"Dinginess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reeking with rank smoke and the fumes of stale beer. The floor was strewn with sawdust, streaked and circled by shuffling feet; the mirror backing the bar was covered with soiled gauze dotted with tawdry roses, and an indescribable dinginess seemed to have laid its sordid fingers ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... in George's first impressions of her? They were no sooner engaged than it had begun to wane. Was it like the bird or the flower, that adorns itself only for the wooing time, and sinks into relative dinginess when the mating ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... uncomfortable chamber repaired, one March evening, Mr. Frank Pixley, Republican precinct committee-man, nor was its dinginess an unharmonious setting for that political brilliant. He was a pock-pitted, damp-looking, soiled little fungus of a man, who had attained to his office because, in the dirtiest precinct of the wickedest ward in the city, he had, through the operation of a befitting ingenuity, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... him and went back to his hot little room on the fourth floor, happy in spite of heat and dinginess and a certain homesick feeling. Was he not to ride with Starr in the morning? He could hardly sleep for thinking of it, and of all he ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... sage bush. This, as he drew near, he discovered to be a portion of an old flour sack, washed clean and left bleaching in the sun and wind until it had assumed a colour a shade more pure than its original dinginess. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... friendship with Blake all sides of life had been viewed in turn, as all topics had been discussed as component parts of a fascinatingly interesting world. To-night he went forward, mingling with the inhabitants of the district, revelling with morbid realism in the forbidding dinginess of their appearance. He was not of that quarter—that was patent to every rough who lounged outside a cafe door, as it was patent to every slovenly woman who gave him a glance in passing. He was not ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... straight-laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the marble—speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work—as he indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. Powers and Mr. Hart, American ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... flimsy coverings the somber hue of their nets was new. On leaving Remate de Males the insect bars had been clean white; and though they had grown somewhat soiled from daily handling, they never had approached the drab dinginess of the barriers draping the hammocks of the Peruvian rivermen. In fact, their owners had been at some pains to keep them as clean as possible, folding them each morning with military precision and ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... up to London a couple of days before the session began in order to find himself rooms. He hunted about the streets that led out of the Westminster Bridge Road, but their dinginess was distasteful to him; and at last he found one in Kennington which had a quiet and old-world air. It reminded one a little of the London which Thackeray knew on that side of the river, and in the Kennington Road, through which the great barouche ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... for ornaments, and the same couple of little windows looking out upon a stretch of the noble river, from which you might have fished. There was the same colour of paint on the walls, which had been so managed as to represent the dinginess of antiquity. There was also, to all appearance, Mrs Roby's own identical bed, with its chintz curtains. Here, however, resemblance ended, for there was none of the Grubb's Court dirt. The craft on the river were not so large or numerous, the reach being above the bridges. If you ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... trees, many flowers, and even some fruit. We must not forget to state that the extreme cleanliness of the courtyard was such as intimated that mop and pail had done their utmost in that favoured spot to atone for the general dirt and dinginess of the quarter where ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... far from correct. The Esquimaux are, as a matter of fact, considerably darker than the red Indians of the United States. They are not reddish: they are brown, to which grease and dinginess add not a little. On they came till within fifty yards; when all drew up on a sudden, and sat regarding us in something like silence. Perhaps our bayonets, with the sunlight flashing on them, may have filled them with a momentary suspicion of ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a bull-trout, a visitor from the neighbouring river; but we all concluded at the time, from the extreme dinginess of its coat, that it had lived for years in its dark pool, a hermit apart from its fellows. I am not now, however, altogether certain that the inference was a sound one. Some fishes, like some men, have a wonderful ability of assuming the colours ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... on the way to Highbury, or the big drapers and clothiers in the Upper Street—made her realise how right had been her longing for the West End. It had been more than a dream. It had been an inspiration. Holloway was seen in its dinginess, its greasy mud on the rough roads, the general air it had of being a step or two behind the times; and here was the brilliance, the enthralling reality, of the West to take its place. Sally was conscious of new buoyancy. If she had been ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... but she had never visited any of the Cardew plants. She had never been permitted to do so. Perhaps the neighborhood would have impressed her more had she not seen, in the camp, that life can be stripped sometimes to its essentials, and still have lost very little. But the dinginess depressed her. Smoke was in the atmosphere, like a heavy fog. Soot lay on the window-sills, and mingled with street dust to form little black whirlpools in the wind. Even the white river steamers, guiding their heavy laden coal barges with the current, were gray with soft coal smoke. The foam ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... room where Dirk's treasure was sleeping,—not a thing in it save the two wooden stools and rough board which upheld their still little burden. Pure and white the child lay,—a fair, delicate flower when compared with the dinginess and squalor of everything about it; and something of this contrast seemed to glimmer upon Dirk's rough perceptions, for he said ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... and hanging cast-steel rapier, and silken calves and buckled shoes,—and above all the abundant real point lace (upon which Lord Houghton more than once has commented with me as to the comparative superiority of his or mine,—both being of ancestral dinginess, and only to be washed in coffee)—these are ill exchanged for boots and trousers and straight black sword, and everything of grace and beauty diligently tailored away. When I last attended at St. James's in honour of Prince Albert Victor's first reception, I was, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... nor the dinginess was seen by Laura. A subtle fascination held her in thrall—she saw ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... blazed everywhere. Bob was struck by the numbers of clairvoyants, palm readers, Hindu frauds, crazy cults, fake healers, Chinese doctors, and the like thus lavishly advertised. The class that elsewhere is pressed by necessity to the inexpensive dinginess of back streets, here blossomed forth in truly tropical luxuriance. Street vendors with all sorts of things, from mechanical toys to spot eradicators, spread their portable lay-outs at every corner. Vacant lots were crowded with spielers of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the dinginess of the little room. There was a bed, covered with musty, ragged clothing; a table, littered with broken and dirty dishes and pieces of stale food; a stove, cracked and greasy, and one or two bare boxes serving as articles of furniture. But it was to the bed Dave turned, and, with another match, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... Pennsylvania—or perhaps I should better describe it as an amalgamation of Swansea, Merthyr-Tydvil, and South Shields. It is, without exception, the blackest place which I ever saw. The three English towns which I have named are very dirty, but all their combined soot and grease and dinginess do not equal that of Pittsburg. As regards scenery it is beautifully situated, being at the foot of the Alleghany Mountains, and at the juncture of the two rivers Monongahela and Alleghany. Here, at the town, they come together, and form the River Ohio. Nothing can be more picturesque than the site, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... The shut-in dinginess of Digby Street, the gloomy aspect of Shamrock House, cast such a chill across Joan's spirits that, as she stood hesitating with her hand on the bell, the instinct came to her to scramble back into the cab and tell the man to drive her anywhere away from such ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... and luxury in one story of what had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun...." ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... boy to watch after meeting till the fire died out. We just make the house do; strips have been laid on the floor, paper pasted over the wall gaps, seats of rough boards set in the building, windows tightened, and there we gathered. God's Spirit met us in spite of cold and dinginess and needs. I believe ten or twelve rose for prayers during those two weeks. Since warm weather Brother Myers has continued the meetings, and I trust a score or more have given ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her impatience of stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... surrounded and formed the courts, evidently the oldest and strongest of Bicetre, harmonized in dinginess with the scene. At every barred window, and these were numerous, about a dozen ruffianly heads were thrust together, to regard the chains of their companions.—What a study of physiognomy! The murderer's scowl was there, by the side of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... propitiate something in him, always without producing the least effect. Her mental vision presented to her his image as he had walked about the horrid little rooms, his somewhat stiffly held head not much below the low ceilings. He had taken in shabby carpets, furniture, faded walls, general dim dinginess. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... truckle- beds and ragged pallets covered the floor, and, eked out by old saddles and threadbare horserugs, marked the sleeping quarters either of the servants or of travellers of the meaner sort. But the dinginess was naught to the two who knelt looking into it, afraid to move. Was the place empty? That was the point; the question which had first stayed, and then set their pulses ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman |
