"Emptier" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... careless laugh. 'As to whether I stay here so many weeks or so many years, that is a matter of supreme uncertainty. I never am in the same mind very long together. But I am heartily sick of knocking about abroad, and I cannot possibly find life emptier or duller here than I have found it in places ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... I give back into Beauty's hand Her borrowed songs, but I shall hold always Secret and safe from every care's demand, A flame of light to fill my emptier days, That quieter fellowship, which made a shrine This ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... white river lapsed along, Now a broad broken glare, Now winding through the bosom'd lands, Till lost in distance, where The tall hills, sunning their chisell'd peaks, Made emptier the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... to do right than discernment to sift right from wrong? Pity that so many daring, honest men should have been spitted on rapiers, cloven with sabres, riddled with bullet-holes, for the sake of a vain breath, emptier than the glass he had raised to his lips last night! And yet—he might search, and deny, and argue, and scoff—honour remained a fact. No, not a fact, a law. A law having rules, and conditions and penalties and rewards all defined in the human heart, all equally beyond the range ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... ever they should be fired. Inside the routine was as it used to be, and when I turned down the passage to get my permit to go upstairs, I could hardly believe that I had been away for so long. The place is emptier than it was. There is not the same eager crowd of country delegates pressing up and down the corridors and collecting literature from the stalls that I used to see in the old days when the serious little workman from the Viborg side stood guard over Trotsky's door, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... time I grew calmer, and I went back to the hotel and up to my room. It seemed emptier, blanker still, now that even the dead body of the dog had gone. In the grate, and scattered over the carpet, remained still remnants of black tinder. I felt suddenly tired, worn out. I flung myself, dressed as I was, upon the bed, and lay there in a sort of stupor. And the slow, dark hours ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... announce their safe arrival. Kitty wrote to her father a letter full of eagerness and promises, and longings for the holidays, which made Dr. Trenire smile and sigh as he laid it away in his pocket-book, and made the house seem emptier and less itself even than it had done before. In with her father's letter Kitty put one for Betty. It was the first that young person had ever received, and it so filled her with a sense of importance that Anna and Tony said she was almost unbearable all the rest of the day. How many times ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... emptier than the cottages about which our friends strolled. But the cottages were all ready, the rows of new chairs stood on the fresh piazzas, the windows were invitingly open, the pathetic little patches of flowers in front tried hard to look festive ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... too, is the perfume in the vial. But the man who has that vial opens the windows and throws the stopper away, and all the air is sweet forever. The perfume evaporates, forever. And this, Habib, is the miracle. The vial is never any emptier than when ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... impulsion he will soon cease to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past and the new resources of the present, and as he grows older, he will live in a mental atmosphere which is always growing thinner and emptier. Do we not all know many people who seem to live in a mental vacuum—to whom indeed, we have great difficulty in attributing immortality because they apparently have so little life except that of the body? Fifteen ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... the positivist theory. It is evident, therefore, that one of the first results of positivism is to destroy even the rudiments of any machinery by which one man could govern, with authority, the inward kingdom of another; and the moral imperative is reduced to an empty vaunt. For what can be an emptier flourish than for one set of men, and these a confessed minority, to proclaim imperious laws to others, which they can never get the others to obey, and which are essentially meaningless to the only people to whom they are not superfluous? Suppose that, on ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... still; long years have passed: it is only a crumpled little yellow fragment; but the world would be poorer and emptier to ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... will the visage fail, And grow again as he gazeth, black hair and gleaming eyes, And fade again into nothing, as for more of vision he tries: Then all is nought but the night, yea the waste of an emptier thing, And the fire-wall Sigurd forgetteth, nor feeleth the hand of the King: Nay, what is it now he remembereth? it is nought that aforetime he knew, And no world is there left him to live in, and no deed to rejoice in or rue; But frail and alone he fareth, and as one in the sphere-stream's ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... forsooth, under the impulse of a dream, he had set out thither, and was expecting God as if by a wonder, to unravel this more than Gordian knot. The mendicant answered "Good Heaven! are you so mad and foolish as to rely on a dream, which is emptier than nothing, and journey hither? I should betake myself to Dort, to dig up a treasure buried under such a tree in such a man's garden (now this garden had belonged to the dreamer's father), likewise revealed to me in a dream." The other ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... was some distance away, he knew, a good hour's walk on hard pavement and through considerable heat. But he had made forced marches in Sonora as badly shod and on even an emptier stomach. For Justus Miles, though he might not have looked it, was a bona fide soldier of fortune, stranded in New York. Five feet eight in height, he was, loose and rangy in build, and with deceptively mild blue eyes. He had fought through the World War, served under Kemal Pasha in Turkey, ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... summoned its dormant energies. It had not been severe enough to destroy, and only fierce enough to force folk to shake off the torpor that had lain upon them during the two previous regimes. People began to work again, bellies were somewhat emptier and heads somewhat fuller than they had been under Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon. Above all, the vapid and superficial life of the Second Empire was ended. People were more sober and inward and realistic than they had been. There was an unusual activity in all the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... countries. Railways are still conducted in some parts of Europe on the prison system, and Cartoner, glancing into the third-class waiting room, saw that it was thronged. The second-class room was a little emptier, and beyond it the sacred green-tinted shades of the first-class waiting-room promised solitude. He went in alone. There was one person in the bare room, who rose as he came in. It was Wanda. The ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... ran, most sadly flurried; And, coming back, thrust out her head, Which, sticking there, she said, "This is the hole, there can't be blunder: What makes it now so small, I wonder, Where, but the other day, I pass'd with ease?" A Rat her trouble sees, And cries, "But with an emptier belly; You entered lean, ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... Young,[1220] "have been all this day in the Palais-Royal;" the press is so great that an apple thrown from a balcony on the moving floor of heads would not reach the ground. The condition of these heads may be imagined; they are emptier of ballast than any in France, the most inflated with speculative ideas, the most excitable and the most excited. In this pell-mell of improvised politicians no one knows who is speaking; nobody is responsible for what he says. Each ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Zelotes walked alone to and from the office. Olive Snow no longer baked and iced large chocolate layer cakes because a certain inmate of her household was so fond of them. Rachel Ellis discussed Foul Play and Robert Penfold with no one. The house was emptier, more old-fashioned and behind the times, more lonely—surprisingly empty and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... period of life when many have been living on the capital of their acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were at twenty, Dudley Veneer was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his present years. He had entered that period which marks the decline of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... o' brave man will slap children, an' call a boy a calf, an' bully timid women, an' knock down little Chinks and dagoes! Oh, A know his kind o' thunder-barrel bravery, that makes the more noise the emptier and bigger it is—they're thick as louse ticks under the slimy side of a dirty board in this world, Wayland; an' they're thick in the girth an' thicker in the skull." Matthews had taken one of the Forest axes from the saddle. He left the whiskey ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... of Representatives was early deserted. An adjournment would hardly have made it emptier. The speaker, it is true, retained his chair, but no business of moment was or could be attended to. Members all rushed in to hear Mr. Webster, and no call of the House or other parliamentary proceedings could call them back. ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in point of actual music, we cannot fail to find an emptier, a more grandiose manner in all these symphonic poems than in the two symphonies. It seems as if an unconscious sense of the greater nobility of the classic medium drove Liszt to a far higher inspiration in ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp |
