"Rootless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves, many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless existence,—all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of their monotonous drudgery,—for the bright, capable, adaptive many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and beauty ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... compeers,—clothed with wealth and power, To day is poorer than his humblest hind. A whirlwind from the desert! All unwarn'd Its fury came. Earth like a vassal shook. Majestic trees flew hurtling through the air Like rootless reeds. There was no time for flight. Buried in household wrecks, all helpless lay Masses of quivering life. Job's eldest son That day held banquet for their numerous line At his own house. With revelry and song, One moment in the glow of kindred hearts The lordly ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... anything That in the heart of God holds not its root; Nor falsely deem there is any life at all That doth in him nor sleep nor shine nor sing; I know the plants that bear the noisome fruit Of burning and of ashes and of gall— From God's heart torn, rootless to man's ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... Dionaea; almost certainly with Aldrovanda; and, from analogy, very probable with Roridula and Byblis. We can thus understand how it is that the three first-named genera are provided with such small roots, and that Aldrovanda is quite rootless; about the roots of the two other genera nothing is known. It is, no doubt, a surprising fact that a whole group of plants (and, as we shall presently see, some other plants not allied to the Droseraceae) should subsist partly by digesting animal matter, and partly by decomposing carbonic ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... died, not fighting but impotent. Hung on the wire, between trenches, burning and freezing, Groaning for water with armies of men so near; The fall over cliff, the clutch at the rootless grass, The beach rushing up, the whirling, the turning headfirst; Stiff writhings of strychnine, taken in error or haste, Angina pectoris, shudders of the heart; Failure and crushing by flying weight to the ground, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... that dignify or delight our nature. I have ever said, 'Reverence the rulers.' Let, then, his image stand; but stand apart from Pindar's. Pallas and Jove! defend me from being carried down the stream of time among a shoal of royalets, and the rootless ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones. The man who sees no beauty in its petals, finds no perfume in its breath, may well accord it the parentage of the stones; the man whose heart swells beholding it will be ready to think it has ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... had turned to exasperation when he found that the Weymore sleigh was not awaiting him. It was absurd, of course; but, though he had joked with Rainer over Mrs. Culme's forgetfulness, to confess it had cost a pang. That was what his rootless life had brought him to: for lack of a personal stake in things his sensibility was at the mercy of such trifles.... Yes; that, and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of starved aptitudes, all these had brought him to the perilous verge over which, ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... damnable snares of the pulpit! It was that which ruined me—the notion that I must take the minister for my pattern, and live up to my idea of him, before even I had begun to cherish anything real in me! It was the road royal to hypocrisy! Without that rootless, worthless, devilish fancy, I might have been no worse than other people! Now I am lost! Now I shall never get back to bare honesty, not to say innocence! They are both ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... higher responsibility, bows and accepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts once more. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... thin foam that enamels yonder tract of ocean, belongs to it, is a part of it, yet is, after all, but a bequest of tempests, and covers only a dark abyss of crossing currents and desolate tangles of rootless kelp. Everybody was drawn to her, yet not a soul took any comfort in her. Her very voice had in it a despairing sweetness, that seemed far in advance of her actual history; it was an anticipated miserere, a perpetual dirge, where nothing had yet ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Rootless middle classes and the wretched of the earth might join forces and pull down ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... out, but the sickly yellow stems continue to flourish and spread, drawing their nourishment not from the soil itself, but by strangling and sucking the life juices of the hosts on which it feeds. I have seen whole byways covered thus with yellow dodder—rootless, leafless, parasitic—reaching up to the sunlight, quite cutting off and smothering the plants which gave it life. A week or two it flourishes and then most of it perishes miserably. So many of us come to be like that: so much ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson |
