"Colourless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to go to bed, but he was arrested by the urgency in her voice. What was the matter with her? So intent had he been, for the past months, on his own affairs that he had not thought of his mother at all. He looked across the table at her—a little insignificant woman, colourless, with no personality. And yet to-night something was happening to her. He felt all the impatience of a man who is closely occupied with his own drama but is forced, quite against his will, ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... was a short, stout woman, with colourless, rather pinched features, and a wealth of glorious red hair. Some one had once told her that her profile was classic, and she still rejoiced in believing it, was always photographed from a side ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... said Sara Ray solemnly, but with a certain relish. It was as if she enjoyed looking forward to something in which nothing, neither an unsympathetic mother, nor the cruel fate which had made her a colourless little nonentity, could prevent her from being ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... this time there was a mark like a cross upon her bosom, consisting of two bands crossed, about three inches long and one wide. Later the skin often rose in blisters on this place, as if from a burn, and when these blisters burst a burning colourless liquid issued from them, sometimes in such quantities as to soak through several sheets. She was long without perceiving what the case really was, and only thought that she was in a strong perspiration. The particular meaning of this mark has never ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... by an arm, and turned him on his back. His face was colourless, and the life seemed to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... vibrated to those low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder. I looked at Mr. Rochester; I made him look at me. His face was colourless rock; his eye both spark and flint; he seemed as if he ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... an upper servant of the house, and yet, as he glanced at her, a strange and unaccountable feeling of interest seized upon him. The creamy pallor of her skin, colourless save for the full red lips, the dark eyes full of unutterable longing, the aristocratic poise of the head, the softly rounded figure, elegant in its simple gown and apron, all impressed him as he had never before been impressed ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... else. What is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. It is no vague scholastic abstraction that will satisfy the speculative instinct in our modern minds. Who would change the colour or curve of a rose-leaf for that ousia akhromatos, askhematistos, anaphes—that colourless, formless, intangible, being—Plato put so high? For the true illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo mystic, lost to sense, understanding, individuality, but one such as Goethe, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... must needs fling it all aside with such bitter anger and harsh regret when the thunderbolt fell and the searching dart stabbed him awake? Outraged, hurt-maddened, he had flung away, as he believed, to outer darkness, and to a joyless, purposeless, colourless life. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... blend of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode across the lawn towards the one tall ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... her vis-a-vis with some renewal of her former interest. She saw a young man who was, without doubt, good-looking, although he certainly had an over-tired and somewhat depressed appearance. His cheeks were colourless, and there were little dark lines under his eyes as though he suffered from sleeplessness. He was clean-shaven and he had the sensitive mouth of an artist. His forehead was high and exceptionally good. His air of breeding ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... joy, and excitement of the fighting men out there in the searchlights and the dull anguish of waiting here in the darkness; imagining horrors; praying the Almighty our men may be vouchsafed valour to stick it through the night; wondering, waiting until the wire brings its colourless message! ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... the years of my life,' and so on, without a syllable about anything except the purely earthly view of life. Of course, when you shut out God, the past is all dark enough, grey and dismal, like the landscape on some cloudy day, where the woods stand black, and the rivers creep melancholy through colourless fields, and the sky is grey and formless above. Let the sun come out, and the river flashes into a golden mirror, and the woods are alive with twinkling lights and shadows, and the sky stretches a blue pavilion above them, and all the birds sing. Let God into your life, and its whole complexion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... down from his stool. His face was almost colourless, but for two bright red spots, the size of quarters, beneath either cheek-bone. He was half a head shorter than the shipping clerk, and apparently about half as wide; but there was sincerity in his manner and an ominous snap in the unflinching stare of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not occur to me then—at least I did not know it—that the great Greek statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure" seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with human emotion. Who that has read it can ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... father anxiously, for he had heard that people sometimes went mad from disappointment and anxiety. The pale intellectual face wore a look of horror, as if the dark eyes saw some dreadful sight; the thin figure moved nervously, the colourless lips twitched, the lean fingers opened and shut spasmodically on nothing. It was enough to scare the boy, who had always known his father gentle, sweet-tempered, and hopeful even under failure; but Overholt was ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... hundred feet in height are almost as many thousand; that entering wedge of cloud is a mile and a half wide in the gap itself, while beyond the gap it is a veritable ocean; and that foreground of cinder-cone and volcanic ash, mushy and colourless in appearance, is in truth gorgeous-hued in brick- red, terra-cotta rose, yellow ochre, and purplish black. Also, words are a vain thing and drive to despair. To say that a crater- wall is two thousand feet high is to say just precisely that it ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... and Mullins was beginning to clear away, when a stormy step was heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton with a panic-stricken face. He was colourless almost to the neck, but he denied that he had any news, though not without a pregnant glance at Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the Londoners, but City men above all others, till Thrush and he should be alone together. The incidental diatribe ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... experience in reading through the stock of three circulating libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without the countenance of their parents, "because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story." But apart from his characters, who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention, Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful "properties." The background of his story is a Gothic castle, singularly unenchanted it is true, but capable of being invested by Mrs. Radcliffe with mysterious grandeur. Otranto contains underground ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... gray face bent over his colourless hands as he twisted the papers, "shall we not tell Mr. Griggs what is to be done? Afterward he can lie in the tent and sleep until evening, for he is weary and needs ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... broached. There were two cases standing ready in a state-room; these two were brought out, broken open, and tested. Still with the same result: the contents were still colourless and tasteless, and dead as the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... already mentioned as a product of its volcanoes, Iceland is famed for another mineral of great scientific value. It is that fine variety of carbonate of lime named Iceland-spar. Transparent and colourless, like glass, this mineral possesses the property of double refraction—any small object viewed through it in a particular direction appearing double. It is much used for optical ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... changing under the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in the kingdom of his soul the whole resistless commonwealth of the emotions revolted together to ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... envied privilege and strange experience that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the edge of their wit, in the wild life of the people, beside which the life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still were full of family forms—which seemed, one dimly made out through the false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note of New England; the note that ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of the permanent value of the legislative programme which it carried to successful completion. The ensuing session was very short; for time was needed to prepare the various important measures which the Reformers intended to bring forward. The troubled year of European revolution, 1848, was rather colourless in the annals of Canada; not so the ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... like the shape of the coverlid of the last sleep, when the turf scarcely rises. She is some seventeen or eighteen years old, her head is turned towards us on the pillow, the cheek resting on her hand, as if she were thinking, yet utterly calm in sleep, and almost colourless. Her hair is tied with a narrow riband, and divided into two wreaths, which encircle her head like a double crown. The white nightgown hides the arm, raised on the ...
— Saint Ursula - Story of Ursula and Dream of Ursula • John Ruskin
... Freudenberg succeeded in preparing the former by shaking a mixture of finely powdered glucose, chloroform, and quinoline with an excess of tricarbomethoxygalloyl chloride for twenty-four hours and precipitating the resulting product with methyl alcohol; suitably purified, a light amorphous colourless substance was obtained which proved to be penta-(tricarbomethoxygalloyl) glucose. Careful saponification with excess alkali in acetone-aqueous solution at room temperature yielded a tannin very closely resembling tannin, identified as pentagalloyl glucose. It is doubtful, ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... accepted this tribute to her many trials with becoming modesty. She was a dull, colourless woman whose sole distinction lay in the visitations of affliction, and it is not too much to affirm that she was proud of them. She was sewing, not too rapidly, on a very long seam, which occupation was typical of her course of life. She sighed heavily in response ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... while their shiny leaves showed brightly against the blue of the sky, and cast upon the ground a network of light and shadow, figuring the palms of some Indian fabric. Here there was shade beside which that of the European orchard seemed colourless, insipid; the warm joy of sunlight, softened into flying gold-dust; the glad certainty of evergreen foliage; the penetrating perfume of blossom, and the more subdued fragrance of fruit; all helping to fill the body with the soft ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... "Outside things are colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... hairless, and had no lips, the lappels and clitoris showed when she was standing up with thighs closed; when her thighs were open her cunt looked as if the lips had been cut off, she had lightish brown hair and almost colourless eyes. Her room was ragged, and I always found her cooking, she wore garters of ragged ribbon below her knees, and ragged slippers. For all that I went to see her I suppose a dozen times, and nearly always fucked ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... lighted by a lamp turned low. By the bedside sat Grace, wrapped in a shawl; on the pillow lay the white face of Agnes Darling, calm in her slumber, but colourless as ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... it was found that incandescent solids and liquids (including the carbon glowing in a white gas flame) give continuous spectra; gases, except under enormous pressure, give bright lines. If sodium or common salt be thrown on the colourless flame of a spirit lamp, it gives it a yellow colour, and its spectrum is a bright yellow line agreeing in position with line D ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... hours which will bring a shudder whenever in future days memory seizes an idle moment to refresh herself. I had been dining with Scarfield and his mother at Hampstead, and with the entry of the coffee he had pleaded a sudden dyspepsia and withdrawn. So his mother, a dear colourless old lady, undertook to entertain me. By her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... the contents of it out of me. Whichever was his design, I resolved to be upon my guard in every word I said to him, and leave no door open to any trickery either way. For of one thing I felt sure, that the colourless young man had torn himself away from the mud-honey of Piccadilly for this voyage to India only because he had heard there was a chance of ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... been to me like a terrible black cloud, constantly pressing down on me, smothering me. You stalk around me like a grim, sepulchral figure, closing me up in the circle of your narrow ideas. But now I can endure it no longer. I was a proud, high-spirited girl, you've made of me a colourless social automaton, a slave of your stupid worldly traditions. I'm turning into a feeble, complaining, discontented wife! And I refuse to be it. I'm going home—where at least there's some human spontaneity left in people; I'm going back ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... who can satisfactorily describe the opposite sex. Women's heroes are women in disguise, or mere lay-figures, walking gentlemen who parade tolerably through their parts, but have no real vitality. On the other hand, the heroines of male writers are for the most part unnaturally strained or quite colourless; male hands are too heavy for the delicate work required. Milton could draw a majestic Satan, but his Eve is no better than a good-managing housekeeper who knows her place. It is, therefore, remarkable that Richardson's greatest ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino. There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste of time ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... population of Holland the halcyon days are past. The spirit of reform is in the air. It may not be long before the tjalk, with its doll's house and its residential population, will finally disappear, and leave the canals of Holland as dull and colourless as the inland waters of any other country. The reform seems likely to come about in this way. There are at least 30,000 children resident on the canal-boats. How are they to be properly educated and brought up as useful citizens ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... with all the prestige of the Professor's name, was not long in meeting with adherents, and the cardinal points insisted upon were—1st. That the generic relationship of the coloured "gonidia" to the colourless filaments which compose the lichen thallus, had only been assumed, and not proved; 2nd. That the membrane of the gonidia was chemically different from the membrane of the other tissues, inasmuch as the first had a reaction corresponding ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... of rare sincerity. There were no reflected lights about her; no gloss on her skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on her soul. Simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and her master to conquer and understand. Her flesh was cold and colourless,—there were no surface tints on it,—it warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,—out of her heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It had been cut from ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was full of essential daylight, colourless and clean; and the valley underneath was flooded with a grey reflection. A few thin vapours clung in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which was hardly interrupted when ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a glacis of smooth blue mud which sloped up to a weed-grown dyke; behind lay the same flat country, colourless, humid; and opposite us, two miles away, scarcely visible in the deepening twilight, ran the outline of a similar shore. Between rolled the turgid Elbe. 'The Styx flowing through Tartarus,' I thought to myself, recalling some ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... that goes on in a boozing-place, while the persons who draw wild pictures of impossible horrors are worse than the hired men who write in publican's papers. It is the plain truth that is wanted, and one year of life in a public-house teaches a man more than all the strained lectures and colourless statistics. I am going to give a series of pictures that will set forth every phase of public-house life. It is useless to step casually into a bar, and then turn out a flashy article. If you want to know how Drink really acts on the inner life ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... colourless and blank by Wren, has never yet been finished. The Protestant choir remains in one corner, like a dry, shrivelled nut in a large shell. Like the proud snail in the fable, that took possession of the lobster-shell and starved there, we remained ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the grey darkness, the earth was soft with snow. Upon the illimitable horizon beyond the mountain peaks were straying gleams of dawn, colourless, but none the less ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... is applied to a cyst filled with a clear colourless jelly or colloid material, met with in the vicinity of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... alone!" came in a voice so shaken Katherine fell to trembling in very fear. Cedric threw wide the door and stood within, facing them all. His face gleamed like marble, so colourless and still it seemed. His body swayed by love and anger, knew not which way to turn, but appeared to sway from side to side. His breath came in quick, sharp pants. His hair, damp as if from fine rain, was dishevelled. His dark eyes shot forth sparks of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... of a woman living in a quiet little New England village who complained of her loneliness there, where the quilting bees were the only saving features of an otherwise colourless existence. She told the interested listener that in this out-of-the-way hamlet she did not mind the monotony much because there were plenty of "quiltings," adding that she had helped that winter at more than twenty-five quilting ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... burden of its music may be? Where the branches throw a deep shade, there does it have its nest: and it comes in the evening and flies away in the morning, and says not a word of that which it means. None tell me of this bird that sings within me. It is neither coloured nor colourless: it has neither form nor outline: It sits in the shadow of love. It dwells within the Unattainable, the Infinite, and the Eternal; and no one marks when it comes and goes. Kabr says: "O brother ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... rugged and snow-patched, but no longer mysterious dome of Mauna Loa; while everywhere, ravines, woods, waterfalls, and stretches of lawn- like grass delight the eye. All green that I have ever seen, of English lawns in June, or Alpine valleys, seems poor and colourless as compared with the dazzling green of this sixty-five miles. It is a joyous green, a glory. Whenever I look up from my writing, I ask, Was there ever such green? Was there ever such sunshine? Was there ever such an atmosphere? Was there ever such ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... done. None remained but the two officials, the accused, the accuser, and Miles Hendon. This latter was rigid and colourless, and on his forehead big drops of cold sweat gathered, broke and blended together, and trickled down his face. The judge turned to the woman again, and said, in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with a smile half bitter, half plaintive, on her colourless lips. "Did you wait to ask me that question till you knew what my answer must be? I have pledged the name of ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was no wonder that her mother's old home in Ontario, where her grandmother and Aunt Edith still lived, became to Libby Anne a sort of Paradise Valley, the delectable country of her dreams, and through all her colourless childhood there ran a hope like a thread of gold that some time she and ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... living-room of small Lancashire houses, he found himself in an atmosphere of modest cosy comfort which is seldom to be found outside the North and the Midland manufacturing districts. It is the other side of the hard, colourless life that is lived in mill and mine and forge, and it has a charm that is ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... comprehension of Nature. But the contradiction is easily explained. The study of Nature, as it was carried on in the Renaissance, comprised the study of effects which had remained unnoticed by antiquity; and the study of the statue, colourless, without light, shade, or perspective, interfered with, and was interfered with by, the study of colour, of light and shade, of perspective, and of all that a generation of painters would seek to learn from Nature. Nor ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... a colourless pall, gradually deepening to almost black at the horizon, and the ice was ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... the Selache lurched viciously each time a white-topped sea came up upon her quarter, and as soon as it seemed advisable to leave the deck Dampier went down. Wyllard lay in his bunk, with his eyes half-open, but there was no expression in them, and his face was almost colourless except for the broad smear of blood. It was oozing fast from a laceration in his scalp, but Dampier, who noticed his chilliness, did not in the meanwhile trouble about that. He stripped off the senseless man's long boots, and unshipping a hot fender ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... statement of the relation actually existing between England and her self-governing colonies by a perusal of Mr. Todd's most instructive 'Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies.' But the statement, brief and colourless though it be, is sufficient for its purpose; it shows that the proposal to give to Ireland the institutions of a colony is ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... is a simple process. The raw liquid is first boiled, and the steam which generates passes through a complication of sinuous tubing until it reaches a single tap, where it spirts out in fits and starts into the cold colourless spirit called 'aguardiente.' A glass valve is connected with the tap, and by means of this the degrees of strength formed by the spirit are gauged. The distillers are already at work, as the operations in this department are best accomplished out of harvest time. One of them ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... now as he walked up the silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. And ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... better his position, wishing to have an individuality of his own in her regard; but he could not change the colourless role which she assigned him. So he became silent, speaking only when some remark was obviously intended for him, and watched her face and expression. He had always told himself that her dominant characteristic was strength, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... replica, in fact, of that fashionable gathering upstairs; a ghost that haunts every house where balls and good suppers are given; a picture drawn with white chalk on grey cardboard, dull and colourless, now that the bright silk dresses and gorgeously embroidered coats were no longer there to fill in the foreground, and now that the candles flickered ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... injured by incessant application, and seemed to be afraid that variety of employment would distract his attention. So he went on from week to week, and month to month, preparing his mind for usefulness, but his body for the grave. His pale brow grew yet paler, his cheek hollow, and his hand thin and colourless, but still he declared himself to be in perfect health, and no one ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... rather a colourless way of stating it,' the man called Trent replied, as he dissected a sole. 'I should prefer to put it that I have come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty, and vindicate the honour ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... little out of sorts, perhaps. The sun, merely the sun;' and waving his hand in a hurried manner, Dr Pendle withdrew as quickly as his dignity permitted, leaning on Gabriel's arm. The curate's face was as colourless as that of his father, and he seemed equally as nervous in manner. Captain Pendle returned to Mab in a state of bewilderment, for which ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... flowers have almost certainly become more or less completely peloric through reversion. Corydalis tuberosa properly has one of its two nectaries colourless, destitute of nectar, only half the size of the other, and {59} therefore, to a certain extent, in a rudimentary state; the pistil is curved towards the perfect nectary, and the hood, formed of the inner petals, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... be a colourless reflection of public opinion for the time being. It will certainly not be a Party organ, and that for sufficient reason. Neither Party has at this moment any distinctive body of doctrine, any well-conceived system of faith, which would justify Us in labelling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... and colourless fluidity of manner is often the only medium through which a vision of the world can be expressed at all; a vision, that is to say, of a particular kind, with the passion of it carried ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... grant. For the most part, the butlers observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was 'a flame of old-world fealty all bright.' Were these but the finer comedians? There was one (I ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange effect ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... could have shut it all out, she thought, if she had held in her hands the gold that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age. But she had never seen it. The reality of her own life was too weak and colourless, by contrast, to make the name of fortune an excuse for the sordid facts of meanness. There was no splendour about her, no wild gaiety, none of the glorious extravagance of conscious young wealth, and there was very little amusement to divert her thoughts. ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... had reached the dreary waste called by the inhabitants Hammerton Heath. At some seasons of the year it was golden with gorse or purple with ling, but in this drear winter season it was bare and colourless, and utterly desolate. The outline of dark forests could be seen all around on the horizon; but the road led over the exposed ground, where not a tree broke the monotony of the way. Cuthbert was glad enough to have a companion ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... spring. Yes, even now I think I recognise the blonde divinity. She's the third one from the end in that row of steamer-chairs in the wide part of the deck. Her orchids lie disconsolate upon her chest, her eyes are closed, her hair blows in straight, strawlike strings across her colourless face, her hat is on one ear, and she is wrapped like a mummy in an atrocious rug of ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... bitter, breathless battling with the storm, then a close cottage-room, with rain-flooded floor, the one small window carefully darkened, and on a pillow in the furthest corner, shaded by heavy bed-curtains, a wrinkled old woman's face, pinched and colourless, on which the ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... play an important part in this fantastic pose. They are very wide, green on the outer edge, but colourless and transparent elsewhere. Numerous nervures, spreading out fan-wise, cross them in the direction of their length. Others, transversal but finer, cut the first at right angles, forming with them a multitude of meshes. In the spectral attitude the wings are outspread and erected ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... freedom ran through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm within her husband's, and as they moved off it could be seen from the way in which ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... upon them? A. Because the heat goes from the outward parts of the body to the inward, to help nature to expel their terms, which deprivation of heat doth cause a paleness in the face. Or, because that flux is caused of raw humours, which, when they run, make the face colourless. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... flat country, the same grey fields, the same files of soldiers moving across those fields toward distant billets, the same transports and ambulances, and over all the same colourless sky. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... historian as judge another. In an early essay on Doellinger he makes a distinction of this kind. The reader must bear it in mind in considering Acton's own writing. Some of the essays here printed, and still more the lectures, are anything but colourless; they show very distinctly the predilections of the writer, and it is hardly conceivable that they should have been written by a defender of absolutism, or even by an old-fashioned Tory. What Acton really demanded was not the academic aloofness of the pedant who stands ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... taken into serious consideration the difficulties that lay in their path in the New World they were seeking. Probably, considering the land they were leaving was one of volcanoes and desert wastes, they hoped for better things. Their Icelandic life must indeed be hard and colourless, so hard as to have taken from them all pleasure in existence. To judge by their apathy, these questions did not seem to have been taken much into account by them; possibly when the sight of green fields, and Nature's abundance, break upon their view, dormant will, and energy may rise ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... chain one's eyes fast, to see Althea's face, still heavenly fair in spite of her anguish, bending over Andrew's, which was livid in colour, all but fleshless, and the eyes deep sunk in their sockets; yet he smiled, a smile full of a strange radiance; and he moved his colourless lips, saying something which Althea bent her head very low to hear; then looking up ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... they are infested. Nearly every class of the animal kingdom contributes members to this strange population. The young forms of many fish, as for instance of conger, flying gurnards, and some flatfish, are pelagic and have colourless blood, and pale, transparent, gelatinous or cartilaginous skeletons. The tadpole-like stages of the sea-squirts, which in adult life are to be found attached to rocks like weeds, drift about in the surface waters until their time comes for settling down in life. Many other Ascidians pass ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... coward and gave the shameful order?" Challoner's eyes glittered, though his face was colourless. "It's unthinkable!" ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... moon doubly ringed by mist, made the hazy night look grey. At intervals, phantom flashes flushed the sky. The mud of the roadway formed a colourless paste that made marching not unlike skating ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... to continue, but hardly knew what to say. His heart was overflowing with pity for this lonely old man whose life lay in the past, grey and colourless, except for that single bright spot where love had made its mark. Suddenly he stretched out his hand toward the old man, and said: "What you want is a friend, ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... to reveal the absence of certain vocal cords requisite to perfect harmony; and Siward smiled in his listless, pleasant way, and turned off down his corridor, unaware that the Sagamore pup was following close at his heels until he heard Quarrier's even, colourless voice: "Ferrall, would you be good enough to send ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... fifteen minutes and filter. The filtered liquid will weigh about five and a quarter pounds, is transparent, colourless, and of the specific gravity of 1.267. (30 ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... seemed as if all the colour which should have gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities marked upon it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism, with its ruddy arteries converging to a central point. It was as though the State had been sucked white and colourless, and against this pallid background the red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with life-blood, reaching out to infinity, gorged to bursting; an excrescence, a gigantic parasite fattening upon the life-blood of an ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... drama is, in fact, deemed by the manager to be inadequate to satisfy the necessary commercial purposes of the theatre. The average purveyor of public entertainment reckons Shakespeare's plays among tasteless and colourless commodities, which only become marketable when they are reinforced by the independent arts of music and painting. Shakespeare's words must be spoken to musical accompaniments specially prepared for the occasion. Pictorial tableaux, even though they suggest topics without relevance to the development ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with her just as she reached Barbara. Barbara leant no more against the wall, but lay huddled at the foot of it. Weariness and hunger had overcome her; she was in a faint, her lips colourless and her eyes closed. Nell dropped beside her, murmuring low, soft consolations. I stood by in awkward helplessness. These matters ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... outside was the twilight of advancing dawn. It was daylight! Sunday! She jumped out of bed in a flash and pulled open the window. The trees were there still and the flowers too and all the white of last night, but so pale, dim and colourless beside the glittering brightness of a moment ago ... and never an angel! She gave a sigh. The sky was hung with a thick grey shroud; and in the east a long thin cleft had been torn in the grey; and behind that, deep down, was ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers. A poet's face ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell
... Author, during the summer months of the year 1793, conducted a party of young ladies; one of whom, of stature elegantly small, and of complexion colourless yet clear, was proclaimed the Faery Queen. On which occasion the following Irregular ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... heard it, go there some day, but not when it is so cold as this. How very pale you are! What a contrast with Moore! 'Mai io l'ho veduto piu bello che jeri, ma e la belta della morte,' or a statue of white marble so colourless, and the dark brow and hair such a contrast. I never see you without wishing to cry; if any painter could paint me that face as it is, I would give them any thing I possess on earth,—not one has yet ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... appeared more impressive, more perfectly finished and turned out; never had he appeared so near to his tailor and so far from his audience. He was a handsome man in his rather colourless fashion, a man who would look any part with distinction from policeman to President. His sleek iron-gray hair had as usual the rich sheen of velvet; his thin, sharp profile was like the face on a Roman coin. A man of power, of intellect, of character; and yet a ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... all the blood out of a newspaper and leaves it colourless and inane; sometimes he leaves it undisturbed, and lets it talk out its opinions with a frankness and vigour hardly to be surpassed, I think, in the journals of any country. Apparently the censor sometimes revises his verdicts upon second thought, for several times ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... virtuous Cimmerians who dwell by the shore of a melancholy sea, bristling with rocks ever lashed by the storm. The sun is scarcely known in this country, its flowers are seaweed, marine plants, and the coloured shells which are gathered in the recesses of lonely bays. The clouds seem colourless, and even joy is rather sorrowful there; but fountains of fresh water spring out of the rocks, and the eyes of the young girls are like the green fountains in which, with their beds of waving herbs, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... at his moustache as he gazed at her. The exquisitely colourless face, in which the violet eyes glowed like two twin flowers, the delicately cut lips, soft and red, the dark hair clustering at the ivory temples in wet rings, set his heart beating with a heavy pulsation that was an ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... sister, and had never been as handsome. But he was not at all the person to knock into a gutter, for though not in orders, he had the air of being on the verge of them, and his features, as well as his clothes, had the clerical cut. In his presence conversation became pure and colourless and full of understatements, and—just as if he was a real clergyman—neither men nor boys ever forgot that he was there. He had observed this, and it pleased him very much. His conscience permitted him to enter the Church whenever his profession, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... mean?" Larry let his horse go, and flung himself on his knees beside Donovan. Christian, colourless continued to try and soothe Nancy, who lay without moving, though her frightened eye turned from one to another, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... entered he smote this staff upon the floor, and, contracting his brows and opening his mouth to its fullest extent, laughed in a dreadful, unnatural way. He had lost the sight of one eye, and its colourless pupil kept rolling about and imparting to his hideous face an even more repellent ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... a Mormon, wouldn't you, Mamma? Worse than being a Chinee and having to sit at the theatre penned up with only females. Think of sharing a man with six other women, and being a kind of servant. It is natural they look cowed and colourless,—the ones we saw; at least they were pointed out to us. But really it seems much honester to call them wives openly than to be like—but no, I won't speak of it any more. Only I will never share a man with another woman! Not the least little scrap ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... of this region are tall and shapely, but very pale and colourless. One end of the country borders upon Great Rosia. And as there is no more to be said about it, I will now proceed, and first I will tell you ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the panes The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet Here, while Day's presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... impure hues, as Poussin did in his "Deluge." In this work, neither black nor white, blue, red, nor yellow appears; the whole mass being, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This absence of colour, however, is a merit, and not a fault. Vandyke employed such means with admirable effect in the background of a Crucifixion, and in his Pieta; and the Phaton of Giulio Romano is celebrated for a suffusion ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... lips, which were almost too red; but she had admirable eyes, brown, with a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of intelligence and meaning, and so clear that they seemed to throw a glow upon her thin, colourless face. There were bronze glints in the sombre clusters of her hair, and the eyelashes, long and coal black, made her complexion appear still ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Bela, even as a curious expression of obstinacy, not unmixed with cruelty, crept into his colourless face, "you seem to forget, Irma neni, that the rest of Elsa's life will have to be spent in listening to me. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... again at the girl on the other side of the table, guarded by the brancardiers and a couple of doctors, while the monk talked to him rapidly in Latin. He saw her closed eyes and colourless lips. ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... began by removing her gloves and bonnet before a dressing glass, which was kept in position by a mangy hair brush thrust between the frame and its supports. Then, to the girl's wondering astonishment, the woman unpinned and took off her fair curls, revealing a mop of tangled, frowsy, colourless hair, which the wig had concealed. Next, she removed her sober, well-cut costume, also, her silk underskirt, to put on a much worn, greasy dressing-gown. Then, she pulled off her pretty shoes and silk stockings, to thrust her feet into worn slippers, through ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... hands inclined to cross each other, and had the mechanical junction of habitual prayer. He had what might be called a wan countenance; for the countenance is above all things a reflection, and it is an error to believe that idea is colourless. That countenance was evidently the surface of a strange inner state, the result of a composition of contradictions, some tending to drift away in good, others in evil, and to an observer it was the revelation of one who was less and more than human—capable of falling below the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... our Minister there, is your friend, but he is a weak, colourless creature, and he gives no weight or point to his reports. He tries hard to be honest, but he is wofully under the influence of the others. And ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... Oswego he had entered Union College, and after teaching in Fort Edward Collegiate Institute he became a soldier. Since 1874 he had been in the Assembly and in Congress. He was fully six feet tall, well proportioned, with a large head, a noticeably high forehead, a strong, self-reliant, colourless face, and a resolute chin. A blond moustache covered a firm mouth. He had the appearance of a man of reserve power, and as a speaker, although without the gift of brilliantly phrased sentences, he made a favourable impression. His easy, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... (1660), a broad comedy of vulgar jealousy, and a decided check—the only one in his dramatic career—in the somewhat colourless tragi-comedy Don Garcie de Navarre (1661), Moliere found a theme, suggested by the Adelphi of Terence, which was happily suited to his genius. L'Ecole des Maris (1661) contrasts two methods of education—one ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... being transparent and colourless fluids, their internal motions are not easily discovered by the sight, and when these motions are very slow, they make no impression whatever on any of our senses, consequently they cannot be detected by us without the aid ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... down the quaintly irregular front street, which was all red brick houses with small window-panes, three to the width of the window, except where an aspiring tradesman had introduced plate-glass and a vulgar disguise of stucco, which converted the warm-toned bricks into commonplace colourless greyness. It was on one side of this street that the principal shops were, and Beth stood for some time gazing at a print in a stationer's window—a lovely little composition of waves lapping in gently towards a sheltered nook on a sandy beach. Beth, wafted there instantly, heard ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Yet again no character, no taking and lively story, is elaborated. Nectanabus has a certain personal interest: but he was given to, not invented by, the Romance writers. Olympias has very little character in more senses than one: Candace is not worked out: and Alexander himself is entirely colourless. The fantastic story, and the wonders with which it was bespread, seem to have absorbed the attention of writers and hearers; and nobody seems to have thought of any more. Perhaps this was merely due to the fact that none of the more original genius of the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... ye aghast, who see me colourless? Surely every live man fades among the dead. Evil to the lonely man, and burdensome to the single, remains every dwelling in the world. Hapless are they whom chance hath bereft of human help. The listless night of the cavern, the darkness of the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... remain," said Gertrude, the blood, for the first time since her re-appearance on deck, rushing into her colourless cheeks, until they appeared charged to fulness. "I like not the wretches who would be ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... of Our School, presents the Latin master as a colourless doubled-up near-sighted man with a crutch, who was always cold, and always putting onions into his ears for deafness, and always disclosing ends of flannel under all his garments, and almost always applying a ball of pocket-handkerchief ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... thing he had always hated. She had a small, heart-shaped face, so light in colour as to suggest anaemia, with a high, thin nose, of which the nostrils were excessively pinched together, a short upper lip, and a thick, quite colourless mouth, small when closed, when she laughed opening wide far back to her throat, showing, as it seemed, an infinite quantity of ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... diversions were colourless and tame in comparison with les grands cavalcades d'amour, in which Trofast was always one of the foremost. Six, eight, ten, or twelve large yellow, black, and red dogs, with a long following of ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... was pale, clear and smooth, her eyes wide apart and so dark as to be colourless, but of a wondrous softness. Her hair was of that shade of gold that suggests silver, and in its curves, where the sun had not bleached it, it was full of tints ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... matched his leaf surroundings to a nicety. The base was suffused with a faint blush of purple. As the days passed the purple darkened to black, and shifted upwards, leaving the parts beneath it pale and colourless. It seemed to struggle towards the sun. On the eighteenth day the shell parted at the summit, and the little Emperor ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... person was in the vicinity, and it was quickly evident from the manner in which the wayfarer recognised him and came forward to meet him with outstretched hand that they had met by appointment. Short of stature as he was, with fair hair, colourless eyes, and a fair moustache, his slouching appearance was that of one who had seen better days, even though there still remained about him a vestige of dandyism. The close observer would, however, detect that his clothes, shabby though they were, were ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... directions to the cabman, and when I drew it in again to glance anxiously at the face which already I so passionately loved, I saw that it was even whiter than before. The eyes were drooping and the dark curling lashes almost swept the colourless cheeks. As though she felt my gaze upon her, she looked up instantly, and made an effort to smile; but the mischievous light which had danced in her eyes when she first sank restfully back upon the shabby cushions of the cab had been suddenly and ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... poet is meant to bring the object itself into more vivid relief, to make it visible by means of the selected qualities. In other words, the one aims at abstract symbols, the other at picturesque effects. The one can carry on his deductions by the aid of colourless signs, X or Y. The other appeals to the emotions through the symbols which will most vividly express the real objects in their ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... way, then, he accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father. He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English. He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney. He believed these things, not because he was a fool, or shallow, or lacking in humour, or snobbish, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... father's everyday life. It has seemed to me that I might carry out this object in the form of a rough sketch of a day's life at Down, interspersed with such recollections as are called up by the record. Many of these recollections, which have a meaning for those who knew my father, will seem colourless or trifling to strangers. Nevertheless, I give them in the hope that they may help to preserve that impression of his personality which remains on the minds of those who knew and loved him—an impression at once so vivid ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... familiarly, sea blubbers, are seen in the waters that lave our own shores. They are of various sizes, from that of a large plate to a pin-head. They are almost colourless, like clear jelly, and when carelessly observed, seem to be dead objects drifting with the tide; but a closer observation shows that they are possessed of life, though not of a particularly active kind, and ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... been haggard, ghost-like, and wild, energy in his gestures, and frenzy in his aspect. It was now the appearance of a corpse. He was brought in in a chair, unable to stand, fatigued and almost destroyed by the journey he had just taken. His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life. His head reclined upon his bosom, except that now and then he lifted it up, and opened his eyes with a languid glance; immediately after which he sunk back into his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin |
