"Grayness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and before dawn you are awakened by the singing of countless birds of many kinds. The air is fresh and cool, and you draw your woolen blankets a little closer around you. The tent is closed, but through the little cracks you can see that all is still dark. In a few moments a faint grayness steals into the air, and off in the half darkness you hear the Somali gunbearers chanting their morning prayers—soft, musical, and soothing. Then there are more voices murmuring in the air and the camp slowly awakens to life. ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... resolution was weakening and strengthening, ebbing and flowing. The thing that perturbed him went on as steadily as his pulse, but he was almost unconscious of it. He was submerged in the vast impersonal grayness about him, and at intervals the sidelong roll of the boat measured off time like the ticking of a clock. He felt released from everything that troubled and perplexed him. It was as if he had tricked and outwitted torturing ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... back fragment by fragment, while Nada stood behind him, her wide-open, childishly beautiful eyes beginning to comprehend the struggle that was disrupting the heart of this man who was an outlaw—and her god among men. And when Jolly Roger turned, his face had aged to the grayness of stone, and his eyes were dull, and there was a terribly dead ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... "Don't be angry with me—I can't help it—I'm not glad or sorry for anything now," she answered; and her voice matched his for grayness. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... down the hill from his big, square house—its weather-beaten grayness matching the ledges on which it was propped. His beard and hair were the color of the ledges, too, and the seams in his hard face were like ledgerifts. His belted jacket was stone gray and it was buttoned over the torso of a man who was six feet tall—yes, a bit over that height. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... strong and true are the friendships; so brave and kind are the men I meet—so beautiful the whole world of the Singing Mouse, that when it is over, and in a chill I start up, I scarce can bear the shrinking in of the walls, and the grayness of the once red fire, and my gold turned to earthenware, and my pictures turned to splotches. In my hand everything I touch feels awkward. A pen—a pen—to talk of that? If one could use it while in the land of the Singing Mouse—then ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... aware of a change. There came a grayness in the room. The moonlight had lost its white brilliance, the night was waning. Sylvia rose from her bed, and slowly like one very tired she began to gather together and pack into a bag such few clothes as she could carry. ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... really hems us in with narrow light and shuts us upon ourselves, night that sets us free and reveals to us all the secrets of the sky. I thought of that when one by one the stars melted and the moon became a breath, and up over the wide grayness crept color and radiance and the sun himself, —the sky soaring higher and higher, like a great thin bubble of flaky hues,—and, all about, nothing but the everlasting wash of waters broke the sacred hush. And it seemed as if God had been with us, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... to a pot where lime was seething, or rather had been seething. He took up the thick lumps and crushed them into dust. He made his face as white as if he were going to play the king in Macbeth, and Banquo's ghost was arising; and he turned his glossy locks into a cadaverous and premature grayness, and Bess didn't like it. She wanted to see him only one Sunday in "his best shuit"; but Jem, unkind fellow, would not grant her ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... goddess Athene shed a thick mist round him. When he awoke, the sheltering heavens, the long paths, and the trees in bloom all looked strange to him when seen through the grayness of the mist. ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... the same way, and the same colour may appear to be of a different tint to different eyes; and it seems certain that climate and surroundings affect the colour sense: light and colour will stimulate the delight in colour; while, where grayness and dullness characterize the surroundings of life, the colour sense will grow weak, or, if it is manifested at all, it will show a tendency to grayness and heaviness ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... is a decidedly inheritable trait. And so is premature grayness of the hair. But it is doubtful if any woman would permit these factors to play any role in her choice ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... into the grayness of dawn when he took her to the waiting carriage. She put her hand through the window and he held it for a long time, while they once more went over ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... are cromlechs set alone—a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight. There are cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand. There are circles beside circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting their aisles. There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their companion, and, beyond the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... leaping: the bleak clearness of brisk March skies; the shining grayness of meadows from which mists were slowly rising; the faint flush of greenness which was gathering in hedges; the shy pageant of spring unfolding, with the promised certainty of new summers which are never ending. The world looked young. As the train dashed by, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... a refreshing and unique human comedy that would not only electrify the public but whose chief actors balked all speculation. He could not help owning that Ellen Webster's bequest, heartily as he disapproved of it, lent a welcome bit of color to the grayness of his days. Ever since he had drawn up the fantastic document it had furnished him with riddles so interesting and unsolvable that they rendered tales of Peter Featherstone and Martin Chuzzlewit tame reading. These worthies were only creations of paper and ink; but here was a living, ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... the Highlands without suffering from it; it is so damp and so depressing in winter-time, when the wind howls so piteously in the twisted branches of the Scotch firs, and when the rain imprisons one for weeks within liquid walls of unrelieved grayness. Mr. Hamerton, since he came to Innistrynich, had repeatedly suffered from what he believed to be toothache, although his teeth were all perfectly sound, and the pain being always attended by insomnia, was a cause of weakness and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... application should be done by one experienced in its use. The judicious use of these hair-dyes will give the hair above the surface of the skin a brownish-black appearance, the intensity of the color of which depends upon the strength of the solution. But hair-dyeing for premature grayness should be avoided, as the diseased condition may be averted by the proper remedies. Never permit the hair to be bleached for the purpose of obtaining the fashionable golden hue, as the arsenical solution generally used is highly dangerous; but, if your patients must have their hair of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... black, but faintly gray, and beside them, on either side, floated two exact replicas of their ship! Zezdon Afthen stared. But in another moment, both were gone, and space was black, yet in but a few moments a grayness was showing, and light was appearing from all about, growing gradually in intensity. For three seconds Arcot continued thus, then he pulled the metal button down the slide, and flicked over another that he had pulled to cause the ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... gray vapor had now arisen many more degrees above the horizon, and was gradually losing its grayness of tint. The heat of the water was extreme, even unpleasant to the touch, and its milky hue was more evident than ever. Today a violent agitation of the water occurred very close to the canoe. It was attended, as usual, with a wild flaring up of the vapor at its summit, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... out barking, his voice rising to a yell as he paused and listened through the silence. Wunpost lay in bed and waited, then rose cautiously up and peered from the mouth of the cave. A pale moon was shining on the jagged rocks above and there was a grayness that foretold the dawn, but the bottom of Tank Canyon was still dark as a pocket and he went back to wait for the day. Good Luck came back whining, and a growl rumbled in his throat—then he leapt up again and Wunpost felt ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... at the bow again, and the row-locks squeaked. Another hour and then another passed in silence before the girl noted that she no longer seemed to float through abysmal darkness, but that the river showed in muddy grayness just over the gunwale. She saw Runnion more clearly, too, and made out his hateful outlines, though for all else she beheld they might have been miles out upon a placid sea, and so imperceptible was the laggard day's approach ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... minute, Mortimer," I broke in, becoming suddenly aware there was a grayness in the eastern sky. "I want to creep in toward the house while it remains dark. You can tell the rest as we go along. Tom, take these ropes and tie your man up. Make him safe, and then come ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... unaccountable weariness of spirit, I stood within the lobby looking out upon the grayness of London in November. A slight mental effort was sufficient to blot out that drab prospect and to conjure up before my mind's eye a balcony overlooking the Nile—a glimpse of dusty palms, a white wall overgrown with purple blossoms, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... river. She had never seen one, but Zoe had stamped its terrors deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of seeing,—heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... a scarlet eggy probing the mother-of-pearl lake with a long red line of shadow, until it wasted into grayness and so disappeared. Then home-returning sails became spiritualized, and moved in mist as in a dream—foggy lake and sky, as one body, seeming to push ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... table. The eyes of the man who sat there were perfectly wide-open, but there was something unnatural in their fixed stare,—something unnatural, too, in the drawn grayness of ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the left wing, Nina looked. From thence she could see five other vast hotels, and the yard of Charing Cross Station, with three night-cabs drawn up to the kerb, and a red van of W.H. Smith and Son disappearing into the station. The Strand was quite empty. It was a strange world of sleep and grayness and disillusion. Within a couple of hundred yards or so of her thousands of people lay asleep, and they would all soon wake into the disillusion, and the Strand would wake, and the first omnibus of all the omnibuses ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... If any other comes, I shall pitch-plaster him, for I could not endure that noise again. But you see, at a glance, why you have failed to see it, as we always do with our little oversights, when humbly pointed out to us. It is the colour of the ground and the background too, and the grayness of the scanty growth that hides it. Nobody finds it out by walking across it, because of this swampy place on your side, and the shoot of flints down from the cliff on the other, all sharp as a knife, and as rough as a saw. And ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... my pace, trying to peer through the sullen fog, as I ran. The occasional dull boom of a gun called "Help," from out the grayness, with pathetic persistency. Soon another sound caught my ear, or rather vibrated through my frame, for the ground beneath me seemed to tremble, and I turned to see the swift oncoming of the life-saving crew from ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... disclose vaster grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it. In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the confiding and admiring ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... beside Bo, and for a long time they climbed steadily in silence. Helen knew when that dark hour before dawn had passed, and she welcomed an almost imperceptible lightening in the east. Then the stars paled. Gradually a grayness absorbed all but the larger stars. The great white morning star, wonderful as Helen had never seen it, lost its brilliance and life and seemed to retreat ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... back against the wall, the grayness deepened, took the form of a man. And out of that mistiness a face was etched, a face that had no single line of humor in it, a bleak face with the fire of anger in ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... cobble-stones. A lantern flashing in and out among barns lit up my ceiling for a moment, a rough country voice hailed another rough country voice somewhere outside, and the day slowly coughed and sneezed itself awake in the six-o'clock grayness. I heard Colin moving in the next room, and presently we were down-stairs, alertly hungry. Our hostess, with morning smile, asked if we would mind waiting breakfast for "the boarders." Meanwhile, we stepped out into the unfolding day, and the village that ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... Greece. All among the red, pink, and yellow houses, huddled picturesquely together round the great arena, you see Rome in the carved columns and dark piles of brick built into mediaeval walls. The glow and colour of the shops and houses seem only to intensify the grimness and grayness of that Roman background, the immense wall of the arena. Greece you see in the eyes of the beautiful, stately women, young and old, in their classic features, and the moulding of their noble figures. (No wonder Epistemon urged his giant to let the beautiful ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... crown of the hill stood a curious structure, actually small, but looming large in the grayness. The main body of the building was elevated upon posts, and was smaller at the bottom than where the spreading walls met the peaked roof. This roof spread out on both sides into broad verandas, and under these two wing-like shelters some three or four score of people were ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... was singularly shaggy and picturesque in its tawny grayness, and wavy, wiry length. Above his eyes his heavy brows of the same texture and color seemed to make a pent-house, from which the high, pale brow receded gradually; his profile was aquiline to absolute grotesqueness. The idea of ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... "You shall go, now, Stephen Holmes,—quick! before your sovereign lady fades, like Cinderella, into grayness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... she nested there through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne, champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over the military post in the corner ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... a certain child through the first six years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on a narrow but highly fashionable London street and looked on at the passing of motors, carriages and people in the dull afternoon grayness. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet, if set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his victim for some time without speaking. The other's eyes dropped, and a grayness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's face. At length the ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... as the most grateful lubricant known to the human machine, is destined to play another part of increasing importance in our national life as a kind of national shock-absorber as well. But its role is something more than this, surely. When life is drab, it takes away its grayness. When life is sad, it brings us solace. When life is dull, it brings us new inspiration. When we are a-weary, it brings us comfort and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... lived on Cardew Way. She wondered if Aunt Elinor found that curious, as she did. Did she resent these ever-present reminders of her lost family? Did she have any bitterness because the very grayness of her skies was making her hard old father richer ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... grayness of morning he heard a great cry, swelling louder and louder until the forest echoed. It was a cry of grief and of rage. The strangely silent lodge had been investigated and his bloody work was known. Feet thudded past his wood-pile, hasty figures brushed against it, as the best warriors ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... plantation, you watch the tall palms, planted in a line, that shield, its borders. An avenue of like growth leads you to the house, where barking dogs announce you, and Don Juan, an elderly gentleman in slippers and a Panama hat, his hair, face, and eyes all faded to one hue of grayness, comes out to accost us. Here, again, Hulia Protestante becomes the subject of a series of attacks, in a new kind. Don Juan first exhausts his flower-garden upon her, and explains all that is new to her. Then she must see his blind Chino, a sightless Samson ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... no question about that, the change from the constant glare of a white sun in a blue sky, to the soft damp grayness of the fog. It was already rolling over the level plain towards the mountains and, in a short time, a high fog was spread over the ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... humiliation at the mere thought of making a request, no matter what its nature may be. So promotion had come to him tardily, and by virtue of the slowly-working laws of seniority. He had been made a sub-lieutenant in 1802, but it was not until 1829 that he became a major, in spite of the grayness of his moustaches. His life had been so blameless that no man in the army, not even the general himself, could approach him without an involuntary feeling of respect. It is possible that he was not forgiven for this ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... the blackness of the cold winter night; inside the grayness of stained walls lighted by the glow from the blazing fires. A few pieces of statuary, copies of the work of the idealistic Greek period, stood in the hall and the living room. All that meant merely comfort, homelikeness—all in a word that was characteristically ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... slid out the door while the waiter's back was turned. The two men were ambling slowly down the road toward Economy. Billy started on a dead run. His rubber soled shoes made no echo and he was too light on his feet to make a thud. He disappeared into the grayness like a spirit. He had more cause than ever now for hurry. Mark! Mark! His beloved Mark Carter! What must he do about it? Must he tell Mark? Or did Mark perhaps know? What had happened anyway? There had evidently been a shooting. ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... hate or killing, but the call for protection, swiftly following our lead. Being civilized, we instinctively knew the way out of the jungle to human habitation. We approached the village which was still sleeping in the morning grayness, and behind us saw horny deer, leopards, and wild cats rushing after us. Then the boars came after us, dashing out of the jungle in terror. Vast clouds of blackness were rising from the horizon, and when the morning light grew more intense, I realized they ...
— Kari the Elephant • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... degrees the sun shone through the misty grayness, bathing the road before them, and lighting up the bare hedges on either side until it really seemed that spring had come, that the fresh morning air was certainly full of the scent of primroses and violets, and the sweet earthy smell of moss. The birds ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... have become utterly changed; the dark preoccupation had been absent from his face—the gauntness, the grayness, seemed to have become subdued; the deep lines of pain, imperceptible at times, smoothed out and shadowed in an ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... set much store by our headstones, did he ever find them out. Certain of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for they came over from England, and are now fallen into the grayness of age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the blackberry binds them fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such veiling; for most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning skulls, and awful cherubs compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely feathered wings. One ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... in, and I pulled out into mid-stream. It was almost daylight now, but there was still a grayness in the atmosphere that exactly matched the tint of Wetter's face. Noticing this suddenly I pointed it ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the leader as he went whirling over the edge, and one after another the party followed. When the last had gone to his death she arose to her feet with a laugh of triumph. "Now I, too, can die!" she cried. So saying, she fell forward into the grayness of space. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... old-fashioned dignity of its own; the town, harbour, ports, and people seem, as it were, consecrated to packets. There is an antique and reverend grayness in its old inns, old streets, old houses, all clustered and huddled into the little sheltered amphitheatre, as if trying to get down close by their pride, the packets. For centuries it has been the threshold, the hall-door, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... studied for a lifetime, is never exhausted, and is never completely understood. This knowledge comes later; and it is then that the Chapter of the Great Book of Human Nature, which deals with natives, engrosses his attention and, touching the grayness of his life, like the rising sun, turns it into gold ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... moon, my everybody's moon, Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks—no one's: very dear, no less. You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony! A common grayness 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 Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... that the breeze lifts it; just now it looked like heavy linen held out by pins. Observe that the satiny lustre I am putting on the bosom gives it the plump suppleness of the flesh of a young girl. See how this tone of mingled reddish-brown and ochre warms up the cold grayness of that large shadow where the blood seemed to stagnate rather than flow. Young man, young man! what I am showing you now no other master in the world can teach you. Mabuse alone knew the secret of giving life to form. Mabuse had but one ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... details of what he called "getting everything settled"—she rode in a taxi to take the train for Southampton. Her last impression of London was of rows upon rows of mean houses, of cats wandering in back-yards among groves of home-washed underclothing, and a smoky grayness which gave way, as the train raced on, to the clearer gray of the suburbs and the good green and brown of the ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... movement, simple as the question and answer that had preceded it, but it held interest for Blake. He could not have analyzed the impression, but something in the boy's air touched him, something in the young figure so plainly clad, so aloof, stood out with sharp appeal in the grayness and unreality of the dawn. A feeling that was neither curiosity nor pity, and yet savored of both, urged him to further speech. As his two companions, anxious to be free of the train, passed out into the corridor, he glanced once more at the slight figure, at the high Russian boots, the long ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Which everybody looks on and calls his, 30 And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks—no one's: very dear, no less. You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony! A common grayness 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. 40 There's the bell clinking from the ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning |
