"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... livelihood, when he copied out the "Heloise" for dilettante ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the genus irritabile thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tonic. But, as I listened eagerly to the deep tones of his reassuring voice, and the visions of the night time paled a little, I began to realize how very hard it was going to be to tell him my wild, intangible tale. Some men radiate an animal vigour that destroys the delicate woof of a vision and effectually prevents its reconstruction. Chapter was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... in the direction of the house. Her husband looked after her with mute sorrow at his own incapacity to melt from vision in that intangible manner—from situations that ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... "Leo Grammont, the greatest lion-tamer who ever lived, once told me that a man in love with a woman could not control lions; that when a man falls in love he loses that intangible, mysterious quality—call it mesmerism or whatever you like—the occult force that dominates beasts. And he said that the lions knew it, that they perceived it sometimes even before the man himself was aware that he ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... smiling eyes, from her innocently-sloping shoulders and faintly-rosy hands, from her light and, at the same time, rather languid gait, from the very sound of her voice, which was low and sweet,—there breathed forth an insinuating charm, as intangible as a delicate perfume, a soft and as yet modest intoxication, something which it is difficult to express in words, but which touched and excited,—and, of course, excited something which was not timidity. ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... accomplishing anything, Mr. MacGentle fell, no one knew exactly how, into the presidential chair of the Beacon Hill Bank. As soon as he was there, everybody saw that there he belonged. His social position, his culture, his honorable, albeit intangible record, suited the old bank well. He had an air of subdued wisdom, and people were fond of appealing to his judgment and asking his advice,—- perhaps because he never seemed to expect them to follow it when given (as, indeed, they never did). The ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... her as companions the five maidens, Meditation, Contrition, Compassion, Cleanness and Fruition, while near by await her seven teachers, Discretion, Devotion, Dilection, Deliberation, Declaration, Determination and Divination, a goodly company of Doctors indeed. Of all these intangible figures one only, Milton's 'cherub Contemplation', speaks, but the rest are quite obviously represented on the stage, though whether all in flesh and blood may be matter for uncertainty. Much more talkative, on the other hand, are similar abstractions in Scene 11. Here, in the presence ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... teaching. Our usual tests—examination, recitation, quiz, reports, laboratory notebooks—evaluate in a measure work done, knowledge or general grasp acquired, and accuracy developed. We need, however, measurements of skill, of habits, and of the still more intangible attitudes and appreciations. These may be gained in part by furnishing really educative situations and observing the time and character of the student's reaction. Every true teacher is in reality an experimental psychologist, and must apply directly the methods ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... if somebody had come in and put a hand on her shoulder. Everything went still. She had a sense of happiness and peace suddenly there with her in the room. Not so much her own as the happiness and peace of an immense, invisible, intangible being of whose life she was thus aware. She knew, somehow through It, that there was no need to get away; she was out of it all now, this minute. There was always a point where she could get out of it and into this enduring happiness ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... they were, for all their gray and savage glint, for their owner was struggling with an intangible suggestion of the familiarity of the face and figure of the woman ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Pygmalion: I have grovelled down in adoration at its feet, and have found it the same immobile, relentless, unresponsive image. Youth is yet mine, but it is a youth hoary in desolation. Centuries of anguish have flooded through my bosom, even in the heyday of existence. The tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, have been at deadly strife in my conjectures. The present has been to me an evasion, the future an enigma; the earth a delusion, the heavens a doubt. Even the pomp of those inexplicable stars is a new agony of indecision ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... remind me of a hearse's plumes; their rustling—of the rustling and switching of a pall or winding-sheet. The trunk, black, sinuous, towering, is assuredly no piece of timber, but something pulpy, something intangible, something antagonistic, mystic, devilish. I turn from it and shudder. Then my mind reverts to the elm—the elm on which Sir Algernon hanged himself. I remember it is not more than twenty yards from where I stand. I stare down at the soil, at the clumps of crested dog's-tail and ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... when he does; for then the day of the general conflagration will be at hand. In the mean time, it remains, like the top of Mount Meru, covered with clouds, or, like the inside of a Chinese puzzle, a work of unrivaled art, conceivable but intangible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... defining it as that "which can be bought or sold." Cherbuliez ("Precis," p. 70) defines wealth as the material product of nature appropriated by labor for the wants of man. Carey ("Social Science," i, 186) asserts that wealth consists in the power to command Nature's services, including in wealth such intangible ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... as to discover the wonderful lost Mariposa, the Veiled Mariposa; but although a vast fortune lay before his eyes, within his grasp, he was withheld from profiting by this strange stumble upon Golconda by the intangible potent arm of the law. And all his diligent efforts to find the owners of the property had been in vain. Then he had come to New York, largely to enjoy a long-anticipated vacation, and before he had had time to make definite ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... not only in intelligence and efficiency, but in an intangible something referred to as "personality". If your acquaintance is applying for a certain position, and has named you as one of his references, you will be asked by the appointing officer to tell what you know of the candidate's experience, his knowledge and skill in the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... or spirit, of a man was called KHU, and it seems to have taken form as a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body; the KHUs formed a class of celestial beings who lived with the gods, but their functions are not clear. The KHU, like the KA, could be imprisoned in the tomb, and to obviate this catastrophe special ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... than affection. He now sat down in his swivel-chair and turned it from the writing-desk which stood on the rug before the fireplace, and looked up into the eyes of her effigy with a sense of her intangible presence in it, and with a dumb longing to rest his soul against hers. She was the only one who could have seen him in his wish to have not been what he was; she would have denied it to his face, if he had told her he was a thief; and as he meant to make himself more and more a thief, her ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... childish wistfulness at times, and with this an intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown race that ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... rendered at least plausible, that a force not less universal than gravity itself, but with whose modes of action we are as yet unacquainted, pervades the universe, and forms, it might be said, an intangible bond of sympathy between its parts. Now for the investigation of this influence two roads are open. It may be pursued by observation either of the bodies from which it proceeds, or of the effects which it produces—that is to say, either ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... religious emotion is feeble here, and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and evanescent—un non so che, to use the poet's favorite phrase—which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty. Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of passion, not of humor, not of piety, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... woman. Well aware of the power and fascination of the mysterious, she exploited it with a profound understanding of the human heart. She mingled the realities of life with the mysteries of thought, and the sun of her revelations is always veiled by intangible clouds. From her gospel one might cull at random scores of phrases that defy human understanding. "Evil is nothing, no thing, mind or power," she says in Science and Health. "As manifested by mankind, it stands ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... we strive to decipher and unweave the spiral harmonies of Chopin, but they elude as does the sound of falling waters in a dream. Those violet bubbles of prismatic light that the Sarmatian composer blows for us are too fragile, too intangible, too spirit-haunted to be played. [All this sounds as if I were really trying to write after the manner of the busy Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who helped Liszt to manufacture his book on Chopin; indeed, it is suspected, altered every line ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of awful nightmare struggling—in which he was bound hand-and-foot and doomed to failure and torture from the outset, the sport, plaything, and victim of a fearful, intangible Horror—this would be sheer amusement and recreation. What could mere man do to him, much less mere boy! Why, the most awful torture-chamber of the Holy Inquisition of old was a pleasant recreation-room compared with any place where ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Phoebe, and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist, deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur not,—question not,—but make ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enthusiast with sharp emphasis that to all civilized mankind, save and excepting those few chosen ones who shared his peculiar convictions, he was a common thief, a bandit, an outlaw. Public opinion, potential or expressed, is at best but an intangible thing. But for a few tumultuous seconds Griswold writhed under the ban of it as if it had been a whip of scorpions. Then he smiled to think how strong the bonds of custom had grown; and at the smile conscience flung ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... shake off the fright that had startled him. It was as if an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him the intangible shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of foreboding. Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in the air. He gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could not understand. Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? No, Matt had the nicked cup, and he ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... brought him stiffly to attention, mouth open and eyes bulging with horror. One of those unbelievably white arms stretched forth, threateningly tense, and a jeweled finger leveled itself at the rash Ionian. From it there flashed an intangible something that leaped to bridge the distance with the speed of light, something that screeched as it flew and crashed like breaking glass when it struck Antazzo's horrified face. In an instant he was on the floor, screaming and ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... bidding, because of their having the brains, it might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had not changed in the slightest detail. The crystal sphere still softly glowed, with intangible shadows flitting across its surface; the adept still sat cross-legged staring into its depths; opposite him, the cobra, its hood distended, ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... It has fulfilled—nay, more than fulfilled—her wishes. The triumph of her success is pleasant to her, and has brought a little more than their usual glow into her cheeks, and yet—Heaven knows what vague and intangible dreams and fancies have not somehow sunk down chill and cold within her during ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... all impressed. Such a proposition did not appeal to her. It was too vague and intangible. People all got married, of course, some day, but not until you were very, very old and staid, and all the joy of life had departed from it—just as everybody died some day. But, though death was ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... sweeps of radiant snow, their shattered peaks reared high into the very heavens. A great silence reigned. There was no wind with us, and yet, even as we watched, a white cloud flitted past the virgin peak of Kolahoi—ghostly, intangible; and immediately, even as vultures assemble suddenly, no one knows whence, so did the clouds appear, surging over the gleaming shoulders of the mountain ridges, and up and round the grim precipices. We turned and hurried down the face of the glacier, and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... accident, contagion, and malignancy, we need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... imperialistic, and in favor of a vigorous constructive foreign policy. The Democratic party has generally accepted the lukewarm international policy of Jefferson and the exaltation of the locality and the plain individual as championed by Jackson. Thus, though in a somewhat intangible and variable form, the doctrinal distinctions between ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... something very intangible, and yet nothing is more actually felt—or missed. There are certain houses that seem to radiate warmth like an open wood fire, there are others that suggest an arrival by wireless at the North Pole, even though a much ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of what everyone is interested ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... a desire to tear through the shield which the written words had formed about a mysterious past and disclose that which was so effectively hidden. So much had the letter told—and yet so little! Dark had been the hints of some mysterious, intangible thing, great enough in its horror and its far-reaching consequences to cause death for one who had known of it and a living panic for him who had perpetrated it. As for the man who stood now with the letter clenched before him, there was promise of wealth, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... desk, or in the courts; among men in the crowded mart, or in places simply where the idle and the thoughtless congregate, it was still my companion. It was, however, still a shadow only; a dull, intangible, half-formed image of the mind; the crude creature of a fear rather than a desire; for, of a truth, nothing could be more really terrible to me than the apparent necessity of taking the life of one so dear to me once, and still so dear to the only friends I had ever ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... her dressing-table, smiling at what she was about to do. It seemed as though she were going to bribe the girl to love her, but she was only yielding to the pathetic human desire to give something tangible since the intangible was ignored. 'When I was twenty-one,' she said, 'your father gave ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... followed were days of unrest to Constance Wardour. The intangible, yet distinctly realized trouble, and fear, and dread, were new experiences in ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... is listened to by few people, unless he is very great indeed; and even so his reward is apt to be intangible and scanty; while to be deliberately a lesser poet is perhaps the most unworldly thing that a man can do, because he thus courts derision; indeed, if there is a bad sign of the world's temper just now, it is that men will listen to politicians, scientists, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... United States v. Deveaux,[524] Chief Justice Marshall declared: "That invisible, intangible, and artificial being, that mere legal entity, a corporation aggregate, is certainly not a citizen; and consequently cannot sue or be sued in the courts of the United States, unless the rights ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... seldom know who slaughtered the meat or canned the fruit we eat, who made the clothing or utensils we use; shoddy articles and unwholesome food can be sold in quantity with little fear of the consumer's anger. All sorts of intangible and hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless men injuries to reputation, to credit, to success. In a city the criminal can hide and escape far more easily, can associate with his own kind, have a certain code of his own (cf. "honor among thieves"), ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp. The stars between the snow-flurries showed that the floe had swung round and was end on to the swell, a position exposing it to sudden strains. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... hid thy gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its silver web unweave, Thy footless ghost on some unfooted lawn Whose air ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... expressed in many less spectacular ways, the amount of alumni gifts is the most available standard by which the effectiveness of this support can be shown. Judged by this rough and ready approximation for a force which is in reality intangible and based on something finer and more spiritual than material gifts, particularly since it represents obviously only the sentiment of the few rather than that of the thousands who would do likewise if they were able, it shows nevertheless how responsively the University's ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... she loved him," said Henry, "I should have hesitated a long time before seeking to fasten the murder on him. I may have only a vague regard for justice, for abstract right is so intangible; but I have a strong and ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... of his affection there was indeed, to display to the eyes of her world. But it was for intangible proof that Susan's heart longed day after day. In spite of comment and of envy from the office, in spite of the flowers and messages and calls upon which Auntie and the girls were placing such flattering significance, Susan ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and difficulties to bring to pass the dreams of thousands of women. The world's standard of success may appear to give the prize to those who collect things, but in reality the crown of victory, the laurel wreath, the tribute beyond all material value, is always reserved for those invisible, intangible qualities which are evinced ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... Englishman. This feeling of his childhood recurred to him now with irresistible force. The throb of the motor of human life was pulsating in his ears; but added to it was something more, something elusive, intangible, but all-powerful. The moment he had arrived within the city limits he had felt the first trace of its presence. As he approached the centre of congestion it had deepened, had become more and more a guiding influence. Since then, by day or by night, wherever he went, augmenting ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... America's first ally. The king was the state, the king was the country, the king was all. There was one king, with power not derived from his people, and too high to be questioned; and the rest were all subjects, with no political right but obedience. All above was intangible power, all below quiet subjection. A recent occurrence in the French Chambers shows us how public opinion on these subjects is changed. A minister had spoken of the "king's subjects." "There are no subjects," exclaimed hundreds of voices at once, "in a country ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... day, and amid ten thousand flaming guardians of freedom,[227] he escapes with perfect impunity! Is he not a most marvelous proper rogue? But perhaps the reason the abolitionists do not lay hands on him is that he is an imaginary being, who, though intangible and invisible, will yet serve just as well to create an alarm and keep up a great excitement as if he were a ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... hypnotized subjects who have been to several other hypnotists without success, and I have had some of my unsuccessful subjects hypnotized by other hypnotists. How and why does it happen? I believe that some of the reasons are so intangible that it would be impossible to explain all of them with ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... the arrest had seemed but a secondary matter in accord with the insanity of zu Pfeiffer's statement that he was engaged to Lucille. The affair had been so sudden that for some time he could progress no farther in an attempt to think than a gasp, pawing mentally at an intangible substance which eluded him like a child's small hand trying to grasp a toy balloon. Sense of reality appeared to have been dissolved. He had followed the sergeant across the square meekly without realising what was happening, and when he had been ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... their young shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody likes Abundance, while Lotus is very popular and counts one of the queens as her intimate friend. ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... unpardonable coarseness, be styled a matter of animal enjoyment, because out of the very perfection of that lower bliss there had arisen a dream-like development of spiritual happiness. As in the master-pieces of painting and poetry, there was a something intangible, a final deliciousness that only fluttered about your comprehension, vanishing whenever you tried to detain it, and compelling you to recognize it by faith rather than sense. It seemed as if a diviner set of senses were requisite, and had been partly supplied, for the special ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... viewing the girl in a new way. Hitherto he had regarded her as something almost intangible, an essence of elusive femininity, radiant, overpowering, and in nowise to be considered as a material ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... silent while Don Ippolito moved up and down the room, with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy girl. Neither could put an end to this interview, so full of intangible, inconclusive misery. Ferris drew a long breath, and then said steadily, "Don Ippolito, I suppose you did not speak idly to me of your—your feeling for Miss Vervain, and that I may speak plainly to ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... he looked forward daily, hourly, to the anguish of her departure. She would vanish out of his life, intangible as a melted snow-flake, and only memory would stay behind to tell him he had known and loved her. Why should this be so hard to bear? If she stayed, he dared not tell her she was dear to him; he dared not stretch forth his hand to help her. In all the world there was no creature more utterly ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... there was yet so much to see and hear and feel in the sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... probable that this young woman is the daughter of that marriage. When I saw her in this room to-day I was puzzled by an intangible likeness in her. ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a compound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. The visible, corporeal movement ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... far it was a matter of course that some people were married—their household life went unnoticed; the fact had no relation to her own intangible dreams or hopes; it was a condition inherent to these elders, and not of any particular interest to her. But Alice Wayne had been a girl like herself until now. This matter-of-fact community of living ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... C. B. Cates, Commandant of the Marine Corps: "Leadership is intangible, hard to measure and difficult to describe. Its qualities would seem to stem from many factors. But certainly they must include a measure of inherent ability to control and direct, self-confidence based on expert knowledge, initiative, loyalty, pride, and a sense of responsibility. Inherent ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the Between World. This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than that which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sensation swept through her heart, a sensation elusive and intangible. She surrendered without question. At this moment the Eve in her evaded all questions. Here was a man. The mood which seized her was as novel as this love which asked nothing but love, and the willingness to pay any price; and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... thing as individual responsibility," returned my husband. "As to social responsibility, it is an intangible thing; very well to talk about, but reached by no law, either of conscience or the statute-book. You and I, and every other living soul, must answer to God for what we do. No custom or law of society will save us from the consequences ...
— The Son of My Friend - New Temperance Tales No. 1 • T. S. Arthur
... relationship to this man of whom she saw so little, and yet with whom she felt on close, intangible terms of intimacy! His work tied him to London, and of late years she had not been much in London. He knew very little of her movements. Why, this very letter had been sent to her, care of her London club, the club which had its uses—principally—when she wanted to ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... crossed Paresi's face. The rocket noise was gone as the mind reached for it, like an occluded thought. The motors were silent; there wasn't a tremor of vibration. Yet somewhere a ghost engine was warming up, preparing a ghost ship for an intangible take-off into nothingness. ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... have made of the simplest things, wherein to be everlastingly confounded. Might one just look up and reach out overhead, instead of looking around one and trying to grope at one's level. Truths made intangible by the impenetrable meshes of faulty creeds and ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... with that accomplished under the stimulus of financial gain, or for the end of mere selfish display. The latter is a species of artistic prostitution. Superficially the performances may seem something alike, the difference may be intangible, but it exists and is real. Time is ever the winnower. Things always prove their survival value, that is to say the real things last, while the shams are sooner or later extinguished. It is necessary, no doubt, to make a living, no one will be so foolish ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... carrying to practical success the ideal which he preached. But to assume that he must accordingly be adjudged a failure is to ignore the significance of the ideals to which he awakened the world. Much there was that was unattainable and intangible, but its value to mankind in the development of ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... giving forth daily their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as tone into ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... a piece with the rest of him. It was not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience—an intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington himself would have been disgusted by any mention ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Then the Captain votes against you. What, sir, did not the Athenians, the wisest of nations, appropriate to their theatre their most sacred and intangible fund? Did not they give to melopoeia, choregraphy, and the sundry forms of didascalics, the precedence of all other matters, civil and military? Was it not their law, that even the proposal to divert this fund to any other purpose should be punished with death? But, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... country are eating the life out of it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said that it was based on usurpation, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... handed the young lady in; but Constance declared that though he sat beside her and took care of her at breakfast he had on one of his intangible fits which drove her to the last extreme ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... will; 'it had both substance and form.... It had power to leave the tomb.... It could revisit the body in the tomb ... and could reincarnate it and hold converse with it.' Again there was the 'Khu', the 'spiritual intelligence', or spirit. It took the form of 'a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body.'... Then, again, there was the 'Sekhem', or 'power' of a man, his strength or vital force personified. These were the 'Khaibit', or 'shadow', the 'Ren', or 'name', the 'Khat', or 'physical body', and 'Ab', the 'heart', in which life was ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... brilliant, discerning governesses—or even mothers. There are not enough of either to go round. So that the seventy-five per cent., possibly more, don't know how to learn, and the mere twenty-five per cent. do. It is hard to tackle effectively so intangible a problem as the correct primary method of teaching, and the statesman, through whose instrumentality this percentage is reversed, may give up politics for gold not had brilliant, discerning governesses with a clear conscience. The first step, therefore, is to reform the education ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... nature of those forces? Do they, or either of them, belong to the domain of the supernatural? Are they the products of some supreme force, or forces, heretofore unappreciated? The reply is clear and unquestionable. The supernatural must necessarily be a part of the Divine Essence, and consequently intangible. Not so the subjects of our inquiry. They are natural products, therefore, and the result of the operation of some power commensurate with the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... many tribes, who adore material things, the Pawnees simply regarded certain localities as sacred—they became so only because they were blessed by the Divine presence. Ti-ra-wa was not personified; he was as intangible as the God of the Christian. The sacred nature of the Pawnee deity extended to all animal nature —the fish that swim in the rivers, the birds that fly in the air, and all the beasts which roam over ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the incident was apparently forgotten. They had tea to the accompaniment of much light-hearted chatter on the parts of Violet and Max Wyndham. Colonel Campion sat in heavy silence, and Olga instinctively held aloof. There was something in Max's attitude that puzzled her, but it was something so intangible that she could not even vaguely define it to herself. All his careless banter notwithstanding, she was fully convinced in her own mind that he was not in the smallest degree dazzled or so much as attracted ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... failed. Dion had never left her since he had killed Robin. In the flesh he had pursued her in the walled garden at Welsley on that dark night of November when for her the whole world had changed. In another intangible, mysterious guise he had attended her ever since. He had been about her path and about her bed. Even when she knelt at the altar in the Supreme Service he had been there. She had felt his presence as she ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... troubled, also, without knowing just why, and she watched his departure with an unhappy feeling that somehow the changes which the year had made in both their lives had raised a misty barrier between them—intangible, but not easily to be swept away. Furthermore, young as she was, she intuitively sensed that hers was the necessity of reconstructing their friendship on a new foundation, because she was a woman. The man could not ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Single Tax a candidate whose private character was generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... salutation of "How dee?" Amanda detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line, but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as usual, though without looking at her, "Goin' to Sudleigh with the butter to-day?" Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... little while did the wretched king strive to resist the decrees of fate. And in her own chamber, where so short a time before the little princess had known the joy of something inexpressible—something most exquisite—intangible—unknown—she sat, like a flower broken by the ruthless storm, sobbing pitifully, dry-eyed, with sobs that strained her soul, for the shameful, hideous fate that ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... existence peculiar in its aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the very circumstances now surrounding me—my coal fire and the dingy room in the bustling hotel—appeared far off and intangible; the next instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she, too, was bored, that the Colonel bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... wonderful to him that within the space of a few minutes he should have developed from an absolute stranger to her into an acquaintance of the house, walking about in it, peering into its recesses, disturbing its secrets, which were hers. But she remained as mysterious, as withdrawn and intangible, as ever. And then she shifted round suddenly on the chair, and her absorbed, intent face softened into a most beautiful, simple smile—a smile of welcome. An astonishing and celestial change!... She was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... been cleverly planned by Jefferson Worth to force The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company to make a large contribution to the railroad builder's personal fortune. The people sensed something in the whole transaction that they could not clearly grasp, an intangible, mysterious something, as great as it was indefinite. They felt blindly that they were being used without their consent in a game played by these master financiers, and they resented being sacrificed as dumb ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... lay any claims to cleverness, his resourcefulness, at least, he was forced to admit, was no match for hers. She came, she went without being seen—and behind her remained, instead of clews to her identity, only an amazing, intangible mystery, that left him at times appalled and dismayed. How did she know about those conditions in West Broadway, how did she know about Metzer's murder, how did she know about Markel and Wilbur—how did she know about a hundred ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... guesswork; exactly the same figure of sixty thousand is commonly brought forward as the probable number of prostitutes not only in Berlin, but also in London and in New York. It is absolutely impossible to say whether it is under or over the real number, for secret prostitution is quite intangible. Even if the facts were miraculously revealed there would still remain the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not prostitution. The avowed and public prostitute is linked by various gradations on the one side to the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... elsewhere. He could not enter again into the heritage of boyhood and the heart of youth. He could not find there the old dreams and hopes that had made life sweet. He understood that he could not bring back to the old valley what he had taken from it. He had lost that intangible, all-real wealth of faith and idealism and zest; he had bartered it away for the hard, yellow gold of the marketplace, and he realized at last how much poorer he was than when he had left that home valley. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not been revealed to him until just a moment past. Everything had changed when she looked out with that sweet, steady gaze through the parted veil and then slowly closed it. She had changed. There was something intangible about her that last moment, baffling, haunting. He leaned against a crooked old gate-post that as a boy he had climbed, and the thought came to him that this spot would all his life be vivid and poignant in his memory. The first sight of a blue-eyed, sunny-haired ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the case confronted Wade and gripped his soul. He seemed to feel himself changing inwardly, as if a gray, gloomy, sodden hand, as intangible as a ghostly dream, had taken him bodily from himself and was now leading him into shadows, into drear, lonely, dark solitude, where all was cold and bleak; and on and on over naked shingles that marked the world of tragedy. Here he must ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... to the end. But now that she had disappointed him, he had, so he told himself, done with fine illusions and fair beliefs for ever. And he had started on a lonely quest,—a search for something vague and intangible, the very nature of which he himself could not tell. Some glimmering ghost of a notion lurked in his mind that perhaps, during his self-imposed solitary ramblings, he might find some new and unexplored channel wherein his vast wealth might flow to good purpose after his death, without the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... beyond control. But at the same time the necessity for decided action, if I was to save his life, came to me with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment, Shorthouse was only a man; it was flesh and blood I had to contend with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my mind with ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... sometimes performed after Valentine's death and sometimes before it. Margaret is kneeling in the shadowy minster, striving to pray, but the voice of conscience stifles her half-formed utterances. In Gounod's libretto, the intangible reproaches which Margaret addresses to herself are materialised in the form of Mephistopheles, a proceeding which is both meaningless and inartistic, though perhaps dramatically unavoidable. In the,' last act, after a short scene on ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... early city-state had of the Divine; (2) the chief forms and methods of their worship. We saw that they did not think of the divine beings as existing in human form with human weaknesses, but as invisible and intangible functional powers, numina. Each had its special limited sphere of action; and some were now localised within the pomoerium, or just outside it within the ager Romanus, and worshipped under a particular name. I suggested that this very settlement had probably some influence in preparing ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... fear many times, for fear was in the air for weeks along the Russian front, the fear of German shells, of poison gas, and of that worst poison of all—Russian treachery. But that fear was not like this fear, which was intimate, personal but intangible. He marked it in the scrutiny of the man who opened the door and of the aged woman who suddenly appeared beside him in the dim hallway and led him noiselessly up the stair to a lighted room upon the second floor. At the doorway the ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... laugh at me when I tell you that it is because I am afraid for you. Truly I am! I don't know that I can explain exactly so you'll understand but there was something disturbing which I felt when he spoke quite casually of you. It was almost too intangible to put into words but it was like a gloating secret satisfaction, as though he had the best of you in some ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—out to the Sun.... ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... cross the other night when I wouldn't go home with her. I must go and see her. She says she loved me—really loved me! ... She used to lie and dream of pulling me out of burning houses. I wonder why I am liked! How intangible, and yet how real! What a wonderful character I would make in ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... past. In vain he cried to the wheelman to stop the wheel: there was no answer. Would those stars never cease blinking in and out, or the wind stop whipping the swift clouds past? So he went on, endless years, driving through space, some terrible intangible weight dragging at his heart, and all his body ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... symbols,—symbols which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... trembled. He was not outside; he was stifling in the dark room. The light had gone entirely, and he was struggling to free himself from an intangible enemy or friend; a thing that had, unknown to himself, evolved during those isolated years among the pines, and was restraining his lower ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... signally distinguish Captain King's pen.... He occupies a position in American literature entirely his own.... His is the literature of honest sentiment, pure and tender.... His heroes and his charming heroines are the product of the army, and it is pleasant to meet, even in this intangible way, women who can break their hearts and men who would die rather ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... an influence permeating even the inanimate objects about him, so that they seemed to reflect the spirit of those who dwelt there. No room had given him this sense of companionship since he had spent his boyish holidays in the old Count Benedetto's apartments; but it was of another, intangible world that his present surroundings spoke. Vivaldi received him kindly and asked him to repeat his visit; and Odo returned as often ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... was upon her to track down this intangible racial distinction, but she saw Runnion, whom she could not bear, coming towards them, so thanked Stark hurriedly and went ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... later. Denny Bolton's long, tanned face was entirely grave—even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips—an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and figure, even there in the ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the thoughtful and ashen-cowled company, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... which have most to do with promoting the ascent of the soul? The first is atmosphere. In a bright, clear, sunshiny atmosphere the body attains its most healthful growth. So with the soul. Atmosphere is one of those intangible things that every one understands and no one can easily define. It is composed of a thousand different elements. The atmosphere of a household is the spirit by which it is pervaded. Are all reverent, earnest, cheerful, optimistic? Do love ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... or identification, except by guesswork, or the locality where they were found. Articles of domestic use scattered through the rubbish helped to tell who some of the bodies were. Part of a set of dinner plates told one man where in the intangible mass his house was. In one place was a photograph album with one picture recognizable. From this the body of a child near by was identified. A man who had spent a day and all night looking for the body ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... subtile and remote as to be imperceptible to others. Life was to her a toy with which she amused herself, and she found her chief enjoyment in trying experiments upon it of which the results were intangible ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... dignity of her carriage. Her deep, suppressed feeling, which bordered on despair; her womanly pride, which would disguise all suffering at every cost, gave to her presence a subtle power, felt none the less because intangible. It was evident that she neither saw nor cared for the strangers who were looking their curiosity and admiration; and Graydon understood her barely well enough to think, "Something, whatever it may be, makes her unlike other girls. She was languidly indifferent ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... had to admit it—she did not want to go. The attraction that held her was as yet too intangible to be definitely analyzed, but she could not deny its existence. She did not love the man—oh, surely she did not love him—for she did not want to marry him. She brought her feelings to that touchstone ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... carrying on our business and our daily avocations. The wonder of the carpet that would carry the person through the air who sat upon it and wished is nothing compared with the power of electricity, steam, any one of these invisible, intangible powers that are thrilling through the world to-day. There never was so much room for mystery, for awe, for poetry, for romance, as there is in the midst of our commercial life in ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... condition of the atmosphere of his mind, all its darker and hidden characteristics sprang into a vigorous growth. Superstitions and presentiments crowded in upon him. He peopled his surroundings with the shades of intangible deeds that yet awaited doing, and grew afraid of his own thoughts. He would have fled from the spot, but he could not fly; he could only watch the flicker of the moonlight upon the peaceful pool ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the light of overpowering love together with the intangible pride so marked on the representations of profane deities. But the most manifest emotions were the great yearning and entreaty. They were marked in the attitude of the head thrown back, in the outstretched arms and in the bent knee. That there was more hopeful expectancy than despairing insistence, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... a shadow would have been enough to relax its hold. And she had found a will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor, which goes on pinching or crushing without alarm at thunder. Not that Grandcourt was without calculation of the intangible effects which were the chief means of mastery; indeed, he had a surprising acuteness in detecting that situation of feeling in Gwendolen which made her proud and rebellious spirit dumb and helpless ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... older, home ceased to be the absolutely complete and satisfying world which it had been in early days? Why was it that, surrounded with father and mother, and sisters and brothers, all dear and kind and loving, the heart would yet experience a feeling of loneliness, a longing for something too intangible to be ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... as horrible discords on my secret ear as the gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the year the Caucasus resembles a gorgeous cathedral built by great craftsmen (always great craftsmen are great sinners) to conceal their past from the prying eyes of conscience. Which cathedral is a sort of intangible edifice of gold and turquoise and emerald, and has thrown over its hills rare carpets silk-embroidered by Turcoman weavers of Shemi and Samarkand, and contains, heaped everywhere, plunder brought from all the quarters of the world for the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to Cytherea—if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in the domain of quite simple material things the dislike of having fixed habits of thought disturbed, leads gentlemen to resent innovations in that way, it is not astonishing that innovations of a more intangible and elusive kind should be subject to a like unconscious misrepresentation, especially by newspapers and public men pushed by commercial or political necessity to say the popular thing rather than the true ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... started at once. Surely it ought to be the matter of only a few weeks to undo a single day. Let him get the tang of the salt air, let him go to bed every night dog-tired physically, let him get out of sight of her eyes and lips, and that something—intangible as a perfume—that emanated from her, and doubtless he would be laughing at himself as heartily as he had ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... farmer's house, trimly painted, with barns and hay-stacks and wood-piles drawn up in goodly array, stands in its old orchard, and offers the front of a fortress against want and misery. Idle aspect! fortress of vain front! there are intangible foes that no man may conquer! In such a stronghold was born Roger Pierce, the Man ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... from under her lashes. What could she do with this man? Nothing affected him. He seemed to have crossed some intangible barrier and to stand closer to her than any other man had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... phantom of her! What was she? An illusion creating illusions, a mockery, a dream, a shadow, a vanity, a vexation of spirit! The fault, the sin, was in himself, in his rebellious thought, in his untamed memory. Though mobile as water, intangible as vapor, Thought, nevertheless, may be tamed by the Will, may be harnessed to the chariot of Wisdom—must be!—that happiness be found. And he recited the blessed verses of the "Book of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... Graham, nor even Paula, imagine that Dick—the keen one, the deep one, who could see and sense things yet to occur and out of intangible nuances and glimmerings build shrewd speculations and hypotheses that subsequent events often proved correct—was already sensing what had not happened but what might happen. He had not heard Paula's brief significant words at the hitching post; nor had he seen Graham catch her in that deep scrutiny ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Sassafras, he went home discomforted and even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a second squall from the same quarter ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... misgivings; behind this shield, even in rapacity, he had experienced peace of mind, absence of remorse. If he could have put away from him his love for the girl he would have done so willingly. Why should he battle and strive for an unattainable something as intangible as a dream? It was so paradoxical that Allis's love for Mortimer seemed hopeless because of the latter's defeat, while his, Crane's love, was equally hopeless in his hour ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... we have to learn is what we owe for a kindness received. One says he owes the money which he got, another a consulship, another a province. These, however, are but the outward tokens of good services, not the services themselves. A benefit is to the hand something intangible; it is a process in the mind. There is a world of difference between the material of a benefit and the benefit itself. Hence the reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the good will of the giver. The things which we hold in our hands, which ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... tired of amiable young men. His face was thin, and refined, and strong—the strength of level brows, straight nose and square chin, with a pair of paradoxical lips, which were curved and womanish in their sensitiveness; the refinement was an intangible expression which belonged to no particular feature but pervaded the whole face. As to his eyes, she was left to speculate upon their color, since she had not seen them, but she reflected that many a girl would give a good deal to own ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... been impossible before. And through it all she was acutely conscious of Max Errington's proximity—knew instinctively that the passion of the song was shaking him equally with herself. It was as though some intangible live wire were stretched between them so that each could sense the emotion of the other—as though the garment with which we so persistently conceal our souls from one another's eyes were suddenly ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... I am intangible; can't be seen, yet can be felt; am apparent to the taste—certainly to the touch, for I am pocketed daily, and there is no one who would not gladly grasp me at any time when offered; at the same time, I am almost always disagreeable, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a classic outline! Sketched in bare outline it would have lacerated an artist's eye, but then more things than line go to the making up a girlish face: there is youth, for instance, and a blooming complexion; there is vivacity, and sweetness, and an intangible something which for want of a better name we call "charm." Mrs Victor beheld all these attributes in her sister's face, and her eyes softened as they looked, but ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... say, there is a very important but intangible thing called 'judgment'. You have part of it, but not by far enough. You've been studying the laws about ages and rights, James, but you've missed a couple of them because you've been looking for evidence favorable to ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... staircase—left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr. Jarvis Lorry twice ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... living flowers, above which there floated the gleam of bare shoulders, of hair sown with diamonds that looked like drops of water on the dark women, glittering reflections on the fair, and the same heady perfume, the same confused and gentle hum, compact of vibrant warmth and intangible wings, which, in summer, caresses a garden-bed through all its flowering time. Now and then a little laugh, rising into this luminous atmosphere, a quicker inspiration in the air, which would cause aigrettes and curls to tremble, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
