"Avidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with compunction, doubtless, on the very morrow, how thumpingly her heart had beaten at this foretaste of their being left together: she should judge at leisure the surrender she was making to the consciousness of complications about to be bodily lifted. She should judge at leisure even that avidity for an issue which was making so little of any complication but the unextinguished presence of the others; and indeed that she was already simplifying so much more than her husband came out for her next in the face with which he listened. He might certainly well be puzzled, in respect to his father-in-law ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... such as she had obtained in winter when the Nancy Hanks was frozen up near a schoolhouse. Then she studied with avidity. Had she ever remained long enough for the teachers really to get acquainted with the shy, odd child, she might have made good friends. As it was, she knew few people well and was as ignorant of life as it was lived by comfortably situated people as a civilized ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... detecting the mystification, the latter was disposed to believe himself a subject of interest with this person, against whose exclusiveness and haughty reserve, notwithstanding, he had been making side-hits ever since the ship had sailed. But the avidity with which the Americans of Mr. Dodge's temperament are apt to swallow the crumbs of flattery that fall from the Englishman's table, is matter of history, and the editor himself was never so happy as when he could lay hold of a paragraph to republish, in which a few words of ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... her compliments, while his soul sickened at the avidity with which she swallowed them. He asked himself if it would not be better to put an end to this impossible state of things by telling her he was in love with Anne. But when he glanced at the little fragile figure beside him, and noted the delicacy and ethereal look in her face, ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... crowded with cattle, lowing and fighting with each other to come at the troughs. Excessive thirst made many of them furious; others, being too weak to contend for the water, endeavoured to quench their thirst by devouring the black mud from the gutters near the wells, which they did with great avidity, though it was commonly fatal ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... was a favourite meet, and in the ladies' drawing-room each fresh piece of news was torn with avidity. The consumption of notepaper was extraordinary. Two, three, four, and even five sheets of paper were often filled with what these scavengeresses could rake out of the gutters of gossip. 'Ah! me arm aches, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... up and down from one man's room to another, and from one College to another, imploring society, a little conversation, and a little relief of the burden which pressed upon my spirits; and I am sorry to say, that those who, when I was cheerful and lively, sought my society with avidity, now, when I actually needed conversation, were too busy to grant it. Our College examination was then approaching, and I perceived with anguish that I had read for the university scholarship until I had barely ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... vessels, carrying fifteen hundred men, to which number he had been restricted; for he left behind him more than two thousand discontented and disconsolate men, who begged to be allowed to embark at their own expense; such was their avidity for gold and such their desire ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Intelligence: the Emperor at Wilhelmshohe!!!" The large type in which the heading was printed and the three marks of exclamation showed plainly that the article was very important. I began to read with avidity, but was utterly mystified. What emperor was this? Probably the Tsar or the Emperor of Austria, for there was no German Emperor in those days. But no! It was evidently the Emperor of the French. And how did Napoleon get to Wilhelmshohe? The French must have broken through the Rhine ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... charge with the more confidence that I knew Dr Duncan would call several times in the course of the day. As for Tom, I had equal assurance that he would attend to orders; and as Gerard was very fond of him, I dismissed all anxiety about both, and allowed my mind to return with fresh avidity to the contemplation of its own cares, and fears, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... she believed herself to have obtained on observing that Bluebell never failed to study the daily papers with an avidity unusual at ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... elementary gases and their mixtures, including among the latter the earth's atmosphere, were almost as pervious as a vacuum to ordinary radiant heat, the compound gases were one and all absorbers, some of them taking up with intense avidity the motion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... and act with such astonishing rapidity, that an uninitiated bystander would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the progress of the game. The initiated, however, of whom there is always an eager group looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity; and as they are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of a dispute, and are frequently divided in their partisanship, it is often a very noisy proceeding. It is never the quietest game in the world; for the numbers are always called in a loud sharp voice, and follow as close ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... royal encouragement were given to settle the country over the mountains; that the suspension of this encouragement, by the proclamation of October 1763, was merely temporary, untill the lands were purchased from the natives;—that the avidity to settle these lands was so great, that large settlements were made thereon, before they were purchased;—that although the settlers were daily exposed to the cruelties of the savages, neither a military force, nor repeated ...
— Report of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations on the Petition of the Honourable Thomas Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, John Sargent, and Samuel Wharton, Esquires, and their Associates • Great Britain Board of Trade
... goes, but leaves us very far from a complete explanation of this unpleasant survival. So scandalous is the interrelation of the armament firms[11] which has developed the world's trade in munitions and explosives into one obscene cartel; so cynical is the avidity with which their agents exchange their trade secrets, sell ships and guns, often by means of diplomatic blackmail, to friend or foe alike, and follow those pioneers of civilisation the missionary, the gin merchant and the procurer,[12] ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... then that the above-named gentleman, whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... Chaucians do not only possess but fill; a people of all the Germans the most noble, such as would rather maintain their grandeur by justice than violence. They live in repose, retired from broils abroad, void of avidity to possess more, free from a spirit of domineering over others. They provoke no wars, they ravage no countries, they pursue no plunder. Of their bravery and power, the chief evidence arises from hence, that, without wronging or ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... read editorials, and got interested. The Colonist never advanced beyond the proof-sheet stage, but as such it circulated with avidity over the valley. Eloquence flowed serene under mashed type and variegated fonts. The editor persisted in viewing the Empire and Republic as political parties, and the horrors of civil warfare as incidents ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... sweet not to be swallowed with avidity by me. Too late I remembered that I was already enslaved by inextricable obligations. It was easy to have hidden this impediment from the eyes of my companion, but here my integrity refused to yield. I can, indeed, lay claim to little merit on account of this forbearance. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... to his darlings he thought a woman the worst, and had therefore seized with avidity the chance of making that room a hidden one, the possibility of which he had spied almost the moment he ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... should have a polite permission to depart with all speed. The philosophers were dismissed, but it was impossible to restrain the Roman youth who had listened to the addresses of the strangers with an avidity all the greater because their utterances had been found scandalous, and they went to Athens, or Rhodes, to hear more ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... went into the public room of the Commercial Hotel, and took up a paper to read. There was a paragraph about California, and some recent discoveries there, which he read with avidity. ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... less professionally, I was disturbed to note that there began to appear in various publications—especially M——'s, which was flourishing greatly for the moment—stories which while exhibiting much of the deftness and repression as well as an avidity for the true color of things, still showed what I had at first feared they might: a decided compromise. That curse of all American fiction, the necessarily happy ending, had been impressed on him—by whom? To my sincere dissatisfaction, he began writing stories, some at least, which ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... fellow-sufferers, and long after Henrietta had tired of singing, Rose went on playing, mournfully, as it seemed to Henrietta, consoling herself with sweet sounds. Sophia sat before her embroidery frame, slowly pushing her needle in and out; Caroline read a novel with avidity and an occasional pause for chuckles, and when Rose at length dropped her hands on her knees and remained motionless, staring at the keys, Henrietta startled her aunts by saying firmly, 'I am ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that all our natural inclinations lead us towards sin! The man of God had succeeded in guarding his eyes, but he had left his nostrils undefended, and so the devil, as it were, caught him by the nose. This saint now inhaled the fragrance of mignonette with avidity and lust, that is to say, with that sinful instinct which makes us long for the enjoyment of natural pleasures and which leads us into ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... of very able correspondents, who watched and reported to their transatlantic readers every move in the Home Rule campaign. An American public, by no means limited to the American-Irish, devoured every morsel of this intelligence with an avidity which could not have been surpassed if the United States had been engaged in a war with Great Britain. Among these correspondents perhaps the most brilliant was the late Harold Frederic. Not many months before he died I received a letter from him, in which he said that, although we were ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... With avidity—for there is ever a charm in the supernatural—did the Arabs receive from their Nestorian and Jewish medical instructors these mystical interpretations along with true knowledge. And far from resting satisfied with what their masters had thus delivered, they proceeded forthwith to improve and extend ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... story which will be read with avidity, as it ought to be, it is so brightly and frankly written, and with such evident knowledge of the temperaments and habits, the friendships and ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... unwittingly closed upon the brilliant vision of the Golden City, my auricular organs became more exquisitely sensible to the tide of heavenly melodies, now rolling in awful and inexpressible beauty around me; my spirit, lapped in ecstacy, quaffed with avidity the majestic stream, and upon me seemed opening the light and loveliness of worlds more enrapturing even, and ineffable, than this! But there was a pause in the music, and anon the magic bells of the Golden City were heard chiming in harp-like notes, which dropped ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... same expression which most frequently lurked over it. Crossing over to a table at the farthest end of the apartment from the door, he addressed a few words to its occupants; assumed a vacant chair by its side, and joined in the play. For hours he sat grasping the cards with trembling avidity, winning and losing, apparently unmindful of either. But this was merely the gilded outwardness—within, rankled fierce passions, like the lightning in the summer-evening cloud. The night glided on; its dank air grew ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... crops; some said it was the prospect of national expansion. In any event the country got tired of its long fit of sulks; trade revived, railroads set about mending their tracks, mills opened—a current of splendid vitality began to throb. Men took to their business with renewed avidity, content to go their old ways, to make new snares and to enter them, all unconscious of any mighty purpose. Those at the faro tables of the market increased the stakes and opened new tables. New industrial companies sprung up overnight like mushrooms, watered and sunned by the easy ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with avidity, and repaired to his tent. But what was his confusion and surprise to find, on examining his present, that it was nothing but a fragment of a human skull. "And is this," exclaimed he, "the mighty gift that they ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... where, in place of antiphonaries, heavy ledgers reposed on reading-desks. Like leprosy, the avidity of the age was ravaging the Church, weighing down the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... difficult to give an adequate idea of Mrs Hominy's freshness next day, or of the avidity with which she went headlong into moral philosophy at breakfast. Some little additional degree of asperity, perhaps, was visible in her features, but not more than the pickles would have naturally produced. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... gained much from Comte, with which to enrich my chapters in the subsequent rewriting: and his book was of essential service to me in some of the parts which still remained to be thought out. As his subsequent volumes successively made their appearance, I read them with avidity, but, when he reached the subject of Social Science, with varying feelings. The fourth volume disappointed me: it contained those of his opinions on social subjects with which I most disagree. But the fifth, containing the connected view of history, rekindled all my enthusiasm; which ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... time, talent and energy in the cause of freedom." In this abiding faith she came to Philadelphia, hoping that the way would open for usefulness, and to publish her little book (above referred to). She visited the Anti-Slavery Office and read Anti-Slavery documents with great avidity; in the mean time making her home at the station of the Underground Rail Road, where she frequently saw passengers and heard their melting tales of suffering and wrong, which intensely increased her sympathy in their behalf. Although anxious to enter the Anti-Slavery field as a worker, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... seized with a dreadful fit of coughing, which I expected every moment would terminate his frail existence. I gave him a teaspoonful of currant jelly, which he took with avidity, but could not retain a moment on ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... inferior to those which constantly pass between friends on the topics of the hour or their own affairs. It is charitable to conjecture that their writers never imagined that they could be exposed in print, or would not be burned as soon as read. And yet, with what avidity are they conned and discussed! Look at the letters of Lord Byron, Moore, and Campbell. How much brainless twattle do they contain, amid a few grains of wit and humor. What mere commonplace! Editors ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of anatomy. I studied the lungs, the throat, the brain—nothing escaped me. I pursued my studies with the avidity of the medical student wrapped up in his work. I read all the books that had been published on the subject of stammering. I sought eagerly for translations of foreign books on the subject. I lived in the libraries. ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... has been said, was in reality a trifle fagged. When everybody had removed to the Gymnasium, where the dancing was to be, and he had been delightful there, too, for a whole half-hour, he grasped with avidity at his first chance to slip away, and did so under cover ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... different encampments. Bales were hastily ripped open, and their motley contents poured forth. A mania for purchasing spread itself throughout the several bands—munitions for war, for hunting, for gallantry, were seized upon with equal avidity—rifles, hunting knives, traps, scarlet cloth, red blankets, garish beads, and glittering trinkets, were bought at any price, and scores run up without any thought how they were ever to be rubbed off. The free trappers, especially, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the productions of the dry (we cannot call them high) grounds: the swamps, with which this coast abounds, are still more fruitful, and abundantly compensate the avidity and barrenness of the soil around them. They bear rice in such plenty, especially the marsh about New Orleans, "That the inhabitants reap the greatest advantage from it, and reckon it the manna of the land." [Footnote: Dumont, I. 15.] It was ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... imagined that with regard to this bird (kept as it is all but exclusively for its beauty), any spontaneous beautiful variation in colour or form would have been neglected. On the contrary, it would have been seized upon with avidity and preserved with anxious care. Yet apart from the black-shouldered and white varieties, no tendency to change has been known to show itself. As to its being too beautiful for improvement, that ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Anville will think I persecute her: yet so much as I have to say, and so much as I wish to hear, with so few opportunities for either, she cannot wonder-and I hope she will not be offended-that I seize with such avidity every moment in my power to converse with her. You are grave," added he, taking my hand; "I hope the pleasure it gives to me, will not be a subject of pain to you? -You are silent!-Something, I am sure, has afflicted you:-would to Heaven I were able to console you!-Would ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... horror, bethought him of Jack's admonition about the water. He slipped down from the tree, gathered the large moist leaves that clustered near the pool and held them to the burning lips, Jones swallowed the drops with a hideous gurgling avidity, clutching the boy's hand ravenously to secure a more copious flow. There was a tin cup in the holster under the invalid's head. Taking this, Dick dipped up water from the black pool between the green leaves; the hot lips sucked it ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... to which St. Elmo subscribed was one renowned for the lofty tone of its articles and the asperity of its carping criticisms, and this periodical Edna always singled out and read with avidity. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... as she knew, her late mistress's sister lived, Mrs. O'Connett, formerly Miss Sophia Pratt. Mrs. O'Connett, a young widow, had just lost her only child, a boy about the age of the little one rescued from the cruel seas. She seized on him with feverish avidity, adopted him as her own, quitted the place for another Anglo-French town where she was not previously known, taught the child to call her "Mamma," and had never let it transpire that the boy was not hers. But now, after the lapse of a few years, Mrs. O'Connett was on the eve of marriage ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... was plain that it was still in their thoughts, from the joy with which they resumed their lives, the pleasant life from day to day, which is never truly valued until it is endangered. As usual when danger is past, they gulped it down with renewed avidity. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... at a country seat; and so we appear to be. The French nobility do not seem to have any taste for solitude. Their love of variety induces them to change the scene; but the same tumult of guests and visitors, coming and going, is every where their delight. Whatever can attract company they seek with avidity. I am dear to them, because I am an English beauty, as they tell me, and all the world is desirous of paying its court ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... of paper fluttered to the ground. Roger seized it with avidity, and, crouching on the floor, smoothed the paper out ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... and all regions with which it came into contact. It knew continued war and interrupted peace for centuries. It held united under its vast sway, states decrepit with the oldest of civilisations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism. It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, the science of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and the daring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas of the Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident. Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... again removed, and planted on Fingal's grave; and there—on a seat that her brother had constructed—would Edith sit, hour after hour, either buried in contemplations of the past and the future, or else devouring with avidity the few books that her parents possessed, or that she could procure from their friends and neighbors. She formed no intimacy with any of her own young countrywomen. They were too unlike herself—they had generally known no sorrow: or, ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents, and I continued to read with the greatest avidity. When I returned home my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few besides ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... century, wandering poets went from castle to castle reciting or singing love-songs, composed in the old Provencal dialect, a sort of vulgarized Latin. The life in the great feudal chateaux was so dull that the lords and ladies seized with avidity any amusement which promised to while away an idle hour. The troubadours were made much of and became a strong element in the development of the Southern spirit. So-called Courts of Love were formed where questions of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... intelligent being. But when first I opened a book, after so long an abstinence from all mental nourishment,—Oh it was rapture! no half-famished beggar regaled suddenly with food, ever seized on his repast with more hungry avidity." ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery, and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... leading a more severely-wounded comrade, whose discoloured visages declare their extreme suffering;—their uniforms either hanging in shreds, or totally despoiled of them by those marauders who ravage a field of battle in merciless avidity of plunder and murder. These brave fellows, these steady warriors, so redoubtable a few hours since, are now sunk into the helplessness of infancy, the feebleness of woman, over whom man arrogates a power that may not be disputed, but whose solacing influence in the hour of tribulation and sickness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... pass any but a suspicious eye, and bountifully enriched it with the petting phrases and loving nicknames that had been familiar on the child's lips from her nursery days. She carried it to the mother, who took it with avidity, and kissed it, and fondled it, reading its precious words over and over again, and dwelling with deep contentment upon its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and laughed, and I suspected that she divined Nick's propensity for adventure. However, she said nothing more than to bid me sit down at the table, and presently Zoey came in with lights and strange, highly seasoned dishes, which I ate with avidity, notwithstanding my uneasiness of mind, watching the while the party at the far end of the room. There were five young gentlemen playing a game I knew not, with intervals of intense silence, and boisterous laughter and execrations while the cards ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... apostles; and we have not the least evidence to be depended on, that those now received were not also apocryphal. For they were written nobody certainly knows by whom, or where, or when. They first appeared in an age of credulity, when forgeries of this kind abounded and were received with avidity by those whose opinions they favoured, while they were rejected as spurious by many sects of Christians, who asserted that they were possessed of the genuine apostles, which, however, those who received "the four," denied. 6. All the different sects of Christians, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... telegraph wires had never been so congested with news as on that morning. In a little over an hour after the judge had left the court the London papers were full of it. Stirring headlines were on the placards of all the evening papers, and people bought them with almost the same avidity as they had bought them in Manchester. In a sense there seemed no reason why so much interest should have been aroused, but in another there was. Such a confession on the part of the judge was almost unprecedented, and as both Judge Bolitho and Paul Stepaside were ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... change of sentiment with regard to the whole matter of cooperation took place, contemporaneously with the industrial depression and unsuccessful strikes. The rank and file, who had hitherto been indifferent, now seized upon the idea with avidity. The enthusiasm ran so high in Lynn, Massachusetts, that it was found necessary to raise the shares of the Knights of Labor Cooperative Shoe Company to $100 in order to prevent a large influx of "unsuitable members." In 1885 Powderly complained that "many of our members grow impatient and unreasonable ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... made both the picker-up and the payer exceedingly contented. Meanwhile Peter with difficulty restrained Leslie from "picking up" stray pieces of mosaic from tessellated pavements, and other curios. Oddly together with Leslie's feeling for the costly went the insane and indiscriminate avidity of the ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... former only had been distinguishable, amid the intervals that ensued between each sullen booming of the cannon. While this impression continued on the mind of the anxious officer, he caught, with the avidity of desperation, at the faint and improbable idea that his companions might be able to penetrate to his place of concealment, and procure his liberation; but when he found the firing, instead of drawing nearer, was confined to the same ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... instantaneous cures, inspired discourses, and demoniacal possessions, the records of which were shelved in our libraries but yesterday in the alcove headed 'superstitions,' now, under the brand-new title of 'cases of hystero-epilepsy,' are republished, reobserved, and reported with an even too credulous avidity. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... beginning to agitate Europe: the King of Poland, Augustus III., had died in 1763, leaving the unhappy country over which he had reigned a prey to internal anarchy ever increasing and systematically fanned by the avidity or jealousy of the great powers, its neighbors. "As it is to the interest of the two monarchs of Russia and Prussia that the Polish commonwealth should preserve its right to free election of a king," said the secret ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "Progressus Rei Botanicae", Vol. I. page 1, Jena, 1907.), have furnished conclusive evidence in favour of these facts. It was found that when the reticular framework of a nucleus prepares to divide, it separates into single segments. These then become thicker and denser, taking up with avidity certain stains, which are used as aids to investigation, and finally form longer or shorter, variously bent, rodlets of uniform thickness. In these organs which, on account of their special property of absorbing certain stains, were styled Chromosomes ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... intellectual activity. Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... given Grace, but she refused to receive them; and now, she asked for these very pearls, which, intrinsically, were not half the value of the sum I had informed Mr. Hardinge Grace had requested me to expend in purchasing a memorial. This avidity to possess these pearls—for so it struck me—was difficult to account for, Grace having owned divers other ornaments that were more costly, and which she had much oftener worn. I confess, I had thought of attempting to persuade Lucy to receive my own necklace as the memorial of Grace, but, a little ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... down beside the open window with a groan. An hour later he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched out his hand with avidity towards a book on the table. It was an obscure and difficult Greek text, and he spent the greater part of the night over it, rekindling in himself with feverish haste the embers of his one ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... valor in the trenches, very similar to the tales he had recounted to us at Salisbury Plain of his achievements in the Great Retreat, and the cook had given him a meal befitting a hero of his caliber, which Scotty had devoured with the relish and avidity of four heroes, while the others had shown him the due and necessary deference ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... between great darknesses, enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below. He was going along this path without looking back, without a thought for those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps even over familiar. His hands would be in his pockets, his indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him. And as he strolled along that path, the darkness closed ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... tragedy. Glaring headlines, sandwiched biographies of every member of the household, subtle innuendoes, the usual familiar tag about the police having a clue. Nothing was spared us. It was a slack time. The war was momentarily inactive, and the newspapers seized with avidity on this crime in fashionable life: "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" was the topic of ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... difference with Blackwood, he proceeded in December of that year to London, with the view of effecting an arrangement for the republication of his whole works. His reception in the metropolis was worthy of his fame; he was courted with avidity by all the literary circles, and feted at the tables of the nobility. A great festival, attended by nearly two hundred persons, including noblemen, members of Parliament, and men of letters, was given him in Freemasons' Hall, on the anniversary of the birthday of Burns. The duties of chairman ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... With avidity I read that the young Princess, as noted for her beauty as for her jewels, the only daughter of the millionaire Italian shipowner Andrea Ottone, of Genoa, who had married the Prince a year ago, had been robbed of her famous string of pearls ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... that the protege of the good Dr. Clarke rewarded his patron's kindness. His classical attainments were far above the usual University standard, and he read with avidity the English philosophers from Bacon down to Shaftesbury. He early exhibited that hopeful propensity—the noble avarice of books. In his first half-yearly account of nine pounds are entries for "King's Inquiry," and an interleaved New Testament; and a guinea presented ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Study! How stupid! No, indeed! She wanted no scholar for a husband, who would bore her with horrid old dull books and lectures and never want to go anywhere with her! She must switch him away from this idea at once! She returned to the rejected business proposition with zeal and avidity. What was it? What did it involve? What were its future possibilities? Great! What on earth could he find in that to object to? How ridiculous! How long ago had that been offered to him? Was it too late to accept? What? He had had the offer repeated even more flatteringly that very day? ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... also a mullā, and also called Muḥammad; he was conspicuous for his bitter hostility to the Sheykhi and the Bābī sects. Ḳurratu'l 'Ayn herself had a flexible and progressive mind, and shrank from no theological problem, old or new. She absorbed with avidity the latest religious novelties, which were those of the Bāb, and though not much sympathy could be expected from most of her family, yet there was one of her cousins who was favourable like herself to the claims of the Bāb. Her father, too, though he upbraided his daughter for ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... After the maguey has yielded its sap to the last quart, and begins to wilt, there appears in the stalk a nest of white caterpillars, which the Indians consider to be a great luxury, and which they eat with avidity, besides which the roots of the exhausted plant are boiled and eaten, possessing considerable nutritive properties. The native people of New Zealand exhibit a similar appetite. When the trunks of the tall kauri trees, which have been uprooted by storms, have lain so ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... disturb me, of course, for it was tavern-tidings and neighbours' news. Neighbours! How much is that sacred word prostituted! You shall find people opening their ears with avidity to the gossip of a neighbourhood, when nineteen times in twenty it is less entitled to credit than the intelligence which is obtained from a distance, provided the latter come from persons of the same class in life as the individuals in question, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... hit upon none that we could spare for you to take over to your doin's. The old woman has got some popcorn candy and rag dolls hid in the clothes chest, and we allow to give Christmas a little whirl of our own in a insignificant sort of style. No, I couldn't, with any degree of avidity, seem to fall in with the idea of lettin' none of 'em go. Thank you ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... injustice on the part of her officials? There can be no doubt that many high-handed and arbitrary acts were done against English subjects by the officers of Spanish authority. On every real and every reported and every imaginary act of Spanish harshness the Patriots seized with avidity. They presented petitions, moved for papers, moved that this injured person and that be allowed to appear and state his case at the bar of the House of Commons. Some English sailors and other Englishmen were thus allowed to ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... trials than those of the Old Bailey would be included in the package of books we received from London; among these my husband found and read with avidity:— ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... principal transactions in which he had been engaged during his political career, with copies of his letters to the first public characters of the day in our own and in foreign countries. Even by those who had felt no regard for the man, the letters of such a minister would have been read with avidity; but Mr. Percy perused them with a stronger interest than any which could be created by mere political or philosophical curiosity. He read them with a pleasure which a generous mind takes in admiring that which is good and great, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... arrived only about 50 yards behind. I have never felt so done, and so was my team. Of course we need not have raced, but we did, and I would do the same thing every time. Titus produced a mug of brandy he had sharked from the ship and we all lapped it up with avidity. The other team were just about laid out, too, so I don't think there was much to be said ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... world; and his code of laws lasted till Justinian. Among many of his useful measures of reform he issued decrees restricting the power of masters over their slaves, and depriving them of their old capital jurisdiction. His biographers find little to accuse him of beyond a singular avidity for fame, addiction to magic arts and luxurious vices: yet they adduce no proof of his having, at any rate before the date of his final retirement to his Tiburtine villa, shared the crimes of a Nero or a Commodus. On the whole, we must recognise in Hadrian a nature of extraordinary energy, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... clay, but fine-fine & delicate. I did hate to burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a pleasure. When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect was & how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster & Co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford —to my friends—but they ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Lord Vincent was unfolding to his companion. It was the very same plot that he had communicated to his valet, the atrocity of which had shocked even that cut-throat. It did not shock Faustina, however. She listened with avidity. She co-operated with zeal. She suggested such modifications and improvements for securing the success of the conspiracy, and the safety of the conspirators, as only her woman's tact, inspired by the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... disposition on the part of the cactuses is a tolerably easy one to guess. Fodder is rare in the desert. The starving herbivores that find themselves from time to time belated on the confines of such thirsty regions would seize with avidity upon any succulent plant which offered them food and drink at once in their last extremity. Fancy the joy with which a lost caravan, dying of hunger and thirst in the byways of Sahara, would hail a great bed of melons, cucumbers, and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... absurdities of folly, and the blunders of ignorance; the contrast of characters and the clash of opinions, the scandalous anecdotes of the day, related with sprightly malice, and listened to with equally malicious avidity,—all these, in my days of health and happiness, had power to surprise, or amuse, or provoke me. I could mingle then in the conflict of minds; and hear my part with smiles in the social circle; though the next moment, perhaps, I might contemn myself and others: and the personal scandal, the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... But Fergus Duff, while he revelled in the writings of certain of the poets of the age, was incapable of finding poetry for himself in the things around him: Donal Grant, on the other hand, while he seized on the poems Fergus lent him, with an avidity even greater than his, received from the nature around him influences similar to those which exhaled from the words of the poet. In some sense, then, Donal was original; that is, he received at first hand what Fergus required to have "put on" him, to quote Celia, in As you like it, "as pigeons feed ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... to reach a complete understanding of his subject. From each and every detail one is driven to consider the whole; the only thing that matters is that one go to work in the right way, with strength, intelligence, and avidity. Let one choose several different points of departure, working through from each of them to the whole, and one will grasp the whole all the more surely, and comprehend the wealth of detail all the more fully. Accordingly, by sinking deep into the particular, ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... three-sided in form, with sharp angles, similar in shape to beech-mast, whence the name from the Ger. Buchweizen, beechwheat. Buckwheat is grown in Great Britain only to supply food for pheasants and to feed poultry, which devour the seeds with avidity. In the northern countries of Europe, however, the seeds are employed as human food, chiefly in the form of cakes, which when baked thin have an agreeable taste, with a darkish somewhat violet colour. The meal of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... interests, to get rid of the favourite, and so was Gunga Khowas, a boatman, another personal servant and favourite of the King. These three men soon interested in their cause some of the most influential ladies of the palace, and all sought with avidity the opportunity to effect their object. Ghalib Jung was the person, or one of the persons, through whom the King invited females, noted for either their beauty or their accomplishments, and he was told to bring a celebrated dancing-girl, named ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... something worth having from Mehemet Ali. It is, however, doubtful. Nations appear as poor as individuals, and as unwilling to risk their money upon such matters. I hope the French will avail themselves of the benefits you offer them. It is truly strange that it is not grasped at with more avidity. If I can do anything in Egypt, I will try Turkey ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... plan. Many powerful impressions and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach that in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes irresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delighted avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose imperfect symmetries and segments are harmoniously filled out by the adjusting complement ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... these little love passages in the different colleges in the country. The studious young citizens read the "criticism" and the "essay" with the most praiseworthy avidity. Karl had replied to the essay in a few majestic sentences in the Editor's Table, the effect of which was somewhat impaired by the real editor's saying in a note at the foot, that he wasn't going to have any ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... able to perceive the benefits of regular industry; his head has proved as clear in the apprehension of the distinction between right and wrong as that of the more highly cultivated moralist; and he receives the fundamental truths of the gospel with an avidity, and applies them—at least to the lives and characters of his neighbors—with a keenness, which show him to be not far behind the rest of mankind in sensibility and acuteness. Without referring to the testimony of the elder missionaries, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... at pages containing lives of "self-made" men, who had risen as inventors or improvers in mechanics or as discoverers of important facts of natural science. Jan had not hitherto studied their careers with the avidity Master Swift would have liked to see, but one day he found him reading the fat volume ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... reference to the tonic port, until one day I noticed that our cat (who had recently lost her kittens) seemed in a poor state of health. I gave it a few spoonfuls of the tonic port in a little milk. It drank it with avidity, somewhat to my surprise. I had one or two little things to do in the garden after that, and when I came back Eliza said that the cat had become so very strange in its manner that she had thought it best to lock ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... country. I was a most decided advocate for the general measures of the government, although I abhorred some of the tyrannical acts of the ministers. I was an enthusiastic admirer of our beautiful constitution, the history of which I read at that time with great avidity, believing that it was in all its material points carried practically into effect, notwithstanding my friend and tutor had so strenuously endeavoured to convince me that it was only the theory ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... managing by some admirable diplomacy to evade the issue until the very last moment. But with the three—Roland, Nat, and Josie—so involved, we sensed a storm below the horizon, and awaited its breaking, if not with avidity, at ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... England and of France have, in truth, made little use of manuscript researches. Life is very short for long histories; and those who rage with an avidity of fame or profit will gladly taste the fruit which they cannot mature. Researches too remotely sought after, or too slowly acquired, or too fully detailed, would be so many obstructions in the smooth texture ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... August came—the date for breaking up camp and going into barracks—I felt as though I had been at West Point always, and that if I staid to graduation, I would have to remain always. I did not take hold of my studies with avidity, in fact I rarely ever read over a lesson the second time during my entire cadetship. I could not sit in my room doing nothing. There is a fine library connected with the Academy from which cadets can ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... was more secret on the birth of this son (if Peck's Richard Plantagenet was truly so) than on those of his other natural children. Perhaps the truest remark that can be made on this whole story is, that the avidity with which our historians swallowed one gross ill-concocted legend, prevented them from desiring or daring to sift a single part of it. If crumbs of truth are mingled with it, at least they are now undistinguishable in such a mass ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... seized with avidity the opportunity which fortune thus offered him to signalize himself, and found stronger claims to the esteem and regard of his sovereign, on whose features he had lately observed a degree of coldness which little accorded with her former cordiality. He did not regret his being excluded from ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... tutor, once clergyman, did not eat his food quite as "nicely" as he did at home—he devoured it; that Mrs. Maloney ate more, and, to say the least, with less delay, than was her custom in the select atmosphere of her English dining-room; and that while Joan attacked her tin plateful with genuine avidity, Sangree, the Canadian, bit and gnawed at his, laughing and talking and complimenting the cook all the while, and making me think with secret amusement of a starved animal at its first meal. While, from their remarks about myself, I judged that I had changed and grown wild as much ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... see her Greek Tragedy without a smile, indeed, she went so far as sometimes to think that its reception in the old kitchen of the farmhouse had given her a greater avidity ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... master, but, ye see, beef an' mutton, ducks an' chicken, an' sich, ain't good enough for your Nobs nowadays, oh no! They must dewour larks wi' gusto, and French hortolons wi' avidity, and wi' a occasional leg of a frog throw'd in for a relish—though, to be sure, a frog's leg ain't over meaty at the best o' times. Oh, it's all true, young sir; it's all wrote down here in this priceless wollum." Here he tapped ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... his victim with an eye of avidity and triumph. His eager curiosity wandered over her hoard of charms; and his brutal passion was soothed with the contemplation of her disorder. Already in imagination, he had possessed himself of a decisive advantage over so apparent ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... encamped at Nyambwa, drinking the excellent water found here with the avidity of thirsty camels. Extensive fields of grain had heralded the neighbourhood of the villages, at the sight of which we were conscious that the caravan was quickening its pace, as approaching its halting-place. As the Wasungu drew within the populated area, crowds ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... one most difficult to be answered. But an unexpected stroke of good fortune was in store for us. Strolling into the bar-room of the principal hotel, I saw a play-bill stuck up on the wall. This I read with avidity; and then, to my great satisfaction, I became aware of the fact that an old friend of mine, one Bill Pratt, a travelling actor and manager, had "just arrived in Lancaster with a talented company of comedians, who would that ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... continued to increase in the north of Europe. About the end of September there appeared at Kiel, in Denmark, a libellous pamphlet, which was bought and read with inconceivable avidity. This pamphlet, which was very ably written, was the production of some fanatic who openly preached a crusade against France. The author regarded the blood of millions of men as a trifling sacrifice for the great object of humiliating France and bringing her back to the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton |
