"Featureless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forest shut the roadside in On either hand, and 'mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds, or flapped amongst the flames,— Vultures and kites and crows,—with brazen plumes And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts, Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths, Hungering, but hard to fill,—all swooping down To gorge upon the meat of wicked ones; Whereof the limbs disparted, trunks and heads, Offal and marrow, littered all the way. By such a path the king passed, sore afeared ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... whose knowledge all comes from reading accumulates a great number of what?—facts? No, of the shadows of facts; shadows often so thin, indistinct and featureless, that, when one of the facts themselves runs against him in real life, he does not know his old friend, round about which he has written a smart leader in a journal and a ponderous trifle in the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... rarer bursts. Excitement helps us in the one; nothing but dogged principle, and close communion with God, 'mounting on wings as eagles,' will help us in the other. But we may have Him with us in all the arid and featureless levels across which we have to plod, as well as in the height to which we sometimes have to struggle upwards, or in the depths into which we have sometimes to plunge. If we have the life of Christ within us, then neither the one nor the other will exhaust our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... of the party he was permitted to look on, when he was not helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the petits fours. He was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a high-school party, the children had been featureless gabies. Now they were men and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard stories of what the Athletic Club called "goings on" at young parties; ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... stopped short and stared. A dim, distorted something was peering at him from over the top of a big boulder. It was moving—it nodded at him. Then he indistinctly recognized it as a tall, conical hat. There seemed a sort of featureless face ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth silver-pink exterior was featureless. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... This microscopic, featureless creature is already a human individual, with certain of its future traits—those that we call "native"—already settled. It is a human being as distinguished from any other species, it is a white or colored ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... temptation to secure for its divinity the honour and title of Creator. Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect. It offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe. It does not reach behind the appearances of space and time. It sees only a featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the Unconditioned, can assert anything at all. At the back of all known ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... am he for whom the entire world is searching, whom none has ever seen, whom none can recognise!... I am Crime incarnated!... I am Night!... No human sees my face, because Crime and Night are featureless!... I am illimitable Power!... I am he who mocks at all the powers, at all the efforts, at all the forces!... I am master of all, of everything; of all times and seasons.... I am Death!... Bobinette, thou hast said ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... said it, was all candour. It had filled out; it had bloomed in her happiness; it was shadowless, featureless almost, like a flower. ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... by the paw Of a springing beast that died in giving death. Again the featureless torn face he saw, The ribboned bosom emptied of warm breath; Again the circle sudden hush'd with awe, And smothered moaning heard the hush beneath. Again, again, and every night again, Vision renewed and ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... listened to their honest chat: Said one: "To-morrow we shall be Plod plod along the featureless sands, And coasting miles and miles of sea." Said one: "Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat." Said one: "To-morrow shall be like To-day, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... is fled, When we poor sons and daughters of reality Are in our graves forgotten and quite dead, And Time destroys our mottoes of morality— The lithographic hand of Old Mortality Shall still restore thy emblem on the stone, A featureless death's head, And rob ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... smartly back to our camp of 28th ult. The people bear their hunger well. They collect mushrooms and plants, and often get lost in this flat featureless country. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... put upon paper exactly as they were spoken, in most instances they would not convey to a reader the same thought they conveyed to a listener. It is much more exacting to express the truth one wishes to convey, by silent, featureless symbols than by that wonderful organ of communication, the human voice. Now, if to the human voice be added eyes, features, gestures, and pose, we easily understand the great advantage a speaker ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of the entire audience were directed upon him alone. The stage seemed very large, and he was cut off from the audience by a wall of blinding rays, and at first he could only distinguish vast vague semicircles and a floor of pale, featureless faces. However, he depended upon ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... thing the want of which mars the pleasantly flowing but somewhat featureless octosyllables of his French models. In the famous passage[117] where he has been thought to reflect on Wolfram, he certainly praises other poets without stint, and shows himself a generous as well as ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... saw three wounded of the war: And the first had lost his eyes; And the second went on wheels and had No legs below the thighs; And the face of the third was featureless, And his mouth ran cornerwise. So I made a rhyme about each one, And this ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... the grave; her dark head bowed, and lost in her long, loosened Indian hair; her hands extended to the cross-foot, with a little brass crucifix clasped between; a crucifix worn featureless, like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain. She did not see me, and I made no noise, but slid aside, and ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... that was slain. 'This company of brethren praising God in the tongues of the whole world represented the whole world which shall one day praise God in its various tongues' (Bengel). Pentecost reversed Babel, not by bringing about a featureless monopoly, but by consecrating diversity, and showing that each language could be hallowed, and that each lent some new strain of music ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow; Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, Crooking the toe in the trigger, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... on he pointed out the great men whose names suggested history to Bradley and whose actual presence amazed him. There was Amos B. Tripp, whom Radbourn said resembled "a Chinese god"—immense, featureless, bald, with a pout on his face like an enormous baby. The "watch dog of the house," Major Hendricks, was tall, thin, with the voice and manner of an old woman. His eyes were invisible, and his chin-beard wagged up and down as he shouted in high ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... soon as I retire to the Stadthaus for two hours of quiet before dinner, so I must give the features of Malacca mainly in outline. Having written this sentence, I am compelled to say that the feature of Malacca is that it is featureless! It is a land where it is "always afternoon"—hot, still, dreamy. Existence stagnates. Trade pursues its operations invisibly. Commerce hovers far off on the shallow sea. The British and French mail steamers give the port a wide offing. It has no politics, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... with her, yet something like conversation had been taking place. It had come to him, too, that she had a mind, and now that he really looked at her he saw that the face was intelligent. Yesterday that face had been no more to him than a smudge, without character, and almost featureless, while to-day.... ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... becomes a great plain, hedgeless, and at times almost featureless. The sun in the afternoon throws the shadows of the roadside trees at right angles, so that the road becomes divided into accurate squares by the thin lines of shadow. The straight run from St Pierre is broken where the road crosses the Dives. It is a pretty spot with a farm, a manor-house ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... square, painted, ugly, featureless boxes built all after the same pattern of dreariness. He looked on this gay bewilderment of bad ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... of the Tudor castle and the long featureless rib of grinding pebbles that screened off the outer sea, which could be heard lifting and dipping rhythmically in the wide vagueness of the Bay. At the under-hill island townlet of the Wells there were no flys, and leaving his things to be brought on, as he often did, he climbed the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... petticoat, too short by several inches, left her legs bare. She might have belonged to some tribe of Redskins in Fenimore Cooper's novels; for her neck, arms, and ankles looked as if they had been painted brick-red. There was no spark of intelligence in her featureless face; her pale, bluish eyes looked out dull and expressionless from beneath the eyebrows with one or two straggling white hairs on them. Her teeth were prominent and uneven, but white as ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... standing rigging all but entirely hiding Mr. Benny's quay-door, the approach to which she completely obstructed. A little above her forestay a small window, uncurtained and brightly lit, broke the long stretch of featureless black wall. This was the window of Mr. Benny's inner office, and within, as she checked her way, catching at the gunwale of one among the tethered boats, Myra could see the upper half of a hanging lamp and the shadow of its reflector on ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his two feminine visitors in easy chairs and took one himself, while Jose, with noiseless deftness, cleared away the remains of food. Pearl had wandered to the window and, drawing the curtain aside, stood gazing out into the featureless, black ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... something in a silent egg which moves one's deeper emotions—something solemn in its embryotic inertia, something awesome in its featureless immobility. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... slowly. He turned back to the screen and stared at the still featureless dot that was the Earth. "We can't be the only ones ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... not in the dark room then, but poised at the edge of a brightness which seemed featureless and without limit, spread out around her with a feeling-tone like "sea" or "sky." But it was an unquiet place. There was a sense of unseen things on all sides watching her ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... variance with its surroundings. These things had been put down hastily as the students had arrived and hurried at once to secure their seats in the adjacent lecture theatre. Deadened by the closed door, the measured accents of the professor sounded as a featureless muttering. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... had travelled much amongst monotonous, drab towns without character or amusements. She had kept her eyes open. She had seen that it was from the denizens of the dull streets in these towns that the quack religions won their recruits. Mme. Dauvray's life had been a featureless sort of affair until these experiments had come to colour it. Madame Dauvray must at any rate preserve the memory ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... height, and with every structural detail chiselled with patient care into intricate patterns of fruit and foliage, and you will get some idea of a Brunswick street. The town contained four or five splendid old churches, and their mediaeval builders had taken advantage of the dead-flat, featureless plain in which Brunswick stands, to erect such lofty towers as only the architects in the Low Countries ever devised; towers which served as landmarks for miles around, their soaring height silhouetted against the pale northern sky. The irregular ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... the hall in uniform, with which it must be confessed they seem thoroughly satisfied—Uthwart quite perversely at ease in the stiff make of his scarlet jacket with black facings—and so pass onward on their way to Dover, Dunkirk, they scarcely know whither finally, among the featureless villages, the long monotonous lines of the windmills, the poplars, blurred with cold fogs, but marking the [230] roads through the snow which covers the endless plain, till they come in sight at last ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... chronicle or fiction I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them. The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... flotilla—mother-ship, tugs and all—was out to sea long before the dawn. You would have liked the picture: the immense stretch of the grayish, winter-stricken sea, the little covey of submarines running awash, the gray mother-ship going ahead, as casually as an excursion steamer, into the featureless dawn. ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Peninsula looks a tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord K.'s small and featureless map. I do not speak for myself for I have so far only examined the terrain through a field glass. I refer to the tone of the sailors, which strikes me as being graver and less irresponsible than the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... entertain the party. In front of the dais in academic dress stood the Vice-Chancellor, a thin, silver-haired man, with a determined mouth, such as befitted the champion of a hundred orthodoxies; and beside him his widowed sister, a nervous and rather featureless lady who was helping him to receive. The guest of the evening had ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... differs little from the rest of the Tigris valley, the same level plain of loam and mud, a strip of two or three miles nearest the river highly irrigated, and at this season, green with young corn and barley; further afield the bare, brown, featureless desert stretching out endlessly in every direction. Dawn and dusk transform this shadowless wilderness into a land of the most wonderful colour and atmosphere, but throughout the heat of the day the glare and dust make it hateful to white men. And even in April, the shade temperature ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... descend. The waste was featureless, then and for a seemingly interminable time afterward. Then his estimated position matched the site of the static-earth-shock-concussion-wave-occurrence. There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was different from any other part. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... commonplace of the mean and dull monotony that weighs like a nightmare upon this vast East London and its human hive, which hums and toils, drones and feeds, by night and day, in these numberless featureless boxes of wood and stone, on this flat, interminable earth that stretches eastward to Essex marshes and southward to the river, and bears yellow brick and cemeteries for corn. Well! Tressady knew that the thought ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cards, a rare manner; he was perfect master of what not to say to such a personage as Mr. Verver while the particular importance that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves, his repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles, successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and revealed, lay there at ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... find a name for that subtle feeling which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was a reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I had a distinct sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had moved and charmed me once, and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and stood for a while looking out. The houses opposite and all down the road were exactly alike, all featureless and grey, roofed with slate, three-storied, with basement kitchens. Nearly every one of them had "Apartments" in gilt letters on the fanlight over the front door. It was raining. The pavements were wet and there was mud ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... serve to show the general nature of most Mesopotamian river scenery, dead flat, with nothing or little to relieve the monotony, a great expanse of muddy waters and featureless dust, with just a suggestion in one direction of a low line of blue—very faint. It tells of the far-away Persian mountains and ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... that lady, as formed from Esther's letter. The only person in sight was an elderly woman, sitting in a wagon with mail bags piled around her. Two hundred would have been a charitable guess at her weight; her face was as round and red as a harvest-moon and almost as featureless. She wore a tight, black, cashmere dress, made in the fashion of ten years ago, a little dusty black straw hat trimmed with bows of yellow ribbon, and faded ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... devoted himself to me: but imagine our conversation—he spoke in Latin and I in French: however we understood each other very well. It is on the whole a dreary country except where enlivened by lakes: some parts are pine forests and birch forests, but others are featureless ground with boulder stones, like the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... be, Niebeldingk," she said. "As far as he is concerned he is, doubtless, in the right. And nothing would be more shameful than if society were already to begin to make a featureless model ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... and wrapped with all the jealous care of the East against the curious eyes of strangers. Aquila took in her featureless presence with a single irritated look ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Mountains and passes, valleys and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages and rice swamps; poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples, prostrate Buddhas, strings of straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey, featureless streets, and quiet, staring crowds, are all jumbled up fantastically in my memory. Fine weather accompanied me through beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa, where I ate my lunch in the street to avoid the innumerable fleas of the tea-house, ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... such influences as these, there is little more distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre. And in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an empty soap box with a clatter to wake the seven sleepers. Instantly he knew it had been put there for him to stumble over. A strong searchlight flooded the stairs and focused on him. He caught a momentary glimpse of a featureless face standing out above the light—a face that was nothing but a red bandanna handkerchief with slits in it for eyes—and of a pair of feet below at ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... She gave me a momentary glance. Oh, God be thanked for the love-light in those brown eyes! The memory of it warmed my heart a thousand times when long weary miles were between us, and a desolate sky shut down around the far desolate plains of a silent, featureless land. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... estancia and placed our pupil on it, we liked the place so well that we made arrangements to stay there for six weeks at least, thus getting a very good idea of its daily life. The province of Buenos Ayres is one great featureless, treeless, dead-flat plain, and being all an alluvial deposit, it contains neither a pebble in the soil nor a single spring of water. Water is found everywhere at a depth of six or seven feet, and this great level extends ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... I any the less for these mutilations, for these subtractions of the flesh? Certainly not. Clip my hair. Shave from me with sharp razors my lips, my nose, my ears—ay, and tear out the eyes of me by the roots; and there, mewed in that featureless skull that is attached to a hacked and mangled torso, there in that cell of the chemic flesh, will ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... bitten to the bone: sometimes, in fact, it is all bone and gristle, and the ravages of cooking minimise its bulk in a disheartening way. One and a half pound of bread is more than the third of a big loaf, but minus butter it makes a featureless repast. Breakfast and tea without butter and milk does not always make a ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... right on the curve. He could see the massive hull of the cruiser plainly now. It was almost featureless until, as he watched, several ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe |
