"Dinginess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more and more dense as you approach the great towns. Yet this compound of smut, fog, and common air is an elixir of youth; and this is one of the surprises of London, to see amid so much soot and dinginess such fresh, blooming complexions, and in general such a fine physical tone and full-bloodedness among the people,—such as one has come to associate only with the best air and the purest, wholesomest country influences. What the secret ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... some fruit. We must not forget to state that the extreme cleanliness of the courtyard was such as intimated that mop and pail had done their utmost in that favoured spot to atone for the general dirt and dinginess of the quarter where the ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... were overlooked or forgotten. The spirit of the mighty dead seemed to hover around, as a sort of genius loci, rescuing the wretched tenement from otherwise deserved oblivion, and making its very dinginess venerable! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... be described are the dinginess of the walls, the smokiness of the ceilings, the grimy windows, the heavy, ever-murky atmosphere of these rooms. They were 8 feet 6 inches in height, and any curious statist can calculate the number of cubic feet of air which they afforded to ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... nearest in age to Marianne, and her favourite playfellow. She told of some of their sports in their London home, speaking of them with eagerness and fondness that showed what joys they had been, though to Guy they seemed but the very proof of dreariness and dinginess. She talked of walks to school, when Felix would tell what he would do when he was a man, and how he took care of her at the crossings, and how rude boys used to drive them, and how they would look in at ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but right long ago, As the cracks and the dinginess amply doth show; About the same time that a strange petrifaction Confined the incumbent to mere Sunday action. So many abuses in this place are rife, The only church things giving token of life Are the singing ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... paint for her mansion, and soon it looked new—dark red, with a gleaming white roof, while the rooms were painted in pretty fresh colours. "Won't Tommy get a shock!" chuckled Bob gleefully. The dinginess of the house had not escaped him on the morning that they had made their first inspection, but Tommy, who loved freshness and colours, had made no sign. Had you probed the matter, Tommy would probably have remarked, with some annoyance, that it ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... back to his hot little room on the fourth floor, happy in spite of heat and dinginess and a certain homesick feeling. Was he not to ride with Starr in the morning? He could hardly sleep for thinking of it, and of all he ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... here, as well as in all the gatherings of the people of this city, was the absence of dinginess and dowdiness that goes with poverty. In the great mass of stone houses, pretty brick and wood villas, and apartment "houses," the upper flats of which are reached by curving iron Jacob stairways, that make habitable Quebec there are patches of cramped wooden houses, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... positive picture is at once developed. At first it most commonly happens that the whole picture is sooty or dingy to such a degree that it is condemned as spoiled, but on keeping it between the leaves of a book, especially in a moist atmosphere, by extremely slow degrees this dinginess disappears, and the picture disengages itself with continually increasing sharpness and clearness, and acquires the exact effect of a copper-plate engraving on a paper more or less tinted ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... a hansom first, and then we'll invent something." He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... her his image as he had walked about the horrid little rooms, his somewhat stiffly held head not much below the low ceilings. He had taken in shabby carpets, furniture, faded walls, general dim dinginess. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere outside the Panada or the Kitchen of the Casa Kirsch. But in the Merceria I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice which bored the men from Munich to extinction—really they were so bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to the caramei man as the town's one excitement. I thought the illuminations ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... swear, Such a radiant dress; All the whitenesses we prize Suddenly before our eyes Turn to dinginess. Gone are all the shining joys That we held so dear; Linens, marbles, gleaming plumes We must hide in shadowed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these people do not clean their houses more than they clean their yards, yet their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... in other respects so far below it! Martins love to frequent towns, especially if there are great lakes and rivers at hand; nay, they even affect the close air of London. And I have not only seen them nesting in the Borough, but even in the Strand and Fleet- street; but then it was obvious from the dinginess of their aspect that their feathers partook of the filth of that sooty atmosphere. Martins are by far the least agile of the four species; their wings and tails are short, and therefore they are not capable of such ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... threshold of the outer door, that the domicile was not as he had known it. With the familiar fragrance of Earwaker's special 'mixture' blended a suggestion of new upholstery. The little vestibule had somehow put off its dinginess, and an unwontedly brilliant light from the sitting-room revealed changes of the interior which the visitor remarked ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... on Sunday, March 11th, and in our walk from the shore to the quaint old tavern known as the King's Arms,—combining much comfort with its dinginess,—we found the day was but partially observed as one of rest. The stores were mostly open, and the numerous bar-rooms noticeably so, after the usual style in Roman Catholic countries. The first impression was, that we were within the precincts of a large fort or military ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... vegetables strove to outwit the seasons, and before the brown cottage in which Cavendish had begun a successful career. The black roof-tree of the cottage sagged in the middle, and the weather-boarding was dingy with the streaky dinginess of old paint that has never had enough oil. The fences, too, were unpainted and rudely patched. Nevertheless a second glance told one that there were no gaps in them, that the farm machines kept their bright colors well under cover, and that the garden rows were beautifully straight and clean. ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... even my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds of primeval forest. I have ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... like the crack of a door by comparison with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... his own ancestor. He wondered to himself where lay the charm and power to attract in a place so colorless, and he thought, as was his habit with all interiors, how different he would want it to be if he ever became a member. His fresh young nature revolted at the dinginess and bareness of the surroundings. He couldn't understand why the men came here and what could be the fascination of sitting round these cold tables talking by the hour when there was so much happiness outside—so much of light and air and ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of coals, seemed wretchedly mean and small—and partly on the question of table cloths at tea, which Mrs. Jones had "never heard of," especially when the use of plate and lines was included in the rent. And the dinginess of the article produced at last out of an omnium-gatherum sort of kitchen cupboard, made an ominous impression upon the country girl, accustomed to clean, tidy, country ways—where the kitchen was kept as neat as the parlor, and the bedrooms were ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... somewhat higher than the wing in which they had been confined. Filthy truckle- beds and ragged pallets covered the floor, and, eked out by old saddles and threadbare horserugs, marked the sleeping quarters either of the servants or of travellers of the meaner sort. But the dinginess was naught to the two who knelt looking into it, afraid to move. Was the place empty? That was the point; the question which had first stayed, and then set their ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... squalor and luxury in one story of what had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun...." ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many of these powerful ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the five men housed under those flimsy coverings the somber hue of their nets was new. On leaving Remate de Males the insect bars had been clean white; and though they had grown somewhat soiled from daily handling, they never had approached the drab dinginess of the barriers draping the hammocks of the Peruvian rivermen. In fact, their owners had been at some pains to keep them as clean as possible, folding them each morning with military precision and stowing them carefully. Wherefore ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... might once have been devised for a man, but long since had fallen below that rank. It had a breadth of dirty canvas thrown across it, from under which the occupant had crawled out. Beneath might be seen the edges of two or three worn and dirty cotton quilts and a pair of blankets of like dinginess. Below this lay a worn elk hide, and under all a lower-breadth of the over-lapping canvas. It was such a bed as primarily a cow-puncher might have had, but fallen into such condition that no cow camp would ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... with your deliciously crumbling butter cookies and your kaffee kuchen, and your thick cream, and your thicker waitresses and your cockroaches, and your dinginess and your dowdy German ladies and your black, black Kaffee, where in this country ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... before, when Cousin Agnes was a little girl, for the cretonne curtains must once have been very pretty, with bunches of pink roses, which now, however, were faded, as well as the carpet on the floor, and the paper on the walls, to an over-all dinginess such as you never see in a country room even when everything in ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... and the day wore on. The hedges were growing bare now, and the leaves on them were turning red and yellow and brown; but the autumn sun shone, and there were space and air and sunshine all about them. Oh, what a change after the close, narrow streets, the gloom and dinginess, the want of space! Jessie's spirits began to rise. How could she be unhappy in this beautiful world, with home before her, and granp and granny waiting for her, and the cottage, and her own dear little bedroom. "Will my rose ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... waiter went before them up the narrow stairs and led them into a dusky, fady, gloomy-looking chamber, whose carpet, curtains, and chair coverings seemed all of mingled hues of browns and grays, and from their fadiness and dinginess almost ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... structure. A stone pulpit, huge and clumsy, erected by subscription to the memory of some elderly inhabitant, stands like a misshapen blot before the altar rails; a window, too broad for its length, and generally out of proportion, throws too much light upon the dinginess within; the general character of the ugly old place has lost something, but assuredly gained nothing, by these innovations. It is hard to put "a piece of new cloth on ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... the second-rate Old Masters. His work was hung up in any out-of-the-way corner of the gallery that could be found; it had been bought under protest; it was admitted by sufferance; its freshness and brightness damaged it terribly by contrast with the dirtiness and the dinginess of its elderly predecessors; and its only points selected for praise were those in which it most nearly resembled the peculiar mannerism of some Old Master, not those in which it resembled the ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... his clear-cut face with trim short black whiskers under a cap of curly iron-grey hair was the only warm spot in the dinginess of that room cooled by the cheerless tablecloth. We knew him already by sight as the owner of a little five-ton cutter, which he sailed alone apparently, a fellow yachtsman in the unpretending band of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... throne-room now in its condition of dismantled tawdriness, I could form no idea of the fine effect when King and Court in all their splendour were gathered in it on a ceremonial day. I tried to accept his assurances, but it was not easy to imagine such forlorn dinginess changed into dazzling splendour. Just over the throne, and in the centre of the Palace and of the city, rose in gracefully diminishing stages of fantastic woodcarving a tapering phya-sath or spire similar to those surmounting sacred buildings, and crowned with the gilded ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... flowered waistcoat, and hanging cast-steel rapier, and silken calves and buckled shoes,—and above all the abundant real point lace (upon which Lord Houghton more than once has commented with me as to the comparative superiority of his or mine,—both being of ancestral dinginess, and only to be washed in coffee)—these are ill exchanged for boots and trousers and straight black sword, and everything of grace and beauty diligently tailored away. When I last attended at ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for that journey to Beckenham, happy in the idea of escaping from the monotonous unfriendly streets, and the grime and mire and general dinginess of London life, when an unlooked-for calamity befell them, and the prospect of release had, for the time at least, to be given up. Young Lovel fell ill. He was "about his teeth," the woman of the house said, and tried to make ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a bull-trout, a visitor from the neighbouring river; but we all concluded at the time, from the extreme dinginess of its coat, that it had lived for years in its dark pool, a hermit apart from its fellows. I am not now, however, altogether certain that the inference was a sound one. Some fishes, like some men, have a wonderful ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... London a couple of days before the session began in order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him; and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... directions, thus giving the whole apartment a cheerful, light appearance, quite indescribable. The moment our stove was heated, however, the crystals became fluid, and ere long evaporated, leaving the walls exposed in all their original dinginess. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... fall to pieces, and don't know it then, but persist in packing them up and carrying them away for the sake of auld lang syne, till, set up again in your new abode, you suddenly find that their sacredness is gone, their dignity has degraded into dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the excessively heavy deck beams, and the general gloom of the interior, finished off in dark wood and ornamented with carved paneling. Filled with wonderment as to why I had been sent for, I halted at the foot of the steps gazing about the dreary interior, surprised at its positive dinginess. There were evidently six staterooms opening on the main cabin, and these must be little more than boxes to judge from the breadth of the vessel. What was farther aft I could not determine because ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... housewife. Like the worn white paint upon its exterior, the walls and floors within called loudly for a restoring hand. As for the furnishings, Georgiana looked about her with an appraising eye which took in all their dinginess. The old rugs and carpets were so nearly threadbare; the furniture was so worn; the very muslin curtains at the windows, though white as hands could make them, had been so many times repaired that even artful draping could not wholly ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... with him coarse bits of table-cloths and towels, which he laundered as if they had been the finest linen. He mended, he patched, he darned, and in the hardest fight the poor must face—the fight with dirt and dinginess—he always held his own. They had nothing but dry bread and coffee this evening, but Lazarus had made the coffee ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the honey of life was waiting in the comb in the hive of the world for Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, whenever he might choose to take it. But his choice was to sit in rags and dinginess on a bench in a park. For he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth, had stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the unarmoured, beating heart of ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... had a few moors and heaths where he could breathe, I don't know whether he could have stayed in England; and as for London, the din, the dinginess, the squalor of houses and people, sat like a ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at him more closely. I noticed now his frayed cuffs and the dinginess of his over-brushed clothes. Not even the magnetism of his spectacles could conceal it. Perhaps I had been forgetting something, whether the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... cold and dry, but he possessed a chestful of his father's, and used to read them frequently, by way of grateful change to his hearers. The sermons of the elder Godwin were recognised by the orthodoxy of their sentiment, and the dinginess of their colour, and were much relished; and so long as the stock lasted, the future author of "Caleb Williams" commanded a tolerable audience; but so soon as he had read them all, and resumed his own ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... most of the members of her family. She saw from the countenances of the three aunts that they were displeased with her, but the consciousness of this did not spoil life for her. She humanly enjoyed their discomfiture, knowing that it was based upon the dinginess of Fred's clothes and prospects. Their new broad tolerance of the Holtons did not cover the tragic implications of Fred's raiment. They meant to protect Phil in every way, and yet there was ground for despair when she chose the most undesirable young man in ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... lying on the lounge grew pale before the blood reacted in a purple flush. His very bulk emphasized the shabbiness of the stained and almost buttonless Prince Albert coat he wore, the dinginess of the little room he ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Pennsylvania—or perhaps I should better describe it as an amalgamation of Swansea, Merthyr-Tydvil, and South Shields. It is, without exception, the blackest place which I ever saw. The three English towns which I have named are very dirty, but all their combined soot and grease and dinginess do not equal that of Pittsburg. As regards scenery it is beautifully situated, being at the foot of the Alleghany Mountains, and at the juncture of the two rivers Monongahela and Alleghany. Here, at the town, they come together, and ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... turned up his light, and was prowling about the room. The clear inky dinginess that comes before the raw dawn of a spring morning, found his white face at the window, looking out upon the great ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... by telling him that in my country he would find that the negro was a person held in very high esteem, that the women in particular valued him for that very dinginess which the Americans found distasteful, and told him that I could name several ladies of quality who had ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... it the Hospital, for it seemed to be a receptacle for all the maimed and rickety chairs of the household, footstools in a dilapidated condition, and odd pieces of lumber that had no other place. Archibald regarded it with a troubled gaze; somehow, its dinginess had never before so impressed him; and then as he looked at his sister the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... I entered my seventeenth year. For the last two years my mind had been expanding and growing discontented with my lot. The moroseness of my uncle, the sullenness of his housekeeper, the gloom and dinginess of the bare rooms had grown insupportable to me. These alone I might have endured, but added to them were other sources of disquiet, not the least of which being hints from the housekeeper that it was time I began ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... one source of magnificent profit was the easy reception of any goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where they came from. But there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness or dinginess ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot |
