"Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of perry or stale beer, put to it one ounce of isinglass, beat well and cut or pull'd to small pieces; put it to the perry or beer, and let it steep three or four days. Keep whisking it together, or else the glass will stick to the bottom, and ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... Englishman; but he was chiefly won by the dolce far niente of the natives, and the Oriental license of polygamy. In a word, Joseph had the same taste for a full-blooded cuffee, that an epicure has for the haut gout of a stale partridge, and was in ecstasies at my extrication. He neglected his siestas and his accounts; he wandered from house to house with the rapture of an impatient bridegroom; and, till every thing was ready ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... only just been opened, and was being dusted and swept by two slatternly women with dago complexions, and voices like hyenas. It still reeked of stale ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... out one and deposits its own instead. I revisited the nest a few days afterward and found an egg again cast out, but none had been put in its place. The nest had been abandoned by its owner and the eggs were stale. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... fine the tender part of one dozen artichokes. Take one loaf of stale bread crumbs, moisten and squeeze, and add three tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, three cloves of garlic, bruised, one onion chopped fine, several sprigs of parsley chopped fine, a little celery and half a cup of olive oil. Mix all together thoroughly with plenty of pepper and salt and make into ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... charm, despite the efforts of modern novelists and playwrights to render it stale and hackneyed, attaching to the middle of the seventeenth century—that period of upheaval and turmoil which saw a stately debonnaire Court swept away by the flames of Civil War, and the reign of an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of a ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... foremost in the fight, Not quite a Felon, yet but half a Knight. [xiv] The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base. 170 And think'st thou, SCOTT! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance, Though MURRAY with his MILLER may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? [24] No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade, Let such forego the poet's sacred name, Who rack their brains ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... suddenly aware of a sickish, heavy odor in the chamber. The window had been closed. But it was something more than stale air that ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... would have been, Apparently, in being seen. He may have had for evil or for good No argument; he may have had no care For what without himself went anywhere To failure or to glory, and least of all For such a stale, flamboyant miracle; He may have been the prophet of an art Immovable to old idolatries; He may have been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... tried them; that in only once trying them, and viewing them, we find out their secret, and that afterwards the show is too superficial to arrest our attention. As dramatists and novelists repeat their plots, so does man's life repeat itself, and at length grows stale. This is what, in my desponding moments, I have sometimes suspected. What to do, if this ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius—these were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... It reeked of stale cigar-smoke, which would hang in the curtains for a week. It was very untidy. There were many indications that old Robinson had quitted in haste. On the table were ash-trays, old cigar-stumps, matches, burned and new; magazines, hairpins, a tooth-brush, and two calf-bound ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... clouds of tobacco smoke, and perhaps all redolent of rum, was enough to disenchant the most ardent lover of the sea. The food, bad enough in all ages of seafaring, was, in the early days of our merchant marine, too often barely fit to keep life in men's bodies. The unceasing round of salt pork, stale beef, "duff," "lobscouse," doubtful coffee sweetened with molasses, and water, stale, lukewarm, and tasting vilely of the hogshead in which it had been stored, required sturdy appetites to make it even tolerable. Even in later days Frank T. Bullen was able to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... only place to live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose; nor was this effect to be wondered at, when we consider that this substance abounds with the self-same volatile salts that are so greedily smelled to by the most delicate invalids, after they have been ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... His appearance was typically English; his manner as free and forthcoming as a Frenchman's. Thirty years before he had been drawn by a master-hand as Mr. Vavasour in Tancred, but no lapse of time could stale his infinite variety. He was poet, essayist, politician, public orator, country gentleman, railway-director, host, guest, ball-giver, and ball-goer, and acted each part with equal zest and assiduity. When I first knew him he was ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... thought money so desirable as it is usually imagined; if you would enjoy you must transform it; and this transformation is frequently attended with inconvenience; you must bargain, purchase, pay dear, be badly served, and often duped. I buy an egg, am assured it is new-laid —I find it stale; fruit in its utmost perfection—'tis absolutely green. I love good wine, but where shall I get it? Not at my wine merchant's —he will poison me to a certainty. I wish to be universally respected; how shall ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... creaking sound, and a new damp chilliness was added to the stale atmosphere of the passage. Someone had quietly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... there with such violence that the Galla peasantry would allow neither ingress nor egress. [21] I had the pleasure of reflecting for some time, dear L., upon the amount of responsibility incurred by using the phrase "I will;" and the only consolation that suggested itself was the stale assurance that ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... were on their feet now, insisting that the King modify Joan's frankness; but he was not minded to do it. His ordinary councils were stale water—his spirit was drinking wine, now, and the taste of it ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... dream? It seems like one. Have we been to Holland? Have we heard the chimes at midnight at Antwerp? Were we really away for a week, or have I been sitting up in the room dozing, before this stale old desk? Here's the desk; yes. But if it has been a dream, how could I have learned to hum that tune out of Dinorah? Ah, is it that tune, or myself that I am humming? If it was a dream how comes this yellow NOTICE DES TABLEAUX ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... which recognized not the angels of the Lord, that ye be not delivered into the hands of your enemies, and your land be cursed, and your sanctuary destroyed, and you be scattered to the four corners of the earth, and scorned in the confusion like stale water, until the Most High shall visit the earth, and break the heads of the dragons in the waters. Tell this, my sons, unto your children, that they be not disobedient toward God, for I read in the tablets of the heavens that you will be contumacious ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... ever, the heart sickens and the will flags, and life becomes a pageant that hath ceased to entertain. As I moved through the mist and the silence, and felt the tug of the thong that bound me to the wrist of the savage who stalked before me, I cared not how soon they made an end, seeing how stale and unprofitable were all ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yams, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... foigne, to see thee trauerse, to see thee heere, to see thee there, to see thee passe thy puncto, thy stock, thy reuerse, thy distance, thy montant: Is he dead, my Ethiopian? Is he dead, my Francisco? ha Bully? what saies my Esculapius? my Galien? my heart of Elder? ha? is he dead bully-Stale? is he dead? Cai. By gar, he is de Coward-Iack-Priest of de vorld: he is not ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... in a big way. You are not a chip on the River of Life, you are a Supreme Master in a Universe of Facts. You think you are stuck in the harbor mud, but it is only that the tide is out. Command your Will to put up the sails, God will send you wind and tide to bear you out of the stale, sordid mental and bodily conditions you are living in, give you wider horizon, and a limitless ocean of experience. If anybody does not wish to sail with you, leave them on the shore. Let go of your past, break away from conditions that hold ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... all, Clara? You, the well-known leader of a large social circle—you, the proud beauty and envied lady of rank and fashion,—you will be made a subject for the coarse jests of lawyers,—the very judge on the bench will probably play off his stale witticism at your expense,—your dearest friends will tear your name to shreds,—the newspapers will reek of your doings,—and honest housemaids reading of your fall from your high estate, will thank God that their souls and bodies are more ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... neither, are signs visible to the dullest apprehension. The once national sport of horse-racing is being degraded to a trade in which it is difficult to perceive anything either sportive or national. The old pretence about the improvement of the breed of horses has become a delusion, too stale for jesting.' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... intelligent person for all the annoyances and trouble which are necessarily encountered. It was past midnight when we arrived at the railroad station at Burgos, where, having telegraphed from Madrid, a very dirty omnibus was in waiting to take us to the hotel. How that vehicle did smell of garlic, stale tobacco, and accumulated filth, to which the odor of an ill-trimmed kerosene lamp added its pungent flavor. But we were soon set down before the hotel, where there was not a light to be seen, every one, servants and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Stale bread, pilot-bread, dried corn-cakes, and crumbs, soaked a few minutes in water, or better still in milk, and fried, are ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... can plainly see it is nearing the end. For more than two hours we have been strolling about the boulevards, but have not met with one adventure. Everywhere the stereotyped faces and masks; the same jokes as last year; even the coffee and the cake look stale to me. Arthur, don't you ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... typewriters and the hum of subdued voices, but now the rooms were empty and the only sound to be heard was the heavy tread of Varr himself as he walked through the main office to the small room where his own desk was located. He frowned at the difference, and sniffed discontentedly at the stale air which seemed already to have taken on the peculiar flat mustiness appropriate to closed and deserted habitations. He frowned again when he drew his finger along a desk and noted the depth of the furrow it had made ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances than it is at present, and lies ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... has now become the great variety artist, one in truth whose infinite variety detention cannot stale any more than Customs officers can arrest the ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... tears, thin and watery blood; Brazening the conscious lie unto the world That it was done for hallowing Freedom's sake, Until the names of "Freedom," "Patriot," stank, Blown on and poison'd by these beggar lips; That men had need to coin fresh words to mean The holy things with stale use so defil'd. ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... I could observe the old Fellow was very uneasy at the Affront, and at his being obliged to repeat his Commands several times to no purpose; 'till at last one of the [Lads [2]] presented him with some stale Tea in a broken Dish, accompanied with a Plate of brown Sugar; which so raised his Indignation, that after several obliging Appellations of Dog and Rascal, he asked him aloud before the whole Company, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... add the hot milk, and cook till creamy, put in the salt and vanilla, and cool. Then cut stale cake into strips, or split lady-fingers into halves, and spread with jam. Put them on the sides and bottom of a flat glass dish, and gently ...
— A Little Cook Book for a Little Girl • Caroline French Benton
... Council (1904), were reforms of the highest importance, resulting from the report of a "triumvirate" consisting of Lord Esher, Sir John Fisher and Sir George Clarke, appointed in November 1903. The Unionist regime as a whole, however, had collapsed. Its ministers had become "stale." The heavy taxation of the war years was still retained, to the disgust especially of the income-tax payers; and new issues arose over the Education Act, labour questions, and the introduction of Chinese labour into South Africa (in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... so," said Lord Reggie. "Nothing is really worth much till it is a trifle stale. A soul that is fresh is hardly a soul at all. Sensations give the grain to the wood, the depth and dignity to the picture. No fruit is so worthless as the fruit ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... beg you to believe," he went on with great dignity, "that just so soon as I made certain you had nothing to learn from me I left you to your rose-gathering. Observe I have not said one word about the thorns. That is the stale gibe of the cynic whose heart of youth has dried before its time. And what if there are thorns? A single rose with the dew of love upon it is worth more than a pair of scratched hands. Gape? Could you believe it of me—of me, Francois Villon? No, son of my teaching, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... I could turn his mind away from the events of that strenuous day; and when at length I succeeded in doing so, and could get him to talk about himself, it appeared that, stirring though the events seemed to be which were nightly happening before Port Arthur, they were all flat, stale, and unprofitable, compared with such an event as the storming of the Nanshan Heights. And so, as a matter of fact, they were, as I soon discovered for myself; for the duty of our destroyer flotilla ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... weeks, to visit Polpier—cleared up soon after midday. At one o'clock or thereabouts Nicky-Nan, having dined on a stale crust and a slice of bacon, and recovered somewhat from his first alarm (as even so frugal a meal will put courage into a man), ventured to the porch again for a look at the weather. The weather and the set of the wind always come first ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... hard on yer head-rails," said Ricks, trying to bite through a piece of stale bread. A baker had let them have three loaves for a dime because they ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... years ago, has disappeared since Paris has become the world's railway terminus. M. Emile Villars, who is so obliging as to make the observation, proceeds to be very clever. Scratch the Russian, and you know what you will find. I answer, a gentleman uninfluenced by a stale proverb; we have a delightful specimen in this very house. M. Villars is great at scratching, since his readers are recommended to grate Peruvians and Javanese. Under the three articles, we are told, lies the one barbarous material! The ladies of these are charming, seductive, ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... what Zilah thought, however. He wondered if this happy hallucination which had lasted so many years, these eternal love-scenes with Vivian, love-scenes which never grew stale, despite the years and the wrinkles, were not the ideal form of happiness for a being condemned to this earth. This poetical monomaniac lived with his dreams realized, finding, in an asylum of Vaugirard, all ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... independent, anyhow." I suspect I must have been a rather unlovely customer, take it all together. Still, every once in a while it boils up in me yet against the discretion that has come with the years, and I want to slam in after the old fashion. Seems to me we are in danger of growing stale with ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... expense Hath won for him coeval youth With the immaculate prime of Truth; While we, who make pretence At living on, and wake and eat and sleep, And life's stale trick by repetition keep, Our fickle permanence (A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play Of busy idlesse ceases with our day) Is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... history of the malloc {arena}. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such as {LISP}, which employ a garbage collector (see {GC}). Also called a {stale pointer bug}. See also {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... cried Jack. "Split me to the chin like a cod! Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a pickle! 'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day! 'Tis all along o' goodness gone stale from too much salt," ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... this black shadow of war had loomed up with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood- brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King" and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and English literature, of German ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... must not open them. One was thankful for such modicum of comparatively pure air as came up the open stair from the floor below; but in the freshness of the morning one trembled to anticipate the atmosphere of this stale and stuffy eyrie through the heat of a summer's day. And yet neither the size nor the scent of the place, nor any other merely scenic feature, was half so disturbing or fantastic as the appearance of ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... wanted to look at the Moon," she said, turning around, and then it was all gone—the face, the night, the Moon, the magic—and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... remember forms, and gaits, and faces; and you can't disguise a person that's done me a kindness so that I won't know him thereafter wherever I find him. I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him—he will tell you so. Many a time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn, "Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me." Then he goes to sleep. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... story here commence, But you might think it stale; So we'll suppose that we have reached The ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... she clapt him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life. How often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor, dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I am like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people's hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say "I am misunderstood," or "I have become second-rate," because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... shirts, blue dungarees and glazed black hats with trailing ribbons, or in cheap and clumsy shore clothes. There was a scraping of fiddle from an upper window, the sound of heavy capering feet and the stale laughter of harborside women. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... A little indulgence may, perhaps, be shown toward persons who are a week or a fortnight from us by the post, since otherwise we could never converse together. But even they should reply to only the weightier matters suggested, since what they say will probably be stale before it reaches the eyes for which it was written. For the like reasons, I hold a Californian or European correspondence to be an impossibility. As for him whose want of politeness fixes a gulf, a week broad, between himself and his correspondent, there is no excuse. As one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down; Creep home, and take your place there, The spent and maimed among; God grant you find one face there, You ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reached at the end of about twenty or twenty-four hours. As the germinating disk contains 100 apertures for as many seeds, it is only necessary to count the number of seeds that have germinated in order to get the percentage of fresh and stale ones. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... occurs more frequently in big, than small Oysters; in those that are pierced by the Worm, oftner, than {206} in those that are not, and rather upon the Convex-side, than the other; and more in fresh ones; than in the stale. ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... literary world; you are no longer young, you have padded the hoof till your soles are worn through!—Yes, my boy, you turn your socks under like a street urchin to hide the holes, so that the legs cover the heels! In short, the joke is too stale. Your excuses are more familiar than ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... a different thing. 'Influence' makes me think of canting clergymen, and stout pompous women, who don't know what they're talking about, and can't argue—who think they've settled everything by a stale quotation—or an appeal to 'your better self'—or St. Paul. If Mr. Winnington tries it on with 'influence'—we'll ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive, supported by such stale admiration. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the townsfolk of Tarascon could have seen the great Tartarin, lying in his commode drawer, in the pale, dismal light which filtered through the porthole, amongst the stale smell of cooking and wet wood, the depressing odour of the ferry boat. If they had heard him groan at every turn of the propeller, ask for tea every five minutes, and complain to the steward in the weak voice of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... the Union"; "our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country";—these are the mottoes, old, stale, hackneyed, and threadbare as they may have seemed when employed as the watchwords of an electioneering campaign, but clothed with a new power, a new significance, a new gloss, and a new glory, when uttered as the battlecries of a nation struggling ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... him; but it will subject me to a pinch for stale news. There, give me my patient's picture, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... feet The first of all, and, drawing near thy lady, Remove her chair and offer her thy hand, And lead her to the other room, nor suffer longer That the stale reek of viands shall offend Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums That meanwhile burn, sweeten and purify The heavy ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... his praise, and continued to look about the room over his shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, Thaw, and resolue it selfe into a Dew: Or that the Euerlasting had not fixt His Cannon 'gainst Selfe-slaughter. O God, O God! How weary, stale, flat, and vnprofitable Seemes to me all the vses of this world? Fie on't? Oh fie, fie, 'tis an vnweeded Garden That growes to Seed: Things rank, and grosse in Nature Possesse it meerely. That it should ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... know. It's just their perversity. It'll look so stupid to have two separate shows. Whichever comes last will seem so stale after the other." ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... the Prussians the day before, and our fellows had been sore put to it to hold their own against Ney, but had beaten him off at last. It seems an old stale story to you now, but you cannot think how we scrambled round those two men in the barn, and pushed and fought, just to catch a word of what they said, and how those who had heard were in turn mobbed by those who ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... necessary to count the landings to know, in the dimness of the hallway, when he reached the fifth floor. He had to pause outside the door to catch his breath; a moment's nausea seized him at the smell of stale food and ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... healing rays had come too late. We crossed some deserted public gardens commanded by a gorgeous casino, its porticos heaped with chairs and tables; so past kiosques and cafs, great white hotels with boarded windows, bazaars and booths, and all the stale lees of vulgar frivolity, to the post-office, which at least was alive. I received a packet of letters and purchased a local time-table, from which we learned that the steamer sailed daily to Borkum via Norderney, touching three times a week at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... have some before I go. Come; don't move till I have done." And as he spoke to her he went on tugging at the bone, and swallowing the lumps of stale bread. He had already finished the bowl of milk. "And, now," said he, "tell me who ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... coach led his tired horses under cover of a shed in the courtyard. The chief room of the inn was a cheerless apartment, long and dark, with narrow, rough wooden tables fitted round the walls. A strong, stale smell greeted the nose disagreeably. One or two peasants sat at the far end of one of the tables; they stared rudely as the lady entered, and whispered remarks about her, grinning broadly the while. She glanced haughtily at them and called to the innkeeper, who had followed her from the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Hamlet, Act i. Sc. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... he had ordered that these people be well fed; that he had supplied the money to buy them good and nourishing food. Now, if his poor pensioners received nothing but dry bread, and very stale, hard bread at that, while he paid for good food for them, somebody must be making money out of him, to whom he had no idea of being charitable ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... small, The liquorice and the setewall,* *valerian And many a clove-gilofre, And nutemeg to put in ale, Whether it be moist* or stale, *new Or for to ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... joints; laying them by until cool, she then tore them to pieces with her fingers; and afterward fried the already over-roasted meat with onions, garlic, red pepper, and oil, which is always rancid in Portugal, from the custom of never pressing the olives until they are stale. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hugely while he was whipping things into shape, but the last month he's been going stale. The tenants are all so thankful to do as they please that they're excruciatingly polite to him, no matter what he does or says. He's tired of the beaches and he has begun to cuss the long, smooth roads that are signed so that he couldn't get lost if he tried. It does seem ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... was of sufficient concentration to support human life. Not that he had any real choice, but it would have been good to know. As it was, he turned the air valve automatically, and listened nervously as the stale air hissed out and the fresh air ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... is it?" the plump man murmured at last. "So that's it. And I never dreamed of it once. I must be going stale." ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... women, haggard, painted and old, One fresh bud in a garland withered and stale, She, with her innocent voice and her clear eyes, told Tale after ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... "difficult to work," says Dickens, with obvious truth. How was he to get the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault? As to the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think, "No, that is impossible, and also is stale. Datchery cannot be Drood," and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... smell, no decay! Frost cannot hurt them, heat preserves them! For long voyages, army and navy use, mining, lumbering, and hunting outfits, they are simply invaluable! For all classes of consumers, they are cheaper, cleaner and more wholesome than the ordinary stale and wilted vegetables, for sale in the city markets! We have named these cubes, 'Solaris Vegetable Concentrates,' a title which we have copyrighted. The packages readily wholesale at 75 cents, to be retailed at one ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... woodwork; but she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the odours she used to catch in passing the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... preparing for it: these dull victims dancing before the palace of their sacrificer: this first consul designated the father of the nation which he was about to devour: this mixture of stupidity on one side, and cunning on the other: the stale hypocrisy of the courtiers throwing a veil over the arrogance of the master: all inspired me with an insurmountable disgust. It was necessary however to constrain one's feelings, and during these solemnities you were exposed to meet with official congratulations, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... all was with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... of the gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... bruised and scraped by sliding, a manager who was not an idiot would have a care of such valuable runmakers for his team. Lake had "Charley-horse." Hathaway's arm was sore. Bane's stomach threatened gastritis. Spike Doran's finger needed a chance to heal. I was stale, and the other players, three pitchers, swore their arms should ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... of Europe come to us so late, and so suspiciously, that observations on them would certainly be stale, and possibly wide of their actual state. From their general aspect, however, I collect that your Majesty's interposition in them has been disinterested and generous, and having in view only the general good of the great European family. When ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... malt, hops, ale, and small-beer, till I began to feel as though the world was one vast brewhouse; and calculated, added, and subtracted pounds, shillings, and pence, until all other lore appeared "stale, flat, and unprofitable." I was in this counting-house four years, and was, finally, discharged by my prudent principal as an unthrifty servant, for having, during a day of unusual business, cut up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... my bird. Thy shape invisible retain thou still: The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither, For stale[445-46] to catch ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Syndicalism Laws, which never convicted a criminal, were used savagely and with full force against the workers in their struggle for better conditions. By means of newspaper-made war hysteria the profiteers of Big Business entrenched themselves in public opinion. By posing as "100% Americans" (how stale and trite the phrase has become from their long misuse of it!) these social parasites sought to convince the nation that they, and not the truly American unionists whose backs they were trying to ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... practically restricted to the man who brings up his ponies from the Punjab, but golf is for all, and the nine-hole course, although flat, is not stale, and need not be unprofitable, unless you are fallen upon—as I was—by two stalwart Sappers, sons of Canada and potent wielders of the cleek, who gave me enough to do to keep my rupees in my pocket and the honour of ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... plane, smooth; prostrate, prone; stale, insipid, vapid, tasteless, unsavory, unpalatable, mawkish; peremptory, unqualified, positive; spatulous, spatulate; sonant, vocal. Antonyms: convex, concave, warped, cambered, undulating, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow's tooth-brush; an echo of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... that's stale here, will be new there a twelvemonth hence; and if a man of the town by chance come amongst them, he's reverenced for teaching them ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... meal. We had each of us a fresh cocoa-nut with a hole bored in it, containing at least a pint of clear, sweet- tasting water. This is erroneously termed by us "Milk," but it only becomes thick and milky when the cocoa-nut is very stale, in which condition it is never eaten in ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... up that joke, J. J. It was all very well pulling my leg last night, and I didn't mind it a bit; but a thing like that gets to be stale the ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... appearance of energy which momentarily satisfies a public demand that something shall be done. It also afforded Canning the peg on which to hang a grievance, and dexterously to prolong discussion until the matter became stale in public interest. By the irrelevancy of the punishment to the crime, and by the intrusion of secondary matters into the complaint, the "Chesapeake" issue, essentially clear, sharp, and impressive, became hopelessly confused ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... as every one of us may find Him, in Christ, has found a Good that cannot change, pass, or grow stale. His blessedness will always last, as long as he keeps fast hold of that which he has, and lets no man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... place. It would be a pity if all these problems could be solved. The joy of the intellectual life would be largely gone. I would not rob a man of his problems, nor would I have another man rob me of my problems. They are the delight of life, and the whole intellectual world would be stale and unprofitable if we ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... misfortunes that have ever happened to us; we stoop in our gait, and bury our hands in our breeches-pockets; we say, 'What is life?—a stone to be shied into a horsepond!' We pine for some congenial heart, and have an itching desire to talk prodigiously about ourselves; all other subjects seem weary, stale, and unprofitable. We feel as if a fly could knock us down, and are in a humour to fall in love, and make a very sad piece of business of it. Yet with all this weakness we have at these moments a finer ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... power of narrative. Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of Ambra. The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists. The poem recounts how the wood-nymph Ambra, beloved of Lauro, is pursued by the river-god Ombrone, one of Arno's tributary divinities, and praying to Diana in her hour of need, is by her transformed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... hesitation on my part. I had been, if I may express myself so, put out of gear mentally. But as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... a very low, close, swampy country, and our goat's flesh began to be very stale through the heat, not only of the sun, but the muletto's back: however, we pleased ourselves we should have one more meal of it before it was too bad to eat; so, having travelled about three miles from the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... this hour the saloons were well patronized, for not only was the camp astir, but also the usual stale crowd of all-night loiterers was not yet sufficiently intoxicated to go to bed. As 'Poleon neared the first resort, the door opened and a woman emerged. She was silhouetted briefly against the illumination ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... inhabitant remaining was out of doors. The women, in twos and threes, bareheaded and in white aprons, gossiped in the alley between the blocks. Men, having a rest between drinks, sat on their heels and talked. The place smelled stale; the slate roofs ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, with fishermen's boats and decaying nets and remnants of stale fish. He loves the dreary estuary, where the slow tide sways backwards and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Chase, sintenced by yer aunt and cousins to solitary confinement on bread and water till you die—and the sooner you do that last the better they will be pleased!" returned the coarse woman letting down her basket and taking out a glass tumbler, two large bottles of water, some loaves of stale bread, and some of Dainty's clothes, saying, facetiously: "Here's yer duds and yer grub—enough o' both ter last yer a week—and at the end of a week I'll call again with more provisions, miss—and ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... of the oil of the machines and the new leather—a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather. The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface. Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees, the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little and ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... where one may obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of our Missis's eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... thronged with fellow passengers similarly haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and down another platform—at last into the hot and dusty haven ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the corner house in an angle of a, dismal street, through the open door of which two men had just gone in. Following, they ascended some wooden, fresh-washed stairs, and entered a large boarded room smelling of sawdust, gas, stale coffee, and old clothes. It was furnished with a bagatelle board, two or three wooden tables, some wooden forms, and a wooden bookcase. Seated on these wooden chairs, or standing up, were youths, and older men of the working class, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stand by the ditch with their hands in their pockets sucking a stale pipe. They would rather lounge there in the bitterest north-east wind that ever blew than do a single hour's honest work. Blackguard is written in their faces. The poacher needs some courage, at least; he knows a penalty awaits detection. These fellows have no idea of sport, no courage, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... "A dog especially. You better keep him if you don't want him hurt or anything." He took a bite of pie. (It was not very good pie. The crust was soggy because Johnny Calvert's cook stove was not a good baker, and the frosting had gone watery, because the eggs were stale, and Helen May had made a mistake and used too much sugar in the filling; but Starr liked it, anyway, just because she had made it.) "Maybe you can learn him to herd goats," he suggested, as though the idea ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... more amusing than Woodbridge to a young London Clerk, a Nephew of the Cowells, who comes to me for a short Holyday, when he can get away from his Desk. But early in October I shall be back at my old routine, stale enough. I think that, as a general rule, people should die ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... expect it; but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will readily believe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... his reach. And in the same way, when rumours reached him prejudicial to Lizzie in respect of the diamonds, he perceived that such prejudice might work weal for him. A gentleman once, on ordering a mackerel for dinner, was told that a fresh mackerel would come to a shilling. He could have a stale mackerel for sixpence. "Then bring me a stale mackerel," said the gentleman. Mr. Emilius coveted fish, but was aware that his position did not justify him in expecting the best fish on the market. The ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... English satirist in the exposing of the cant and knavery of the pretenders to religion, what room is there for him to lash the infamies of the law! On this point the French are babes in iniquity compared to us—a counsel prostituting himself for money is a matter with us so stale, that it is hardly food for satire: which, to be popular, must find some much more complicated and interesting knavery whereon ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doors in the rear of the truck, releasing a faint odor of stale bread. The truck was empty. Whedbee deposited the almost weightless burden. The chief looked him in the eye. "I am promoting you to captain," he repeated. "You will replace Hanks, ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... something unusual in her manner. But, when she had slowly mounted the stairs and lighted the gas in the bedroom the sight of her sister's clothes cast over the chairs was proof that Lise had already donned her evening finery and departed. The room was filled with the stale smell of clothes, which Janet detested. She flung open the windows. She took off her hat and swiftly tidied herself, yet the relief she felt at Lise's absence was modified by a sudden, vehement protest against ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... piece of soap was one requiring the closest attention and many an hour of drudgery. The supplying of the household with its winter stock of candles was a harsh but inevitable duty in the autumn, and the lugging about of immense kettles, the smell of tallow, deer suet, bear's grease, and stale pot-liquor, and the constant demands of the great fireplace must have made the candle season a period of terror and loathing to many a burdened wife and mother. Then, too, the constant care of the wood ashes and hunks of fat and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... misery; whether he be able or not, it is expected from him, if there comes a Brief to town, for the Minister to cast in his mite will not satisfy! unless he can create sixpence or a shilling to put into the box, for a stale [lure], to decoy in the rest of the parish. Nay, he that hath but L20 or L30 [ L60 to L90 now] per annum, if he bids not up as high as the best in the parish in all acts of charity, he is counted carnal and earthly-minded; only because ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... it to new uses. As the fisherman's wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels, said when she was asked what was to be done with him, "Take the eels out and set him again," so Harris and Douglas have shown a disposition to take the eels out of that stale fraud by which they gained Harris's election, and set the fraud again more than once. On the 9th of July, 1856, Douglas attempted a repetition of it upon Trumbull on the floor of the Senate of the United ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... by four stones. Ropes stretched across these, and covered by a blanket, constituted the bed. A board, of which one end rested on the bedstead and the other was thrust between the logs that composed the wall, sustained the stale fragments of a rye-loaf, and a cedar bucket kept entire by withes instead of hoops. In the bucket was a little water, full of droppings from the roof, drowned insects, and sand. A basket or two neatly made, and a hoe, with a stake thrust into it by way of handle, made up all the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland called Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... "cush." You will not find this word in the dictionaries of the day, but it was in the soldier's vocabulary, now obsolete. Chip up bacon in fine particles, place in an oven and fry to a crisp. Fill the oven one-third or one-half full of branch water, then take the stale corn bread, the more moldy the better, rub into fine crumbs, mix and bring the whole to a boil, gently stirring with a forked stick. When cold, eat with fingers and to prevent waste or to avoid carrying it on ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... are the future guineas that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs, except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in, I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the above a businesslike statement? Away, then, with this stale miracle. If you would see for yourself a miracle which can never pall, a vision of youth and health to be crowned with garlands for ever, come down and see Kate Hickey, whom you suppose to be a little girl. Illusion, my lord cardinal, illusion! She is seventeen, with ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... though we 're ca'd a wee before The stale "three score an' ten," When Joy keeks kindly at your door, Aye bid her welcome ben. About yon blissfu' bowers above Let doubtfu' mortals speir; Sae weel ken we that "heaven is love," Since ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a good deal on the man," said Bartley. "But that's stale, Kinney. It's the old formula of the anti-capital-punishment fellows. Try something else. They're not talking of hanging me yet." He kept on writing, and the philosopher stood over him with a humorous twinkle of enjoyment ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... on from night to day and on to night again. It was a veritable feast of lanterns, and not until the last one had burned to the socket and the wine-vats were empty and the studio strewn with unrecognizable debris and permeated with odors stale, flat and unprofitable, did the revels cease. Paul came to dine; he remained three days; he had not yet worn out his welcome, but he had resolved, as was his wont at intervals, to withdraw from the world, and so he returned to the Eyrie,—which was ever his initial ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed, extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man's eyes; there ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Human jokes, however stale, He jumps about and wags his tail, And Human People clap their hands And think ...
— The Kitten's Garden of Verses • Oliver Herford
... room, dim with tobacco-smoke and redolent of stale beer. At the far end a small stage with faded red hangings. The card read No. 7, and the programme informed me that the turn was "A Bouquet of Ballads." A slight, fair-haired girl appeared on the stage. Her cheeks were burning, and she kept her eyes fixed on the floor. The piano jangled, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and that of a kind that does not stale itself. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be ...
— The Federalist Papers
... drink only from your canteens. If the canteens fail, never fill them from flowing water unless the Indians also drink from the stream. There are always small pools to be found, and, though their water may be warm and stale, it is not likely to be poisoned, as ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... short of success as a tragic character, if his aspirations are too mean, his qualities too contemptible to win our sympathy save at rare moments of transcendent poetry, what shall be said of the setting provided for the story of his career? Once more we are offered the stale devices of the Moralities, the Good and Bad Angels, the Devil, the Old Man (formerly known as Sage Counsel), the Seven Deadly Sins, Heaven, Hell, and the carefully-pointed moral at the end. Even the Senecan Chorus has been forced into service to tell us of Faustus's ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the greatest lesson in holiness and is from the only one that can teach holiness. Great lessons can be taught by all persons, taught of God, but 'tis better to drink at the fountain than out of a stale bucket. Besides all have imperfection. "To the law and to the testimony if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them." "They shall all be taught of God." "If any lack wisdom, let him ask ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... bombs remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like a kind of fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer |
