"Insipid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the profane to penetrate, which signifies that all that he learned from God, concerning amorous adventures, should be wrapped in profound silence. How beautiful all these allegories are! And how true! How insipid life would be without these mysterious liaisons, by which Nature carries out her designs, eluding the social ties, without breaking them! Disciples of Mercury, I salute you, whatever be your sex; to your discretion, to your persuasive arts ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... to Kate the summer seemed suddenly to have lost its glory and music, if she found the round of social pleasures on which she had just entered grown strangely insipid, if it sometimes seemed to her that she had quaffed all the richness and sweetness of life on that wondrous first night till only the dregs remained, she gave no sign. With her sunny smile and lightsome ways she reigned supreme, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... to the English poet in one of the public squares here. The features of the bust do not strike me as remarkably etherial, but the inscription is a good specimen of Italian adapted to lapidary uses—it avoids those insipid verbal terminations which weaken the language and sometimes render it almost ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... fancy dressings, and elaborate garnishings, and you will soon become proficient in the art. Do not prepare plain salads until the moment they are wanted at table. Should they be mixed long before they are served, you will find the lettuce flabby and the dressing watery and insipid. ...
— Fifty Salads • Thomas Jefferson Murrey
... as perfection is Insipid in this naughty world of ours, Where our first parents never learned to kiss Till they were exiled from their earlier bowers, Where all was peace, and innocence, and bliss,[b] (I wonder how they got through the twelve hours), Don Jose, like a lineal son ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the fields and gardens wherein the beautiful mutations occur. To turn iron into gold would be a prosaic, barren process that might result in trouble to all concerned, but to transform heavy black earth and insipid rain-water into edible rubies, with celestial perfume and ambrosial flavor, is indeed an art that appeals to the entire race, and enlists that imperious nether organ which has never lost its power over heart ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... relic, given him by his dying mother, which extricates him from his many plights. He meets lions and bears, and highwaymen attack him; but from all he escapes by a miracle. If, however, some principal personage is not taken off by a tragic end, the Indians find the play insipid. During the intermission one or two clowns come out and raise a laugh by jests that are frigid enough "to freeze hot water in the tropics." After the play is over a clown appears again and criticizes the play and makes satirical comments on the village officials. These plays usually ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise. Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had kissed in ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... caught his fancy. His ideal woman (though he was perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... like most Parisian suppers, in silence, followed by a noise of words which could not be distinguished, then with pleasantries of which most were insipid, with false news, with bad reasoning, a little politics, and much evil speaking; they also ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... I, "you must be aware that every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author draws to a conclusion,—just like your tea, which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup. Now, as I think the one is by no means improved by the luscious lump of half-dissolved sugar usually found at the bottom of it, so I am of opinion that a history, growing already vapid, is but dully crutched up by a detail of circumstances which every reader ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... moral truth, withal a negative truth, 'not to harm,' nor was this verity invented by them. Indeed, what to the Jain is the great truth is only a grotesque exaggeration of what other sects recognized in a reasonable form. Of all the sects the Jains are the most colorless, the most insipid. They have no literature worthy of the name. They were not original enough to give up many orthodox features, so that they seem like a weakened rill of Brahmanism, cut off from the source, yet devoid of all independent character. A religion ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... villains who go to any meeting to disturb it. Let anybody who can hire a house and pay for it have his way, and let none be disturbed; the opposers can stay away. But for us, let us be thankful that in such hot weather there is something to amuse us, something to season our insipid dishes, something to spice our dull days with. Mem. It was cooler in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... too often insipid. There is nothing wrong with it, but it does not interest us—it lacks character, lacks color, lacks power. It too closely resembles what we conceive of the angels as having— impeccability without the warmth ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... more, go not so fast as my body to the earth. In the same instant that I feel the first attempt of the disease, I feel the victory; in the twinkling of an eye I can scarce see; instantly the taste is insipid and fatuous; instantly the appetite is dull and desireless; instantly the knees are sinking and strengthless; and in an instant, sleep, which is the picture, the copy of death, is taken away, that the original, death itself, may succeed, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... required all their Precaution and Activity, none but the Favourite was left for the Monarch to divert himself with. But Conversation between two Lovers, who are continually together, would soon become insipid, if they confined themselves to common Topics. These Lovers were not so Phlegmatic, they ardently repeated their Protestations to love each other with an eternal Constancy. They mutually urged that the present Vehemence ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... hunting down the grosser instances of adulteration, grubbiness and dirt, and with it all the common bakehouse remains for the most part a subterranean haunt of rats, mice and cockroaches, and the ordinary baker's bread is so insipid and unnutritious that a great number of more prosperous people now-a-days find it advantageous to health and pocket alike to bake at home. A considerable amount of physical degeneration may be connected ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... To be free, I have no taste of those insipid dry discourses with which our sex of force must entertain themselves apart from men. We may affect endearments to each other, profess eternal friendships, and seem to dote like lovers; but 'tis not in our natures long to persevere. Love will resume his empire ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... little that is poetical in the American struggle—no mighty romance in tumbling a few chests of tea into the Atlantic. Washington they think insipid; and because America has produced hitherto no great poet, its whole history they regard as a gigantic commonplace—thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... you sleep. They are so careful not to exasperate a critic, that they never leave him any work; so busy with the broom, and make so clean a riddance that there is little left either for censure or for praise: For no part of a poem is worth our discommending, where the whole is insipid; as when we have once tasted of palled wine, we stay not to examine it glass by glass. But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are often careless in essentials. Thus, their Hippolytus is so scrupulous in point of decency, that he will rather expose himself to ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... one just described. When taken out, in somewhat less than an hour, the outside of the fruit is nicely browned, and the inner part so strongly resembles the crumb of wheaten bread as to have suggested the name of the tree. It is not, however, quite so pleasant to the taste, being rather insipid and slightly sweet. Nevertheless it is extremely good for food, and is much prized by the natives, to whom it may almost be said to be the staff ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... knowing that he who explains is lost. I told the story of the poppy over again. I went into the minutest details. I added to it, and expanded. I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk no more they looked bored. Also, they said insipid things, and soothful things, and things concerning other things, and not at all to the point. I was consumed with anger, and there and then I ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Helen of Troy. No, you don't think me hideous: you simply think me plain. There was a time when I thought YOU plain—you whose face, now that the moon shines full on it, is seen to be of a beauty that is flawless without being insipid. Oh that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek! You shudder at the notion of such contact. My voice grates on you. You try to silence me with frantic though exquisite gestures, and with noises inarticulate but divine. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... afterwards she met the Brazilian unexpectedly at Lucca, with an insipid-looking, light-haired, thin Englishwoman on his arm. Wanda stood still and looked at him steadily, but he glanced at her quite indifferently; he did not choose to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... roughness, accompanied with flavour, is given by the chips of oak and beech; and if logwood and walnut peels are used, the astringency will also be united to a portion of colour and flavour. All these substances may be rendered highly useful in giving positive qualities to insipid wines. A simple infusion alone is necessary, in such proportion as the exigencies may require; care being taken to rack and fine the wine after the desired effect has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... the true womanly character of my mother," said he. "There is nothing so insipid and tiresome as a woman who gives up the graces and muses to excite herself ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Sir W. Pen up to the Duke, where the King come also and staid till the Duke was ready. It being Collar-day, we had no time to talk with him about any business. To the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... upwards and outwards as high as three or four feet. Scattered through it are patches of Stilbocarpa polaris, locally known as Maori cabbage. It is of a more vivid green than the tussock and is edible, though somewhat stringy and insipid. Our sheep ate it readily, even nibbling the roots after the plant ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and moisture. So by this jewel of a pool in its verdant setting we have a sense of an activity which is gentle and refined. The glen's is a shy and intimate Beauty, especially congenial to us after the forceful Beauty of the river and the bold, proud Beauty of the cliffs. But it is no insipid Beauty: in its very ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... competitors, and often overwhelmed himself, did not, indeed, always permit him to attend deliberately to this principle, and often hurried him into an abuse of practice which in the lights turned breadth into mannered or insipid flatness; and in the shadows into a total extinction of parts. Of all this he has in the schools of San Rollo and Marco given the most unquestionable instances—'The Resurrection of Christ,' and 'The Massacre of the Innocents,' comprehend every charm by which chiaro-scuro fascinates ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... becomes insipid when the spirit is roused by a different object, it is well known, likewise, that the sense of pain is prevented by any vehement affection of the soul. Wounds received in a heat of passion, in the hurry, the ardour, or consternation ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... musquameena, bear-berry, because these animals are said to fatten on it. The dwarf Canadian cornel bears a corymb of red berries which are highly ornamental to the woods throughout the country but are not otherwise worthy of notice for they have an insipid farinaceous taste ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... purple, was formerly confounded with the red choke-berry. But because it sometimes elects to live in dry ground its leaves require no woolly mat on the underside to absorb vapors arising from wet retreats. No wonder that the insipid little berries. related to apples, pears, and other luscious fruits, should share with a cousin, the mountain ash, or rowan, the reproachful ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... later so many women painted delicate and insipid subjects that I have not space even for their names. A critic has said that the Dutch school "became a nursery for female talent." It may have reached the Kindergarten stage, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... be welcomed with a sense of refreshing pungency by readers who have been cloyed by a too long succession of insipid ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for Propertius, and I own that Tibullus is rather insipid to me. Lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! He had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. His taste was wretched, to be sure; still the Pharsalia is in my judgment a very wonderful ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... courage, perseverance, and prudence is not to be denied. Any one who believes that any good thing on this earth can be got without those virtues may believe in the philosopher's stone or the fountain of youth. If there were any Utopia its inhabitants would certainly be very insipid and characterless. ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... Rickie glanced back at Cadover, and thought of the insipid day that lay before him. Generally he was attracted by fresh people, and Stephen was almost fresh: they had been to him symbols of the unknown, and all that they did was interesting. But now he cared for the unknown ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... to frighten silly Scribblers from playing with such edg'd Tools again. But after all, what were their Works against me, but a mere hot Hash of cold Meat, of fifty half read political Authors, and unknown common-place Party-Writers, mix'd up with common Reports, and a few insipid lifeless Scraps of their own tasteless ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... to the God of Riches, half a dozen Chinamen in need of the god's good offices were holding a small feast in his honour. They had prepared many dishes, and, having "dedicated to the god the spiritual essence, were now about to partake of the insipid remains." "Ching fan," they courteously said to us when we approached down the path. "We invite (you to take) rice." We raised our clasped hands: "Ching, ching," we replied, "we invite (you to go on), we invite," and passed on. They were bent ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... you like women to be rather insipid. Philip Wakem betrayed you; he said so one day ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... would be necessary to have lived in his times, to be qualified to judge of this. The subtle salt and spirit of the ancient raillery, according to father Brumoi, is evaporated through length of time, and what remains of it is become flat and insipid to us; though the sharpest part will retain ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... pot, add the various vegetables, (having first sliced them,) in sufficient quantities to make the soup very thick; hang it over the fire and let it boil slowly, or simmer steadily till dinner time. Boiling it much on the second day will destroy the flavour, and render it flat and insipid. For this reason, in making fine, clear beef soup, the vegetables are to be cooked separately. They need not be put in the first day, as the soup is to be strained; and on the second day, if put in raw, the length of time required to ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... worst fed in Germany. I had no prejudice against Saxon fare upon my arrival in Leipsic, but found, after a fortnight's trial, that I could not possibly endure its unvarying boiled fresh beef, excessively insipid, with no other accompaniment than various kinds of beans stewed into a sort of porridge. Potato dumplings were a ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... ideal type of womanly perfection in the age which produced it, but now the sex would hardly feel themselves flattered by so poor an interpretation. The form is all that could be desired, but the head and features are positively insipid, and a phrenologist would tell you by the development of the cranium that female education was not a part of the Grecian policy. There is in this statue a certain air of wantonness, a perceptible consciousness of being valued and admired solely for physical beauty, which just as plainly ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... London. Leaving his luggage in a cloak-room at the station, he took a stroll about town, dropping into public-houses here and there, and drinking terrible brandy. At home he drank mastica as Englishmen drink beer, and brandy was insipid as water to his palate, and had just now almost as little effect upon his head. Demetri Agryopoulo had discovered the one secret of the true dissembler, that he who controls his features controls ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... Oregon grape, the salmon berry, red or yellow, as big as the yolk of an egg, the salal berry, any quantity of blueberries, huckleberries, both red and blue, sarvis berries, bear berries, mountain ash berries (also loved of bears), thimble berries, high bush cranberries, gooseberries—large and insipid—currants, wild cherries, choke cherries; many of these friends of old, others seen here for the first time, dainty picking in the autumn for deer, bears, foxes, squirrels and many birds. What particularly appealed ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... robber, after a time render all course of slow, steady, progressive, unvaried occupation and the prospect only of a limited mediocrity at the end of long labour, to the last degree tame, languid, and insipid. The interesting nature of their exploits may be conceived ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... of novels because they were made chiefly to set forth desperate love scrapes. Much reading of love stories makes one soft, insipid, absent-minded, and useless. Affections in life usually work out very differently. The lady does not always break into tears, nor faint, nor do the parents always oppose the situation, so that a romantic elopement is possible. Excessive reading of ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... apology for it is that it depicts family life with fidelity. Its characters are supposed to act and talk as people act and talk at home and in society. I trust this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do. Was ever produced so insipid ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... delightful; after our long cruise in the damp gloomy climates of the south, to breathe a clear dry air and feel honest warm sunshine, and eat good fresh roast beef must be the summum bonum of human life. I do not like the look of the rocks half so much as the beef, there is too much of those rather insipid ingredients, mica, quartz and feldspar. Our plans are at present undecided; there is a good deal of work to the south of Valparaiso and to the north an indefinite quantity. I look forward to every part with interest. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one addressed her she resented it like a contradiction. A part of the way she had the company of some neighbour girls and a loutish young man; never had they seemed so insipid, never had she made herself so disagreeable. But these struck aside to their various destinations or were out-walked and left behind; and when she had driven off with sharp words the proffered convoy of some of her nephews and nieces, she was free to go on alone up Hermiston ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to custom at two o'clock. The wife of Don Jose, and her maiden sister and three daughters, pretty, palefaced, black-eyed girls, with hair like the raven's wing, were present, as were the family priest and two gentlemen, cousins of our host. We first had an insipid kind of soup, and then their principal dish, called puchero. It contained all sorts of meats and vegetables mixed up together—beef, pork, ham, bacon, sausage, poultry, cabbage, yuccas camotes (a sort of potato), potatoes, rice, peas, chochitas (grains of maize), ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Nature, which is certainly our Author's Masterpiece, I thought, they could not be set in too good a Light. Indeed, to point out, and exclaim upon, all the Beauties of Shakespeare, as they come singly in Review, would be as insipid, as endless; as tedious, as unnecessary: But the Explanation of those Beauties, that are less obvious to common Readers, and whose Illustration depends on the Rules of just Criticism, and an exact ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... the undulations and twistings of wood and copper, accentuating the sugary languor of the blond with its clear and lively decors, attenuating the pungency of the brunette with its tapestries of aqueous, sweet, almost insipid tones. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... reality that can only come from two sources; from high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or else from experience of life acting on and strengthening a generous nature. 'The cause of most books of morality being so insipid,' he says, 'is that their authors are not sincere; is that, being feeble echoes of one another, they could not venture to publish their own real maxims and private sentiments.'[22] One of the secrets of his own freedom from this ordinary insipidity of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... would not suit at all. She's too—I hardly know what, unless I say, lifeless, or insipid. And then, I could not spare my seamstress. She ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... Scotland in those days was simply frittered away in the tittle-tattle of cross and causeway, and the insipid talk of taverns. The most trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and discussed, and magnified into events of the first importance. Many residents had no trade or profession whatever. Annuitants and retired merchants built themselves houses, had their portraits ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... courtesy is mentioned, for example, as one mode of wreaking vengeance in country villages. Thus the high culture and aesthetic temperament of the Italians gave an intellectual quality to their vices. Crude lust and bloodshed were insipid to their palates: they required the pungent sauce of a ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... "These things want thinking out. A limited vision might be restricted in other ways than by mere stupid opaque fog, and bald, insipid position in Space. Consider how much more aggravating it would be—from the point of view of Providence—to limit the vision to the selection of peculiar objects which would give offence to the Taste or Religious Convictions of its owner! Suppose that Miss Scatcherd's eyes, for instance, could ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... or vessel. jonote. a tree. Jornada. a day's march. juez. judge. ke'esh. a votive figure. ladino. a mestizo, a person not Indian. ladron, ladrones. thief, thieves. liana. vine. licenciado. lawyer. lima. a fruit, somewhat like an insipid orange. lindas. pretty (girls). llano. a grassy plain. machete. a large knife. maestro. teacher, a master in any trade. maguey. a plant, the century plant or agave, yielding pulque. mai, pelico. tobacco, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... points, shows them characteristically and with comparatively little offence, while it exhibits what the shopkeepers would, I believe, call "a range of his best lines." The autobiographic hero, Paul Deligny, is one of his nearest approaches to a gentleman, yet no one can call him insipid or priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not such a madcap as the similarly situated Frederique of Une Gaillarde (v. inf.), by no ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... implored Blanch not to let him out of her sight—to go off with him alone as often as possible and flirt with him to any length; a tremendous concession on Mrs. Forest's part—nothing less than a complete surrender, she being one of those proud but insipid mortals whose temperature could be easily gauged by the inclination of her long, slender, slightly upturned nose which seemed to be forever pointing toward a better world. For her, it was not enough that one's appearance and innate refinement marked one as a lady or a gentleman, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... be prevented by such apprehensions; but I doubted that it would not be possible to prevail on Dr Johnson to relinquish, for some time, the felicity of a London life, which, to a man who can enjoy it with full intellectual relish, is apt to make existence in any narrower sphere seem insipid or irksome. I doubted that he would not be willing to come down from his elevated state of philosophical dignity; from a superiority of wisdom among the wise, and of learning among the learned; and from flashing his wit upon minds bright ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, and approved. This was not insipid, single-word talk of drummer-boys. It dealt with a life he knew and in part understood. The atmosphere suited him, and he throve by inches. They gave him a white drill suit as the weather warmed, and he rejoiced in the new-found bodily comforts ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... Great Britain, ratified by King George, was returned to the United States government in February, much to the relief of its friends, and indeed of all parties. "We are wasting our time in the most insipid manner, waiting for the treaty," wrote John Adams to his wife on the tenth of January. "Nothing of any consequence will be done till that arrives, and is mauled and abused, and then acquiesced in. For the antis must be more numerous than I believe them, and made ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the insipid details which overlay them, the annals of Ceylon present comparatively few stirring incidents, and still fewer events of historic importance to repay the toil of their perusal. They profess to record no occurrence anterior to the advent ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... 'It is a word for Germans, "housewife." Our English ideal is something immeasurably higher and better. A companion, a complement! Do you know, Miss Cayley, it always sickens me when I hear German students sentimentalising over their maedchen: their beautiful, pure, insipid, yellow-haired, blue-eyed maedchen; her, so fair, so innocent, so unapproachably vacuous—so like a wax doll—and then think of how they design her in days to come to cook sausages for their dinner, and knit them endless stockings through a placid middle age, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... taste insipid, trim off the rind, cut the remainder into neat pieces, pour over them a plain salad-dressing, and they will ...
— Breakfast Dainties • Thomas J. Murrey
... of an Arab? May I, really? I always thought you were a man in a hundred; and now I know it! That's a bargain, then. Things have been deadly insipid the last two days. But I have ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... demands. Night became day; and she had to learn to sleep until noon. She found no time for study; none even for reading. And conversation, such as was indulged under the Hawley-Crowles roof, was confined to insipid society happenings, with frequent sprinklings of racy items anent divorce, scandal, murder, or the debauch of manhood. From this she drew more and more ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... strait-waistcoat of perpendicular lines; the Italian effloresced on the mainland into the meaningless ornamentation of the Certosa of Pavia and the Cathedral of Como (a style sometimes ignorantly called Italian Gothic), and at Venice into the insipid confusion of the Porta della Carta and wild crockets of St. Mark's. This corruption of all architecture, especially ecclesiastical, corresponded with, and marked the state of religion over all Europe,—the peculiar degradation of the Romanist superstition, and of public ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... I speak of, a county contest was a very different thing indeed from the tame and insipid farce that now passes under that name: where a briefless barrister, bullied by both sides, sits as assessor; a few drunken voters, a radical O'Connellite grocer, a demagogue priest, a deputy grand-purple-something from the Trinity College ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic. To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of every-day life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization,—and this virtue was hers. New England Puritanism must be credited with the making of many such women. Severe as was her discipline, and harsh as seems now her rule, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... years Sir Christopher was occupied with the architectural metamorphosis of his old family mansion, thus anticipating through the prompting of his individual taste that general re-action from the insipid imitation of the Palladian style towards a restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness of determination which was regarded with not a little contempt by his fox-hunting neighbors.... "An obstinate, crotchety ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... decadence of a fishing village under the influence of city boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, "The Cutter Wild Duck," is a shudderingly insipid composition about a village lion who got drunk on his birthday, fell overboard, and committed no end of follies. A later volume of "Little Tales" is, indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The stories have all more or less of a marine flavor; but the only one of them ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Another of a yellow color, and of the size and taste of the large red currant, the bush four or five feet high; and the third a beautiful scarlet, resembling the strawberry in sweetness, though rather insipid, and growing on ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... opportunity of predicting the future rivalry between Rome and Carthage, and the ultimate triumph of the former power. All through the poem there are allusions to the history of Rome, and to the descent of the Julian house from the great Trojan hero. The hero Aeneas, himself, is rather an insipid character, but, on the other hand, Dido is painted with great force, truth, and tenderness. The visit to Carthage gives occasion for the narrative of the fall of Troy in the second and third books, while the sixth book, describing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the parlour I found Eliza there with Rose, and no one else. The surprise was not altogether so agreeable as it ought to have been. We chatted together a long time, but I found her rather frivolous, and even a little insipid, compared with the more mature and earnest Mrs. Graham. Alas, for ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... lady, then, when the queen was sending her invitations, Miss Hamilton addressed a fac-simile note, commanding her attendance in the character of a Babylonian; and to another, a Miss Blague, who was extremely blonde with a most insipid tint, she sent several yards of the palest yellow ribbon, requesting her to wear it in her hair. The jest, which succeeded admirably, was characteristic of Miss ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... examined this all-important matter, and made it a personal one. Engrossed in business, young and healthy, he no doubt felt, like thousands of others, that there was time enough for him to attend to the interests of his soul, (which, to the natural heart, is insipid, if not distasteful); but, when he saw his wife so deeply interested, he did all he could to encourage her. He knelt with her at the bedside in secret prayer, conversed with her on the subject, went with her to church, and sympathized with her; until, as a reward, I truly believe, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... no insipid, allegorical air, as might be supposed; and its composition is very graceful, simple, and harmonious. The costume is very happily managed. The angel figure is draped, and with, the liberty-cap, which, as a badge both of ancient and modern times, seems to connect the two figures, and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of their seeds. And as for his Reasons you may find divers of them scatter'd up and down his writings; the considerabl'st of which seem to be these three; The Ultimate Reduction of mixt Bodies into Insipid Water, the Vicissitude of the supposed Elements, and the production of perfectly mixt Bodies out of simple Water. And first he affirmes that the Sal circulatus Paracelsi, or his Liquor Alkahest, does adequately ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual. But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... if it be more than an on dit which he had picked up in London society. Voltaire could not have seen Andreini's drama, for it is not at all a ridiculous trifle. Though much of the dialogue is as insipid as dialogue in operettas usually is, there is great invention in the plot, and animation in the action. Andreini is incessantly offending against taste, and is infected with the vice of the Marinists, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... The characters, though true to life, may be lifeless and colorless, and their doings and what happens to them uninteresting. For this reason, many modern writers of tales for children, respecting the worth of the realistic, neglect to comply with what the realistic demands, and produce insipid, unconvincing tales. The realistic tale should deal with the simple and the ordinary rather than with the exceptional; and the test is not how much, but ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... it glows! Thou fool, go in and comfort her! When such a head as thine no outlet knows, It thinks the end must soon occur. Hail him, who keeps a steadfast mind! Thou, else, dost well the devil-nature wear: Naught so insipid in the world I find As is a ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... required a larger fortune to support the title properly. Heiresses vary, and persons interested in one of them beforehand are prepared to find that she is too yellow or too red, tall and toppling or short and square, violent and capricious or moony and insipid; but in every case it is taken for granted that she will consider herself an appendage to her fortune, and marry where others think her fortunes ought to go. Nature, however, not only accommodates herself ill to our favorite ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... mourn the absence of my worthiest friend. Here is wood and water, meadows and mountains, the Dryads and Hamadryads; but here's no Mr. Pepys, no Dr. Gale. Nothing of all the cheer in the parlour that I taste; all's insipid, and all will be so to me, till I see and enjoy you again. I long to know what you do, and what you think, because I am certain you do both what is worthy the knowing and imitation. On Monday next will Mr. Bentley resume his lecture, I think, at Bow Church: I fear I shall hardly get through this ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... sight to see unfortunate men who might do better work, condemned to filling the trough with insipid and unsavoury swill collected from the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... passionately. At this time he conceived God as the Great Musician of the spheres; and soon he will write that "we are a strophe in a poem." At the same time, the vivid and lightning figures of the Psalms, sweeping over the insipid metaphors of the rhetoric which encumbered his memory, awoke in the depths of him his wild African imagination and sent him soaring. And then the affectionate note, the plaint in those sacred songs: Deus, Deus meus!—"O God! O my ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... they were once in the garden, Victoire had no time for anyone but Mrs. Val and Clementina. He had done his duty by the Misses Neverbend and those other two insipid young English girls, and now he had his own affairs to look after. He also knew that Miss Golightly had ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... provided by the Government, the writer continues, "Our kangaroo cats are like mutton but much leaner and there is a kind of chickweed so much in taste like spinach that no difference can be discerned. Something like ground ivy is used for tea but a scarcity of salt and sugar makes our best meals insipid...Everyone is so taken up with their own misfortunes that they have no pity to bestow on others."* (* To-day Sydney is the seventh city of the Empire.) What was written of Sydney may be said to have been true of all the settlements. Everywhere ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,—no, not at evening parties,—and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caffe and the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the world. Our boarding- house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Well, to say the truth, the Lady Gycia is not at all to my taste. It is a cold, insipid style of beauty, at the best; and she is as self-willed and as straitlaced as a lady abbess. I suppose she is well matched with ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... tire, might then have entertained me, and all that now passes for unmeaning dissipation, might then have worn the appearance of variety and pleasure. But where the mind is wholly without interest, every thing is languid and insipid; and accustomed as I have long been to think friendship the first of human blessings, and social converse the greatest of human enjoyments, how ever can I reconcile myself to a state of careless ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... and girls climbing up to steal them, and scrambling for them: nothing overhead; no giants tumbling down, no Jupiter thundering, no Mars and Venus caught at mid-day, no river-gods pouring out their urns upon us; for, as I think nothing so insipid as a flat ceiling, I think nothing so absurd as a storied one. Before I was aware, and without my participation, the painter had adorned that of my bedchamber with a golden shower, bursting from varied and irradiated clouds. On my expostulation, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... years ago, the Minister of State invested with extraordinary powers. The newspapers made noise enough about that fanatical, narrow-chested figure in gold-laced uniform, with a face of crumpled parchment, insipid, bespectacled eyes, and the cross of the Order of St. Procopius hung under the skinny throat. For a time, it may be remembered, not a month passed without his portrait appearing in some one of the illustrated papers of Europe. He served the monarchy by imprisoning, exiling, or sending to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of the dahlia, salted and boiled, are eaten by the Indians; it is a farinaceous food of a somewhat insipid taste. Certainly, the wild potato is not much better; and who can tell whether cultivation, after having enriched our gardens with its beautiful flowers, may not also furnish our tables with the bulbs of this plant ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... generated. Too common a course I know it is, when the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no menace of a breeze—the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing cloud, that in such circumstances the blood stagnates: life, from excess and plethora of sweets, becomes insipid: the spirit of action droops: and it is oftentimes found at such seasons that slight annoyances and molestations, or even misfortunes in a lower key, are not wholly undesirable, as means of stimulating the lazy energies, and disturbing a slumber which is, or soon will be, morbid ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... thought of Nellie's meek admiration of all my words and ways, and got her photo out to soothe my vanity. For the first time it struck me that her features were somewhat insipid. The thought seemed like disloyalty, so I banished it and went ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to suppose that Ezra felt himself in any degree in love at this time. He recognized his companion's sweetness and gentleness, but these were not qualities which appealed to his admiration. Kate's amiable, quiet ways seemed insipid to a man who was used to female society of a ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... acceptable gifts. Emerson took especial pleasure in the beauty of fruits and the thought of how they had been evolved from useless, insipid seed cases.] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fingers. She was physically cramped by her surroundings, and the reproachful gentleness in Mrs. Gay's face embarrassed her only less than did the intimate pleasantry of Jonathan's tone. Every detail of the library—the richness and heaviness of the furniture, the insipid fixed smiles in the family portrait, the costly fragility of the china ornaments—all these seemed to unite in some occult power which overthrew her self-possession and paralyzed ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the mind from its road of serious thoughts; by instilling gaiety and airiness of spirit; by provoking to such dispositions of spirit in way of emulation or complaisance; and by seasoning matters, otherwise distasteful or insipid, with an unusual, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... will yet show a sameness and sickening repetition in all its parts, and all his trees will be like one another, except so far as one leans east and another west, one is broadest at the top and another at the bottom, while through all this insipid repetition, the means by which he forces contrast, dark boughs opposed to light, rugged to smooth, etc., will be painfully evident, to the utter destruction of all dignity and repose. The imaginative ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the time the ducks were roasted. He also roasted a few ground-nuts, both of which were very acceptable to us after not having tasted vegetables for so long a time. We thought the boiled plantains were rather insipid, until Shimbo produced a bag full of cayenne pepper, with which he sprinkled them as he hooked them out of the pot, and placed them on some broad leaves to serve as plates. Altogether, we had not had so satisfactory a meal for some time. We told Aboh that we hoped to have plenty of game for his ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... anticipate the argument. Their quickness goes before the speaker. If not struck with the vivacity of his manner, the elegance of his sentiments, and the glowing colours of his descriptions, they soon grow weary of the flat insipid discourse. Even in the lowest class of life, there is now a relish for rich and splendid ornament. Their taste requires the gay, the florid, and the brilliant. The unpolished style of antiquity would now succeed as ill at the bar, as the modern actor who should ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... white avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about death that ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... fancies, the laughter of the critical." Dryden "regretted that Shakspere did not know or rarely observed the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... his mirth and a truculent sense of the humorous with his cruelties, we cannot wonder that he should soon blend his cruelties with his ordinary festivities, and that his daily banquets would soon become insipid without them. Hence he required a daily supply of executions in his own halls and banqueting rooms; nor was a dinner held to be complete without such a dessert. Artists were sought out who had dexterity and strength enough to do what Lucan somewhere calls ensem rotare, that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... beginning and end of thought. He was not one of that cloud of false witnesses, who, calling themselves Christians, take no trouble for the end for which Christ was born, namely, their salvation from unrighteousness—a class that may be divided into the insipid and the offensive, both regardless of obedience, the former indifferent to, the latter ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... if they were so to be called, merely added to my zest and enjoyment. Here, indeed, was agreeable and talented society! Aunt Agnes was right,—my associates hitherto had been frivolous and volatile. The world of fashion was a sham. What a contrast,—I could not help making it,—between the insipid speeches of my former friends and the clever talk of this purely literary circle, where ideas and ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... that of Plumer Ward, forgotten as it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was the author of Tremaine (1825) and De Vere (1827), two novels of the life of a modern English gentleman, which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull enough. But they contained "portraits" of public persons, they undertook to hold the mirror up to the political and fashionable world of London, and they lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... almost perpendicular wall or rock; upon the other side there was left only a narrow passage. They stepped through it, so that they could see the waterfall and the gorge, and stopped silent. The sun, now fairly high, was in no sense the familiar orb of day, but was a pale, insipid thing, only one-fifth the diameter of the sun to which they were accustomed, and which could almost be studied with the unshielded eye. From their feet a grassy meadow a few hundred feet wide sloped gently down to the river, from whose farther bank a precipice sprang upward for ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... afford to humble himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my life once and for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides, there is something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who runs on errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an artist. Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... as it made him feel more sensibly all the charms that Corinne could diffuse through society, by observing the void caused by her absence. He essayed to converse with some ladies, who answered him in that insipid phraseology which is established to avoid the true expression of our sentiments and opinions, if those who use it have anything of this sort to conceal. He approached several groups of gentlemen who seemed by their ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... recorded in his too brief chapters of autobiography, "his passion for fencing which nothing could overcome." As an amateur actor he paid the manager of the Richmond Theatre seven guineas and a half for permission to undertake "the inferior insipid part of Richmond," who does not appear until the fifth act of the play. The Richard of the night was a brother-amateur, equally enthusiastic, one Litchfield by name. "I cared for nothing," wrote Mathews, "except the last scene of Richmond, but in that I was ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... unnatural caricatura. His plays appear not to be legitimate comedies, but strings of repartees and sallies of wit, the most poignant and polite indeed, but unnatural and ill placed. The trite and trivial character of a fop, hath strangely engrossed the English stage, and given an insipid similiarity to our best comic pieces: originals can never be wanting in such a kingdom as this, where each man follows his natural inclinations and propensities, if our writers would really contemplate nature, and endeavour to open those mines of humour which ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... resign the inheritance of the great warrior and lawgiver. The meek, bald, fat, stammering, simple Charles, or Louis, who successively sat upon his throne—princes, whose only historic individuality consists in these insipid appellations—had not the sense to comprehend, far less to develop, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bounteous store for the benefit of man. "This is not solitude." The milk is rich, but tastes rather too strong of the goat to be agreeable to every one at first, although probably we should soon have thought cow's milk comparatively insipid. On the day's journey we had seen some of these goats at a considerable distance from the auberge, and a young man who carried our luggage, after giving chase to several, at length caught one, and in spite of her remonstrances, milked her by main ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... the roads had been muddy; the sun had been too bright; there had been chops when there should have been croquettes for luncheon; the concert seats were too far forward; the soprano had a thin voice, and the bass a faulty enunciation; at dinner the soup was insipid, and the dessert a disappointment; afterwards, in the evening, callers had stayed ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... For though Catherine never had truly loved this man, some years older than herself and of radically different character, still she liked and respected him, and found him—by his very force and dominance—far more to her taste than the insipid hangers-on, sons of fortune or fortune-hunters, who, like the sap-brained Van Slyke, made up so great ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... chenopodiaceous plant from three to four feet high. The stiff-leaved Cymbidium was still very common, and two or three plants of it were frequently observed on the same tree; its stem is eatable, but glutinous and insipid. ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... Manning, who is in China, Lamb says, "The household gods are slow to come, but here I mean to live and die. Come, and bring any of your friends the mandarins with you. My best room commands a court in which are trees and a pump, the water of which is excellent cold—with brandy, and not very insipid without." At about the same time we find Mary Lamb recording that her genial brother had suddenly taken to living like an anchorite. He tabooed all alcoholic drinks, and confined himself to cold water and cold tea. But the beverage drawn from Hare Court did not agree with his internal economy: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I hate to be called—they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... is the dunce from his own point of view,—the dunce with his eyes turned inward,—confining his duncehood to the bosom of his family. The dunce objective is the dunce butting against his neighbor's study-door,—intruding, obtruding, protruding his insipid folly and still more insipid wisdom at all times and seasons. He is a creature utterly devoid of shame. He is like Milton's angels, in one respect at least: you may thrust him through and through with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of this class have been subjected to this same criticism. So regularly is it made, indeed, that Scott when he wrote a review of some of his own tales for the "Quarterly" felt obliged to adopt it in speaking of himself. He describes his heroes as amiable, insipid young men, the sort of pattern people that nobody cares a farthing about. Untrue as this is of many of Scott's creations, (p. 278) it is unquestionably true of the higher characters that Cooper introduces. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... little amount of shade in the fleece of male sheep is considered, if not absolutely desirable, at any rate quite pardonable? A male sheep with a fleece as white as that of a ewe-lamb,—is he not considered to be, among muttons, somewhat insipid? It was of this taste which Pope was conscious when he declared that every woman was at heart a rake. And so it comes to pass that very black sheep indeed are admitted into society, till at last anxious fathers and more anxious mothers begin to be aware that their ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... An insipid style, is responsible for much of the ineffectiveness in business letters. Few men will take the time to decipher a proposition that is obscured by ambiguous words and involved phrases. Unless it is obviously ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... plentifully sprinkled it with salmon oil, and manifested by his own example that we were to eat of it. I just tasted it, and found the oil perfectly sweet, without which the other ingredient would have been very insipid. The chief partook of it with great avidity after it had received an additional quantity of oil. This dish is considered by these people as a great delicacy; and on examination, I discovered it to consist of the inner rind of the hemlock pine tree, taken ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself in these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality, if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost of one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she saw pleased him more than ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... be cut or scraped before they are boiled, or the juice will run out, and make them insipid. In summer, they will boil in an hour—in winter, it takes three hours to boil them tender. The tops in summer are good boiled for greens. Boiled beets cut in slices, and put in cold spiced vinegar for several days, are ...
— The American Housewife • Anonymous
... along the coast this summer from Los Angeles to Oregon and Washington, and looked over orchards. I find that in the West, as in the East, the tendency is for the Persian walnut to store up an undue amount of starch in the kernel. It is apt also to store up an undue proportion of tannin, and to be insipid. That means that in this country we must develop our own type of walnut, and it is quite the exception to find among any Persian walnuts growing on the Atlantic Coast or the Pacific Coast or in the middle of the country walnuts that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers whilst he murmured a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma's sleeve to press her arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... satisfaction; from whom you learn nothing, and in whom you love nothing—to have such a set for your society, is worse than to live in absolute solitude; and is a thousand times more pernicious to the faculties of social enjoyment, by circulating in its channels a stream so insipid.' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... effort to reply, taking refuge in comparative silence. This course encouraged him and her uncle. The former liked her manifestation of spirit as long as he believed it to be within control. To his impetuous, imperious nature the idea of a tame, insipid bride was not agreeable; while Mr. Baron, still under the illusion that she was yet but a submissive child, thought that her bad mood was passing and would be gone in the morning. He little dreamed how swiftly her mind was awakening and developing under the spur of events. ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... fails to handle his plots in a dramatic manner and, as a result, does not secure the totality of impression so vital to the drama. Frequently, too, his characters are tedious, and in their dialogue manage to be provokingly unnatural or insipid. They also lack in individuality and independence in speech and action. Many of his situations, likewise, are at fault. For instance, one can scarcely conceive of such characters as Ulysses and Circe playing the subordinate roles assigned to them in ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... not observed it before in a novel. Some I have seen begin with an unexpected accident which has been the only surprizing part of the story, cause enough to make the sequel look flat, tedious, and insipid; for 'tis but reasonable the reader should expect, if not to rise, at least to keep upon a level in the entertainment, for so he may be kept on, in hopes, that some time, or other, it may mend; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... error might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me—but I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me. But I know the treasures of the Bible; I love and adore them. I can see the Well of Life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and earnestly of this interview. Leonora Kimball had been taught to believe that the chief badges of an aristocracy were complete idleness of the women, and the possession of enough wealth to support such idleness. It mattered not how mentally insipid or morally opaque or physically inane such women might be, the true test of being fitted for the purple was whether or not they had ever done any useful work, and whether or not they had money enough so that the other ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... shaved. See me, with the eye of fancy, in the chill hours of the morning—say about a quarter to twelve, noon—see me awake! First thing of all, without one thought of the plausible but unsatisfactory small beer, or the healthful though insipid soda-water, I take the deadly razor in my vacillating grasp; I proceed to skate upon the margin of eternity. Stimulating thought! I bleed, perhaps, but with medicable wounds. The stubble reaped, I pass out of my chamber, calm but triumphant. To employ ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this writer, "are just as great and as insipid idlers, in their way, as are the male triflers. They seldom walk in the streets, but are almost always cooped up in their carriages, driving about the streets, and leaving their cards at the houses of their friends, whom they never think of seeing, although they may be at home at the time; thence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to come. The ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... over-stepping the bounds of courtesy, never exaggerating a defect or concealing a beauty. A talk might be raised about the inconsistency with a former tone; but if the fact was made apparent that the later effusions of a tender and melodious, but shallow Muse, were but dilutions, ever more watery and insipid, of the first sweet and abundant flow, was the critic or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... be omitted altogether, and indeed with more profit than loss to the opera; for if you will read the scene it evidently becomes cold and insipid by the addition of an air or a duet, and very irksome to the other actors, who must stand, by all the time unoccupied; besides, the noble contest between Ilia and Idamante would become too long, and thus ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... Bixiou, he will come too," cried Blondet; "there is no fun without him. Without him champagne cloys my tongue, and I find everything insipid, even the pepper ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... it be grand!" said Lenora that night, as she sat sipping her tea. "Won't it be grand, if you do succeed, and won't I lord it over Miss Margaret! As for that little white-faced Carrie, she's too insipid for one to trouble herself about, and I dare say thinks you a very nice woman, for how can her Sabbath-school teacher be otherwise;" and a satirical laugh echoed through the room. Suddenly springing up, Lenora glanced at herself in the mirror, and turning to her mother, said, ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... lovelier of his own had he than her, His only child, his Edith, whom he loved As heiress and not heir regretfully? But 'he that marries her marries her name' This fiat somewhat soothed himself and wife, His wife a faded beauty of the Baths, Insipid as the Queen upon a card; Her all of thought and bearing hardly more Than his own shadow in ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... wrote home soon enough, for he was choking with anger, not on account of the aristocratic airs of Frankfort (for Bismarck dearly loved a title), but choking with anger because his beloved King of Prussia was a Nobody in this crazy Parliament. "I find them a drowsy, insipid set of creatures, only endurable when I appear among them as so much ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the hangings, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Bela Moshi had taken particular pains to leave it in a safe place before the sortie, the subaltern strained the liquid. It was warm and insipid, yet it was now free from contamination, and Bela Moshi drank it ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... deciphering the name of Master Gerard Roussel—Magister Gerardus—in Megaera, the fury with the flaming torch, that seduced her. On complaint of his sister, Francis, in some indignation, ordered the arrest of the author of the insipid drama, as well as of the youthful performers. The former could not be found, and the latter, thanks to the queen's clemency, escaped with a less rigorous punishment than ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... regretted nothing of past splendor; she possessed an affectionate husband, and was happy in retirement. The son was a pleasing young man, and his wife engaging and interesting; the daughters were charming women, entirely free from the insipid languor or wretched affectation, which in young ladies of fashion so much destroys originality of character, and makes us find, in one of the fashionables, the prototype and pattern of thousands. In a word, this ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... Doctors. Of the account of belles-lettres in 1754, two years after Amelia and in the actual year of Sir Charles Grandison, M. Rouquet's report is not flattering:—"The presses of England, made celebrated by so many masterpieces of wit and science, now scarcely print anything but miserable and insipid romances, repulsive volumes, frigid and tedious letters, where the most tasteless puerility passes for wit and genius, and an inflamed imagination exerts itself under the pretext of forming manners." It is possible ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson |
