"Blankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the landing, and Hubert said, 'Won't you come in for a moment?' She followed him into the room. His calm face, usually a perfect picture of repose and self-possession, betrayed his emotion by a certain blankness in the eyes, certain contractions in the skin of the forehead. 'I'm afraid,' he said, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... monotony of light and shadow, had sunk beneath another level, but one that glistened, sparkled, was instinct with varying life, and moved and even danced below him. The low palisades of regularly recurring tules that had fenced in, impeded, but never relieved the blankness of his horizon, were forever swallowed up behind him. All trail of past degradation, all record of pain and suffering, all footprints of his wandering and misguided feet were smoothly wiped out in that obliterating sea. He was physically helpless, and he felt it; he was in ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... thought dwelt the dogging fear of illness and incapacity, goading her to work while she could. She hardly remembered the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. In the blankness of her misery shefelt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and "dependent" was ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... in Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,—it wants the German to coin a word for that,—no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness too much upon ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... handful of loose weeds and grass and earth, Uprooted in his anguish as he fell, And slowly from his heart the thick stream flowed, Fouling the green, leaving the fair, sweet face Ghastly, transparent, with blue, stony eyes Staring in blankness on that other one Who triumphed over him. With hot desire Of instant vengeance I unsheathed my sword To rush upon the slayer, when he turned In his first terror ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... they could comprehend the truth, the enemy's goal was just before the Sunrise warriors, and half a minute of time remained in which to play. One more line plunge with Burleigh holding the ball! A film came before his eyes. A sudden blankness of failure and despair seized him. In the grandstand, Elinor Wream stood clutching a pennant in both hands, her dark eyes luminous with proud hope. Amid all the yells and cheers, her sweet voice ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... to Lucy the idea that of course she would hardly see this rider again after to-day. Even if he went to the Ford, which event was unlikely, he would not remain there long. The sensation of blankness puzzled her, and she felt an ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... house was on a high point facing the western shore of Lake Memphremagog, with only a narrow strip of land separating it from the waters of the lake. The blankness of the entire rear facade of the structure was broken only by one window, built into a deep embrasure. Above the window was a small circular opening about ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... in herself. Altogether the heavens were very dark; and it was scarcely possible for any one who knew well his jovial cast of countenance, to keep from laughing, whatever his real sympathy, at the unusual length and blankness which were suddenly ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... sideways, with his head down. Mrs Verloc gazed at the whitewashed wall. A blank wall—perfectly blank. A blankness to run at and dash your head against. Mrs Verloc remained immovably seated. She kept still as the population of half the globe would keep still in astonishment and despair, were the sun suddenly put out in the summer sky by the perfidy of ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... and avid, and between her brows were two outcurving and passionate wrinkles. She was thirty, perhaps, or younger. Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her with stilled blankness. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father, for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good deal of this focused on Horace Gower and ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... this blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for fear ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... deliberate on-coming of age draws on all of us were, it is true, nearly obliterated, but in their place was a certain blankness that ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... mind of the failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell—so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... to say. He looked at me with that blankness of incomprehension that must be maddening in a man after you are ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... open window in the antechamber, the valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly—as it seemed to his friends—to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the tone of ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the head of the institution, I was ushered into a room which was barer and harder than I had supposed, from Walkirk's description of it. It did not even contain the religious pictures or the crucifixes which would have relieved the blankness of the walls in a Roman Catholic establishment of ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... extremest depth of horror. The book said that he had felt as though his bones were turning to water, and Zaidos had sneered at the description. It flashed into his mind when he looked into the wild, chalky countenance of the man against the wall. He glanced down the line of soldiers. A stupid blankness seemed to envelop them. Pale as death they stared at the shaking creature before them. There was a terrible silence that sounded as loud and beat as fiercely in their ears as the boom of cannon. Things moved with frightful deliberation. It seemed that they stood for hours staring at the doomed ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... her I spied a long line of white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, but as dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but if already it was putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which seemed to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-glass upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gang-way and the two men in her. The cask was in the stern of the boat. ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... she saw no hope of sending them; and, worse than all, she lived in daily dread lest any of them should be inspired to apply to Theo himself. Look where she would a blank wall confronted her; and in the midst of the blankness she sat, a dainty, dejected figure, with ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... bonny eyes! lovely in shape and colour, delicately fringed; but there was something strange in their expression—or rather, in their want of it. Many babies have a round, vacant stare—but this was no stare, only a wide, full look—a look of quiet blankness—an UNSEEING look. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Denton was called from another direction at that moment, and he did not see the actual meeting between the two. Evan had his back to the light and Anway did not instantly recognise him. Anway's expression graduated from expectancy at the sound of the word friend to blankness as he failed to recognise Evan, and to something like ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... gleamed for a moment in the young man's refined face. He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a tangle ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in the forest at all—not the cry of a bird, not the rustle of snow falling from a branch—but there was something deeper and remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the face of the forest—an effective silence which was not blankness—a voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of receiving ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... His life must pay. O, soul so full of sin, So devil tangled, tortured—which not prayer Nor watching could deliver. So I thought To save my soul from murder I must fly— I felt an urging as one does in sleep Pursued by giant things to fly, to fly From terror, death, from blankness on the scene, From emptiness, from beauty gone. The world Seemed something seen in fever, where the steps Of men are muffled, and a futile scheme Impels all steps. So packing up my kit, My Bible in my pocket, secretly I disappeared. Next day took ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... down at the eager, joyous face, so expressive in spite of the blankness behind the eyes. His own face filled suddenly with a new light, and he put out his hands as if he were about to catch Kirk to him. But the moment passed; the reserve of long years, which he could not in an instant push from him, settled again in his angular ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... The blankness of the lawyer's face was a remarkable sight. His small, athletic brain failed him. ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... the morning with a headache. My emotion of the previous day had vanished. It was replaced by a dreary sense of blankness and a sort of sadness I had not known till then, as though ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... "Eight cents," he said to the Indian. Whereupon the Indians laughed scornfully and chorused, "Forty cents!" A pained expression came into his face, and he looked about him anxiously. The sympathetic light in Frona's eyes caught him, and he regarded her with intent blankness. In reality he was busy reducing a three-ton outfit to terms of cash at forty dollars per hundred-weight. "Twenty-four hundred dollars for thirty miles!" he ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Just as a speaker may take advantage of the prejudices and passions of an audience, so he may take advantage of their ignorance. Against the blankness of their brains he may hurl unfamiliar names to dazzle them, cite facts of all kinds to impress them, show a wide knowledge of all sorts of things, "play up to them" in every way, until they become so impressed ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... kind of smoke, and it looks bright, and the thicker the smoke the brighter it looks; the blackness is simply the utter absence of smoke; there is nothing at all for the light to illuminate, accordingly we have the blankness of sheer invisibility. Here is a flame burning under the beam, and, to show what real smoke looks like, I will burn also this spirit lamp filled with turpentine instead of alcohol. Why the convention currents were free from dust was unknown; Tyndall thought the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... was becoming sleepy. A blankness was invading her mind, and the talk in the crypt seemed to lose its meaning, and to consist chiefly of S's. She pondered idly on the family of children with their elders, all of whom were now studying ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... largely in his first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... mariners had said was off St Abb's Head o' Thursday, when t' Resolution came in; and there was wives and maids wi' husbands an' sweethearts aboard t' Good Fortune ready to throw their eyes out on their heads wi' gazin', gazin' nor'ards over t'sea, as were all one haze o' blankness wi' t' rain; and when t' afternoon tide comed in, an' niver a line on her to be seen, folk were oncertain as t' whether she were holding off for fear o' t' tender—as were out o' sight, too—or what were her mak' o' goin' on. An' t' poor wet draggled women folk came up t' town, some slowly cryin', ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... glare of the lamp vanished from Stella's brain, leaving an awful blankness, a sense as of something burnt out, a taste of ashes in the mouth. But yet the darkness was full of horrors; unseen monsters leaped past her as in a surging torrent, devils' hands clawed at her, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... such surprise that she felt that Bertha, at least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was proportionately disconcerted by the blankness of the look returned. But in an instant she saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of necessity, to look blank before the others, and that, to mitigate the effect of her own surprise, she must at once produce some simple reason for it. The long habit of rapid ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... don't know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... vault above the river another of those sinister round holes through which he momentarily expected to see a headless corpse shoot downward in its last plunge to a watery grave. A few feet along the platform a closed door broke the blankness of the wall. As he lay looking at it and wondering what lay behind, his mind filled with fragments of many wild schemes of escape, it opened and a white robed Wieroo stepped out upon the platform. The creature carried a large wooden basin filled with rubbish. Its eyes were not upon Bradley, ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hoped to sleep that night but she did sleep and heavily. When she awoke it was to blankness, a cold throbbing blankness of undefined ill being. Then her Ego, with a sigh, came back from far places; the busy brain shot into focus; all the memories, fears, humiliation of the night before stood forth clear and poignant. She buried ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... into the darkness amid rooms and passages with which he considers himself familiar and suddenly—there comes a door where should be space, or space where there should be a window—and he is lost, his senses betray him, for the moment he is completely fogged, all bearings lost, possessed with the blankness that ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... night, thinking of you. I do not look upon you as actually unhappy, that is not in your nature, you sunbeam, yet you lack in your dear life the best light, that of another's shedding. Now that I know what it is to be loved, I look upon the blankness of ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... streets of the town, and thought what a lonely wretch I was. The desert of Sahara is somewhat dismal, I daresay; but in its dismality there is at least a flavour of romance, a smack of adventure. O, the hopeless dulness, the unutterable blankness of a provincial town late on a Sunday night, as it presents itself to the contemplation of a friendless young man without a sixpence in his pocket, or one bright hope to tempt him to forgetfulness of the past in pleasant dreaming of ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... conversation exclusively to fish. That this thoughtful act was appreciated by the overworked politician it is needless to remark; he settled down to his brief respite with a tranquil contentment and complete blankness of mind which only the cleverest of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... us long," said Patty, a spark of mischief breaking through the blankness of her face, "to earn money enough for a carriage—you thump the tambourine and I'll dance the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... as the piles of straw stuffed into bed-ticks are called; but it had nothing whatever beyond these articles. There was not even the remnant of a bedstead; not a cheap print, so common in the hovels of the poor, to relieve the blankness of the rough, whitewashed walls. The bedroom, which was little more than half the size of the other, was that outrage of capital upon poverty known as a 'dark room,' by which is meant that it had no window opening to the outer air; and this ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... in the spaces of blankness, Lost in the deepening abysses, Haunted and tracked by the past: No more sweet human caresses, No more the springing of morning, Never again from the present Into a future beguiled: Lonely, defiled, and despairing, Out of the body ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... loveliness, with everything so soft and kind and sweet all round, it would be easier to tell him, to try and explain, to ask for something different, for at least an attempt at something different in their lives in the future, instead of the blankness of separation, the cold—oh, the cold—of nothing at all but the great windiness of faith, the great bleakness of works. Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one's very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was worth more than all ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... struggle—indeed, the struggle had only been loyalty to a lost cause. His calm assent to his wife's ultimatum left her a little blank; but in the immediate excitement of removal, in the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand. He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled; when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn't wonder. ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... never be able to approach his prey. In short, he'd fail to survive. Complete telepathic blankness would have a high survival value. But an ability to detect mental radiation would still be a big help." ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... breath Dan stared at him with the blankness of surprise. "Where did you come from, Big Abel?" he questioned at ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... in a household on a Christmas Day, the very contrast between the time as it now is, and the day as it has often been, gives a poignancy to sorrow—a more utter blankness to the desolation. James Leigh died just as the far-away bells of Rochdale Church were ringing for morning service on Christmas Day, 1836. A few minutes before his death, he opened his already glazing eyes, and made a sign to his wife, by the faint motion of his lips, that he had yet something ...
— Lizzie Leigh • Elizabeth Gaskell
... want of conversation, largely due to the fact that no conversation was expected: we most of us know the horrible blankness which comes over our minds when we realize that because we are eating we are also supposed to talk, whether we have anything to say or not. It was also due to the more primitive reason that in a company of ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... "stared" at passers-by—with truth, because very near the roof were two little windows shaped like half-circles. They somehow bore a close resemblance to a pair of eyes that stared and stared and stared with calm, unwinking blankness. ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring down his ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... inert, though it knows itself and knows that it stills lives—which fundamentally differentiates it from sleep, because in sleep we do not know our body, we do not know if we are alive or dead, we know nothing. In ecstasy is no such blankness: merely the body is perforce inert, it would be entirely forgotten but for its ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... an appearance at six o'clock on the fatal evening. He was a short, slight man, with a clean-shaven face mapped with tiny wrinkles, and a pair of colourless eyes the blankness of whose expression defied research. In conversation, especially conversation of a diplomatic nature, Mr. Smith seemed to be looking through his opponent at something beyond, an uncomfortable habit which was a source of much discomfort to ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... where vegetation is found at all, it is more ungrateful than the blankness of Aracama. Tangled thickets of wiry bushes, without fruit and without a name, springing up among deep fissures of calcined rock, and treacherously masking them; or a parched ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... now. She has not been her natural self for these last few days, but she had other causes for worry, and I have been willing enough to think that these were the occasion of her restless ways and short, sharp speech and the blankness with which she met all my attempts to soothe and encourage her. This evening"—I choked at the word. The day had been one string of extraordinary experiences, accumulating in intensity to the one ghastly discovery which had ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... that table the sunshine of the morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. "He's getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he is beginning to ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... accused with sturdy courage of something which he did not do and no one would mind his doing, but under the influence of Fear, to tell the least little truth about him will put a whole assembly into a sort of blankness. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... to blacken her life even before it actually fell upon her,—through it all, she never wavered. When he first told her that he must go, that it was the one thing he held it wise and right to do, she shrunk back affrighted, trembling at the coming blankness of a life without him. But after a while, seeing the misery that came into his face reflected from hers, she rose bravely above the terrible woe, and then, with her arms round him and her eyes looking steadfastly into his, she said, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... in so short a space to tell what the next ten years did to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... blankness, for he had placed himself so that he could see nothing but the sky, and had taken off his silver ears as well as his gold spectacles—what was the use of either when he had no legs with which to walk or run?—up from below ...
— 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
... 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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... in many places with tiny red lines which made zig-zags and curves over the blankness of the region south of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness in respect of his other connexions was only a touch in the picture of that plasticity Stransom had supreme reason to know so great a master could have ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... do much for love of his Lord, to carry the message of the Gospel into the Andredsweald, where the kindred of his mother yet lived, and the thought that he should never see their forest glades again was painful. And the blankness of unconsciousness, the fearful nature of the black death, was in itself repulsive; but it had all been ordered and settled by Infinite Love before ever he was born, probably before the worlds were framed, and Martin said with all his heart the words breathed by the Incarnate ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... would get him to Ardingly for tea, the other at 6.45. She was quite determined to see him, but more inflexible than that resolve was the Euclidean postulate that no one in Tilling should think that she had taken any deliberate step to do so. For the present she had disarmed suspicion by the blankness of her indifference as to what might happen on Saturday or Sunday; but she herself strongly suspected that everybody else, in spite of the public attitude of Tilling to such subjects, was determined to see him too. How to see and not be seen was the question which engrossed ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... encounter with her sister; but the words Selina spoke the moment the brougham began to move were of course exactly those she had not foreseen. She had considered that she might take this tone or that tone or even no tone at all; she was quite prepared for her presenting a face of blankness to any form of interrogation and saying, 'What on earth are you talking about?' It was in short conceivable to her that Selina would deny absolutely that she had been in the museum, that they had stood face to face and that she had fled in confusion. She was capable of explaining ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... said, and she went out. I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking. A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not only for the gain to my art, but ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... piece my life together as it was before ever I saw him. I must confess that I find it hard to keep my mind on the play when the moonshine comes into my room. It is full moon here, and last night I was out on the pergola for hours, staring away at the shining blankness that hides so much. Imagine it! tables and chairs, and trestles and bars of gold! Confound it!—if only one could hit on that Cavorite again! But a thing like that doesn't come twice in a life. Here ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... drawing-room, Roger drank his hastily and withdrew. A few minutes later she heard a car start outside and knew that he had taken himself off. In spite of herself she felt hurt. It was a trifling thing to mind about, yet she did mind, and it was with a sense of blankness that she resigned herself to playing ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... as she had never known it in her life; going down and down before it, not even putting out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could see from ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... that terrible old sorrow; Too numb to weep, too cowardly to pray. Again the blankness of a dread to-morrow Filled me with ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... it was using twenty thousand kilofranks. Then, by delicately manipulating the variable condensers and inductances of his sensitive shunting relay circuits, he slowly shifted that frightful rod of energy from frequency to frequency, staring into the brilliant blankness of his micrometer screen as he did so. After a few minutes of search the screen darkened somewhat, revealing the image of the Jovian globe. Brandon instantly shifted into that one channel the entire ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... I could accept your invitation," Miss Ocky answered gravely. Her eyes left his face and seemed to shield her thoughts behind a film of blankness. "I'm afraid I have other—plans," she added quietly. "It's after nine—don't ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... feeling that, in losing her brother she had lost the glory of her life, the source of her intellectual enjoyment. "You don't know," she wrote to a friend, "the blank of life after having lived within the radiance of genius." Yet to live in this blankness, and to do the best she could with it, became the work of Caroline Lucretia Herschel at the age of threescore years and ten,—an age when most of us have already put off our cares and anxieties, but when she began to enter ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... the window, and again they heard the footsteps in the corridor. Hodge went through the window at a flying leap and hurled open the corridor door, only to again find silence and blankness. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it with penetrant anxiety. "Did you really enjoy ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of pleasure. A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of The Sportsman in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts stamping his feet. "I was knocked down by a taxi last year," he says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of that! Are they going ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... at him with dead blankness. Passers-by hopped over the coal-hole and glanced up at the pair standing engrossed upon the doorstep. Such as knew either of them concluded from their air that Mr. Beirne ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... motives of an emissary of Prince Bismarck. The superficial reason was a belief that Mrs. Steuben would pay her visit first—it was probably only a question of leaving cards—and bring her young friend to the Capitol at the hour when the yellow afternoon light would give a tone to the blankness of its marble walls. The Capitol was a splendid building, but it was rather wanting in tone. Vogelstein's curiosity about Pandora Day had been much more quickened than checked by the revelations made to him in Mrs. Bonnycastle's drawing-room. It was a relief to have the creature ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... in them, and during the days that followed this did not diminish. For all his years his wits seemed bright; only whenever the suggestion arose that he might be happier if he took up his quarters elsewhere his eyes seemed actually to film over like a bird's with the blankness that descended on them. Indeed, there seemed no real reason for getting rid of him. He was old and strange, but he behaved himself and played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success. He ousted the grandfather—so ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... out of himself for the moment by the appalling realization which surged over him; then, remembering himself, caught the doctor's swiftly given upward look and returned it with one of innocent blankness. "Awful, isn't it, doctor? Don't think it's smallpox, or something of that ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... then at the expressionless face of the curio dealer. Was it merely the natural blankness of his countenance that impressed me, or was there, in fact, something deep and dark hidden in it, something of "East is East and West is West" which I did not and could not understand? Craig was admiring the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... life. Whom could he curse now? Not a soul—no one, at any rate, against whom he could launch an anathema with any real heart in it. Than curse vainly and superficially, far better not to curse at all. He missed Phineas beyond all his conception of the blankness of bereavement. Like himself, Phineas had found salvation in the army. Doggie realized how he had striven in his own queer way to redeem the villainy of his tutorship. No woman could have been ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... knees by his side. Raising his heavy head in her arms she held it against her bosom. She did not know that her lips touched his, she was seeking only to learn if he breathed. When his eyes opened blankly, she kissed them till they closed again, because she could not bear to see the dreadful blankness that was in them. When he moaned she fell to rocking gently back and forth, holding his head closer against her breast, and presently began to croon softly. She never once thought of calling for help; ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... approach in the darkness of the lawns. Blurred by the darkness and diminished to the barest indications of humanity, their forms are more piteous and forlorn than ever; their faces, thrown up by the darkness, more awful in their blankness and their pallor. The scene, drenched in darkness, is unearthly and unintelligible. You cannot account for it in saying to yourself that these are the refugees, and everybody knows what a refugee is; that there is War—and everybody ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... to be seen." This young man was the only one who had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal of a ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... what seems to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing—" Pilch paused a moment, then said, "Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... in youth these days: since young folk have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep, and certain drugs,' said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the blankness that half menaced ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... enquiring stare of Sir Morton Pippitt's former butler—now on 'temp'ry' service at the Manor,—he became aware that there was also a new and rather pretty housemaid beside the said butler, who whispered when she ought to have been silent,—and he saw blankness on the fat face of Mrs. Spruce, a face which was tied up like a round red damaged sort of fruit in a black basket-like bonnet, fastened with very broad violet strings. Now Mrs. Spruce always paid the most pious attention to his ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... had seen it. He carried the manuscript about with him, as Goethe did his "Faust," for years, and added to it, or erased, all according to the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the question of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... murmur came from within, not so much as the faintest rustle of clothing or the flutter of a withheld breath. All was perfectly still—too still. As the full force of this fact impressed itself upon them, a blankness settled over their features. The significance of this undisturbed quiet was making itself felt. If the two were there, or if he were there alone, they would certainly hear some movement, voluntary or involuntary—and ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... he remembered! There was no fortune, no little girl! His dreams were all shattered, the last effort of his life had been in vain. He caught hold of the tumbler with fingers that shook as though an ague were upon him, lifted it to his lips and drank. Then there came the old blankness, and he saw nothing but what seemed to him the face of a satyr—dark and evil—mocking him through the shadows which had surely fallen now for ever. Da Souza lifted him up and conveyed him carefully to ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... see a ghostly outline, much too large for men. It might be a ship, but it would have to be large enough for a space-yacht. No stinking two-man sled like his spacer. And he could not be sure in that eerie blankness if it ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... declining years, is both a sad and a perplexing prospect to a thoughtful person. For such a person cannot regard this great change simply in the light of a rest from toil and worry; he will know quite well what a blankness and listlessness and loss of interest in life will come of feeling all at once that you have nothing at all to do. And so it is a great blessing, if your vocation be one which is a dignified and befitting one for an old man to be engaged in, one that beseems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... together on a balcony An hour when the night Died into blankness, And light mist Curling beneath us, hid the earth, And the cold, unburied stars ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... fiction of our time. To M. Halevy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as are so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... as grist. Having provided for energy, stored-up energy for grinding, he guards and preserves that energy as the most important and culminating thing in his intellectual life. He insists on making provision for it. He makes ready solitude for it, blankness, reverie, sleep, silence. He cultivates the general habit not only of rejecting things, but of keeping out of their way when necessary, so as not to have to reject them, and he knows the passion in all times and all places ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... But now I am a coward. Let me tell you everything. My wounds were bad, but not desperate. The brancardiers carried me down to Verdun, at night I suppose, but I was unconscious; and so to the hospital at Vaudelaincourt. There were days and nights of blankness mixed with pain. Then I came to my senses and had rest. It was wonderful. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. Would God it had been so! Then I should have been with my lieutenant. They told me he had passed away ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... romantic dream, which she would not for the wealth of India have revealed to mortal ear, that in the days to come Brian's life would be in somewise linked with hers. Perhaps this foolish thought was engendered of the blankness of her own life, a stage on which the players had been so few that this figure of an unknown young man ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... he was brought back and by her order to her house. Fatally wounded, in delirium her name was ever on his lips, but in his eyes blankness. And on her knees by his bed she had twisted in an agony of prayer that for one moment, but one moment, light might come into them that she might pray for pardon ere he died. But no light came and he died, not knowing that for her ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... folding her hands and looking upwards with a kind of devout blankness, 'I wouldn't lay myself out as she does; I wouldn't be as bold as her; I wouldn't seem to say to all male creeturs "Come and kiss me"'—and here a shudder quite convulsed her frame—'for any earthly crowns as might be offered. Worlds,' Miggs added solemnly, 'should not ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... into the window, and the curtain of that descended relentlessly. The bank had suddenly taken on an aspect of Sabbath blankness. Once more the Colonel rattled the knob, then he turned to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... cheerful-looking place, which, with its trees and kiosque, recalled the Place Verte at Antwerp, I noticed a large building of the pattern so common in France for colleges and convents—a vast expanse of whiteness or blankness, and a yet vaster array of long windows. It appeared to be a cavalry barrack for soldiers. The bugles sounded through the archway, and orderlies were riding in and out. This monotonous building, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... his head to convey the blankness of his ignorance, whereupon other men addressed him, also in northern tongues. Then, as he still shook his head, a lad of about nineteen came forward and spoke ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... spite of Mr Jobson's prevarications." He turned to the witness. "Now, sir," he said sternly, "you have already told the Court that you have no idea what you were doing on the night of April 24th, 1897. I put it to you once more that this blankness of memory is due to the fact that you were in a state of intoxication on the premises of the Hackney Chess Circle. Can you swear on your oath that this is ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... This blankness lasted a certain number of seconds. Then it passed away, and he painfully recovered his identity. But the experience was not new to him—it would recur—let him ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sat regarding the emissary with a curious chill blankness. In peace, to the outward eye he was a commonplace man; in war he changed. The authority with which he was clothed went, no doubt, for much, but it was rather, perhaps, that a door had been opened for him. His inner self became ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... puzzle set by a Competition Editor. Here is another one, which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in blankness. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... window, to see on floor and table ample evidence of recent packing. That gave check to a creeping blankness which was benumbing Pan. He went on to look into his mother's bedroom. The bed looked as if it had been used during the night and had not been made up. Perhaps his mother and Lucy had gone into Marco ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... of the outer door was his only answer; and he drew back, his face fallen to a sudden blankness of expression, his hand going out as if for ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... a sturdy cottage, with a grim endurance and inflexibility which even some later and lighter additions had softened rather than changed. On either side of the door, against the bleak whitewashed wall, two tall fuchsias relieved the rigid blankness with a show of color. The windows were prettily draped with curtains caught up with gay ribbons. In a stony pound-like enclosure there was some attempt at floral cultivation, but all quite recent. So, too, were a wicker garden seat, a bright Japanese umbrella, and a tropical ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... have a bit of a romp.... Well, EMILY, my dear, here we are, all of us—ready for anything in the way of a frolic—what's it to be? Forfeits, games, Puss in the Corner, something to cheer us all up, eh? Won't anyone make a suggestion? [General expression of gloomy blankness. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed—it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and tried to show them the practical value ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Tige's rock, where he camped every night. He had brought picture books with him, illustrated alphabets and one-syllable stories with the thought of possible need for them. And the brown eyes of the two little fellows, so like his own in the old days, as he well knew, in their blankness and wonder, gave eager response to new things. He called the spot "our school," and the two little pupils soon learned their letters, while in a month's time little Steve was reading simple stories telling that "The dog is on the mat," and "The cat ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... able to discover within himself. During this profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs he remained staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole. Then, without stirring ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... by the little wit he had he remembered that the water-gate was midway the building or thereabouts. He turned his face to the wall and, half clinging, half swimming, edged along it till he reached port. The last ebb of his strength sufficed to drag him up the stair; then he floated off into blankness again. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... an interval of blankness. He might, perhaps, have obtained grammars from Alfredston, but to do that required money, and a knowledge of what books to order; and though physically comfortable, he was in such absolute dependence as to be without a farthing of ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy |
