"Greyness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cry for gains Upon the blue and brazen sky. The precious venom in my veins To-morrow will be parched and dry. To-morrow it shall be my goal To throw myself away from me, To lose the outline of my soul Against the greyness of the sea. ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... sunset in Venice,—that supreme moment when the magical flush of light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all covered with ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the inward gladness of a princess when she has come into view of a desired kingdom—whether it shall endure or be destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon the prince reciprocating and making her queen of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Lady Kingsmead had left him, the light falling directly on his head in a way that showed up very plainly the curious halo-like effect caused by the silver greyness of ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the same causes operate, in a slightly different way, in favour of a general greyness or brownness as against pronounced shades of black, white, red, green, or yellow. Desert animals, like intense South Kensington, go in only for neutral tints. In proportion as each individual approaches in hue to the sand about ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage I possessed was ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony! A common greyness silvers everything,— All in a twilight, you and I alike—, You at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone, you know),—but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... now flung aloft until the whole ocean to the limits of the horizon lay spread around us, anon sweeping down the back of some giant billow until it seemed that the boat was about to plunge to the ocean's bed, and the passage of every hour was marked by an increasing greyness and haggardness in the faces of my companions, while a more hopelessly despairing expression ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... and he went out. There was a faint greyness of dawn now which showed him the great square of the city on which he and Lucy had looked from the prison window, a very long time ago as it seemed. He found without difficulty the ruins ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... people continued to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... nearly a month to refashion the book," he continues, "and I believe a month's mental labour at the present time would do me up." The weather in particular affected, him. For years he had been accustomed to sun- warmed Spain, and the gloom and greyness of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... an imposing building viewed from within, when the paling-gate had closed behind them. To Laura, who came from a township of one-storied brick or weatherboard houses, it seemed vast in its breadth and height, appalling in its sombre greyness. Between Godmother and Cousin Grace she walked up an asphalted path, and mounted the steps that led to a massive stone portico. The bell Godmother rang made no answering sound, but after a very few seconds the door swung back, and a slender maidservant in cap and apron stood before ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the trees, and I looked down in the last greyness of dusk on a strange and beautiful sight. The channel led to a landlocked pool, maybe a mile around, and this was as full of shipping as a town's harbour. The water was but a pit of darkness, but I could make out the masts rising into the half light, ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... steamer with two raking funnels—the leave boat, the ship of heart's desire for many men. Clouds of smoke, issuing defiantly from her funnels, were immediately swept sideways by the wind and beaten down by the rain. The smoke ceased to be smoke, became a duller greyness added to the greyness of the air, dissolved into smuts and was carried to earth—or to the faces and ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... unfortunate for the spirits of the Lebanon people that the meeting summoned by local agitators to discuss with asperity affairs on both sides of the Sagalac should, while starting with fitful sunlight in the early morning, have developed to a bleak greyness by three o'clock in the afternoon, the time set for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... East, which of you holds your head highest this side of Suez. All you western nations are to us a peck of dust outside our palace gates. Listen, dear one. We can leave, if you will, to-night, and top the clouds before sunrise. And I promise you this," he went on, "when you pass from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting sunshine of the East, you will not care any longer about these people who go about the world on all fours. Day by day you will know what life and love mean. You will find the cloying weight of material things pass from your brain and body, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had grown compassionate as she watched him, for there was a suggestive greyness in his face. It was evident to her that he ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... evening, the time of day when the magic of Japan is at its most powerful. All that was cheap and sordid was shut out by the bamboo fence and wrapped away in the twilight mists. It was a half-hour of luminous greyness. The skies were grey and the waters of the bay and the roofs of the houses. A grey vapour rose from the town; and a black-grey trail of smoke drifted from the dockyards and from the steamers in the harbour. The cries and activities of the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... semblance of a man; but its unique characteristic was its awful greyness. It had the greyness of a rain cloud, yet rather that of a column of smoke. And from the centre of the dimly defined head, two eyes—balls of living ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... by khaki-clad drivers with rifles slung over their shoulders, lumbered through the dimly-lighted thoroughfares; ammunition vans stood at every street corner; guns rattled along drawn by straining horses, the sweat steaming from the animals' flanks and withers; an ambulance party sped through the greyness of the foggy morning, accompanied by a Red Cross lorry piled high with chests and stretcher poles, and soldiers in files and fours, in companies and columns, were in movement everywhere—their legions seemed ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... do you good. There are hot scones in that dish," Pixie said quietly. The greyness of the street seemed to have entered the room—to have entered her heart. It was all grey. ... "We knew, of course, that you must like it, when ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... did not lock it again, motioned her to a chair, and dropped heavily into his accustomed seat by the writing-table, where for a while his fingers played nervously with the scattered papers. Now by the lamplight she noted the extreme greyness of his face and the hard brilliance of his eyes, ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of frost. The cold, and movement, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... day he proposed to ask Madame Goesler to make him the happiest of men,—as he certainly would have thought himself for a time, had she consented to put him in possession of her large income. He had therefore padded himself with more than ordinary care,—reduced but not obliterated the greyness of his locks,—looked carefully to the fitting of his trousers, and spared himself those ordinary labours of the morning which might have robbed him of any ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... on a dank afternoon, early in November. The wintry sunshine, in fitful gleams, pierced the greyness of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... disclaiming this charge he showed his great powers of oratory and the splendid and thrilling notes of his fine voice. He defended himself at once from the charge of undue partiality with strong passion and deep emotion, which lie hidden beneath his deep reserve. With a face ghastly almost in its greyness, in its deepening glows and manifest passion, he repudiated the charge of unfairness; he vehemently struck his hand on the order paper which he held, and as he neared to the end of his little speech there was a ring in his voice dangerously near a sob or a tear. It is on such occasions ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... put on the coffee. He was wearing his robe and the pinched greyness of his face told Corinne he had been up half the night. He poured coffee for her, smiling wanly. "If I have any commitments today, Corinne, will you please see that they are ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... had been abroad; the summer in Italy, the winter in Egypt, and had come back with our eyes full of colour, armed against the deadly greyness of England for three months ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... remarkable expression. The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... deeper a woe touches me in heart, so much the more am I urged to recite it. The world disappears: I see only the grand reliques of a world—memorials of a love that has departed, has been—the record of a sorrow that is, and has its greyness converted into verdure—monuments of a wrath that has been reconciled, of a wrong that has been atoned for—convulsions of a storm that has gone by. What I am going to say is the most like a superstitious thing that I ever shall say. And ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal to sense has interest for him. How could such an one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is satisfied as he watches the escape of the sensuous elements from his conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... competence, lays his worn tools before Priapus the Garden- Keeper. Heracles and Artemis receive the aged soldier's shield into their temples, that it may grow old there amid the sound of hymns and the dances of maidens.[23] Quiet peace, as of the greyness of a summer evening, is ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbled under the feet that trod ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... he kept on. It was the time when the cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation: and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things, ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... crossed so swiftly gleamed like the sea, and the cows loomed through the greyness like peaceful apparitions. But the dark wood with its sepulchral fir-tops and mysteriously spreading beech-trees was full of formless terror, and once the girl screamed as the birds flew with an awful sound through the dark undergrowth. A gloomy wood by night has terrors for ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... she had gained a point, and scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee upon a victory. They were but commonplaces that remained to be exchanged, but the low, moved voices in which they passed made them sacred in the memory. In the falling greyness of the evening he watched her figure winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave a hand, and then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if something went along with her out of the deepest of his heart. And something surely had come, and come to dwell there. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, ... those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... The greyness of the distant hills Is silvered in the lucid East, See, now the sheeny-plumed cock ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... out, and the wolf-dog went with him each time. But towards the last Black Bart preferred to stay in the room, crouched in front of her and blinking at the fire, as if he knew that each time his master would return to the fire. Then, why leave the pleasant warmth for the chilly greyness of ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... and eternity permits no lifting of its folds; there is no parting of its greyness, save for a passage, but perhaps, in "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns" Anne Coleman and her lover have met once more, and the long life of faithfulness at last has ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... if she saw it, the intensity of the gaze of his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the place were light and her look not averted, his "marching" face and those lines radiating to his temples (horizon tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and suddenly had upon her senses, with an extraordinary pungency, causing them to swim, that odd, nice smell there was about him of mingled peat and soap and fresh tobacco, of tweed and heather and ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... yellow marbled paper, its long rows of hat-pegs, its disreputable array of umbrellas, a broken mortar-board and a tattered and scattered Principia, seemed dim and dull in contrast with the luminous stir of the early March evening outside. An unusual sense of the greyness of a teacher's life, of the greyness indeed of the life of all studious souls came, and went in his mind. He took the "lines," written painfully over three pages of exercise book, and obliterated them with a huge G.E.L., scrawled monstrously across each page. He heard the ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... most wonderful golden brightness, just as Mrs. Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance, the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... delighted to say that we have arrived, and see our dear Florence—the Queen of Italy, after all . . . A comfort is that Robert is considered here to be looking better than he ever was known to look—and this, notwithstanding the greyness of his beard . . . which indeed, is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. This greyness was suddenly developed—let me tell you how. He was in a state of bilious ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... seen it scores of times in that abominable low-lying part of the town, and I knew the symptoms. There was a faint smell in the air, an odour that bit the nostrils, carrying the reek of that changeless wilderness of factories and houses. The opaque grey sky lost its greyness and was struck to a lurid yellow. Banks of high fog rolled up the east and moved menacingly, almost imperceptibly, upon the town. For a moment there were dim shadows of the wharves and the riverside houses, ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... henceforward at the Hook at five A.M. I am sorry for this, because after a rough passage it was very pleasant to glide in the early morning steadily up the Maas and gradually acquire a sense of Dutch quietude and greyness. No longer, however, can this be done, as the Batavier boats reach Rotterdam at night; and one therefore misses the river, with the little villages on its banks, each with a tiny canal-harbour of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... tenseness. Now it was all gone. She looked at Melville Stoner who occasionally looked at her. There was something in his eyes, a kind of laughter—a mocking kind of laughter. His eyes were grey, of a cold greyness, like the ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... The greyness had rolled away now, and the evening grown exceptionally lovely, with clear skies overhead and great banks of pearly tinted clouds on the horizons. Where should she go? Only two ways lay open. Either she must follow Diana and Stanley up the valley, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... between white walls, it came in whiffs and pulses, like a distant music. Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was already sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging skyward through the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child should understand the strange thing that was about to happen up there on the hill. The knowledge of Death was shining instinctively in the child's eyes. She was part of the stillness and greyness that was creeping over ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... can realize why, and I saw for a little into the outside edge of life as lived by these women. I wonder how I can best convey to you the horror and pity of it, for we—despite the greyness of our lives—have something within ourselves to which we can turn, but they have weighed even hopes and dreams with the weights of shame, and found their poor value in pounds, shillings and pence. That is why their eyes as they pass you in the streets ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... arm and scampered off to the Rat Hole to yarn with the twins, making what speed I could in the fog and untimely dusk, and happy, for the moment, to be free of the brooding shadow in our house. The day was not yet fled; but the light abroad—a sullen greyness, splashed with angry red in the west, where the mist was thinning—was fading fast and fearfully. And there was an ominous stirring of wind in the east: at intervals, storm puffs came swirling over the hills from the sea; and they ran off inland like mad, leaving the air of a sudden ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... of the country was so much changed that he had some difficulty in making his way. The vivid colours of the earth were all gone, and in place of them was the painful greyness of the dead trees, and the yellow of the parched soil. Nothing was overthrown in ruin, but all stood dead in its place. The shapes of men and animals only lay strewn upon the earth. The human beings were comparatively rare; they were the last survivors of the destroying drought whom ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... bay now, for I may never see anything like it again; never have I seen anything like it before. Forgive me, remember that three days ago I was in Ireland, the day before yesterday I was in England, yesterday I was in Paris. I have come out of the greyness of the North. When I left Paris all was grey, and when the train passed through Lyons a grey night was gathering; now I see no cloud at all: the change is so wonderful. You cannot appreciate my admiration. You have been looking at the bay for the last three weeks, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... sat at his dark little window, looking over at the place of his covenant until the shadowy, ethereal greyness of the dawn concentrated itself in a glorious bar on the eastern horizon and gradually grew into the great ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the last stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was—attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a son who ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... her the while with disapproval of her appearance, and anger at her condition. She knew the look only too well, poor soul, and her attitude was deprecating as she sat there gazing up pitifully at the strip of level greyness above the houses opposite. She said nothing, however, only rocked herself on her chair, and looked forlornly miserable; seeing which brought his irritation to a climax. He flung the book across the room; but even in the act, his countenance cleared. He was standing in the window, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... day brings back to a man the gloomiest things he knows," said Lord Dunstanwolde after a few moments' silent gazing upon the scene. "I no sooner paused here to look forth at the greyness than there came back to me a hard tale I heard before I left Gloucestershire. 'Twas another tale ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hand above her without turning her head, and it shone pale in the mist, an eerie beacon, and thus the boat passed from view in the greyness, though as the paddles dipped for the start the song still rung forth, beating ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... this period was an old man in appearance, though by no means an old man in years, being hardly more than fifty. Why he should have withered away, as it were, into premature greyness, and loss of the muscle and energy of life, none knew; unless, indeed, his wife did know. But so it was. He had, one may say, all that a kind fortune could give him. He had a wife who was devoted to him; he had a son ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odour of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind greyness with shadowy grandeur. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the gallery Where the chime keeps the night and day: It hurt his brain,—he could not pray. He had his face upon the stone: Deep 'twixt the narrow shafts, his eye Passed all the roofs unto the sky Whose greyness the wind swept alone. Close by his feet he saw it shake With wind in pools that the rains make: The ripple set his eyes to ache. He said, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... part of the troublesome Road was thus deceived; at length the Openings among the Trees grew larger, the Air seemed thinner, it lay with less oppression upon us, and we could now and then discern tracks in it of a lighter Greyness, like the Breakings of Day, short in duration, much enlivening, and called in that Country Gleams of Amusement. Within a short while these Gleams began to appear more frequent, and then brighter and of a longer continuance; the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... low again. It was almost dying. The daylight was fading every moment. The cinders fell together with a crumbling sound, and a greyness crept into their glowing depths. The old man sitting there made no ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... natures would grow more and more like one another. Then, turning on his thoughts, he dismissed them. They were the morbid feverish fancies of an exceptional, of a terrible night. He opened the window quietly so as not to awaken his wife. And in the melancholy greyness of the dawn he looked down into the street and wondered ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... had hidden her light behind a heavy bank of clouds, a dull greyness pervaded the whole landscape, causing it to look weird and forlorn in the gloom. The few trees dotted about here and there looked starved and gaunt on the barren hill-side, with great skeleton-like arms that waved mournfully in the breeze; the ground uneven and parched—after ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we had been told it would be very cold. Then we said goodbye ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... worse than usual that morning. After days of rain and greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... overhead neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land; not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky—the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, and the heavy clay of the fields ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... sad, ceaseless, as the cry of a warped humanity. Some paces more, and the promise is fulfilled, the hints and whisperings become fruition: the ground breaks steeply away, and you look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads, rolling woodland, and — bounding all, blent with the horizon, a greyness, a gleam — the English Channel. A road of promises, of hinted surprises, following each other with the inevitable sequence ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... rapidly; the lights of Dover twinkled through the greyness. Micky stood and watched till they could no longer be seen. He was chilled to the bone in spite of his warm coat; he turned the collar up round his throat and thrust his hands deeply ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were hung with similar drops, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... they were bound. A long, level stretch lay before them, and the donkeys took it at a canter. At the farther side were scattered rocks, black upon orange; and in the midst of them rose some broken shafts of pillars and a length of engraved wall, looking in its greyness and its solidity more like some work of Nature than of man. The fat, sleek dragoman had dismounted, and stood waiting in his petticoats and his cover-coat for the stragglers to gather ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven—these will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many of the Lancers, for, tired of the plodding life of keeping with the tremendous baggage train for a whole week, the two friends had ridden out in advance over a wide open series of rolling downs covered with dry scrubby growth, parched to greyness by the ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... on now to a finish, but the upshot is sure to be a finish. Their anticipations of an unclouded dawn, when the present night has worn itself into the streaky greyness of morning, are certain to come to pass. The ordeal which we are undergoing is tremendous, but at any rate the nation and its allies will emerge from it rejuvenated under the spell of the present magicians, as the old ram emerged lamb-like and frisky from Medea's cauldron. That, in brief, would ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... along well enough. He had been wont to see similar things in the "Daily News," in Chicago, but they did not hold his attention. Now, these things were like grey clouds hovering along the horizon of a clear day. They threatened to cover and obscure his life with chilly greyness. He tried to shake them off, to forget and brace up. Sometimes ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... furious; and Brandon, they say, wants to cut Ronder's throat. Ronder! Mrs. Combermere paused, partly to get her breath, partly to enjoy for an instant the shining, glittering grass, dotted with figures, stretching like a carpet from the vast greyness of the Cathedral. Ronder! There was a remarkable man! Mrs. Combermere was conquered by him, in spite of herself. How, in seven short months, he had conquered everybody! What an amusing talker, what a good preacher, what a clever business head! And yet she did not really like him. His praises ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... club-house a cheerful fire was burning, and the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green, and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member nodded approvingly. A ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... had ridden her was lying on his back at the edge of the cornfield, and the greyness of his face told that he ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... ill-directed lives. It has been pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing variety of morals, menages, occupations and types, at present so mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the course of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... distinguished by their hair; but I suspect that it was not the mere fact of its greyness to which she wished to draw my attention—rather it was to the manner in which they wore it, brushed up high and away from their foreheads, like dowagers of yore. Standing in a corner together very ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... Charolais were quick laying the table. Charolais kept up a running fire of questions as he did it; but Lupin did not trouble to answer them. He lay back, relaxed, drawing deep breaths. Already his lips had lost their greyness, and were pink; there was a suggestion of blood under the skin of his pale face. They soon had the table laid; and he walked to it on fairly steady feet. He sat down; Charolais whipped ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... you. Sometimes at night I have thought I have heard footsteps in the garden, and have got quietly out of bed lest I should wake him, and gone to the window to look out, but there has been only dark or the greyness of the morning, and I have gone crying back to bed again. Still I think you have been near us though you were too proud to let us know—and now at last I have you in my arms once more, my ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... home almost fainting with fatigue, but ready to fall asleep the moment he got into bed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper, with the advertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness of the light that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the muffled voices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to make out the design that had once colored the faded carpet on the floor, and wondered about the dead ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... to read this book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,—or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?—which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great doctrines ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... greyness of the landscape was in keeping with her own great sorrow. She had lost all that was dear to her; and, young as she was, with hardly any experience of the world and its ways, she was already the victim of grim circumstance, broken by the grief of a self-renounced love ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... until shortly after four, when the eastern sky began to lighten. The next half-hour passed more slowly than any that had gone before. Gradually their range of vision enlarged, and Steve, peering into the greyness, drew Bert's attention to a darker hulk that lay a few hundred yards up the harbour. They watched it anxiously as the light increased. That it was a boat of about the size of the Follow Me and that is was painted dark became more and more apparent. Then, quite suddenly, a ray ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... his wrongs the captain, a day or two after his daughter's return, strolled slowly down towards the harbour. It was afternoon, and the short winter day was already drawing towards a close. The shipping looked cold and desolate in the greyness, but a bustle of work prevailed on the Conqueror, which was nearly ready for sea again. The captain's gaze wandered from his old craft to the small vessels dotted about the harbour and finally dwelt admiringly on the lines of the whaler Seabird, which had put in a few days before as the result ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... himself without the aid of horse and hound; while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that blocked the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and monotonous whiteness, while all the edges of the landscape were outlined vaguely against the misty greyness of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... her spirit being the spirit of the true snob, the hectorer of the humble, the devout groveller in the courtyards of the great, she was a much-changed woman. Even her hair felt it, and settled down unchecked to greyness. She no longer cared to put on a pink tulle bow in the afternoons, which may or may not be a sign of grace. She ceased to suppose that she was pretty. When the accounts of Priscilla's wedding filled all the papers she became so ill that she had to go to ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... with awe and gladness, for indeed he knew not what deity had thus favoured him, but he would not reject the help of the Unknown God; so he bowed his head in reverence, and when he looked again the cross and the angel had disappeared, and around him as he woke was the greyness of the rising dawn. The emperor summoned to his tent two soldiers from the troops, and bade them make a cross of wood to bear before the army. This they did, greatly marvelling, and Constantine called a standard-bearer, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not—that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever I spoke ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... spent. And never shall I forget the aspect of day when it came. It was like a ghost or pale shadow of the glorious days of July with which we are usually blessed. The barometer did not go down, nor was there any rain, but an unusual greyness wrapped earth and sky. I heard people say in the streets, and I am aware that the same words came to my own lips: 'If it were not full summer, I should say it was going to snow.' We have much snow in the Haute Bourgogne, and we ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw off a burden grown unendurable. But it was fastened immovably—his responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... The stars go out all at once, and the inky sky which serves then becomes a delicate blue. The shadows melt deeper and deeper into the forest, clearly revealing the outlines of the straight-stemmed trees. There is just this interregnum of pearl greyness, a sort of hush-light, which lasts whilst a man counts twenty, before the silver lances of the sun are flashing through the leaves, and the grey veil which blurs the islands to shapeless blotches in a river of dull silver is burnt to nothingness, ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... all Dickens' genius, he had to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before coming upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let us go back for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay, to the earliest streak upon the greyness of night, to his first original published composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to "Pickwick" too, has told us somewhat about that first paper of his; how it was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... right up to the shoulder. The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all the fulness of its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate, smooth, pearly greyness of light, in which the town lies steeped during the early hours, into sharp-cut masses of black shade and spaces of hot, blinding glare. Three long rectangles of sunshine fell through the windows of the sala; while just across the street the front of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and was forthwith ushered up into Mr. Wilks's private sanctum. The sub-editor was a dry, grizzly-bearded man, with a prevailing wolfish greyness of demeanour about his whole person; and he shook Ernest's proffered hand solemnly, in the dreary fashion that is always begotten of the systematic transposition of night ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... noticed that Parrish was already speaking of Atlantis as if it was in the past. They drew a hopeful augury from that. And then there was nothing to do but resign themselves to that universal greyness—and to hope. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... skirt. Her upper body resembled a ball lying on a high little table. She looked at him temptingly and sympathetically, with an amorous smile, which the fog contorted into an insane expression. Kohn disappeared immediately in the greyness. She groaned ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... life was finished. Watch, originally jet-black without a spot, became quite grey, the greyness being most marked on the head, which became at ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... In the greyness of the dawn some soldiers appeared on the outskirts of the Barbarians, and filed past with their helmets raised on the points of their pikes; they saluted the Mercenaries and asked them whether they had no messages to send ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... must bob," said Betty. "I think I should have noticed your cherries bobbing, Miss Stone." She was looking intently at the quiet cheek close beside her own, with its little flush of pink, and the greyness of the hair that lay beside it. "I notice all your things, ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... coming to a stop. Larry gripped the table, struggling to hold firm to his reeling senses. This soundless, grinding halt! His swaying gaze strayed from the mirror. Outside the glowing bars he could now discern the luminous greyness separating. Swift, soundless claps of light and dark, alternating. Daylight and darkness. They had been blended, but now they were separating. The passing, retrograding days—a dozen to the second of ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!" There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial love and reverence ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... when I awaked into the Future, into the Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... with honesty, because she usually liked them better than the people who criticised her and combated and admired her from her own plane. After the trunks were checked and she still had a margin of time, she walked up and down the platform leaning on Lydia's arm, and talked about the greyness of New England and the lovely immortalities of Italy. When they saw the smoke far down the track, she stopped, still ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown |
