"Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem. The town lay at the sea's edge on a strip of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band. Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the sea-following range of the Cordilleras. In front the sea was ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Everything they had ever had was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... foreign travel, spent his life at Breslau as an exemplary and highly esteemed official of the town. Incidentally he poetized in the inflated and ornate style which has given the so-called second Silesian school its evil reputation. His work is decidedly vacuous as poetry, but has its interest as indicating the literary drift of the age of puffs, powder, and pedantry. The selections follow Bobertag's edition ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... philosopher or a fool. And if a faulty example be a child's most constant and influential teacher, what wonder that the lessons, well-learned, are put in practice? And just then, if you listen, you will hear some one issue the emphatic but vacuous command, "Don't!" And the baby doesn't, for the space of a few seconds; after which, unable to get any new suggestions out of the idea-less instructions given him, he proceeds to do the same thing over, only to be again commanded to desist, a spanking ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... Butch was far too thick to allow his hat to sit in its normal position. It was perched high on top, and secured in place by a bit of string which passed from side to side under the chin. Behind him came Lovel, an almost albino type with straw-coloured hair and eyes bleached and passionless; the vacuous smile was never gone ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... I can almost see them evaporating. Yes, the time will come when some one of our mutual friends, driving past the Meadow Creek Paresis Club, where Dr. McMullen receives certain amiable but not entirely responsible persons, will behold you hanging cheerily by one hand from the pergola roof with a vacuous smile on your twitching lips, and will say to me sadly: 'Charlie, you knew him, didn't you, in the old days, when his mind was as keen and bright as an editor's knife?' And with chastened melancholy I will respond: 'Yes, George, it is true. And moreover I was with him on the day when his mind ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of knowing her mother very well." I stopped and blushed. Did I really know Sarah Walker very well? And would Sarah Walker know me now? Or would it not be very like her to go back on me? There was certainly anything but promise in the feeble-minded, vacuous copy of Sarah before me. I was yet hesitating, when the Prince, who had possibly received some quieting assurance from the portier, himself stepped forward, stammered that the Princess would, without doubt, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... It was talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... lowered over the cliffs supports the adventurous bird-nester in safety above the murmuring sea. They who clasp Christ's hand outstretched from above, may swing over the deepest, most vacuous abyss, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by both." Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta was pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Which means? That the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... beauty was regnant in London. They were not politicians as were their Graces of Gordon and Devonshire, nor had they the ability to become such. Neither were they the associates of brilliant, intellectual men, but participants in the gay, vacuous, showy society of the rapid set of the aristocracy. The elder sister gained the coronet of Coventry, but her vanity caused her own undoing; the younger was a part of the exhibition of "Beauty and the Beast." A high price was paid for her position ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... wall smiling complacently while other people were up and doing. I've always felt I wouldn't mind being a chaperon if they'd let me set up some sort of a workshop in the ballroom, or even if I could take my mending, or a book to read. But slow, long hours of vacuous smiling certainly would wear me out. However, I don't imagine that Mary will call upon me for ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog. He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the overseer's ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round forehead ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... unprepared than he seemed. Arms hanging and face vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely and, increasing the impetus of his attack, sent him staggering against ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... creature contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... not at all interested in that addlepated, monkey-faced nincompoop. He's after my daughter, but he shall never marry her. Why, if wives could be supported for fifty cents a year, that empty-headed specimen of vacuous mentality couldn't even keep a cock-roach ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c. (imaginary) 515; immaterial &c. 137; spectral &c. 980; dreamy; shadowy; ethereal, airy; cloud built, cloud formed; gossamery, illusory, insubstantial, unreal. vacant, vacuous; empty &c. 187; eviscerated; blank, hollow; nominal; null; inane. Phr. there's nothing in it; " an ocean of dreams without a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of all, Pilar in two different positions, then the pictures of three children, a girl and two boys, and finally the full-length portrait of a gentleman in the embroidered dress coat and sword of the diplomatic service, and the handsome, vacuous, carefully groomed head of ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... he had dealt them. Anon there would be railings and to spare—against him, against themselves, against the dead man above stairs, against Fate, and more besides. For the present there was this horrid, almost vacuous calm. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Your conversation bores me inexpressibly, and your countenance, which is at once vacuous and singularly plain, disagrees with me thoroughly. Go! or ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... long years he had cautiously studied that same sea of always anxious faces! He well knew all the types from the disdainful woman of fashion, the crafty daughter of sin, the vacuous country visitor, down to the argus-eyed mere de famille, sternly resolute in her set purpose of making three dollars take the place of five, by some ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... first title In 1731 was "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal antipathy, promptly attacked ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... very close together. A little bright tray was at their feet, and a big bottle with a cap and scarf of gold foil stood sentinel over two glasses of such an exquisite shape that Marcella stared hard at them as she passed, saying "Good night." Mr. Peters was smiling with filmy, vacuous eyes. The little lady was flushed and vivid-looking. They both nodded beamingly at her. At the other side of the steps, in the bright light of the electric lamp was a small bundle, between two scarlet fire buckets. It ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... conversation are chalk eggs," said Emerson. There are many chalk eggs on the market. Most of us feel that to "be sociable" we must talk incessantly. True, there are sometimes dreadful pauses in conversation when no one seems able to think of anything to say, and the longer the pause the more vacuous ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... ablest thinkers, such as Hume and Mill, have failed to perceive even so much as the intellectual necessity of looking beyond our empirical knowledge of the fact to gain any explanation of the fact itself. Therefore they give to the world the wholly vacuous, or merely tautological theory of causation—viz. that of constancy of sequence within ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... character: he is the kind of god that has once for all made that kind of a world. The God of the theistic writers lives on as purely abstract heights as does the Absolute. Absolutism has a certain sweep and dash about it, while the usual theism is more insipid, but both are equally remote and vacuous. What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the inference to which the modern philosophy would give the greatest probablility is, that all space is full of matter in the common sense of the word, but really occupied by particles of matter with vacuous interstices.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... mental state. After living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly await creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances comfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the table the Geographical Magazine invites to unexciting wonder at the way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the tailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the human being that inhabits the earth? And thus Lodge bottles Haeckel up on his own premises and shows that the very evolutionary principles to which the German scientist appeals demolish his theory! He practically says to Haeckel, "Your philosophy, sir, fails to show how it is possible for the vacuous mind of the infant to evolve into the genius of the philosopher in thirty or forty years." In other words, if the infant is nothing but the form we see it would be utter absurdity to say that that mass of matter can evolve a high grade of intelligence within a few years when it ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... a good-looking, if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... his hands in his pockets, but a very alert gleam in his usually vacuous face, stood in the windowed doorway. From behind him, two exceedingly formidable-looking men slipped into the room. There was no fight, not even a struggle. Seaman, who had never recovered from the shock of his surprise, and was now completely unnerved, was ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... night, amidst the fury of the storm, that Montesma's opinion had been formed. Smithson began to think that his friend was right. The sailors had honest countenances, but they looked horribly stupid. Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis?—could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the fury ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. No, and he, Govinda, as well did not want to become one of those, not one of those tens of thousands of Brahmans. He wanted to follow Siddhartha, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... is not to be taken seriously, and I hold that any kind of conversation goes, as long as it is properly vacuous and irrelevant. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... as if the noise had pierced his heart, and remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... scrambled quickly to his feet and in the instant his whole demeanor changed. From demoniacal rage he became suddenly convulsed with hysterical laughter although it was a question in the girl's mind as to which was the more terrifying. His companions stood looking on with vacuous grins upon their countenances, while he from whom the girl had wrested the weapon leaped up and down shrieking with laughter. If Bertha Kircher had needed further evidence to assure her that they were in the hands of a mentally deranged people the man's present actions ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it some fifty or sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering in the hope that it would prove a likely ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... stole lead! And they got off with all your money. Gosh! I'm glad I didn't have none along." His eyes were mirthless and his face vacuous. "Beats all. Never heard tell of ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... answer. His countenance, expressive for a moment, was now reserved. His eyes became vacuous. He did not appear to hear the skipper's wondering question. He was now attending to his own monologue. His lips let fall, as if mechanically, in a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the foolish, vacuous laugh of a man whose thoughts are too happy for the banality ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... as strong as her father and as wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet and pearls in a royal carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and bright-eyed lovers, and solemn statesmen, and great nobles, vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling before her; and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding on white horses behind; and when the fanfares went shattering down the street, vibrating through the continuous roar ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... condition of the passengers, I should say that faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea-monster on whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions. One thing above all struck me as never before,—the terrible ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of burden, a creature in whom civic virtues of a high order were not likely to develop. If he betook himself to the town his possible usefulness lessened in proportion as he fell into drunken or dissolute habits, or lapsed into a state of lazy and vacuous dreaminess, enlivened only by chatter or the rolling of a cigarette. On the other hand, when employed in a capacity where native talent might be tested, he often revealed a power of action which, if properly guided, could be turned ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... he become duller, as Mr. Harrison appears to suppose. He will remain in essence what he always has been and always must have been. But whereas his dullness would, if left to itself, have been merely vacuous, it may have become, under cureful cultivation, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... The vacuous, almost happy languor of the sick was replaced in Gerald by an irritable gloominess, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... writing-desk penning letters, glanced up, her mind visioning for the moment the youth in question. Kilmer Duelma—tall, stocky, swaggering, his clothes the loose, nonchalant perfection of the season, his walk ambling, studied, lackadaisical, aimless, his color high, his cheeks full, his eyes a little vacuous, his mind acquiescing in a sort of genial, inconsequential way to every query and thought that was put to him. The younger of the two sons of Auguste Duelma, banker, promoter, multimillionaire, he would come into a fortune estimated roughly at between six and eight millions. At the ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... violence. The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm. "Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this realm ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... moral and religious principles were known by the firm stand she took against common incentives to dissipation and irreligion—such as card-playing and Sunday entertainments—against the introduction of questionable topics, unseemly language, and vacuous frivolity into conversation. Her religious influence, thus far, was almost a silent or negative one; but it had its effect on others, and laid the foundation of that direct searching and far-reaching influence, which, under the ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... concrete Thought it is different, for while each form occupies and obscures a certain space here, form is nonexistent when viewed from the standpoint of the Region of concrete Thought. Where the form was, a transparent, vacuous space is observable. From that empty void comes a sound which is the "keynote" that creates and maintains the form whence it appears to come, as the almost invisible core of a gas-flame is the source ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... far niente and vacuous inaction here have been undermining my spirit; this inert brooding upon the earth; this empty life, and bursting brain! Immediately after eating at noon to-day, I said ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... are ordered. They rise and proceed, incompletely awake, their eyes puffy, their wrinkles underlined. There are young men among them with thin necks and vacuous eyes, and old men; and in the middle, ordinary ones. They march with a commonplace and pacific step. What they are going to do seems to us, who did it last night, beyond human strength. But still they go away ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... a most sand-the-sugar face, this morning, as he pocketed about ten times the value of a trifle—candles, in fact, which have risen twenty-five per cent. in the last two days—and folding his arms, scowled from under his kepi into futurity, with stern but vacuous resolution. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... by all means," repeated the Doctor. "Isn't it nearly dinner-time? I am starving. I have been twenty miles round the country to-day, and when I come in I find that long-legged fellow Morris philandering away, and have to listen to his vacuous nonsense for an hour. Whatever brings him here so often? He ought to have something better to do with his time than to be idling it away over afternoon tea. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... an impression that you were there. I fancied you were from father's carefully vacuous look whenever I glanced at his face. But were you careful about what you said, and did you see Menlove? I felt all the time that I had done wrong in letting you come; the gratification to you was not worth ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... responsibilities at the age of ten, and gained her sobriquet of 'Marm Lisa.' She grew more human, more tractable, under Mr. Grubb's fostering care; but that blessed martyr had now been dead two years, and she began to wear her former vacuous look, and to slip back into the past that was still more dreadful than ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes—I believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'—are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, the fact that she contemplates ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... door the vacuous look slipped from his face like a mask. The loose-lipped, lost-dog expression was gone. He looked once more alert, competent, fit for the emergency. It had been his cue to let his adversary underestimate him. During the long night ride he had had ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... are many pictures, few of which are good enough. It belongs to the school of Giovanni Bellini and is conspicuous for the elimination of character. Vacuous bland countenances, indicative merely of pious mildness, surround you, reaching perhaps their highest point of meek ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... carried by an atom of hydrogen when hydrogen atoms move in a liquid or gas under the directing influence of the electric current. Some chemists speak of the electrons, which are the [beta]-rays from radium, and the kathode rays produced in almost vacuous tubes, as non-material particles of electricity. Non-material means devoid of mass. The method by which approximate determinations have been made of the charges on electrons consists in measuring the ratio between the charges and the ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... from the grove. He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" tie pink; a Panama hat with ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... out of Erebus into the day, There's plenty of room overhead; No boring or blasting of rocks in the way, No stratum of sticky, impervious clay— All vacuous vapor instead. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... are right . . . No doubt, they fall, these seconds . . . When suddenly all's distempered, vacuous, ugly, And even those most like angels creep for schemes. The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... not a single female. Everybody in it was given up to contemplation and ascetic absorption; and it is well known that profound contemplation, for any length of time, and the presence of the fair sex, are incompatible. I was much troubled by this vacuous sensation, which I felt to be in the highest degree derogatory to my fifth principle, and the secret of which I discovered, during a trance-condition which lasted for several months, to arise from a subtle magnetism, to which, owing to my peculiar ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... that odious woman mean by perpetually talking about Sir Abraham? The Countess intercepted a glance between her and the hated Juliana. She felt it was a malignant conspiracy: still the vacuous vulgar air of the woman told her that most probably she was but an instrument, not a confederate, and was only trying to push herself into acquaintance with the great: a proceeding scorned and abominated by the Countess, who longed to punish her for her insolent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the right sort!—She was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about her,—the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,—"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"—the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,—a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,—pray for her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a soul to ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... as compared with the denser land. Siemens endeavoured to render this difference visible by means of mercury contained in a chamber having a bottom extremely sensitive to the pressure of the mercury upon it, and resembling in some respects the vacuous chamber of an aneroid barometer. Just as the latter instrument indicates the pressure of the atmosphere above it, so the bathometer was intended to show the pull of the earth below it; and experiment proved, we believe, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... an absolute vacuum. Experiment alone could answer this question, but there were difficulties in the way of this which seemed almost insurmountable. The rays are stopped by glass even of slight thickness, and how then could the almost vacuous space in which they have to come into existence be separated from the space, absolutely vacuous or filled with gas, into which it was ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... smile intended for Bob McGraw, and a drummer who sold lace goods for a St. Louis house appropriated that smile to himself. He leered across the aisle familiarly and with a vacuous smile inquired: ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... to this," drawled Average Jones intently, looking the employee between his vacuous eyes. "Ransom shipped the chair to Plymouth Street and from there to Linder's house. He figured out that Linder would put it in his study and do his sitting at the window in it. And you were to know when he was there by seeing ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Sir Ashmead Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths—the loud and blatant voice—the bumptious temper—that make the commoner form of Tory—all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to remain while his servile ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... was heartsick. Then he would look at all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of lust, the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it was a heart-breaking ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is," said Nick at last—"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... break, and that therefore the whole mass of the glacier may break at that temperature, setting aside the contradiction to the facts of regelation which such an assumption involves, I would refer to Dr. Tyndall's experiments concerning the vacuous spots in the ice. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... other's large and vacuous countenance became sober enough. "For a trap to catch flies," he said, shortly, and turning his shoulder to all but the men of highest rank, again wetted his throat, then let his empty tankard touch the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less than the depth of an average wave. Three hundred such layers placed one on top of the other would ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... wine—for in these respects I am allowed what I choose—and sat down to think. But I found it hard to give my thoughts to anything. There was a hollow somewhere in my mind into which all serious thoughts fell jumbled. I felt neither pained nor confused, but only vacuous. I battled with this feeling until I subdued it. Then I grasped the situation firmly. What object have I, here and now, and everywhere and always, next to the rectitude of my own soul? There is only one answer to that question: ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... Vavasour in a remote part of the salon. With her was a vacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continually addressing remarks to a ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... doing about it, Carson?" asked the man whose unusually vacuous expression gave him his name of Poker Face. "Stick on ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... of us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by our struggling, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of such a fine fellow as Carnaby. On the whole, Rolfe preferred this hypothesis. He had never heard her say anything really bright, or witty, or significant. But Hugh spoke of her fine qualities of head and heart; Alma Frothingham made her an exemplar, and would not one woman see through the vacuous ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... and stepped back from Wanda's arms. Bergstrom's two-piece orchestra was in the throes of its jazziest fox-trot number. Chug stood there a moment, in the centre of the floor, staring at Wanda's face that was staring back at him in vacuous surprise. He turned, without a word, and crossed the crowded floor, bumping couples blindly as he went. And so down the rickety wooden stairs, into the street, and out into the decent darkness ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... until Gage carried the slack form inside. Then, his shoulders sagging, the heavy pistol in his right hand coming to a poise, the fingers of the left hand brushing the butt of the weapon in the holster at his left hip, the vacuous gleam in his eyes telling them all that his senses were alert to catch the slightest ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... with the old gentleman," said the doctor. He was looking at the window, as though at some object of great interest to be seen thence. His tone was gentle and unaffected. For the twentieth time Edwin privately admitted that in spite of the weak, vacuous smile which seemed to delight everybody except himself, there was a sympathetic quality in this bland doctor. In common moments he was common, but in the rare moment when a man with such a smile ought to be at his worst, a certain soft dignity ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Agnew; at Daney's left the old Laird beheld his new daughter-in-law, while further down the pew as far as she could retreat, Mrs. Daney, with face aflame, sat rigid, her bovine countenance upraised and her somewhat vacuous glance fixed unblinkingly at a point some forty feet over Mr. Tingley's pious head. Donald intercepted the old man's amazed and troubled glance, and smiled at his father with his eyes—an affectionate overture that was not lost on The Laird ere he jerked his ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... room was startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... for a moment, but instantly avoided the other's glance, his features being still distorted by a vacuous smile. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... closer above the motionless head, with puzzled eyes striving to pin down some elusive resemblance that he thought to trace in those vacuous features—a resemblance to some one he had seen, or known, at some ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Malvey stooped, Boca flung herself in front of him. "Pig!" she flamed. She turned furiously on her father, whose vacuous grin faded as she cursed ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... his cigar wallowing in the throes of a vacuous but conciliatory smile. Every one stood ready for a shocking display ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to erase ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... finding out things. Joe Arnold had an innocent, incurious, almost stupid countenance that suggested a chronic desire for sleep rather than any more alert characteristic. He had a dull, uninterested way of asking questions which suggested the impulse of a vacuous mind to "keep the talk going," rather than any desire to secure the information asked for. Indeed, when he asked a question and it was not promptly answered, he ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... absurdity worthy of the vacuous minds of those who engage in it.. To suggest that I shall sit in a cramped position in a draughty gallery for several hours at a stretch in order to watch empty-headed young men playing a perverted form of battledoor and shuttlecock across a net, is to imply that ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... the sexual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fuerbringer, and Loewenfeld have all alike remarked) made a virtue of their weakness. Many others, whose ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... there was of Lulu's visit. Father couldn't help remembering her suggestion that they ought to bag a social or artistic lion as an attraction for "The T Room." He was delighted to find that, after weeks of vacuous worry, he ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... such a man do loosed in the world? What might he not do? Was it possible that it was this man who stood before us now with his eyes fastened upon us so intently and his lips spread in that little, empty smile? Suddenly I knew! Those eyes! Those eyes were the shiny, vacuous, soulless eyes ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... are agglomerated in one orb, to be ultimately congealed into stone. What, then, is the office of the Creator according to this scheme, as repulsive as it is absurd? It would appear that, at some moment in a vacuous eternity, He calls matter out of nothing, whirls it into fiery vortices, and then lets it cool down to the absolute zero wherein death ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... if Stratton's touch had discharged all power from the man he had seized, the fierce look faded from his face, which grew heavy, vacuous, and dull; his legs trembled beneath him, and he lurched forward, and was only saved from falling by a rapid movement on Stratton's part as he swung him into an easy-chair, where his enemy sank back with his head lying over on one shoulder, and his leaden eyes ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... and her love of art. What would she be, for instance, if she were not a musician? Or would her face be the same face if it were robbed of its mirth? But mirth is enchanting only when the source of it is the intelligence. Vacuous laughter is the most tiresome of things; a face of stone is more inveigling. But Doris prided herself on her beauty more than on her wit, and she was disinclined to admit the contention that beauty is dependent upon ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... I perform; speak thou, and be it done! My overshadowing Spirit and Might with thee I send along; ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heaven and Earth; Boundless the Deep, because I Am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I, uncircumscribed myself, retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessity and Chance Approach not me, and what I will is Fate. So spake the Almighty, and to what he spake His Word, the Filial Godhead, gave effect. Immediate ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... from his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac |
