"Calloused" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plants that, owing to the tangle of roots, can be at best but superficially dug and must rely upon top dressing for its nutriment. Owing to the difficulty of digging the hole, it is likely to be a tight fit for the pot-bound ball of calloused roots that is to fill it. Hence, instead of the woody roots and delicate fibres being carefully spread out and covered, so that each one is surrounded by fresh earth, they are jammed just as they are (or often with an additional squeeze) into a rigid ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Frank commented in a puzzled voice. "I grew up on a farm. Those are work horses, but field horses always have harness marks on them where the hair gets rubbed off or the skin gets calloused. If they used these horses for work, there ought to be collar and hames rubs on their necks. There ought to be worn streaks left by the traces on their sides. There isn't. Far as the evidence shows, they might have been ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the men, as well as the orders. Heartfelt expressions of regret came from all, for in spite of his constitutional nervousness, Billy was a prime favorite. But I knew that I was the only one with whom the pain and sting would live; the men were so calloused by such happenings that they no ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... out the hand-carved belt and holster, held it up, and inspected it critically. He felt of it with his calloused hands, and finally gestured to Pete. "It is for you, muchacho. I made it. Stand so. There, it should hang this way." Montoya buckled the belt around Pete and stepped back. "A little to the front. Bueno! Tie the thong ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... at Parral because he gave me some change and there were two Huerta bills in it," said a man with a star on his hat and precious stones on his black, calloused hands. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... dinner-time," he explained. "Nobody home at The Dreamerie—" He took her face in his calloused hands, drew her to him. "You're sweet in that calico gown," he informed her, waiving a preliminary word of greeting. "I love you," he added softly, and kissed ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... monotone, which made the profanity lose its customary effect. He had been, and was, a hard drinker; he had knocked about the world until the marks of its sharp corners were on his very soul, which was thereby calloused, until his very sensibility to loss was dulled. He ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... sleep well for the morrow would be a day he'd never forget. Even to his calloused mind the dangers involved in the ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... the cry, its unrelenting prolongation, its being caught up at different points, and sent through the lowermost depths of the ship; all this produces a most dismal effect upon every heart not calloused ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... But Jacket's sensibilities were calloused, it seemed. "Of what use would your few pesetas be among so many?" he inquired. "God has willed this, and He knows what He is doing. Besides, your 'pretty one' is probably as hungry as are these people. No doubt we shall find that she, too, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... alone was cheerful. Joy bubbled from that calloused heart of his in striking contrast to the gloom of his companions. Most of the time he was our helmsman, his eye cocked aloft at the taut halyards of eva-eva, occasionally glancing from the sun to the compass-plant which bloomed in a shell ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... a critical moment, he would not have hesitated one instant as to what he should do, for had it been otherwise he would have ordered him to be destroyed as quickly as he would have ordered the execution of any criminal.—But hardened and calloused as he was by power, and self-willed as he was from never being thwarted in his wishes, yet he found it difficult to give the order that should sacrifice the life of one who had so gallantly saved him ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... drew it speculatively across his calloused old thumb, while with his mild blue eyes, which his spectacles enormously exaggerated, ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... carefully at his own kit. He did not intend to be caught in any carelessness or neglect of duty. He had cast aside as unsafe the idea of skipping away. It was more dangerous than the falling shells. He, like many another, had become calloused. On battlefields men move with as much of a sense of security as though they were invisible. It is not so much that they are not afraid as that they grow into a feeling that the dreadful din, the rattle ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... experience in the city. Then he had been driven by boundless energy and hope—the same energy and the same hope that had brought him here from his little mid-western community in the first place. Year by year, however, as custom calloused him to the only part in life he seemed fit to play, he forgot about the waste of time in the Interborough cars. Destiny, he said to himself, had hollowed out the subway as the rut in which his life was ordained to travel; destiny had condemned him inescapably ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one woman. It was glorious and... pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work—she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her husband, worth one billion, eight hundred millions ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... for his kindness, though her heart was numb with suffering at this new blow. She who had suffered so much was at last beyond reach of the keenest of misery's pangs, for her senses were numbed and calloused. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... cents, he was still Jack to Little Rivers; still the knight who had come over the range to vanquish Pete Leddy; still a fellow-rancher in the full freemasonry of calloused hands; still the joyous teller of stories. The thought of losing him set tendrils in the ranchers' hearts twitching in sympathy with tendrils in his own, which he found rooted very deep now that he ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... away the fact that he had done things. They were large, broad; the knuckles heavy; the palms calloused by something rougher than oar and tennis-racket. The microscopic traces of black grease did not for months quite come out of the cracks in his skin. And two of his well-kept but thick nails ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... went between the cart and the stable, each time with a full sack on her back, and beyond passing the time of day with me she took no notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty, she fumbled for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb. The hands were noteworthy. They were large- knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises, healed and healing, such as are common ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... to reply, Lord James stooped and crept through the narrow passage under the thorny wall. As he straightened up on the inner side, Blake caught and gripped his hand in a big calloused palm. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... home early in the evening. In the side yard was a hammock under the trees which had been unoccupied this year past, but to-night it was occupied again. Martha was there with the baby against her breast, and Jed was there, his arm tightly about his wife, and one of the baby's hands lying on his calloused palm.... As Scattergood watched he saw Jed bend clumsily and kiss the tiny fingers ... and Martha turned a trifle and smiled up into her ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... now, near the roadside Cross. And they stopped a moment in front of it. The Rector's ruddy face had turned pale as death, and he kept biting nervously at his fingers, those blunt, bony, calloused ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... I congratulated myself on my partners. Jim, though sometimes bellicosely evangelical, was the soul of kindly goodness, cheerfulness and patience. It was refreshing to know among so many sin-calloused men one who always rang true, true as the gold in the pan. As for the Prodigal, he was a Prince. I often thought that God at the birth of him must have reached out to the sunshine and crammed a mighty handful of it into the boy. Surely it ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... to command him to be released when the Prime Minister suggested that the prisoner's fingers be examined. They were found greatly flattened and calloused at the ends. ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... his thigh with a calloused hand. "I should 'a' known! All right, Rick. I'll do it. Then maybe I can get my congressman to ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... had said the old Gipsy at the Generalife in Granada when I had spoken bolee with him. Lermontoff shook hands with me. His was as hard as leather, calloused as a sailor's or a miner's, and so contradicted his balanced head, intellectual face, and general air of knowledge and world experience that ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... wrapped the lad up snugly in his blankets and prompted him while he said his prayers. No woman's hands could have been tenderer than the calloused ones of this frontiersman. The boy was his life. For the girl-bride of John Beaudry had died to ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... faster often than he could write them down. But first he must needs experience the sensation. This type of brain suffers from one disadvantage. In time the receptive surface of it becomes dulled, calloused, and as the confirmed drug-user requires constantly increasing or varying doses to produce effect, so such an imagination requires constantly increasing or varying doses ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... removed, cold-water bandages to the injured parts will soon remove the soreness and swelling, especially in recent cases. If, however, the fetlock has become calloused from long-continued bruising, a Spanish-fly blister over the parts, repeated in two or three weeks if necessary, will aid in reducing the leg to ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... stealthily across the patio, her riding-habit flapping about her feet in the wind, looked at her uneasily as if he would like to remonstrate; but being a mere peon, he bent silently and held his calloused, brown palm for the senorita's foot; reverently straightened the flapping skirt when she was mounted, and sent a hasty prayer to whatever saint might be counted upon to watch most carefully over a ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... struck Brayley's heavy cheek-bone, was swollen to twice its natural size, stiff and sore. The nails were broken and blackened. There were a dozen scratches and little cuts. The palms were hard and calloused, with bits of loose skin along the base of the fingers where blisters had formed and broken and ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... meet Roy and find the same dear lover; another to have a piano; a child to get ginger snaps. I never quite fancied the restriction of musical instruments in visions of heaven to harps alone. They at first blister the fingers until they are calloused. The afflicted washerwoman, whose only daughter had just died, was not in the least consoled by the assurance that Melinda was perfectly happy, playing a harp in heaven. "She never was no musicianer, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the end of my rope at last, and I felt like breaking away right there; any one not utterly calloused would, I think, have felt the same squeamishness with that sort of a tale crowding close. If she had been expecting bad news of any kind it wouldn't have been so hard to go on; but I couldn't beat about the bush any longer, so ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... payment. Was my name providentially ordered to be Green, that he might pass verbal contumely upon it? Does he suppose that a man can live thirty-five years in this state of probation, without becoming slightly calloused to a pun on his own name? Yet he continues to pun on mine as if the process were highly amusing. Then again he interrupts any little attempts at pleasing conversation with his infernal absurdities. I was speaking ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up. The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the tide brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day. Occasionally came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster. But calloused as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... one of the Packard units, a sort of confident mastery in his very stride, the biggest man of them, unkempt and heavy, with a brutal face and hard eyes. Joe Woods, his name. Packard had already heard of him, a rowdy and a rough-neck but a capable timberjack to the calloused fingers of him. He followed ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... the center of the room, in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightdress, her sparse hair drawn with unpleasant tension from her brow, her pale eyes wide, moved forward a step, one bare foot, calloused even across ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... up his great hands, calloused heavily over the palms. "I've learned several things by actual experience: drilling, dynamiting, sharpening steel, mucking ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... far with their hazing, some of the larger boys led him further into the stream, handling him as tenderly as they had roughly, assuring him of perfect safety. He was caused to lie on his stomach and, with Cousin Charley holding his broad, calloused palm against his chest, "Al-f-u-r-d" was given his first lesson in swimming. One boy declared, even before "Al-f-u-r-d" had moved a muscle, that he had already ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... the Lieutenant's future and the length he was sure to go, and finally drifted into the same story he had told Necia. Burrell at last sensed the meaning of the crafty old soldier's strategy and dismissed him, but not before his work had been accomplished. If a coarse-fibred, calloused old campaigner like Corporal Thomas could recognize the impossibility of a union between Necia and himself, then the young man must have been blind indeed not to have seen it for himself. The Kentuckian was a man of strong and virile passions, but he was also well balanced, and had ever followed ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... "Perhaps he 's calloused," said the Deacon, "by what the paper said the other night about his buying a parcel of clothes hooked out of some man's entry. We concluded 'twas ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... thus maimed and suffering, she never for an instant forgot her beloved bag in whose silken meshes so many of her young lay hidden. She continued her efforts to drag the bag away, and was so persistent and showed such high courage, that my calloused sensibilities, hardened by much biological research, were touched, and I gave her her treasure, which she bore ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... substitutes vanity for it. New York with its petty, mischievous class-makers, the pattern for the rich and the 'smarties' throughout the country. These 'cut-out' minds and hearts, the best of them incapable of growth and calloused wherever the ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... hickory shirt and a pair of pants like their father's, made out of brown denims by the mother's never-resting hands,—hands that in sleep still sewed, and skimmed, and baked, and churned. The boys had gone to bed without washing their feet, which now looked like toads, calloused, brown, and chapped. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the gorilla charged. Two mighty, calloused hands seized upon the ape-man, great fangs were bared close to his face, a hideous growl burst from the cavernous throat and hot breath fanned Tarzan's cheek, and still he sat grinning at the apparition. Tarzan might be fooled once or twice, but ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... things that she thought of. Every night, on her knees in the nurses' parlor at prayers, she promised, if she were accepted as a nurse, to try never to become calloused, never to regard her patients as "cases," never to allow the cleanliness and routine of her ward to delay a cup of water to the thirsty, or her arms ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... would have been harder to reason than the other. Both impressions began to wear off after the first tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the very first cicatrized before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it had quite calloused over; so that he did not mind anything so much as what always seemed to him the inadequate effect of his experience with his hearers. Some listened carelessly; some nervously; some incredulously, as if he were ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells |
