"Directness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brutal directness of his look her own eyes slowly sank. A very faint tinge of colour crept over her pallor, but she made ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... pleased Mrs. Tretherick. She did not stop to consider how much an imperfect knowledge of English added to his curt directness and sincerity. But she said, "Don't tell anybody you have seen me," and took out ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Hawthorne felt for the sufferers, and the memorial that he submitted to our government on their account has a dignity, a clearness and cogency of statement, worthy of Blackstone or Marshall. It is in marked contrast to the evasive reply of Secretary Cass, both for its fine English and for the directness of its logic. It is published at length in Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father, and is unique for the insight which it affords as to Hawthorne's mental ability in this direction. We may infer from it that if he had ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours. People are simplified alike by great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was Gravener's directness that begot my own, I seem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt. My enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... strong terms his dread and horror of narcotism; the use for pleasure's sake, not to relieve pain or nervous excitement, of drugs which act, as he said, through the brain upon the soul. His judgment, expressed with unusual directness and severity and enforced by experience, has become with his followers a tradition not less imperative than the most binding of their laws. It was so held, above all, in that household in which Eveena and I had first learnt the "lore of the Starlight." Esmo, indeed, regarded not merely ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... think it all over. It had but one other occupant, a huge man with heavy shoulders who lowered the paper he had been reading and looked at Jimmy through a pair of clear, gray, appraising eyes that conveyed such a sense of directness as to slightly disconcert one with ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... She ran along the path for some distance, then turned abruptly at a point where an abandoned lot filled with stumps joined the area by the brook. She made her swift way among these stumps, Anthony following, his hope rising as he noted the directness of his wife's aim. At the biggest stump she came to a standstill, carefully swung out-ward like a door a great slab of bark, and disclosed a hollow. The sunlight streamed in upon a little heap of blue, and a tangled ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... least satisfactory, must be based on love; and that love worth the name is an essentially two-sided business. Indirectly the girl had learnt much on this difficult subject from her great-aunt; and with characteristic directness had agreed with herself to wait till her heart was touched, if she waited a lifetime—though of exactly in what either her heart, or the touching of it, consisted she was ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Court at Aix has grandeur, for all its touches of simplicity; the fighting is good; the marriage scene and its fatal interruption (for we hear nothing of the princess on William's second visit to Rome) give a dramatic turn: and though there is no fine writing, there is a refreshing directness. The shortness, too (it has less than three thousand lines), is undoubtedly in its favour, for these pieces are apt to be rather too long than too short. And if the pusillanimity and faineantise of Louis seem at first sight exaggerated, it must be remembered ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... realized this fully, but he also knew that to go on would simply be to increase the number of defective batteries in circulation, which would ultimately result in a permanent closure and real failure. Hence he took the course which one would expect of Edison's common sense and directness of action. He was not satisfied that the battery was a complete success, so he shut down and went to ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... conscientiousness, of course, which leads him to adopt so much elaborate syntax from bygone masters of style. Finally,—the point in which, I think, Dio has come nearest to the gloomy Athenian,—something of the matter-of-fact directness of Thukydides is perceptible in this Roman History. The operator unrolls before us the long panorama of wars and plots and bribes and murders: his pictures speak, but he himself seldom interjects a word. Sometimes ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... peasant, in daily manual labour. Since that time he wrote a vast number of religious, political, and social tracts, dealing with war, marriage, law-courts, imprisonment, etc. Many of the religious tracts belong to literature by the beauty and simple directness of their style. Two short stories and one long novel, all written with a didactic purpose, are of this period, and added to their author's reputation: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreuzer ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... yet in his mouth when the scout dashed forward like a catapult and struck a tremendous blow, driven with such directness and swiftness that it could not have been parried. At the very instant Hardynge made the charge, Lone Wolf did the same, and the two similar blows, aimed at the same moment, encountered half way with ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... jostle each other, become so inextricably intermingled, that it is very often extremely difficult for us to make out any meaning at all. Then many of his thoughts are so subtle and so profound that they cannot easily be drawn up from the depths in which they lie. No man can write with greater directness, greater lyric vigour, fire, and impulse, than Browning when he chooses— write more clearly and forcibly about such subjects as love and war; but it is very seldom that he does choose. The infinite complexity of human life and its ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... Unamuno, who lives in close touch with the people, has enriched the Spanish literary language by returning to it many a popular term. His vocabulary abounds in racy words of the soil, and his writings gain from them an almost peasant-like pith and directness which suits his own Basque primitive nature. His expression occurs simultaneously with the thoughts and feelings to be expressed, the flow of which, but loosely controlled by the critical mind, often breaks through the meshes of established diction and gives birth to new forms created under ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... of forming letters with the pen or brush, from good types, Roman and Gothic, however, would afford very good preliminary practice to a student of line and form. The hand would acquire directness of stroke and touch, while the eye would grow accustomed to good lines of composition and simple constructive forms. The progressive nature of writing—the gradual building up of the forms of the letters—and the necessity of ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... any rate, to display a haughty stand-offishness; but she went down before the sweet face and girlish voice, and, if the truth must be told, by a certain something in Nell's eyes, which shone there when the Annie Laurie was beating before a contrary wind; a directness of gaze which indicated a spirit, not easily quelled, lurking behind the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... Francis, or at Naples, in the king's chapel, his frescos, though dimmed by the dust of five hundred years, blackened by the smoke of incense, abused by restorers, still show a power of imagination, a spirituality and tenderness of feeling, a simplicity and directness of treatment, which give them place among the most sacred and precious works that Art has yet produced. That quiet, solitary chapel of the Arena at Padua is one of the places most worthy of reverence in Italy; for in the pictures from the lives of the Virgin and the Saviour, that are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... pass. He was almost embarrassing in his directness, though she acquitted him of any crude ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... has been given by road engineers to community planning, and with the vast sums which are now being expended by the federal, state and county governments on permanent roads, it is of the utmost importance that this matter of road location with regard to directness of access to the community centers should receive much more careful study and better supervision by all the authorities concerned, not only with regard to topography, but with regard to the social and economic welfare of the areas concerned. The newer sections of the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... difficult to give an adequate idea of Mozart's works. He possessed a certain simple charm of expression which, in its directness, has an element of pathos lacking in the comparatively jolly light-heartedness of Haydn. German opera profited much from his practically adopting the art principles of Gluck, although it must be confessed that this change ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... in natural philosophy are characterized by remarkable directness, patience, and inventiveness, absolute candor in seeking the truth, and a powerful scientific imagination. What has been usually considered his first discovery was the now familiar fact that northeast storms on the Atlantic coast begin to leeward. The Pennsylvania ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... not open the window before," returned Nan, speaking with that directness and fine simplicity that always put things to rights at once: "it would have startled us before we got to the five hundred, and then Phillis would have been disappointed. Mother, shall we bring out some more chairs instead of going into the parlor? It is so much pleasanter out here." And ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... me also," she said. "In what are termed my escapades I am alone. You appealed to me," with a directness which amazed me, "because of your handsome face, your elegant form, your bright eyes. You are a man who loves adventure which has the spice of danger in it. My countrymen——." She crooked one of her bare shoulders, which shone like yellow ivory in the subdued ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... study the speeches of John Bright. They are noteworthy for their simplicity of diction and uniform quality of directness. His method was to make a plain statement of facts, enunciate certain fundamental principles, then follow with his ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... of the outer appearance of that little house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends—for very many years, at any rate. It will almost certainly be tinted, it may even be ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... they had also paid no attention to descriptions, personal expressions, personal sensations, they had also demanded nothing but facts and figures. Mariana was not a child, but she was like a child in the directness and simplicity of ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... grave wonder, and then said with her old directness: "But if I had been told such a secret affecting you, I should have told you." She stopped suddenly, seeing his eyes fixed on her, and dropped her own lids with a slight color. "I mean," she said hesitatingly, "of course you have acted nobly, generously, kindly, wisely—but ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... This young daughter of hers, with her directness and her smiling ignoring of the small subterfuges of life, rather frightened her. The terrible honesty of youth! All these years of ironing the wrinkles out of life, of smoothing the difficulties between old Anthony and Howard, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been protected. It was equally important that the legislation should come from such sources, when we consider the effect upon the enemy, still having a foothold in the State. They might reasonably apprehend that the laws springing from such a body would be marked by a stern directness and decision of purpose which would leave nothing to be hoped by disaffection or hostility; and their proceedings did not disappoint the expectations ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... considered a somewhat ungodly but a very just man, and while the Deacon most highly disapproved of his spiritual state, and doubted that he and 'vital piety' were strangers, he still respected Peter's rugged honesty and directness of purpose, and ranked him foremost among the 'world's people.' He was a man of powerful frame and strong impulses, and when his feelings were aroused he stood in awe of no man, high or low. When he forced his way into the arbor, therefore, the Deacon paused ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... business capacity were remarkable. He was made for work and could not long be happy without it. Whatever subject he was engaged upon, he kept his object clearly in view, and made straight for it, aiming far more at clearness and directness than at elegance of periods or symmetry of arrangement. He wrote his letters with great ease and rapidity: and having written them he very rarely had occasion to re-write them, though he often added insertions and interlineations, even in the most ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... services to the cause of the Union procured him a welcome second in warmth to that of no other leader, after thanking Londonderry and Carson "for the great lead they have given us in recent difficult weeks "—an allusion to the Churchill incident that was not lost on the audience—added with a blunt directness characteristic of the speaker: "If they are going to put Lord Londonderry and Sir Edward Carson into the dock, they will have to find one large enough to hold the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... half-dumb with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it. And they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness, directness. Above all, they are every one of them men and women, with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to mere drapery. "I grant," said Lessing, "that there is also ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... black loops of ball fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon's dress was noticeably simple. She volunteered little, but, when directly addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the directness, the conviction, of her replies. The right woman, Jasper Penny repeated silently. Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free, he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was exactly the wife he wanted. But no such person had appeared ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... see what's been wrong with me from the start. You've tried to say it yourself at times, only I couldn't take it in. Do you remember the day in my office when you came to tell me that"—he nerved himself to approach the subject with the simple directness he knew ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... even when they were not actually present to the eye. As a preacher Emerson has been described as making a deep impression on susceptible hearers of a quiet mind, by 'the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular simplicity and directness of a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... old themes. Mr. Mitchell handles his subject with unusual directness, bringing to its discussion clarity of thought and lucidity of expression which has already won the enthusiastic endorsement of Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Chas. W. Gordon, D.D., (Ralph Connor) Archdeacon Cody ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... the surrounding districts and elsewhere, were present. As soon as these savages entered the hall they began asking where the buffet was, as though they had been put up to it beforehand, and learning that there was no buffet they began swearing with brutal directness, and an unprecedented insolence; some of them, it is true, were drunk when they came. Some of them were dazed like savages at the splendour of the hall, as they had never seen anything like it, and subsided for a minute gazing at it open-mouthed. This great ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of Isabelle's talk was not to be stayed. She was excited and keyed up high. There was a simplicity and directness about this Judd woman that made her think of Mrs. Benjamin, so she told all about Hill Top and her life there, her love of it, her despair at ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... news. You relieve me. Perhaps it is not a general topic as yet." Then shortly and with lawyer-like directness, "Show me the letter which has ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... to each other as they groped about in the road, and either making jokes at the expense of the new Electricity Department, or frankly cursing it with true Five Towns directness of speech. And as Mr Blackshaw went down the hill into the town his heart was as black as the street itself with rage and disappointment. He had made ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... by saying that his distinguishing quality—that which puts so unmistakable a stamp upon his work—eludes precise definition. His tone is unmistakable. Its chief possession is a certain clarity and directness which is apparent no less in moments of great stress and complexity of emotion than in passages of simpler and slighter content. His style has little of the torrential rhetoric, the unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, though it owns something ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... resistance are alike included in the design of our being. Hunger—to illustrate—respects food, food only. It asks leave to be hunger neither of your conscience, your sense of personal dignity, nor indeed of your humanity in any form; but exists by its own permission, and pushes with brute directness toward its own ends. True, the soul may at last so far prevail as to make itself felt even in the stomach; and the true gentleman could as soon relish a lunch of porcupines' quills as a dinner basely obtained, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... about 1600 feet high. The canyon was surprisingly beautiful and romantic. The river seemed to change its mood here, and began to flow with an impetus it had exhibited nowhere above. It swept on with a directness and a concentration of purpose that had about it something ominous. And just here, at the foot of the right hand wall which was perpendicular for 800 feet, with the left more sloping, and clothed with cedar shrubs, we beheld our first real rapid, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... under the uncertain torches, his wide, impassioned gestures, with the carpenter's nail claw always before his hearers, made him a strange kind of specter in the night. Yet the simplicity of his manner and the directness of his appeal went to the hearts of his hearers. The first part of his message was one of peace. He told the workers that every inch they gained they lost when they tried to overcome cunning with force. "The dynamiter tears the ground from under labor—not ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... smallest doubt. But it was not Mr. Timson's way to take things for granted in silence, and it must be admitted that his curiosity in this particular case was not without warrant. After a scrutiny of John's face and person, which was not brief enough to be unnoticeable, he said, with a directness which left nothing in that line to be desired, "I reckon you're the new man Dave's ben gettin' up ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... a few moments in silence and then Pearl spoke. "Why," she asked with her usual directness, "why did you get up and walk up and down the room last night when Hughie was playing? What was it in his music that made you forget all of us and even, as you said, forget that you were not in your ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sagacity of a native, he held his way along the barrens of pine, through occasional little fertile vales, across brooks and rivulets, and over undulating hills, with the accuracy of instinct, and nearly with the directness of a bird. He never seemed to hesitate. Whether the path was hardly distinguishable, whether it disappeared, or whether it lay beaten and plain before him, made no sensible difference in his speed or certainty. It seemed as if fatigue could not affect him. Whenever the eyes of the wearied travelers ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... fortnight later, he came upon Roberts in the hall. "Well," said Breeze, with abrupt directness, ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... of our rapid and complex industrial development is more important than that of the employment of women and children. The presence of women in industry reacts with extreme directness upon the character of the home and upon family life, and the conditions surrounding the employment of children bear a vital relation to our future citizenship. Our legislation in those areas under the control of the Congress is very ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the effort, and the natural result is that before he is done praying his fingers begin to twitch involuntarily and thus cause the beads to move. As before stated, their motion is irregular; but the peculiar delicacy of touch acquired by long practice probably imparts more directness to their movements than would at first ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... originality; that is just what I can't see. What he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... straight look, quick to fasten, slow to let go, never yet quite softened, and yet never mannishly hard. But, in its own way, perhaps, there is no look so hard as the look of maiden innocence can be. There can even be something terrible in its unconscious stare. There is the spirit of God's own fearful directness in it. Half quibbling with words perhaps, but surely with half truth, one might say that youth "is," while all else "has been"; and that youth alone possesses the present, too innocent to know it all, yet too selfish even to ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... thought itself untroubled by quirks and turns and a restricted musical scale; it has allowed this thought to shine out in all its own essential beauty, and thus, in this so-called German folk song, the greatest effects of poignancy are often reached through absolute simplicity and directness. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Bok immensely to Mr. Curtis's methods was their perfect simplicity and directness. He believed absolutely in the final outcome of his proposition: where others saw mist and failure ahead, he saw clear weather and the port of success. Never did he waver: never did he deflect from his course. He knew no path save the direct one that led straight ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... an evident intention of remaining that Debby resolved to make use of the moment, and ease her conscience of one care that burdened it; therefore she answered his question with her usual directness,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... estate was but little enlarged since the reign of James, though profiting, of course, by improved cultivation and the different value of money. On the other hand, perhaps there were scarcely ten families in the country who could boast of a similar directness of descent on all sides from the proudest and noblest aristocracy of the soil; and Sir Miles St. John, by blood, was, almost at the distance of eight centuries, as pure a Norman as his ancestral William. His grandfather, nevertheless, had deviated ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has qualities of simplicity, directness, and warm human feeling which link it to the less ornate forms of carol literature. Its first verse is adapted from a secular song; its melody may, perhaps, have been composed by Luther himself. There is another Christmas hymn of Luther's, too—"Vom Himmel kam der Engel ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they'd been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the virtuous rout, and never got a finger-mark ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... welcome been waiting for you o'er long," I said to him as he entered the room, and here the fine directness of him ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... can be drawn from a poet's earliest lispings there are instances enough to prove. Shakespeare's first poems, though brimful of vigor and youth and picturesqueness, give but a very faint promise of the directness, condensation and overflowing moral of his maturer works. Perhaps, however, Shakespeare is hardly a case in point, his "Venus and Adonis" having been published, we believe, in his twenty-sixth year. Milton's Latin verses show tenderness, a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... said now every Session, with sharper point, and even more uncompromising directness, by Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Storey, and others. It was new to the House of Commons twenty-two years ago, and when Mr. Auberon Herbert (to-day a sedate gentleman, who writes good Tory letters to the Times) seconded the motion in a speech of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... transcribe nature upon his pages, his sermons are not lacking in decoration. He used figures of speech and drew freely on history and art for illustrations, but not so much to elucidate his subject as to ornament it. His essays on social and literary subjects are written with the aim of directness of statement, pure and simple; but the stuff of which his sermons are ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... at their disposal, be able to call out a new force of volunteers. If the dam gave way and the rafts were swept out the thing would probably happen by noon and there were few telephones in this sparsely peopled community. Yet the device was simple and one of pioneer directness. In many of those households to which the tired workers returned, there were brothers or sons who had heretofore stayed at home. Those who had responded to the first call were all men who were not afraid of toil, but those who might answer the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... of our use. In his poetic diction there is little that is not in accord with later usage; and while in prose the language has become more flexible, its constructions more varied and complex, its rhythm more perfected, his prose style at its best still remains unsurpassed in vigor, in directness, and in simplicity. Changeful from generation to generation as language is, and as Dante recognized it to be, it has not so changed in six hundred years that his tongue has become strange. There is no similar example in any other modern literature. The force ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... than the grounds themselves is the inscription which I found at the gates of the loveliest of them all. I wish I had the ipsissima verba of it, for it seemed to be characterised by an admirable simplicity and directness. The sense of it ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... in the form-rooms at the quarter to eleven interval, and in the houses after lunch it was the sole topic of conversation. Dunstable and Linton were bombarded with questions and witticisms of the near personal sort. To the latter they replied with directness, to the former evasively. ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... directness! Here's explanatoryness! In my pap days I learned that without a verb there could not be a sentence, not even a judge's sentence. I know "was" ain't much of a word all alone by itself, but then chuck it in among ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in his wife's presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... when some measure of order was restored, he began his tale. In simple language now, yet with a vehemence and directness that drove home every point, he tore their hearts with the story of yesterday's happenings at Gavrillac. He drew tears from them with the pathos of his picture of the bereaved widow Mabey and her three starving, destitute ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim could never have been planned. With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... shake away from you—because Pierre's dead." This was a Joan he had not yet realized, and he knew that after all his enchanted leopardess was a woman and that his wooing of her had hardly yet begun. So did she baffle him by the utter directness of her heart. There was so little of a barrier against him and yet—there was so much. For the first time, he doubted his wizardry, and, at that, his desire for the wild girl's love stood up like a giant and gripped ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of them now remembered. When Innes had received it, there had been nothing further from his mind than to bury himself in the moors with Archie; but not even the most acute political heads are guided through the steps of life with unerring directness. That would require a gift of prophecy which has been denied to man. For instance, who could have imagined that, not a month after he had received the letter, and turned it into mockery, and put off answering it, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... quietly, meeting his gaze with a directness that hurt him sorely. "And you, too, understand. I could not be your wife. I am glad yet sorry that you love me, and I am proud to have heard you say that you want me. But I am a sensible creature, Mr. Chase, and, being sensible, am therefore selfish. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... it appears, must go on all through creation. We eat ducks, turkeys, and chickens, though we don't swallow them whole, feathers and all. Our four-footed friends, less civilized, take things with more directness and simplicity, and chew each other up without ceremony, or swallow each other alive. Of these unceremonious habits we ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... What a great directness of purpose may be traced in the career of Pitt, who lived—ay, and died—for the sake of political supremacy. From a child, the idea was drilled into him that he must accomplish a public career worthy of his illustrious father. Even from boyhood ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... knew why," she said calmly, emotionlessly. He drew back instantly, chilled by her directness. "You came because there was promise of an interesting adventure, which you now are on the point of making impossible by a rather rash ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than Shakspeare. He would as soon hear "a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry wheel grate on the axletree." He was as much of a man—not a ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... British Tories, who professed to fear for the existence of the Church of England itself. The majority of the English clergy denounced the proposition, and some even declared its author a madman; but Mr. Gladstone pursued his chosen way with energy and directness. In one of those elevated speeches with which he was accustomed to ennoble debate, he laid the details of his plan open to the Commons. The Irish Church was to be disestablished and disendowed, its bishops were to lose ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... of the sea, and of eager hurry, in the movement of the verse. Compare the directness of the opening with that of the preceding poem: What is the advantage of such a beginning? How much is told of the hero? By what means is his heroism emphasized? How is Browning's departure from the legend a gain? Observe ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... point. If you examine the human brain, you will find it, though capable of being stretched to a great length, compressed in a diminutive compass, involved and snarled; whereas the same physical portion of the genus gets simplicity, a beginning and an end, a directness and consecutiveness that are necessary to logic, and, as has just been mentioned, a point, in the monikin seat of reason, which, by all analogy, go to prove the superiority of the animal possessing advantages ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... more realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see again in La Touche. All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp, realised that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which transformed him. When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience. Once there was occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus winced from the grip. When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured to apologise playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once again he had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... occasion to speak to the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger, occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee!" The young man much resented this directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago—"a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him—victim ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... language; and that great writing is that in which much is said in few words, and those words the simplest that will answer the purpose. Having made this notable discovery, he became a great eraser of adjectives, and toiled after simplicity and directness. Mr. Everett quotes a few sentences from his Fourth-of-July oration of 1806, when he was twenty-four, which shows an amazing advance upon the effort of his ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... which a day earlier would have passed unheeded, aroused all her instincts of defense. She was half-aware of the irony by which their talk about the nephews of Jack Holton had carried them with so fateful a directness to her mother. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... language, and where people are accustomed to it in conversation, understand it perfectly, and make unconscious allowance for it. Displayed here in the United States, in a mercantile community, and in a tongue characterized by directness and simplicity, it makes the actors almost entirely incomprehensible to people outside their own set, as is shown by the attempts made to explain and understand the letters in the case. Most of the critics, both the friendly and hostile, are compelled to treat them as written in a ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... Lazarus, and she in turn conferred distinction upon her race. To be born a woman also lends a grace and a subtle magnetism to her influence. Nowhere is there contradiction or incongruity. Her works bear the imprint of her character, and her character of her works; the same directness and honesty, the same limpid purity of tone, and the same atmosphere of things refined and beautiful. The vulgar, the false, and the ignoble,—she scarcely comprehended them, while on every side she was open ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... it indefinitely separates itself. God and man, having divided between them the antagonistic faculties of being, seem to be playing a game in which the control of the universe is the stake, the one having spontaneity, directness, infallibility, eternity, the other having foresight, deduction, mobility, time. God and man hold each other in perpetual check and continually avoid each other; while the latter goes ahead in reflection ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... doubt that Olivia would come. But he had thought it natural that she should come to him in such an hour of distress, for he knew the simple directness of her nature. Therefore he had taken no chance. He had gone to High Wycombe, ransacked its simple provision shops, and brought ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... by the King's visit and by the directness of his questioning. It was Nicholas who answered ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... conventional people, who could never appreciate the fine directness and simplicity, of Dad's nature—not if they lived to be a thousand years old. But Mr. Blakely Porter understood perfectly; I know he did, for he told me so afterwards. "It was the greatest compliment I ever had paid me in my life," he ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... a directness that had been foreign to her of late, but that was part and parcel of her real, beautiful nature. "I cannot understand. I only know there is a change in me, or in you to me, and that I cannot help it, or that I have not been able to help it. Sometimes I feel—do not be angry, ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... squall and prevented his mother from replying, but the hard lines had relaxed in the good old face. She was again "mother" whom they all knew and loved. Sanderson followed close after David; he had just come from Boston, he said, and inquired for Kate with a simple directness that left no doubt as to whom ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... recommend that the stories be told in the language of the ex-slave, without excessive editorializing and "artistic" introductions on the part of the interviewer. The contrast between the directness of the ex-slave speech and the roundabout and at times pompous comments of the interviewer is frequently glaring. Care should be taken lest expressions such as the following creep in: "inflicting wounds from which he never ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... reply with her customary directness. Trifling as it was, the reference to Montbarry, proceeding from that woman of all others, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... not to have offered him money yesterday," she thought: "this waste of time need never have happened." She set her mistake right with admirable brevity and directness. "Don't distress yourself, Mr. Le Frank. Now my name is on it, the Song is mine. If your publisher's account is not satisfactory—be so good as to send it to me." Mr. Le Frank dropped his dry handkerchief, and sprang theatrically to his feet. ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... he answered with untroubled directness. "He certainly is. What do you say we start dancing and let Miss Maxwell see? Though there's only one woman here who can give him full swing to show ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London |
