"Unsmiling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to get a volume of Pliny's letters. Expecting to see no one, and accustomed to attend without distraction to the business in hand, he was as quietly going out, when the host spoke to him, and without surprise, and with unsmiling courtesy, Thoreau greeted his friends. He seated himself, maintaining the same habitual erect posture, which made it seem impossible that he could ever lounge or slouch, and that made Hawthorne speak of him as "cast-iron," and immediately he began to talk in the strain ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... She panted a little from the climb up the steep. He saw her bosom rise and fall under the khaki jacket; her nostrils were slightly distended. In that first glimpse of her, he took in the graceful, perfect figure; the lovely, brilliant face; the glorious though unsmiling eyes. "You must leave at once. This is private property. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... dieser Parvenu des Himmels was angry with Israel for reminding Him of his former obscure national relations—what was it but a lively rendering of what German savants said so unreadably about the evolution of the God-Idea? But she felt also it would have been finer to bear unsmiling the smileless destinies; not to affront with the tinkle of vain laughter the vast imperturbable. She answered ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the women before him. Then he produced another tribute, a broad soft scarf of filmy texture, rich in color and pattern, a lovely thing, even to my eye, and offered it with a deep bow to the tall unsmiling woman who seemed to head the ranks before him. She took it with a gracious nod of acknowledgment, and passed it on to ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... quite well,' he answered in his quick, abrupt unsmiling manner. 'But why do you always come without any warning? If you let me know, I should be ready for you. I am always busy in the morning, and a fellow who has so much hard work to do can't always be in trim ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... sad and unsmiling, but grateful, passionately grateful to her "nurse-lady," as she called Mrs. Holmes; yet when, that kind woman stooped to kiss her once, Omassa shrank from the caress with such repugnance as deeply to wound her, until the little Japanese had ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... so he spoke in a very low, calm voice while a half-smile played across his lips but his cold, gray eyes were unsmiling. ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... saw Sal. She was sunning herself with other convalescents before the door. Her childlike face expressed only calm. She gazed at them, unsmiling. ...
— Gloria and Treeless Street • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... to a chair with unsmiling unconcern; dropped into another, crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair, her hands folded across the back of her head, her sleeves, wide and flaring, sliding down below her elbows. She caught Braman's burning stare of interest ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the room. He had loved Elise before with as unselfish a love as he could know. But hitherto he had not admired her. Now he rubbed his hands and chuckled softly, baring his teeth with unsmiling lips. ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... was an absolute seignior in vessels of iron—the kind that spit smoke and cannon balls. How about Jaime's grandfather, Don Horacio? Pep had seen him but few times, and yet he still trembled with respect as he recalled his regal appearance, his grave, unsmiling face, and the imposing gesture which accompanied his benevolent acts. He was a king after the ancient style, one of those kings who are good and just fathers of the poor, offering bread with one hand and holding a rod in ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... unsmiling manner was not at all like the Roderick McRae he had known in college, but the young man laid the ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... orchestra, holding a lobster claw in one hand and wielding the little two-pronged fork with the other. She dropped claw, fork, and popular air to stare open-mouthed at Gabe. Then a slow, uncertain smile crept about her lips, although her eyes were still unsmiling. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... for breath as they forged their bitter way into the gale, and few were they who took more than a single turn of the deck. Like beaten cowards they soon slunk into the sheltered spots, or sought even less heroic means of surrender by tumbling into bed with the considerate help of unsmiling stewards. The great ship went up and the great ship came down: when up so high that the sky seemed to be startlingly near and down so horribly low that the bottom of the ocean was even nearer. And it creaked and groaned and sighed even above the wild monody of the wind, like a thing in ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Ponatah was unsmiling. "I'm simple, but I can see through people. I can tell the good ones and the bad ones. You're a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... moving for a moment—half in caress—half in benediction, while he felt her almost imperceptible gesture dismissing this unusual audience where soul had faced soul on the brink of a great catastrophe; and he rose to meet the strange, luminous, unsmiling gaze of the great dark eyes which yesterday had been almost the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the hearth. She was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... His voice, unlike the rest of him, could be thick and soft and fluid. He put his arm round her, and she offered him her mouth, curled forward, obedient but unsmiling. Her hand, surrendered to his, lay limp in the hard clasp of it. He raised it as if weighing the ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... from nineteen to twenty her neck had broadened at the base the least one might discern, that her face was less full yet richer in suggestion—her face of the odds and ends when she did not smile. At this moment she was not only unsmiling, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... to her red frock was a string of sparkling green stones which fell low on her breast. Her long, brown fingers blazed with rings, and in her ears, swinging against her olive cheeks, were great hoops of dull gold. Her black shining hair was gathered low on her neck, her unsmiling lips were scarlet as a pomegranate flower, and exquisitely cut; and the fainter, duskier pomegranate bloom on her oval cheeks faded into delicate stains like pale coffee ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Then she recognized him and held out her hand. Her face was serious, unsmiling, her ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... was restless and miserable, wandering from window to window to scan the dour, unsmiling sky. Carl White, dropping in to pay a call, was alarmed when he heard that Chester had gone with Joe, and had not tact enough to conceal ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... point on the road to recovery, just halfway between illness and health, that Norah and Max brought the great and unsmiling Von Gerhard on the scene. It appeared that even New York was respectfully aware of Von Gerhard, the nerve specialist, in spite of the fact that he lived in Milwaukee. The idea of bringing him up to look ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... turned and trotted at Mrs. Carew's side, through the huge station; but she looked up once or twice rather anxiously into the lady's unsmiling face. At last she ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... not." She looked at him, unsmiling: "It was the acquired habit of indifference in me which you mistook for—I think you mistook it for stupidity. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... bourgeoise our front door was hung with heavy black curtains, and our Maiden passed forth into the broad day for the first time in ten years. She went out unsmiling, uncooing, without flutter or quirk, and no date upon her pine coffin, for with her last ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... never forget Tony's face. 'Twas a little, round, firm, tight face, with a seam here and there left by the smallpox, but not enough to hurt his looks in a woman's eye, though he'd had it badish when he was a boy. So very serious looking and unsmiling 'a was, that young man, that it really seemed as if he couldn't laugh at all without great pain to his conscience. He looked very hard at a small speck in your eye when talking to 'ee. And there was no more sign of a whisker or beard on ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... he opined at last; then he cried brightly: "Ha! Pressed flowers! I'm full of old-fashioned sentiment." After studying Lorelei's unsmiling face his tone altered. "Oh, I know! I slipped, but it couldn't be helped. Nature insisted, and I yielded gracefully, but no harm done, none whatever. This isn't a defeat, my dear; it's a victory. I licked the demon rum and proved myself a man of iron. I subjugated ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... her to the girls, but her smile reminded Billie of the smile on the face of a Chinese idol which she and her chums had come upon among the antiques of the old homestead at Cherry Corners. It was merely a crack in her face and the beady black eyes remained unsmiling. ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... people were differently impressed. They thought Evadne was cold and preoccupied when it came to the parting, and did not seem to feel leaving her friends at all. She went out dry-eyed after kissing her mother, took her seat in the carriage, bowed polite but unsmiling acknowledgments to her friends, and drove off with Major Colquhoun with as little show of emotion, and much the same air as if she had merely been going somewhere on business, and expected ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Miss Theodosia. For here again was the trail of the roses. Stefana had "posed" them in all the little pictures. The effect of a rose-draped Carruthers was almost startling. He gazed from behind them stolidly, unsmiling and unhappy-souled. Carruthers ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... been amusing you, dear?" she said, casually enough; but the smile which accompanied the remark did not harmonize with the unsmiling and anxious eyes. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... at her and wondered whether she was growing the least bit personal. She was looking straight ahead, with an unsmiling gaze. As I glanced at her, there beside me, with the breeze blowing wisps of golden hair around ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... venturing to pinch her cheek or pat her on the shoulder into the bargain, accepted the situation with another type of smile—the Smile-that-children-expect. As a matter of fact, children hate it. They see through its artificial humbug easily. They prefer a solemn and unsmiling face invariably. It's the latter that produces chocolates and sudden presents; it's the stern-faced sort that play hide-and-seek or stand on their heads. The Smilers are bored at heart. They mean to escape at the first opportunity. And the children never ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... quivered), a little yellow mustache, and a little round stomach. Himself and his business he took very seriously, though he was far less tricky than Mr. Pemberton. The Real Estate Board of Trade was impressed by his unsmiling insistence on the Dignity of the Profession, and always asked him to serve on committees. It was Mr. Truax who bought the property for sub-development, and though he had less abstract intelligence than Mr. Fein, he was a better judge of "what the people want"; of just how high to make restrictions ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... face was very set. His final wish was the key-note of his life. His was truly an unsmiling existence. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... inferred from analogy. I played chess with Fyne in the late afternoon, and sometimes came over to the cottage early enough to have tea with the whole family at a big round table. They sat about it, an unsmiling, sunburnt company of very few words indeed. Even the children were silent and as if contemptuous of each other and of their elders. Fyne muttered sometimes deep down in his chest some insignificant remark. Mrs ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... was a gurgling cry of joyful discovery, but it was followed almost instantly by silence. The black-garbed, unsmiling woman did not invite approach, and the boy fell back at his first step. He ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... hands lying before her in her lap, in the same hard tone as if the words were cut in ebony; with the same fixed lips—the same pale, unsmiling severity of face; above which the abundant hair, streaked with early gray, was almost entirely ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... stretched out unsmiling, and inexpressibly desolate. The path of duty seemed straight ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... SIR WILFRID CATES-DARBY. He is a high-bred, sporting Englishman. His manner, his dress and his diction are the perfection of English elegance. His movements are quick and graceful. He talks lightly and with ease. He is full of life and unsmiling good temper. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... flickering light, standing, straight and silent in her short skirt and moccasins, her leaf-brown hair tied with bracken and turned to midnight black by the shadows, her grey eyes mysterious under their dark lashes, and her lips unsmiling, Desire might well have been some beauty of that vanishing race. A princess, perhaps, waiting with grave courtesy for the welcome due her ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Professor." And the Professor looked at Chad curiously, and smiled and smiled again kindly when he saw the boy's grave, unsmiling eyes fastened on him. ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... could not look at him. She could only listen to the flutter of the fringes of the parasol carried above her head. She felt herself small and stupid. She could not understand what he could see in her to come back to. Then she gave a side glance at him. She saw an unsmiling profile. The lines in his face were indeed extraordinary, but none was hard. She liked that wonderful mobility that had survived the batterings ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... opened and Lydia, breathless and rosy and threadbare, came into his little private office. She closed the door and stood with her back against it, unsmiling. ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... things of this generation's "four-year-olds" where my father could hear me. To have simply skinned me alive and considered his duty at an end would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one so sinning. He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of precocity. If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said them in his hearing, he would have destroyed me. He would, indeed. He would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for I would have had judgment ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... at the head of the table, she looked again. His eyes were fixed on her with a curious intentness. He seemed to be surveying her, from the top of her burnished hair to the very gown she wore. His gaze made her vaguely uncomfortable. It was unsmiling, appraising, almost—only that was incredible in ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... an unsmiling negative. Smiling was apparently unnatural to him. The lack of it and the lack of expression in his eyes, except when stirred by terror, showed something of ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... first glance Leonora noticed that Arthur was considerably thinner. She was overcome by a violent emotion that contained both fear and joy. And as he approached her, agitated and unsmiling, the joy said: 'How heavenly it is to see him again!' But the fear asked: 'Why is he so worn? What have you been doing to him all these months, Leonora?' She met him in the middle of the lawn, and they shook hands timidly, clumsily, embarrassed. Carpenter, with that inborn delicacy of tact which ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... cold individual to whose doubtful mercies she had confided her child at such short notice had been softened by the references to him in Jewel's letters; and it was with a shock of disappointment that she found herself repulsed now by the same unyielding personality, the same cold-eyed, unsmiling, fastidiously dressed figure, whose image had lingered in her memory. A dozen eager questions rose to her lips, but she ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... Emma McChesney's eyes, and something in her set, unsmiling face, told him that she was not seeing seashores. She was staring straight at him, straight through him, miles beyond him. There was about her that tense, electric, breathless air of complete detachment, which always enveloped her when her lightning mind was leaping ahead to a goal unguessed ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... belonged to a different type,—a tall, gaunt, black, unsmiling sybil, weighted with the woe of the world. She ran away from slavery and giving up her own name took the name of Sojourner Truth. She says: "I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither salutation, and said, "I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne." Her voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was severely unsmiling. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... books on education. Even the schoolboys were embarrassed at the sight of the old man's swarthy, pockmarked face, his lank figure, invariably clothed in a sort of scanty grey dresscoat. The boys did not suspect then that this grim, unsmiling old gentleman, with his crane-like gait and his long nose, was at heart troubling and yearning over each one of them almost as over his own son. He once conceived the idea of talking to them about Washington: 'My young nurslings,' he began, but at the first sounds of his strange voice the ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... stillness, gazing out over the chilly and mournful sea. There was something so unutterably sad about Felicita's condition that it awed the simple, cheerful nature of Madame. It was more than illness and exhaustion. The white, unsmiling face, the drooping head, the languor of the thin, long hands, the fathomless sorrow lurking behind her dark eyes—all spoke of a heart-sickness such as Madame had never seen or dreamed of. The children did not cheer their mother. When she saw that, Madame felt that there was nothing to be done but ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... said, carefully unsmiling. Good God, it was still Prohibition! Memory stabbed at him, bringing what had so recently emerged from past into present clearly into focus, technicolored focus. "I've got a little ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... a space between them. She was the first to speak, and she did so with a cool, unsmiling demeanor which reminded him of childhood days when he ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... left the room Mr. Evringham and his housekeeper stood regarding one another. His usually unsmiling countenance was relaxed. Mrs. Forbes observed his novel expression, but did not suspect that the light twinkling in his deep-set eyes was partly due to the sight of her ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... under the coquettish onslaughts of Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Wheatley, who extracted from him with wheedling perseverance his opinions on the State, the climate, and the country. Lord Hastings replied with iron-bound and unsmiling brevity, his wide cold glance resting with motionless attention upon the painted physiognomy of Mrs. Peck and the broad and buxom one of Mrs. Wheatley, and his head turning with dignified difficulty in his exceedingly high and tight collar, as ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... felt utterly safe and wholly at peace. Something was hammering at Bell's brain, warning him, and he could not understand what it was. But he exchanged the decorous limp handshake which is conventional south of Panama, and followed his unsmiling host to rooms where a servant laid out a bewildering assortment of garments. They were all rather formal, the sort of clothing that is held to be fitting for a man of position where Spanish is the official ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... the "Princess" in her turn denuded herself of her wealth of wig, and Madame Depine watched with unsmiling satisfaction the stretchings of tape ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... before it had known good or evil;[7] on the children of a house all struck down in one day and buried in one grave;[8] on the boy whom his parents could not keep, though they held both his little hands in theirs, led downward by the Angel of Death to the unsmiling land.[9] Then follows the keener sadness of the young life, spared till it opened into flower only to be cut down before noon; the girl who, sickening for her baby-brother, lost care for her playmates, and found no ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... conversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl in red, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences and briefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent as youth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse |
