Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:40

Excerpt #1, from The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells

…the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red star that was new to me; it was even more splendid than our own green Sirius. And amid all these scintillating points of light one bright planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend. “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organisations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear…

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Excerpt #2, from Candide, by Voltaire

…demoniac dreams in barbarous style, interrupted in sequence, with long apostrophes to the gods, because they do not know how to speak to men, with false maxims, with bombastic commonplaces!" Candide listened with attention to this discourse, and conceived a great idea of the speaker, and as the Marchioness had taken care to place him beside her, he leaned towards her and took the liberty of asking who was the man who had spoken so well. “He is a scholar,” said the lady, “who does not play, whom the Abbé sometimes brings to supper; he is perfectly at home among tragedies and books, and he has written a tragedy which was hissed, and a book of which nothing has ever been seen outside his bookseller’s shop excepting the copy which he dedicated to me.” “The great man!” said Candide. “He is another Pangloss!” Then, turning towards him, he said: “Sir, you think doubtless that all is for the best in the moral and physical world, and that nothing could be otherwise than it is?” “I, sir!” answered the scholar, "I know nothing of all that; I find that all goes awry with me; that no one knows either what is his rank, nor what is his condition, what he does nor what he ought to do; and that except supper, which is always gay, and where there appears to be enough concord, all the rest of the time is passed in impertinent quarrels;…

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Excerpt #3, from Our Pirate Hoard, by Thomas A. Janvier

…destiny too. After talking the matter over quite seriously, we decided that the best thing for us to do was to go and live either in or near Lewes, so that my opportunities for investigation might be ample. I think, too, that Susan was pleased with the prospect of having a nice little house of our own, with a cow and peach-trees and chickens, where we could be very happy together. Moreover, she had notions about house-keeping, especially about house-keeping in the country, which she wanted to put into practice. We found a confirmation of my destiny in the ease with which the preliminaries of my search were accomplished. The house that we wanted seemed to be there just waiting for us–a little bit of a house, well out in the country, with a couple of acres of land around it, the peach-trees really growing, and a shed that the man said would hold a cow nicely. What I think pleased Susan most of all was a swallow’s nest under the eaves, with the mother swallow sitting upon a brood of dear little swallows, and the father swallow flying around chippering like anything. “Just think of it!” said the dear child; “it is like living in a feudal castle, and having kestrels building their nests on the battlements.” I did not check her sweet enthusiasm by asking her to name some particular feudal castle with a frieze of kestrels’ nests. I kissed her,…

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Excerpt #4, from Biology, by Edmund B. Wilson

…time will not admit of a full explanation of the manner in which this particular result was reached. I will however attempt to give an indication of the general Mendelian principle by means of which predictions of this kind are made. This principle appears in its simplest form in the behavior of two contrasting characters of the same general type–for instance two colors, such as gray and white in mice. If two animals, which show respectively two such characters are bred together, only one of the characters (known as the “dominant”) appears in the offspring, while the other (known as the “recessive”) disappears from view. In the next generation, obtained by breeding these hybrids together, both characters appear separately and in a definite ratio, there being in the long run three individuals that show the dominant character to one that shows the recessive. Thus, in the case of gray and white mice, the first cross is always gray, while the next generation includes three grays to one white. This is the fundamental Mendelian ratio for a single pair of characters; and from it may readily be deduced the more complicated combinations that appear when two or more pairs of characters are considered together. Such combinations appear in definite series, the nature of which may be worked out by a simple method of binomial expansion. By the use of this principle astonishingly accurate numerical predictions may be…

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Excerpt #5, from The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 10 (of 12), by William Hazlitt

…the abuse she has had to encounter from some of our Tory journals—abuse, of which we shall say no more at present, than that it is incomparably less humiliating to the object than to the author. Common justice seemed to require this observation from us—nor will it appear altogether out of place when we add, that we cannot but suspect that it is to a feeling connected with that subject that we are indebted for the work now before us. Salvator Rosa was, like his fair biographer, in hostility with the High-church and High-monarchy men of his day; and the enemy of the Holy Alliance, in the nineteenth century, must have followed with peculiar interest the fortunes of an artist who was so obnoxious to the suspicions of the Holy Office in the seventeenth. There are few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men; and, among painters, there are few names of greater note, or that have a more powerful attraction, than that of Salvator Rosa. We are not sure, however, that Lady Morgan’s work is not, upon the whole, more calculated to dissolve than to rivet the spell which these circumstances might, at first, throw over the reader’s mind. The great charm of biography consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we…

