"Inexpressive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seems best to denote light and life, and to tell of a mind that thinks and of a heart that feels. I can name no colour in describing the soft changing tints of Madeline Staveley's face, but I will make bold to say that no man ever found it insipid or inexpressive. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the Boston Literary Gazette, gave a personal description which was not sufficiently flattering, and roused the lady's indignant comments. It dared to state that she was "short, with a broad face, blue, inexpressive eyes, and seemed, if such a thing may be named, about forty years of age." Imagine the sensations this paragraph produced! She at once retorted, exclaiming in mock earnest, "I appeal! I appeal to the Titian of his age and country—I appeal to you, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Would you have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... legal domicile, his hat touching the sill, looking up and then down the street, as if waiting the arrival of a victim upon whom to pronounce one of his awful judgments. Felsh is a different species of person, being a short, stunted man, with a flat, inexpressive face. He has very much the appearance of a man who had been clumsily thrown together for any purpose future circumstances might require. Between these worthies and one Hanz Von Vickeinsteighner there has long existed a business connection, which is now being transferred into ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... that—as he had learned in the Mission garden at St. Augustine—such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination. But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating any by so much ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... taken a few turns backward and forward, alone, he was joined by a spare, quiet, gray-haired man, whose personal appearance was totally devoid of marked character of any kind; whose inexpressive face and conventionally-quiet manner presented nothing that attracted approval and nothing that inspired dislike. This was Mr. Pendril—this was the man on whose lips hung the future of the orphans ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for once to quote a not inexpressive barbarism of Bentham—which every now and then breaks out either in passing compliment—amounting to but a bow—or in eloquent laudation, during which the poet appears to be prostrate on his knees. He speaks nobly of cathedrals, and minsters, and so forth, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... without perceiving that in those writers it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form and color? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be itself an attribute of both. Color may be expressive or inexpressive, like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes, words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting, appalling, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed and its history written; also of C. N——, who, it appears, is passing through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... verse of ill-matched rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerable tombstones. But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses, we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds a profound and individual purport in what seems so vague and inexpressive unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew, though the selfsame words may have ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... meilleurs Artistes de l'Allemagne:' Schulgen, Dusseldorf and Paris. Overbeck had an aversion to the heavy and mechanical schools of engraving; he objected to meaningless masses of shadow and to the multiplication of lines inexpressive of form. Accordingly these engravings from the Gospels, in common with other plates from the master, possess merits the opposites to such defects. Like the original drawings, they are chiefly dependent on outline, and even their slightness is not ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... or entonic variety is distinguished by florid skin, full strong pulse, turgid veins, with firm and vigorous muscular fibres, and the serous or atonic, is denoted by a full, but frequent and feeble pulse, smooth and soft skin, plump but inexpressive figure, and general languor or debility of the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... over the back of a chair. He faces the spectator, on his head a long, pointed black hat with a wide brim. His collar is white. A shadow covers the face above the eyes. These are rather melancholy, inexpressive; the flesh tints are anaemic, almost morbid. We are far away from the Vermeer of the Milkmaid and the Letter. There is something disquieting in this portrait, but it is a masterpiece ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... most effective, that they have formulated what might almost be called an instrumental language. Though the effective capacity of each instrument is restricted not only by its mechanics, but also by the quality of its tones—a melody conceived for one instrument sometimes becoming utterly inexpressive and unbeautiful by transferrence to another—the range of effects is extended almost to infinity by means of combination, or, as a painter might say, by mixing the colors. The art of writing effectively for instruments ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the menace of night; Then a long, lonely, leaden mere Backed by a desolate fell As by a spectral battlement; and then, Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, A vast, grey, listless, inexpressive sky, So beggared, so incredibly bereft Of starlight and the song of racing worlds It might have bellied down upon the Void Where as in terror Light was ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... yell of the savages, as they closed in deadly conflict; not a sound was to be heard but the hoarse cry of the vulture, flapping her wings and mounting into the air, alarmed at the intrusion of man. Those countenances, which had so lately beamed with daring and defiance, were unmeaning and inexpressive; and what with the effect produced on the dead bodies, by the excessive heat and the mangling and disfiguration of the tomahawk and scalping knife, scarcely one could be distinguished from another. Friends tortured themselves in vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter himself could perhaps have improved. He would not have fired so many guns in the hollow, and the grey old castle so near: he would have found means, too, to prevent the crowd from so nearly swallowing ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... are worshipped, apart from the sacred truths they represent. The gods we have introduced from Egypt are regarded by the priests of that learned land as emblems of certain divine truths brought down from ancient times. They are like the Hermae at our doors, which outwardly appear to rest on inexpressive blocks of stone; but when opened, they are found to contain beautiful statues of the gods within them. It is not so with the new fables which the Greeks are continually mixing with their mythology. Pygmalion, as we all know, first ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... beam from his eye. Nor should he fail to look at his hearers, if he would have his hearers look at him. Among the faults to be avoided in the management of the eye, Dr. Porter notices particularly that unmeaning look which the eye "bent on vacuity" has, resembling the inexpressive glare of the glass eye of a wax figure; that indefinite sweep of the eye which ranges from one side to the other of an assembly, resting nowhere; and that tremulous, roving cast of the eye, and winking of the eyelid, which is in direct contrast to an open, collected, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... register approved of by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who regarded the undamped pianoforte as the more agreeable for improvising.. He appears, however, to have known but little of the capabilities of the instrument, which seemed to him coarse and inexpressive beside his favorite clavichord. Stein appears to have made use of the "una corda" shift. Probably by knee-pedals, subsequently by foot-pedals, the following effects were added ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... turn me, mould me, mellow me for use. Pervade my being with Thy vital force, That this else inexpressive life of mine May become eloquent and full of power, Impregnated with life and strength divine. Put the bright torch of heaven into my hand, That I may carry it aloft And win the eye of weary wanderers ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... very well wear. It was indeed a part of Osmond's cleverness that he could look consummately uncompromised. His present appearance, however, was not a confession of disappointment; it was simply a part of Osmond's habitual system, which was to be inexpressive exactly in proportion as he was really intent. He had been intent on this prize from the first; but he had never allowed his eagerness to irradiate his refined face. He had treated his possible son-in-law as he treated every one—with an air of being interested in him only for his own advantage, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... music musical! My neighbor has a mocking-bird: its song Has been as little heeded as the noise Of rattling wheels incessant; but to-day One of its strains brought all Elysium back Into my heart. What was it? What the tie Linking it with some inexpressive joy? At length I solve the mystery! Those notes, Pensively slow and sadly exquisite, Were what the wood-thrush piped at early dawn After that evening passage in the boat, When stars came out, that never more shall set. Oh! sweet and clear ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... with the weepers off his cuffs and the crape off his bonnet; he had divested himself of the hateful things whenever he found himself alone, and he was listening with a rapt and inexpressive face to the pensive call of the curlew as it rose over the fields, and the tears ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... thing." Elsie withdrew her observant short-sighted eyes from Mrs. Pendleton's crowning glory, and a smile barely touched the corners of her expressively inexpressive mouth. Mrs. Pendleton glanced up, faintly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... leg?" asked General Feversham, as he rose briskly from his chair. He was a small wiry man, and, in spite of his white hairs, alert. But the alertness was of the body. A bony face, with a high narrow forehead and steel-blue inexpressive eyes, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... I am lucky enough to possess certain advantages. I have, for instance, managed to preserve the ability to speak dialect in spite of all the efforts of my pastors and masters to make me talk the stereotyped, comparatively inexpressive compromise which goes by the name of King's English. Tony is hard of hearing, catches the meaning of dialect far quicker than that of standard English, and I notice that the damn'd spot sir seldom blots our conversation when it ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... hands behind his back, his feet slightly apart, stood very straight and stiff by the side of the compass stand. His face, now hardly visible, was as inexpressive as the door ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... until the longed-for moment arrived. It had happened often before, Saltash's caprice had sometimes driven him to the verge of rebellion, but no one—not even Saltash himself—ever suspected it. Silent, phlegmatic, inexpressive, Larpent held on ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... only fault. It was stuck on the back of his head, and he was in a white waistcoat and shirt sleeves. He welcomed me with a forgetfulness of my bitter satire and my hostile abstinence that was almost divine. His glasses fell off at the sight of me. His round inexpressive eyes shone brightly. He held out his ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... disgusted with one another's society. Where matters have not gone to this length, I have seen sisters who would never caress each other, or, by any but the most formal and dignified methods, express their affection for each other. I have seen them live together for months and years as inexpressive of affection for each other as cattle in a stall,—more so: for I have seen a cow affectionately lick her neighbor's ear by the half-hour, while among these girls I have failed to see a kiss, or hear a tender word, or witness any exhibition ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... it had on the bishop. With these little plans in his mind the chaplain crept about the tea-table like a tame cat, and handed round cake and bread with his most winning smile. His pale face was even more inexpressive than usual, and none could have guessed, from outward appearance, his malicious intents—least of all the trio he was with. They were too upright themselves to suspect ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... such an absurd little inexpressive word on paper, but Anne made a song of it on two notes, combining astonishment with a sincerity that was absolutely final. If, after that, Jervaise had dared to say, "Are you sure?" I believe I should ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... other, and then away. Joe turned unexpectedly, and shambled off in the direction of the village. Not a word out of Anna as she returned by the side of her protector, but every now and then she looked at him sideways. The Boy felt her inexpressive gratitude, and was glad his journey had been delayed, or ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... forward for a glimpse of Quarrier's face. The face appeared to be a study in blankness. His natural visage was emotionless and inexpressive enough, but this face, from which every vestige of colour had fled, fascinated her with its dead whiteness; and the hair brushed high, the long, black lashes, the silky beard, struck her as absolutely ghastly, as though they had been glued ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... of night; Then a long, lonely, leaden mere Backed by a desolate fell, As by a spectral battlement; and then, Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky, So beggared, so incredibly bereft Of starlight and the song of racing worlds, It might have bellied down upon the Void Where as in terror ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... particular impression, however, on Althea herself. A dozen other young fellows had been more demonstrative and more fluent. He simply slid over the surface of her mind and fell away again. She had known him—intermittently—for years as a somewhat inexpressive boy; now, as a potential gallant, he was negligible, as compared with others. But Albert, speaking in a sense either specific or general, did not mean ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... nothing. She was engaged in contemplating with a studiously inexpressive countenance the stub of her precious and only pencil. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... lost the properties of hyssop known to Solomon, we regain our superiority over that learned Hebrew by christening it Gratiola officinalis. The sexes must not be taught in one room to discard such ugly and inexpressive terms as snow-drop, meadow-sweet, heart's-ease, fever-few, cowslip, etc., and learn to know the cowslip as Primula veris—by class, Pentandria monogynia; and the buttercup as Ranunculus acnis—Polyandria monogynia; the snow-drop as Galanthus nivalis—Hexandria monogynia; and the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... those peaceful young gentlemen, the German agricultural students; but they were all three beaming upon him with their spectacles, looking about as round in the face and as inexpressive as so ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... scornful attitude towards democracy. There was something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism to the crowd—on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman, picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude, dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed, envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common imaginative purposes one left out the policeman ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... projecting at right angles to his body, sat alone, on the same bench, the lone old pensioner. I seemed to have been sleeping for three months. I felt sad, and knew not why. How ideal is the reality of life! and the inexpressive cause of grief is ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... from Norman, was equally inexpressive of the almost incredulous gratitude and tenderness of ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... these nights, when she came up to the garret cold, hungry, tired, and with a tempest raging in her small breast, Emily's stare seemed so vacant, her sawdust legs and arms so limp and inexpressive, that Sara lost ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to pronounce decidedly on their original workmanship: but, judging by what appears, it would seem to have been of a ruder and coarser character than that of the slabs or of the royal statues. The Nebo images are heavy, formal, inexpressive, and not over well-proportioned; but they are not wanting in a certain quiet dignity which impresses the beholder. They are unfortunately disfigured, like so many of the lions and bulls, by several lines of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... enormous high-top boots, to one of which was affixed a brass spur. Over his shoulder, holding the two ends in his hands, he carried a strong, flexible whip, silver mounted, and polished like patent leather. He was about six feet high, stoutly built, with a heavy, inexpressive face, and a clear, sharp gray eye. One glance satisfied me that he ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... she takes snuff, and females arrive at womanhood in warm countries much sooner than in cold ones. Her person is tall, stout, and well proportioned, though it has not dignity sufficient to be commanding; her countenance is round and open, but dull and almost inexpressive; mildness of manners, evenness of temper, and inactivity of body also, might notwithstanding, I think be clearly defined in it; on the whole she has a perfect virginity of face, which betrays not the smallest symptoms of feeling. Her forehead is smooth and shining as ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... ourselves to one another. The language of everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do our living with—even the things that human beings amuse themselves with—are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to cover, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... body have to think about the livelong day that is so absorbing that all one's bright thoughts, and one's most whimsical sallies, pass without notice? Should I see her once move a muscle of her very plain, doggedly inexpressive, provokingly composed phiz, I should jump up ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... men came into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale, inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... put the paper down, took a peep at my bonnet in the glass to see if it was neat, and looked at the room, which was not half lighted, and at the shabby, dusty tables, and at the piles of writings, and at a bookcase full of the most inexpressive-looking books that ever had anything to say for themselves. Then I went on, thinking, thinking, thinking; and the fire went on, burning, burning, burning; and the candles went on flickering and guttering, and there were no snuffers—until the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... these vague ideas in check for several months; for with it was associated the idea of restraint. Moreover, Gertrude, though inferior in beauty, was yet a pretty contrast to her rival. Her light hair fell in silken ringlets down her shoulders, her blue eyes were gentle though inexpressive, and her healthy cheeks were like opening rosebuds. He had already become accustomed to the dangerous experiment of resisting his own inward convictions; and this new impulse to ambition, combined with the strong temptation of variety in love, met the ardent young man ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... from an asylum—a surprising deaf-mute or one of the operative blind. Her noble pagan head gave her privileges that she neglected, and when people were admiring her brow she was wondering whether there were a good fire in her bedroom. She was simple, kind and good; inexpressive but not inhuman or stupid. Now and again she dropped something that had a sifted, selected air—the sound of an impression at first hand. She had no imagination, but she had added up her feelings, some of her reflections, about ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... her one of my most profound obeisances. A few common-places passed between us, and then her brother-in-law leading her down to dinner, the evening passed by with politeness on both sides. Adela did not appear to heed her presence one way or the other. But then of late she had been very inexpressive. ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... to acquire the absolute mastery of drawing which was possessed by the better disciples of the schools. But he is painstaking, determined to get on, and eager to satisfy the continually increasing demand for work. His draperies are confused and unmeaning, his faces round, with small features, inexpressive button mouths, and weak chins, and his flesh tints have little of the glow which is later the prerogative of every second-rate painter. Yet Catena succeeds, like many another careful mediocre man, in securing patronage, and as the sixteenth century opened he gained ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... her, listened to her as she chattered away her hurried, inexpressive unmeaning slang, and looked at him with her bright, small, ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... little timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and the Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy and shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might interfere with her work. If their friendship ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the nakedness of their eyebrows, of which the movements are thus rendered less conspicuous. When, however, they raise their eyebrows their foreheads become, as with us, transversely wrinkled. In comparison with man, their faces are inexpressive, chiefly owing to their not frowning under any emotion of the mind—that is, as far as I have been able to observe, and I carefully attended to this point. Frowning, which is one of the most important of all the expressions in man, is ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... doubtful company. He accepted ungraciously the cup handed to him by Mrs. Fyne, took an unwilling sip or two and put it down as if there were some moral contamination in the coffee of these "swells." Between whiles he directed mysteriously inexpressive glances at little Fyne, who, I gather, had no breakfast that morning at all. Neither had the girl. She never moved her hands from her lap till her appointed guardian got up, leaving ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... publication. Then his communications became comparatively hurried and matter-of-fact. His boy's return home for the holidays was always rather a stirring time for his private feelings, but he became more and more inexpressive. He would sometimes lay a hand on those growing shoulders and then withdraw it. They felt braced-up shoulders, stiffly inflexible or—they would wince. And when one has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon one, what is ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Oriental munificence can scarcely be more disenchanting than the sight of the sketch of Mohammed-Schah which Prince Soltykoff had the honor to take. The large head, the heavy inexpressive features, the clumsy frame, are sad dream dispellers; and were it not for the redeeming Persian cap, the "Centre of the World" might be mistaken for a grocer of the Rue St. Denis in a shawl dressing-gown. On grand occasions ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... rode up to him, Jose was still swearing. He was walking among the wounded sheep, shooting those which he considered helplessly injured. His mouth was dry, his voice husky, and on his lips foam lay in yellow flecks. He ceased to imprecate only when, by repetition, his oaths became too inexpressive to be ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... a clump of askaris stood leaning on their rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... blanching of the rose-tint on her cheek, Rose to more perfect worship. It might seem As if a sacred temple, purified By prayers and praises, were a place sublime, Of fitting sanctity, wherein to hear The inexpressive call that summoneth The ready spirit upward. But the change In her delightful home, what words can tell! The shock and contrast, when a mind so skill'd With order and efficiency to fill Each post of woman's duty and of love, Vanished ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... behind the inexpressive barrier of his superbly controlled features, but the coldness of his eyes ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... children, with birds or fruit, pretty in features, and utterly inexpressive, like the cherubs of ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... anxiety. She would feel of the wax with her fingers, bury the letters in her pocket, hesitate about delivering them, and the moment when mademoiselle unfolded the terrible paper and scanned its contents with the inexpressive eye of elderly people was as full of suspense to her as if she were awaiting sentence of death. She felt that her secret and her falsehood were in everybody's hand. The house had seen her and might speak. The quarter knew her as she was. ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... her face by thick round velvet pads, which, when the waltzing pace became exhilarating, occasionally showed themselves, looking greasy. She had a pair of eyes set straight in her head, faultless in form, and perfectly inexpressive. She had a nose equally straight, but perhaps a little too coarse in dimensions. She had a mouth not over large, with two thin lips and small whitish teeth; and she had a chin equal in contour to the rest of her face, but on which Venus had not deigned to set a dimple. Nature might ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... collections of syllables, such as "locate," "operate," "antagonize," "transportation," "commutation," and "proposition," is an irony of civilisation. These words, if words they may be called, are hideous to the eye, offensive to the ear, and inexpressive to the mind. They are the base coins of language. They bear upon their face no decent superscription. They are put upon the street, fresh from some smasher's den, and not even the newspapers, contemptuous as they are of style, have reason to be proud of them! Nor is there any clear link between ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... only correctly but elegantly; and not only elegantly but eloquently. In order to do this, I will first take pains to get an habitual, but unaffected, purity, correctness and elegance of style in my common conversation; I will seek for the best words, and take care to reject improper, inexpressive, and vulgar ones. I will read the greatest masters of oratory, both ancient and modern, and I will read them singly in that view. I will study Demosthenes and Cicero, not to discover an old Athenian ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... and hands were small and delicate; that her eyes were bright when looked at, but not brilliant so as to make their brilliancy palpably visible to all around her; her hair was dark brown, and worn very plainly brushed from her forehead; her lips were thin, and her mouth, perhaps, in general inexpressive, but when she was eager in conversation it would show itself to be animated with curves of wondrous energy; and, quiet as she was in manner, sober and demure as was her usual settled appearance, she could talk, when the fit came on her, with an energy which ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... as modern politicians mostly do when President-making. But before Smooth proceeds to transcribe the elements of his speech, some description of his person may be necessary; in truth, he hears the reader demanding it. Flum is a long-jointed man, tall and coarse of figure, has a broad inexpressive face, with a spacious mouth and thin lips, disclosing irregular and discolored teeth; to which is added a sharp, projecting chin, prominent cheek bones, lazy grey eyes, deeply sunken under narrow arches slightly fringed with short, sprouting, reddish hairs, and a thin high bridged ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... in the Far West. We went to San Francisco, among other places. We attended part of a performance at the Chinese theater. Oh, those rows of impenetrable faces gazing at the stage with their long, shining, inexpressive eyes! What a look of the everlasting the Chinese have! "We have been before you—we shall be after you," ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... father's executioner, red with the life-blood of him who gave him being—a father he revered, and whose memory he cherished. The filial and hereditary hatred was in his heart. The feeling was mutual. Both knew it, and the cold, passive eye, and relaxed, inexpressive features but bespoke the subdued, not the extinguished passion. Chillie McIntosh is only one-fourth Indian in blood. Hopothlayohola is a full-blooded Indian. His features are coarse and striking. His high forehead and prominent ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the sable of the hair, the politician's eye was usually small, and intensely black—not the dead, inexpressive jet, which gives the idea of a hole through white paper, or of a cavernous socket in a death's-head; but the keen, midnight darkness, in whose depths you can see a twinkle of starlight—where you feel that there is meaning as well as color. There might be an expression ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... said the Duke, and he smiled as he spoke with a peculiarly sweet expression, which would at times come across his generally inexpressive face,—"I remember once that some First Minister of the Crown gave evidence as to the amount of his salary, saying that his place entailed upon him expenses higher than his stipend would defray. I begin to think that my experience will ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Andante rather quickly as he feared it might prove tedious. I assured him that his Andante, no matter how short its duration might be, would inevitably prove tedious if it was played in a vapid and inexpressive manner; whereas if the orchestra could be got to play the very pretty and ingenious theme, as I felt confident he meant it and as I now sang it to him, it would certainly please. Mr. Potter was touched; he agreed, and excused ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... provincial palazzo? On the face of the matter, I know, there is often no very salient peg to hang a romance on. A sort of dusky blankness invests the establishment, which has often a rather imbecile old age. But a hundred brooding secrets lurk in this inexpressive mask, and the Chigi Palace did duty for me in the suggestive twilight as the most haunted of houses. Its basement walls sloped outward like the beginning of a pyramid, and its lower windows were covered with massive iron cages. Within the doorway, across the court, I saw ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Of gladness, as here laughter: and below, As the mind saddens, murkier grows the shade. "God seeth all: and in him is thy sight," Said I, "blest Spirit! Therefore will of his Cannot to thee be dark. Why then delays Thy voice to satisfy my wish untold, That voice which joins the inexpressive song, Pastime of heav'n, the which those ardours sing, That cowl them with six shadowing wings outspread? I would not wait thy asking, wert thou known To me, as thoroughly I to thee am known.'' He forthwith answ'ring, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... fell silent; his dreamy gaze shifted from vacancy to her—and, casually, across the room, where it settled lightly as a butterfly on his wife, and there it poised for a moment's inexpressive examination. Scott Seagrave was talking to Rosalie; she did not ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... did them no good, and was not enjoyed; as if they were too clean; and as if their clothes were not comfortable. Every face seemed to have been squeezed into the same mould, to grow it into one particular make, which was inexpressive, inanimate, and dull, while they all wore the look of being on the high-road to old-manism without having been allowed to stop and play on the way, and ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... casually given, she took in full measure. For twenty minutes, by the clock, she aired her views in a stream of vigorous colloquial English, lapsing into ready-made phrases of melodrama, common to the normally inexpressive, in moments ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... They bear uncomplainingly,—many of them even without a thought of complaint,—and die at last with their hearts full of love for the brutes who have trampled upon them. Mrs. Stilton was perhaps forty years of age, of middle height, moderately plump in person, with light-brown hair, soft, inexpressive gray eyes, and a meek, helpless, imploring mouth. Her voice was mild and plaintive, and its accents of anger (if she ever gave utterance to such) could not have been distinguished from those of grief. She did not often attend our sessions, and it was evident, that, while she endeavored ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense of that happy time? The lights on the shrine had dwindled ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... weaning. In the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scarcely took in the fact that anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire from top to toe; her saucy tongue was loosened, and her bright eyes dancing in wild excitement. Joking and laughing in the roaring circle ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne |
