"Blase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... watched her attentively through many long evenings. At first, she had seemed to him what she really was, a strong and beautiful woman, but the desire to know her never troubled him. She possessed nothing to recommend her in the eyes of a blase man, and yet he returned to the Circus, allured by he knew not what, importuned by ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... taken my two distinctly blase daughters to see a popular melodrama. The great audience that packed the theater to the roof went wild, and my young ladies, infected in spite of themselves with the same enthusiasm, gave evidences of a quite ordinary ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... fairest pass the day in the Corso, and gallant young gentlemen think it worth while to dress elaborately for a few hours of harmless and spirituelle intrigue. A society that enjoys a holiday so thoroughly has something in it better than the blase cynicism of more civilized capitals. These young fellows talk like the lovers of the old romances. I have never heard prettier periods of devotion than from some gentle savage, stretched out on the front seat of a landau under the peering eyes of his lady, safe in his disguise, if not self-betrayed, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... weapons, the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has never been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent." The reviewer had probably read the work through from one paper cover to the other. It was in fact too short to bore the most blase of his kind, consisting of but forty-nine small octavo pages. The second edition, which is in the British Museum, bears the following title; "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... to announce some good news, but the thought has overtaken me that it will only add to your severity towards me. I fancy myself six months hence almost a stranger to you. Yes, you are too clever, and I too experienced,—too blase, if you like,—for either of us to deceive the other. Your end is attained without its costing you more than a few ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... is crumbling when quite impossible people like life guards permit themselves to become blase' over ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... of things with no sense to them are interesting," laughed Patty. "I begin to think, Captain Sayre, that you're blase. I never met any one before who was really blase. Do tell me ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... pretend you are getting to be a blase man. I know that you are only about ten years older than I am—not more than nine, I think—and you dance very well, and no doubt ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... children at the end of them unarmed and at the mercy of every adverse blast. The great dangers which seem to be resulting from the system of upbringing in the last fifteen years are that at seventeen or eighteen most young people are satiated with pleasure and blase with life, while they have no definite aim or end of achievement in view, and absolutely no sense of duty or ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... yawning. Are we going to surely catch up with 'em before they get there?" He was encouraging a faint hope that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others there, be found in blase seclusion before the fire and ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... coolness and indifference, how little he counted for in my life. Petsjorin had done with life; I had not even begun to live. Petsjorin had drained the cup of enjoyment; I had never tasted so much as a drop of it. Petsjorin was as blase as a splendid Russian Officer of the Guards could be; I, as full of expectation as an insignificant Copenhagen schoolboy could be. Nevertheless, I had the perplexing feeling of having, for the first time in my life, seen my inmost nature, hitherto ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... tired in a few years of Mme. Pompadour and wished that he had not encouraged her to run away from her husband. She, however, retained her hold upon the blase and alcoholic monarch by her wonderful versatility ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... Mexicans, but I'm afraid they're too lazy to be very wild. Nothing but a revolution excites them these days and sometimes I think they're getting a bit blase over them. Now and then they wake up over a cock-fight." They walked down the ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... fashionable Latin-Greek speech of the city folks, gaping with their mouths wide open, greedily at the steaks of sacrificial meat displayed behind enlarging glasses in the cheap cook shop windows. There they giggle and chuckle, those wily landlords with their blase habitues and their underlings, the greasy cooks, the roguish "good mixers" at the bar and the winsome if resolute copae—waitresses—all ready to go, to do business. So slippery are the cooks that Plautus ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... pipe and tabor, two empties and a brass tray. Yet the semblance of the thing is there and this often deceives the very elect. Around every art studio are found the young men in velveteen who smoke infinite cigarettes, and throw off opinions about this great man and that, and prate prosaically in blase monotone of the Beautiful. Sometimes these young persons give lectures on "Art as I Have Found It"; but do not be deceived by this—the art that lives is probably being produced by small, shy, red-headed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... thinking with one mind on what is now going on about us. It is a very grave but a splendid time. Whatever in the last analysis we shall go through, at present there is no longer any one of us who any longer regards life in the role of a blase or critical spectator, but each one of us stands in the very midst of life, and, indeed, in the very midst of a higher life. God has of a sudden brought us out of the wretchedness of the day to a high place to which we have never before spiritually attained. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... mad, they become so deadened by excess of enjoyment and indulgence that ordinary pleasure is uninteresting. They seek unnatural excitement, original methods and unusual activities to appease the appetite. Then they become blase and constitutional pessimists. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... was no casuist, nor had ponder'd Upon the moral lessons of mankind: Besides, he had not seen of several hundred A lady altogether to his mind. A little 'blase'—'t is not to be wonder'd At, that his heart had got a tougher rind: And though not vainer from his past success, No ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... to disentangle the thread of this intrigue. In the absorption of mind to which she was a prey she was no longer mistress of herself. The Colonel, interpreting to his own advantage the embarrassment evident in the Countess' manner and speech, became more ardent and pressing. The old blase diplomates, amusing themselves by watching the play of faces, had never found so many intrigues at once to watch or guess at. The passions agitating the two couples were to be seen with variations at every step in the ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... rolled down her cheeks as she spoke, and Wilhelm was not sufficiently blase to scoff at the doting nonsense of a love-sick woman. Love has enormous power, and at its heat all firmness, all resistance, melts away. Pilar's affection filled Wilhelm with heartfelt emotion and gratitude. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... disciples and are consequently often invoked by the less orthodox Muslims as intercessors with him, much after the fashion of the Quatuordecim Adjutores, the Fourteen Helpers [in time of need], (i.e. Saints Catherine, Margaret, Barbara, Pantaleon, Vitus, Eustace, Blase, Gregory, Nicholas, Erasmus, Giles, George, Leonard and Christopher) of ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... persecution of Licinius, in 316, by the command of Agricolaus, governor of Cappadocia and the lesser Armenia. It is mentioned in the acts of St. Eustratius, who received the crown of martyrdom in the reign of Dioclesian, and is honored on the 13th of December, that St. Blase, the bishop of Sebaste, honorably received his relics, deposited them with those of St. Orestes, and punctually executed every article of the last will and testament of St. Eustratius. His festival is kept a holiday in the Greek church on the 11th of February. He is ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... less confidently. [FOOTNOTE: Schumann, who in 1839 attempted to give a history of Liszt's development (in the "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik"), remarked that when Liszt, on the one hand, was brooding over the most gloomy fancies, and indifferent, nay, even blase, and, on the other hand, laughing and madly daring, indulged in the most extravagant virtuoso tricks, "the sight of Chopin, it seems, first brought him ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that they were blase, or indifferent to novel sights, but travel was now, with them, an old story. They had been out West, to the Pacific Coast, and in far-off jungle lands, to say nothing of their trip to the place of the earthquakes, and the more recent ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like, and blase, and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very happy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... perched on a poplar limb, who cocked his head and heard the singer through, and then made that almost imperceptible gesture with which a great critic indicates his approval of a novice. "Not half bad," he seemed to say,—this blase old habitue of the thicket music-halls. "I shouldn't wonder if something could be made of that voice if it were trained ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... She takes one, draws him to her bosom; he dishonors her and returns to the Bourse. She cries all night, but discovers that tears make her eyes red. She takes a consoler, for the loss of whom another consoles her; thus up to the age of thirty or more. Then, blase and corrupted, with no human sentiment, not even disgust, she meets a fine youth with raven locks, ardent eye and hopeful heart; she recalls her own youth, she remembers what she has suffered, and telling him the story of her life, she teaches him ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... you are a genius to think about it," I gasped, as I sat down on a very cruet Killarney branch and just as quickly sat up again, receiving comforting expressions of sympathy from across the bush, to which I paid no heed. "Those blase city men will go crazy about it. We can have the barbecue up on the bluff, where we have always had it for the political rallies, and a fish-fry and the country people in their wagons with children tumbling all over everything and—and you will make a great ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blase or ennuye. He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view is almost entirely personal. It is not the lacrimae rerum, but the lacrimae dierum suorum, that ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... come were. Sche seide, at entre of the pas Hou Mars, which god of Armes was, Hath set tuo Oxen sterne and stoute, That caste fyr and flamme aboute Bothe at the mouth and ate nase, So that thei setten al on blase 3510 What thing that passeth hem betwene: And forthermore upon the grene Ther goth the flees of gold to kepe A Serpent, which mai nevere slepe. Thus who that evere scholde it winne, The fyr to stoppe he mot beginne, Which that the fierce bestes caste, And ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... like a speck the blaze of setting day MS. Letter to Southey: Had cross'd the mighty orb's dilated blase. MS. Letter ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... centre of operations, and as the authors of these outrages remained undiscovered, they credited them all to Mme. de Combray's inspiration, and this accusation without proof is none too bold. The theft of state funds was a bagatelle to people whom ten years of implacable warfare had rendered blase about all brigandage. Moreover, it was easily conceivable that the snare laid by Bonaparte for Frotte, who was so popular in Normandy, the summary execution of the General and his six officers, the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien, the death ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... whose white shoulders and arms and animated faces flashed out in the semi-obscurity; and in their rear stood a crowd of spectators —beautiful young gentlemen with vacant faces and the elevated Oxford shoulders, rosy youth already blase to all this world can offer, and gray-headed men young again in the prospect of a new sensation. So they kneel or stand, worshipers before the shrine, expecting the advent of the Goddess ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... travel will forever remain in the realm of the impossible, probably would, if a rocket that were shot to the moon, for instance, did arrive, and perhaps return to give proof of its safe arrival on our satellite, accept the phenomenon in a perfectly blase, twentieth century manner. Dr. Smith, that phenomenal writer of classic scientific fiction, seems to have become so thoroughly convinced of the advent of interplanetary travel that it is difficult for the reader to feel, after finishing "Spacehounds of IPC," that travel in the great spaces ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... his fast horses, his gold and silver cigarette-cases, his clothes from a New York tailor, his recklessness of money showered upon him by indulgent mothers or doting grandfathers, he respects nothing and nobody. He is blase if you please. Watch him at a social function how condescendingly he deigns to select a partner for the popular waltz or two step how carelessly he shoulders older people out of his way, with what a blank stare ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... never been so happy; he was overwhelmed with joy. Until then, he had only thought of business matters. To be rich was the aim of his life; and now he was going to work for happiness. It was all pleasure for him. He was not blase; he amused himself like a child, adorning the rooms which were to be occupied by Jeanne. To his mind nothing was too expensive for the temple of his goddess, as he said, with a loud laugh which lighted up his whole face. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... certaine on't; I felt his lips, And they were flesh; they breath'd on mine a warmth Temperate as westerne kisses which the morne Weaps liquid drops to purchase. This confirmes It was no apparition that contemnd My willingnes, but he, his reall selfe, Mockt my integrity: he must not passe soe, To blase abroad my infamy. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... habitually shows towards his son a dislike bordering on hatred—such are the sad subjects for study that I have found here. At first I wished to persuade myself that M. Leminof was simply a cold hard character, a skeptic by disposition, a blase grandee, who believed it a duty to himself to openly testify his scorn for all the humbug of sentiment. He is nothing of the kind. The Count's mind is diseased, his soul tormented, his heart eaten by a secret ulcer and he avenges its sufferings by making others suffer. Yes, the misanthrope ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blase air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with care to play the role of an "unidentified man." No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... English dandy: the first is an impertinent, affected coxcomb, who makes love to every woman as a matter of course—it is his vocation. The second is a cold, contemptuous, conceited creature, intrenched in a double armour of selfishness, blase upon everything. [11] ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... in with Arabella, and Archer with Jill. Arabella promptly yielded to Jack. New devotion. More transports. Jill and Archer were shocked. Jill clung to the bars of her cage, quivering, and screaming remonstrance; and even blase Archer chattered angrily at some of the scenes. Then the doctor hung curtains between the cages to shut out the view. Jill and Archer, left to each other, grew interested. They ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired, ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying his employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... and the epoch of wars would be over. "I expect then," he wrote, "to be within measurable distance of a marshal's baton, and you will be an experienced married woman. You shall look out a wife for me. I will be, probably, bald by then, and a little blase. I shall require a young girl, pretty of course, and with a large fortune, which should help me to close my glorious career in the splendour befitting my exalted rank." He ended with the information that he had just given a lesson to a worrying, quarrelsome ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; they ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... wrong or imperfect they would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth. Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... but now lifted so chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae with which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of life's incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous combat. She reckons up the arrearages, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... was to arrive Graydon was dining with the Jack Percivals. There were a dozen in the party—a blase, bored collection of human beings who had dined out so incessantly that eating was a punishment. They had come to look upon food as a foe to comfort and a grievous obstacle in the path of pleasure. Bridge was just beginning to take hold of them; its grip was tightening with new coils as each ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... them and of their own grim wit. Look at all the double entendres the salesman had given his father, and his father had never suspected. Even the head of the Bureau of Health and Sanity had been terrifyingly blase about it. ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... fancies of the dream. It is the thoughts we have thought, the painfully-wrought products of the waking mind, given in a sparkle of mocking laughter against the background of nightly visions. See the play over and over again. Do not study it with Bottom's ass's head, and do not be so blase that you reject the performance because it does not ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... not seen much of society. Well, since she is not gawky, I like her better than if she were blase. Anything but your blase girls," he observed to himself, with a consciousness that he was an experienced man ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... imagination proudly, in order to reconcile yourself to something which suggests itself as more ideal than that for which the unreasoning heart hungers. You are sad, but you are not practical and you are not blase. ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... into the hall, leaning upon the arm of a gentleman. Having requested her escort to get her a glass of water she was left alone a few moments. Hemstead immediately joined her and asked, "Who is that blase-looking man upon whose arm Miss ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... sufficient to support life indefinitely. It is one of the foods of which people never seem to tire. Tiring of food is often an indication of excess. It is with food as with amusement, if we get too much we become blase. Those who eat in moderation are content with simple foods, but those who eat too much want a great variety, as a rule. There are beef gluttons, who are satisfied with their flesh and liquor, but this is because the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... was blase, but he had a heart; his sympathies were slow, but he was not insensible to misfortune. Accordingly he responded with a cry of pity, running his eye over his friend to estimate the ravages of Temperance. Midway in its course his gaze halted, he passed a silk-gloved palm lightly across his brow, ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... heart of the portrait-painter; and now he read the little actress's behavior with a good measure of precision. Her restlessness, her chattering, the high, unpleasing pitch of her naturally lovely low voice, her assumption of the manner and speech of the blase young person of the stage, he saw to be primarily the cover of nervousness. He understood that the girl was troubled about something, was perhaps suffering, and tried to conceal it in this way. Moreover, he felt that, whatever it was, she ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... a rather blase child confronted with a new mechanical toy; 'did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn't bad; it's what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... girl who prided herself on her carefully blase' and supercilious attitude towards life; but this changeling was too much for her. She released the handle, tottered back, and, having uttered a discordant squeak of amazement, stood staring, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... term when your meaning can be as well expressed in English. Instead of blase, use surfeited, or wearied; for cortege use procession for couleur de rose, rose-color; for dejeuner, breakfast; for employe, employee; for en route, on the way; for entre nous, between ourselves; for fait accompli, an accomplished ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... I think I could enjoy ever so many things for years and years without growing blase," ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... little Billy Frost, the Patterson boys, home from college for Thanksgiving, Reddy Johnson, and Carl Polhemus—answered not at all, as is the custom with young men. Sally and Martie did not like the Patterson boys; George was fat and stupid; Arthur at eighteen sophisticated and blase, with dissipated eyes; both were supercilious, and the girls did not really believe that they would come. Still, there was not much to lose ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... brulante Que ton sein palpitant ne pouvait contenir! Tu vivrais, tu verrais te suivre et t'applaudir De ce public blase la foule indifferente, Qui prodigue aujourd'hui sa faveur inconstante A des gens dont pas un, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... his brother-officers directly he joined. It was his freshness, his overflowing good spirits, his hearty and unmistakable enjoyment of life, that first won their regard. The boy suddenly dropped into their midst was no blase youth, no mere swaggering puppy. He was afire with the joy of existence, radiant with happiness, excited—and not ashamed to show it—by all the newness and fascination of Indian life. The Major screwed ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... member of the Committee on Ways and Means. On the floor of the House his formal speeches on the tariff, a topic to which nothing new could be brought, commanded the attention of one of the most critical and blase audiences of the world. The silver question, which was the principal topic before Congress at the following session, afforded a fresher field for his oratory; indeed, Bryan was the principal aid to Bland both as speaker and parliamentarian in the old leader's monetary ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... a hundred times a day, sat at table with people who were keenly observant of her every act and word, and spent some reluctant hours in the society of those who strove to cultivate her for their own blase enjoyment. She only knew that among the company she met a number of interesting men and women, with whom she and her husband were thoroughly congenial, and that it did not matter in the least about the rest. If those whom she liked ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... her intently, narrowly, searchingly. He saw what she herself had not seen—the natural changes that ten years had brought to her. He saw other things—that she had not suspected—a certain blase sophistication; a too bold and artful expression of the eyes—as though she knew their power and the lure of them; the slightly hard curve in the corners of her mouth; a second character lurking around her—indefinite, vague, repelling—the subconscious self, that no artifice can hide—the ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... at one corner, and a barely perceptible droop of pathos at the other, lent an indescribable piquance to her dimpled smile. The blue orbs which raised to his own with a Sphinxian laugh in their azure depths thrilled him—Holloway, the blase, the hardened theatrical manager, flattered and cajoled by hundreds of beautiful women on the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... chap, Dan," he remarked, as if he were deeply considering the verity of that statement. "One wouldn't pick you out as a blase individual who is tired of everything the world has to offer. You are as filled with energy and nervous force as any chap I ever knew; and you are not ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... A and Miss B, twenty-eight and twenty-five years old respectively, have known one another for several years, and in spite of their occupation, which is supposed to make people blase and cynical—he being a reporter and she a special story writer—are quite in love with each other. But their occupation and income are such that they cannot possibly afford to have and to bring up any children. They would love to get married, but the specter of a child—or rather ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Atkins, after one languid glance in his direction, had sprung from the truck and was gazing at him as if he was some apparition, some figure in a nightmare, instead of his blase self. And he, as he looked at the lightkeeper's astounded countenance, dropped the cigar stump from his fingers and stepped backward in ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... man with a passion for adventure. But invariable success in his flirtations had made him blase, and now it was only the absolutely novel that could appeal to him. And there could certainly be no question about the woman who had sent him the present invitation being anything but a commonplace one! Moreover, it was not just any woman who had asked him to keep ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... where the kind pleasant little third officer lashed me tight. It was far more formidable than the first gale, but less beautiful; and we made so much lee-way that we lost ten days, and only arrived here yesterday. I recommend a fortnight's heavy gale in the South Atlantic as a cure for a blase state of mind. It cannot be described; the sound, the sense of being hurled along without the smallest regard to 'this side uppermost'; the beauty of the whole scene, and the occasional crack and bear-away of sails and spars; the officer ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... alive. For six months they moped about their corral, but at last they began to improve. The oldest doe gave birth to two fawns which actually survived. But, even when the next mating season began, the buck continued to be lanquid and blase. At no time did he exhibit signs of temper, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... up, Hetty and her ranching neighbors had screamed to high heaven and high congressmen about the loss of the road and range. The fence stayed up. Now they had gotten used to the idea and had even grown blase about the frequent nuclear blasts that rattled the desert floor sixty miles ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... but slumber, Geve Otes unto Saynt Uncumber, And Beanes in a certen number Unto Saynt Blase and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... than those gathered at the breakfast table could not have been found in New London or anywhere else; certainly not at the Griswold where the majority of them were either satiated society girls whose winters had been spent in a mad social whirl, or the blase city youths who at nineteen had already found life ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... rest of the day in London, where it must be admitted he caused a genuine sensation—no mean feat in such a blase place. ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... married! It was incredible. And to whom had he struck the bold corsair flag which had so long been the terror of husbands? To Kaethe von Markwald, in whom nothing piquant could be discovered which would be likely specially to attract a blase man of the world! She was beautiful, certainly, but he had passed by many handsomer women. She was not stupid, but how many cleverer fair ones, with all their craft, had been unable to hold him in ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... This rather mythical fortune contributed not a little to the fact that "every one" was in love with her. Not only the bachelors of the family, that was a matter of course, but artists and amateurs, even the most blase, swarmed round her, la jeunesse doree (which is homely enough in Norway), without an exception. A living work of art, worth more or less money, piquante and admired, how each longed to carry her home, to gloat over her, to call her ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... sister or an old mother to support!" She had no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blase. ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... create its own, and the young man who does the century's work will be a product of its university system. Of this we may be sure, the training for strenuous life is not in academic idleness. The development of living ideals is not in an atmosphere of cynicism. The blase, lukewarm, fin-de-siecle young man of the clubs will not represent university culture, nor, on the other hand, will culture be ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all perhaps, as she had said, that men had made her—a travesty on splendid girlhood. He wept for her friends, embodying in them all of their class—for little Bessy Bell, with her ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... her record and his own. He had found fault with her—so he mused—HE! And what could he say for himself? When she built her first church what was he doing? Gathering other blase multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace with it; losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting, and sillily vain of the admiring notoriety it made for him. When she was building her first university, what was he doing? Polluting himself with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gentlemen at home who could stand comparison with this handsome fellow across the danger line. But to compare any one of the men in Lady Bazelhurst's house party—oh, it was absurd! She looked them over. Dull-eyed, blase, frayed by the social whirl, worn out, pulseless, all of them. They talked automobile, bridge, women, and self in particular; in the seclusion of a tete-a-tete they talked love with an ardor that lost most of its danger because it was from force of habit. One of the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... drew a small grain-leather notebook, from which he extracted an unmounted photograph. The superintendent looked into the pictured face of a full-cheeked, wide-mouthed, square-jawed man with a slightly blase expression and a half-cynical smile. After studying it a minute he nodded ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... the days when Louisa Musgrove lived at Captain Harville's house. Every one who stays at Lyme must buy or borrow a copy of Persuasion. It is wonderful how an old-fashioned tale such as this novel of Jane Austen will delight and interest the most blase of readers when he or she can identify the scenes depicted in its pages, and how the early Victorian atmosphere of the book will seem to descend on the quaint streets that have altered so little since it ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... about in its place, and that was the rather pathetic spectacle the boys are, in numbers of families in the East,—tied to their mothers' apron strings, treated like girls and taken constantly to Europe with or without a tutor; little, blase grandfathers driving motor cars and dressing in grown up clothes. I longed to send them all to Eton and let them get flogged and have to fag and be turned into children first, and then men. I asked the ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... fruitless social striving had rendered her desperate, and she would have staged a ballet on her dining table, with her own ample self as premiere danseuse, did the attraction but promise recognition from the blase members of fashionable New York's ultra-conservative set. From childhood she had looked eagerly forward through the years with an eye single to such recognition as life's desideratum. To this end she had bartered both youth and beauty with ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... White House one night some years ago, a group of two or three gentlemen were observing the swirling throng, with its ambitions, its jealousies, its brief flashes of happiness, its numberless and infinitesimal intrigues, its atmosphere of jaded, blase, and defeated expectations. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... hundred roubles a year, if not more, as a pension for her. In short it was "all a caprice, a fancy of a man prematurely weary on his side, perhaps—it may even have been, as Kirillov says, a new experiment of a blase man, with the object of finding out what you can bring a crazy cripple to." (You picked out on purpose, he said, the lowest creature, a cripple, for ever covered with disgrace and blows, knowing, too, that this creature was dying of comic love for you, and set to work to mystify ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his riding boots and breeches he immediately shared attention with a large, venerable-looking Durham that was being auctioned. The Durham, however, returned the stare of the crowd with blase eyes which said that he had seen all of life he wanted to and did not care what further happened, while Wallie felt distinctly uncomfortable at the attention he attracted, and wished ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... or, at least, on a little consideration. But neither she nor anyone else dreamed or imagined that I could be other than the King. So the likeness served, and for an hour I stood there, feeling as weary and blase as though I had been a king all my life; and everybody kissed my hand, and the ambassadors paid me their respects, among them old Lord Topham, at whose house in Grosvenor Square I had danced a score of times. Thank heaven, the old man ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... dreaming of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen. He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a thousand follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man—the most abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his head, suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,—to set fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... as though an adder had bitten him; the blase composure which is the pride of every British officer had melted in the rays of those blue eyes that for years had been the stars of his worship. It was a very human young man, badly shaken and badly conscious of his display of weakness, who faced the tall figure in the tightly ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... following sally of Figaro's (though here an attempt is perhaps made to suggest the image of an animal rather than that of a thing): "Quel homme est-ce?—C'est un beau, gros, court, jeune vieillard, gris pommele, ruse, rase, blase, qui guette et furette, et gronde et geint tout a la fois." [Footnote: "What sort of man is here?—He is a handsome, stout, short, youthful old gentleman, iron-grey, an artful knave, clean shaved, clean 'used up,' ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... was quite serious, but there was an odd expression in her eye. Mr. Holway, blond, immaculate and blase, bowed. Then he, ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... artist, had reached that blase period when, only upon rare occasions, did he feel disposed to enlarge his acquaintance. But this fresh-skinned young Britisher went to his heart at once, a kindred soul, and he adopted him forthwith. He and Thomas ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... wonderful Southern sky, with the air laden with the perfume of countless cherry blossoms, Paul felt that he had been translated into fairy-land, and he was almost afraid to speak lest he break the spell and suddenly find himself back in blase Western Europe again. ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... she motioned. He soon recognized the slender figure, the indolent attitude of Tom Appleton, the blase young man whom he was so accustomed to meeting at billiard-tables, in clubs, or hotels. A tolerant, amiable expression saved the youth's smooth, handsome face from vacuity. He ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... notoriously slow service. He begged her to order—and she did: ordered a meal which contained T.N.T. possibilities for acute indigestion. Carroll smiled and let her have her way—he was amused at her valiant efforts to appear the blase ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... seems so outside one's jurisdiction. One is oppressed with a sense of the futility of interference. And this was no ordinary dog fight. It was a stunning melee, which would have excited favourable comment even among the blase residents of a negro quarter or the not easily-pleased critics of a Lancashire mining-village. From all over the beach dogs of every size, breed, and colour were racing to the scene: and while some of ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... with deliberation, "I freely confess that I am not an effete and blase old thing, like—like one who shall be nameless. There is a variety of fruit (the husbandman's despair), a tough, cross-grained, sour-hearted variety of fruit, that dries up and shrivels, and never ripens. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll bow to them, which he did, in a very languid and blase fashion. "You'll never see such trees again," she told him, giving him a vindictive shake, "for you'll be brokened long ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... being funny, and that was quite enough. London people in every set are so desperate for something out of the ordinary way, for variety and oddness, that the Mitchells were frequently asked for invitations by most distinguished persons who hoped, in their blase fatigue, to meet ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... relieving him from troublesome cares, furnishing him at fair rates, or for nothing, with corn, wine, and oil, giving him sumptuous meals and well-got-up fetes, providing him with pictures, statues, pantomimists, gladiators, and lions, resuscitating his "blase" taste every morning with some surprising novelty, and even occasionally converting themselves into actors, charioteers, singers, and gladiators for his especial delight. In order to lodge this group of amateurs in a very suitable ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... her feet as thistledown and as graceful as a swaying rose. Nyoda watched her with keen pleasure, but it was not her twinkling feet, nor the artistic posing of her limbs that held her attention, but the new expression on her face. The old selfish, blase' look was gone, and her features were lit up by an eager smile that sparkled in her eyes and curved up the corners of her pretty mouth. Again the leaven was at work in her, and she was fulfilling the Law of the Camp Fire, which ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... "Tribune." Greeley was so much pleased with Thoreau that he offered to set him to work as reporter, for Greeley had guessed the truth that the best city reporters are country boys. They observe and hear—all is curious and wonderful to them: by and by they will become blase—sophisticated—that is, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... juice on—the engine cranked and ready for another Vanderbilt Cup Race." Bobbie gave the waiter one of his best smiles—behind that smile was a manful look, a kindliness of character and a great power of purpose, which rang true, even to this blase and cynical dispenser of the grape. The latter nodded and smiled, albeit flabbily, into the winsome eyes ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... this time was more remarkable in Mr Stevenson than his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men affect to be blase and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and, above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... once on to a strange summit, and pierced with the intensest pangs of an unknown devotion. Henceforward her life was dedicated; but, unlike the happier saints of a holier persuasion, she was to find no peace on earth. It was, indeed, hardly to be expected that Walpole, a blase bachelor of fifty, should have reciprocated so singular a passion; yet he might at least have treated it with gentleness and respect. The total impression of him which these letters produce is very damaging. It is ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... rising with that blase air which distinguishes the matured man of the world from the enthusiastic tyro,-"done! and we will adjourn afterwards ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... times, and divorced once. So fastidious a fine gentleman was he that the maids were not allowed to make his bed except in white kid gloves, and his groom of his chambers had orders to fumigate his rooms after liveried servants had been in them. He is described as handsome, witty, and blase, a roue in principles and a Tory in politics. Nothing pleased Lady Morgan better in her old age, we are told, than to have it insinuated that there had been 'something wrong' between herself ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... that was not possible in the publicity of a dinner-table. He whispered in my ear, he leant to me, he behaved as an infatuated lover, and presently it seemed to me that my fellow-guests smiled here and there and looked significant. Lady Ardaragh talked more than ever to the blase-looking young lord who was her neighbour and her colour was heightened. Her witticisms came to me across the table, or a portion of them, and I thought she was saying wild, unbecoming things. I was sure ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... in a very blase fashion and held out her hand. The spots in the veil seemed to dazzle him; for a moment ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,—the lyrics, Childe Harold and Don Juan—as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably in the decadent verse at the other end of the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... she is a trained professional, and yet even the most blase among them give hints as to the compass of their woman-nature. I think their characters are often suggested quite definitely by their tones. Indeed, I even find myself judging people by their voices. Henry's tones indicate many of his ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... he conveys distinctly the impression of a creature to the last degree blase. Even when a crab is let down into his grotto by an attendant for the edification of the visitors the octopus seems to regard it with only lukewarm interest. If he deigns to go in pursuit, it is with the air of one who says, "Anything to oblige," rather than of eagerness for a morsel of food. Yet ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... entertainment and of amusement is always within their reach, thanks to the loftiness of their station, their wealth, and facilitated furthermore by the anxiety of their courtiers both to please them and to retain their favor, they naturally soon become blase to such an extent that they become a prey to ennui—a thoroughly royal malady, from which few, if any, of the scions of the reigning houses of Europe are exempt. "Ennui," like "chic," is a French word difficult ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... achieve a supremely blase air while the words were being counted, but it crumbled instantly when the telegraphist shot a quick look at Joan and gave Martin ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the comedy before we are introduced to this paragon, who enters just after Lady Easy and the maid, Edging, have discovered fresh proofs of his flirtation with Lady Graveairs. Charles is inclined to be philosophical in a blase, tired way, and he says: "How like children do we judge of happiness! When I was stinted in my fortune almost everything was a pleasure to me, because most things then being out of my reach, I had always the pleasure ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... to play chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradise theme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on the World screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest accommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen too there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to take in old ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... near the stern rail had a different and more serious interrogation to make. He appeared rather blase about it as he leaned over the rail and, directing his voice toward a soldier on the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... chance which always comes. And when at the Sylvester Arms, on one of those rare occasions when M'Adam was not present, Tammas summed up the little man in that historic phrase of his, "When he's drunk he's wi'lent, and when he bain't he's wicious," there was an applause to gratify the blase heart ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... the porter to paste the scarlet labels on his cases. He was beginning to take a certain blase pride in his luggage. Already it had the appearance of having traveled widely. It would look well on ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... themselves and for themselves; they deliberately view them as sources of a personal pleasurable sensation. I do not mean the crude egoist who asks of anything or anybody, "What good is it (or he) for me?" but I mean that connoisseur in emotions, casually blase and bored, who seeks new sensations. This is an introspective deviation of a serious kind, for the connoisseur in emotions rarely is happy and usually is most deeply miserable. Bourget in his remarkable psychological novel, "A Love Crime," ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Romeo, a blase bird with the air of having bitter memories, affected for a long time not to hear his mistress's blandishments. After looking contemptuously into his seed-cup, he crept slowly around the sides of his cage, fixing a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of conversation, of small talk. I would equip myself to be able to entertain the grouchiest, most blase people. For there is hardly a business in the world in which it is not a great advantage to be able ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... little-known but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a slim (indeed, truncated) account of faithful love, sinks into bathos; it is, perhaps, most interesting for its opening scene of a blase New York City crowd gathering around a fallen man — and doing nothing ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... part of the hall the audience could be divided into two species, one less numerous than the other. First, the devotees of music, who went to nearly every concert, extremely knowing, extremely blase, extremely disdainful and fastidious, with precise views about every musical composition, every conductor, and every performer; weary of melodious nights at which the same melodies were ever heard, but ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... great mistake to figure Mephistopheles as a rather blase brunette," she remarked crisply. "I am absolutely certain that if you could catch the devil without his mask you'd find him a ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... It would be an exaggeration to say that the baby interested the entire town, Bursley being an ancient, blase sort of borough of some thirty thousand inhabitants. Babies, in fact, arrived in Bursley at the rate of more than a thousand every year. Nevertheless, a few weeks after the advent of Mrs Blackshaw's baby, when the medical officer of health reported ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Even the blase bell-captain, by virtue of his calling a person of few enthusiasms and no illusions, edged up to the desk and inquired the name of the distinguished stranger ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... one's welcome and there was no limit to the length of his stay. Isolation made opportunities for such social intercourse rare and therefore everyone got more "kick" out of these occasions than is possible in our swiftly moving, blase age. ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... possibilities of a realization of his ideal. It was, perhaps, an unfortunate thing for the women, particularly as he brought to each trial a surprising freshness, which was very deceptive, and quite distinct from the 'blase' familiarity of the man of gallantry. It was this perennial virginity of the affections that most endeared him to the best women, who were prone to exercise toward him a chivalrous protection,—as ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... only to the extent of throwing his hat on the table. He did not sit or remove his overcoat. He was pale, his eyes were swollen and red, his hair was disarranged, and in all respects he looked unlike his usual blase and immaculate self. His forehead was wet, showing that he had hurried on his way to the ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... when he fusses around his "Observatorio meteorologico," which consists of a maximum and minimum thermometer and a pluviometer, in a tightly closed box, raised above the ground on a tall pole, then indeed, his air would impress even the most blase town-sport. I was in the village when this observatory was installed, and after it had been running about a week, the mighty official called on me and asked me confidentially if I would not look the observatory over and see ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... You get awfully blase on this duty—things which should excite you don't at all. For instance, out of the air come messages like the following: "Am being chased and delayed by submarine." "Torpedoed and sinking fast." And you merely look at the chart and decide ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Now the blase chauffeur swung the car sharply to the left, past the aviation field, and so came to the wide-scattered settlement—almost a colony—which, hidden behind high, barb-wire-topped fences, carried on the many and complex activities of the partners' experiment station. Here ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... for the stale. If there was a touch of appreciation left in him for the bloom and unsophistication which is the charm of youth, it rekindled now. He looked into her pretty face and felt the subtle waves of young life radiating therefrom. In that large clear eye he could see nothing that his blase nature could understand as guile. The little vanity, if he could have perceived it there, would have touched him as a ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the clerk, with the derision of blase youth. "If that's your test, you ought to see ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a contralto: and that voice is very often out, you know," Pen said, bitterly. "I have heard a great deal of music, in London," he continued. "I'm tired of those professional people—they sing too loud—or I have grown too old or too blase. One grows old very soon, in London, Miss Amory. And like all old fellows, I only care for the songs I heard ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gave the unhappy Jim a chance to recover himself, to regain his vanished cuffs, display his heavy watch-chain, curl his mustache, and otherwise reassume his air of blase fastidiousness. But the transfer made, Phoebe, after shaking hands, became speechless under these perfections. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the lieutenant, handsome, tall, well made, with a high-bred if somewhat dissipated face, an air of blase indifference a little overdone, and an accent which he had brought back with him from Oxford, and which he was anxious not to lose. Indeed, the bare thought of the possibility of his dropping into the flat, semi-nasal of his native land filled the lieutenant ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor |
