"Airiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perfectly well bred; of course he helped to praise it in some old-established diner-out, or some woman of good fashion, whose mots it was customary to repeat, and he even tolerated it in books; but he was at a loss with these people, who looked at life in so bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or pretension, nay, with a whimsical readiness to acknowledge kindred in ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation." They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the streets as I had seen them. (It is impossible for me to think of them as anything but streets; it would seem as though the rock roof over all would give the appearance of a series of tunnels; but I had always the impression of airiness and openness.) ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Besides this, there is the white, or little gray, birch, which is seldom over twenty-five or thirty feet high. It is, however, a graceful and beautiful object, enjoying to an eminent decree the lightness and airiness of the birch family, and spreading out its glistening leaves on the ends of a very slender and often pensile spray with an indescribable softness. An English poet has called ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... he said, with an assumption of nonchalant airiness and candid promptness. "She 'better bettered' his expectations—she surpassed his fondest. She was a thousand times more delightful than he had dreamed—though, as you know, he had dreamed a good deal. Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... portrait was painted in the eighteenth by Drouais. M. Trimolet has etched in a Dutch manner a landscape of Hobbema in the Louvre, but M. Gaucherel translates a Ruysdael from the Demidoff collection into an exquisite delicacy and airiness of line which is the language of etching in its most modern expression. A Demidoff Rembrandt, a Lucrezia, reproduced by the needle of M. Koepping, is an example of the naivete of an art which gave itself no thought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... with which I have no reason to think the writer just mentioned was acquainted. Now and then I can trace in the turn of a phrase, in the twinkle of an epithet, a faint reminiscence of a certain satirical levity, airiness, jauntiness, if I may hint such a word, which is just enough to remind me of those perilous shallows of his early time through which his richly freighted argosy had passed with such wonderful escape from their dangers and such very slight marks of injury. That which is pleasant gayety ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... James Cotton blandly and politely, and Jim, in his heavy way, mistook this airiness for non-paying symptoms on ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... the sunset. Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardly reach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of aspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction in his eye. After the usual salutations, he took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of the kind called "churchwarden" from the box on the ground, filled and lighted it, and for a little while we were silent all three. The clergyman ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith |
