"Possessive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... officer of grade superior to his own, an officer must use the possessive adjective; a senior addressing a junior uses the title of the grade only. Thus: A major to a colonel says "Mon colonel," but the colonel to the ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... under certain conditions, into whose and whom; but that and which always remain the same, with the exception of the possessive case, as ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... situation, began to wear rather threadbare, while the practical inconveniences and restrictions it imposed increasingly disclosed themselves. A lover, as Helen reflected, provided you see enough of him, offers but small improvement upon a husband. He is liable to become possessive and didactic, after the manner of the natural man. He is liable to forget that the relation is permitted, not legalised—that it exists on suffrance merely, and is therefore terminable at the will of either ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to kiss and say good night as usual, but the excitement of a new experience had stirred Caroline's emotions, and Wilf's pride in her had also roused the possessive instinct in him, so that the kiss they exchanged was a little different from the almost passionless salute to which they had long grown accustomed. Wilf's eyes shone and Caroline's cheeks were flushed when they drew back from each other. She began to speak quickly, nervously. "Well, so long! ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... kinds of discontent— Malignant, and progressive,— The latter is the proper sort, Of it, be quite possessive. The former, born of parentage Whose motive powers are evil, Serves but one purpose here ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Betty did not "waste" any time that night over home-lessons. How can the beginner of a great singer be expected to care whether the pronoun "that" in "I dare do all 'that' may become a man," is relative or possessive? or whether Smyrna is the capital of Turkey or Japan? or even whether the Red Sea has to do ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... wistfully. The bow-legged range-rider was in no hurry to have her go. She was the first girl who had ever looked twice at him, the first one he had ever taken out or talked nonsense with or been ordered about by in the possessive fashion used by the modern young woman. Hence he was head ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... day after the funeral that it all came out. Lena and Ethel were sitting up together over the papers and the letters, turning out his bureau. I suppose that, in the grand immunity his death conferred on her, poor Lena had become provokingly possessive. I can hear her saying to Ethel that there had never been anybody but her, all those years. Praising his faithfulness; holding out her dead happiness, and apologizing to Ethel for talking about it when Ethel didn't understand, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... establish himself in Ann's thoughts he had certainly succeeded. Odd snatches of his conversation kept recurring to her mind—his coolly possessive: "I don't like losing my belongings," followed by that equally significant: "The future would be mine." It was outrageous! Apparently Brett Forrester had never got beyond the primitive idea of the cave-man who captured his chosen mate by force of his good right ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... February 17th, Chamberlain dined with the Prince of Wales. In noting the invitation in my diary I put down: "The Prince of Wales has asked Chamberlain to dinner for Saturday. I call this 'nobbling my party.'" But the possessive pronoun with regard to the party was not according to my custom. We always said that the party consisted of three in all—two leaders and a follower—and Dillwyn acknowledged Chamberlain and ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... astonished to hear it avowed by any woman who has the slightest pretensions to delicacy of sentiment, or liberality of mind. I should expect to find this vulgar prejudice only among the downright dames, who talk of my good man, and lay a particular emphasis on the possessive pronoun my; who understand literally, and expect that their spouses should adhere punctually to every coarse article of our strange ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... of this remark, though his eyes were on her. They were not like Rolfe's eyes, insinuating, possessive; they had the anomalistic quality, of being at once personal and impersonal, friendly, alight, evoking ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to derivation, uotan is from the pure Maya root-word tan, which means primarily "the breast," or that which is in front or in the middle of the body; with the possessive prefix it becomes utan. In Tzendal this word means both breast and heart. This is well illustrated by an ancient manuscript, dating from 1707, in my possession. It is a guide to priests for administering ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... sufficient ground for belief. The fact that those books exist has certainly been known from the age of the apostles to the present time, for men quoted extensively from them in the second century. The names they bear were in the possessive case then, and it is but fair to consider them the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... Lord Fordyce acquiesced, as he would have done to any penance she chose to impose upon him, and in his secret thoughts rather respected her for her decision; he was then more than delighted when she put her slender hand upon his arm with possessive familiarity as soon as they had reached the anteroom where the collection of miniatures were kept; but he did not know that she was aware that Michael stood where he could see them ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... and it is just the same in speech making. If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... forms Incorporation subordinates the nominal concepts of the phrase to those of time and relation, which are essentially verbal, and this often where the true verbal concept, that of abstract action, is lacking, and the verb itself is in reality a noun in the possessive relation.[6-2][TN-1] ...
— A Record of Study in Aboriginal American Languages • Daniel G. Brinton
... and Lady had been restricted to members of the Royal Family alone, when used with the Christian name only. A great deal of this feeling was still left; and it will be commonly found (I do not say universally) that when persons of the sixteenth century used the definite article instead of the possessive pronoun, before a title and a Christian name, they meant to indicate that they regarded him of whom they spoke as a royal person. Let me instance Lord Guilford Dudley. Those who called him "the Lord Guilford" were partisans of Lady Jane Grey: those from whose lips he ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... over which one can exercise ownership can be conjugated by possessive suffixes for number ...
— The Gundungurra Language • R. H. Mathews
... successful. They had gone abroad on the same steamer the year before, dawdled through a London season, and come home simultaneously—he rather bored and languid, she of a demure and downcast, but withal possessive, air. She had said they were not engaged—"oh, dear no, only excellent friends," but looking all the while a contradiction of the words. Then unwisely she had taken Hilary to that tiresome tea for the little Rhett girl—and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... frock coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict. Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days, as they have come down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and ending in a double-lobed fin. Laid out on the platform, it kept struggling with convulsive movements, trying to turn over, making such efforts that its final lunge was about to flip it into the sea. But Conseil, being very possessive of his fish, rushed at it, and before I could stop him, he ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... way of thinking, this expression "my august confederates." Is there not something astounding about the use of the possessive pronoun in connection with the word "august," implying sovereignty? One wonders what part can they have to play, these confederates, led and dominated by a personality as jealous and self-centred as this ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... the possessive are not at hand, but these given indicate that, as in most Malay dialects, a noun with a possessive suffix is one form of ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... such vision came to Claire de Wissant. As she went down the cliff-side her lovely eyes rested on these sinister, man-created monsters with a feeling of sisterly, possessive affection. She had become so familiarly acquainted with each and all of them in the last few months; she knew with such a curious, intimate knowledge where they differed, both from each other and also from other submarine craft, not ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... into the work-room, dropped an allusion to her young cousin, the architect, the effect was the same on Charity. The hemlock garland she was wearing fell to her knees and she sat in a kind of trance. It was so manifestly absurd that Miss Hatchard should talk of Harney in that familiar possessive way, as if she had any claim on him, or knew anything about him. She, Charity Royall, was the only being on earth who really knew him, knew him from the soles of his feet to the rumpled crest of his hair, knew the shifting lights ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... through the mire of Lutetia on tiptoe, like a dancer who studies her steps, without soiling her white stockings with a single speck of mud. The manolas of Madrid, the cigaretas of Seville in their satin slippers are not better shod; mine—pardon the anticipation of this possessive pronoun—put forward from under the seat an irreproachable boot and aristocratically turned ankle. If she would give me that graceful buskin to place in my museum beside the shoe of Carlotta Grisi, the Princess Houn-Gin's boot and Gracia of Grenada's slipper, I would ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... moment, when a possible, nay, a probable chance, might for ever have blasted his ambitious hopes, he for the first time spoke of France as his. Considering the circumstances in which we then stood, this use of the possessive pronoun "my" describes more forcibly than anything that can be said the flashes of divination which crossed Bonaparte's brain when he was wrapped up in his chimerical ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... difference, meet one halfway, give and take; come to terms &c. (contract) 769; submit to arbitration, abide by arbitration; patch up, bridge over, arrange; straighten out, adjust, differences, agree; make the best of, make a virtue of necessity; take the will for the deed. % Section IV. POSSESSIVE RELATIONS <— That is, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidious. Takes sleeping powders during course of disease and uses telephone frequently to find out if the object of his affections is lunching with another man. Is extremely possessive as to women, and has had in early years a strong desire to take the other fellow's girl away from him. Is pugnacious and intelligent, but has moments of great tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to the neighbors ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... difficulty with the church is that she has lost her interrogation point. At the day of Pentecost people were saying, "What do these things mean?" To-day they never think of saying it. I have been told in a little pamphlet issued by an English writer that the church has lost her possessive case, which means that somehow she has gone on without realizing that the risen, glorified Christ is her blessed Lord. It is a great thing to say "Jesus"; infinitely greater is it to say "My Jesus." ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... had gone to bed David sat thinking of the episode. One of the little criticisms, quite definite now, lingered: a suspicion that Shirley's words were not always pearls of wisdom, that her attitude was a little too possessive, her demands upon his time and thought and scanty store of money a trifle less than reasonable sometimes. Sternly he crushed ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... most decidedly!" she returned, without repudiating the possessive pronoun. "It doesn't follow that I think anything of him—apart from what you did between ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... sure of that," he returned stiffly; "but since you wish it I will give your message to—my wife." He always hesitated over the possessive pronoun in addressing Haskett. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... usual idiomatic mode of expressing possession of parts of the body, wearing apparel, etc., by the use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective his, her, etc., the dative pronoun also being often added to indicate the possessor, as: Yo me corte el dedo, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had not been light enough. She should havekept to the character of the "little friend," the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may find ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... a small square window in the wall at one end of the veranda. Then he came round and once more vaulted the veranda rail, for he seemed to hold ordinary means of entry in contempt. His eye looked very possessive for that of one seeking employment as a guide, but he stood at respectful ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... weeds, not flowers, of speech Which the Seven Dialecticians teach; Filthy Conjunctions, and Dissolute Nouns, And Particles pick'd from the kennels of towns, With Irregular Verbs for irregular jobs, Chiefly active in rows and mobs, Picking Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight; Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in— A jargon so truly adapted, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram." Yet my classic love aggressive, If you'll pardon the possessive, Is exceedingly impressive When ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... generally in the possessive case; examples are "Santa Ana's house," "Santa Maria's umbrella," "San Jose's canes." Less commonly the names of other Bible worthies occur; thus "Adam's hair." There is not always any evident fitness in the selection of the Saint in the connection ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... certain renunciation of that Particular and Fleeting. A refusal to get everything out of it that we can for ourselves, to be possessive, or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a sense of detachment or asceticism; of further destiny and obligation for the soul than complete ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... youth. Esther's eyes were quite dry now. Her nervousness was passing. Regret and pity were merged in one overpowering, instinctive desire: the desire to show him beyond all manner of doubt that she repudiated that possessive touch upon her hand. "I could not ever possibly marry you," she said, as calmly as if she had been accustomed to ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Thess. v. 23. But the A.V. hardly brings out the full force of the distinction. The definite article has a possessive force, as if it were "your spirit, your soul, your body"; as though the spirit was as distinct from the soul as each of them is ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... no, not my name, I feel sure.' He accentuated the possessive pronoun strongly, and then proceeded to explain the accentuation, smiling more and more amiably as he did so. 'No, not my name; my brother's—my brother's, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... woman's face was expressionless. But she moved the coin nearer to her eyes and a smile broke and widened until her whole face was a wrinkle of joy. When she turned in the doorway, the interviewer noticed that the hand jammed into an apron pocket was clutched into a possessive fist, cradling the precious twenty ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... possessive noun, which belongs to another word, but is still a noun. They may be regarded as elliptical expressions, meaning a walk in the morning, a bank in New York, a bill as to tax on the ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... livelihood. The new order has given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had never enjoyed ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... likewise the people are different. And as every Woman-who-goes-hunting-with-her-husband is sure to go through a Yeddar experience, I offer a few observations by way of enlightenment before telling how I killed my antelope. (If you wish to be proper, always use the possessive for animals you have killed. It is a Western ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... sympathy abated; when she came to the broken chest I wished I were elsewhere. We had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke for her with indignant eloquence. "My chest!" it cried, with a stress on the possessive. "My chest—broken open! This is a fine state of things!" I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged—on Francois and his wife—and found I had made things worse instead of better. She repeated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... write and ask your father what we ought to do." . . . She stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun. Mark was unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him throw his arms about his mother's neck while she was still alive. Mrs. Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of her married life, shed fresh tears of sorrow for her husband, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... rather spring guns with wires on every bush ... such dreadful possibilities of stumbling on 'conditional moods,' 'imperfect tenses,' 'singular numbers,'—I should have been too glad to put up with the safe spot for the sole of my foot though no larger than afforded by such a word as 'Conjunction,' 'possessive pronoun—,' secure so far from poor Tippet's catastrophe. Well, I ventured, and what did I find? This—which I copy from the book now—'If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett |