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Excerpt #6, from The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant

…definition on the basis of materialism of the constitution of my Ego as a merely thinking subject. But, because my existence is considered in the first proposition as given, for it does not mean, “Every thinking being exists” (for this would be predicating of them absolute necessity), but only, “I exist thinking”; the proposition is quite empirical, and contains the determinability of my existence merely in relation to my representations in time. But as I require for this purpose something that is permanent, such as is not given in internal intuition; the mode of my existence, whether as substance or as accident, cannot be determined by means of this simple self-consciousness. Thus, if materialism is inadequate to explain the mode in which I exist, spiritualism is likewise as insufficient; and the conclusion is that we are utterly unable to attain to any knowledge of the constitution of the soul, in so far as relates to the possibility of its existence apart from external objects. And, indeed, how should it be possible, merely by the aid of the unity of consciousness—which we cognize only for the reason that it is indispensable to the possibility of experience—to pass the bounds of experience (our existence in this life); and to extend our cognition to the nature of all thinking beings by means of the empirical—but in relation to every sort of intuition, perfectly…

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Excerpt #7, from On the Trail of the Space Pirates, by Carey Rockwell

…“Pal, I’ve been waiting for this a long time!” “Yah,” the man answered, “me too!” Then he looked at Tom closely. “Say, I’ve never seen you around here before!” “I just got in on the supply ship last week. They kept me in the tower for a while,” Tom replied. “Oh, well,” said the man, “they ain’t keepin’ anybody there anymore!” “Come on you guys,” snarled a heavy-set man in the air lock above them. “We ain’t got all day!” Tom looked up, and without being told, he felt he was looking into the face of Bull Coxine. And when the other prisoner spoke, he was certain. “Yeah, Bull,” said the man. “Comin’, comin’!” He reached up and Bull grabbed his outstretched hand. When Bull pulled, the man literally leaped through the air into the air lock. “All right, space crawler,” roared Bull to Tom, “you’re next!” The big man stuck out his hand. Tom gulped. For one desperate second he thought of turning and running away. “Well?” growled Bull. “You coming or ain’t cha?” “You’re blasted right I’m coming,” said Tom. “This is one time the Solar Guard is taking it on the chin. And, crawler, am I happy to see it!” He grabbed Bull’s hand and was lifted as easily as if he had been a feather. Coxine dropped him on the deck and turned away without a word…

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Excerpt #8, from Radio Active Substances, by Marie Curie

…similar circumstances. This fact may be explained by assuming that the radio-active energy is stored in liquids in exactly the same form as in gases (in the form of an emanation). A solution of a radium salt behaves in a somewhat similar manner. At first, it is a remarkable fact that the solution of a radium salt placed for some time in a confined space is no more active than pure water placed in a vessel in the same enclosure, when the equilibrium of activity is established. If the radium solution be removed from the enclosure and left standing in the air in a wide-necked vessel, the activity spreads itself into space, and the solution becomes nearly inactive, though still containing radium. If this solution be now enclosed in a stoppered flask, it gradually regains, in about a fortnight, a maximum of activity, which may be considerable. On the other hand, a liquid made active, but not containing radium, does not regain its activity in a closed flask after having been exposed to the atmosphere. Theory of Radio-activity. The following is, according to MM. Curie and Debierne, a very general theory which allows of the co-ordination of the results of the investigation of induced radio-activity, which results I have just stated, and which constitute facts apart from any hypothesis….

