"Vapid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me, and, once cured, the charms of the wheel are as vapid as the defence of a vigilant committee to the man it means to hang. Stubborn—it would not go a step without being pushed. It would not even stand up by itself, and I literally had to push it—it, as well as ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... rechauffe of the week's news she probably extracted enough information to enable her to display that well-bred interest, that vague and superficial acquaintance with the subject which will pass muster in society, and which probably explains alike the very vapid talk and the wildly false accusations which form the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... these black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours. Yet if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face. Vapid, with sordid content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr. The sentry had told him the Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the Federal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... are the signs and indications of great changes taking place upon the visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in hand march the visible and the imponderable forces of this earthly life. Ignorance and vapid superstitions can no longer block the doorway of ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... Janet had told her, and so thinking could not for the moment answer—could not meet his earnest gaze. Dark as it was she felt, rather than saw, the glow of his deep blue eyes. She could not mistake the tenderness of his tone. She had so believed in him. He seemed so far above the callow, vapid, empty-headed youngsters the other girls were twittering about from morn till night. She felt that she believed in him now, no matter what had been said or who had said it. She felt that if he would but say it was all a mistake—that no woman had ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... story, "What Happened at Mendocino." What happened to the story does not appear. He went to church generally, and some of the sermons were good and others "vapid and trite." Once in a while he goes to a dance, but not to his great satisfaction. He didn't dance particularly well. He tells of a Christmas dinner that he helped his sister to prepare. Something made him dissatisfied with himself and he bewails his melancholy and gloomy forebodings that ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... struck that note of regret which never leaves an audience unmoved; she appealed to the sadness which lingers for ever in the heart of man, and, after the vapid brilliancies of La Fontaine's comedy, the strain had all the greater power to stir. Wilhelmine, an unseen spectator at many rehearsals of the theatricals, had calculated this to a nicety, with an artist's instinct for playing ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... steps 'twixt me and fame— So like, egad, we're just the same; I never half squeeze out a thought, But jumps its fellow on the spot— My tenderest dreams, my fondest touch, Are victims to his ready clutch; The whirling waltz, the gay costume, The porcelain tooth, the gallic bloom; The vapid smiles, the lisping loves Of turtles (never meant for doves)— The dreary stuff that fills the ears, Where all the orators are peers— The hides reveal'd through ball-room dresses, Where all the parties are peer-esses; The dulness of the toujours gai, The yawning night, the sleepy day, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... men or young women are brought together into one home, to lead a common family life with common purposes and prospects, the religious equality principle breaks down; you must have common religious teaching and common worship, and these must be utterly vapid and miserable, unless there be a hearty agreement upon the grounds and articles of faith, such as is only possible for those who are of one Church, or at all events of one denomination. Doubtless on this very account ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Farce. Miss Matthews is a new and remarkable study of the femme entretenue, to parallel which, as in the case of Lady Bellaston, we must go to Balzac; Mrs. James, again, is an excellent example of that vapid and colourless nonentity, the "person of condition." Mrs. Bennet, although apparently more contradictory and less intelligible, is nevertheless true to her past history and present environments; while her husband, the sergeant, with his concealed and reverential ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... or "lower line," is but a narrative of the decline of the power and prosperity which had been matured under the Bengal conquerors and of the rise of the Malabar marauders, whose ceaseless forays and incursions eventually reduced authority to feebleness and the island to desolation. The vapid biography of the royal imbeciles who filled the throne from the third to the thirteenth century scarcely embodies an incident of sufficient interest to diversify the monotonous repetition of temples founded and dagobas repaired, of tanks constructed and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... remnant of feeling left, and would have liked to kick him. Though Melmotte was by far the bigger man, and was also the younger, Lord Alfred would not have lacked the pluck to kick him. Lord Alfred, in spite of his habitual idleness and vapid uselessness, had still left about him a dash of vigour, and sometimes thought that he would kick Melmotte and have done with it. But there were his poor boys, and those bills in Melmotte's safe. And then Melmotte lost his points so regularly, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... there is to whom these things, That nobody else's mind calls back, Have a savour that scenes in being lack, And a presence more than the actual brings; To whom to-day is beneaped and stale, And its urgent clack But a vapid tale. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... that old fraud asleep again. And to-morrow he'll print half a column of vapid reminiscence and call it criticism. It's a wonder his paper stands for him. Because he once heard ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... in art as clime, yet sunk so low Beneath the despot Teuton's rule, I see Thy halls deserted, fallen, yet in thee Much splendour to admire there still exists. Well could I quit my native land, and flee The rugged northern clime, the vapid mists, With thee to dwell, did I that only ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... came, and the company at Lossie House was still seated at table, Clementina heartily weary of the vapid talk that had been going on all through the dinner, when she was informed that a fisherman of the name of Mair was at the door, accompanied by his wife, saying they had an appointment with her. She had already acquainted her hostess, when first they sat ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... company of well-bred people," and that neither great vice nor great misery is a subject for ridicule. From all this we may gather that Cicero was full of graceful and clever jocosity, but did not indulge in what was vapid and objectionable. Both by precept and practice he approved good verbal humour. The better class of puns was used in the literature of the time, as we find by St. Paul and others, not in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... asserted itself, however. As she went about her accustomed tasks, all bereft of their wonted interest, vapid and burdensome, she carried so woe-begone a face that it caught his attention, and ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... far I regard this as your masterpiece! You are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in the presence of his wife; for he could not bring himself to overwhelm her with the news. She saw, however, with the quick eyes of affection, that all was not well with him. She marked his altered looks and stifled sighs, and was not to be deceived by his sickly and vapid attempts at cheerfulness. She tasked all her sprightly powers and tender blandishments to win him back to happiness; but she only drove the arrow deeper into his soul. The more he saw cause to love her, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... liquor, and make it turn mouldy. Then, though the bottles should be clean and dry, yet if the corks be not new and sound, the liquor will be damaged; for if the air can by any means penetrate, the liquor will grow flat, and never rise. As soon as a cask of liquor begins to grow vapid, and to lose its briskness, while it is on the tap, it should be drawn off immediately into bottles; and in order to quicken it, put a piece of loaf sugar into every bottle, about the size of a walnut. To forward the ripening, wrap the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... rapture in the sheer release of control must have been in Charles Lamb's mind when he wrote to Coleridge about the "pure happiness" of being insane. "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so." (June ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... had been hard work to hold on to this lease, a fight for bread at times. But wealth was here in this soil and in this sun. And more than wealth. There was health and liberty in it. No heckling social restrictions, no vapid idle piffle at dull teas; no lugubrious pretence of burdensome duties. Here one slept and ate and worked and watched the changing light, and breathed the desert air and lived. It was a ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... nights, nay, some hours, like the "ten righteous persons in Sodom," save the rest of the vapid, tiresome, miserable months and years of life. One of these hours my dear Clarinda blest ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... motherly, tolerant smile; nor did Raymond attempt to defend her, for he felt the justice of his neighbour's description: Cousin Maria's good sense was incontestable, magnificent. She took an affectionate, indulgent view of most of the persons mentioned, and yet her tone was far from being vapid or vague. Madame de Brives usually remarked that they were coming very soon again to see her, she did them so much good. 'The freshness of your judgment—the freshness of your judgment!' she repeated, with ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... coolness in the presence of appalling sights that we have rarely seen equaled even in the stronger sex, and which, when united with a tender sympathy, as in her case, makes the model nurse. The feeling of horror which shrinks from the sight of agony and vents itself in vapid exclamations, she rightly deemed had no place in the character of one who proposes to do anything. So putting this aside she learned to be happy in the hospital, and consequently made others happy. Never in our observation has this first condition of success ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... of a poet, that which seems to have arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in which he most excels, is that of scene-painting in the higher sense of the term; not the mere power of producing that rather vapid species of composition usually termed descriptive poetry,—for there is not in these volumes one passage of pure description,—but the power of creating scenery in keeping with some state of human feeling, so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... the Blighted Fraus. When I told those eight phlegmatic souls I was going, they all said 'So!' much as they had said 'So!' to every previous remark I had been moved to make to them. 'So' is capital garnishing: but viewed as a staple of conversation, I find it a trifle vapid, not ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... From strenuous toil his hours of sweetest ease. The sedentary stretch their lazy length When custom bids, but no refreshment find, For none they need: the languid eye, the cheek Deserted of its bloom, the flaccid, shrunk, And withered muscle, and the vapid soul, Reproach their owner with that love of rest To which he forfeits even the rest he loves. Not such the alert and active. Measure life By its true worth, the comforts it affords, And theirs alone seems worthy of the name Good health, and, its associate in the most, Good temper; spirits ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn't know what old frumps his father might have frequented—the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees—but he could remember Mme. de Marignac's Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... followed the publication of the 'Vicar'. But towards the middle of 1766, he was meditating a new experiment in that line in which Farquhar, Steele, Southerne, and others of his countrymen had succeeded before him. A fervent lover of the stage, he detested the vapid and colourless 'genteel' comedy which had gradually gained ground in England; and he determined to follow up 'The Clandestine Marriage', then recently adapted by Colman and Garrick from Hogarth's 'Marriage A-la-Mode', with another ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... he really meant Dona Isolda—had not been able to find time to drop him so much as two or three lines to say that they had arrived safely, and were hoping to see him soon. Of course, as he told himself, there was no very particular reason why anyone should have written so very vapid and commonplace a piece of intelligence as that they had arrived home safely, for it might be taken for granted that they had done so: the trains in Cuba travelled too slowly, and the traffic was too meagre, to admit of the ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Pater so great, so wise, so salutary a writer is his perpetual insistence on the criminal, mad foolishness of letting slip, in silly chatter and vapid preaching, the unreturning days of our youth! "Carry, O Youths and Maidens," he seems to say. "Carry with infinite devotion that vase of many odours which is your Life on Earth. Spill as little as may be of its unvalued wine; let no rain-drops ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... murmurs of Nan's beautifully modulated voice in his ears, he found his anger slowly rising, not against any one in particular, but against the vulgar ostentation in which these people moved and the vapid assumption of superiority with which they evidently looked out ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... which was thoroughly vapid and insincere, the spoken being false, and the unspoken, true. Sanine sat silently listening to this mute but sincere conversation, as expressed by faces, hands, feet and tremulous accents. Lida was unhappy, Volochine longed for all her beauty, while Sarudine loathed Lida, Sanine, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... life than they offered to him. But was he sure that he had found it to be better? He had certainly sighed for the gauds which he had left. While his young wife was living he had kept his sighs down, so that she should not hear them; but he had been forced to acknowledge that his new life had been vapid and flavourless. Now he had been tempted back again to the old haunts. Would the Countesses' cards ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of London dainties, with that table-beer, guiltless of hops and malt, vapid and nauseous; much fitter to facilitate the operation of a vomit, than to quench thirst and promote digestion; the tallowy rancid mass, called butter, manufactured with candle grease and kitchen stuff; ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... out at a dreary world. Even the lovers by the elm tree did not quicken her pulse. Scarcely more did they interest her than her vapid adventure with Ahab Wright. All romantic adventure, personal or vicarious, was as ashes on her lips. But emotion was not all dead in her. As she gazed at Lila and Kenyon, Margaret wondered if her husband could see the pair. Her first emotional reaction was ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... object, but of avoiding consequences for the subject. The straightforward meaning, and the ironical, are both good; anything between them, in which the real meaning is merely to leave alone, and severely is no more than an echo, is pointless and vapid and in print intolerable. Examples follow: (1, straightforward) You must show him, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, your detestation of the crime; (2, ironical) Fish of prey do not appear to relish the sharp ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... maniac of the name of ———, a bedlamite to all intents and purposes, a demon in the disguise of virtue, and a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence, possessing neither principle, honor, nor honesty; a vain and vapid creature whom nature plumed out for the annoyance of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... poor devil, for fear of its being vulgar. A good joke grows in a wet soil; it flourishes in low places, but withers on your d—d high, dry grounds. I once kept high company, sir, until I nearly ruined myself; I grew so dull, and vapid, and genteel. Nothing saved me but being arrested by my landlady and thrown into prison; where a course of catch-clubs, eight-penny ale, and poor-devil company, manured my mind and brought it back to ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... years, to allow himself to be crushed at once because he had made a mistake. If the world, his world, chose to go to war with him, he would be ready for the fight. As for Butterwell,—Butterwell the incompetent, Butterwell the vapid,—for Butterwell, who in every little official difficulty had for years past come to him, he would let Butterwell know what it was to be thus disloyal to one who had condescended to be his friend. He would ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... fashion. Moreover, his character has suffered from the partiality of injudicious friends quite as much as from the unjust accusations of enemies. It is peculiarly cruel to represent him as a faultless being, a sort of vapid angel. We can never take much interest in such a character, because we feel quite sure that, if the whole truth were before us, he would appear in a different light. John Wesley's character is a singularly interesting one, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... throws. Hail, sleep, restorer of the tortured mind, Balm of the soul, and friend to human kind! The toils and tumults of our earthly scene Subside, and melt into thy sway serene. Life's sweetest cup, with purest blessings fraught, Were, without thee, a vapid joyless thought! My fellow captives all thy pleasures taste; Their fears, their sorrows, all in sleep are past; } Oh! be it peaceful still, for this may be the last! } Now, borne in vision to those airy plains } Where fancy undisturb'd ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... Greek dramas were not light and vapid like modern plays. They dealt with serious subjects, and the audience often used to commit the words to ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play," he continued, "is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack - but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend me the help of your arm? ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Is it not singular that even Diderot sometimes failed to remember that Mars and Venus are dead, that they can never be the source of a fresh and natural inspiration, and that neither artist nor spectator can be moved by cold and vapid allegories in an extinct dialect? If Diderot could have seen such a treatment of La Grenee's subject as Landseer's Peace, with its children playing at the mouth of the slumbering gun, he would have been the first to cry out how much nearer this came to ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... is the most arrogant, self-opinionated, self-complacent, vapid piece of humanity in this town or any other town. She irritates me to the point of impoliteness. She never sees that people don't want her. ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... turns the rose-color, and her eyes shine on me; and if I have been patient with some vapid visitor, uttering weary commonplaces (longing, oh how infinitely, all the while in my heart, for Captain Leezur and the log!) she comes to me afterward, and leans over me with a caress and says, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... well, and dropped the subject. In my own mind I did not drop the subject until I fell asleep that night. I found myself from time to time wondering what sort of a woman was that nun. Was she an elderly, sharp-faced creature; was she a vapid, fat-faced creature, or a young and pleasing creature? And when I had asked myself these questions, I snubbed myself for taking the trouble to think about the matter, and then ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus of Dissent. A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... forget every ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... man of brain is not for the woman of brain. What the intellectual woman requires in man is not something to argue with, but something to look at. To an empty-headed woman I can imagine the soldier type proving vapid and uninteresting; to the woman of mind he represents her ideal of man—a creature strong, handsome, well-dressed, and not ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... recall the conversation, but it was one of those inconsequential talks that Bohemians consider so brilliant and everybody else so vapid. As we skimmed from one subject to another, treating the big facts of life as if they were mere incidents and the little as if they overshadowed all else, I could see that Craig, who had a faculty of probing into the very ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... theory is fine; not all the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... say it? Dare I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in the republican service have done the incredible things here set out for the love of a woman—for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost of woman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write it—the pallid splendour of that thing I loved, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... running over, but never tedious—nunquam sufflaminandus erat. He is one of those writers who can never tire us, not even of himself; and the reason is, he is always 'full of matter.' He never runs to lees, never gives us the vapid leavings of himself, is never 'weary, stale, and unprofitable,' but always setting out afresh on his journey, clearing away some old nuisance, and turning up new mould. His egotism is delightful, for ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... who have completed the arrangement of the Fair, have studiously avoided preceding it with noisy and demonstrative babblings, which are so often the vapid precursors of promises as empty as those who make them; therefore, in some quarters, our Fair has been overlooked. It is not, we think, a presumptuous interpretation of this great movement, to say, that the voice of God now seems to utter "Speak to the people that they go forward." "Go forward" ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... could not find a word to say in protest. Crimson with shame, confused and furious, I was wondering how I could interfere, when suddenly the consultation ceased and the gentlemen at once surrounded me. One of them, a little old man with a vapid smile and twinkling eyes, tapped me on the cheek, and said: 'So she is as good as she is pretty!' I could have struck him; but all the others laughed approvingly, with the exception of M. de Chalusse, whose manner became more and more frigid, and whose lips wore a constrained ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own or Newton Forster. To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other. Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force is to multiply experience ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is difficult to preserve with any grace the narrative simplicity of this ode, and the humor of the turn with which it concludes. I feel, indeed, that the translation must appear vapid, if not ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of sex above all objective facts. The desires and feelings and sentiments are set up in opposition to historical experience and communal tradition. We hear much, and especially in the writings and talk of women, of such vapid phrases as "Self-realisation in love," "The enhancement of the individual life," and "The spiritualising of sex." Such personal views, which exalt the passing needs of the individual above the enduring interests of the race, are ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... often also assumed the character of a grin? No error so common or so grievous as to suppose that a smile is a necessary ingredient of the pleasing. There are few faces that can afford to smile. A smile is sometimes bewitching, in general vapid, often a contortion. But the bewitching smile usually beams from the grave face. It is then irresistible. Tancred, though he was unaware of it, was gifted with this rare spell. He had inherited it from his mother; a woman naturally earnest and serious, and of a singular ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... dangerous for young ladies to know young gentlemen. But I do know enough of him to understand that he ought not to like such a girl as Griselda Grantly. He ought to know that she is a mere automaton, cold, lifeless, spiritless, and even vapid. There is, I believe, nothing in her mentally, whatever may be her moral excellences. To me she is more absolutely like a statue than any other human being I ever saw. To sit still and be admired is all that she desires; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... began to appear in the buttermilk pool on the churn-top, Jimmy heard a step on the gravel walk behind him. The step came nearer; when Jimmy lifted his eyes, they glared into the face of Harold Jones. Choler cooled into surprise, and surprise exploded into a vapid, grinning "Huh!" which was followed by another "Huh!" that gurgled out into a real laugh as Jimmy greeted the visitor. The Jones boy giggled, and Jimmy found his tongue and asked: "Did you ever churn?" When Harold admitted that he, too, was a slave ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... LADY LOUISA,—This accompanies Harold the Dauntless. I thought once I should have made it something clever, but it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing all the other deities of Paganism, the Muse should have been ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... lost their bloom and breath And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the Falls of Death, Feel we its tide ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... in love with Lola, the "Baby-Talk Lady," a vapid little flirt. To woo her in a manner worthy of himself (and of her) he steals his father's evening clothes. When his wooings become a nuisance to the neighborhood, his mother steals them back, and has them let out to fit the middle-aged form of her husband, ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... heavily laden. The young men of the party have dived into "The Welsh Rarebit Warren," there to spend the early hours of the morning, listening to sentimental songs chanted amid fumes of tobacco and spirits, to hear sorry wit, and make vapid remarks. The great feature of the evening being a melodramatic dirge, supposed to be sung by a condemned felon—a triumphant lamentation and delineation of brutal character,—so eloquent and thrilling, in its monosyllabic groans of anguish, that it ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... these matters that Bobby, dropping in at the Idlers' Club one dull night, found no one there but Silas Trimmer's son-in-law, the vapid and dissolute Clarence Smythe, which was a trifle worse than finding the place entirely deserted. To-night Clarence was in possession of what was known at the Idlers' as "one of Smythe's soggy buns," and despite countless snubs in the past he seized upon Bobby ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... mercy. I confess I was surprised at hearing the SIZE of the Americans sneered at by POCKET-HANDKERCHIEFS, as I remember to have read that the NOSES of the New Yorkers, in particular, were materially larger than common. When the supercilious and vapid point out faults, they ever run into contradictions and folly; it is only under the lash of the discerning and the experienced, that we betray by our writhings the power of the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... he interjected on my reverie, "but these papers issue such lamentable stuff! Such vapid essays, such aimless stories, such bread-and-butter school-girl poetry,—'sing' and 'spring,' 'bird' and 'heard,'—not an elevating idea or thought through the whole thing from beginning to end; and then ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... suspicion of the truth. She had come to the party, in consequence, on the knife-edge of anticipation and alarm; had chosen a place by the door, where I found her, on my arrival, surrounded by a posse of vapid youths; and, when I drew near, sprang up to meet me in the most natural manner in the world, and, obviously, with a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... admirably, and, as his cheval de battaile, he talked with a keenness of observation and a dexterity of language, scarcely less rare than wit, and still more exciting among the exhausted minds, and in the vapid phraseology, of fashion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... indignation, despite physiognomies trained to resemble their own, have these fellows casked up in tubs without lanterns, but with the appropriate "snuffers," fit emblems of their faiths, and dropped far outside Sandy Hook. A proper finale to the vapid utterance made by one of these gentry that all "Reformers should be annihilated," Imagine Plato or Epicurus offering such a suggestion. O tempora! ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... authorship. He has had but two competitors for this fame,—it is remarkable that they were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley Montague in England; yet, how utterly inferior are De Sevigne's feeble sketches of court life, and vapid panegyrics on the "adorable Grignan;" or the Englishwoman's rambling details of travels and tribulations, to the pungent pleasantry and substantial vigour of Walpole! The Frenchwoman's sketches are like her artificial flowers, to the freshness of the true. Lady Mary's slipshod ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld's and Mrs Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... who dream as I, Aspiringly, are damned, and die: Yet should I swear I mean alone, By notes so very shrilly blown, To break upon Time's monotone, While yet my vapid joy and grief Are tintless of the yellow leaf— Why not an imp the greybeard hath, Will shake his shadow in my path— And e'en the greybeard will ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... rooted here among the groves, But languidly adjust My vapid vegetable loves [4] With ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... N. insipidity, blandness; tastelessness &c adj.. V. be tasteless &c adj.. Adj. bland, void of taste &c 390; insipid; tasteless, gustless^, savorless; ingustible^, mawkish, milk and water, weak, stale, flat, vapid, fade, wishy-washy, mild; untasted^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... weakly where the record of a long life filled with human sympathy should have blazed in answer. The gold for which he had striven lay forgotten at his feet; the hate which he had nurtured passed, a vapid filmy shade, as the withered soul shrank shivering, chilled at the void the ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... not have helped her. Indeed, she did not price herself highly enough to make her feel that she would be justified in being angry. It was natural enough that he shouldn't want her. She knew herself to be a poor, thin, vapid, tawdry creature, with nothing to recommend her to any man except a sort of second-rate, provincial-town fashion which,—infatuated as she was,—she attributed in a great degree to the thing she carried ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... stroke of work? You and I know the difference; we can appreciate the fun of loafing between spells of work; but these people have got no standards to measure their fun by, so it's all the same to them—flat, vapid, monotonous, unless they season it up with cocktails and carrying on; and even that gets to have all the same flavour of tastelessness after a while. That's why so many of these women are going in for the suffragette ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... matter of some moment, even at this early stage. Mothers sometimes forget that children cannot read slipshod, awkward, redundant prose, and sing-song vapid verse, for ten or twelve years, and then take kindly to the ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... face was uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the green-room. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in Tristram Shandy.... Yet no occasion is lost.... Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression, and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is something: degraded by the oft-quoted platitude: 'Go, poor devil,' says ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... air is, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... beauty and its fascination. Suddenly something sordid, ugly, disgusting, breaks the spell. On the Promenade des Anglais sewage greets the eye as well as the nose. Not vicious women and poor little dolls alone, but cruel and weak faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your race frightens you. Except clothes and jewels and the ability to ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... but delightfully familiar. Philip would have a spasm of horror at the muddle he had made. But the spasm would pass, and again he would be enchanted by the kind, cheerful voices, the laughter that was never vapid, and the light caress of the arm ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... I daresay we shall meet some one we know at the table d'hote to-day. It is extraordinary that the only travellers we have encountered, since we left Paris, have been one horribly vapid Englishman and wife whom we dropped at Basle, one boring Englishman whom we found (and, thank God, left) at Geneva, and two English maiden ladies, whom we found sitting on a rock (with parasols) the day before yesterday, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... course, too imaginative a turn of mind to leave facts in their native nakedness, but this tendency of his is too apparent to need pointing out. What betrays him is the wonderful family likeness of his portraits, a kind of vapid esprit, not distantly related to silliness, with which the limner endows his unfortunate sitters, Chopin as well as Liszt and Tausig. Indeed, the portraits compared with the originals are like Dresden china figures compared with Greek statuary. It seems to me also very improbable ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... solutions, such as legalizing the sale of heroin to break the world-wide criminal control on the distribution of drugs—that your vapid Puritan morality wouldn't permit. Millions of dollars for enforcement, and to punish the sick, but not one cent for prevention, and almost nothing to find out why people become addicts in the first place, and how ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... sometimes diversified, and the vacuities of conversation sometimes supplied. We rejoice in the reflection that we have stores of novelty yet unexhausted, which may be opened when repletion shall call for change, and gratifications yet untasted, by which life, when it shall become vapid or bitter, may be restored to its former sweetness and sprightliness, and again irritate the appetite, and again sparkle ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... The vapid little woman sat looking reflectively out of the window for a whole minute after this deliverance. Yes, certainly Mr. Brownleigh was a good man. He was the one man of culture, education, refinement, who had come her way in many a year who had patiently and persistently and gloriously ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... ornament: the beauty of his writings consisted in their perspicuity and strength. A verbal critic might discover inaccuracies in his compositions, but the man of sense would find in them nothing unmeaning—- nothing useless—nothing vapid. He was not a turner of fine periods—he was not a fine writer—but he wrote with strength, precision, and lucidity; and his compositions, even where they failed to produce conviction, could never be read without creating respect for the masculine ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... in the morning found them in a corner of an all-night cafe, Kernan still boasting in a vapid and rambling way, Woods thinking moodily over the end that had come to his usefulness as an upholder ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... suffered to cool, it will, in cooling, fill the room with its fragrance: but becoming cold, it will lose much of its flavor. Being again heated, its taste and flavor will be still further impaired, and heated a third time, it will be found vapid and nauseous. The aroma diffused through the room proved that the coffee has been deprived of its most volatile parts, and hence of its agreeableness and virtue. By pouring boiling water on the coffee, and surrounding ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... saw at Max Laboureur's struck me as vapid and finikin. There were some pretty groups, but nothing to tempt me ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... gladdened the hearts of the crew and lower-deck passengers and also of the inhabitants of Lembarene, who got dashes of it on our arrival there. Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black man or white; I have enjoyed it far more than the stringy beef or vapid goat's flesh one gets ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... by an addition of between 30 to 40 per cent. of alcohol before they are shipped to England, without which they would be unsaleable; as to our taste, they would be empty and vapid. We must therefore make a considerable allowance when judging of Cyprus wines in their present extremely rude and ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... murmuring from the group behind him: vapid expressions of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... could change in a moment to insolence, a superficial observer might have taken them for a couple of bankers. Any such mistake would have been impossible, however, if the listener could have heard them converse, and seen them on their guard with men whom they feared, vapid and commonplace with their equals, slippery with the inferiors whom courtiers and statesmen know how to tame by a tactful word, or to humiliate with ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... engineering literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate study of the ways of nature, the author's words will too often be found vapid. This fact—engineering looks one way, and literature another—was what my grandfather overlooked. All his life long, his pen was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself against all possible contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his notice but he perceived ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
