"Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Emerson. There are many chalk eggs on the market. Most of us feel that to "be sociable" we must talk incessantly. True, there are sometimes dreadful pauses in conversation when no one seems able to think of anything to say, and the longer the pause the more vacuous one's mind. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if her husband should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so that she could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell. Thus Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments, the narrow views by which his wife—fancying she had achieved the first victory—tried to gain a second by bringing him back within ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... The vacuous, almost happy languor of the sick was replaced in Gerald by an irritable gloominess, decently repressed, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... looked round him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... lady is not at the head of her house it is certainly vacuous," Ideala agreed, "like the lives of our own ladies when they are not forced to do anything. Why, at Scarborough this year they had to take to changing their dresses four times a day; so you can imagine how they languish ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... faint dull vacuous smile flickered over his face, and he shuddered. "I understand! You come to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... stole lead! And they got off with all your money. Gosh! I'm glad I didn't have none along." His eyes were mirthless and his face vacuous. "Beats all. Never heard tell ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... might have guessed. I wonder it never occurred to me," Mrs. Linceford was replying presently, to her vacuous inquiry. "The name seemed familiar, too; only he called himself 'Dakie.' I remember perfectly now. Old Jacob Thayne, the Chicago millionaire. He married pretty little Mrs. Ingleside, the Illinois Representative's widow, that first winter I was in Washington. ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Boys in the back-ground, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... are about to be married; everything prepared—four apathetic bridesmaids, and the four acolytes in tights—who have possibly been kindly lent by the Convent for the occasion—in a vacuous row at the back of the scene. Fancy Manrico has forgotten to give them the usual initial brooches, and they feel the wedding is a poky affair, and take no interest in it. Leonora herself is in low spirits—seems to miss the confidant, and to be oppressed with a misgiving that the wedding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... Nick at last—"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... cellarers redoubled their activities, the flagons circulated more briskly, and the noise they made must have disturbed the monks entrenched in their cells against these earthly vanities. The laughter of Andreas grew louder and more vacuous, and when at last he heaved himself up at midnight and departed to bed, that he might take some rest against the morrow's hunt, he staggered a little in ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him—his tie, ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... mutual friends, driving past the Meadow Creek Paresis Club, where Dr. McMullen receives certain amiable but not entirely responsible persons, will behold you hanging cheerily by one hand from the pergola roof with a vacuous smile on your twitching lips, and will say to me sadly: 'Charlie, you knew him, didn't you, in the old days, when his mind was as keen and bright as an editor's knife?' And with chastened melancholy I will respond: 'Yes, George, it is true. And moreover I was with him on ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... feature, distorted the face that was once so mildly gay. Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim; then he consented to forget him, and went ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... final role in the free life of Liubka. She had already complained to Lichonin for a long time that the presence of Simanovsky was oppressive to her; but Lichonin paid no attention to womanish trifles: the vacuous, fictitious, wordy hypnosis of this man of commands was strong within him. There are influences, to get rid of which is difficult, almost impossible. On the other hand, he was already for a long time ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... was to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his own tediousness; ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... that's the Blackbird's note, the sweet Night's knell. Behold, Beloved, the penance you would brave!' 'Curs'd when it comes, the bitter thing we crave! Thou leav'st me now, like to the moon at dawn, A little, vacuous world alone in air. I will not care! When dark comes back my dark shall be withdrawn! Go free; For 'tis with me As when the cup the Child scoops in the sand Fills, and is part and parcel of the Sea. I'll say it to myself and understand. ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" tie pink; a Panama hat with a fold of light tan and white silk round ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... this," drawled Average Jones intently, looking the employee between his vacuous eyes. "Ransom shipped the chair to Plymouth Street and from there to Linder's house. He figured out that Linder would put it in his study and do his sitting at the window in it. And you were to know when he was there by seeing his feet in the window, and give the signal ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... places Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover There is nothing I do not question Two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money Vacuous countenances Virtues of her deceased spouse We never need fear that he will undervalue himself What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune Wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... was still playing looked up. He was about fifty years of age, clean shaven, with vacuous eyes and a weak mouth. He was the host ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes—I believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'—are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous, troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he supposed that when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be as it was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Then he would look at all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of lust, the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it was a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Whether it was deliberate intent, or just natural "horse" predominating his actions, it would be difficult to determine. Finally the post gave way and fell. The colt drew back and contemplated the opening with a vacuous eye. It was not interesting now. No, indeed! ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... that I've got anything against you." She addressed it as if there were an intelligence back of the vacuous pleasantness of the young face. "It's only that there's not any you and hasn't been for I don't know how long. It's so much deader than death, all ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the spirit turned into something different." And then Justin's hopes would have soared ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous. Lanterns swayed here and there, people were talking in an undertone on the launch and in the boats. She could hear Winifred moaning: 'OH DO FIND HER GERALD, DO FIND HER,' and someone trying to comfort the child. Gudrun paddled aimlessly ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty, with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy were ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... After living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... was talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson |
