"Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense of walking very fast—almost of taking flight—down a long dim corridor, and of a door that opened into an immense room. All that I remember of it, as I saw it then, was a number of pastel portraits of weak, vacuous individuals, in dulled, gilt, oval frames. The heads stood out from the panelling and stared at me from between ringlets, from under powdered hair, simpering, or contemptuous with the expression that must have prevailed in the monde of the time before the Revolution. At a great distance, ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... many chalk eggs on the market. Most of us feel that to "be sociable" we must talk incessantly. True, there are sometimes dreadful pauses in conversation when no one seems able to think of anything to say, and the longer the pause the more vacuous one's mind. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes—I believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'—are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, the fact that she contemplates purchasing the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... had had a few words with my hostess, the crowd resolved itself into a dozen persons at most, and seeing Karine at a far end of the room surrounded by three or four vacuous-looking young men, I desperately ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... methods of finding it out. He accordingly set off at his best pace, and pushed Ladoc so hard, that he arrived at the upper fishery in a state of profuse perspiration, with a very red face, and with a disagreeably vacuous feeling about the ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... many others, whose mental processes are a feeble imitation of its own. Thus it came to pass that, as the years rolled on, Harston learned to lean more and more upon his old school-fellow, grafting many of his stern peculiarities upon his own simple vacuous nature, until he became a strange parody of the original. To him Girdlestone was the ideal man, Girdlestone's ways the correct ways, and Girdlestone's opinions the weightiest of all opinions. Forty years of this undeviating fidelity must, however he might conceal ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... flung herself in front of him. "Pig!" she flamed. She turned furiously on her father, whose vacuous grin faded as she cursed him shrilly ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the fury of the storm, that Montesma's opinion had been formed. Smithson began to think that his friend was right. The sailors had honest countenances, but they looked horribly stupid. Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis?—could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... two later she could watch them, although never without profound emotion. Two hundred girls, ranging in years from ten to twenty, with roughly clipped hair, and the hideous gray-green checked aprons of the institution. Two hundred faces, sullen or vacuous, pretty, silly faces, hard faces, faces tragically hopeless and pale. These young things were offenders against the law, shut away here behind iron bars for the good of the commonwealth. Julia, whose life had made her wise ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... twittering manner of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess' peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... as grandpa called him, though he wasn't a relation—was a very tall, thin man with a blonde, rather vacuous face; but at exhortation and prayer he "had the gift." For so good a man, he had a remarkably poor opinion of the virtues of his fellow-men. Missy couldn't understand half his fiery eloquence; but she ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... by all means," repeated the Doctor. "Isn't it nearly dinner-time? I am starving. I have been twenty miles round the country to-day, and when I come in I find that long-legged fellow Morris philandering away, and have to listen to his vacuous nonsense for an hour. Whatever brings him here so often? He ought to have something better to do with his time than to be idling it away over afternoon tea. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... [contraction of 'stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... there was of Lulu's visit. Father couldn't help remembering her suggestion that they ought to bag a social or artistic lion as an attraction for "The T Room." He was delighted to find that, after weeks of vacuous worry, he had ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... genius is that it has made his holy retreat fashionable. The villas rise in rows along the edges of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where the feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. A stream of chattering, vacuous, indifferent tourists pours listlessly along the road from table-d'hote to table-d'hote. The turbid outflow of the vulgar world seems a profanation of these august haunts. One hopes despairingly that something ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... what I choose—and sat down to think. But I found it hard to give my thoughts to anything. There was a hollow somewhere in my mind into which all serious thoughts fell jumbled. I felt neither pained nor confused, but only vacuous. I battled with this feeling until I subdued it. Then I grasped the situation firmly. What object have I, here and now, and everywhere and always, next to the rectitude of my own soul? There is only one ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... disappear &c. 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c. (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; " an ocean of dreams ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I had an impression that you were there. I fancied you were from father's carefully vacuous look whenever I glanced at his face. But were you careful about what you said, and did you see Menlove? I felt all the time that I had done wrong in letting you come; the gratification to you was not worth the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Scotland; and among the rocks and the heather Ernest felt he could endure Lord Exmoor and Lord Lynmouth a little more resignedly than among the reiterated polite platitudes and monotonous gaieties of the vacuous London drawing-rooms. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... I'm not at all interested in that addlepated, monkey-faced nincompoop. He's after my daughter, but he shall never marry her. Why, if wives could be supported for fifty cents a year, that empty-headed specimen of vacuous mentality couldn't even keep ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... qualities, that seemed to be by far the greater proportion of all the men one saw about in buses and in the streets and met in business; tabby cats—sloppy, old-womanish creatures. Cheshire cats—the kind that grinned out of vacuous minds and that never could speak to a woman without grinning; the unattached men at the boarding house invariably were of the Cheshire-cat cats. Tomcats—the beastly ones with lecherous eyes that looked at you. "Of course they're beasts." It had been a large experience of the tomcat ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... the sexual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fuerbringer, and Loewenfeld have all alike remarked) made a virtue of their weakness. Many others, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... paralysis had fallen on their wits. They were stunned under the shock of the blow he had dealt them. Anon there would be railings and to spare—against him, against themselves, against the dead man above stairs, against Fate, and more besides. For the present there was this horrid, almost vacuous calm. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... He stopped, and stepped back from Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing continue for ever, or will a new era dawn?" Not a bit! Mrs. Lessways ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... group dominated for the moment by an angular woman who was saying loud and penetrating things about the suffrage, Mrs. Pett had seized and removed a tall, blonde young man with a mild, vacuous face. For the past few minutes this young man had been sitting bolt upright on a chair with his hands on his knees, so exactly in the manner of an end-man at a minstrel show that one would hardly have been surprised had he burst into ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... beast of burden, a creature in whom civic virtues of a high order were not likely to develop. If he betook himself to the town his possible usefulness lessened in proportion as he fell into drunken or dissolute habits, or lapsed into a state of lazy and vacuous dreaminess, enlivened only by chatter or the rolling of a cigarette. On the other hand, when employed in a capacity where native talent might be tested, he often revealed a power of action which, if properly guided, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... of plantation life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog. He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the overseer's whip when his labours flagged, and ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... done! My overshadowing Spirit and Might with thee I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth; Boundless the Deep, because I Am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I, uncircumscribed myself, retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessity and Chance Approach not me, and what I will is Fate. So spake the Almighty, and to what he spake His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect. Immediate ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the intellectual condition of the passengers, I should say that faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea-monster on whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions. One thing above all struck me as never before,—the terrible ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He couldn't ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... him, after being led to a corner seat by the obsequious head waiter. There was a preponderance of fat old men and vacuous looking young girls of the type designated on Broadway as "chickens." Here and there a slumming party was to be seen—elderly women and ill-at-ease men, staring curiously at the diners and dancers; young married couples who seemed to be enjoying their self-thrilled deviltry and new-found freedom. ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... lies not in knowledge of it but in assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has power—power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... was attempted for a third time, and then relinquished in favor of a waltz. Miniature couples circled and staggered, the girls again prim, the boys stolid or with working mouths, or as smooth and vacuous as chestnuts, little sailors and apparitions in white, obviously enjoying their employment. During this not a word was exchanged; except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab of fat in exaggerated ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... wreathed her flabby face in a vacuous smile. She bobbed up from her seat, bringing the oilcloth bag with her, and towering over Janice Day in ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... grove. He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... pale blue as his hair was pale yellow, seemed filled with an immortal dreaming, the stuff of which no man knew, and himself least of all. Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous innocence. At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the composition of ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... principles were known by the firm stand she took against common incentives to dissipation and irreligion—such as card-playing and Sunday entertainments—against the introduction of questionable topics, unseemly language, and vacuous frivolity into conversation. Her religious influence, thus far, was almost a silent or negative one; but it had its effect on others, and laid the foundation of that direct searching and far-reaching influence, which, under the Divine blessing, ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... was capable of passionate vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His laughter ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... "I 'm not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. And as for making acquaintances—save me from those I 've made ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... extensive foreign travel, spent his life at Breslau as an exemplary and highly esteemed official of the town. Incidentally he poetized in the inflated and ornate style which has given the so-called second Silesian school its evil reputation. His work is decidedly vacuous as poetry, but has its interest as indicating the literary drift of the age of puffs, powder, and pedantry. The selections follow Bobertag's edition ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... to an ideal of life rather than to life itself Truthful Turn of the talk toward the mystical Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian Unfailing American kindness Used to ingratitude from those he helped Vacuous vulgarity of its texts Visited one of the great mills Visitors of the more inquisitive sex Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal Warner's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c 137; spectral &c 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; an ocean of dreams without a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shoulders, indeed, when he came back to himself, and smile at these dreams of the future which he indulged in hours of vacuous idleness; but this self-contempt of a man who catches himself in the very act of flagrant nonsense was nevertheless succeeded by the hope of not losing all the advantages of an honest delusion; and he could ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... elderly men, with grave, rather vacuous faces, and grizzled beards, stand in the court-yard of an ancient palace. On one side is the peristyle, with its square stunted pillars, looking as if the weight above crushed them, though it wearies them no more than the heavens do Atlas; on the other, a gateway, vast, low-browed, shadowy with ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... contagious disease. And these people, bred on this pabulum, in turn make books. If one, it is now admitted, can do nothing else in this world, he can write, and so the evil widens and widens. No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life. A princess born may have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet in the judgment the responsibility will rest upon the writers ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... brocade-covered piano arrested Wilhelm's attention. First of all, Pilar in two different positions, then the pictures of three children, a girl and two boys, and finally the full-length portrait of a gentleman in the embroidered dress coat and sword of the diplomatic service, and the handsome, vacuous, carefully groomed head of a ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... made sure it would be the signal for an instant rising, I was struck dumb with wonder to find that even this had been prepared and was to be accepted. I went from one to another in the Liberal camp, and all were in the same story, all had been drilled and schooled and fitted out with vacuous argument. "The lads had better see some real fighting," they said; "and besides, it will be as well to capture Gerolstein; we can then extend to our neighbours the blessing of liberty on the same day that we snatch it for ourselves; and the republic will be all the stronger to resist, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the railway carriage, he had time to consider the note in all its aspects and in its relation to the extraordinary events of the day. There were but two other occupants of the carriage, an old gentleman with a white beard, and a young Hungarian officer—a vacuous looking youth in uniform—neither of them obviously of material from which secret service agents are made. After the experience at the Konopisht railway station, Renwick had no humor to be shot at in such close quarters, where the range would necessarily be deadly. He settled ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem. The town lay at the sea's edge on a strip of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band. Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the sea-following range of the Cordilleras. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... this particular form of sport,—places, where, if you do not at least talk about hunting and nothing BUT hunting, you are set down as a fool. Politics, art, literature,—these matters brought into conversation merely excite a vacuous stare and yawn,—and you may consider yourself fortunate if, in alluding to such things at all, you are not considered as partially insane. To obtain an ordinary reputation for common-sense in an English hunting county, you must talk horse all day and play Bridge all night,—then ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... places Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover There is nothing I do not question Two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money Vacuous countenances Virtues of her deceased spouse We never need fear that he will undervalue himself What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune Wholesale ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the right sort!—She was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about her,—the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,—"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"—the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,—a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,—pray for her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a soul to heaven ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... recitations.... She decided that most of them were earnest-minded but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do. They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big study-hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes and crayon-boxes. As a provincial, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... quite innocent of any intention of sarcasm. But her mind, like those of so many unoccupied, and consequently self-occupied persons, was addicted to speculation of a minor and vacuous sort. She was also liable —as such persons often are—to mistake cavilling for spirit and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... child let him go, his head drooped, and then he turned and looked at me with a silly, vacuous smile. I looked away hurriedly; this was not a man with whom I cared to ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... that I've got anything against you." She addressed it as if there were an intelligence back of the vacuous pleasantness of the young face. "It's only that there's not any you and hasn't been for I don't know how long. It's so much deader than death, all ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the spirit turned into something different." And then Justin's hopes ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... over the cliffs supports the adventurous bird-nester in safety above the murmuring sea. They who clasp Christ's hand outstretched from above, may swing over the deepest, most vacuous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... of Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge and Lenard. The human optic nerve is affected by a very small range in the waves that exist in the ether. Beyond the visible spectrum of common light are vibrations which have long been known as heat or as photographically active. Crookes in a vacuous bulb produced soft light from high tension electricity. Lenard found that rays from a Crookes' tube passed through substances opaque to common light. Roentgen extended these experiments and used the rays photographically, taking pictures of the bones of the hand ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... Gage carried the slack form inside. Then, his shoulders sagging, the heavy pistol in his right hand coming to a poise, the fingers of the left hand brushing the butt of the weapon in the holster at his left hip, the vacuous gleam in his eyes telling them all that his senses were alert to catch the slightest movement, he ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those vacuous features—a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some past time, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... intended for a laugh, looking unusually bored and vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately strolling away between ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... broad walk of the Villa, and walked towards the kiosk. Near it, on the small, green chairs, were some ladies swathed in gigantic floating-veils, talking to two or three very smart young men in white suits and straw hats, who leaned forward eying them steadily with a determined yet rather vacuous boldness that did not disconcert them. One of the ladies, dressed in black-and-white check, was immensely stout. She seemed to lead the conversation, which was carried on with extreme vivacity in very ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous ass's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen lady in ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... from his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an expression ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... from Las Vegas marched in. Between them was their prisoner, a boy with a vacuous face, clad in a straitjacket that seemed to make no difference at all to him. His mind was—somewhere else. But his body was trapped between the FBI agents: the body ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... spirit of the northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Peggy opened her eyes, there was no light of reason in them—only the vacuous, unseeing stare of a ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... other circumstances, Lavender would have dismissed with contempt as an excellent specimen of the unmitigated cad. He wore a white waistcoat, purple gloves and a green sailor's knot with a diamond in it, and there was a cheery, vacuous, smiling expression on his round face as he industriously smoked a cheroot and made small jokes to the friends who had come to see him off. One of them was a young woman, not very good looking perhaps, who did not join in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... said the doctor. He was looking at the window, as though at some object of great interest to be seen thence. His tone was gentle and unaffected. For the twentieth time Edwin privately admitted that in spite of the weak, vacuous smile which seemed to delight everybody except himself, there was a sympathetic quality in this bland doctor. In common moments he was common, but in the rare moment when a man with such a smile ought to be at his worst, a certain soft ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... was startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught the instructor's ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... the foolish, vacuous laugh of a man whose thoughts are too happy for the banality ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... did not answer. His countenance, expressive for a moment, was now reserved. His eyes became vacuous. He did not appear to hear the skipper's wondering question. He was now attending to his own monologue. His lips let fall, as if mechanically, in a low murmuring ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is not to be taken seriously, and I hold that any kind of conversation goes, as long as it is properly vacuous and irrelevant. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... know," replied Godfrey in a somewhat vacuous fashion. "It was all the same to me if we were hunting for young jackdaws or the man in the moon, as long as ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... invited everywhere; though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington (Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of the house of Podbury), the Baronet of the North, the gallant Crackthorpe, the first ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to the bottom of the river that yesterday at the Cote Dorion? Why had he been saved by this yokel at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain hut, wrapped in silence and lost to the world? Why had his brain and senses lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty consciousness? Was it fate? Did it not seem probable that the Great Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the shores of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... out as a sort of auditorium, and in it some fifty or sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering in the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... character of water as compared with the denser land. Siemens endeavoured to render this difference visible by means of mercury contained in a chamber having a bottom extremely sensitive to the pressure of the mercury upon it, and resembling in some respects the vacuous chamber of an aneroid barometer. Just as the latter instrument indicates the pressure of the atmosphere above it, so the bathometer was intended to show the pull of the earth below it; and experiment proved, we believe, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... result is a succession of loose-jointed scenes[177]. The Aul. too is fragmentary and episodical. The Trin. is insufferably long-winded, with insufficient comic accompaniment. The Cis. is a wretched piece of vacuous inanity[178]. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... woman whose fetich was society with a big "S," and she idolised her only son, a rather vacuous youth who had just ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... be detected in modern youth of both sexes. I did not pursue the question, but alluded to autumn gaieties. She spoke of them without enthusiasm. Miss Somebody's wedding was very dull, and Mrs. Somebody Else's dance manned with vile and vacuous dancers. At the Opera the greatest of German sopranos sang false. All human institutions had taken a crooked turn, and her cat could not be persuaded to pay the commonest attention to its kittens. Then she asked ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... his hearers, than truly representing the speaker's feeling. Then my thoughts reverted to the talk I had overheard, when "Pickles" was made to see veritable showers of "greenbacks" raining into his vacuous pocket. I smiled to myself; and then a spirit of audacity coming over me, I determined to ascertain what Castleton would say to me on the currency question. I concluded to admit that I had overheard through my open window the conversation on monetary ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... and unpassionate and still, Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... The first day of November came, to find the chamber a wide, vacuous thing now, sheltering stone and refuse and two struggling men,—nothing more. Fairchild ceased his labors and mopped his forehead, dripping from the heat engendered by frenzied labor; without the tunnel opening, the snow lay deep upon the mountain sides, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... persons say, when you ask them if they are using a condensing engine, "I can not use it; I have not water enough." A very sufficient answer indeed, if an injection condenser or an ordinary surface condenser constituted the sole means by which a vacuous condition might be obtained; but a very insufficient answer, having regard to the existence of the evaporative condenser, as by its means, whenever there is water enough for the feed of a non condensing engine, there ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead which was ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty, with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... reflected from the screen, revealed a throng of repulsive faces, stretching, row upon row, into the darkness of the rear, into the shadows of the roof—sickly and pimpled and bloated flesh: vicious faces, hopeless, vacuous, diseased. And these were the faces that leered and writhed in the boy's dreams of hell. Here, present and tangible, were gathered all his terrors. He was in the very ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... quickly to his feet and in the instant his whole demeanor changed. From demoniacal rage he became suddenly convulsed with hysterical laughter although it was a question in the girl's mind as to which was the more terrifying. His companions stood looking on with vacuous grins upon their countenances, while he from whom the girl had wrested the weapon leaped up and down shrieking with laughter. If Bertha Kircher had needed further evidence to assure her that they were in the hands of a mentally deranged people the man's present ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at last—"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains and party treacheries: of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... dominant creature, royal by character as by birth, as strong as her father and as wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet and pearls in a royal carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and bright-eyed lovers, and solemn statesmen, and great nobles, vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling before her; and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding on white horses behind; and when the fanfares went shattering down the street, vibrating through the continuous ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... mildly gay. Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim; then he consented to forget ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... I felt like the housemaid who caused to be cut upon her tombstone that she had gone to a better land where her ambition was to do nothing "for ever and ever." I just wanted to be completely idle and vacuous-minded for at least a month, but as I knew that all I could expect in that line was a single bank holiday, like a City clerk on the spree, of it I determined to make ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... was yet in this softened mood. But fate had ordained that other events should restore him to his usual harder self before their interview. The effect was, indeed, presently accomplished by the advent of Smithson into the office. He entered with an expression of discomfiture on his rather vacuous countenance. He walked almost nimbly to the desk and spoke with evident distress, as ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... to me, with a most sand-the-sugar face, this morning, as he pocketed about ten times the value of a trifle—candles, in fact, which have risen twenty-five per cent. in the last two days—and folding his arms, scowled from under his kepi into futurity, with stern but vacuous resolution. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his own tediousness; ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... A faint dull vacuous smile flickered over his face, and he shuddered. "I understand! You come to prepare my soul ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... platform is Sir Ashmead Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths—the loud and blatant voice—the bumptious temper—that make the commoner form of Tory—all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to remain while his servile adulator was pouring on him buckets ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... and tighter, until it seemed as though those in the center must surely be crushed flat. From an ambling, feeding company of animals, they become a lumpy gray blanket, with here and there a long, vacuous face showing idiotically ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower |
