"Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed, extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man's eyes; there was palsy in his trembling limbs; there was ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Many for you. Allons, camerados, we will drink together, O hand-in-hand! That tea-spoon, please, when you've done with it. What butter-colour'd hair you've got. I don't want to be personal. All right, then, you needn't. You're a stale-cadaver. Eighteen-pence if the bottles are returned. Allons, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... and requested something to read; he brought me the whole literary stock of his household, a Dutch family Bible, an almanac in the same language, and a number of old Paris newspapers. As I sat dozing over one of the latter, reading old news and stale criticisms, my ear was now and then struck with bursts of laughter which seemed to proceed from the kitchen. Every one that has travelled on the Continent must know how favorite a resort the kitchen of a country inn is to the middle and inferior order of travellers, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... known to many farmers. Those who wish to consult the remedies recommended against this, may refer to The Annals of Agriculture, and most other books on the subject. It is usual with farmers to mix the Wheat with stale urine or brine, and to dry it by sifting it with slaked lime, which has the effect of causing it to vegetate quickly, and to prevent the attacks of many insects when the seed is first put into the ground. This is considered ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... sufficient tables and benches to seat all patients. Boiled drinking water was accessible at all times. During the eight months the Hospital has been operating, over 3,872 pounds of grease, 2,138 pounds of bones and 8,460 pounds of broken and stale bread have been bartered with Russian peasants. In return, besides eggs, fish, veal and other vegetables over 32,600 pounds (902 poods) of potatoes have been received. Accompanying this report is a statement (a) of British rations (one week issue), (b) a statement of food barter (17 days) and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... bit stale lately," said Lord Algernon, "and I think is getting a little queer in his head. He has a trick of stopping and staring straight ahead, at times, when he seems to go off for a minute or two. There!" continued ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... mean-spirited action."—A. Murray cor. "There is, indeed, one form of orthography which is akin to the subjunctive mood of the Latin tongue."—Booth cor. "To bring him into nearer connexion with real and everyday life."—Philological Museum, Vol. i, p. 459. "The commonplace, stale declamation of its revilers would be silenced."—Id. cor. "She [Cleopatra] formed a very singular and unheard-of project."—Goldsmith cor. "He [William Tell] had many vigilant, though feeble-talented and mean-spirited enemies."—R. Vaux cor. "These old-fashioned people would level ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill—a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet—comatose, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... things have happened," said Mellish. "I won't say that Cashel Byron is getting stale; but I will say that his luck is too good to last; and I know for a fact that he's ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... three years as such before he was eligible for promotion to a lieutenancy. Unless an officer had family interest he often stuck there, and as often had to serve under one more favoured, who was not born when he himself was getting stale. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... was a union to distance every wonder of the kind.—The attachment of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax became commonplace, threadbare, stale in the comparison, exciting no surprize, presenting no disparity, affording nothing to be said or thought.—Mr. Knightley and Harriet Smith!—Such an elevation on her side! Such a debasement on his! It was horrible to Emma to think how it must sink him in the general opinion, to foresee ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... an ass. His jokes strike you as funny at first; but there's nothing in him, he's a mere hawker of stale puns; there's nothing but selfishness under his jesting exterior. I have no belief in him. Yet he is an old school friend; the only one of my twenty-eight classmates whose acquaintance I have kept up. Four are dead, twenty-three ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating her stale old riddle, the answer ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... recognized it as a newspaper sanctum," said he in his thin, piping voice. "No litter, no stale pipes lying about, no cursing and quarreling, no excitement whatever. The editorial room is the index to the workshop; I'll see if the mechanical department is kept ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... the Democratic minority of the committee, after examining Hoffman and Tweed, who disclaimed any knowledge of the transactions and affected to disbelieve the truth of the charges, pronounced the facts cited "stale slanders," and most of the witnesses "notorious swindlers, liars, and thieves," declaring that the fraudulent vote did not exceed 2,000, divided equally between the two parties. Moreover, it pronounced ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... familiar mendicant was a vender of printed ballads. These effusions were so stale, atrocious, and unsalable in their character, that it was easy to detect that hypocrisy, which—in imitation of more ambitious beggary—veiled the real eleemosynary appeal under the thin pretext of offering an equivalent. This beggar—an ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... a great deal, he reflected, one seldom enough, in our staid, our stale society, meets a person of whom one can say so much;—and again ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... try to restore the victims to life; only one recovered sufficiently to be released, and Prince brought it in again, quite dead, five minutes later. I shut the little casement window, but the room became so hot and stuffy, and suspicious fumes of stale beer and tobacco began to assert their presence, so that I found myself obliged to open it again. Sometimes the victim's bones were crunched close to my ear, and I found more than one feather in my hair in the morning. Never was any one so persecuted by a ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs, for the Parsee never ate anything but cake, and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could possibly hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited for the Rhinoceros to come out of the ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... of half a dozen young men, since grown into graver habits, with Foster—home again, and a link once more in the circle of his intimates—at its head. The negro airs were still the favorites; but the collection, from frequent repetition, at length began to grow stale. One night, as a revival measure for the club, and as an opportunity for himself, Foster hinted that, with their permission, he would offer for trial an effort of his own. Accordingly he set to work; and at their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... with Hagthorpe and Wolverstone over a pipe and a bottle of rum in the stifling reek of tar and stale tobacco of a waterside tavern, he was accosted by a splendid ruffian in a gold-laced coat of dark-blue satin with a crimson sash, a foot ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... of these ramblings Rogron picked up various bits of information about Provins, its inhabitants, their marriages, together with stale political news; all of which he narrated to his sister. Scores of times in his walks he would stop and say,—often to the same person on the same day,—"Well, what's the news?" When he reached home he ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... the English mind in its ordinary mechanical action. "Intelligence" is not necessarily "new", nor indeed is "News:" in the oldest dictionary I possess, Baret's Alvearie, 1573, I find "Olde newes or stale newes." A.E.B. is very positive that "news" is plural, and he cites the "Cardinal of York" to prove it. All that I can say is, that I think the Cardinal of York was wrong: and A.E.B. thought so too, when his object was not to confound ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... said the other. 'For scerceness they're better blowed than stale, which they're bound to ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... clothing for her natural growth and development. But scores of little girls go shivering to school every morning after a breakfast of bread and tea, they return numb with cold after a dinner of more bread and tea and they go home to a supper of the same with a piece of stale cake or a cookie to help out. Nature calls aloud for nourishment and there is no answer. The girl enters her teens, finds a "job," goes to work, hungry the long year through, fighting to win out over the cold in winter, and to endure the scorching days of summer. And her religion? ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... century, wonderful art thou indeed—wonderful, but wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like numerals than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare's theatre. The precepts of economy have pierced ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not in town, as the cattleman learned at Monte Joe's dance-hall, piled high with tables and chairs and reeking with the stench, left over from the previous night, of whiskey fumes and stale tobacco smoke. Monte Joe professed not to know where the puncher had gone, but as Trowbridge pressed him for information the voice of a woman, as shrill as the squawk of a parrot, floated down from the ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... endurance was diminishing. The frequent wettings, the shivering nights, the great changes of temperature, the stale and wretched food, the constant anxiety, were sapping their health and strength. On the tenth day of their wanderings in the Great Canon Glover ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... him the divinity is the Great First Cause. In this world of ours he can discern the working of a purposeful will, and confuses his mind with windy, worn-out ideals. Virtue, he says—but to what end repeat such stale old stuff?" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his spintries, sellaries, and slaves, Masters of strange and new commented lusts, For which wise nature hath not left a name. To this (what most strikes us, and bleeding Rome) He is, with all his craft, become the ward To his own vassal, a stale catamite: Whom he, upon our low and suffering necks, Hath raised from excrement to side the gods, And have his proper sacrifice in Rome: Which Jove beholds, and yet will sooner rive A senseless oak with ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... diamond stuck in the centre of a broad expanse of white shirt front. At the other end is the so-called stage, while scattered about indiscriminately are the tables and chairs. The air is filled—yea, reeking—with the fumes of bad whiskey, stale beer, and the odor of foul smelling cheap tobacco smoke, and through all this haze the would-be "show," goes on, and the applause is manifested by whistles, cat calls, the pounding of feet on the floor and glasses on the tables. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... or club, served by a foreign "chef," a Yorkshire pudding, as hard as a stale loaf of bread, is handed round in slabs with the so-called "roast" beef. It is not roasted: it is baked beef, and the pudding is an ill-tasting baked mess, also. Nowhere in London in public or private house do I ever see the properly cooked article. True Yorkshire pudding can only be ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... placed their order for May-day blossoms. The confectionery they decided to leave until the day before the basket hanging, so that it would be perfectly fresh. "Don't insult your friends by handing 'em stale ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... misery; whether he be able or not, it is expected from him, if there comes a Brief to town, for the Minister to cast in his mite will not satisfy! unless he can create sixpence or a shilling to put into the box, for a stale [lure], to decoy in the rest of the parish. Nay, he that hath but L20 or L30 [ L60 to L90 now] per annum, if he bids not up as high as the best in the parish in all acts of charity, he is counted carnal and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... by four stones. Ropes stretched across these, and covered by a blanket, constituted the bed. A board, of which one end rested on the bedstead and the other was thrust between the logs that composed the wall, sustained the stale fragments of a rye-loaf, and a cedar bucket kept entire by withes instead of hoops. In the bucket was a little water, full of droppings from the roof, drowned insects, and sand. A basket or two neatly made, and a hoe, with a stake thrust into it by way of handle, made ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the very next time Elizabeth said au reservoir to her, she would work in an allusion to Elizabeth's own reservoir of corned beef, tongue, flour, bovril, dried apricots and condensed milk. She would have to frame some stinging rejoinder which would "escape her" when next Elizabeth used that stale old phrase: it would have to be short, swift and spontaneous, and therefore required careful thought. It would be good to bring "pop" into it also. "Your reservoir in the garden-room hasn't gone 'pop' again, I hope, darling?" was the first draft that occurred to her, but that was not sufficiently ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... of stale good beer, not porter. Three quarters of a pound fresh blue Aleppo galls, beaten. Four ounces of copperas. Four ounces of gum Arabic in powder. Two ounces ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... bill of health, I had gone to bed early the previous night wishing to prepare for the ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go "stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself, the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you receive another horrible ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the expectations of General Grant in the new command I was about to undertake, adding that thus far the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac had not done all it might have done, and wound up our short conversation by quoting that stale interrogation so prevalent during the early years of the war, "Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?" His manner did not impress me, however, that in asking the question he had meant anything beyond a jest, and I parted from ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellar for anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls here and there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open to the night, smelling of stale ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... through the narrow streets, telling himself a fairy story of how it all might be, with a little house of their own and she waiting for him on the wharf when his ship made fast; a story that never grew stale in the repetition, but which, please God, would come true in the end, with Florence his wife, and all his doubtings ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... feet The first of all, and, drawing near thy lady, Remove her chair and offer her thy hand, And lead her to the other room, nor suffer longer That the stale reek of viands shall offend Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... strings of other people's hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say "I am misunderstood," or "I have become second-rate," because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... give each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all his energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisher rested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that the fresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones. I never knew this to happen, and I must class it with the superstitions of the trade. It may be so in other and more constant countries, but in our fickle republic, each last book has to fight its own ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from night to day and on to night again. It was a veritable feast of lanterns, and not until the last one had burned to the socket and the wine-vats were empty and the studio strewn with unrecognizable debris and permeated with odors stale, flat and unprofitable, did the revels cease. Paul came to dine; he remained three days; he had not yet worn out his welcome, but he had resolved, as was his wont at intervals, to withdraw from the world, and so he returned to the Eyrie,—which was ever his initial step toward the accomplishment ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... appear! Where was his common sense, his "gumption," as old Robert Williamson would have said? Naturally a man liked to look at a pretty face. But was that any reason why he should feel as if life were flat, stale, and unprofitable simply because he could not look at it? He called himself a fool and went home in a petulant mood. Arriving there, he plunged fiercely into solving algebraical equations and working out geometry exercises, determined to put ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the most religious sentiment of which man is capable: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... he drops his pretty head And seems to be dispirited, And then his little mistress says: "Poor Dickie misses his chickweed, Or else I've fed him musty seed As stale as last year's oranges!" But all the time I wonder If we half comprehend In sweet song-words The thought of birds, Or why so oft their raptures In sudden ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... old gentleman who was fast asleep in an easy-chair. He went into the billiard-rooms, in the vague hope that some exciting game might be going on: there was not a soul in the place, the gases were down, and an odor of stale smoke pervaded the dismal chambers. Should he go to the theatre? His sitting there would be a mockery while this vague and terrible fear was present to his heart. Or go down to see Ingram, as had been his wont in previous hours of trouble? He dared not go near ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... honourable of the self-raised princes of the age, had conspired to make him despond of the success of noble, as he recoiled from that of selfish aspirations. And the dreamy melancholy which resulted from his ill-starred love, yet more tended to wean him from the stale and hackneyed pursuits of the world. His character was full of beauty and of poetry—not the less so in that it found not a vent for its emotions in the actual occupation of the poet! Pent within, those emotions diffused themselves over all his ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... found, in its physical aspects, to be typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated, underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas of stale drink and cheap perfume. As we entered a wrangle was going on among a group of young Frenchmen picturesquely attired as art students—almost a sure sign that they were not art students. An undersized girl dressed in a shabby black-and-yellow frock was doing a Spanish dance on a cleared space in ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... been stationary. Also I called attention to the fact that I no longer ate so heavily as once I had. Not that I wished actually to decry my appetite. It had been a good friend to me and not for worlds would I slander it. I have a sincere conviction that age cannot wither nor custom stale my infinite gastric juices. Never, I trust, will there come a time when I shan't relish my victuals or when I'll feel disinclined to chase the last fugitive bite around and around the plate until I overtake it. But I presented the claim, which was quite true, that I was not the consumer, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... moved through her time. Hugging this melody of Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater. Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge. Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder on the air and caking the breathing. Open dressing-room ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... be getting back to Willett," said Mount quietly. "As for me, my errand is done, and the strange, fishy smells of New York town stifle me. I'm stale and timid, and I like not the shape of the gallows yonder. My health requires the half-light of the woods, Mr. Renault, and the friendly shadows which lie at hand like rat-holes in a granary. I've drunk all the ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... expensive, isn't it?" said Dick, regarding his two-shilling-piece ruefully. "And I'm afraid it looks a little stale, too." ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... done man, but he went on. When he was going through a wood further on, two men came out to him, one from each side of the road, and they took hold of the bridle of the horse and led it on between them. They were old stale men with frieze clothes on them, and the old fashions. When they came out of the wood he found people as if there was a fair on the road, with the people buying and selling and they not living people at all. The old men took him through the crowd, and then ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... library of The Crags, the light of dawn stole in through the windows and turned the brilliant light of the lamps into a pale glow. The odor of stale flowers was all about. Mrs. Wellington, with a headache, stood in the doorway. Her husband sat in an armchair with legs outstretched, smoking about his fortieth cigar. Sara Van Valkenberg stood in the middle of the floor. She had been speaking at great length and ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... not build a house, because a den under a cedar's roots is as safe and warm. He never builds a dam, because there are deep places in the river where the current is too swift to freeze. He finds tender twigs much juicier, even in winter, than stale bark stored under water. As for his telltale tracks in the snow, his wits must guard him against enemies; and there is the open stretch of river to ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... words in the previous pages of your note; but it may be my muddle. I see clearly that any satisfaction which Pan may give will depend on the constitution of each man's mind. If you have arrived already at any similar conclusion, the whole will of course appear stale to you. I heard yesterday from Wallace, who says (excuse horrid vanity), "I can hardly tell you how much I admire the chapter on 'Pangenesis.' It is a POSITIVE COMFORT to me to have any feasible explanation of a difficulty that has always ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the Union"; "our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country";—these are the mottoes, old, stale, hackneyed, and threadbare as they may have seemed when employed as the watchwords of an electioneering campaign, but clothed with a new power, a new significance, a new gloss, and a new glory, when uttered as the battlecries of a nation ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... inasmuch as his teeth were not chattering from fear — oh, dear no! oh, certainly not! he marvelled how the 'messieurs' could think of such a thing — but from the chill air of the morning. As for the rag, if monsieur could have but tasted its evil flavour, being compounded indeed of a mixture of stale paraffin oil, grease, and gunpowder, monsieur himself would have spat it out. But he did nothing of the sort; he determined to keep it there till, alas! his stomach 'revolted', and the rag was ejected in an access ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... imitation of tiling, greasy as to its walls and ceiling, and boasting an atmosphere rank with a reek compounded of a dozen elements, in their number alcohol, cheap perfumery, cooked meats, the sweat of unclean humanity, and stale tobacco smoke. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive, supported by such stale admiration. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... and Grace were sitting on the stoop of the boarding-house. On the upper steps, in their shirt-sleeves, were the other boarders; so the bride and bridegroom spoke in whispers. The air of the cross street was stale and stagnant; from it rose exhalations of rotting fruit, the gases of an open subway, the smoke of passing taxicabs. But between the street and the hall bedroom, with its odors of a gas-stove and a kitchen, the choice ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... hard—perhaps harder than ever. She would hear him, across the garden, going over and over a passage, as if he never would be satisfied. But his playing seemed to her to have lost its fire and sweep; to be stale, and as if disillusioned. It was all as though he had said to himself: "What's the use?" In his face, too, there was a change. She knew—she was certain that he was drinking secretly. Was it his failure ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... states of the Peninsula,—halted every other mile to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,—the present railroad period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the methods ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... colored views thrown upon the screen, Lilly sang from a dark stage into the warm musk and stale linen-smelling theater, a ballad as slow and sweet ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... as truth in Kester's words when he said that Grannie had told them the story of Janet's Cove the preceding week. The truth was that she had told them that tale every week since winter set in, but nothing could stale its freshness for them. Besides, did not Grannie introduce surprising variations of narrative every time she told it, so that it never ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner—for we'll be taking side-trails where no car could venture—and pike off for a whole blessed day of care-free ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... them! For long voyages, army and navy use, mining, lumbering, and hunting outfits, they are simply invaluable! For all classes of consumers, they are cheaper, cleaner and more wholesome than the ordinary stale and wilted vegetables, for sale in the city markets! We have named these cubes, 'Solaris Vegetable Concentrates,' a title which we have copyrighted. The packages readily wholesale at 75 cents, to be retailed at one dollar. ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... any friends, and he remained in the little hotel in Jermyn Street, filled at this time of the year principally by Americans, and he dined alone there—dined well, and smoked a long cigar. Then he went for a walk. London at the beginning of August was not empty, but stale, crowded, untidy, hot—unlike itself. He tried not to think of the garden of the Green Gate. Suddenly, with a stab, he imagined Harry and Valentia; probably now he was telling her that the engagement was broken off, and she was smiling and happy. Well! it was what he wished. Since what ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... connexion she had always been moved, by the admitted grossness of her avidity, the way the hospitality of the Ververs met her convenience and ministered to her ease, destitute as the Colonel had kept her, from the first, of any rustic retreat, any leafy bower of her own, any fixed base for the stale season now at hand. She had explained at home, she had repeatedly reexplained, the terms of her dilemma, the real difficulty of her, or—as she now put it—of their position. When the pair could do nothing else, in Cadogan ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... deluged in vinegar, and gobble it up like a famished dog. On either of these unsavory dishes, with a biscuit and a glass or two of Rhine wine, he cared not how sour, he called feasting sumptuously. Upon my observing he might as well have fresh fish and vegetables, instead of stale, he laughed ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... now at hand. The sunlit air invited to the out-door life. The windows and doors of Villa Elsa, which was stale and stuffy from the closed-up winter, stood open and the inmates came out of their hibernation, shook themselves and welcomed the warmth and lack-luster brightness. The lindens and plane trees and shrubberies began to hug the place under their cosy leafage. Herr Bucher's ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... his soul should have gone straightway to the devil if he had sent them any but the best. The beer served at noblemen's tables was commonly a year old, and sometimes two, but this age was not usual. In households generally it was not under a month old, for beer was liked stale if it were not sour, while bread was desired as new as possible so ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... strange how custom can stale our sense of the importance of everyday occurrences, of the ability required for the performance of homely, everyday services? Think of the power of organization required to prepare a meal and place it upon the table ...
— The Suffrage Cook Book • L. O. Kleber
... frais," M. De Banville says himself. He admits that his lighter works, the poems called (in England) vers de societe, are a sort of intellectual cigarette. M. Emile de Girardin said, in the later days of the Empire, that there were too many cigarettes in the air. Their stale perfume clings to the literature of that time, as the odour of pastilles yet hangs about the verse of Dorat, the designs of Eisen, the work of the Pompadour period. There is more than smoke in M. De Banville's ruling inspiration, his ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... give you an idea of my perseverance with difficulties. Follow the example, and you'll soon conquer those young limbs. Now, good morning to you, Price, good morning!' and Philip was hastily bowed out of the stuffy little sanctum, with its piles of MSS. and its odours of stale tobacco. ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... and examined it to find how much it had been cut. He issued them slips, which they added as part of the contributions. "Good work—you, too, Gordon. Best week in the territory for a couple of months. I guess the citizens like you, the way they treat you." He laughed at his stale joke, and Gordon was willing to laugh with him. The credit on the dope had paid for most of the contributions. For once, he had money to show for ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... account of a mythical "German plot," which Lord Wimbourne never heard of, which Sir Bryan Mahon, Commander-in-Chief, told Lord French he flatly disbelieved in, and which, when, after more than two years, the documents are produced, proves to be a stale rehash of negotiations before the Easter Week Rising, with some sham "German Irish Society" in Berlin. On this pretext the Sinn Fein leaders, Messrs de Valera and Griffith (whom there is not a shadow of proof to connect with the German plot), were ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Beth, believing that she understood horse language. She took a stale piece of candy out of her pocket, and gave it to Dolly. This attention sealed a never-ending friendship between ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... great, old-world eyes; upon which, like a clayey monster refusing to be informed with heavenly fire, he rolled to the right of his chair and to the left, and pitched forward, and insisted upon being inanimate. Brought at last to a condition of stale consciousness, he looked at his master long, and uttered surprisingly "Farmer, there's queer things going on in this house," and then relapsed to a combat with Mrs. Sumfit, regarding the candle; she saying that it was not to be entrusted to him, and he sullenly contending ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... combining with those of the violent class, the ultimate tendencies of which are criminal. They are likewise conceited, assuming, and clannish. Any person distinguished by them, will cling to old associations, perpetuate the status of existing parties, be a stickler for creed, ceremonies, and stale opinions, and adhere to ancient orthodoxy in medicine and religion. The animal faculties, since they are staid and regular, are naturally antagonistic to genius, sensibility, and originality. Their mental tendencies have been fairly described and their ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... again, and not think of anything serious or unpleasant. Already, as you know, I am half English; there is something to build upon. Ah, and this is the sentimental hour, just when the sun begins to touch the horizon line of the stale, weary old earth and turns it into rosy gold and heals its troubles and its weariness. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... when Ski-ing is not possible or when a few hours on the rink or toboggan run offer a relief to a stale Ski runner. It is usually only the really keen enthusiast of some years' standing who can spend the whole day waxing or oiling his Skis, or poring over a ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... entirely recovered. It was hoped that his life in the East would be beneficial, but it proved otherwise. Meanwhile, the Civil War was raging in the United States, but the news concerning it was very stale long before it reached us. We did not receive the particulars of the battle of Bull Run, for example, until three months after its occurrence. In view of the turbulent state of affairs at home, the government thought it important that Mr. Gouverneur should remain at his ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... burden-bearer, who had comforted the secluded Mother. He had brought back to the flat the strenuousness of business. But inactivity was hard on his merry heart; he fretted and fussed at having nothing to do; he raged at having to throw away unused bread because it was growing stale. It was Mother who reminded him that they couldn't expect business before ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... practically. But they would be superfluous. Power: unlimited, absolute power was his goal. With his end achieved he could establish an autocracy, a dynasty of science: whatever he chose. Oh, it was a rich-hued, golden, glowing dream; a dream such as men's souls don't formulate in these stale days—not our kind of men. The Teutonic mysticism—you understand. And it ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "Some stale sponge cake is cut in slices less than an inch thick, and these are spread generously with jam and arranged on a crystal dish, blanched and chopped with Clara and Jo and all their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... still, as you know I might find the detention inconvenient, I shall therefore sail early in the speronara. Your letters may be addressed to me as before, but bear in mind that your information is generally too stale. Now I will get a little rest, if you will show me ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... been with you. Next time I'll volunteer. You had action—a run for your money. That's what I enlisted for. Standing still—doing nothing but wait—that drives me half mad. My years of football have made action necessary. Otherwise I go stale in mind and body.... Last night, before you went on that scouting trip, I had been on duty two hours. Near midnight. The shelling had died down. All became quiet. No flares—no flashes anywhere. There was a luminous kind of glow in the sky—moonlight through thin clouds. I had to ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... black fellows and where the net was; the black fellows closing in behind, followed quickly. Poor Noorunglely floundered into the net, up rushed a black fellow and, seizing her, wrung her neck. Having secured her, they would next secure her eggs; that they might be a trifle stale was a ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... as it took almost my last dollar to pay for deck passage thereon, I lived on some small cakes of my own baking, which I carried in a bag. I was now in a sad predicament unless I should connect at Lake Bennett with some one who would carry my outfit back to Skagway on credit. I ate my stale cakes and drank lake water, and thus fooled the little Jap steward out of two dollars. It was a ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... was never monotonous or stale. There was always Pisah, the fish, to be caught in the many streams and the little lakes, and Sabor, with her ferocious cousins to keep one ever on the alert and give zest to every instant that one ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was laid for them in a small private room, which smelt principally of stale tobacco and stale chimney soot. The water-bottle on the table was encrusted with a white enamel advertisement of somebody's whisky, and had another such recommendation legible on its base. The tray used by the girl in attendance was enamelled ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... Christianity, those deep and mystical truths underlying the teachings of Christ, than the child at his mother's knee. I have been to your great cathedrals and churches. I saw only lip-service and routine. I heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... tablespoonful each of butter and flour, add one cupful of milk, and cook until thick, stirring constantly. Add half a cupful of stale bread crumbs, a teaspoonful of grated onion, a tablespoonful of Worcestershire Sauce, a teaspoonful of minced parsley, and the yolks of three eggs, well-beaten. Add one cupful of flaked salmon, mix thoroughly, and fold in the salmon, and bake in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven for forty-five ...
— How to Cook Fish • Olive Green
... wall of the quay, abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... must pity my horrible tale. I'm an object of sorrow, I'm looking quite stale. I gone up my trade selling Pink's Patent Pills To go hunting gold in ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... passing the spot where Carmona had struck at me, and the chapel where I had taken Monica. The stones were slippery as the floor of a ballroom, with wax dropped from innumerable candles, and the air was heavy with the smoke of stale incense. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of stifling heat. A steamship was rolling in a heavy swell, under winds that were as hot as gusts from an open furnace. Under its decks a man lay in an atmosphere of fever and the sickening odour of bandages and stale air. Above the throb of the engines and the rattle of the rudder chain he heard a step going by his open door, and he called in a feeble voice that was cheerful and almost merry, but yet the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... and then kept on going until we reached a big city where there was a brewery, but they had set fire to the whole city before they left. We got some beer and wine just the same. It was a little stale, but it was fine. The Huns' warehouses were all fixed for the winter and the boys got cigars and cigarettes, but I was a little too late to get in ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... some biscuits and stale cake, looked up at them inquiringly, as much as to say, "Aren't we going home now?" Visions of his comfortable bed rose before him, and he felt very inclined for a noon-day nap. But the children told him he was ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... make its appearance than a number of critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into history. The espousal of sexual freedom would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the effort to place Winesburg, ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... London tradesmen were the greatest rogues alive. Secondly, a pottle of strawberries, which she had bought with her own money to grace the tea-table with the only fruit Miss Leaf cared for, had turned out a large delusion, big and beautiful at top, and all below small, crushed, and stale. She had thrown it indignantly, pottle and all, into ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... we met again for prayer, when I found that 10s. 6d. more had come in since the morning. With this 1l. 10s. 6d. we were able to buy, even this Saturday evening, the usual quantity of bread, (as it might be difficult to get stale bread on Monday morning,) and have some money left. God be praised, who gave us grace to come to the decision not to take any bread today, as usual, nor to buy any thing for which we cannot pay at once. We were very comfortable, thankfully taking this money out of our Father's hands, as a proof ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... poached egg with stale, yeast-made, wholemeal bread and nut butter, with lettuce or other salad food. No ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... the luncheon was finished the party returned to the Exposition. There was such a dense crowd in the galleries, it seemed impossible to penetrate it. An odor of perspiring humanity, a stale smell of old gowns and coats, made an atmosphere at once heavy and sickening. No one looked at the pictures any more, but at faces and toilets, seeking out well-known persons; and at times came a great jostling of the ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... or twice and larger portions of each food. However, even the man in athletic training needs less food than is customary for men in training to take. If the foot ball teams would eat somewhat less than they do and a smaller proportion of meat, they would be much less likely to "train stale." ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... I could I nould believe your tales and fables stale and trite, Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the dulld ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... relation, when they take the trouble to praise you. In general, it is their purpose to get the person praised to puff away in return. To me their rank praises no more make amends for their bad poetry than tainted butter would pass off stale fish. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Eastern Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was always filled with a stale ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... had the hills and valley, the birds, the flowers, the clouds, the sun, he had the Rampio, he had Annunziata, he even had Annunziata's uncle; and with all this he had a sense of having stepped out of a world that he knew by heart, that he knew to satiety, a world that was stale and stuffy and threadbare, with its gilt rubbed off and its colours tarnished, into a world where everything was fresh and undiscovered and full of savour, a great cool blue and green world that from minute to minute opened up new perspectives, made new promises, brought to pass new surprises. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... does not always make an editor. Many of our editors grow discouraged over their failure to arouse a support to their journals, blaming the race for non-appreciation, when the fault lies with themselves. Do they give their readers news? If a local sheet, they deal in stale generalities. If a general sheet, they confine themselves to locals of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... silent, yet from Adoree's parlor issued the sound of light fingers upon piano-keys. Adoree entered, to find Campbell Pope, with collar loosened and hair on end, seated at the instrument. The air within the room was blue and reeking with the odor of stale tobacco-smoke, and the ash-receiver at his elbow was piled high with burnt offerings, one of which was now sending an evil-smelling streamer toward ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... dear, nothing of the kind—a fresh egg! Fresh eggs are worth their weight in gold. We have a stale egg, if you don't ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... prints on the walls. There was a lavish display, however, of bottles and glasses, and several shelves were littered with newspapers in different languages. Acetylene lamps hung from the flat ceiling. An odour of stale tobacco and alcohol pervaded the premises. Flies were ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... he changed Lashly for P.O. Evans, and then they seemed to get on better. At lunch-time they discussed the difficulties that the second party was having, and several reasons for them were put forward. One was that the team was stale, another that all the trouble was due to bad stepping and want of swing, and yet another was that the first's party's sledge pulled much more ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... Breathing the stale and stuffy air Of office or consulting room, Our thoughts will wander back to where We heard the ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Quid plura meant. He snorted. "Hoo! Stale! It means, what are you crying about? naturally. Who said it? That letter? Who's it from? Mr. Urquhart, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels, said when she was asked what was to be done with him, "Take the eels out and set him again," so Harris and Douglas have shown a disposition to take the eels out of that stale fraud by which they gained Harris's election, and set the fraud again more than once. On the 9th of July, 1856, Douglas attempted a repetition of it upon Trumbull on the floor of the Senate of the United States, as will appear from the appendix of the Congressional ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... from a stale cake, cut them in shapes, dip them in milk, then fry them in butter; spread jam or marmalade on the top of each, and ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... was old and stale, it was to be taken away, and new and warm put in its place, to show that God has but little delight in the service of his own people when their duties grow stale and mouldy. Therefore he removed his old, stale, mouldy church of the Jews from before him, and set in their rooms upon the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... hurry along in pairs, with their first coat carefully brushed, and the white trousers of last Sunday plentifully besmeared with dust and ink. It evidently requires a considerable mental struggle to avoid investing part of the day's dinner-money in the purchase of the stale tarts so temptingly exposed in dusty tins at the pastry-cooks' doors; but a consciousness of their own importance and the receipt of seven shillings a-week, with the prospect of an early rise to eight, comes to their aid, and they accordingly put their hats ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... by his Chief. He made his way thither, somewhat dubious as to the thrill of his achievement, aware of a shadow about him, the ghost of yesterday's joy, which made all success save the intimate personal one that he most craved, flat, stale, and unprofitable. In the darkness of the street he was aware, too, that he was being observed and followed, but he went boldly toward his destination, sure that as a member of the staff of the British Embassy, his person at least partook of the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... be pleasant to fancy that England was working out, in isolation, an interesting and independent art; but clearly she is doing no such thing. There is no live tradition, nothing but fashions as stale as last week's newspaper. All that is alive is a private schoolboy rivalry, an ambition to be cock of the walk or to ape the cock, to be primus inter pares or amico di primus. There is no live ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... sleepy porter, who with the utmost gruffness produced some lukewarm coffee, with stale, dry slices of over-night bread, and flavoured the whole with an ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... dim with tobacco-smoke and redolent of stale beer. At the far end a small stage with faded red hangings. The card read No. 7, and the programme informed me that the turn was "A Bouquet of Ballads." A slight, fair-haired girl appeared on the stage. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the Worcestershire sauce is left out by braggarts who aver that they can take it or leave it. And, in these degenerate days, when it comes to substitutions for the original beer or stale pale ale, we find the gratings of great Cheddars wet down with mere California sherry or even ginger ale—yet so far, thank goodness, no Cokes. And there's tomato juice out of a can into the Rum Turn Tiddy, and sometimes celery soup in place of milk ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... of a stormy day, fills the edifice. Here the rustling of stoles and the muttering of prayers suggest incantation rather than worship; the organ has a hollow, sepulchral sound of lamentation; and there is a spirit of mystery and terror in the stale, clammy air. The place resembles an antechamber of Purgatory much more than of Heaven. The mummy of Don Jaime II., son of the Conquistador and first king of Majorca, is preserved in a sarcophagus of black marble. This is the only historic monument in the Cathedral, unless the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes suddenly, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... moment at the entrance dazzled by the effect of the light on her eyes, which were smarting with the fog. She found herself looking into a long, narrow, taproom, smelling of stale beer and tobacco fumes, and lit by oil lamps suspended in wire frames from the raftered ceiling. The windows were curtained in cheerful red rep and the place was pleasantly warmed by a stove in one corner. By the stove was a small door apparently leading into the bar, for beside it was a ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... self-government, by attempting any longer to exercise it; they ought to keep their unworthy hands entirely off from the cause of republican liberty, if they are capable of being the victims of artifices so shallow, of tricks so stale, so threadbare, so often practised, so much worn out, on serfs ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... very heartily and sincerely for this favour, I shall just say a word or two in answer to yours. And so you really think you have some morality on hand, a little stale or so but still sound, which you can bestow with advantage upon me? You imagine you can tell me something I never heard before? Now have you sincerely so much vanity, Louisa? Be frank. You acknowledged I have crossed rivers, seas, and mountains; but you are afraid ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... out of countenance, and are masters of all the arts of insolence. Society cannot make gentlemen out of them do what it will. As John Hibbs would say, "they were not brought up to it young." They learn to love excitement, and finding even the reckless whirl of fashion too stale for them, seek gratification out of their own homes. They become constant visitors at the great gaming-houses, and are the best customers of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of perry or stale beer, put to it one ounce of isinglass, beat well and cut or pull'd to small pieces; put it to the perry or beer, and let it steep three or four days. Keep whisking it together, or else the glass will ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... metaphysical realm consisted in nothing more than creatures of fancy and heavenly things at the precise time when real beings and earthly things were beginning to concentrate all interest upon themselves. Metaphysics had become stale. Helvetius and Condillac were born in the same year that Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great French metaphysicians of ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... which he is one of the greatest masters in our language. They are so close to life as all men know it, that the careless reader, as we have already seen, is apt to take them for platitudes; but there is all the difference between the stale superficiality which coldly repeats what only its ears have heard, and these sayings of Johnson heated to new energy in the fires of conscience, thought and experience. "I have already enjoyed too much," says the Prince in Rasselas; "give me something ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... fair repute whom such threats would frighten. If you choose to thwart me in what I always held my last resource for meat and drink, I must stand in the dock even, perhaps, on a heavier charge than one so stale. Each for himself; do your worst—what does ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time to spare. The ship sailed from Southampton in forty eight hours and I had only just arranged to accompany Lord Mountmorres on a tour in the Congo Free Stale. He was going out for the purpose of discovering the true condition of affairs in that country and of writing articles thereupon for the Globe but incidentally hoped to have some big game shooting. After one has read much about a country it is always interesting ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... another. Let not the solemn pretender to decorum, who, in proportion to his demureness, is apt to be worse than others, with owlish visage quote, "frailty, thy name is woman," or, "e'er those shoes were old," or whatever musty apothegms besides, as stale and senseless. The name of Frailty is no more woman than man, and old shoes have no business at weddings. Stand aside O censorious reader, (I desire not thy acquaintance,) while I whisper to both maid and widow, what, probably, they have often pondered—that ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance. Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... the Order, in season and out of season, the poems by which, during his first Irish summer, he was possessed. There came a time when he had, as he believed, put away childish things, that, returning to these venerable trumpet-blasts, he asked himself, in the arrogance of youth, how these stale metaphors, these conventional phrases, these decorations as meretricious as stage jewellry, and metres that cantered along, as he told himself, like solemn old circus-horses, could have had the power to shake his voice and fill ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... left the horizon barren as before; night was falling; without any hope now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale and outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they had ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... stamp, that is, to make an impression and a stamp; stow, to stow, to bestow, steward, or stoward; stead, steady, stedfast, stable, a stable, a stall, to stall, stool, stall, still, stall, stallage, stage, still, adjective, and still, adverb: stale, stout, sturdy, stead, stoat, stallion, stiff, stark-dead, to starve with hunger or cold; stone, steel, stern, stanch, to stanch blood, to stare, steep, steeple, stair, standard, a stated measure, stately. In all these, and perhaps some others, st ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... Hand and Soul. I send you one with this, as printed to go in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless, more poem than story). I printed it since in the Fortnightly—and, I believe, abolished one or two extra sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it's stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which must be new, for I only wrote it ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... strenuous social programme. The milk of a mother who persists in eating irregularly, or who willfully caters to an appetite which craves the rich, highly seasoned articles of diet, or who attempts to satisfy a legitimate hunger by drinking large quantities of stale tea or coffee and eating bread, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... sure," said the restaurant keeper. "The man who runs the hotel, Mr. Brown, had a lot of trouble with him because he wouldn't pay his bill—said it was too high. Then he came here once and said the meat wasn't fresh and the bread was stale and sour. I came close to pitching him out. Don't let him walk over you—if ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... drones hive not with me, Therefore I part with him; and part with him To one that I would have him help to waste His borrow'd purse.—Well, Jessica, go in; Perhaps, I will return immediately; Do as I bid you, Shut doors after you: Fast bind, fast find; A proverb never stale in thrifty mind. ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... presentations call forth interest and attention, repetition, by habituating the nervous arcs, will tend to deaden interest and attention. For this reason the story, first heard with interest and attention, becomes stale by too much repetition. The new toy fails to interest the child after the novelty has worn off. It must be noted, however, that while repetition usually lessens interest, yet when any set of experiences are repeated many times, instead of lessening interest ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... [poor I am but his stale] The word stale, in our authour, used as a substantive, means, not something offered to allure or attract, but something vitiated with use, something of which the best part has been ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the Cardinals ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... and the picturesque breakwater. I do so wish that you and he and I did not suffer so much, but could be at least moderately happy. I am sure you would be glad if you knew even in this time of sorrow, when all seems stale, flat, unprofitable, the pleasure and interest I have had in reading your Vol. 3 ["Modern Painters"]. I study your character in your writings, and I find so much to elevate, to love, to admire—a sort of education for my poor old self—and ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... discuss the great questions of the day, to mold public opinion, and to overawe the Assembly. It was a period of darkness and of gloom; but there is something so intoxicating in the draughts of homage and power, that those who have once quaffed them find all milder stimulants stale and insipid. No sooner were M. and Madame Roland established in their city residence, than they were involved in all the plots and the counterplots of the Revolution. M. Roland was grave, taciturn, oracular. He had no brilliance of talent ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... 796. Cicero mentions the same proverb in his work De Officiis, B. i., ch. 10, substituting the word "injuria" for "malitia." "'Extreme law, extreme injustice,' is now become a stale proverb in discourse." The same sentiment is found ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... you get awful tired of being a jackass? Sometimes I want to kiss you, and sometimes I feel as if I had to kick you. I 'll compromise with you now by letting you bring me some more beer. This got all stale while your sister was here. I saw she did n't like it, and so I would n't drink any more for fear she 'd try to ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... fine bread crumbs, rub stale bread through a wire sieve. For this the hands should be ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... hauteur and detachment of her calling did not speak, but just glanced at a glass dish under a glass cover. There were two stale looking ham sandwiches. ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick |
