"Dinginess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his excitement by telling him that in my country he would find that the negro was a person held in very high esteem, that the women in particular valued him for that very dinginess which the Americans found distasteful, and told him that I could name several ladies of quality who ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... when at last she reached the towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ever palaces ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... you care to stay here," remarked Droulde, with a momentary smile, as he contrasted in his mind the fastidious appearance of his friend with the dinginess and dirt of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... bar, through the grim and smoky folds of which were visible sheets of unbleached factory muslin, an emaciated mattress, and a pair of lean pillows, which seemed quite lost in the much too large cases which covered them. The boy sighed as he took in all the dinginess and gloom, and his heart throbbed yearningly for the pleasant room which, even in adversity, had been his at home, cheered and enlivened so often, too, by the ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... bowing, the waiter went before them up the narrow stairs and led them into a dusky, fady, gloomy-looking chamber, whose carpet, curtains, and chair coverings seemed all of mingled hues of browns and grays, and from their fadiness and dinginess almost ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... tinkling charm of manner, that girlish flippancy and repartee, that had counted for so much in George's first impressions of her? They were no sooner engaged than it had begun to wane. Was it like the bird or the flower, that adorns itself only for the wooing time, and sinks into relative dinginess when ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Since then his shyness, apparently, had grown less or his misery greater, for it was with a strange grim avidity that he now attached himself to our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... whitewashed, but right long ago, As the cracks and the dinginess amply doth show; About the same time that a strange petrifaction Confined the incumbent to mere Sunday action. So many abuses in this place are rife, The only church things giving token of life Are the singing ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as well as in all the gatherings of the people of this city, was the absence of dinginess and dowdiness that goes with poverty. In the great mass of stone houses, pretty brick and wood villas, and apartment "houses," the upper flats of which are reached by curving iron Jacob stairways, that make habitable Quebec there are patches of cramped wooden ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... before, when Cousin Agnes was a little girl, for the cretonne curtains must once have been very pretty, with bunches of pink roses, which now, however, were faded, as well as the carpet on the floor, and the paper on the walls, to an over-all dinginess such as you never see in a country room even when everything in it ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... formed the courts, evidently the oldest and strongest of Bicetre, harmonized in dinginess with the scene. At every barred window, and these were numerous, about a dozen ruffianly heads were thrust together, to regard the chains of their companions.—What a study of physiognomy! The murderer's scowl was there, by the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... of going through a marriage ceremony. Her dress, of the latest fashion and the richest material, with dangling gold handbag and chatelaine, contrasted strangely with Laura's shabbiness and the general dinginess of Mrs. Farley's boarding-house. But the two girls were too glad to see each other to care about anything else. With little cries of delight, they fell into ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... this side the water; but I belong to that infirm, decrepit, bedridden old country, England, and must acknowledge, with a blush for the stupidity of the prejudice, that it is so very long since I have seen anything old, that the lower streets of Charleston, in all their dinginess and decay, were a refreshment and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... repaired, one March evening, Mr. Frank Pixley, Republican precinct committee-man, nor was its dinginess an unharmonious setting for that political brilliant. He was a pock-pitted, damp-looking, soiled little fungus of a man, who had attained to his office because, in the dirtiest precinct of the wickedest ward in the city, he had, through the operation ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... a couple of days before the session began in order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him; and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great barouche of the Newcomes ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... told Roger Tabor that in time Joe might come to be what the town thought him, if it gave him no other chance. Only its dinginess and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the barrooms—except that of the "National House"—welcomed him gratefully and admiringly. Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when nice girls wear pretty spring ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... learned to do many things in his young days in barracks. He carried about with him coarse bits of table-cloths and towels, which he laundered as if they had been the finest linen. He mended, he patched, he darned, and in the hardest fight the poor must face—the fight with dirt and dinginess—he always held his own. They had nothing but dry bread and coffee this evening, but Lazarus had made the coffee and ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... summer day in London formed a cloudless dome, where the sun still swung high on its westering course. In front of the distances that dusky pall was visible, and the houses at the edge of the Park were blurred in outline and made beautiful by the inimitable dinginess ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... find in the immense dinginess of London, and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... right, and there once more I saw, as on that first afternoon, the weathercock that watched the winds over the stables at Oldcastle Hall. It had caught just one glimpse of the sun through some rent in the vapours, and flung it across to me, ere it vanished again amid the general dinginess of the hour. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... in a queue being no other than his own ancestor. He wondered to himself where lay the charm and power to attract in a place so colorless, and he thought, as was his habit with all interiors, how different he would want it to be if he ever became a member. His fresh young nature revolted at the dinginess and bareness of the surroundings. He couldn't understand why the men came here and what could be the fascination of sitting round these cold tables talking by the hour when there was so much happiness outside—so much of light and air and ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... by a very slight effort of the will. Electric signs blazed everywhere. Bob was struck by the numbers of clairvoyants, palm readers, Hindu frauds, crazy cults, fake healers, Chinese doctors, and the like thus lavishly advertised. The class that elsewhere is pressed by necessity to the inexpensive dinginess of back streets, here blossomed forth in truly tropical luxuriance. Street vendors with all sorts of things, from mechanical toys to spot eradicators, spread their portable lay-outs at every corner. Vacant lots were crowded with spielers of all sorts—religious or political fanatics, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... one February evening, Malkin became aware, from the very threshold of the outer door, that the domicile was not as he had known it. With the familiar fragrance of Earwaker's special 'mixture' blended a suggestion of new upholstery. The little vestibule had somehow put off its dinginess, and an unwontedly brilliant light from the sitting-room revealed changes of the interior which the visitor remarked with ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... roof, the same little fireplace, with the space above for ornaments, and the same couple of little windows looking out upon a stretch of the noble river, from which you might have fished. There was the same colour of paint on the walls, which had been so managed as to represent the dinginess of antiquity. There was also, to all appearance, Mrs Roby's own identical bed, with its chintz curtains. Here, however, resemblance ended, for there was none of the Grubb's Court dirt. The craft on the river were not so large or numerous, the reach being above the bridges. If ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... square of glass. Theseus, who got through the Labyrinth, would have been puzzled with this mystic passage. We never saw such a time-worn and dumfounding road to any place, and if those who patronise it regularly had done their best to discover the essence of dinginess and intractibility, they could not have hit upon a better spot than this. A warm air wave, similar to that you expect on entering a bakehouse, met us just when we had passed the wooden partition. In the centre of the room there was a stove, almost red-hot. This apartment, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... monarch wore, I swear, Such a radiant dress; All the whitenesses we prize Suddenly before our eyes Turn to dinginess. Gone are all the shining joys That we held so dear; Linens, marbles, gleaming plumes We must hide in shadowed glooms— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the wilds of primeval forest. I have ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher |
