"Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" tie pink; a Panama hat with a fold of light tan ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... like he might go some," Lambert commented in the vacuous way of a man who felt that he must say something, even though he didn't know anything ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... in a remote part of the salon. With her was a vacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continually addressing remarks to a ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... put up. The victim was a German, wearing the white crescent of the Second Division of the Eleventh Corps, whom we had nicknamed "Sigel." Hardship and exposure had crazed him, and brought on a severe attack of St. Vitus's dance. As he went hobbling around with a vacuous grin upon his face, he spied an old piece of cloth lying on the ground inside the Dead Line. He stooped down and reached under for it. At that instant the guard fired. The charge of ball-and-buck entered the poor old fellow's shoulder and tore through his body. He fell dead, still ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Malvey stooped, Boca flung herself in front of him. "Pig!" she flamed. She turned furiously on her father, whose vacuous grin faded as she cursed him shrilly for ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... faint dull vacuous smile flickered over his face, and he shuddered. "I understand! You come to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... settled peace. How many of you are there who dare not be quiet because then you are most troubled? How many of you are there who dare not reflect because then you are wretched? How many of you are uncomfortable when alone, either because you are utterly vacuous, or because then you are surrounded by the ghosts of ugly thoughts that murder sleep and stuff every pillow with thorns? The world will bring you excitement; Christ, and Christ alone ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... was yet in this softened mood. But fate had ordained that other events should restore him to his usual harder self before their interview. The effect was, indeed, presently accomplished by the advent of Smithson into the office. He entered with an expression of discomfiture on his rather vacuous countenance. He walked almost nimbly to the desk and spoke with evident distress, as his employer looked ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... about it, Carson?" asked the man whose unusually vacuous expression gave him his name of Poker Face. "Stick on the ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... room was startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... agglomerated in one orb, to be ultimately congealed into stone. What, then, is the office of the Creator according to this scheme, as repulsive as it is absurd? It would appear that, at some moment in a vacuous eternity, He calls matter out of nothing, whirls it into fiery vortices, and then lets it cool down to the absolute zero wherein ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... representatives of the world to which she aspired—could not let the opportunity slip. She fairly deluged them with the spray of her admiring ejaculations in praise of the musician—employing, hit or miss, every musical term that popped into her vacuous head. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... cruel, unreasoning. What would such a man do loosed in the world? What might he not do? Was it possible that it was this man who stood before us now with his eyes fastened upon us so intently and his lips spread in that little, empty smile? Suddenly I knew! Those eyes! Those eyes were the shiny, vacuous, ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary Sutherland. "Yes, I did bang out of the house," she said, "for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr. Windibank—that is, my father—took it all. He would not go to the police, and he would not go to you, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... their feet, and a big bottle with a cap and scarf of gold foil stood sentinel over two glasses of such an exquisite shape that Marcella stared hard at them as she passed, saying "Good night." Mr. Peters was smiling with filmy, vacuous eyes. The little lady was flushed and vivid-looking. They both nodded beamingly at her. At the other side of the steps, in the bright light of the electric lamp was a small bundle, between two scarlet fire buckets. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... grimaces, but rather the freshness of a simpler mental state. After living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... said the doctor. He was looking at the window, as though at some object of great interest to be seen thence. His tone was gentle and unaffected. For the twentieth time Edwin privately admitted that in spite of the weak, vacuous smile which seemed to delight everybody except himself, there was a sympathetic quality in this bland doctor. In common moments he was common, but in the rare moment when a man with such a smile ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... is," said Nick at last—"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... vigorous brain collects around it in time many others, whose mental processes are a feeble imitation of its own. Thus it came to pass that, as the years rolled on, Harston learned to lean more and more upon his old school-fellow, grafting many of his stern peculiarities upon his own simple vacuous nature, until he became a strange parody of the original. To him Girdlestone was the ideal man, Girdlestone's ways the correct ways, and Girdlestone's opinions the weightiest of all opinions. Forty years of this undeviating fidelity must, however ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over them was swallowed in the hot air. Then the coach began to move and at the same time the giant trees stirred in a peculiar way. They, like a vast army, bent low with a sound as of heavy artillery rumbling over a bridge that covered vacuous depths. Then they began a deafening noise, their branches sweeping hard against ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... can almost see them evaporating. Yes, the time will come when some one of our mutual friends, driving past the Meadow Creek Paresis Club, where Dr. McMullen receives certain amiable but not entirely responsible persons, will behold you hanging cheerily by one hand from the pergola roof with a vacuous smile on your twitching lips, and will say to me sadly: 'Charlie, you knew him, didn't you, in the old days, when his mind was as keen and bright as an editor's knife?' And with chastened melancholy I will respond: 'Yes, George, it is true. And moreover I was with him on the day when ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... surrounds it, as shown. A boiler at one end is used to heat the substance with which it is desired to impregnate the wood. An air pump is also employed to remove the steam, generated in the heated timber, and the air from the tank. The pores of the wood being thus rendered vacuous, the hot liquid or vapors from the heating tank readily penetrate the entire substance, and thoroughly impregnate it. This apparatus is the invention of George ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... or there are parts of space which have no matter. The alternative is undeniable, and the inference to which the modern philosophy would give the greatest probablility is, that all space is full of matter in the common sense of the word, but really occupied by particles of matter with vacuous interstices.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... those Vandals," said a grocer to me, with a most sand-the-sugar face, this morning, as he pocketed about ten times the value of a trifle—candles, in fact, which have risen twenty-five per cent. in the last two days—and folding his arms, scowled from under his kepi into futurity, with stern but vacuous resolution. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... bullies were made of, and took rather eccentric methods of finding it out. He accordingly set off at his best pace, and pushed Ladoc so hard, that he arrived at the upper fishery in a state of profuse perspiration, with a very red face, and with a disagreeably vacuous feeling about ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... smile intended for Bob McGraw, and a drummer who sold lace goods for a St. Louis house appropriated that smile to himself. He leered across the aisle familiarly and with a vacuous ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... posterity shall read of how the diseased mind of a single lunatic has stabbed history's richest pages with a sword of murder, rapacity and lust, it will turn a lip of contempt toward every nation that stood upon a vacuous neutrality. To hell with neutrality, when a madman ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... a laugh, looking unusually bored and vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately strolling away between reeling ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... term with Chuang Tzu for the exercise of his wit. Light asked Nothing, saying: "Do you, sir, exist, or do you not exist?" But getting no answer to his question, Light set to work to watch for the appearance of Nothing. Hidden, vacuous—all day long he looked but could not see it, listened but could not hear it, grasped at but could not seize it. "Bravo!" cried Light; "who can equal this? I can get to be nothing [meaning darkness], but I can't get to be ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... as grandpa called him, though he wasn't a relation—was a very tall, thin man with a blonde, rather vacuous face; but at exhortation and prayer he "had the gift." For so good a man, he had a remarkably poor opinion of the virtues of his fellow-men. Missy couldn't understand half his fiery eloquence; but she felt his inspiration; ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Vegas marched in. Between them was their prisoner, a boy with a vacuous face, clad in a straitjacket that seemed to make no difference at all to him. His mind was—somewhere else. But his body was trapped between the FBI agents: ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... carried the slack form inside. Then, his shoulders sagging, the heavy pistol in his right hand coming to a poise, the fingers of the left hand brushing the butt of the weapon in the holster at his left hip, the vacuous gleam in his eyes telling them all that his senses were alert to catch the slightest movement, he spoke, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... favourite orator of the Tory provincial platform is Sir Ashmead Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths—the loud and blatant voice—the bumptious temper—that make the commoner form of Tory—all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. No, and he, Govinda, as well did not want to become one of those, not one of those tens of thousands of Brahmans. He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And in days ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... had cautiously studied that same sea of always anxious faces! He well knew all the types from the disdainful woman of fashion, the crafty daughter of sin, the vacuous country visitor, down to the argus-eyed mere de famille, sternly resolute in her set purpose of making three dollars take the place of five, ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... see if his new boss was anywhere in sight and would come to tell him where to unpack his belongings. A sandy complexioned young man with red eyelids and no lashes presently emerged from the stable and came toward him, his mouth sagging loosely open, his eye; vacuous. He was clad in faded overalls turned up a foot at the bottom and showing frayed, shoddy trousers beneath and rusty, run-down shoes that proved he was not a rider. His hat was peppered with little holes, as if someone had fired a charge of ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... But seated in his compartment of the railway carriage, he had time to consider the note in all its aspects and in its relation to the extraordinary events of the day. There were but two other occupants of the carriage, an old gentleman with a white beard, and a young Hungarian officer—a vacuous looking youth in uniform—neither of them obviously of material from which secret service agents are made. After the experience at the Konopisht railway station, Renwick had no humor to be shot at in such close quarters, where the range would necessarily be ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... attentive. Boys, in the background, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from the imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mouth, Paul," said the pretty nurse. The hulking mass of not-quite-human gazed at her with vacuous eyes and opened its mouth. Dexterously, she spooned a mouthful of baby food into it. "Now swallow it, Paul. That's it. ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... moment, but instantly avoided the other's glance, his features being still distorted by a vacuous smile. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare against the heterogenist. We expose them to a warm Alpine sun by day, and at night we suspend them in a warm kitchen. Four of them have been accidentally broken; but at the end of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace. On one side is the peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... eyes, a sandy complexion and straight flaxen hair, which he wore banged over his forehead. A vacuous stare usually rested on his face, and he spoke in a ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... not answer. His countenance, expressive for a moment, was now reserved. His eyes became vacuous. He did not appear to hear the skipper's wondering question. He was now attending to his own monologue. His lips let fall, as if mechanically, in a low murmuring ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge and Lenard. The human optic nerve is affected by a very small range in the waves that exist in the ether. Beyond the visible spectrum of common light are vibrations which have long been known as heat or as photographically active. Crookes in a vacuous bulb produced soft light from high tension electricity. Lenard found that rays from a Crookes' tube passed through substances opaque to common light. Roentgen extended these experiments and used the rays photographically, taking pictures of the bones ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... but shrug his shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could remount on a chimera which he thought less wild, as leading to a via media, a compromise, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... called Young Germany, were fond of repeating the insinuation of Fanny Tarnow (1835), that the poet prized in Bettina only her capacity for idolizing him. But Goethe's attitude toward the "Child" was far removed from that of poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her composition. G. von Loeper has well said of her composite traits: "The tender radiance of first youth hovers over her descriptions; but, while one is beholding, Bettina suddenly changes into a mischievous elf, and, if we reach out to grasp the kobold, lo! a sibyl stands ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... amiable. They had bought a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a new play with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces nervously, stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of his handsome, rather vacuous face. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... monocle and stared with a vacuous blandness well calculated to madden his friend. Blake hurled a magazine, which his lordship deftly sidestepped. He reached for his hat, and ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... conversation bores me inexpressibly, and your countenance, which is at once vacuous and singularly plain, disagrees with me thoroughly. Go! or ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... that they ceased to live after their author had died. His connection with this earth was always just at the snapping-point. His works constitute, in many instances, a poetic rearrangement of what he had just latterly read. And when he is original he is vacuous. To emphasize his works for their own sake would consequently be to set up false values. Loeben can be studied with profit only by those people who believe that great poets can be better understood and appreciated ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... was in spirit wholly dramatic—intended rather to fill the assumed expectations of his hearers, than truly representing the speaker's feeling. Then my thoughts reverted to the talk I had overheard, when "Pickles" was made to see veritable showers of "greenbacks" raining into his vacuous pocket. I smiled to myself; and then a spirit of audacity coming over me, I determined to ascertain what Castleton would say to me on the currency question. I concluded to admit that I had overheard through my open window ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... exercise her attractions upon. She spent evening after evening with Mrs. Fargus, until the cropped hair, the spectacles, above all, the black satin dress with the crimson scarf, getting more and more twisted, became intolerable. And Mr. Fargus' cough and his vacuous conversation, in which no shadow of an idea ever appeared, tried her temper. But she forebore, seeing how anxious they were to please her. That was the worst. These simple kind-hearted people saw that their sitting-room bored Mildred, and they often took ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... called at the house several times, ostensibly to see Mrs. Ryder, and when introduced to Shirley she had condescended to give the latter a supercilious nod. Her conversation was generally of the silly, vacuous sort, concerning chiefly new dresses or bonnets, and Shirley at once read her character—frivolous, amusement-loving, empty-headed, irresponsible—just the kind of girl to do something foolish without weighing the consequences. After chatting a few moments ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. And as for making ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... a good-looking, if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him—his tie, his handkerchief protruding ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... or two later she could watch them, although never without profound emotion. Two hundred girls, ranging in years from ten to twenty, with roughly clipped hair, and the hideous gray-green checked aprons of the institution. Two hundred faces, sullen or vacuous, pretty, silly faces, hard faces, faces tragically hopeless and pale. These young things were offenders against the law, shut away here behind iron bars for the good of the commonwealth. Julia, whose life had made her wise beyond her years, watched them and pondered. Here was an almost ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... there was of Lulu's visit. Father couldn't help remembering her suggestion that they ought to bag a social or artistic lion as an attraction for "The T Room." He was delighted to find that, after weeks of vacuous worry, he had ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... glass of wine—for in these respects I am allowed what I choose—and sat down to think. But I found it hard to give my thoughts to anything. There was a hollow somewhere in my mind into which all serious thoughts fell jumbled. I felt neither pained nor confused, but only vacuous. I battled with this feeling until I subdued it. Then I grasped the situation firmly. What object have I, here and now, and everywhere and always, next to the rectitude of my own soul? There is only one answer to that question: Cecilia's happiness! How to secure ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... thou, and be it done! My overshadowing Spirit and Might with thee I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth; Boundless the Deep, because I Am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I, uncircumscribed myself, retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessity and Chance Approach not me, and what I will is Fate. So spake the Almighty, and to what he spake His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect. Immediate are the acts of God, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... a clever man, she was essentially a woman, with all a woman's passion for the admiration and love of men; and one cannot wonder, however much one may deplore, that while her imbecile husband was guzzling with common soldiers, or playing with his toys and tin cannon in bed, vacuous smiles on his face, his beautiful bride should find her own pleasures in the homage of a Soltykoff, a Poniatowski, an Orloff, or any other of the legion of lovers who in quick succession took ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a conqueror—of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and among the rocks and the heather Ernest felt he could endure Lord Exmoor and Lord Lynmouth a little more resignedly than among the reiterated polite platitudes and monotonous gaieties of the vacuous London drawing-rooms. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... a foolish woman whose fetich was society with a big "S," and she idolised her only son, a rather vacuous youth who had just managed to scrape ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... whether she were in velvet or in rags, they would invariably exclaim, "There goes one to Petticoat Burle's taste!" Thus Melanie, with her opulent presence, quite conquered him. He was lost—quite wrecked. In less than a fortnight he had fallen to vacuous imbecility. With much the expression of a whipped hound in the tiny sunken eyes which lighted up his bloated face, he was incessantly watching the widow in mute adoration before her masculine features and stubby hair. For fear that he might ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... tea is not to be taken seriously, and I hold that any kind of conversation goes, as long as it is properly vacuous and irrelevant. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... around him, after being led to a corner seat by the obsequious head waiter. There was a preponderance of fat old men and vacuous looking young girls of the type designated on Broadway as "chickens." Here and there a slumming party was to be seen—elderly women and ill-at-ease men, staring curiously at the diners and dancers; young married couples who ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for one's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek." What was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it, or any interest? A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle voice and a dual; a language ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... this pabulum, in turn make books. If one, it is now admitted, can do nothing else in this world, he can write, and so the evil widens and widens. No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life. A princess born may have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet in the judgment the responsibility will rest upon the writers ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... positions, then the pictures of three children, a girl and two boys, and finally the full-length portrait of a gentleman in the embroidered dress coat and sword of the diplomatic service, and the handsome, vacuous, carefully groomed ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... bottles Haeckel up on his own premises and shows that the very evolutionary principles to which the German scientist appeals demolish his theory! He practically says to Haeckel, "Your philosophy, sir, fails to show how it is possible for the vacuous mind of the infant to evolve into the genius of the philosopher in thirty or forty years." In other words, if the infant is nothing but the form we see it would be utter absurdity to say that that mass of matter can evolve a high ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... Hilary observed, "Vyvian is less of a vacuous fool than most of the members of our present delightful house-party. He at least knows something of art and literature, and can converse without jarring one's taste violently by his every word. He is not, after all, a Miss Matthews or a Mr. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... pressure, or even in an absolute vacuum. Experiment alone could answer this question, but there were difficulties in the way of this which seemed almost insurmountable. The rays are stopped by glass even of slight thickness, and how then could the almost vacuous space in which they have to come into existence be separated from the space, absolutely vacuous or filled with gas, into which it was desired to ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His laughter ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the hutch, Excalibur wagged his tail and contemplated the rabbit with his usual air of vacuous benevolence. The rabbit made not the faintest response, but continued to munch green feed, twitching its nose in a superior manner. Finally, when it could endure Excalibur's admiring inspection and hard breathing no longer, it turned its back ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... unfortunately hear no more of parents opposing their children's wishes to become artists. The result of all these facilities for art study has been to swamp natural genius and to produce enormous quantities of vacuous little water colours and slimy little oil colours. Young men have been prevented from going to Australia and Canada and becoming rough farmers, and young ladies from following them and becoming rough wives and themothers ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... listless progress. The light, reflected from the screen, revealed a throng of repulsive faces, stretching, row upon row, into the darkness of the rear, into the shadows of the roof—sickly and pimpled and bloated flesh: vicious faces, hopeless, vacuous, diseased. And these were the faces that leered and writhed in the boy's dreams of hell. Here, present and tangible, were gathered all his terrors. He was in the very ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous ass's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of 'stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... convalescence from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Ecu (was it?) toward the bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops—every particular in the impression once so quick and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... round him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... said Audits shortly. "Maybe because he's the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it's to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He's going to give it to me at Palm Beach—if you'll show a ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... manlike qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business; tabby cats—sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats—the kind that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably were of the Cheshire-cat cats. Tomcats—the beastly ones with lecherous eyes that looked at you. "Of course they're beasts." ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... that poor little Alisa Bennett assumed maternal responsibilities at the age of ten, and gained her sobriquet of 'Marm Lisa.' She grew more human, more tractable, under Mr. Grubb's fostering care; but that blessed martyr had now been dead two years, and she began to wear her former vacuous look, and to slip back into the past that was still ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then, hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What gain in living on? Once dead his sluggish spirit at least would find its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be for him. What else, in sober earnest, had he been all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Linders come by all means," repeated the Doctor. "Isn't it nearly dinner-time? I am starving. I have been twenty miles round the country to-day, and when I come in I find that long-legged fellow Morris philandering away, and have to listen to his vacuous nonsense for an hour. Whatever brings him here so often? He ought to have something better to do with his time than to be idling it away over afternoon tea. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and when MacRae had convinced him that our business was urgent, and not for his ears, he graciously allowed us to enter the Presence—who proved to be a heavy-set person with sandy, mutton-chop whiskers set bias on a vacuous, round, florid countenance. His braid-trimmed uniform was cut to fit him like the skin of an exceedingly well-stuffed sausage, and from his comfortable seat behind a flat-topped desk he gazed upon us with the wisdom of a tree-full of owls and the ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his own ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... overdone She always laughs and cries in the right places Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover There is nothing I do not question Two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money Vacuous countenances Virtues of her deceased spouse We never need fear that he will undervalue himself What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune Wholesale thinker ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... months of plantation life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog. He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the overseer's whip when his labours ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... waking in me the awful thought of my beloved passing through the shadow of death with no one beside him to help or comfort him, in absolute loneliness and uncertainty. The thought was unendurable. For a moment I wished he might die suddenly, and so escape the vacuous despair of a conscious lingering betwixt life and the something or the nothing ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... more very shameful, distressing, and final role in the free life of Liubka. She had already complained to Lichonin for a long time that the presence of Simanovsky was oppressive to her; but Lichonin paid no attention to womanish trifles: the vacuous, fictitious, wordy hypnosis of this man of commands was strong within him. There are influences, to get rid of which is difficult, almost impossible. On the other hand, he was already for a long time feeling the burden ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... non-existence (e.g. of jug) perceived before along with the perception of the locus of non-existence (e.g. ground). Negation or non-existence (abhava) can thus, according to Nyaya, generate its cognition just as any positive existence can do. Negation is not mere negativity or mere vacuous absence, but is what generates the cognition "is not," as position (bhava) is what generates ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... creature contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... on the other side of the way. Jocelyn Thew slackened his pace somewhat and watched him keenly. He was short, he wore a cheap ready-made suit of some plain material, and a straw hat tilted on the back of his head. He had round cheeks, he shambled rather than walked, and his vacuous countenance seemed both good-natured and unintelligent. To all appearances a more harmless person never breathed, yet Jocelyn Thew, as he studied him earnestly, felt that slight tightening of the nerves which came ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... violence. The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm. "Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... for education vainly imagine; but neither will he become duller, as Mr. Harrison appears to suppose. He will remain in essence what he always has been and always must have been. But whereas his dullness would, if left to itself, have been merely vacuous, it may have become, under cureful ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... content her with what she well knew she had done to disappoint Mr. Woodburn of his prey. George Grey was really a bore of capacity to wreck the social patience of the most courteous. The rector fled from him, John always had lessons and how would James endure his vacuous talk. It all helped her to be comfortably angry, and there too was ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an expression ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... compared with the denser land. Siemens endeavoured to render this difference visible by means of mercury contained in a chamber having a bottom extremely sensitive to the pressure of the mercury upon it, and resembling in some respects the vacuous chamber of an aneroid barometer. Just as the latter instrument indicates the pressure of the atmosphere above it, so the bathometer was intended to show the pull of the earth below it; and experiment proved, we believe, that for every 1,000 fathoms of ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night," I had announced on entering old Ebbits's cabin; and he had looked at me blear- eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a contemptuous grunt. Zilla was his wife, and no more bitter-tongued, implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon. Nor would I have stopped there had my dogs been less tired or ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... still, Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... showed neither fear nor resentment. Evidently she had suffered so much as to have exhausted her capability for further suffering. She submitted to the other's will like a tired child, dropping into a chair and eyeing him with a vacuous expression. ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... impression that you were there. I fancied you were from father's carefully vacuous look whenever I glanced at his face. But were you careful about what you said, and did you see Menlove? I felt all the time that I had done wrong in letting you come; the gratification to you was not worth ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... inbreathing, gaping desire that drew this red gush in me; I must be reciprocating your vacuous, hideous passion. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... stalked up and down the conveyors, arrogant, manifestly itching for a pretext to ray the conquered. But the Earthmen gave them no opportunity. The groups melted at their approach into meek, vacuous individuals; reformed instantly as they moved on. And there were no informers. The Earthmen had resumed their almost forgotten Earth ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... e-e-e-e, and never stopped. But Gwendolen had not been alarmed whatever it was, because her "puppar" was there. But it was exhausting to the intellect to tell of, for the description ended with a musical, if vacuous, laugh, and a plunge into Sally's bosom, where the narrator remained chuckling, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... The men settled down again. The cellarers redoubled their activities, the flagons circulated more briskly, and the noise they made must have disturbed the monks entrenched in their cells against these earthly vanities. The laughter of Andreas grew louder and more vacuous, and when at last he heaved himself up at midnight and departed to bed, that he might take some rest against the morrow's hunt, he staggered a little in ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... walked towards the kiosk. Near it, on the small, green chairs, were some ladies swathed in gigantic floating-veils, talking to two or three very smart young men in white suits and straw hats, who leaned forward eying them steadily with a determined yet rather vacuous boldness that did not disconcert them. One of the ladies, dressed in black-and-white check, was immensely stout. She seemed to lead the conversation, which was carried on with extreme vivacity in very ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens |
