"Languorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made the poor man forget his troubles and filled him instead with delightful visions of sunny lands and blue skies and red poppies and fair women and languorous luxury. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... day peeps through the dripping panes. The spark of life glows once more in their languorous bodies. He awakes, Ada's eyes are looking at him. A whole life passes in a few moments: days of sin, greatness, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... for which he had designed this chamber, this painted atmosphere which gave new color to faces grown dull and withered by the use of ceruse and by nights of dissipation, there were other, more personal and perverse pleasures which he enjoyed in these languorous surroundings,—pleasures which in some way stimulated memories of his past pains ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Through the open windows came the sound of carriages driven along the dusty way, the shouts of the coachmen to their horses, the jingling of bells, the hooting of motor horns. A lime tree, whose leaves were stirred by the languorous breeze, kept tapping against the window. From a further distance came the faint, muffled voices of promenaders, and the echo of the guns from the Tir du Pigeons. But through it all, Selingman, lying on his back ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... silence between us, yet a silence that was full of leafy stirrings, soft night noises, and the languorous murmur of the brook. Presently Charmian reached out a hand, broke off a twig of willow and began to turn it round and round in her white fingers, while I sought ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... glass splintered, and a ruby-red snakelike thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson's ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... This languorous spell disappeared presently, and then the days were full of life and action. Mrs. Beck and Bobby and Boyd, however, did not go in for anything very strenuous. Edith Wayne, too, preferred to walk through the groves or sit upon the grassy promontory. It was Helen and Dorothy who ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his eyes slowly ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... old slaveholder that he had been. Here, too, he had seen the hope of restoring his wife's health—for which he had undertaken the overland emigration—more than fulfilled in Mrs. Peyton's improved physical condition, albeit at the expense, perhaps, of some of the languorous graces ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... If a storm arose, a fury that raged and threatened, it presently swept away, and the blue laughed again. When the sun sank, there arose in the east such a moon as might have been sole light to all the realms of faery. A beauty languorous and seductive was most absolute empress of the wonderful land ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... place, and Sanine's curious gaze was riveted on her white silhouette in the moonlight. Sarudine now came from the lighted drawing-room on to the veranda. Sanine distinctly heard the faint jingling of his-spurs. In the drawing-room Tanaroff was playing an old-fashioned, mournful waltz whose languorous cadences floated on the air. Approaching Lida, Sarudine gently and deftly placed his arm round her waist. Sanine could perceive that both figures became merged into one that ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... half risen, the better to focus an opera-glass on the box. The gong solemnly announced the second act, and Alice moved her chair to face the stage. Once more Montani scanned the party with his glass. As the lights faded Alice, with the pretty languorous gesture I so well remembered, opened her fan—the fan of ostrich plumes, that became a blur of white that held my eye through the ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... entering. Hush! If I could but describe her! Languorous, slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were her lover, my boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and sudden, how hostile, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... behind a bank of graceful exotic plants, struck up a languorous waltz, and the couples, only too eager to respond to the invitation, began to turn and glide over the polished ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... Maria," says Mr Frankfort Moore, "the art of the dance had become part of her nature. Her languorous eyes were in sympathy with the voluptuous movements of her feet and lithe body, and the curves made by her arms formed an invisible chain that held everyone entranced. The caresses of her fingers, ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... shadowy wood, from dewy grass and flower, stole wafts of perfume, while from some thicket near by a blackbird filled the air with the rich note of his languorous song; but Barnabas frowned only the blacker, and his hand clenched itself on the stick he carried, a heavy stick, that he had cut from ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... first. He was a pleasant, hollow-chested little man; his delicacy of lung gave him his excuse for playing gentleman farmer. She, half-Spanish, carried bulk for the family and carried it well. The Andalusian showed in her coy yet open air, in her small, broad hand and foot, in a languorous liquidity of eye. Their son, a well-behaved and pretty youth of twelve, and their daughter, two years older, rode behind them on the back seat. The daughter bore one of those mosaic names with which the mixed race has sprinkled California—Teresa del Vinal Morse. A pretty, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... rest. In the afternoon you may very pleasantly take boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place, full of the debris of the sea, old masts and ropes, here a rusty anchor, there a golden net, with sailors lying asleep on the parapet of the harbour, and the whole place full of the soft sea wind, languorous and yet virile withal, the shady narrow ways, the low archways, the crooked steps pleasant with the song of the sea, the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... with Dorothy, but I did not stand with her on the basis of my former emotional interest. In a way she symbolized the false standards, the languorous aristocracy of the South. She was a presence of romantic music, a warmth that produces dreams. She was not the intense light that shone around Abigail. I had a letter from Abigail in my pocket. Parts of it wedged ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish." And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... be so welcome to Lycabetta, languorous Lycabetta, as news of the whereabouts of the fool who had caused her so many hours of mortal anguish. Lysidice shivered still in the warm air at the thought of that night when all in the palace of pleasure believed themselves ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... remained longer than was absolutely necessary, silent, quite still, while the air grew thick with the push of unspoken and as yet unspeakable matters, and Helen's hands resting upon his shoulders grew heavy, as the seconds passed, with languorous weight. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... restlessly about, without relief, without gaining any added clearness of vision. The atmosphere of the place seemed to him somehow enervating. The little 'walk amongst the rhododendrons was still fragrant 'with perfume, reminiscent of that strange moment of emotion. The air was still languorous. Although the nightingale's song had ceased, the atmosphere seemed still vibrating with the music of his past song. He stood before the window of the room where he had talked with Julia. What would she say, he wondered? Would she think that he had sold his soul ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... along the southern sky. Occasionally a sound of voices, the creak of a wooden windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as it was wound slowly up the foreshore, came from the direction of the ferry and of Faircloth's Inn. The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted breath of the mud-flats a wholesome reminder ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... certainly did pull the frigid mitt! So I wend my way back to the demure Dolores, the houri of my heart, and the next time I'll take a crack at the big guns in Seattle. And I'll sure reward you for your generosity in taking me to Blewett, all the long, long, languid, languorous way——" ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the same deep silence. The air, which should have been full of the twittering of birds, was heavy and languorous. There was no flutter of butterfly-wings or darting of flies; the fountains on the lawns were not playing, and as the Prince glanced over the edge of the marble basin of one of them he could see the goldfish beneath the water-lily leaves lying still, ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... murmur of the pines with the drowsy, languorous breeze relaxed his conscience; at all events the contours of the upturned lips were irresistible. Silently he rolled over once—the soft carpet of pine-needles abetting the manoeuvre—until his face was at right ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... languorous in its appeal to the senses, exuded from this perfect creation; added to this, the subtle, unfailing scent of young womanhood; the warm, alive feel of her presence in the atmosphere; a suggestion of something sensuous, clean, pure, delicious. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... night after the above-recorded conversation between Billy and myself brought with it the threat of a change of weather. It had been exceptionally hot all day, with less wind than usual, and there was a languorous quality in the atmosphere that seemed to portend thunder, a portent that was strengthened toward nightfall when the wind died away to the merest zephyr, while a great bank of heavy, lowering cloud piled itself up slowly along the eastern ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... her ears. And the powerful odors that impregnated the atmosphere of the cellar and rendered it foul to suffocation—dampness and dog and dregs of wine, and garlic and decaying vegetables—became the languorous breath of June flowers. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... suppose, weighed the question, "It's the weather," he decided. "Yes—I 'll bet you ten-and-sixpence that it's nothing more than just this silly, sentimental, languorous ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies' Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her physical presence ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... road led between grassy banks topped by hedgerows and trees whose wide-flung, rusting leafage cast a pleasant shade, while high in the sunny air a lark carolled faint and sweet against the blue. From the distant woods stole a wind languorous and fragrant of dewy earth, of herb and flower, a wind soft as a caress yet vital and full of promise (as it were) so that as I breathed of it, hope and strength were renewed in me with an assurance of ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... gone to bathe, and another time at midnight when he was playing cards. Remembering this, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna flushed crimson, and looked round at the cook as though she might overhear her thoughts. The long, insufferably hot, wearisome days, beautiful languorous evenings and stifling nights, and the whole manner of living, when from morning to night one is at a loss to fill up the useless hours, and the persistent thought that she was the prettiest young woman in the town, and that her youth was ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... said Manuel, in his soft and languorous voice, "is a revolver. My finger is on the trigger. If you tell one lie—why, that is the end of you! Why did you mention the ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of Young England and boiled beef ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... cherry orchards and green meadows, and the river winding along the valley, and the church tower peeping out among the elms, they all make a most effective picture. There's something dreadfully sleepy and languorous about it, though; stagnation seems to be the dominant note. Nothing ever happens here; seedtime and harvest, an occasional outbreak of measles or a mildly destructive thunderstorm, and a little election excitement about once in five ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... of hilarity which had penetrated to the outer hall, and, merely waving the playwright toward Tinker, swept the same gesture upward to complete it by resting a cordial hand upon the departing guest's shoulder. This personage, a wasp-figured, languorous youth, with pale plastered hair over a talcum face, flicked his host lightly upon the breast with a ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... gods. Sacred and soft as lotos-flowers Are those long languorous hands of ours That carry spices ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... left at this point, he was free to dispose of it under the auspices of near-Hindoos in the Indian room, of merry Swiss peasants in the Swiss room, or in other appropriately furnished apartments of red-shirted, Bret Harte miners, fur-clad Esquimaux, or languorous Spaniards. He could then, if a man of spirit, who did not know when he was beaten, collect the family jewels, and proceed down the main hall, accompanied by the strains of an excellent band, to the office of a gentlemanly ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... vigorous, these outside impressions often lose, I think, their sharp savours. One is preoccupied with one's own happy schemes and merry visions; the bird sings shrill within its cage, and claps its golden wings. But on such soft and languorous days as these days of early spring, when the body is unstrung, and the bonds and ties that fasten the soul to its prison are loosened and unbound, the spirit, striving to be glad, draws in through the passages of sense these swift impressions of beauty, as a thirsty child drains a cup of ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Overhead against the trunk of a tree a solitary lantern was flickering fitfully. It soon went out. The dazzling lights of the ballroom, glimmering through boughs and vines, shot a few rays into their faces. Music, languorous, torturing the heart, swelled and died on the air, mingled with the murmurings of eager voices. Close around them in the darkness was the heavy fragrance of perishing blossoms—earth dials of yesterday; close around ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... drowsiness crept over me; and a little later I had an odd sense of perfect quietude. I was lying amid moss and violets. In a languorous way I wondered how my surroundings had changed, and at last I awoke to find my head propped on Carlotta's lap and shaded by her red parasol, while she sat happy in full sunshine. I was springing from this posture of impropriety when she laughed and laid ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... craftsmanship as went to the chiselling of this hilt. Of silver it was, wrought into the shape of a standing woman, her feet poised upon the small, chiselled cross-guard, her head forming the pommel; naked she stood in languorous pose, arms raised and hands locked behind her head. The delicate chiselling of the features was worn somewhat by handling and rough usage, but even so the evil beauty of the face was plain and manifest, the wanton languor of the long eyes, the mocking cruelty of ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... has taken sail For lands beyond, soft-horizoned: Down languorous leagues I hold the trail, From Marmalada, steeply throned Above high pastures washed with light, Where dolomite by ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... have a horse to ride and a servant to look after them, things they never would have had had they stayed in Dundee or Glasgow, but though they are proud they are lonely. What does grandeur matter if "the Quothquan folk" can't see it? The peepul trees rustle softly overhead, the languorous soft air laps them round, the scent of the East is in their nostrils, but their eyes are with their hearts, and is this what they see? A night of drizzling rain, a street of tall, dingy, grey houses, and a boy, his day's work done, bounding upstairs three steps at a time to a cosy kitchen where ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... a relief to Strange when the sweet, languorous monologue, punctuated from time to time by a response from himself, or an interjectory remark from one of the others, came to an end, and they proceeded to the patio ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... into July and July moved by in a procession of hot, languorous days and still, warm nights. Sometimes it rained, and then the leaves and flowers, adroop under the sun's ardor, quivered and swayed with delight and scented the moist air with the sweet, faint fragrance of their gratitude. Often the showers came at night, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... sense, shared, I think, by the others, that I ought to worry a bit about him. But it was no use. One by one we lowered ourselves into the pit of our arboreal home and drifted into delicious languorous reveries, not of William Henry Thomas. We had other ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and one's actual happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which she ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the languorous evening returned, and Gracieuse was seated in the darkness meditating on her stone bench, a young human form started up suddenly near her; someone who had come in sandals, without making more noise than the silk owls make in the air, from the rear of the ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... to dreams by the languorous warm night and Boyar's easy stride up the steep, touched his neck with the rein and turned him into the Old ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the gloaming She used to sit combing Her hair in a languorous way. And her suitors would stop To look into the shop, And stand there the rest of the day. She filled them with mute, but with deep despair, For she never glanced up, with a smile, to where They ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... be her special care.... But this is anticipating our story. Betty Van Lew, full of the charm and enthusiasm of youth, had just come home from school, and with her had come the Northern friend, to whom the Southern city with its languorous beauty and warm hospitality was a wonder and ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... long, well-formed lines of lodges. Many-hued blankets hung fluttering in the sun, and rising lazily were curling columns of blue smoke. The scene was picturesque and reposeful; the vivid hues suggesting the Indians love of color and ornament; the absence of life and stir, his languorous habit of sleeping away ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... man's heart to woman's tenderness! We have heard tell of poets, who singing of death have persuaded many straightway to die,—but when they sing of sweeter themes, of lover's vows, of passion-frenzies, and languorous desires, cold is the blood that will not warm and thrill to their divinely eloquent allurements. Come hither, fair sir!" and he beckoned to Theos, who mechanically advanced in obedience to the command—"Thou hast thoughts of thine own, doubtless, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... tinkle-tinkle of serenading guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls, and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon full of obscure melancholy of a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... whom he believed he owed his ruin in San Francisco. She was as beautiful and alluring as ever, albeit she was thinner and more spiritual than he had ever seen her. She was tastefully dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of its inauspicious beginning, we spent an enjoyable afternoon. By common consent New College was ruled out of our itinerary, but Oxford cannot be viewed in a day, and we found much to delight our senses south of the High Street. Finally, a languorous journey by punt from the Barges to Magdalen Bridge more than compensated us for the somnolent half-hour which we had been proposing to spend under the shadow of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... people have been dancing—waltzing, polkaing, dancing the csardas—mostly the csardas, the dance of the nation, of the people, the most exhilarating, most entrancing, most voluptuous dance that feet of man have ever trod. The girls and lads are indefatigable, the slow and languorous Lassu (slow movement) alternates with the mad, merry csardas, they twirl and twist, advance, retreat, separate and reunite in a mad, intoxicating whirl. Small booted feet stamp on the rough wooden floor, sending up clouds of dust. What matter if the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... should keep Court-favour: here and there the small bright head, A light of healing, glanced about the couch, Or through the parted silks the tender face Peeped, shining in upon the wounded man With blush and smile, a medicine in themselves To wile the length from languorous hours, and draw The sting from pain; nor seemed it strange that soon He rose up whole, and those fair charities Joined at her side; nor stranger seemed that hears So gentle, so employed, should close in ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... over the tropics, A white-curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.... The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds.... A flute drones its insect music to the night Below the curving moon-petal of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Moskowszki has shown himself most happy in catching the spirit of Spanish music. He has a book of Spanish dances and two Spanish albums full of music of most varying mood, yet every mood characteristic of Spain and its people, now gay, now languorous, now dashing, now subdued, now softly whispering, now full of verve and passion, like the "Bolero," the fifth of the "Spanish Dances," Op. 12, with its sharply accentuated rhythm and dashing melody, which toward the end fairly ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... returned and went their way. The young Baron Rothschild came on to the plateau for a couple of weeks and then disappeared. And still we lingered on, happy, healthy, generally hungry, and intoxicated with the languorous murmur of Africa. ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... the peaceful calm of the tiny bay, with its groups of fishermen and women on the soft white sands, or wading into the clear blue water to reach their boats, the surroundings made the place a pleasant oasis in the desert of his life. The rest was sweet and languorous, and he passed his time now strolling out on the dry, warm sands, thinking, now high up on the grassy top of the cliff, where he could look down on people enjoying their ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... whom Landor speaks. His genius is robust with vigorous blood, and his tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health. The most subtle of minds, his is the least sickly. The wind that blows in his pages is no hot and languorous breeze, laden with scents and sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea. His poetry is a tonic; it braces and invigorates. "Il fait vivre ses phrases:" his verse lives and throbs with life. He is incomparably plentiful of vital heat; "so thoroughly ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... The languorous life of the islands exactly suited Mask Twain. All his life he remembered them—always planning to return, some day, to stay there until he died. In one of his note-books he wrote: "Went with Mr. Dam to his cool, vine-shaded home; no care-worn or eager, anxious faces in this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bench, while their be-ribboned charges scattered peanuts before a fluttering crowd of sparrows, pigeons, and squirrels; and, leaning on a rude crutch, a lame old negro woman was dragging a basket of brushwood to the brow of the hill. The scene was very peaceful, wrapped in that languorous stillness which is the pervading charm of the South; and beyond the high spikes of the iron fence, the noise of passing street cars sounded ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... known in London, and I believe is still alive, was one of those beauties in whom it is difficult to find any positive fault. Her hair was chestnut coloured, and astonishingly long and thick, her blue eyes were at once languorous and brilliant, her skin, faintly tinged with a rosy hue, was of a dazzling whiteness; she was tall for her age, and seemed likely to become as tall as Pauline. Her breast was perhaps a little small, but perfectly shaped, her hands were white and plump, her feet ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for the same reasons. The Boston girl said she had seen these same girls, or their professional sisters, in the Algerian theater. But their performance had been modified to suit the western taste. They sing and dance, but their songs and dances are nothing more dangerous than a languorous drone. But there are also some funny parts, according to the Algerian idea. They are played by a jet black Somauli woman who joins in the dance and a jet black Somauli boy in the orchestra who has a face of India rubber ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... objects at a great distance, yet veiling the far horizon in a haze of gold and purple. Overhead, clouds of the most gorgeous hues, like precious gems converted into vapor, floated in a sky of the serenest azure. The languorous atmosphere, the beauty of the heavens, the inviting shores, produced in me a feeling of contentment not easily described. To add to my senses another enjoyment, my ears were greeted with sounds of sweet music, in which I detected the mingling of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... fairly crashing its way through, laying out a straight-away course of silver cinders across the harbor, and in all parts of the heavens stars were breaking out like a rash. In two minutes it had become a balmy, languorous ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... large importance. I had been to the Hutchinses' church; and Maude, as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly increased in attractiveness and desirability. Her voice was very sweet, and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only with love, but also with a reviving spirituality. How often the two seem to go ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... term was at full tide in Harding. If you were a freshman, it made you feel sleepy and happy and utterly regardless of the future terrors of the conditioned state in comparison with the present joys of tennis and canoeing or the languorous fascination of a hammock on the back campus,—where one goes to study and remains to dream. If you were a senior it made a lump come in your throat,—the fleeting loveliness of this last spring term, when all the trials of being a Harding girl are forgotten and all the joys grow dearer than ever, ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... moonlight and the silence were extremely soothing, and the motion of the raft was gentle and languorous. Freddie's head sank against Aunt Amanda's shoulder, and his eyes closed; and in another moment he was asleep. Aunt Amanda herself nodded, and her eyes closed; she was asleep too. Toby yawned, and leaned heavily ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... thing before his grieved eyes and devoutly wished it in the place of punishment of the wicked dead. The sincere passion of his tones not only arrested my steps but lured through the open doorway the languorous and yawning Buck Devine, who hung over the worker with disrespectful attention. I joined the pair. To Buck's query, voiced in a key of feigned mirth, Sandy said with simple dignity that it was going to ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... physical beauty of the Greeks, from Boston, were there; fair women from Washington, whose charms make the reputation of many a newspaper correspondent; spirited stars of official and diplomatic life, who have moments of longing to shine in some more languorous material paradise, had made a hasty flitting to be present at the ceremony, sustained by a slight feeling of bravado in making this exceptional descent. But the favored hundred spectators were mainly from ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... winds and languorous days held for another full month in the mountains. Then the pines complained all through one night, and in the morning they roared like the rush of breakers in a storm, and sent dead branches crashing down, and sifted brown needles thick upon the ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... know what the softly-lit, luxurious sick-room is like. The couch is delicious for languorous limbs, the temperature is daintily adjusted, the nurse is deft and silent, and there is no sound to jar on weak nerves. But try to imagine the state of things in the sick-room where Ferrier watched when the second gale came away. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... divan, and a great drooping elm furnished a royal canopy. A half-moon hung in the sky, whitening a few small clouds that seemed to be painted on the blue-black dome. The air, though not oppressive, was warm enough to make all nature languorous, and the soft breath of the south wind was almost narcotic in its power to soothe. A great forest is never still; even its silence has a note of its own. The trees seem to whisper to each other ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... bluff, so kindly, so blunt in address, so unaffected, loving all that he saw, the tide of full-blooded and restless life running so vigorously in his veins; or, further back, Rossetti, with his wide eyes, half bright, half languorous, pale, haunted with impossible dreams, pacing, rapt in feverish thought, through the lonely fields. The ghosts of heroes! And whether it was that my own memories and affections and visions stirred my brain, or that some tide of the spirit still sets from the undiscovered shores ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sacrificed the cover of one of his beloved 'Saturday Evening Posts' for this portrait, and with extreme neatness had scissored it out and fastened it on the wall—a pleasant change from the cocaine and chocolate-box suggestiveness of the languorous Kirchner type that in 1916 and 1917 lent a pinchbeck Montmartre atmosphere to so many English messes in ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... reader knows from the start. But with what breathless interest do we follow this history of love! We seem to be admitted to the confidences of beings of another sphere, to celestial heights of affection. We hear the heart-beats and see the glances of the languid, languorous eyes. The universe itself seems to stand still for these two lovers. Their heads are among the stars, their hearts in heaven. Their love is as pure as a sonnet of Keats, as ineffable as shimmering starlight. Day by day we trace its current, we cannot say growth because it sprang ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... young! I seem ages older. And, shall I come to the point,—I want to establish myself. I cannot always be accepting the hospitality of my dearest friends, and I have a longing for a home. You see American ways have spoiled me already." And she raises her deep, languorous eyes. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... tremor went shivering down His whole body. She left on the air as she went A subtle suggestion of perfume; the scent Which steals out of some fans, or old laces, and seems Full of soft fragrant fancies and languorous dreams. She haunted the mind, though she passed from the sight. When Roger Montrose sought his pillow that night, 'Twas to dream of La Travers. He thought she became A burning red rose, with each leaf like a flame. He stooped down ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... thrilling illusion of the hour. When the others returned to their seats or promenaded the brilliant rooms they escaped alone and unobserved into the conservatory. Here they beheld the greatest possible contrast to the desolate wintry waste without. The air was heavy and languorous with the odour of tropic flowers. The music, almost oppressive in the crowded parlours, melted deliciously upon the ear as they wandered away. Helene, when she noticed that they were quite alone, suffered a vague alarm. She told herself in one moment that it ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... touch you, I cannot pay you my dues in return for your priceless gifts. Thus my love is incomplete. Sometimes in the enigmatic depth of your sad look, in your playful words mocking at their own meaning, I gain glimpses of a being trying to rend asunder the languorous grace of her body, to emerge in a chaste fire of pain through a vaporous veil of smiles. Illusion is the first appearance of Truth. She advances towards her lover in disguise. But a time comes when she throws off her ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... with the music or as model?" asked Mademoiselle Emilie, the girl-artist from Madrid, with black hair dyed golden, who always swore by Murillo's Virgins, and who did her work dreamily, as if the motions of her hands were timed to the languorous rhythm of some far-off, daintily-touched guitar beneath vine-wreathed balcony ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... species of way-freight, which whiled away most of the day at a speed fittingly respectful to the scenery about us. With every station the population grew perceptibly more lazy. The alert, eager attitude of the plateau gave place to a languorous lethargy evident in both faces and movements. People seemed less sulky than those higher up, more communicative and approachable, but also, strangely enough, less courteous, apparently from laziness, a lack of the energy necessary ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... each strove for the mastery of the air. The land-breeze blows down through the pines, resinous, fragrant, cold, bringing breath-like memories of dim, dark woods shaded by myriad pine-needles. The breeze from the Gulf is warm and soft and languorous, blowing up from the south with its suggestion of tropical warmth and passion. It is strong and masterful, and tossed Annette's hair and whipped her skirts about her in ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... moustache and sudden pointed beard sloping inward; nor can one listen to the deep, tired, and ghostly voice slowly uttering the laborious ideas of his troubled mind with the somewhat painful pronunciation of the elocutionist (he makes chapell of Chapel); nor mark his languorous movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... of those days that come perhaps only in October—days of rich, languorous sunshine full of a mysterious contentment, days when the heart says, "My cup runneth over," and happy tears suddenly well to the eyes, as though from a deep overflowing sense of the goodness of God. It was really ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... when dewy flowers fresh-waked Filled the glad air with perfume languorous, And piping birds a pretty tumult made, Thrilling the day with blended ecstasy; When dew in grass did light a thousand fires, And gemmed the green in flashing bravery— Forth of her bower the fair Yolanda came, Fresh as the morn and, like the morning, young, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... with a sweet, languorous sense of perfect comfort. Heavy-lidded, she glanced about her. Ah! Once more she was in her own wide, gracious bed—of a different caste, of an entirely different race, from the second maid's paving-stone pallet, from that ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... at thirty-two, was still fair. Her face was thin, but her languorous eyes were expressive and her mouth delicate. A certain shadow about its corners may have meant rigidity of will or only a habit of introspection, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... met Lady Wilding for the first time. He found her what he afterward termed "a splendid animal," beautiful, statuesque, more of Juno than of Venus, and freely endowed with the languorous temperament and the splendid earthy loveliness which grows nowhere but under tropical skies and in the shadow of palm groves and the flame of cactus flowers. She showed him but scant courtesy, however, for she was but a poor hostess, and after dinner carried ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... little boys, was ever more knave than fool, and the trapper who was wily enough to ensnare him had achieved something notable. Augustus, when he realized that his fate was sealed, and his night's lodging settled, wisely made the best of things, and listened, with a languorous air of complete comprehension, to the incoherent babble concerning pigs and heroes, moles and bonfires, which served Harold for a self-sung lullaby. Yet it may be doubted whether Augustus was one of those rare ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... of the last days of July, cooled and freshened by a touch of rain and dropping back again to a languorous warmth. London looked at its summer best, rain-washed and sun-lit, with the maximum of coming and going in its ...
— When William Came • Saki
... here surrounded with roses and with that languorous lilt in her ear, Crystal felt as if she too were under the influence of some unseen Mesmer, who had lulled the activity of her brain into a kind of wakeful sleep even while her senses remained keenly, vitally on the alert. She knew, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy |
