, these quite often in Napoleon's almost cryptic but still decipherable handwriting. Much of course is in cipher, but the key is available and sometimes the official decipherment. The archives of St. Petersburg are also available for properly accredited searchers; Tratchefski has gone a considerable distance in publishing the decisive papers, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... over Calhoun's shoulder. She uttered a cryptic sentence or two. It should have amounted to identification, but there was skepticism in the ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster |
