"Dullness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seem to be wandering from my story, let me say here that my father had been in treaty with this Mr. Peter Walpole concerning my apprenticeship to him in Norwich. After moping a long time at the dullness of my life in Brandon I had plucked up courage to tell my father that I would fain be abroad. He heard me less unkindly than I had feared, and contrived this plan for settling me away from home ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... cared to listen to what they had to say. She did not know that their travels, their adventures, their stored-up experience had made them rich in anecdote, ready of tongue to tell of wonders undreamed of in the dullness of her own ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... phrase which does not exclude—perhaps it even suggests—some hint of dullness. The matter-of-fact people are valuable in their way, but rarely illuminative, and it is because they lack the imagination that means sympathy. Now in Jesus' case there is a quickness and vividness of sympathy—he likes the ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... practice. That is why the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... been talking of the bees his face had lost its dullness; he had not looked stupid at all, and scarcely ugly. She would try and ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... there wouldn't be any dullness. Jonadab would take care of that. He'd have the floor and be givin' his opinions of autos and them that owned and run 'em. And between the drops of his language shower you'd see them boarders nudgin' each other and rockin' back and ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... for a hard-working man, after his daily toil, or in its intervals, there is nothing," says Herschel, "like reading an interesting book. It calls for no bodily exercise, of which he has had enough or too much. It relieves his home of its dullness and sameness, which, in nine cases out of ten, is what drives him out to the alehouse, to his own ruin and his family's. It accompanies him to his next day's work, and, if the book he has been reading be any thing above the very idlest and lightest, gives him something to think of besides the ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... before he had passed to his master's degree. Master of Arts indeed! That degree, if no other, was well bestowed. Universities are unjustly accused of fixing science in stereotype. That diploma is enough of itself to redeem the honors of academical parchment from centuries of learned dullness and scholastic dogmatism. ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... this letter, and gives an account of the original dispute over the Rehearsal. By the substitution of Cibber for Theobald as hero of the Dunciad, much of the satire lost its point. Cibber's faults certainly did not include dullness. A new edition contained a prefatory discourse, probably the work of Warburton, entitled "Ricardus Aristarchus, or the Hero of the Poem," in which Cibber is made to look ridiculous from his own Apology. Cibber ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... it is not, like all works of genius, like the very sun, which, though the highest published creation, or work of genius, has nevertheless black spots and troubled nebulosities amid its effulgence,—a mixture of insight, inspiration, with dullness' double-vision, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... and steeped in radiance which the slightest pressure might disengage in silvery profusion like water wrung from a sea-maid's hair. Bright they are as a young man's visions, and, like them, would be realized in dullness, obscurity and tears. I will look on ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she had kept the most beautiful part to herself, like an unapproachable virgin. But now her cheeks glowed with happy expectation, and her eyes rested upon him eagerly; he no longer represented for her the everyday dullness, he was the fairy-story that might take her by surprise when the need was greatest. He felt he could hardly pay too dearly for this change. Women were not made for adversity and solitude; they were flowers that only opened fully when happiness kissed them. Ellen might shift the responsibility ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of a real white man. We brought him down with us to Para, but he showed no emotion at any of the strange sights of the capital— the steam-vessels, large ships and houses, horses and carriages, the pomp of church ceremonies, and so forth. In this he exhibited the usual dullness of feeling and poverty of thought of the Indian; he had, nevertheless, very keen perceptions, and was quick at learning any mechanical art. Jose, who had resumed, some time before I left the country, his old trade of goldsmith, made him his ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover'd there. How first I enter'd it I scarce can say, Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh'd My senses down, when the true path I left, But when a mountain's foot I reach'd, where clos'd The valley, that had pierc'd my heart with dread, I look'd aloft, and saw his shoulders broad Already ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities Make head ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the prairie seemed to speak of the very desolation of dullness. After sweeping over the vast monotony of the lakes to come to this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon,—to walk, and walk, and run, but never climb, oh! it was too dreary for any but a Hollander to ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort, and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with Gertrude—everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that. He had quarreled ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... and it was a cowardly trick of Jobst to put those branches in the stream. Did I not go over it last night till my brain was dizzy? But still, it is but living and dying like our fathers, and I hate tameness or dullness, and it is like a fool to go back from ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and healthy walk was the matter. I went into the lobby to put on my snow boots and then—as is usually the case with me—my mind won. I thought of tea, crumpets and comfort. Oliver has gone without me, he simply bursts with health and extraordinary dullness. Personally I shall continue ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... and absorptions of military life, in time, dimmed the fancy, but it never altogether vanished. Out on the plains with Custer, away in the mountains and the Indian country, vegetating in the dullness of frontier posts, amid the bustle, the luxury and excitement of city life, the fancy would return; the memory of those soft starlit Virginia evenings would infold him with a subtle spell. In thought he would again ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate. And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight,—something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens, as compared with ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Tristram, is not all we complain of in the volumes before us. We must tax you with what you will dread above the most terrible of all insinuations—nothing less than DULLNESS. Yes, indeed, Mr. Tristram, you are dull, very dull. Your jaded fancy seems to have been exhausted by two pigmy octavos, which scarce contained the substance of a twelve-penny pamphlet, and we now find ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... apparent to him, as he watched Minnie, that she was chafing at the monotony of her life. That fatal supper had wrecked the peace of their little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the floor — This salutation Tabby returned with equal solemnity; and the expression of the two faces, while they continued in this attitude, would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such should ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... the school will arrest his attention is almost certain. Utopia belongs to a county which is proverbial for the dullness of its rustics, but there is no sign of dullness on the face of any Utopian child. On the contrary, so radiantly bright are the faces of the children that something akin to sunshine seems always to fill the school. When he gets to know the school, the visitor ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... be true that God made man, man in his turn made and mismade God who thus becomes a Son of Man and a mere racial type. I need not trouble my reader with further notices of these extracts whose sole use is to show the phenomenal dullness of Lane's latinised style: I prefer ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... government, leaving his son behind him. Jean Jacques was first put under the care of a minister in a neighboring village; then passed two or three years with an uncle in the town. At the age of eleven he was sent to a notary's office, whence he was dismissed for dullness and inaptitude. He was next apprenticed to an engraver, a man of violent temper, who by his cruelty brought out the meanness inherent in the boy's weak nature. Rousseau had not been incapable of generosity; perhaps he never quite became so. But, with ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever. There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British fabric. These ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... which had just been represented, with little success, at the Bath and Bristol theatres. In reply to Walpole's query, Miss More says, "There are, I dare say, some Pretty Passages in it, but all seem to bring it in guilty of the crime of dullness; which I take to be the greatest ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... symbols of the winter that is dead. But the bleak and barren picture very shortly now will pass, For the halls of life are ready for their velvet rugs of grass; And the painters now are waiting with their magic to replace This dullness with a beauty that no mortal ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... There was another thing which added to the dullness of Barbadoes and which seemed to have considerable effect in keeping away strangers from the island. The Legislature had passed a most extraordinary Bill, by virtue of which every person who arrives at Barbadoes is obliged to pay two dollars, and two ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... sharpness; her self-command was giving way. Instead of helping, she had been positively an injury to Allie March; first by the sharpness of her reprimands, and then by sarcastic comments on her extreme dullness. ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... province of woman; minor annoyances her burden. Dullness, bad temper, mal-adroitness, are to her the cause of a thousand petty rubs, which too often spoil the euphony of a silver voice, and discompose the symmetry of fair features. But the confidence which reposes on divine affection, and the charity which covers human ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... New York is dying of dullness," Beaufort grumbled. "And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back on me. Come—think better of it! Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I've ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... his age, light and quick in movement, intent but never deliberate, passing very rapidly from one thing to another, impatient of boredom and dullness, always desiring to do a thing that very minute. He was fair of complexion, with grey-blue eyes and a shock head of light hair, little brushed, and uncut often too long. He was careless of appearances, and wore clothes by preference of great shabbiness. He told me in 1909 that he had only ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... theory which was commonly known by the name of The Greatest Happiness Principle. Another article in the Westminster Review followed; and a surrejoinder by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1829. Macaulay was irritated at what he conceived to be either extreme dullness or gross unfairness on the part of his unknown antagonist, and struck as hard as he could; and he struck very ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Fortunatus' gift Is lying there within his hand, More costly than a pot of pearls, His dullness does ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... mentioned severally and collectively upon virtue; he should know what the effect of beauty is when combined with poverty or wealth in a particular soul, and what are the good and evil consequences of noble and humble birth, of private and public station, of strength and weakness, of cleverness and dullness, and of all the natural and acquired gifts of the soul, and the operation of them when conjoined; he will then look at the nature of the soul, and from the consideration of all these qualities he will be able to determine which is the better and which is the worse; ...
— The Republic • Plato
... acres, but the landscape I; Half the charm to me it yieldeth money can not buy, Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, freshening vigor I; He in velvet, I in fustian, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... and frequently she had technical German translations in the evenings, for which she got nothing extra. Her chief did not know German, and thought she did the translations as easily as she wrote shorthand. Her whole work was moderately interesting, but the dullness of her life became insupportable. Another private secretary at the end of fifteen years in an excellent post, ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... half feared they would be obliged to close their establishments. There were but few visitors, and even these were not of the class which scatters its money profusely. The village around the Falls displayed positive signs of dullness, and the inhabitants had personal as well as patriotic interest in wishing there was no war. The Great Cataract was unchanged in its beauty and grandeur. The flood from the Lakes was not diminished, and the precipice over which the water plunged was none the less steep. The opening war ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... incapable of any useful pursuit than she was before; while by the time that you have regained your normal state of health she will express to you her self-sacrificing affection only by shedding around you a kind of benignant dullness which involuntarily communicates itself both to yourself and to every ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... A dullness seemed to fall on the Sand Club members present. Not only was Marjorie their ringleader and moving spirit, but somehow King's uneasiness impressed all of them, and soon Dick Craig said, "I'm ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... dullness and quiet reigned which always accompanies the presence of a betrothed couple. Often when all sitting together everyone kept silent. Sometimes the others would get up and go away and the couple, left alone, still remained silent. They rarely spoke of their future ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the glow of enthusiasm, he must be the charged battery to generate the current. Interest begets interest. It is as contagious as whooping cough—if a class is exposed it is sure to catch it. The teacher who constantly complains of a dull class, very likely is simply facing a reaction to his own dullness or disagreeableness. "Blue Monday" isn't properly so named merely because of the drowsy pupil. The teacher inevitably sets the pace and determines the tone of his class. Many a teacher when tired, or out of patience, has concluded a recitation feeling that his pupils were about ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... Mr. Yollop had triumphed where Mr. Thorpe had failed! The case which had defied lay treatment had yielded to the parsonic process of cure; and Zack, the rebellious, was tamed at last into spending his evenings in decorous dullness at home! ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... letter as you have done, full of capital description and all good things; though without any compliment I am sure you would write a better than I shall. But you see the original fault in me is that I choose to be in such a place as this at all; that argues certainly a talent for dullness which no situation nor intercourse of men could much improve. It is true; I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen. This is all my live stock. The house is yet damp ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the liability to failure lies in the direction of dullness, monotony, lack of vitality and warmth. This is because the feeling is deep and still; is an undercurrent, strong but unseen. This restrained, repressed feeling is the most difficult fittingly to express. In this kind of speech some marring of just the right effect is difficult ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... day becoming a secular priest. But the ungrateful hound, instead of thanking me, reproached me for having craftily rid myself of him, and added that, as I was going to Paris, I might as well take him with me, as the dullness of Augsburg ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "This is the Sabbath, which, under present circumstances, can only be known by the neat appearance of the boys, in their shiny boots and clean, boiled shirts, as they make their early morning entree for company inspection of arms and accouterments, after which, all is dullness and vacuity. There is a sensible void, apparent to all, requiring something to remove the depressing dullness now surrounding them; and that something is to be found only in the presence of an accommodating and pleasing chaplain. Being to-day in the camp of the 2d Ohio Regiment, I observed this ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... a good many thousands altogether, men and women and children and lads. It was dressed in its Sunday best, in attire which fluctuated from bright tints of glaring newness to the dullness of well-brushed and obtrusive shabbiness. There were every-looking men you could think of and women and girls, young and old, pretty and plain and repulsive. But it was a working-people crowd. There was no room among it for the idlers. Probably it ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... nice about my friend. Indeed, he was always nice, with the niceness of people whose hearts are genuinely humane. But this time it cost him an effort. His attempts at general conversation broke down into dullness. It occurred to me he might have been indisposed. But before I could ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... has always been "different." In the old days Mrs. Norris set her face against dancing, not upon any moral grounds, certainly, but because of its alleged dullness. Why couldn't people enjoy one another without flying into a perspiration? she asked; but, unfortunately for her plans for the establishment of an animated conversazione, the substitutes she had advocated were felt to be even duller. So, one by one, all ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... commenced a new era in Mr. Jorrocks's life, and he entirely forget all about Sunday and Dover dullness the moment he set foot on sprightly France, and he no more recollected it was Sunday, than if such a day had ceased to exist in the calendar. Having bolted his steak, he gave his Hessians their usual flop with his handkerchief, combed his whiskers, pulled his wig straight, and sallied forth, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... everywhere, in men of all races. It is not selfishness, nor the growth of towns or decay of agriculture, which as a fact does not decay, nor education, nor any of the other causes usually given for the dullness, the greyness of village life. The chief cause, I take it, is that gulf, or barrier, which exists between men and men in different classes in our country, or a considerable portion of it—the caste feeling which is becoming increasingly rigid in the rural world, if my own observation, extending ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... is hardly a part of the Budget that is not too stupidly wrong even for the doctor's dullness and ignorance. I am sure Mr. Pitt must concur with me; and I have all the materials for him.—Wrong about the increase of the revenue; wrong as to the produce of the Consolidated Fund; scandalously wrong ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... I will not even ask you to do so, though your presence gave a brightness to my life for a few days which nothing else could have produced. But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness. I had to pay for your visit, and for the comfort of my confession to you at Koenigstein. I was determined that you should know it all; but, having told you, I do not want to see you again. As for writing, he shall not deprive me of the consolation,—nor ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the teeth chatter. Chills are not generally seen in children under six, but an attack begins with uneasiness, the face is pinched, the eyes sunken, the lips and tips of the fingers and toes are blue, and there is dullness and often nausea and vomiting. Then, instead of a chill, the eyelids and limbs begin to twitch, and the child goes into a convulsion. While the surface of the skin is cold and blue during a chill, yet the temperature, taken with the thermometer in the mouth or bowel, reaches 102 deg., ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... there is a Ford, which has a distinguished claim on fame, inasmuch as it is one of the gateways from Burmah into Western China. This Ford is guarded continually by a company of Sikhs, under the command of an English officer. To be candid, it is not a post that is much sought after. Its dullness is extraordinary. True, one can fish there from morning until night, if one is so disposed; and if one has the good fortune to be a botanist, there is an inexhaustible field open for study. It is also true that Nampoung is only thirty miles or so, as the crow flies, from Bhamo, and when one ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... smell are more fragrant than thyme. The approach and touch of these close up the interiors of their mind, and open the exteriors pertaining to the body, from which come their quickness in worldly things and their dullness in ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... large classroom downstairs the other thirty pupils were enjoying themselves with a zest all the greater for the dullness of the weeks which had gone before. The floor had been sponged with milk until it was quite smooth and slippery, a table supplied with such refreshments as lemonade, ginger-beer, and sweet biscuits, was placed ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... shrapnel was bursting over the water; the patter of musketry came creeping out to sea; we are in for it now; the machine guns muttered as through chattering teeth—up to our necks in it now. But would we be out of it? No; not one of us; not for five hundred years stuffed full of dullness and routine. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... the corridor outside the bedrooms, pale and composed, and neat as ever in her modest print dress. I noticed a curious dimness and dullness in her eyes—not as if she had been crying but as if she had been looking at something too long. Possibly, it was a misty something raised by her own thoughts. There was certainly no object about her ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Phil accused herself of dullness in not having thought earlier of the photograph gallery. Her father must have been conducting himself very quietly there or she would have heard him before. It had been a bright day and he had undoubtedly been taking advantage of the sun to do his printing. She ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857, I had no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had. A year later, we reproached ourselves with dullness for being perplexed by such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the 'Origin,' was, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" I suppose that Columbus' companions said much the same when he made the egg stand ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Virginia had already peopled the valley with imaginary settlers, each one of a certain type, and they adapted their pastime to the particular neighbors whom they chose to invite for the evening. How little the helpless folk in the city, bored with their own dullness, and dependent on others for amusement—how little could such as these cope with the loneliness of the home on the plains, or comprehend the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... ran, Jason hurled himself toward the East Entry; his eyes following, in the opposite direction, a dullness moving in the blaze inside the Fane. A smoothly moving, white on white, unfaced ghost of whiteness within, a part of, the blazing radionic light. Just as he rounded the East end of the Fane, he glimpsed the vertical ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... he feared, not even an earthquake nor a storm at sea, as is said to be the case with the Celts."] It is therefore evident that fearlessness is a vice, whether it result from lack of love, pride of soul, or dullness of understanding: yet the latter is excused from ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... And what 's very true, tho' few people know it, Fine coffee 's the basis of every fine poet; For many a writer as windy as Boreas Has been vastly improved by the drink ever glorious. Coffee brightens the dullness of heavy philosophy, And opens the science of mighty geometry. Our law-makers, too, when the nectar imbibing, Plan wondrous reforms, quite beyond the describing; The odor of coffee they delight in inhaling, And promise the country to alter laws ailing. From the brow of the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Circumstances of her Charms, he saw her in all her native Beauties, free from the Incumbrance of Dress, her Hair as black as Ebony, hung flowing in careless Curls over her Shoulders, it hung link'd in amorous Twinings, as if in Love with its own Beauties; her Eyes not yet freed from the Dullness of the late Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, seem'd like a thin ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Dog, back to the Age of the Crippled Men. I found no time better than my own. Back and back I peered, back as far as the Numbered Years. The Twenty-Eighth Century was boredom unendurable, the Twenty-Sixth a morass of dullness. Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth—wherever I looked, tediety ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... young bee-eaters are to be seen hawking at insects; they are distinguishable from adults by the dullness of the plumage and the fact that the median tail feathers are ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... love in Keith's feelings toward Johan, nothing emotional. The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his character did not come into play at all. In fact, he rather looked down on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of personal neatness. The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that particular game was concerned, Johan was simply an accessory to it in same way as his tin ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... that of dullness and damp, accompanied by a mouldering vapour, like that from the charnel-house or the grave. Their way was down a winding and broken staircase; at the bottom a straight passage led them on to a considerable distance. Damps oozing from the walls made the path more and more tiresome and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... satiated an old desire to travel in lands not visited by all the world. Now he was back in New York to look after the investments his guardian had made, and he found them so ridiculously satisfactory that they cast a shadow of dullness across his mind, always ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... but only a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it, composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the nautical enterprise of Holland. We only are to be reproached, who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types of sea, the small waves en papillote, and peruke-like ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... vent. It was not lighted without a purpose. The peasant had a son, to whom the flame had been passed on; for he aimed at the priesthood. This has ever been a refuge of ambitious minds that cannot rise by any other means above the dullness of the peasant's life, which is the more endurable the more the man is able to place himself upon the animal level of his plodding ox. The son was being educated in a seminary, but he was now home for the holidays. Presently ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... slain by me with thy help in the wood of Kishkindhya! I regard that worst of monkeys on earth to be highly ungrateful, for, O Lakshmana, that wretch hath now forgotten me who am sunk in such distress! I think he is unwilling to fulfil his pledge, disregarding, from dullness of understanding, one who hath done him such services! If thou findest him lukewarm and rolling in sensual joys, thou must then send him, by the path Vali hath been made to follow, to the common goal of all creatures! If, on ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... most remarkable debaters in this singular parliament, where self-satisfied ignorance and dullness of apprehension were so hard to pierce, was the youthful envoy of the Czechoslovaks, M. Benes. This politician, who before the Conference came to an end was offered the honorable task of forming a new Cabinet, which he wisely declined, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... He had been with Cumming's forces, closely opposed to my own position at Bull Run. He himself was instantly killed, and his son Harry, practically at his side, seriously, possibly fatally wounded, was now in hospital at Richmond. Even by this time we were learning the dullness to surprise and shock which war always brings. We ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... water welling up converts the upper waste into a garden. Just so at her words and her look his heart suddenly filled, as if it came from afar, with the youthful passion he had felt toward Miss Bood, but which, he knew not exactly when or how, had been gradually overgrown with the dullness of familiarity and had lapsed into an indolent affectionate habit. The warm, voluptuous pulse of this new feeling—new, and yet instantly recognized as old—brought with it a flood of youthful associations, and commingled the far past with the present in a confusion ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and hence that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides somewhat forestalled his age—as his example had a very important influence upon his successors—as he did not exhibit till the fame of Sophocles was already confirmed—and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... help feeling that in condemning ourselves to desperate dullness we paid too high a price for the good opinion of our French friends. If they were really shocked at our levity in playing games during the war, it would have been better to lacerate their feelings a little. They would very soon have got accustomed ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... Undine, surprised at his dullness, tried to explain. "Oh that wouldn't be the reason GIVEN, of course. Any lawyer could fix it up for them. Don't they ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... gave splendid entertainments, which contrasted with the dullness of everyday life. So it was necessary that they should hold a good deal of handsome furniture and beautiful tapestries in reserve. This was the case ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... departments of professional and business enterprise presents a constant temptation to seize every advantage, fair or unfair, which promises immediate profit. It is unfortunately true that the successful cleverness which sacrifices honor to gain is more easily condoned by public opinion than honest dullness which is caught in the snares laid for it by the cunning manipulators of speculation. The man who fails to deliver what he has bought, to meet his paper at maturity and make good the certifications of his banker, loses at once his business standing, and is practically ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in Barrack-room Ballads, but in Mr. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... days the arrival of the mail was an important event. It awoke the small German town from its habitual slumberous dullness, and a letter caused its recipient to be regarded as a ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... of Bruce's rare type made up to the trainers for the dullness of their average pupils. He learned with bewildering ease. He never ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Art is nothing—genius is nothing—but no! that is blasphemous. It is we that are nothing—if not stupid. Dullness is the universe. The grasshoppers are too faint to sing, the birds sit still on the boughs, waiting for the leaves to fan them. Children are wilted into silence and slumberous nonentity; boys do not bathe to-day—they welter, hour after hour, in the dark water near the shaded rock. Even ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... seasons, all along his course, when he loved God supremely; when he embraced the cross joyfully and penitently; when he held intimate communion with Christ, and loved his neighbor as himself But he was always in terror, lest under the force of temptation, all this should give place to deadness and dullness, when he should chafe and rebel in the hour of trial, and judge his fellow-man with a harsh and bitter judgment, and give way to angry, passionate emotions. But these fluctuations cease, after a time, to disturb his peace. Love to Christ becomes the abiding, inmost principle ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... the stupidity, for very few Donkeys are stupid, although they try to seem so) is correct, but nevertheless it is doubtful if the animal is much to blame for it. There is every reason to believe that the dullness and laziness of the Donkey is owing entirely to his association ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... of abuse of the sexual organs are loss of nervous energy, dullness of the mental faculties, and delight in obscene stories. The expression of the face becomes coarse, and the movements slow; the eye is sunken, the face bloated and pale, and the disposition is fretful and irritable; the appetite is capricious, the throat ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... recorded of the infancy of Chatterton, parents may be satisfied that an inaptness to learn in childhood, is far from being a prognostic of future dullness. At the age of five years, he was sent to the school of which his father had been master, and was found so incorrigibly stupid, that he was rejected by the teacher, whose name was Love, as incapable of profiting by his instruction. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... bobbed her head. She had always been a slim creature of moods mercurial; she would always be that. And now her violet eyes radiated anticipation, perverse and impish and far, far different from the sullen dullness which had filled them an hour before. Miss Sarah had spoken with well-seasoned wisdom, as was her wont: there are sometimes big moments which are the bigger for lack of analysis. The girl did not know why, all in one breath, she no longer feared nor doubted—but she knew! And that was a world and ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... to grow old. I can not imagine my eyes dim or my hair gray. I can not imagine my heart beating slowly. I can not realize a day when the warmth and beauty of life will have changed into cold and dullness." ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... and gym suits. They give the wearer such a sense of freedom." She laughed again. Elizabeth knew not whether she were serious or joking. She was so effervescing with good humor that her companion had no opportunity for a moment's dullness or homesickness. ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... out. Perhaps the wonder did not really exist in life. It had something to do with God. She wanted to ascend upwards, to go at once up into God's house, to be there among the light strong men and women who had died and left dullness and heaviness behind them on the earth. Thinking of them took some of her weariness away and sometimes she went out of the orchard in the late afternoon walking almost lightly. Something like grace seemed to have come into her tall ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... in state up the staircase with the gilt balustrades, and come tumbling down again presently.—Well, I won't give you an historical disquisition in the Titmarsh manner upon this, but reserve it for Punch—for whom on Thursday an article that I think is quite unexampled for dullness even in that journal, and that beats the dullest Jerrold. What a jaunty, off-hand, satiric rogue I am to be sure—and a gay young dog! I took a very great liking and admiration for Clough. He is a real poet, and a simple, affectionate creature. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... and some streets of aristocratic dullness, inhabited by wealthy merchants, we spent some hours in the mercantile quarter; which is practically one vast market or bazaar, thronged with masculine humanity from morning till night. Eight feet is the width of the widest street but one, and between the passers-by, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... about from people who once were fond of theater and music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old school inclined toward the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... these exquisite bits of carved ivory. This one is the god monkey who sees no evil, his hands cover his eyes; this one is the god monkey who hears no evil, his hands cover his ears; and this one is the god monkey who speaks no evil, his hands cover his mouth. Half ashamed of our own dullness an old lesson came back with new significance,—be blind, deaf, and ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... It promotes insensible perspiration, dissolves all phlegmatic and viscous humors that are apt to obstruct the narrow channels of the nerves. It helps the memory, and would quicken even Helvetian dullness. 'Tis friendly to the lungs, much more than scolding itself. It comforts the stomach and strengthens the bowels, preventing all colics and fluxes. In one word, it will make a man live a great while, and very well while he does live; and, what is more, it will even make old age amiable, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... have his own way—and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sillier inasmuch as the word "wrong" (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to "that other monsieur." There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence—the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know. Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons had judged wrongly of his nationality; ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... resources of drinking, obscene conversation, and games of chance, to which men have had recourse that they might rouze their minds: being rather willing to suffer the extremes of misery than that dullness, and inanity, which ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay With light from fountains elder than the Day; 100 A conscience more divine than we, A gladness fed with secret tears, A vexing, forward-reaching sense Of some more noble permanence; A light across the sea, Which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... having for a little while drifted perilously near to the shores of dullness, again bobbed merrily on the waters of farce. What a lot of funny things there were, all waiting to be done! This that Urquhart suggested should certainly, if possible, be ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... connected with a habit of thought that was rather critical than sentimental. Hamlet had a shrewd judgment, a lively and caustic wit, an exacting standard, and a turn for satire. He was fond of question and debate, an enemy to all illusion, impatient of dulness,[typo for dullness?] and not indisposed to alarm and bewilder it; and he had brought with him from Wittenberg a philosophy half stoical and half transcendental, with whose eccentricities he would torment the wisdom of the Court. He looked upon ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... out upon a stormy sea. It does look a bit mad, doesn't it? And yet it only looks mad because of our blindness and dullness and stupid unbelief. What did Peter have under him when he was in the ship? Upon what were his fellow disciples trusting to keep them from the bottom of the sea? Just two or three planks, that is all. Upon what was Peter trusting? He was trusting upon the sure word of God. When he let ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... of those that will not, there are also two sorts. For the first there are the sort who are so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness, regarding nothing, thinking almost of nothing, no more than if they lay in a lethargy. With them it may so befall that wit and remembrance will wear away and fall even fair from them. And this comfortless ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... about "true Imperialism," or "our loyalty to our gallant leader," you might have thought you knew what I meant; because I meant nothing. But I do mean something; and I do want you to understand what I mean. I will, therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and I will ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... when she compared very badly with the other young ladies of Simla with their high spirits and their pretty complexions, very badly indeed. Those were occasions when the gay monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a little heavily upon her, and the dullness she felt translated itself in her expression. But she was by ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the fondness which the authoress shows for exhibiting uninteresting and tiresome people in all their interminable tediousness; and if the morbid tone which we have already mentioned reminds us of a French school of novelists, her passion for photographing the minutest details of dullness reminds us painfully of those American ladies who contribute so largely to the literature of our railway-stalls, by flooding their boundless prairies of dingy paper with inexhaustible masses of blotchy type. We quite admit the naturalness ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even, that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Shatushka?" She shook her head. "You may be a very sensible man but you're dull. It's strange for me to look at all of you. I don't understand how it is people are dull. Sadness is not dullness. I'm happy." ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... which diffused a summer temperature through the house. In mine, the heat came up through an exquisite Etruscan vase, covered with flowers, which seemed to emit odor as well as warmth, and threw the illusion of spring over the dullness and gloom of winter. But I missed the glowing hearth of Mrs. Linwood, the brightness and heartiness ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... that it is a little dull, Donald," Minnie said, "but not being a man, I suppose desires like yours would seem improper When you go," and her voice trembled a little, "I will feel the dullness all ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... there was no 1820 port, and no recollections of old days. They were rather dull, the three of them, as they sat together,—and dullness is always more endurable than sadness. Old Mr Harding went to sleep and the archdeacon was cross. "Henry," he said, "you haven't a word to throw to a dog." "I've got rather a headache this evening, sir," said the major. The archdeacon ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... pure air must be emphasized from first to last. Some think that the dullness felt by many people in the early morning is due to the impure air of cities, and to the failure to open windows. A lady once said to me, "When I am in the country I always sleep out of doors. Then I have not the slightest disinclination to get up. I do it as naturally ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... dullness, where the Fancy's bad, So without Judgement, Fancy is but mad: And Judgement has a boundless influence, Not only in the choice of words, or sense, But on the world, on manners, and on men; Fancy is but the feather of the pen: Reason is that substantial useful part, Which gains ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... The dullness seemed to have dropped away from the commonplace face as if it had been a veil; the eyes were burning with a hungry pathos and fire and passion; they were raised to his and held him with the power of an indescribable anguish. "Dunnot forget as I'm here," the voice growing sharp and intense, ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he was too weak to enjoy anything, but lay all day long on his sofa, fidgeting his nurse extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... taken in this book, however, though often permitted to essay-writers for the relief of their dullness, I never mean to take more,—the relation of composed metaphor as of actual dream, pp. 27 and 171. I assumed, it is true, that in these places the supposed dream would be easily seen to be an invention; but must not any more, even under so transparent disguise, pretend to any share ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... retardation, and impairs the drainage of the subjacent lung. Limitation of expansion will be found on the invaded side. The area below the foreign body will give an impaired percussion note. Breath-sounds are diminished in the area of dullness, and vocal resonance and fremitus are impaired. Rales are of great diagnostic import; the passage of air past the foreign body is accompanied by blowing, harsh breathing, and snoring; snapping rales are heard usually with greatest intensity ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... his innocent heart, Her temple and her place of birth, Where she would ever wish to dwell, Life of the fountain there, beneath Its salient springs, and far apart, Hating to wander out on earth, Or breathe into the hollow air, Whose dullness would make visible Her subtil, warm, and golden breath, Which mixing with the infant's blood, Fullfills him with beatitude. Oh! sure it is a special care Of God, to fortify from doubt, To arm in proof, and guard about With triple-mailed ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... and little dinners in the vaults of the House and elsewhere, arising out of his political intentions, and with the appearance of a Lady Harman there came a certain urgency on the part of those who maintain in a state of hectic dullness the social activities of the great Liberal party. Horatio Blenker, Sir Isaac's editor, showed a disposition to be socially very helpful, and after Mrs. Blenker had called in a state of worldly instructiveness, there was ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... truths? Well, as simple as they seem to you, reader, you shall yet see others which surpass them in dullness and simplicity. For our course is the reverse of that of the geometricians: with them, the farther they advance, the more difficult their problems become; we, on the contrary, after having commenced with the most abstruse propositions, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... doublet and drew forth a miniature. Like a ruddy ember it lay in his hand. "Paris! O prince of cities, there lies upon your stones the broken cup which held my youth!" The yellow of the candle and the red of the fire gave a singularly rich tone to his face, from which the dullness of intoxication was ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... lost in her new thoughts, and went to bed as though she were dreaming. Grace had experienced nothing but a sense of dullness and extreme sleepiness. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... awhile; and this indeed did shame Paul a little, to find himself being used so lovingly for a sorrow which he was hardly feeling. But he said to himself that sorrow must come unbidden, and that it was no sorrow that was made with labour and intention. He was a little angered with himself for his dullness—but then song was so beautiful, that he could think of nothing else; he ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... life [wrote "Fiona Macleod"] has a vital and great part to play. We have a most noble ideal if we will but accept it. And that is, not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is gone away upon the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn, or dullness with contempt, or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we are a vital part, so that, with this Celtic emotion, Celtic love ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt |
