"Greyness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had ridden her was lying on his back at the edge of the cornfield, and the greyness of his face told ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... days. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought—Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we thought you ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... scores of times in that abominable low-lying part of the town, and I knew the symptoms. There was a faint smell in the air, an odour that bit the nostrils, carrying the reek of that changeless wilderness of factories and houses. The opaque grey sky lost its greyness and was struck to a lurid yellow. Banks of high fog rolled up the east and moved menacingly, almost imperceptibly, upon the town. For a moment there were dim shadows of the wharves and the riverside houses, with a church tower dimmer still behind ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... greyness silvers everything,— All in a twilight, you and I alike —You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone, you know),—but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... more gazing into the dark rafters, his jaws apart, the greyness of death settling about ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... and vividness as well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... that dim and sparkling esplanade the Siwanois had now seated himself. For a while, straining my eyes where I lay flat among the taller fringing ferns, I could just make out a blot in the greyness where he sat upright, like a watching catamount under ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... huge fire burnt cheerfully, and with his back to it, his feet planted wide apart upon the hearth, stood a powerfully built man of medium height, whose youthful face and uprightness of carriage assorted ill with the grey of his hair, pronouncing that greyness premature. He seemed all clad in leather, for where his jerkin stopped his boots began. A cuirass and feathered headpiece lay in a corner, whilst on the table Kenneth espied a broad-brimmed hat, a huge sword, and ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the haar, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there, shrouded in the heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that before many hours our eyes would feast ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... watched the quick, short breathing. It seemed strangely impossible to sleep against such odds. They saw the lines of the face grow sharper and whiter, the dark eye-sockets sink to a curious roundness, a greyness gather about the mouth. There were times when they looked at each other in the last surmise. Yet the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... their similar natures would grow more and more like one another. Then, turning on his thoughts, he dismissed them. They were the morbid feverish fancies of an exceptional, of a terrible night. He opened the window quietly so as not to awaken his wife. And in the melancholy greyness of the dawn he looked down into the street and wondered ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... had grown compassionate as she watched him, for there was a suggestive greyness in his face. It was evident to her that he ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... farther wing, went up some disjointed steps, and entered the deep twilight of a narrow and incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the early night. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... having been hard at work for some hours, with only the voice of the little rill, and some hares and a pheasant for company. The sun was gone down behind the black wood on the farther cliffs of Bagworthy, and the russet of the tufts and spear-beds was becoming gray, while the greyness of the sapling ash grew brown against the sky; the hollow curves of the little stream became black beneath the grasses and the fairy fans innumerable, while outside the hedge our clover was crimping its leaves in the dewfall, like the cocked hats of wood-sorrel,—when, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... had been abroad; the summer in Italy, the winter in Egypt, and had come back with our eyes full of colour, armed against the deadly greyness of England for three months ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... into the sallow greyness of his face there crept a dark flush, that faded presently and left his colour more grey and bloodless ...
— When William Came • Saki
... rapidly; the lights of Dover twinkled through the greyness. Micky stood and watched till they could no longer be seen. He was chilled to the bone in spite of his warm coat; he turned the collar up round his throat and thrust his hands deeply ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,—or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?—which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... deeper than technique. It is a difference of vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of The Professor, its stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, but not one that can stand among Charlotte Bronte's ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... no more than one-storey bungalows; half the folks one saw were coloured; a rare Malay woman flaunted colour like a tropic bird. Avenues of pines resembled huge scrub; they cast strong shadows even in the greyness of the day. Far above the huge ramparts of Table Mountain lay the clouds, and the wind whistled mournfully from the organ pipes of the Devil's Peak. In unoccupied lands were great patches of wild arum, and suddenly I saw the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Viking man, now completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we had been told it would be very cold. Then we ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... great fear, noted the failing light in her friend's eyes, but was convinced that, for all the weakening of the woman's physical processes, she desired as ardently as ever a sight of Mr Poulter before she died. A few minutes later, a greyness crept into Miss Nippett's face. Mavis repressed an inclination to fly from the room. Then, although she feared to believe the evidence of her ears, a knock was heard at the door. After what seemed an interval of centuries, she heard footsteps ascending the stairs. Mavis glanced ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... be the same as the first. "It would take nearly a month to refashion the book," he continues, "and I believe a month's mental labour at the present time would do me up." The weather in particular affected, him. For years he had been accustomed to sun- warmed Spain, and the gloom and greyness of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... some remote semblance of a man; but its unique characteristic was its awful greyness. It had the greyness of a rain cloud, yet rather that of a column of smoke. And from the centre of the dimly defined head, two eyes—balls of living ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... all over the flabby cheeks, hanging in big loose folds upon the short, loose-folded red neck; massive features, but coarsened and drawn; and dull, thick, silent-looking lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the red skin; pale blue eyes tending to a watery greyness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streakings of red; something inexpressibly sad, gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the whole face: such was the man who awaited Louise of Stolberg in the Compagnoni-Marefoschi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good Friday the 17th of ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... went with her, willingly enough, after I had kissed him. He didn't resent Susie's manner at all. As I watched he stopped after going a few yards, and looked out at sea, beyond the entrance of the cove. Everything was disappearing in a dull greyness that was beginning to blot out the rocky cliffs, and ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt. It was Youghal's ambition—or perhaps his hobby—to infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of the colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that were inherent from the Celtic strain in him. His success was only a half-measure. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven—these will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... body resembled a ball lying on a high little table. She looked at him temptingly and sympathetically, with an amorous smile, which the fog contorted into an insane expression. Kohn disappeared immediately in the greyness. She groaned and then ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... cold wind, and the song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odour of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind greyness ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... early in the morning. The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the club-house a cheerful fire was burning, and the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green, and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member nodded approvingly. A ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet, if set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his victim for some time without speaking. The other's eyes dropped, and a greyness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's face. At length the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... its yellow marbled paper, its long rows of hat-pegs, its disreputable array of umbrellas, a broken mortar-board and a tattered and scattered Principia, seemed dim and dull in contrast with the luminous stir of the early March evening outside. An unusual sense of the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life of all studious souls came, and went in his mind. He took the "lines," written painfully over three pages of exercise book, and obliterated them with a huge G.E.L., scrawled monstrously across each page. He heard ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... in the meantime? He seemed to have done all that there was for him to do. His executors would do the rest. He had no farewell-letters to write. He had no friends with whom he was on terms of valediction. There was nothing at all for him to do. He stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live in ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... room was draped in the grey of dawn, cold, harsh, lifeless. Every object on the wall was plainly visible in this drear light. The light green stripes in the wall paper were leaden in colour, the darker border above was almost blue in its greyness. For many minutes Hawkins remained motionless in his bed, seeking a solution of the mystery. Gradually the conviction grew upon him that he was not alone in the room. There was no sound, no visible proof that any one was present, but ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... do you good. There are hot scones in that dish," Pixie said quietly. The greyness of the street seemed to have entered the room—to have entered her heart. It was all grey. ... "We knew, of course, that you must like it, when ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... quick laying the table. Charolais kept up a running fire of questions as he did it; but Lupin did not trouble to answer them. He lay back, relaxed, drawing deep breaths. Already his lips had lost their greyness, and were pink; there was a suggestion of blood under the skin of his pale face. They soon had the table laid; and he walked to it on fairly steady feet. He sat down; Charolais whipped off a ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing variety of morals, menages, occupations and types, at present so mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... there aren't any, flies will come streaming in from the garden as soon as the light comes, following the scent of blood. No, not there, a little to the right, he heard her crying, and, finding a piece of linen and a hammer and some nails, he went out into the greyness still undisturbed by the chirrup of a ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was—attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a son who seemed ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... where Venice sat enthroned a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... reached? It was preposterous, ridiculous, unthinkable, the one as great a blunder as the other. So Stephen La Mothe gilded his gold, painting his lily lover-fashion time out of mind, and whitewashed into a pleasant greyness all the ugly smirchings with which Villon had ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... The greyness had rolled away now, and the evening grown exceptionally lovely, with clear skies overhead and great banks of pearly tinted clouds on the horizons. Where should she go? Only two ways lay open. Either she must follow Diana and Stanley up the valley, or she must stroll down to the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... now to a finish, but the upshot is sure to be a finish. Their anticipations of an unclouded dawn, when the present night has worn itself into the streaky greyness of morning, are certain to come to pass. The ordeal which we are undergoing is tremendous, but at any rate the nation and its allies will emerge from it rejuvenated under the spell of the present magicians, as the old ram emerged lamb-like and frisky from Medea's ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... must bob," said Betty. "I think I should have noticed your cherries bobbing, Miss Stone." She was looking intently at the quiet cheek close beside her own, with its little flush of pink, and the greyness of the hair that lay beside it. "I notice all your things, Nono," ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, while a member of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... came out on the edge of the ruddy ring of light and stood peering around at the woods where already a vague greyness was ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... gallery Where the chime keeps the night and day: It hurt his brain,—he could not pray. He had his face upon the stone: Deep 'twixt the narrow shafts, his eye Passed all the roofs unto the sky Whose greyness the wind swept alone. Close by his feet he saw it shake With wind in pools that the rains make: The ripple set his eyes to ache. He said, "Calm hath ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle—until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the way. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... old coat of her father's over her black dress, and went out, her nailed boots clattering on the cobble-stones. The men were up—they should have been up an hour now—but no sounds of activity came from the barns. The yard was in stillness, a little mist floating against the walls, and the pervading greyness of the morning seemed to be lit up by the huge blotches of yellow lichen that covered the slated roofs of barns and dwelling—the roofs were all new, having only for a year or two superseded the old roofs of osier thatch, but that queer golden rust had almost hidden their substance, covering them ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... odd whim of the weather the wind had backed around into the east, gathering the clouds once more. The brilliancy of the morning had given place to greyness, the high slits of windows seemed dirtier than ever as the train pulled into the station at Hampton, shrouded in Gothic gloom. As she left the car Janet was aware of the presence on the platform of an unusual number of people; she wondered vaguely, as she pushed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... me when I awaked into the Future, into the Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were hung with similar drops, like diamonds on ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... to right and left, up the glen and down it. There was no one to be seen. The sun had fallen by this time beneath the rim of the hills; a greyness of twilight was spread over the whole scene, and under the trees the dusk of night was already silently ousting the day. He turned once ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account" in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings. Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a superfluity of "matter in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... than usual that morning. After days of rain and greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had included the customers. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the room Wonder was sleeping peacefully again, but at the chill hour when watchers blow out the night-lights, and a dreary greyness comes like a fog through the curtains, Antony and Beatrice fell into each other's arms in anguish, for Wonder ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... enough. He had been wont to see similar things in the "Daily News," in Chicago, but they did not hold his attention. Now, these things were like grey clouds hovering along the horizon of a clear day. They threatened to cover and obscure his life with chilly greyness. He tried to shake them off, to forget and brace up. Sometimes he said to ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... walls of Pont l'Eveque stand out against the clear sky of morning, a light mist girdling the basement of the walls. Had we been a smaller and swifter company, we should have arrived an hour before the first greyness shows the shapes of things. But now, alas! we no sooner saw the town than we heard the bells and trumpets calling the townsfolk and men-at-arms to be on their ward. The great guns of the keep roared at us so soon ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... inward gladness of a princess when she has come into view of a desired kingdom—whether it shall endure or be destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon the prince reciprocating and making ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... and scampered off to the Rat Hole to yarn with the twins, making what speed I could in the fog and untimely dusk, and happy, for the moment, to be free of the brooding shadow in our house. The day was not yet fled; but the light abroad—a sullen greyness, splashed with angry red in the west, where the mist was thinning—was fading fast and fearfully. And there was an ominous stirring of wind in the east: at intervals, storm puffs came swirling over the hills from the sea; and they ran off inland like mad, leaving ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... fanciful to say of the three parts into which all Gaul is divided that by their colours may they be known, the blue, the brown and the ghastly, ghoulish, intolerable, bestial, but, thank God, passing, grey? Yes, thank God, the blight of greyness cannot last long; even now the scabrous plague is being burnt up and swept back and overwhelmed by the resistless flood, eager yet cautious, persistent yet fiery, of the blue and the brown. Hideous, pitiable, soul-searing are the scars ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not—that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort—with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... and pulses, like a distant music. Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was already sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging skyward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proudly to confide it to some friend, some mature and brilliant woman who knew the world and understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was worthy of pride. She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last things ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... the Thames Embankment, where everything was in perfect taste and order, where all was modulated, harmonious, soigne and artistic. Yet, somehow, the handsome chambers which hung over the muddy river with its wonderful lights and shades, its mists and radiance, its ghostly softness and greyness, lacked in something that roused imagination, that stirred her senses ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the artistic completeness and intense vision of Nocturne. He has also made two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two, he has had great experience of ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... apprehension crept over the girl. That Diana was not overboard seemed certain; but what new folly had she committed? As if in answer to the gloomy query, the lights were once more switched out, and a strange vapoury greyness took possession of the ship. It was that still small hour when the yellowing East adds pallor to the night without dispersing ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... long years. You remember how sad and dreary was the world yesterday. How dismal everything appeared, with not a glimpse of the blue sky. But look now at all this," and Douglas threw out his hand in an eloquent gesture. "See what a change has taken place in a short time. The greyness is gone, and look how blue is the sky, and how bright and warm the sun. Surely He who is able to effect such a marvellous change in Nature in such a few hours, will not forsake His servant in the hour of need. Cheer up, sir, and do not be so down-hearted. Though things seem dark now, yet hope for ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... Kabardian pipe. He was wearing a shaggy Circassian cap and an officer's overcoat without epaulettes, and he seemed to be about fifty years of age. The swarthiness of his complexion showed that his face had long been acquainted with Transcaucasian suns, and the premature greyness of his moustache was out of keeping with his firm gait and robust appearance. I went up to him and saluted. He silently returned my greeting and emitted an immense cloud ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in her cheeks ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dimly-lighted thoroughfares; ammunition vans stood at every street corner; guns rattled along drawn by straining horses, the sweat steaming from the animals' flanks and withers; an ambulance party sped through the greyness of the foggy morning, accompanied by a Red Cross lorry piled high with chests and stretcher poles, and soldiers in files and fours, in companies and columns, were in movement everywhere—their ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... Melancholy, lay a dark hand on duties and pleasures alike; it is possible to work, to read, to talk, to laugh when it is by. But it sends flowing through the mind a gentle current of sad and weary images and thoughts, which still have a beauty of their own; it tinges one's life with a sober greyness of hue; it heightens perception, though it prevents enjoyment. In such a mood one can sit silent a long time, with one's eyes cast upon the grass; one sees the delicate forms of the tender things that spring softly out of the dark ground; ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hollyhocks, a flood of colour, and with these as sisters, evening primroses, a great abundance. Lilac and crimson grasshoppers rushed over them, jumping into the air and into vision, a puff of bright colour—then subsiding into the greyness of the dust as they alighted and the sombre wing-cases closed over their little glory. On the ground when waiting to spring, these grasshoppers looked as if made of wood: they looked like displaced ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of those common-room encounters, Carmichael used to fling himself out into the east wind and greyness of Edinburgh, fuming against the simplicity of good people, against the provincialism of his college, against the Pharisaism of his church, against the Philistinism of Scottish life. He would go down to Holyrood and pity Queen Mary, transported from the gay ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... her light behind a heavy bank of clouds, a dull greyness pervaded the whole landscape, causing it to look weird and forlorn in the gloom. The few trees dotted about here and there looked starved and gaunt on the barren hill-side, with great skeleton-like arms that waved mournfully in the breeze; the ground uneven and parched—after the summer's ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cheek bones. The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... 5 Bringing the fields benediction And the hills quiet and greyness, Are my long thoughts ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, ... those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... but did not lock it again, motioned her to a chair, and dropped heavily into his accustomed seat by the writing-table, where for a while his fingers played nervously with the scattered papers. Now by the lamplight she noted the extreme greyness of his face and the hard brilliance of his eyes, usually so dull ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the minds of the Chinese are filled with romance and poetry, so that to them the invisible world is peopled with fairies and all kinds of spirits, both good and bad, the former relieving in mysterious ways the dull greyness that sorrow and disaster often shed upon the ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... conscious of greyness and the noise of winds and waters, but presently a black daub seemed to hover for a second somewhere on the verge of his world, to hover and disappear. He wondered what it was. A smut, perhaps. He rubbed his face. The daub returned. ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... brighter aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... politely. In a few moments I found myself in the greyness of the autumn afternoon wandering on the Thames Embankment like a lost soul on the banks of Phlegethon. It seemed as if I had never seen the sun, should never see the sun again. I was ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... glides between; The garland's vernal green Shrivels to greyness in its spectral hand. Joy-bells are muffled, mute, Hushed is the bridal lute, And general grief darkens across ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... eagerness of our pursuit we had come now into one of the densest parts of the forest that we had found, and after wandering on through a faint warm glow caused by the setting sun shining through the tree trunks, a sudden dull greyness had come upon us, followed almost at once by darkness, and we knew that ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... assent at once, and was forthwith ushered up into Mr. Wilks's private sanctum. The sub-editor was a dry, grizzly-bearded man, with a prevailing wolfish greyness of demeanour about his whole person; and he shook Ernest's proffered hand solemnly, in the dreary fashion that is always begotten of the systematic transposition of night ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... extremities of horror or loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical series of events ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... sunset in Venice,—that supreme moment when the magical flush of light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all covered with clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the hidden antique nooks where ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... you gaze southward across the barren, scorched valleys to the far-away mountains, to Monte Amiata, the fairest mountain of Tuscany. From the Ypres Tower of Rye or the Gun Garden below it, you look only across the level and empty Marsh which sinks beyond Camber Castle imperceptibly into the greyness and barrenness of the sea. To the east, across the flat emptiness, the Rother crawls seaward; to the west across the Marsh, as once across the sea, Winchelsea rises against the woods, and beyond, far away, the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into mere ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... much the more am I urged to recite it. The world disappears: I see only the grand reliques of a world—memorials of a love that has departed, has been—the record of a sorrow that is, and has its greyness converted into verdure—monuments of a wrath that has been reconciled, of a wrong that has been atoned for—convulsions of a storm that has gone by. What I am going to say is the most like a superstitious thing that I ever shall say. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the greyness ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... ahead of her the lights of the city shone blurred through the greyness, while above the housetops Auriga was driving higher in the east. With the first touch of fresh air in her face, she felt herself inspired by an energy; which seemed a part of the wind that blew about her; and ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... almost fell into Braun's room. It was quite dark. But Braun was waked by my screams and quietly lit a match. He asked me gently what on earth was the matter. The room was empty and everything was in its place. Outside the first greyness of ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... some little detail of the moment that seemed to justify hope. Perhaps I had some money to spend or a holiday to look forward to; though often enough I would find nothing to save me from realising with childish intensity the greyness of the world in which it was my fate to move. I did not want to go out into life; it was dull and gruel and greasy with soot. I only wanted to stop at home in any little quiet corner out of everybody's way and think ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... that is next to Conaire. Three chief champions, in their first greyness, are therein. As thick as a man's waist is each of their limbs. They have three black swords, each as long as a weaver's beam. These swords would split a hair on water. A great lance in the hand of the midmost man, with fifty rivets through it. The shaft therein is a good load for ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside Bludston would never have ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... bending his head before the tempestuous rain. A rook, blown impotently backwards, essayed slowly to cross towards the western trees. Her eyes followed him until a great gust blew him in a wider curve, backwards and up, and when again he steadied himself he was no more than a blot on the wet greyness of the heavens. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... my feet fingering their heads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses built with grey bricks, seems ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... savage who makes marks on himself similar to the scars carried by the warriors of his tribe (which is probably the origin of tattooing); the Highlander who adopts the plaid worn by the head of his clan; the courtiers who affect greyness, or limp, or cover their necks, in imitation of their king; and the people who ape the courtiers; are alike acting under a kind of government connate with that of Manners, and, like it too, primarily beneficial. For notwithstanding the numberless absurdities into which this copyism has led ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... better-known Harwich route being landed now and henceforward at the Hook at five A.M. I am sorry for this, because after a rough passage it was very pleasant to glide in the early morning steadily up the Maas and gradually acquire a sense of Dutch quietude and greyness. No longer, however, can this be done, as the Batavier boats reach Rotterdam at night; and one therefore misses the river, with the little villages on its banks, each with a tiny canal-harbour of its own; the groups of trees in the early mist; the gulls and herons; and the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... from a kind of mental greyness; he was all subtle tones; the laughter of girls jarred upon him; foolish smartness or amiable foolishness got on his nerves; he detested, with equal sincerity, bright dressing, artistic dabbling, piety, and the glow of health. And when, as his confidential friend—confidential, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... time I felt the grim thrill of life. I crawled forward to the cords of the release valves, made my uncle crawl forward too, and let out the gas until we were falling down through the air like a clumsy glider towards the vague greyness that was land. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... type-written upon the other side, and his gross, empurpled face was seen to change, to assume a patchy greyness. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... that cross it curve down and away; and at this time street after street to the west reveals, and seems to drop into, a mysterious evening sky, full of dull reds and yellows, amber and pale green, and a few pink flecks, and in the midst, sometimes, the flushed, smoke-veiled face of the sun. Then greyness, broken by these patches of misty colour, settles into the lower channels of the New York streets; while the upper heights of the sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with a mellow glow, curiously ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance, the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which the poor ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... of the forest, With thy pine-leaf hat and moss-cloak, Dress thou now the woods in linen, And the wilds a cloth throw over. All the aspens robe in greyness, And the alders robe in beauty, Clothe the pine-trees all in silver, And with gold adorn the fir-trees. 160 Aged pine-trees belt with copper, Belt the fir-trees all with silver, Birch-trees with their golden blossoms, And their trunks with gold adornments. Make ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... out all at once, and the inky sky which serves then becomes a delicate blue. The shadows melt deeper and deeper into the forest, clearly revealing the outlines of the straight-stemmed trees. There is just this interregnum of pearl greyness, a sort of hush-light, which lasts whilst a man counts twenty, before the silver lances of the sun are flashing through the leaves, and the grey veil which blurs the islands to shapeless blotches in a river of dull silver is burnt to nothingness, and the islands are living ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... is in love with the daughter, and his old mother is furious; and Brandon, they say, wants to cut Ronder's throat. Ronder! Mrs. Combermere paused, partly to get her breath, partly to enjoy for an instant the shining, glittering grass, dotted with figures, stretching like a carpet from the vast greyness of the Cathedral. Ronder! There was a remarkable man! Mrs. Combermere was conquered by him, in spite of herself. How, in seven short months, he had conquered everybody! What an amusing talker, what a good preacher, what a clever business head! And yet she did not really like him. His praises ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost. The cold, and movement, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... you, an individual whose face you can see, whose eyes you can read. He has taken unto himself the guise of a man; he has dropped the disguise of an automaton. In those eyes you may read the redness of fury or the greyness of terror; in either case it is you or him. And a soldier's job is ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... day brings back to a man the gloomiest things he knows," said Lord Dunstanwolde after a few moments' silent gazing upon the scene. "I no sooner paused here to look forth at the greyness than there came back to me a hard tale I heard before I left Gloucestershire. 'Twas ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... women who were dancing slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; and about the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, the gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one greyness, because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and turned from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow. Pillars supported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... workmanship of these heart-breaking little studies is, as we should expect from Mr. Gibson, honest and exact. Their grim view of human destiny, its all-pervading greyness, is presented with appropriate austerity; and this restraint and detachment increase their vividness and force.... The beautiful sonnets in the section called "Home" show that he, too, is ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... punctuate the back-street stillness; taxis hum past on their way to the West End, and engender a longing for renewed acquaintance with the normal world and the normal devil; from the ward window I can see the towers of Parliament as they stretch up through the London greyness. For an Englishman just returned from a foreign battlefield to his own capital it should be an inspiring view, that of the Home of Government, wherein the Snowdens, Outhwaites, Ponsonbys, and Sir Vested Interests, talk their hardest for the winning of the war by one side ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... couple of hours of the Museum of the Lateran that I can afford to be magnanimous. It's almost as if the old all-papal paradise had come back. The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool. and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... between us and eternity permits no lifting of its folds; there is no parting of its greyness, save for a passage, but perhaps, in "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns" Anne Coleman and her lover have met once more, and the long life of faithfulness at last has ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the causes of the harvest-moon, and volcanoes, and thunderbolts, and Lord Rosse's telescope, forcing her tired friend to reply by direct appeals, till Albinia almost wished her in the moon herself; and was rejoiced when in the dim greyness of the early summer dawn, the carriage drew up at Madame Belmarche's house. As the light from the weary maid's candle flashed on Genevieve's face, it revealed such a glow of deep crimson on each brown cheek, that Albinia perceived that the excitement must have been almost fever, and went to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can realize why, and I saw for a little into the outside edge of life as lived by these women. I wonder how I can best convey to you the horror and pity of it, for we—despite the greyness of our lives—have something within ourselves to which we can turn, but they have weighed even hopes and dreams with the weights of shame, and found their poor value in pounds, shillings and pence. That is why their eyes as they pass you ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson |
