"Wistfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feel sorry that they are not in their true sphere. The child who stands, half-clad, before the hearth-fire, in the painting called the "Little Cottager," has the delicate features of a true aristocrat. No cottage boy this, with shapely hands and large, melancholy eyes. His wistfulness is so touching that we would fain snatch him from his surroundings, and set him down amidst the soft luxuries which belong ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... the old order of Russia, goes to his doom, there is intoned by his followers the sweetest melody that Moussorgsky wrote or could write. And out of that hymn to the glory of the perishing house there seems to come to us all the pathos of eternally passing things, all the wistfulness of the last sunset, all the last greeting of a vanished happiness. More sheerly than any other moment, more even than the infinitely stern and simple prelude that ushers in the last scene of "Boris" and seems to come out of a great distance and sum up all the sadness and darkness and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and Costobarus regarded her with growing wistfulness. At this last moment his love was to become his obstacle, his fear for his child his ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... not meet her again. And—thank you!" There was a slight unsteadiness once in her voice, and he could almost have sworn her eyes showed that old brave wistfulness. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... wistfulness showed itself upon the young man's face. "You speak so confidently," he said, "that I almost feel I ought to believe you. Why do you tell me that I am the only one of her suitors who would certainly be ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... they were when free of the excitement of fear and mental strain. They were more than ever like the wild wood violets, flecked with those same little brown spots which had made him think sometimes that the flowers were full of laughter. There was something of wistfulness, of thought for him in her eyes now, and ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... remembrance of my final submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by "glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. This dominant object, the shepherdess of the flock, was Miss Bayou or Bayhoo—I recover ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the streaming seas. Sirs, in his old age Whittington returned, And stood with Alice, by the silent tomb In little Pauntley church. There, to his Arms, The Gules and Azure, and the Lion's Head So proudly blazoned on the painted panes; (O, sirs, the simple wistfulness of it Might move hard hearts to laughter, but I think Tears tremble through it, for the Mermaid Inn) He added his new crest, the hard-won sign And lowly prize of his own industry, The Honey-bee. And, far away, the bells ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... she could not bluntly tell him that Lucy had avoided speaking of him, especially when she was not at all certain as to the girl's real feeling in the matter. But, alive to all the suppressed wistfulness in the man's look and tone, she yearned to comfort him, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... think, General, that there is anything that could be done to have Sonya Valesky pardoned, do you?" she inquired, with unconscious wistfulness. "You see, my friend, Nona Davis, wants so much to take Madame Valesky back to the United States with her. Then neither she nor her ideas would be of any more danger to Russia. Nona says Madame Valesky ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... front, the clear, vivid sunlight on the mountain tops, and the serried battlements of the castle, now rising into larger proportions as the boys dropped down the hillside towards the postern door, which led out upon the wild fell. There was something of mute wistfulness in his own gaze as he ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... minute Madison gazed into the tear-splashed eyes, deep, brave in chastened wistfulness, gazed—and like a man stunned walked from the room, the cottage, and out ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... the Luxembourg gardens in which a fete was taking place. Young lovers in the dim sunlight under the trees, paid court to their ladies. There was flirting and teasing and romping play. Though gaiety and frivolity were expressed yet there was a certain wistfulness as well, a little heart-throb ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... thoroughly detested. That was the "Traumerei." Therefore, she played the "Traumerei" slowly—as it should, of course, be played—with full value given to all the pensive, long-drawn notes, and with a finale positively creepy in its dreamy wistfulness. Val, as has been stated, could be ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort. He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something which he was pretty sure would not happen. Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of wistfulness. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... his, but released them after the merest touch, and in the hungry wistfulness of his gaze there was no ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... was white and drawn, and her eyes were wet. Her husband started forward as she extended her hand to him. He clasped them in his own and looked down into her face with the deepest tenderness and wistfulness in his own. Her body swayed suddenly and his expression changed to one of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... seemed as light of body as he was of hand. He sat now watching Strann with the utmost gravity. He had very large brown eyes of a puzzling quality; perhaps that was because there seemed to be no thought behind them and one caught the mystery and the wistfulness of some animals from ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... large frame, large bones in her wrists, large fingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhat too long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by a wistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizon of her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two men talked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of the trampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... safe to go, and he tried to look as though he too were oozing out to a Crane-Simplex, Claire slipped beside him, soft as a shadow, and whispered, "Please don't go. I want to talk to you. Please!" There was fluttering wistfulness in her voice, though instantly it was gone as she hastened to the door and was to be heard asserting that ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... starched lawn which had seemed to her adequate for her unpretentious role of mother! All her humour and independence and self-possession had left her, and in their stead, on what was to have been her great night, had settled only the immemorial wistfulness. ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Gerard as cordially as ever, but there was a wistfulness underlying his expression that inspired the older man with a hearty desire to shake Isabel Rose. She could watch her young lover's emotions with the same diverted interest with which she had watched the struggles of the tiny black-and-scarlet beetle ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... old Jasper in the rear of the shop grew dim with wistfulness as he heard this talk. He knew Buck Heath; he knew his kind; in his day he would have eaten a dozen men of such rough words and such mild deeds as Buck. But searching the face of Andy, he saw no ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... him. She had never seemed so little manlike, so wholly womanly. For the thick coils of hair were loosed on her head, and the black hair framed a face stained, flushed, with eyes that were like a great black, bottomless well of sorrow and wistfulness. And the hand which stretched toward him, palm up, was a symbol of everything new and strange that he ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... something first, then," suggested Gloriana, noting the wistfulness in the big, black eyes of her ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness that was touching in so fine a man. "Wouldn't it be rather a pull sometimes to have—a—to haven?" He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn't—I didn't know. So he brought it out awkwardly: "The ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... only a look, but Madeline Payne would have exchanged all the smiles, hand clasps, and brotherly words she could ever hope to receive from him, for one such glance from his eyes. But the tender wistfulness was all for Claire—blind Claire, who ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... touched the right chord; for she trembled, and a look of wistfulness filled her eyes. "Oh, if I could!" ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... acme of agreeableness), Chirac put his hand on the hand of Sophia as it rested limp on the littered table. Accidentally she caught his eye; she had not meant to do so. They both became self-conscious. His thin, bearded face had more than ever that wistfulness which always softened towards him the uncompromisingness of her character. He had the look of a child. For her, Gerald had sometimes shown the same look. But indeed she was now one of those women ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in the strange little group linked together by the baby's clutches. The young mother and the girl with their heads so near each other, looked in each other's faces. In Lucy's there was a kind of awe, in Bice's a sort of wondering wistfulness mingled with incipient defiance. They were not born to be each other's friends. They were different in everything; they were even on different sides in this house—the one an intruder, belonging to the party which was destroying the other's domestic peace. It would be vain to say that there ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... were away there came to me - From whence I cannot tell - A plaintive lady pale and passionless, Who bent her eyes upon me critically, And weighed me with a wearing wistfulness, As if she ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... her pointed chin in her hands and looked dreamily out into the moonlit night, while she thought her letter out a little more fully before beginning to write. Her big brown eyes were full of wistfulness and romance; for Sidney was romantic, albeit a faithful and understanding acquaintance with her father's books had given to her romance refinement and reason, and the delicacy of her own nature had imparted to it a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life. But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months afterward. The child was "Missing" then, and her ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... case been of intent ignored and allowed to pass by, but never once did she doubt the motive which prompted such neglect. From the moment of their meeting the consciousness of his love had enveloped her. He might set a seal on his lips, but he could not control his eyes, and the wistfulness of that glance made ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... with a fine waxen delicacy that won admiration from all eyes. Her hair was curly and golden, but her eyes were dark like her mother's, and the lids drooped over them in that manner which gives a peculiar expression of dreamy wistfulness. Every one of us must remember eyes that have a strange, peculiar expression of pathos and desire, as if the spirit that looked out of them were pressed with vague remembrances of a past, or but dimly comprehended the mystery of its present ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mourners, and grim fume of pyres. 'T was treason if a thread of silver strayed In tress of singing-girl or nautch-dancer; And every dawn the dying rose was plucked, The dead leaves hid, all evil sights removed For said the King, "If he shall pass his youth Far from such things as move to wistfulness, And brooding on the empty eggs of thought, The shadow of this fate, too vast for man, May fade, belike, and I shall see him grow To that great stature of fair sovereignty When he shall rule all lands—if he will rule— ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... husband's words. She felt a return of that glow of admiration which had thrilled her on the previous night, when he and Richard Lane alone amongst that motley company had played the part of men. A curious, almost pathetic wistfulness crept into her heart. If only he would lean towards her at that moment, if she could see once more the light in his eyes that had shone there during the days of their courtship! If only he could remember that it was still his part to play the lover! If he could be a little less grave, a ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... am more so; but how can I help you out if he never even sees me when I'm there?" And Caroline raised eyes to him that held a hint of wistfulness in ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... At the wistfulness in his voice the girls felt the tears rise to their eyes, and to save them from a breakdown Betty ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... would continue to unmask against me new batteries of defense—severe politeness, formality with me; laughter and scornfulness of me; anger, pitifulness, at last even tears; and always the dread assault of her eyes, and the scent of her hair and the sweet wistfulness of her mouth,—all, all the charms of all women united in her one self, to attack, to assail, to harass, and to make wholly wretched the man who loved her more than anything in life, and who was driven almost to using any means, so only that she ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... take down a New Testament, and present himself at Fernando's bedside, observing gladly that there was much more wistfulness than ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I want," said Henry Vail, looking with the same tender wistfulness into his friend's eyes. "If I'd wanted a missionary I shouldn't have come to you. If I'd wanted a Sunday-school teacher I could have found twenty better; and as for tract distributing and Bible reading, you couldn't do either ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... and the prosperity of the king. The king should always make unto the righteous gifts of all enjoyable articles in abundance. He should certainly dispel the fear of famishing which those men may have.[327] There are no men more sinful than those upon whose food children look with wistfulness without being able to eat them duly. If within thy kingdom any learned Brahmana languishes with hunger like any of those children, thou shalt then incur the sin of foeticide for having allowed such an act. King Sivi himself had ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... "The Wearing of the Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... also. The Sieur kept busy and full of plans, but occasionally there came a wistfulness in his eyes and a pain in the lines that were settling ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... tell her why I had suddenly resolved to break silence; I sent her a little note, only a few words, that I was sorry not to have heard of her for so long a time; but though we had been estranged she had not been forgotten; a little commonplace note, relieved perhaps by a touch of wistfulness, of regret. And this note was sent by a messenger duly instructed to ask for an answer. The news the messenger brought back was somewhat disappointing. The lady was away, but the letter would be ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... met her riding home from an errand to a neighboring ranch, and, turning his horse, rode with her. In worn corduroy skirt, flannel shirt, and gray sombrero, she looked like a handsome, haggard boy, and, that afternoon, there was a certain unusual wistfulness in her eyes, and her mouth had relaxed a little from its bitterness. Perhaps it was the beauty of a clear, keen summer day; without doubt, also, she was touched by the courteous pleasure of his greeting and by his giving up his ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... gazing at the red roofs of the little village across the water. She was a pretty girl, small and trim. Just now some secret sorrow seemed to be troubling her, for on her forehead were wrinkles and in her eyes a look of wistfulness. She had, in fact, all the distinguishing marks of one who is thinking of her ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... before, but Rachel looked back, thinking the old days were better, when Joseph used to come from Azariah's talking about his studies. It may be that Dan, forgetful of his jealousy, looked back to those days gone over with a certain wistfulness. A boy is, if not more interesting, at least more unexpected, than a young man. In the old days Dan did not know what sort of son God had given him, but now he knew that God had given him the son he always desired, and that Azariah's tending of ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... spend the day, for people in the Hollow Land enjoy their pleasures as much by quantity as quality, especially their friends' society; and I could only hope that a certain wistfulness of expression, as she looked back from the tonneau of the red car, meant that Nell would rather have remained with some of those who ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... A note of wistfulness sounded in the high voice. "You won't misunderstand, will you, Jack? I ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... had told Jan all about it, because the girl asked, "Can I be a member of the Megabuck Mob?" There seemed to be just a touch of wistfulness about the way she added, "You always seem to be having adventures of one sort or ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... delight, noting, as he skirts the Park, the gay colours glistening among the dusty trees, the figures flitting past, the riders, the carriages, all suggesting a foreign capital. The great city never looks so brilliant or so stately as on one of these 'broiling' days. One calls up with a sort of wistfulness the great and picturesque cities abroad, with their grand streets and palaces, ever a delightful novelty. We long to be away, to be crossing over that night—enjoying a cool fresh passage, all ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... look at Judith as he spoke. Had he done so he would have been puzzled by the wistfulness in ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... a few minutes, stroking Dido's silky head, letting her rippled ears fall through my fingers. Her dim eyes were fixed on me with a terrible wistfulness, as though she longed to speak and could not. I felt a great pity for the old dog. What a sad lot is theirs, depending on our presence as they do for the light in their sky, to whom our slightest absence is the absence ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... undesirable, but it was the best he could do. He worked methodically, even collecting an armful of the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength. And all the while the dog sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness in its eyes, for it looked upon him as the fire-provider, and the fire was ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... over the contract, spread out on the table. He pretended to read it, but was too agitated to do so. The little purple characters danced in the glow of the lamp. Upon his right shoulder he could feel Dolly's chin; it rested there tenderly, with wistfulness, in prayer. Mixed with his excitement was a vague sadness, a sadness, somehow, as though he were saying farewell to someone. But he had already gone through the crisis; to Dolly's heart-rending cry upon the dietary inadequacy of pine-nuts, he had yielded his ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... to take a chance," said Cameron's mother, looking at the eager faced girl with a cautious wistfulness. "What could we do if night came and we had no place ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... a good man, better for your work than Harkness even.' He spoke without a great amount of interest in the subject, and there was something of downright wistfulness in his look which had followed ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... with intense wistfulness. The Other Girl's eyes were gazing out of the car window as if they saw lost opportunities and yearned over them. Glory could not see the longing in them until they turned suddenly toward her and she caught a wondering glimpse ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... him with a sort of wistfulness; "but the time will pass quickly now. It is so nice to think that we shall begin our new year together." And, as her brother checked an involuntary sigh, she went on eagerly: "If you knew how happy I am about it! It will be something to wake every morning ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... himself interested in what they had to say on the subject of national politics. (The Judge, who had an unimpaired digestion, was attending strictly to his champagne and his dinner.) There was something of anxiety, almost of wistfulness, in her expression as she listened to one or the other doing his admirable best to entertain her. They had the charm of crisp well-modulated voices, these two men of her own class; she had met no ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... extraordinary end and the crowd went out murmuring and disputing, separated himself from his companions and made his way towards Mrs. Greyle and her daughter, who were quietly setting out homewards. To Audrey's surprise the two elders shook hands in silence, and inspected each other with a palpable wistfulness of look. ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... full-dress uniform of second lieutenant of cavalry, the stripes and splashes of yellow suiting his dark skin: a slim, erect figure, not very tall, but a soldier every inch of him, though the wide-apart blue eyes gave the square-chinned face a boyish air of wistfulness, even when he smiled his delightfully childlike, charming smile. Girls glanced at him as they swung past in their partners' arms, noticing how tense was the look on the brown face, and how the straight eyebrows—even blacker than the smooth ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... was without doubt a note of wistfulness. "I would I could say as much for myself." That regret was as audible to Chayne as though it had been uttered. But he closed his ears to it. He began to talk eagerly of his plans. There were familiar ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... prevent the son from ever again seeing the woman who had so indiscreetly married him. Yet, somehow, Mary could not believe that her husband would yield to such paternal coercion. Rather, she was sure that he would prove loyal to her whom he loved, through every trouble. At the thought a certain wistfulness pervaded her, and a poignant regret that this particular man should have been the one chosen of fate to be entangled within her mesh of revenge. There throbbed in her a heart-tormenting realization that there were in life possibilities infinitely more splendid than the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... travel. It was for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to have the very draught? He turned away as he dropped this interrogative sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of the pier two ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of the same wistfulness. The little boy indeed happened to look round for a moment, upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our young man a source of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned. He bounded forward with irrepressible cries of ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another. Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Holmes had turned abruptly, glancing over at the city with a strange wistfulness. It was over in a moment. He resumed the slow, controlling walk beside him. They went on in silence into town, and when they did speak, it was on indifferent subjects, not referring to the last. The Doctor's heat, as it usually did, boiled out in spasms on trifles. Once ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... is only one door to the kingdom of heaven, there is many an entrance to scientific divinity. There is the gate of Free Inquiry as well as the gate of Spiritual Wistfulness. And although there are exceptional instances, on the whole we can predict what school the new-comer will join, by knowing the door through which he entered. If from the wide fields of speculation he has sauntered inside the sacred inclosure; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... sorely puzzled him when he came to think over them afterwards: "They're a baby's notions.... They're silly, silly, silly." Were these things real or were they not? And, as he pondered, yearning dumbly, as only these little souls can yearn, the wistfulness in his heart went out to meet the moonlight in the air. Together they wove a spell that seemed to summon before him a fairy of the night, who whispered an answer into his heart: "We are real so long as you believe in us. It is your imagination that makes ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... Daily Mail correspondent, "is gloriously, tenderly, wistfully beautiful." We rather gather that it is the lid of Carmelite House that gives it just that little note of wistfulness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... More than ever he was persuaded that his day would come. Even might come the day when it would be his lot to lighten the sorrow of those eyes and appease the wistfulness of that tender mouth. He was less sure about this. He had been unable to learn if Beulah Baxter was still unwed. Silver Screenings, in reply to his question, had answered, "Perhaps." Camera, in its answers ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... and stared at the woman, as her abrupt reply reached my ear. Though trembling for the consequences of her boldly spoken wish, Jean did not shrink from my astonished gaze; and when I saw the wistfulness of that wan face, the smile died on my lips, checked by the tender courage which had prompted the utterance of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness, as he told the hardy lie. His mask of a face revealed nothing, but he could not disguise the rage of hunger for her that ravened in his famished eyes. They were upon her lips, her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... always, by Czar—walked out that way to see how things were progressing; and often,—if he had not been too busy to notice,—Aaron King might have seen a look of wistfulness in the keen, baffling eyes of the famous man—so world-weary and sad. And, while he did not cease to mock and jeer and offer sarcastic advice to his younger friend, the touch of pathos—that, like a minor chord, was so often heard in his most caustic and ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... their rounds, and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity—and a touch of wistfulness—the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one equipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... steadfast, that it would almost seem as if it must conjure up the ghostly shape of glimmering canvas from the mysterious distances of sea and sky, and draw it unerringly home by the mere force of intense wistfulness! And those gentle eyes, that were never to see the light of another sun, looked anxiously across the heaving sea till twilight fell, and then John's messenger, Emil, arrived—Emil Ingebertsen, courteous and gentle ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new slant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries" of the modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes. John Mayrant's face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy's expression. It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes, seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid waste, an ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... her he had been unwell Thursday which accounted for his absence. And then: "Oh, I do. Much. All right now." An errant moonbeam came straggling in between a break in the screen of vines and lighted up her face, looking up into his, flooding it with a sort of holy wistfulness. Softly she moved away, out of ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Her lips, her eyes, her hair; her touching confidence; above all—quite unbelievable—her love. Not really love perhaps, just childish fancy. But on the wings of fancy this child would fly far, too far—all wistfulness and warmth beneath that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to go her eye fell upon the telephone. She hesitated. But the memory of Drene's eyes, their wistfulness and trust ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... the front of the box, slim and elegant, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. She was watching the brilliant scene with a certain air of detachment, as if thinking of other things. Her usual lightness and gay banter seemed for the moment to have deserted her, leaving a soft brooding wistfulness that was ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... completely and gazed at her in patient thought. "Linda," he said finally, "I have never heard anything that stirred me so much; not what you said, my dear, but the recognition in your voice." A wistfulness of love for her enveloped him; an ineffable desire as vain as the passion she struggled to give him in return. She smiled in an ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he said looking at her, and answering the wistfulness and the smile and the voice all in one,—"do you know I can never find words that just suit me for you?—And do you know that I think there was never such a New Year's day heard of?—it is all sunshine! Just look how the light is breaking out there upon the ice, and touching the waves, and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... about the rent!" Expeditiously as she spoke she reached for her hip pocket and brought out a roll of bills that fairly took Barton's breath away. "If there's one thing in the world, you know, that I've got, it's money," she confided perfectly simply. "So you see, Mr. Barton," she added with sudden wistfulness, "there's almost nothing on the face of the globe that I couldn't have—if I only had some place to put it." Without further parleying she proffered the roll of ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Aunt Olivia sought and found Rebecca Mary's window and stood beside it till the train started. Through the dusty pane their faces looked oddly unfamiliar to each other, and the two pairs of eyes that gazed out and in had a startled wistfulness in them that no Plummer eyes should have. ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... together as we've always been, it's a question of there being so disgustingly much to get over. If we had, for people like them, but the one ugly spot and the one weak side; if we had made, between us, but the one vulgar kind of mistake: well, I don't say!" She reflected with a wistfulness of note that was in itself a touching eloquence. "To have our reward in this world we've had too sweet a time. We've had it all right down here!" said Julia Bride. "I should have taken the precaution to have ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... naively betrayed by his own words, of a fluid and quick temper, both for love and for hate. For so original a poet he was at first remarkably dependent on his predecessors. The cast of his verse is lyric and subjective; and for all its wistfulness and plaint is sometimes shrill with the shrillness of a soul raw and too sensitive about herself. His strength as a poet may have been his weakness as a man—may have made him, from a human point of view, an unlikely instrument ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... to the baby. "If he cries, 'twon't do no hurt up there. Well!" She seemed to remind herself that there was much to say. "I must be gittin' along with my story." She looked at him in a most moving wistfulness, and added: "I ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... What one thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works is always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bullied you." There was an odd note of wistfulness in the harsh voice, and for a moment the handsome, arrogant old face softened incredibly. "I shouldn't have ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Time and the Place, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... locked his box in its official place, he stood for a few seconds at the open door looking out upon the garden. A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his. Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives. From any such occult mood, at least, he quickly recovered, for he ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... certainty. In a scheme of things utterly bad from the start the only unpardonable folly is that of hope. Raising his eyes for a moment from the face of his watch, he rested them upon the opposite bank, reflectively and not without a certain wistfulness, as if the sternness of their gaze were still capable of mitigation. Soon a look of the deepest satisfaction filled them, though, for a moment, he did not move. He watched a lady who came rapidly, and yet with a trace of hesitation, down the broad grass-walk towards him. She ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... with that wistfulness which so draws me. Her look said: "I pity you. I wish you were as happy as I." And a thought leaped out in answer to her look which would have smote her had it spoken. It was, "You, too, are awakened by a false dawning." Why is she so sure of herself and of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... happily, in pure relief. She loved everybody. She was charming and sunny and gentle with everybody, particularly with Miss Frost, whom she loved with a deep, tender, rather sore love. Poor Miss Frost seemed to have lost a part of her confidence, to have taken on a new wistfulness, a new silence and remoteness. It was as if she found her busy contact with life a strain now. Perhaps she was getting old. Perhaps her ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... That he was a man of a very brave, fearlessly outspoken character. Some of his practical applications in his sermons before the Magistrates are daring in their directness of reproof, and melting in their wistfulness of entreaty. ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... goddess one might have called her, with her high, short mouth and upright head, and her shoulders carried back with a certain haughtiness. Yet only a gracious, pensive goddess might have had this wistfulness in the deep eyes, this little pensive droop of the mouth corners, this piteous quality of the eye which left one saying that here, after all, was a maiden most like to the wild deer of the forest, strong, beautiful, yet ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the large proportion of young people in the place, of all classes, both sexes, and strongly contrasting faces. Delicate girls looking with the sweet wistfulness of maidenly hearts for something strong to lean upon and love; sad-eyed women turning to heaven for the consolations or the satisfactions earth could not give them; anxious mothers perplexed with ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... at the table enjoying some of Huldah's most palatable dishes, Ptolemy came in. There ensued on our part a silence which the lad made no effort to break. Silvia and I each slipped him a side glance. He stood statuesque, watching us with the mute wistfulness of a hungry animal. There were unwonted small red specks high upon his cheekbones, ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... his bones lie, at peace for ever, in the rotten place, with his effigy over them cross-legged and his dog at his feet, and his wife by his side. I think he must sometimes look out of Heaven's gate down on the cathedral and feel glad, grateful—perhaps a bit wistful—if the attribution of wistfulness, which implies regret, to a spirit in ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... tone a strange wistfulness. Evelyn drew her breath sharply, glanced swiftly at the dark face and liquid eyes. Mr. Grymes yet held the manager and his wife in conversation, but Mr. Lee, a small jessamine-scented glove in hand, was hurrying toward them ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... There was a faint note of wistfulness in Nan's voice. "Why should everything that is beautiful be invariably termed 'idealistic'? Oh, there are ten thousand things I'd like altered in ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... she was, he thought. How perfect in her direct and simple dignity. Yet there had crept into her tone a wistfulness which ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... nights I didn't come across them, but the night after that I was sitting by myself at the Maison Pierre when somebody tapped me on the shoulder-blade, and I found Rocky standing beside me, with a sort of mixed expression of wistfulness and apoplexy on his face. How the chappie had contrived to wear my evening clothes so many times without disaster was a mystery to me. He confided later that early in the proceedings he had slit the waistcoat up the back and that that ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. "What good would your going do? Do you suppose it would change anything for me?" She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. "I wonder what your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I've never really known—I suppose we DON'T know much about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you're thirsty?...I used to feel as if all of me was in the palm of ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... could not have dreamed of anything so comfortable, and for your sake—you are happy?" with a touch of wistfulness. ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... if so, unless I speak to you, do not speak to me. Now go your ways, fearing nothing. However great may seem your peril, I say to you—fear nothing. Soon you will hear ill things spoken of me, yet"—and here a touch of human wistfulness came into his inhuman voice—"I pray you believe them not. When I am named Murgh the Fiend and Murgh the Sword, then think of me as Murgh the Helper. What I do is decreed by That which is greater than I, and if you could understand ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... exactly how you're feeling, old chap," he said sympathetically. "I get a dash of the same thing sometimes—generally in the springtime. It begins with a sort of wistfulness, a sense of expansion follows, you go about all the time with your head in the clouds. You want to collect all the beautiful things in life and express them. Oh, I know all about it. It generally means a girl. Where ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... laughed triumphantly, with his arm beneath the head of Dorothy, and with the tender face of Dorothy passive beneath his lips, and with unreasonable wistfulness in his heart, the castle bell tolled midnight. What followed was curious: for as Wednesday passed, the face of Dorothy altered, her flesh roughened under his touch, and her cheeks fell away, and fine lines came about her eyes, and she became the Countess Dorothy ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... at the interminable spin of the landscape with a certain wistfulness. He was coming back into the South, into his own country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and fruitlessly, yet the fat green fields hurtling past him told with what skill and patience their black hands ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... pasture a fox barked distinctly and a coon answered the plaint of the screech owl in a voice not unlike his. It always seems to me that the night hunters of pasture and woodland bewail the passing of such a night as much as I do. The whippoor-will began to voice his petulant wistfulness again. He had been silent for hours, feasting I dare say on myriad moths and unable to call with his mouth full. The whippoor-will chants matins as querulously as he does vespers. Far in the east the stars that had been gleaming brighter as ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the girl mean? He realized that she was in earnest and that he had suddenly become a hero in her eyes. Fate was playing strangely into his hands. A glitter of triumph flashed into his eyes, a glitter that faded into a look of wistfulness as they raised once more ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... point that he has gone far enough in cross-examination and returns to his periodicals and pamphlets. But there's something he likes—a wistfulness—in the young man's face, and he can't quite detach his mind to the presence of palaeolithic man in South Wales. At Swindon they both get out—there was still lingering the practice of taking lunch there—have a hasty lunch together ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... blossoms. The sense of the infirmity of life, the consciousness that it had no more than the signification of a dream with passing lights, or halting steps in the snow, or an old half-forgotten story, had mixed a deep wistfulness and melancholy into the very glamour of the globe, and become heavier itself for all the sweetness of earth. And Debussy has fixed the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... suggests, "a bare figure by Michelangelo, with unduly flexed joints, may come somehow to suggest the moral tragedy of life." Something in the face of an old man painted by Rembrandt may recall to us a similar outward evidence of inner seriousness, wistfulness, and resignation which we have ourselves beheld in living people. And we clearly value the poems of a Wordsworth, a Milton, a Matthew Arnold, not solely for the magnificent form and music of their words, but also for the sober beauty of their meaning. We may come to appreciate even the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... been lying in bed for some little time and commiserating with himself over his sad fate, the door opened and Betty, with the wistfulness quite gone from her face, came in. And such a Betty! Her brown hair was bundled away under one of Cyril's battered straw hats, and thankful indeed had she been that she had so little hair to bundle. She wore one of Cyril's sailor jackets, and a pair of his serge knickers, ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... loved your mother, Justin." The sharp, rugged features of that seared old face seemed of a sudden transfigured and softened. The wild eyes lost some of their glitter in a look of wistfulness, as he pondered a moment the one sweet memory in a wasted life, a life wrecked over thirty years ago—wrecked wantonly by that same Ostermore of whom they spoke, who ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... about it," she replied, a faint smile in her dark eyes that had in it something of wistfulness, something of self-mockery. She looked directly at him and let him have it full in the face. "I ought to be ashamed of it, I suppose, but I'm not. I've thought of you—that way—lots of times. All girls do, when they meet a man ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... of Mr. Begbie's imagination. Dr. Blund is the representative of all those—and their name is legion—who, in the crisis of the soul's secret history, have turned towards the Saviour's strange saying with the most intense wistfulness and yearning. Let me cite three instances—each as unlike the others as it could possibly be—in order to show that all sorts and conditions of men have at some time felt as Dr. Blund felt in those last hours of his. John Bunyan, the tinker of Bedford, was born in the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... wistfulness came into David's eyes when he put aside poor jumping-jack. Such a dear of a jumping-jack he was! You could have kissed the jolly red paint of him, and the pretty toy bank was a thing to hug tight under your arm. That ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... little sisters; how shall a man desert his family? He was born on a farm on the Murge, the watershed between this country and the Adriatic. Thinking of the Murge, that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills whose name suggests its sad monotony, I began to understand the origin of his pagan wistfulness. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... neither their ears nor mine." And he drew up a chair and sat down opposite to Wogan, bending forward with his hands upon his knees. The firelight played upon his pale, indoor face, and it seemed to Wogan that he regarded his guest with a certain wistfulness. Wogan spoke ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... curly head smilingly and, rising from the table, went round to Pan and leaned up to him with both wistfulness ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... was troubled with a sense of regret, noticed that there was a suggestive wistfulness in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the castle she sat sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was swathed in a long cloak of deepest purple reversed with ermine. Her face was thin and of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of wistfulness amid the shadows which her ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... that sometimes at the farm I used to lean over the wood pile for a moment just before supper to watch those purple October sunsets. I would hear the sharp ting of Andrew's little typewriter bell as he was working in his study. And then I would try to swallow down within me the beauty and wistfulness of it all, and run back ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... "here we are." His eyes met Mary V's with a certain shyness, a wistfulness and a daring quite unusual. "Get ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... the world, my darling, full of wonder and wistfulness and strange Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as I greet the cloud Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite dreams that range At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... a beautiful girl: rather she belonged in that very desirable category which is labeled "Sweet." There was an attractive wistfulness about her—an undeniable charm, a wholesomeness—the sort of a woman, reflected Carroll instantly, whom a ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... and pet him and make much of him, and towards whom he found himself absolutely indifferent. Was he falling in love? Had he been asked the question, he would honestly have answered that he was about the last person in the world to form a romantic attachment. There was no kind of sentimental wistfulness in his nature; his imagination had no poetical trick of investing the face and form of any passably good-looking girl with a halo of rainbow-hues; even as a lad his dreams had concerned themselves more with the possibility of his ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... library experience at college, stepped quietly to the desk and served the customer. Hannah dropped her magazine and stole nearer the alcove, listening to the story. Frieda looked up from her writing, as Catherine's voice, full of wistfulness, ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... have lived in peace, just as well without a church as with one. But the girl listened listlessly and unsmilingly, hardly hearing what was said. Going out of the room she sat for a long time on the doorstep, watching the forest path with patient wistfulness. But there was no sign of the young doctor's coming back and it was a relief when David came up the river bank. He reminded her that she had asked him to go with her to the Sisters' house, and she arose and went ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... the glow of her own Orient. I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies. I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief for the child that had gone—into this, if I did remark it, I did not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... filmy wandering eyes fixed themselves with an intensity of wistfulness on Mrs. Thornton's face For a minute, there was no change in its rigidness; it was stern and unmoved;—nay, but that the eyes of the sick woman were growing dim with the slow-gathering tears, she might have seen a dark cloud cross the cold features. And it ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... desperation looked down at her, and saw her face worn into sweet wistfulness by her illness, her dilated eyes and lips parted and quivering into sobs, ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for a longing so fierce had awoke in her that it gave her power to move again. Never in her life had she felt such a hunger of wistfulness. But Jeanne evaded her embrace. She stood ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... twilight. She was of the kind that old age would never wither. In the deep blue eyes was a patient, reflective look that told of a past but unforgotten romance. She turned from his gaze, but not before he had seen the wistfulness his speech had evoked. After he had gone, she ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates |
