"Dullness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... circle, however, the countenances were not so gloomy. There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude towards our Emperor. It is certainly neither philosophical ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the good woman suffered such a disillusionment. Allie, she soon discovered, was anything but a child, or rather she was an amazing and contradictory combination of child and adult. What Mrs. Ring had taken to be mental apathy, inherent dullness, was in reality caution, diffidence, the shyness of ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... shores—Nelson, Collingwood, Cornwallis, Calder—were on the alert. Yet while England's very existence as a Nation hung in the balance, in the gay world of London those who represented the ton danced and flirted, attended routs and assemblies, complaining fretfully of the unwonted dullness of the town, or in their drawing-rooms discussed the topics of the hour—the acting of the wonder-child Roscius; the lamentable scandal relating to Lord Melville; or, ever and again—with a tremor—the possibilities ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... pleasing and tasteful shapes. The figures are small, with a well indicated outline. How pretty are the little subjects at the foot of each month of the Calendar! And how totally different from the common-place stiffness, and notorious dullness, of the generality of Flemish pieces of this character! This book has no superior of its kind in Europe; and is worthy, on a small scale, of what we see in the superb ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... very nice about my friend. Indeed, he was always nice, with the niceness of people whose hearts are genuinely humane. But this time it cost him an effort. His attempts at general conversation broke down into dullness. It occurred to me he might have been indisposed. But before I could frame the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... a time when they could no longer conceal their unhappiness. And as they would not admit the true cause of it, they cast about for another, and had no difficulty in finding it. They set it down to the dullness of provincial life and their surroundings. They found comfort in that. M. Langeais was informed of their plight by his daughter, and was not greatly surprised to hear that she was beginning to weary of heroism. He made use of his ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... yet, may I say frankly, that I read much and listened to much without being able to get a simple workable understanding of how I was to receive the much-talked-of baptism of power. That may quite likely have been due to my own dullness of comprehension. But whatever the cause, my failing to understand led to a rather careful study of the old Book itself until somewhat clearer light has come. And now in this convention I am anxious ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... himself,—it was as though some other force spoke through him, and though he scarcely raised his voice, its tone was so clear, musical, and penetrative that it seemed to give light and warmth to the cold dullness of the cell. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Abbey will once more sink into its accustomed dullness," said he. "Cokely went yesterday, and Tierney and the Ellisons go to-day. Don't you ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... of the genius which is always young—at Birns Castle, which is greatly to be preferred to living in Birns Castle and having nothing to be astonished at, as has been remarked by a high authority in connection with another castle. There was no dullness in this house, although only four people lived in it, but they were all busy always. It was surrounded by a wall which enclosed not only the house, but a garden, a miniature courtyard and a stable: the premises were small, but complete and compact, and the owners were very well pleased ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... of Domenichino did not develop themselves so early as in many other great painters. He was assiduous, thoughtful and circumspect; which his companions attributed to dullness, and they called him the Ox; but the intelligent Annibale Caracci, who observed his faculties with more attention, testified of his abilities by saying to his pupils, "this Ox will in time surpass you all, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... healthy walk was the matter. I went into the lobby to put on my snow boots and then—as is usually the case with me—my mind won. I thought of tea, crumpets and comfort. Oliver has gone without me, he simply bursts with health and extraordinary dullness. Personally I shall continue to be ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... and Dullness.—If the reporter has written a strong lead for his story, he need have small worry about what shall follow, which usually is little more than a simple narration of events in chronological order, with interspersions of explanation or description. If a wise choice ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... the chimney-sweeper's boy met his death by falling from a high gallery to the floor of the court-house at the York Assizes, whilst Sir Thomas Davenport was speaking, it was John Scott who—arguing that the orator's dullness had sent the boy to sleep, and so caused his fatal fall—prosecuted Sir Thomas for murder in the High Court, alleging in the indictment that the death was produced by a "certain blunt instrument of no value, called a long speech." The records ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Dave. You know I slept all the morning, but I'm not suffering from dullness. I'm imagining things. I'm imagining how much worse off we'd be if we didn't have flint and steel. I can always find pleasure ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Ohio, says: "This is the Sabbath, which, under present circumstances, can only be known by the neat appearance of the boys, in their shiny boots and clean, boiled shirts, as they make their early morning entree for company inspection of arms and accouterments, after which, all is dullness and vacuity. There is a sensible void, apparent to all, requiring something to remove the depressing dullness now surrounding them; and that something is to be found only in the presence of an accommodating and pleasing ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... the pleasant looks and bright talk of the young ladies who, as the French say, "preside" at these establishments. But should not the Victorian apostles of abstinence go further? It is well to replace girls by men, and thus subdue the bar to masculine dullness; but could not the Act of Parliament go on to declare that none save plain, grim-visaged males should be tolerated as assistants? The most inveterate toper might hesitate to enter twice if he were always ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... two friends; we have each pinned our card to the red table-cover in the saloon, to indicate our permanent positions at the festive board during the voyage. Unless there is some peculiarity in arrangement or circumstance, all voyages resemble each other so much, that I may well spare you the dullness of repetition. Stewards will occasionally upset a soup-plate, and it will sometimes fall inside the waistcoat of a "swell," who travelling for the first time, thinks it requisite to "get himself up" as if going to the Opera. People under the influence of some internal and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... dullness, many are reflecting on the repose and abundance they enjoyed once in the Union. But there are more acts in this drama! And the bell may ring any moment for the curtain ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... matrimony. It seemed to her now as if that precipitate taking of Arthur Alce had been at the bottom of all her troubles; she had been only a poor little schoolgirl, a raw contriver, hurling herself out of the frying-pan of Ansdore's tyranny into the fire of Donkey Street's dullness. She knew better now—besides, the increased freedom and comfort of her conditions did not involve the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... excellent a woman in every way, should be possessed of a husband of this kind. Beautiful lady, he is not fit even to serve you." The go-between should further talk to the woman about the weakness of the passion of her husband, his jealousy, his roguery, his ingratitude, his aversion to enjoyments, his dullness, his meanness, and all the other faults that he may have, and with which she may be acquainted. She should particularly harp upon that fault or that failing by which the wife may appear to be the most affected. If the wife be a deer woman, and the husband a ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... our readers—those at least who preserve their numbers for binding, and probably most do—than publishing the index in a separate sheet. The list of claims in this number will be found to be unusually full, a gratifying evidence that dullness of business does not cripple the resources nor abate the industry of our inventors. With a parting word of good will to our present subscribers and a welcome to those who begin with our new volume, we wish for all ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... on Saturday, after three weeks of the most astounding dullness, doing nothing and thinking of nothing. I hope my Brain likes it—as for myself, it is dreadful doing nothing. (776/2. Darwin returned to Down from Sevenoaks on Saturday, October 26th, 1872, which fixes the date ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... deep in a fresh game a few moments later, and Paul went outside. He was glad to see them so interested, because he knew that otherwise the curse of dullness might ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... thorns from the palm of his hand,—thorns from the stems of wild roses which she had brought him! The enigma was too great for Houston. He could only gasp with the suddenness of it and sink back into a dullness of outlook and viewpoint which he had lost momentarily. It was thus that old friends had passed him by in Boston; it was thus that men who had been glad to borrow money from him in other days had looked the other ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... for another, Mr. Basket, a married man, embraced the repose of a contemplative life; cultivating a small garden and taking his wife twice a week to the theatre, of which he was a devotee. These punctual jaunts, very sensibly practised as a purge against dullness, together with the stir and hubbub of a garrison town in which his walled garden stood isolated, as it were, all day long, amid marchings, countermarchings, bugle-calls, and the rumble of wagons filled with material of war, gave him a sense of being ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... speak, drew up all his facts and figures in the form of a hollow square, Tyson charged with magnificent contempt of danger. No doubt Tyson's method was extremely amusing and effective, and his sparkling periods proved the enemy's dullness up to the hilt; unfortunately, the prosy but responsible representations of Smedley had more weight ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... his heart. Temporary specific is found for that persistent heartsickness. The remedy seems so natural. Recent Paris and Calcutta retrospect chides his dullness of perception. He now fears "Granny" ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... at Trinity Church has for a considerable period been a troublesome, irregular, unsatisfactory thing. Years ago it was fine; there was full cathedral service in the church then; and the orchestral performances were attractive. But dullness and poorness are now their characteristics. The organ is one of the best in the town; its tones are fine and musical; it could perhaps be improved in one or two particulars; but everything in it is good as far as it goes. The tunes, however, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Lucy that her duty had sailed far away from her on some sea of strange distance and dullness where she could scarcely keep it in sight. Her own very voice seemed strange and dull to her and far away, as she said almost mechanically: "I do think it is my duty—to ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... to shed it on those who are not of their class. Selfishness is common enough everywhere, in men of all races. It is not selfishness, nor the growth of towns or decay of agriculture, which as a fact does not decay, nor education, nor any of the other causes usually given for the dullness, the greyness of village life. The chief cause, I take it, is that gulf, or barrier, which exists between men and men in different classes in our country, or a considerable portion of it—the caste feeling which is becoming increasingly rigid in the rural world, if my own observation, ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the smooth cap of the other. They had not spoken to each other all that while, unless an unfinished word or two of Mrs. Derrick's reached ears that did not heed them. It was Faith herself who first moved, perhaps reminded by the increasing dullness that her mother was feeling it too. She took her hand from the gate, and passing the other round Mrs. Derrick, led her into the house, and into the sitting-room and to a chair; and then went for wood and kindling and built up a fire. She went to the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... — This salutation Tabby returned with equal solemnity; and the expression of the two faces, while they continued in this attitude, would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such should ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... to enter, was also the first to rise, but Lady C. detained her by a slight signal, and she sat down again, and relapsed into dullness and silence. ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... name To gain so poor a thing, a maiden's love. A life where spins the sun from year to year, And where each day is ever like the next— A beauteous but unending sameness, is For woman only, but for manly souls, And most for thine, it's quiet, weary dullness. Thou thrivest best where storms are raging round. On foaming pacers o'er the heaving sea, And on thy tossing plank, come life or death, Thou mayest fight with peril for thine honor. The beauteous desert thou dost paint, would be A grave for high achievements, not yet born; And like thy shield, ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... no complaint now of Filippo's dullness. He soon learned all that the painter-monks could teach him, and as years passed on the prior would rub his hands in delight to think that here was an artist, one of themselves, who would soon be able to paint ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... Circumstances of her Charms, he saw her in all her native Beauties, free from the Incumbrance of Dress, her Hair as black as Ebony, hung flowing in careless Curls over her Shoulders, it hung link'd in amorous Twinings, as if in Love with its own Beauties; her Eyes not yet freed from the Dullness of the late Sleep, cast a languishing Pleasure in their Aspect, which heaviness of Sight added the greatest Beauties to those Suns, because under the Shade of such a Cloud, their Lustre cou'd only be view'd; the lambent Drowsiness that play'd upon her Face, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... their ideal, or on the other by amateurs who regard the Orlando Furioso as the perfection of poetic art. In a word, he hopes to produce something midway between the strict heroic epic, which had failed in Trissino's Italia Liberata through dullness, and the genuine romantic epic, which in Ariosto's masterpiece diverged too widely from the rules of classical pure taste. This new species, combining the attractions of romance with the simplicity of epic poetry, was the gift ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a heavy hand upon the innkeeper's fat shoulder. "Friend," he said, impressively, "I am one not noted either for dullness or lack of courage. I do perpend that to earn these pieces of which you speak one must perform some worthy business. Tell it to me, and you and Nottingham shall see then what Middle the Tinker thinks ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... only distraction was to go for a drive with Mrs. Fargus. But too often Mrs. Fargus could not leave her husband, and these evenings Mildred spent in reading or in writing letters. The dullness of her life and the narrowness and aridity of her acquaintance induced her to write very often to Ralph, and depression of spirits often tempted her to express herself more affectionately than she would have done in wider and pleasanter circumstances. She once spoke of the pleasure ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... come here again. I will not even ask you to do so, though your presence gave a brightness to my life for a few days which nothing else could have produced. But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness. I had to pay for your visit, and for the comfort of my confession to you at Koenigstein. I was determined that you should know it all; but, having told you, I do not want to see you again. As for writing, he shall not deprive me of the consolation,—nor ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... are not much interested, driver," cried Dalny, turning at last to the man who held the lines. "We are bored with this dullness, when Naples holds so much that may be seen by night. Take us ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... satisfaction of their feelings by the sacrifice of security of surface and durability of hue. The walls of our galleries are for the most part divided between pictures whose dead coating of consistent paint, laid on with a heavy hand and a cold heart, secures for them the stability of dullness and the safety of mediocrity; and pictures whose reckless and experimental brilliancy, unequal in its result as lawless in its means, is as evanescent as the dust of an insect's wing, and presents in its chief perfections so ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... refreshed and fed. There was a sudden significant flourish of frisky bowing, now up and again down, enlisting every resonant capacity of horsehair and catgut; the violins quavered to a final long-drawn scrape and silence descended. Dullness ensued; the flavor of the day seemed to pall; the dancers scattered and were presently following the crowd that began to slowly gather about the vacated stand of the musicians, from which elevation the speakers of the occasion ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Introductory Survey of World History, was a simple enough course to teach, but its very simplicity was its undoing, Forrester thought. The deadly dullness of the day-after-day routine was enough to wear out the ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Gulliver is only a consequence of what has gone before; and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock greatness, the pompous dullness, the mean aims, the base successes—all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful allegory—of which ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... round about us all are spread The ruins and the symbols of the winter that is dead. But the bleak and barren picture very shortly now will pass, For the halls of life are ready for their velvet rugs of grass; And the painters now are waiting with their magic to replace This dullness with a beauty that no mortal ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... tired of the confinement and the dullness. Besides, they are frightened. Goodness knows how they've got to know anything of what's going on outside, but they have; and if they hear of this fire it'll be all up with us. They'll go, and a sack of gold won't ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... in revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, The Juniors combine, boys, in friendly HIGH-GO. Glossology, by William Biglow, inserted in Buckingham's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... awhile; and this indeed did shame Paul a little, to find himself being used so lovingly for a sorrow which he was hardly feeling. But he said to himself that sorrow must come unbidden, and that it was no sorrow that was made with labour and intention. He was a little angered with himself for his dullness—but then song was so beautiful, that he could think of ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Calcutta is a very gay place, and makes up for its dullness during the summer. This is the season for horse-racing, hunting, shooting, and theatrical amusements, into which the numerous indigo-planters who come to town from their plantations about this time, enter with spirit, if the crops have been good and ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... world. He need not abjectly feel that he must accept sorrow, trial, defeat, and disaster at the moment, because compensation somewhere awaits him. The law of transmutation supersedes the law of compensation. One may bring to bear, at the moment, the potent force that transforms all: that changes dullness into radiance, trial into joy, depression into exaltation. And how? Simply by bringing to bear on the events and conditions of the hour the intense and creative potency of spiritual power. By means of this we shall ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... intimates had often wondered at her histrionic powers when she pretended to be stupid, which was her usual way of disarming persons who might have been suspicious of her. She had found out much about those archvillains Felix and Hortense Markle by an assumption of supreme dullness. But no one of her acquaintances had ever seen Josie assume the role of a skittish, dressed-up miss, painted ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... better. It would be something gloomy to be shut up here without light enough to study by; but with books and food one might spend many a week here and not be overwhelmed with dullness. The place is something straight, to be sure, and there is bare room for a tall man to ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... early years of life where the outlook for the whole future of the individual is so strongly stamped. To come into contact with no stimulus and arousing agent in the home, or the neighborhood in the earliest years is to become settled into a life-long habit of inert dullness. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... that speaks and moves its goggling eyes, The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts 715 Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats All jumbled up together, to compose A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill, Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, 720 Men, Women, three-years' Children, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... another law-Lord, who, it seems, once took a fancy to associate with the wits of London; but with so little success, that Foote said, 'What can he mean by coming among us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others[557].' Trying him by the test of his colloquial powers, Johnson had found him very defective. He once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'This man now has been ten years about town, and has made nothing of it;' meaning as a companion[558]. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... had not come in with the rest. If he could play, so could they. The little girls had no doubt George would present himself soon: they did not know where he had run; but he would soon have enough of the cold abroad, or of the dullness of the nursery. In another moment Miss Young was informed of the fact of Hester's tears of yesterday; and, much as she wanted the time she was deprived of; she was glad the children had come to her, that this piece of gossip might be stopped. ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... joined by the archdeacon on the gravel before the vicarage, they descended again to grave dullness. Not that Archdeacon Grantly was a dull man; but his frolic humours were of a cumbrous kind; and his wit, when he was witty, did not generally extend itself to his auditory. On the present occasion, he was soon making speeches about wounded roofs and walls, which he declared to be ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and troubled for him, and thought him in immediate danger. He is certainly much mended, though I still fear a consumption for him; he has not been able to move from Richmond this whole winter: I never fail to visit him twice or thrice a week. I heartily pity the fatigue and dullness of your life; nor can I flatter you with pretending to believe it will end soon: I hope you will not be forced to gain as much reputation in the camp as you have in the cabinet!—You see I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... very well, and had access to his presence when officials were kept cooling their heels in the Waiting-room. The President liked to hear the Colonel talk, his voluble ease was a refreshment after the decorous dullness of men who only talked business and government, and everlastingly expounded their notions of justice and the distribution of patronage. The Colonel was as much a lover of farming and of horses as Thomas Jefferson was. He talked to the President ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from people who once were fond of theater and music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new inclines ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... sillier inasmuch as the word "wrong" (bearing any significance of a darkened mind) had not the slightest application to "that other monsieur." There had been neither darkness nor dullness; his eyes, his expression, his manner, betrayed no hint of wildness; rather they bespoke a quick and amiable intelligence—the more amazing that he had shown himself ignorant of things a child of ten would know. Amedee and his fellows of Les Trois Pigeons ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it, composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the nautical enterprise of Holland. We only are to be reproached, who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types of sea, the small waves en ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... teacher chose it, Adam was satisfied, and there hasn't been a successor since with originality enough to start a fresh one. For they ARE a pretty limited lot, you will admit that? Originality is not in their line; they can't think up anything new, anything to freshen up the old moss-grown dullness of the language lesson and put life and "go" into it, and charm and grace ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... and the major gave the poor creature her liberty when he brought his wife to the North. Grace is sunshine embodied. She makes her old, irritable, and sometimes gouty father happy in spite of himself. It was just like her to accept of your offer last evening, for to banish all dullness from her father's life seems her constant thought. So if you wish to grow in the young lady's favor don't be so attentive to her as ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... had reconciled herself long since to the dullness of her life-partner; he could not help it and she had willfully married him in the face of as imposing a phalanx of family and friendly opposition as ever attempted to stand between a girl and ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... some degree of retardation, and impairs the drainage of the subjacent lung. Limitation of expansion will be found on the invaded side. The area below the foreign body will give an impaired percussion note. Breath-sounds are diminished in the area of dullness, and vocal resonance and fremitus are impaired. Rales are of great diagnostic import; the passage of air past the foreign body is accompanied by blowing, harsh breathing, and snoring; snapping rales are heard usually ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... returned by his companion, since none could be given; and when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness of sorrow to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... read. "They are very dull," said the lady; "what is the matter with you?" He confessed that he did not know, and began to talk learnedly about the Greek and Persian poets, until the lady was consumed with a fever of dullness. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... should be the purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on must be quite blue only at some given spot, nor that a ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... to whom to unfold and communicate his griefs, even one to love him unreservedly, all the inner beauty and brightness of his character would have blown and expanded in that genial warmth. He once thought that in Walter he had found such an one, but when he saw that his dullness bored Walter, and that his listless manners and untidy habits made him cross, he shrank back within himself. He was thankful to Walter as a protector, but did not look upon him as a friend in whom he could implicitly confide. The flower without sunshine will lose its colour and its perfume. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... society nor scandal: she had plenty of interest in her life, and in pleasing other people, whenever she could do it with pleasure to herself, and that was nearly always. Her present ailment was not languor, weariness, or dullness, but rather the want of such things; which we long for when they happen to be scarce, and declare them to be our first need, under ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... not spoken a word, at last replied: 'Do to me what you will, but deliver me from the dullness ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... the giver of anything. Birth is the one standing promise-hope for the race, but for poor John this Christmas held no promise. With all his humour, he was one of those people, generally dull and slow—God grant me and mine such dullness and such sloth—who having once loved, cannot cease. During the fortnight he had scarce had a moment's ease from the sting of his Alice's treatment. The honest fellow's feelings were no study to himself; ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... their talents, and did not make an effort to be celebrated, but just look at them! Their names are continually in the newspapers and on men's lips! If you are not tired of listening I will illustrate it by an example. Some years ago I built a bridge in the town of K. I must tell you that the dullness of that scurvy little town was terrible. If it had not been for women and cards I believe I should have gone out of my mind. Well, it's an old story: I was so bored that I got into an affair with a singer. Everyone was enthusiastic ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... thousand veterans under the brave Irish General Keane. The combined forces sailed in the direction of New Orleans, late in November. The wives of many of the officers accompanied them, for not a man doubted that the speedy conquest of Louisiana would be the result of the expedition. The dullness of the voyage was enlightened by music and dancing, and all anticipated exquisite pleasures to be found in the paradise before them. It is said that the British officers had promised their soldiers the privilege of the city, when captured, for three days, and that "booty ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... circumstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of passive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... barbarous nations and characters. Inasmuch as there are many criminals among barbarous people, barbarity, criminality and indifference to pain come together in a large number of cases. But there is nothing remarkable in this, and a direct relation between crime and dullness of the senses ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was not lighted without a purpose. The peasant had a son, to whom the flame had been passed on; for he aimed at the priesthood. This has ever been a refuge of ambitious minds that cannot rise by any other means above the dullness of the peasant's life, which is the more endurable the more the man is able to place himself upon the animal level of his plodding ox. The son was being educated in a seminary, but he was now home for the holidays. Presently he appeared. He was a youth of about nineteen, wearing ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... up, she was saying: "And we have taken a dear old home in Georgetown. No more glare or glitter. Everything is to be subdued to the dullness of a Japanese print—pale gray and dull blue and a splash of black. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... a cheery party; on the contrary, everybody appeared to be so determined not to say the wrong thing, that they remained silent; the dullness of the meal was only broken at long intervals by such carefully expressed sentiments as "I'll trouble you to pass the salt, if you please," or "Will you kindly hand ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... WE COME TO MEETING? Reluctantly? No. Burdened by a feeling of obligation to attend? No. Expecting something dull and tedious? No! If a meeting evokes only dullness in its members it is a dead meeting and ought to be laid down. A live meeting evokes life. Just the prospect of attending such a meeting should quicken us. It were better to come alive doing housework than to become deadened in a ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... that play the fool, in not recognising that heaven is inaccessible and doubtful. But clearer eyes perceive the not at all doubtful dullness of wit, and the gratifying accessibility of every woman when properly handled,—yes, even of her who dares to deal in ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... be true that God made man, man in his turn made and mismade God who thus becomes a Son of Man and a mere racial type. I need not trouble my reader with further notices of these extracts whose sole use is to show the phenomenal dullness of Lane's latinised style: I prefer ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... price and increasing the expenses did not lead to the generally prophesied collapse; this first experiment in modern methods resulted in the rapid growth of the Athenaeum's circulation, to the serious detriment of the Literary Gazette. Jerdan tried to stem the tide by publishing lampoons on the dullness of Dilke's paper; but when the Athenaeum was enlarged in 1835 from sixteen to twenty-four pages Dilke's triumph was evident. The Literary Gazette was compelled to reduce its price to fourpence in its effort to regain the lost subscriptions. Dilke labored ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... thinking and resolution, and so strongly confirmed by faith and hope that nothing can discourage it or make it let go. It is a bulwark against the faults which sink below the normal line of life, dullness, depression, timidity, procrastination, sloth and sadness, moodiness, unsociability—all these it tends to dispel, by its quiet and confident gift of encouragement. And though so contrary to the spirit of childhood, these faults ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... he answered. "I will not fight the dead." He had not moved in his seat, and there was a lethargy and a dullness in his voice and eyes. "There is time enough," he said. "I too will soon be of thy world, thou haggard, bloody shape. Wait until I come, and I will fight ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... indeed well with us. He wuz talkin ez a Dimokrat to Dimokrats; and it wuz appreciated. Strippin off all uv the disguise he hed bin a wearin for four years,—washin off, in rage and whisky, the varnish and putty with wich he hed shined up his dullness, and filled up the cracks and cavities wich hed alluz troubled him,—he stood forth ez we knowd him—Androo Johnson! How he did froth and foam! How he did lash his late associates! and how those Dimokrats who kum to Washinton ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... into the dull, domestic hind"? There could be no doubt that Sheila often sat silent for a considerable time, with her eyes fixed on her father's face when he spoke, or turning to look at some other speaker. Had Lavender now been asked if this silence had not a trifle of dullness in it, he would have replied by asking if there were dullness in the stillness and the silence of the sea. He grew to regard her calm and thoughtful look as a sort of spell; and if you had asked him what Sheila was like, he would have answered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... below there is a Ford, which has a distinguished claim on fame, inasmuch as it is one of the gateways from Burmah into Western China. This Ford is guarded continually by a company of Sikhs, under the command of an English officer. To be candid, it is not a post that is much sought after. Its dullness is extraordinary. True, one can fish there from morning until night, if one is so disposed; and if one has the good fortune to be a botanist, there is an inexhaustible field open for study. It is also true that Nampoung ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the hearing gradually grows less. Loss of hearing may take place suddenly, as after washing the head, or after a general bath, or after an attempt to clean the ear with the end of a towel. Patients will often say the dullness of hearing appeared suddenly. This no doubt was due to the fact that the mass of wax was displaced against the drum suddenly by an unusual movement of the head or the jaws, or the mass became swollen through fluids getting into the canal. If the canal ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... mankind," as well as common courtesy to great and friendly nations, required that sufficient time be given not only to Servia, but to the other nations, to concert for the common good, especially as the period was one of Summer dullness and many of the leading rulers and statesmen were ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... would be taken, or more than once it seemed to Murray that they completely retraced their steps; but after a time a feeling of dullness akin to despair came over the lad, and he resigned himself to his fate, satisfying himself that Roberts was being carefully carried, and then plodding on and on, plunging as it seemed to him in a state of torpidity or stupid sleep in which he kept ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... been troubled by the thought that she would never have any peace until she had paid that visit. It was by no means an agreeable one, for old Mrs. Woodward was exceedingly dull, and Helen felt that she was called upon to make war upon dullness. However, it had occurred to her to get her task out of the way at once, while she felt that she ought ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... perpetual contact with decay and pain—to look persistently into the grey face of death without having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their dull shoulders, or a note ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the first place I have considerably toned down the various exciting peculiarities of the original theory and have reduced it to a greater conformity with the older physics. I do not allow that physical phenomena are due to oddities of space. Also I have added to the dullness of the lecture by my respect for the audience. You would have enjoyed a more popular lecture with illustrations of delightful paradoxes. But I know also that you are serious students who are here because you really want to know how the new theories ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... strange sights which a voyage of this kind brought before him. The Nemesis steamer under weigh puzzled him at first—he then thought it was "all same big cart, only got him shingles** on wheels!" He always expressed great contempt for the dullness of comprehension of his countrymen, "big fools they," he used often to say, "blackfellow no good." Even Malays, Chinamen, and the natives of India, he counted as nothing in his increasing admiration of Europeans, ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, poor, and miserable did the paternal nest seem to him. The solitude and the dullness of a retired country life offended him at every step. He was devoured by ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded him with unloving eyes. His father disliked his metropolitan habits, his dress-coats and ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev |
