"Stone-deaf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fall. Today Sir DONALD MACLEAN, as senior Privy Councillor, took the pas and was able from personal experience to give his conception of the ideal Speaker, who "must not only have good vision but be sometimes quite blind; not only have acute hearing but occasionally be almost stone-deaf." Fortunately the SPEAKER-ELECT can assume these physical defects at will; for, despite its quiet opening, I doubt if the new Parliament when it gets to work will prove precisely a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... and immense blonde whiskers, went on directing his people, checking parcels, making out bills or writing letters at a stand-up desk in the shop, and comported himself in that clatter exactly as though he had been stone-deaf. Now and again he would emit a bothered perfunctory "Sssh," which neither produced nor was expected to produce the slightest effect. "They are very decent to me here," said Jim. "Blake's a little cad, but Egstrom's all right." He stood up quickly, and walking ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to imitate it. An afternoon was not badly spent in discussing this. We recall the fact that it isn't the human ear-drum exactly which will get this—if it ever comes to us—and that Beethoven was stone-deaf when he heard his last symphonies, the great pastoral and dance and choral pieces, and that he wrote them from his inner listening. Parts of them seem to us strains from that great harmony that the birds are ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... question or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There was no doubt about it, they ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... able from personal experience to give his conception of the ideal Speaker, who "must not only have good vision but be sometimes quite blind; not only have acute hearing but occasionally be almost stone-deaf." Fortunately the SPEAKER-ELECT can assume these physical defects at will; for, despite its quiet opening, I doubt if the new Parliament when it gets to work will prove precisely a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... how to go right through the German lines. That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go. But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... him, he saw by her manner that the time was not far distant when her sweet old face would become curiously set, and the comely mouth would shut tight, and the cheque-book would remain locked in her wardrobe, while he poured his flimsy excuses on stone-deaf ears. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... the visible effect this speech had on the stranger he might as well have been stone-deaf, for he ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... to the same divine issue, my poor friend," said Beethoven; "why, just see here—I'm stone-deaf, and can't hear a note of what I'm singing to you! But it is not about that I weep, when I am weeping. It was terrible when it first came on, my deafness, and I could no longer hear the shepherd's ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier |
