"Greyness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boots clattering on the cobble-stones. The men were up—they should have been up an hour now—but no sounds of activity came from the barns. The yard was in stillness, a little mist floating against the walls, and the pervading greyness of the morning seemed to be lit up by the huge blotches of yellow lichen that covered the slated roofs of barns and dwelling—the roofs were all new, having only for a year or two superseded the old roofs ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... imposing building viewed from within, when the paling-gate had closed behind them. To Laura, who came from a township of one-storied brick or weatherboard houses, it seemed vast in its breadth and height, appalling in its sombre greyness. Between Godmother and Cousin Grace she walked up an asphalted path, and mounted the steps that led to a massive stone portico. The bell Godmother rang made no answering sound, but after a very few seconds the door swung back, and a slender maidservant in cap and ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... trajectory it traced through the leaden skies overhead neither of us could tell. Silence again fell like a mist upon the land; not a bird sang, not a twig moved. The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky—the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness. The land was flat as the palm of one's hand, its monotony relieved only by lines of pollarded willows on which some sappers had strung a field telephone. Raindrops hung on the copper wire like a string of pearls, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... tools before Priapus the Garden- Keeper. Heracles and Artemis receive the aged soldier's shield into their temples, that it may grow old there amid the sound of hymns and the dances of maidens.[23] Quiet peace, as of the greyness of a summer evening, is ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... Perhaps you can realize why, and I saw for a little into the outside edge of life as lived by these women. I wonder how I can best convey to you the horror and pity of it, for we—despite the greyness of our lives—have something within ourselves to which we can turn, but they have weighed even hopes and dreams with the weights of shame, and found their poor value in pounds, shillings and pence. That is why their eyes ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... being landed now and henceforward at the Hook at five A.M. I am sorry for this, because after a rough passage it was very pleasant to glide in the early morning steadily up the Maas and gradually acquire a sense of Dutch quietude and greyness. No longer, however, can this be done, as the Batavier boats reach Rotterdam at night; and one therefore misses the river, with the little villages on its banks, each with a tiny canal-harbour of its own; the groups of trees in ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... world and understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was worthy of pride. She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought romance at the price of esteem ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... ears: in the father, the hair began to grow over his body at six years old; in his daughter somewhat earlier, namely, at one year; and in both generations the milk teeth appeared late in life, the permanent teeth being deficient. Greyness of hair at an unusually early age has been transmitted in some families. So, also, has ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... The greyness had rolled away now, and the evening grown exceptionally lovely, with clear skies overhead and great banks of pearly tinted clouds on the horizons. Where should she go? Only two ways lay open. Either she must follow Diana and Stanley up the valley, or she must stroll down to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... In the greyness of the dawn some soldiers appeared on the outskirts of the Barbarians, and filed past with their helmets raised on the points of their pikes; they saluted the Mercenaries and asked them whether they had no messages to send to ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... grey eye see badly in the day-time and well in the night? A. Because greyness is light and shining in itself, and the spirits with which we see are weakened in the day-time and strengthened in ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... segregate and disentangle itself from our present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing variety of morals, menages, occupations and types, at present so mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In the course of these inquiries, we have permitted ourselves to take ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... going through this golden weather, Where leaves have littered every forest way, If there be lovers, they should be together: For this is golden ... but the end is grey. Beyond this shimmer where the bright leaves fall, Behind this haze of silver shot with gold, There is a greyness waiting for it all,— A little longer ... and the ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... brighter aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country to ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... impatience until half-past four precisely; and we would snatch our rifles, and with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle—until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the way. I wonder ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of a man; but its unique characteristic was its awful greyness. It had the greyness of a rain cloud, yet rather that of a column of smoke. And from the centre of the dimly defined head, two eyes—balls of living fire—glared out ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the inward gladness of a princess when she has come into view of a desired kingdom—whether it shall endure or be destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon the prince reciprocating and making her queen of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... all, with the dreariness and greyness and fierceness and dirtiness of it all, he would not change it for those earlier things—this was growing, this ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... himself similar to the scars carried by the warriors of his tribe (which is probably the origin of tattooing); the Highlander who adopts the plaid worn by the head of his clan; the courtiers who affect greyness, or limp, or cover their necks, in imitation of their king; and the people who ape the courtiers; are alike acting under a kind of government connate with that of Manners, and, like it too, primarily beneficial. For notwithstanding the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... frothing away his energy along the line of least resistance. But never before had he been quite so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday dinner may have had its share in his despair—and the greyness of the sky. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable frustration as a business man as the consequence of his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after that—— Perhaps she might have reason to repent when it was too late. And destiny, as I have already intimated, had planted ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... we occupy is 45 metres away from the enemy. The roads of approach are curious and even picturesque in their harshness, emphasised by the greyness of the weather. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... All you western nations are to us a peck of dust outside our palace gates. Listen, dear one. We can leave, if you will, to-night, and top the clouds before sunrise. And I promise you this," he went on, "when you pass from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting sunshine of the East, you will not care any longer about these people who go about the world on all fours. Day by day you will know what life and love mean. You ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... alike; it is possible to work, to read, to talk, to laugh when it is by. But it sends flowing through the mind a gentle current of sad and weary images and thoughts, which still have a beauty of their own; it tinges one's life with a sober greyness of hue; it heightens perception, though it prevents enjoyment. In such a mood one can sit silent a long time, with one's eyes cast upon the grass; one sees the delicate forms of the tender things ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... alone by the fire, watching the greyness of death quench spark after spark of living light, while a late moon sailed leisurely into view, overlaying the steely hardness of ice and snow with a veil of shimmering silver,—he took out the box, and opened it. He knew ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... An ashen greyness had been stealing across the old officer's face, and Mrs. Holl was terrified at seeing him suddenly ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee |