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Excerpt #9, from The Diary of a Nobody, by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith

…London, with his uncle, Mr. Edgar Paul Finsworth (of Finsworth and Pultwell). He said he was sure his uncle would be only too pleased to see me, and he had a nice house, Watney Lodge, only a few minutes’ walk from Muswell Hill Station. I gave him our address, and we parted. In the evening, to my surprise, he called with a very nice letter from Mr. Finsworth, saying if we (including Carrie) would dine with them to-morrow (Sunday), at two o’clock, he would be delighted. Carrie did not like to go; but Teddy Finsworth pressed us so much we consented. Carrie sent Sarah round to the butcher’s and countermanded our half-leg of mutton, which we had ordered for to-morrow. APRIL 28, Sunday.—We found Watney Lodge farther off than we anticipated, and only arrived as the clock struck two, both feeling hot and uncomfortable. To make matters worse, a large collie dog pounced forward to receive us. He barked loudly and jumped up at Carrie, covering her light skirt, which she was wearing for the first time, with mud. Teddy Finsworth came out and drove the dog off and apologised. We were shown into the drawing-room, which was beautifully decorated. It was full of knick-knacks, and some plates hung up on the wall. There were several little wooden milk-stools with paintings on them; also a white wooden banjo, painted by one of Mr. Paul Finsworth’s nieces—a cousin of Teddy’s. Mr. Paul Finsworth seemed quite a distinguished-looking elderly…

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Excerpt #10, from David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

…and–and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’ To make his example the more impressive, Mr. Micawber drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction, and whistled the College Hornpipe. I did not fail to assure him that I would store these precepts in my mind, though indeed I had no need to do so, for, at the time, they affected me visibly. Next morning I met the whole family at the coach office, and saw them, with a desolate heart, take their places outside, at the back. ‘Master Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘God bless you! I never can forget all that, you know, and I never would if I could.’ ‘Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘farewell! Every happiness and prosperity! If, in the progress of revolving years, I could persuade myself that my blighted destiny had been a warning to you, I should feel that I had not occupied another man’s place in existence altogether in vain. In case of anything turning up (of which I am rather confident), I shall be extremely happy if it should be in my power to improve your prospects.’ I think, as Mrs. Micawber sat at the back of the coach, with the children, and I stood in the road looking wistfully at them, a mist cleared from her eyes, and she saw what a little creature I really was….

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Excerpt #11, from The Topaz Story Book: Stories and Legends of Autumn, Hallowe’en, and

…“Well, then–and the Butterflies and the Moths, now there’s the trouble. There are so many Moths, and they’re so dull. Still if you have the Butterflies you can’t leave out the Moths.” “Old Mrs. Moth has been ill lately. That may keep two or three of the Misses Moth at home,” said the colonel. “I thought she was never sick,” said Miss Katy-Did. “Yes, I understand she and her family ate up a whole fur cape last month, and it disagreed with them.” “Oh, how can they eat such things as worsted and fur?” then sneered Miss Katy-Did. “By your fairy-like delicacy one can see that you couldn’t eat such things,” smiled the colonel. “Mamma says she doesn’t know what keeps me alive. Half a dewdrop and a little bit of the nicest part of a rose-leaf often lasts me for a day. But to our list. Let’s see,–the Fireflies, Butterflies, Moths. The Bees must come, I suppose.” “The Bees are a worthy family,” nodded the colonel. “Yes, but dreadfully humdrum. They never talk about anything but honey and housekeeping.” “Then there are the Bumble Bees.” “Oh, I dote on them,” said Miss Katy-Did. “General Bumble is one of…

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Excerpt #12, from Legends of the Gods, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge

…shook, his lips trembled, and the poison took possession of all his flesh just as Hapi (i.e., the Nile) taketh possession of the land through which he floweth. Then the great god made firm his heart (i.e., took courage) and he cried out to those who were in his following:–"Come ye unto me, O ye who have come into being from my members,[FN#67] ye gods who have proceeded from me, for I would make you to know what hath happened. I have been smitten by some deadly thing, of which my heart hath no knowledge, and which I have neither seen with my eyes nor made with my hand; and I have no knowledge at all who hath done this to me. I have never before felt any pain like unto it, and no pain can be worse than this [is]. I am a Prince, the son of a Prince, and the divine emanation which was produced from a god. I am a Great One, the son of a Great One, and my father hath determined for me my name. I have multitudes of names, and I have multitudes of forms, and my being existeth in every god. I have been invoked (or, proclaimed?) by Temu and Heru-Hekennu. My father and my mother uttered my name, and [they] hid it in my body at my birth so that none of those who would use against me words of power might succeed in making their enchantments have dominion over me.[FN#68] I had come forth from my tabernacle to look upon that which I had made, and was making my way through the two lands which I had made, when a blow was aimed at me,…

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