"Dull" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her life, and he was a rival to be feared. That he might also be a rival in his profession, that he was so rich that he was far above the straits in which Morris found himself more and more frequently involved, only added to the flame that consumed him; life without Silvia herself would be dull, colorless, objectless; life without her music would be but ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... that came into the house, Marise took them away from the little boys, although she knew helplessly that this naturally made them extremely keen not to miss any chance to catch a glimpse of such a one. She could see that they thought it queer, there being anything so exciting in this old album of dull snapshots and geographical picture-postcards of places and churches and ruins and things that Father and Mother had seen, so long ago. But you never could tell. The way Mother had spoken, the sound of her voice, the way she had flapped down the page quick, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... around you, hopelessly incapable of perceiving His existence save through that faint spark of unconscious faith that was mercifully planted in you. Snuff that out with dull efforts at reason, and you ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... deeply as if it had been done to herself, said that her brother-in-law had long known that she would only have turned him down if he had. But still Apollonius was only admired and honored more and more, and consequently the ball only became still duller. It became so dull, in fact, that Fritz Nettenmair left with his wife at an hour when as a rule he was only just beginning to be really jovial. Nevertheless he heaped coals of fire on his ungrateful brother's head. He asked the girl in his brother's name to allow ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the true meaning of a treatise, is said to have studied that treatise to purpose. Questioned regarding the meaning of a text, it behoveth one to communicate that meaning which he has comprehended by a careful study. That person of dull intelligence who refuses to expound the meanings of texts in the midst of a conclave of the learned, that person of foolish understanding, never succeeds in expounding the meaning correctly.[1618] An ignorant person, going to expound the true meaning of treatises, incurs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... saw that much was introduced by the foreigner in the wake of Christianity which her alert mind recognised as being all to the advantage of women. Even the old Refuge-keeper could read a little, but she was quite dull and slow, whereas without much trouble Mrs. Fan herself could master quite a number of new characters every day, and a few hours had been enough for the initial lesson of reading the large ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Master Walter's will she bides alone. My father stops in town. I can't see him. My cousin makes his books his company. I'll go to bed and sleep. No—I'll stay up And plague my cousin into making love! For, that he loves me, shrewdly I suspect. How dull he is that hath not sense to see What lies before him, and he'd like to find! I'll change my treatment of him. Cross him, where Before I used to humour him. He comes, Poring upon a book. What's ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... first six months the dress should be of crape cloth, or Henrietta cloth covered entirely with crape, collar and cuffs of white crape, a crape bonnet with a long crape veil, and a widow's cap of white crape if preferred. In America, however, widows' caps are not as universally worn as in England. Dull black kid gloves are worn in first mourning; after that gants de Suede or silk gloves are proper, particularly in summer. After six months' mourning the crape can be removed, and grenadine, copeau fringe, and dead trimmings ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... no chance even of reaching the rocky point where we had stood the day before, for that point stood out alone, and I could not see how it could be reached; but in a dull, despondent way, I thought that we would try to the last; and shrinking back a few yards from the edge of the precipice, we began to climb along the side, in the hope of finding some outlet in that direction; for could we but reach that point by any ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... the care of a Divine Providence, or in its justice, though less believing in this respect than the illiterate but earnest-minded seaman who stood at his side. He knew very well that "all work, and no play, makes Jack a dull boy;" and he understood well enough that it was good for man, at stated seasons, to raise his mind from the cares and business of this world, to muse on those of the world that is to come. Though inclined to Deism, Roswell worshipped in his heart the creator of all he saw ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... your father?' Peachey inquired. He had a dull, depressed look, and moved languidly to draw ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... care of the Chancery, but a fool in that of the Crown, was received with general indignation. "Why that?" says old Renault. "Why that? Why must a fool be a courtier more than a madman? This is the iniquity of this dull age: I remember the time when it went on the mad side; all your top wits were scowrers,[393] rakes, roarers, and demolishers of windows. I remember a mad lord who was drunk five years together, and was the envy of that age, and is faintly imitated by the dull pretenders to vice and ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... passing moment flowing on with all its changes beside the stern, hard, enduring monument of the irrevocable past on which what is written is changelessly written. How different too are the bright sparkling fountains that leap with ever-varying beauty at the foot of the Flaminian obelisk now, from the dull, sleepy monotonous river that, like a Lethe flood, flowed past it in the old days at Heliopolis! Are they not both symbolical of the new and the old world, of the Christian faith, with its progressive thought ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that Marks Mill battle. My husband was there and he sent word for me to come cause he had the measles and they had went in on him. I had to put on boots and wade mud. Young folks now ain't got no sense. I see so many folks now with such dull understanding. Marks Mill was the onliest part of ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... talking and fell fast asleep, leaving me awake, seated on a chest with my face bent over my knees between my hands. And there I sat, till at length the dull beating against the ship's bows, and the silence around soothed me down, and I fell ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... two of the officers and myself rode to Ribeira Grande, a village a few miles eastward of Porto Praya. Until we reached the valley of St. Martin, the country presented its usual dull brown appearance; but here, a very small rill of water produces a most refreshing margin of luxuriant vegetation. In the course of an hour we arrived at Ribeira Grande, and were surprised at the sight of a large ruined fort and cathedral. This little ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... continued operation of this latter process, which only terminates among the warriors of the island after all the figures stretched upon their limbs in youth have been blended together—an effect, however, produced only in cases of extreme longevity—the bodies of these men were of a uniform dull green colour—the hue which the tattooing gradually assumes as the individual advances in age. Their skin had a frightful scaly appearance, which, united with its singular colour, made their limbs not a little resemble dusty specimens of ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... same cotton khaki costumes as the Indian maidens, save that their blanket are of more somber colors, and their headgear is either omitted altogether, or consists of black, bronze, or dull green. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... puts a wet blanket over human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory. Many people frankly prefer "interesting" to "good" people; Nietzsche generalizes this feeling. Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a code for slaves, for the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and lust, the tingle of unrestrained power. Every man for himself then, and the Devil take the hindmost. Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... as when the thunder-cloud descends upon some giant peak—one flash, one peal—the sublimity vanished, and all that remained was the small and cold pattering of rain. Canning started to his feet, and was able only to utter the unguarded words, "It is false!" to which followed a dull chapter of apologies. From that moment, the House became more a scene of real business than of airy ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... knows for certain that they are pursued, as also who is the pursuer. She has heard the question asked by Aguara, recognising his voice; heard also the dull thud of his club as it descended on the skull of the unfortunate man; and now again hears the trampling of hoofs renewed and drawing nearer. She has still hold of Francesca's hand, and for a moment debates within herself what is best to be done, and whether ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... the benches. The captain presently joined her, and the gentlemen saw that she was bright and perfectly self-possessed in conversation: some of them immediately resolved to achieve an acquaintance. The dull, passive existence of the beginning of every voyage, seemed to be now at an end. It was time for the little society of the vessel to awake, stir itself, and organize a life of its own, for ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... place is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too stupid to interpret. She's trying to make herself negative and receptive, as she calls it, but can't, of course, succeed. Haven't you noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had no personality? She thinks impressions will come to her ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... not well and strangely indisposed towards me yawning unduly and complaining that life is dull, yet gay enough for others and of a great joy over riding horseback with Lasselle. Last night did chide her in bed for upwards of an hour and misliked me greatly when I had done to find that she slept for some while before. Will have the doctor ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... fire of skirmishers, mingled with the dull roar of cannon, indicated that Nighthawk had ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... not even know that we ought to live in a world of overflowing loveliness; and that our contribution to it should be the loveliest of all. We are so sodden in the dull ugliness of our interiors, so used to calling a tame weary low-toned color scheme "good taste," that only children dare frankly yearn for Beauty—and they are ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... profuse 'tis Over the classic page of E——e! Veiling the truth in such fine phrase, That we for poetry might take it, Were it not dull as prose, and praise, And endless ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... to Dodge but once during the summer of 1884. My steers had gone to Ogalalla and were sold, the cows remaining at the lower market, all of which had changed owners with the exception of one thousand head. The demand had fallen off, and a dull close of the season was predicted, but I shaded prices and closed up my personal holdings before returning. Several of the firm's steer herds were unsold at Dodge, but on the approach of the shipping season I returned to my task, and we began to move out our beeves ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... Charley poked the barbed end down into the hole. Down, down it went, fifteen, twenty feet, then struck with a dull thud. He began twisting the sapling over and over, then drew it slowly and gently up, but the end came into view with nothing adhering to it. Again and again was the fruitless operation repeated, and a look of disappointment ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... searches endlessly for something in the sea-weed, girding his clean, faded robe above his bare sticks of legs—but Margarita and me. The camphor trees lose their lacquered green and turn to distant chestnut; the scarlet lily fades to a dull rose marsh flower; the lines of the temple are only quaintly-eaved rocks and ledges, and I am over seas again. I wonder if that is the reason I love this place so? But there were no geyser baths there and I had no rheumatism then! Tout lasse, tout casse, tout ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... the Maid of Honor had been trying to get Mr. Esmond to talk, and no doubt voted him a dull fellow. For, by some mistake, just as he was going to pop into the vacant place, he was placed far away from Beatrix's chair, who sat between his Grace and my Lord Ashburnham, and shrugged her lovely ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... protective colouring of moths; on bright coloration as protective in butterflies; on variability in the Papilionidae; on male and female butterflies, inhabiting different stations; on the protective nature of the dull colouring of female butterflies; on mimicry in butterflies; on the bright colours of caterpillars; on brightly-coloured fishes frequenting reefs; on the coral snakes; on Paradisea apoda; on the display of plumage by male birds of paradise; on assemblies of birds of paradise; on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... face, as though he had been wounded by a sharp blade. The mark was not disfiguring, particularly when his features were in repose; but when he was agitated by some violent passion or uncontrollable emotion, the edges of the scar assumed different hues, and appeared of a dull white mixed ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... window looking down into the street, dull and listless and filled with the dread of the future that had once looked so engaging to her. The picture that avarice and greed had painted was gone. In its place was an honest bit of colour on the canvas,—a drab colour ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... there is a command of sufficient heat no trouble should be experienced in March, and it is essential to sow very thinly for two reasons. Crowded seedlings are liable to damp off, particularly in dull, moist weather, and they are so fragile that it is well-nigh impossible to transfer them from the seed-pots until they are about ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... steadiness to supply a sufficiently copious and continuous stream of snow-dust, but that it should come from the north. No perfect banner is ever hung on the Sierra peaks by a south wind. Had the gale that day blown from the south, leaving other conditions unchanged, only a dull, confused, fog-like drift would have been produced; for the snow, instead of being spouted up over the tops of the peaks in concentrated currents to be drawn out as streamers, would have been shed off around the sides, and piled down into the glacier wombs. The cause of ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... of these marshes, these sloughs, the mud of which was systematically raked, the dull gray earth that the Breton flora held in horror, were in keeping with the gloom that filled our souls. When we reached a spot where we crossed an arm of the sea, which no doubt serves to feed the ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... sapling into a splendid 'shillelagh,' with a slender handle and heavy head as ever did execution in a faction fight upon Emerald soil. The very word election had excited his bump of combativeness. But, alas! the little stumpy street was dull and empty as usual; not even the embryo of a mob; no flaring post-bills soliciting votes; the majesty of the people and of the law ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the mail arrived she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called upon her. Now in her great ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... men have suffered, many have died, and all should be warned,—the disease, namely, of mental disgust, the sign and the result of mental debility. Mental disgust "sicklies o'er" all the objects of thought, extinguishes faith in exertion, communicates a dull wretchedness to indolence in the very process by which it makes activity impossible, and drags into its own slough of despond, and discolors with its own morbid reveries, the objects which it should ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... medium for improvement in literature and taste; an aid to the cultivation of the art for its own sake in the manner of gentlemen, not of cheap tradesmen. The selection of commercial prosperity as a goal will ruin any true literary progress, and dull the artistic aspiration of the student as soon as his mercenary instincts shall have been satisfied. Besides, there is really no sound business principle in the so-called "sale" of little papers. No youth could ever found or sustain a real magazine of substantial price and more than nominal ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... all, all Tante's side, with a dreadful clearness. And it was impossible that she should see what he did. He must submit to seeming blurred and dull, to pretending not to see anything. At all events her hand was in his. He felt able to face the duel at close quarters with Madame von Marwitz as long as Karen ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a glass of neat gin down his shrivelled throat, and the effect upon him was extraordinary. A light glimmered in each of his dull eyes, a tinge of colour came into his wax-like cheeks, and, opening his toothless mouth, he suddenly emitted a peculiar, bell-like, and most musical cry. A hoarse roar of laughter from all the company answered ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seemest dull tonight, and yet thou wert not so when we parted for the last fight. Thou didst thy best then to cheer ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... letter and sent it off. That done, I went back into the study. Knowing nothing—able to guess nothing—a dull patience came over me, the patience with which we often wait for unknown, inevitable misfortunes. Sometimes I almost forgot Guy in my startled remembrance of his father's look as he called me away, and sat down—or ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... was at least sixty feet from the pavement, and the fall was the more appalling because the body of Andre struck some of the intervening scaffolding first, and thence bounced off, until the unhappy young man fell with a dull thud, bleeding and ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... now he wanted to do something easy. Under the new genius—who was already urging that the paper should be made a daily—the "Herald" could get along without him; and the "White-Caps" would bother Carlow no longer; and he thought that Kedge Halloway, an honest man, if a dull one, was sure to be renominated for Congress at the district convention which was to meet at Plattville in September—these were his responsibilities, and they did not fret him. Everything was all right. There ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... that I knew the second light was the real one. I hadn't known the first one wasn't real, but when Smugglers' Light came on I could see there was a difference. I'd figured the light was sort of dull because of ground haze. There was ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... eyes to the royal box, where sat a stout, middle-aged man, with a dull, good-humored face, a star and ribbon on his breast, and by his side a woman, ample and motherly, with an ugly tuft of feathers on her head, and a diamond tiara, which lit up her heavy Dutch features like a torch. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... left London for Trieste, en route for India. It was not a cheerful day for saying good-bye to Old England and dear friends. There was a fog as black as midnight, thick snow was lying about the streets, and a dull red gloom only rendered the darkness visible and horrible. The great city was wrapped in the sullen splendours of a London fog. "It looks," said Richard, "as if the city were in mourning for some ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... day being thatched or covered with shingles of wood. As Felix afterwards learnt, this had been effected during the reign of the present king, whose object was to protect his city from being set on fire by burning arrows. The encircling wall had become a dull red hue from the long exposure to the weather, but the roofs were a brighter red. There was no ensign flying on either of the towers, from which he concluded that the king ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... mass, faintly blue in colour. The detective, the policeman and the station official clustered round, their faces turned up to the light and their eyes fixed on the tube. The Russian looked at them narrowly, and reading nothing but dull wonderment in their expressions, ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... took care of Dollysweet. I never neglected her or let her get dirty and untidy, though in time, of course, her pink-and-white complexion faded into pallid yellow, and her bright hair grew dull, and, worst of all—after that I never could bear to look at her—one of her sky-blue eyes dropped, not out, but into her ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... Michael heard steps coming. Then a struggle and a shrill giggle. Some young people were coming to the wake, and he knew a boy had tried to kiss a girl in the dark. He felt a dull ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... been, during many years, a persecuted man; and persecution had produced its usual effect on him. His mind, dull and narrow as it was, had profited under that sharp discipline. While he was excluded from the Court, from the Admiralty, and from the Council, and was in danger of being also excluded from the throne, only because he could not help believing in transubstantiation and in the authority ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was not immersed in the wine, was putrid. 'Look here!' cried I, in mad triumph, plunging my arm into the cask, and drawing forth the ghastly head of Lagrange. I held aloft the horrid trophy of my vengeance; there were the dull, staring eyes, the distorted features, and drops of wine oozed from between the set teeth. With a long, loud shriek, her ladyship fell to the ground insensible; muttering fierce curses on me, the Captain turned to raise her, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... for the Stock Exchange. We got our gallery tickets at the bank where the Golconda folks kept money, and in a little while we was leanin' over a kind of marble bulwarks and starin' down at a gang of men smokin' and foolin' and carryin' on. 'Twas a dull day, so we found out afterward, and I guess likely that was true. Anyway, I never see such grown-up men act so much like children. There was a lot of poles stuck up around with signs on 'em, and around every pole was a circle of bedlamites hollerin' like loons. Hollerin' was ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... answered Valentin, "I am not in a mood for pictures, and the more beautiful they are the less I like them. Their great staring eyes and fixed positions irritate me. I feel as if I were at some big, dull party, in a room full of people I shouldn't wish to speak to. What should I care for their beauty? It's a bore, and, worse still, it's a reproach. I have a great ...
— The American • Henry James
... even do that," the old lady declared contradictiously. "She'll keep you forever in the same dull hole." ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... garishly sunlit side of this planet." And, to tease her and arouse her to combat: "I prefer a farandole to a nocturne; I'd rather have a painting than an etching; Mr. Whistler bores me with his monochromatic mud; I don't like dull colours, dull sounds, dull intellects; and anything called 'an arrangement' on canvas, or anything called 'a human document' or 'an appreciation' in literature, or anything 'precious' in art, or any ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... It was a neat, dull little house, on the shady side of the way, with new, narrow floorcloth in the passage, and new, narrow stair-carpets up to the first floor. The paper was new, and the paint was new, and the furniture was new; and all three, paper, paint, and furniture, bespoke the limited means of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of Fulham to the east of the Fulham Palace Road is very dreary; long, dull streets, lined by small houses and varied by small chapels and big Board schools, constitute an area at the best highly respectable, and at the worst squalid. It is useless to enumerate all the churches and chapels that have sprung up here, particularly as there ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... one of the higher points along its eastern shore when the sun is sloping down the western sky. One memorable evening this view was so beautiful as to be almost unearthly. The sun had sunk behind a heavy cloud-bank, which it tipped with a dull tawny red. By and by the sky began to change. The cloud sank lower, and lay upon the horizon in a perfectly black mass that threw its shadow upon the landscape. Its lining had deepened in color to a blood-red, and the clouds higher up the arch of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... out two cities so near each other and yet so unlike as Cheyenne and Greeley. The latter is quiet, and even accused of being dull, and yet everybody is steadily getting rich. It is a town of readers, thinkers and mental independents. It is composed of the elements of New England shrewdness and Western push, yet Greeley as compared with Cheyenne ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Whither goe I? What shall I be anone? What horred iourney wandrest thou, my soule, Under th'earth in darke, dampe, duskie vaults? Or shall I now to nothing be resolv'd? My feares become my hopes; O would I might. Me thinkes I see the boyling Phlegeton And the dull poole feared of them we feare, The dread and terror of the Gods themselves; The furies arm'd with linkes, with whippes, with snakes, And my owne furies farre more mad then they, My mother and those troopes of ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... for Society needs redemption. Towards the end of the nineteenth century life seemed to be losing its savour. The world had grown grey and anaemic, lacking passion, it seemed. Sedateness became fashionable; only dull people cared to be thought spiritual. At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke. But, as we have seen, before the turn, first in France, then throughout Europe, a new emotional movement began ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... ha'porth of imagination, was Gabrielle Hewish. Luckily that admirable gossip Hoylake had another interest in life besides fishing stories, and one that served my purpose,—genealogy. It is an interest not uncommon with old soldiers—that is why they often write such incredibly dull memoirs—and after allowing him a number of sporting digressions in the direction of a Lochanillaun pike and the altogether admirable blackgame shooting at Roscarna, which, he assured me, was better than anything in the west except Lord Dudley's shoot on the Corrib, I played him tactfully ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... giving the effect of a confused play of expressions. For a moment he looked as though he would cry, but then the crumpled, puckered lines magically smoothed. The eyes, dull and blank, stayed dry. He made a senseless noise and slobbered in doing so. His jaw was slack, his ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... our ears were constantly saluted by dull, thundering, booming sounds, resembling the reports of distant artillery. As we approached the spot whence they proceeded, the ground beneath us shook and trembled as from successive shocks of an earthquake. Ascending a small hillock, the cause of the uproar ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... in Bulstrode Street, Manchester Square, grouped a family in mourning who had had the temerity to come to town in November, for the purpose, no doubt, of raising their spirits. In the dull, small drawing-room of the dull, small house we introduce to you, first, a middle-aged gentleman whose dress showed what dress now fails to show,—his profession. Nobody could mistake the cut of the cloth and the shape of the hat, for he had ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dingy, squalid houses he passed; some broken up by dirty little shops, some presenting the dull uniformity of row after row of mean, stunted brick buildings, the broken windows of many of which were mended with brown paper, or else not mended at all. Here and there a grimy public house, each with its group ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... rent my garments, and raised my voice in loud lamentations. Soon all was consumed, and there remained only the dull glow of red embers. Then I wandered out into the night, stupefied and broken-hearted by the crowning calamity that had overtaken me, afraid even to face my neighbours of the village, naked, ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... But there was a great scene, for she would not, at first, go back with him—at least, she did go back with him; but he insisted, reasonably enough, that all communication should be broken off between her and me. So, finding Italy very dull, and having a fever tertian, I packed up my valise, and prepared to cross the Alps; but my daughter fell ill, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Dull 'ole, this 'ere 'Arrygate, CHARLIE! The only fair fun I can find Is watching the poor sulphur-swiggers, a-gargling and going it blind. Oh, the sniffs and sour faces, old fellow, the shudders and shivers, and sighs; The white lips a-working like rabbits', the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... terrifying lorgnette, and this would have spelled disaster. Those penetrating lenses would never have missed the dazzling light reflected from that traitorous silver. Smiling again, though with a dull heart ache as her gaze still lingered on the sprawling Brent, she took Miss Liz's wrist in the nick ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... in the waters. Below them were broad pads of lotus and water lilies; with alligators like barnacled logs, and cormorants swimming about, and bright-eyed waterfowl. The shadows in the forest were light clear green, and the shadows under the hanging jungle near the water were dull green; and the very upper air itself, in that hot steaming glade, seemed delicately green, too. Butterflies were among the vine blossoms, so brilliant of colour that it seemed to me that the flowers were fluttering from their stems. Across the translucent green shadows flashed birds. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... EMERY, a dull, blue-black mineral, allied in composition to the sapphire, but containing a varying quantity of iron oxide; is found in large masses; is exceedingly hard, and largely used in polishing metals, plate-glass, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... directions. It is common for change to produce like results elsewhere, as well as in school life, especially during the early years of womanhood. Again, those thus affected are quite as likely to be the dull or inattentive as ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... crawled like a leisurely river between the freshly ploughed ridges, where the earth was slowly settling around the transplanted crop. In the distance, labourers were still at work, passing in dull-blue blotches between the rows of bright-green leaves that hung limply on their ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... are not to be depended on, and they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they may train up their soldiers in the art of cutting throats; or as Sallust observed, for keeping their hands in use, that they may not grow dull by too long an intermission. But France has learned to its cost, how dangerous it is to feed such beasts. The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians, and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and quite ruined ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... while," added Richard, "watch well, but anger not, Montagu and the archbishop. It were dangerous to seem to distrust them till proof be clear; it were dull to believe them true. I go at once to ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the nearer these servants kept to the castle, and the farther from the hedge, the more ugly the wilderness appeared. And the nearer they approached the forbidden bounds, their own home appeared more dull, and the wilderness more delightful. And this the master knew when he gave his orders, for he never either did or said any thing without a good reason. And when his servants sometimes desired an explanation of the reason, he used to tell them they would ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... a dull, poor life coming for Lloyd. He was too young to be put to hard, hard work with neither chance for learning nor play. But, as she sat looking in the fire, she suddenly remembered how God, who held the great, moaning sea and the ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... re-acted in various ways on the Women's Suffrage propaganda. It might seem that this had a depressing effect, for the rigid neutrality in regard to party which always had characterised the National Societies for Women's Suffrage might easily seem dull and tame to the ardent party enthusiasts, and many of the Liberal women threw their energies by preference into the Women's Liberal Associations, but the old charge that women had no interest in politics, now ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and held up his hand, when a low, dull, roaring sound as of a flood of water rushing up the valley ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... with this fence to hang on to!" she assured herself, "no matter how fast the tide came in!" She rested a moment on the rail, glancing back at the distant fire, now only a dull glow, low against ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... her hands. And soon he noticed that she was crying. Great tears flowed down her pale cheeks, trickled by her mouth, fell drop by drop on the velvet of her bodice. And more tears followed indefinitely, as though springing from an inexhaustible source. And no sadder sight was ever seen than that dull and resigned despair, which expressed itself in the ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... time. I have corrected seven hundred consecutive pages of MS., and the remaining two hundred will be ready in a fortnight. I do not think there will be a dull page in the whole book, as I have made one or two very important alterations; the account of my imprisonment at Madrid cannot fail, I think, of being particularly interesting.... During the last week I have been chiefly ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... white not paler than blue, why is a connection made by a stove, why is the example which is mentioned not shown to be the same, why is there no adjustment between the place and the separate attention. Why is there a choice in gamboling. Why is there no necessary dull stable, why is there a single piece of any color, why is there that sensible silence. Why is there the resistance in a mixture, why is there no poster, why is there that in the window, why is there no suggester, why is there no window, ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... to begin with, for most of hers had disappeared in the wash at foreign hotels; and Sally wanted veiling. Those were not interesting to me, because they are necessary; and necessaries, like your daily bread and such things, are so dull. I said that I would just wander about a little, as they thought they would be some time, and we made an appointment to meet in half an hour at what they called the notion counter. I hadn't an idea what it was, and didn't like to ask, because I ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the light of the solitary one still flaring, as Hassan held it, I saw a look upon her face which startled me. She pointed before us, uttering a wild, despairing cry, which was drowned a moment after in a dull roar which struck ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... waddles down the street, In all the pomp of ignorant conceit; Men wha grew wise priggin owre hops and raisins, Or gather'd lib'ral views in Bonds and Seisins: If haply Knowledge, on a random tramp, Had shor'd them with a glimmer of his lamp, And would to Common-sense for once betray'd them, Plain, dull Stupidity stept kindly ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... similarity to some expressions about Jahveh, who is also described as having power. Evan had never heard of Jahveh in his life, and imagining him to be some other Mesopotamian idol, read on with a dull curiosity. He learnt that the name Sho, under its third form of Psa, occurs in an early legend which describes how the deity, after the manner of Jupiter on so many occasions, seduced a Virgin and begat a hero. This hero, whose name is not essential to our existence, was, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... a wonderful rocky fiord, where the stones that were thrown down rebounded from side to side, and finally landed with a dull thud in some stagnant-looking water at the bottom. Afterwards, the day being hot, boys and girls scattered for ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... hostess sees that a tete-a-tete conversation is becoming dull, she must make it a trio by the introduction of some sprightly third, or change the duet by substituting another partner and carrying off one to introduce elsewhere. If, however, any conversation seems to be animated and giving pleasure, neither ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... usually only one cluster of flowers to arrange on each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontispiece), and you will find that the richest piece of Gothic spire-sculpture would be dull and graceless beside the grouping of the floral masses in their various life. But it is difficult to give the accuracy of attention {69} necessary to see their beauty without drawing them; and still more difficult to draw them in any approximation to the truth before they change. This is ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... she had changed her gown and that, over some obscurer thing, she wore a long, dull purple coat with wide hanging sleeves; her head was bound and wound, half-Eastern fashion, in a purple veil, hiding her hair. In her dark garb, with all her colors hidden, her brilliance extinguished, she was more wonderful ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... announced the entry of the Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness was a tall man, with a quick, piercing eye, which was prevented from giving to his countenance the expression of intellect, which it otherwise would have done, by the dull and almost brutal effect of his flat, Calmuck nose. He was dressed in a plain green uniform, adorned by a single star; but his tightened waist, his stiff stock, and the elaborate attention which had evidently been bestowed upon his mustachio, denoted the military fop. The Grand Duke was accompanied ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... very quiet all during the evening, meekly holding some worsted for her aunt, then taking a very dull book, and trying to read it. But she was very glad ...
— A Dear Little Girl • Amy E. Blanchard
... at the door. Her face was just Dorothea's grown older, and without its roses; her hair was Dorothea's with its gold grown dull; her very voice and dimples were Dorothea's. A large poppy-trimmed hat adorned her head, and a basket with an old pair of scissors in it ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... are the secular ones. They include all of the ordinary activities of life which we share with the sons and daughters of Adam: eating, sleeping, working, looking after the needs of the body and performing our dull and prosaic duties here on earth. These we often do reluctantly and with many misgivings, often apologizing to God for what we consider a waste of time and strength. The upshot of this is that we are uneasy most of the time. We go about our common tasks with a feeling of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... incisive humor dearly beloved of the intellectual reader. In 'The Way Up' this writer crystallizes a tense and telling problem. The book is earnest enough for the most serious of readers, yet never dull or dreary. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... long since abandoned the army for the political service, and, indeed, he was fast approaching the time-limit of his career. He was a man of breadth and height, but rather heavy and dull of feature, with a worn face and a bald forehead. He had made enemies, and still made them, for he had not the art of suffering fools gladly; and, on the other hand, he made no friends. He had no sense of humour and no general information. He was, therefore, of no assistance at a dinner-party, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... this childish expectation of mine. To the north there was a long low cape, the name of which has now escaped me. In the evening light it had been of the same greyish green tint as the other headlands; but now, as the darkness fell, it gradually broke into a dull glow, like a cooling iron. On that wild night, seen and lost with the heave and sweep of the boat, this lurid streak carried with it a vague but sinister suggestion. The red line splitting the darkness might have been a giant half-forged sword-blade ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... patriarchal mood seemed to her unnecessarily affected, and she requested him to ask Miss Sherard to come and speak to her. 'Kitty amuses me,' she said, with one of her characteristic shrugs, 'and most people are so dull, ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... be here again!" cried Cosin to his sister, unable to repress the pleasure that he felt, but entirely, dull fellow that he ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... moment or two after,—then, seating himself, gave them without the break of a note. Others followed, more difficult, in which he played the bass accompaniment in the manner I have described, repeating instantly the treble. The child looked dull, wearied, during this part of the trial, and his master, perceiving it, announced the exhibition closed, when the musician (who was a citizen of the town, by-the-way) drew out a thick roll of score, which he explained to be a Fantasia of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... business—only for one day, but that Madelon was to spend for the most part alone; for her father, occupied with his affairs, was obliged to go out very early, and leave her to her own devices; and very dull she found them, after the first hour or two. She was a child of many resources, it is true, but these will come to an end when a little girl of nine years old, with books and dolls all packed up, has to amuse herself for ever so many hours in a dull country ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen. The castle formed part of an entrenched camp which Richard designed to cover his Norman capital. Approach by the river was ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... "Dull heape, that thus thy head above the rest doest reare, Precisely yet not know'st who first did place thee there. Ill did those mightie men to trust thee with their storie; Thou hast forgot their names who rear'd thee for their glorie; For all their wondrous cost, thou that hast serv'd them so, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... ever really know people, Uncle Rod, or am I so dull and stupid that I misunderstand? Men are such a puzzle—all except you, you darling dear—and if you were young and not my uncle, even you might be as much of a puzzle as ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... in the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of the holy political covenant resting here—the sacred mules that draw it being stabled in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... my eyes, when I heard the dull regular noise of the axe upon trees. I looked cautiously; the sounds proceeded from the distance, and upon the shores of the river, and behind the camp of the savages, dark forms were moving in every direction, and we at last discovered that the Umbiquas were making ladders to scale the ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... space to time, by trying dimly to imagine what this ever-roaring monster must have consumed during the hundreds of millions of years that slowly rising and slowly sinking continents have exposed their whole areas to her jaws; whoever thus observes and thus reflects must be a dull man, if he does not begin to feel that in the presence of such a destroyer as this we have no reason to wonder at a frequent silence in the testimony of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... that I could do nothing but remain still, and anticipate the reproof that was preparing. What was my agreeable surprise to see the old gentleman standing at the stile, with his hands in his pockets, surveying the whole scene with evident satisfaction! And how dull I must have been, not to have known till my friend the grandfather (who, by- the-bye, said he had been a wonderful cricketer in his time) told me, that it was the clergyman himself who had established the whole thing: that it was his field they played ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... Le Glorieux, "but the question is, whether, judging of your Majesty's wit from its having lodged you here, I should not have cause to be ashamed of having so dull a fool." ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... loud yell. The foe replied to the challenge in the same manner; arrows whizzed and hissed through the air, crossing each other and tearing through the shrubbery or penetrating the trunks of trees with dull thuds. The fight had begun here too, but little if any damage was done as yet by either side. Most of the arrows were shot at random, and both parties whooped and yelled. Their purpose was manifestly to frighten ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... aside his cup, and tilting himself upon the "hind legs" of his chair—"business is very dull, the weather is intolerable, I know you and the children would be much benefitted by a trip into the country—why ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... casualty; Gleig, who was present, says (p. 288): "The deadly shower of grape swept down numbers in the camp."] The night was now as black as pitch; the embers of the deserted camp-fires, beaten about and scattered by the schooner's shot, burned with a dull red glow; and at short intervals the darkness was momentarily lit up by the flashes of the Carolina's guns. Crouched behind the levee, the British soldiers lay motionless, listening in painful silence to the pattering of the grape among the huts, and to the moans and shrieks of the wounded who ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... meet, and there were drilled into his character many good lessons of plain commonsense—a rather unusual equipment for a poet, but still one that should not be waived or considered lightly. At the village school William was neither precocious nor dull, neither black nor white: his cosmos being simply a sort of slaty-gray, a condition of being which attracted no special attention from either his schoolfellows or his tutors. From the village school he went to Marlborough Academy, where by patient grubbing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... continued, "that this man or spirit of a man has been sitting here night after night, and that we have not been able to see him, because our minds are dull and obtuse. Last night the elevating force of a strong passion, such as that which you have confided to me, combined with the power of fine music, so exalted your mind that you became endowed, as it were, with a sixth sense, and suddenly were enabled to see that which had previously ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... in time of relaxation, did he ever suffer her to be absent from him for half an hour. His mind was naturally feeble; and he had received an enfeebling education. He had been brought up amidst the dull magnificence of Versailles. His grandfather was as imperious and as ostentatious in his intercourse with the royal family as in public acts. All those who grew up immediately under the eye of Lewis had the manners of persons who had never known ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
