"Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dead to life once more? Poor fool," (the scoffer cries;) "Gull'd by the despot's hireling lie, with lore That gives for Truth a shadow;—life is o'er When the delusion dies!" "Tremblest thou," hiss'd the serpent-herd in scorn, "Before the vain deceit? Made holy but by custom, stale and worn, The phantom Gods, of craft and folly born— The sick world's solemn cheat? What is this Future underneath the stone? But for the veil that hides, revered alone; The giant shadow of our Terror, thrown On Conscience' troubled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... law. And here the devil, who is himself a kind of lawyer, for he devours his best friends, the devil I say chose these opportunities to vent his choicest malice. He did not set a lawyer to confound a lawyer: that were but a stale device. He humbled him out of the mouths of men who had occasionally read law-books, it is true: but who had read them without a lawyers' obliquity; and had enquired what was the simple unadulterated ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Stage together; so that the Devil, who, it must be confess'd, got infinitely by the Cheat, became bankrupt, and was oblig'd to set other Engines at work, as other Cheats and Deceivers do, who when one Trick grows stale, and will serve no longer, are forc'd ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... monetary crisis had taken place in the mercantile world, and for many days I had heard nothing spoken of but the vast losses which houses and individuals of high character and standing had incurred, and the bankruptcy with which the community had become suddenly threatened. The subject had grown stale and wearisome to me. It had little interest, in fact, for one whose humble salary of one hundred and fifty pounds per annum depended so little upon the great fluctuations of commerce, and I accordingly disposed myself for sleep as soon as the words bills, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... buzzard blinked at him from red-rimmed eyes, across the yellow wall a lizard ran for shelter, at his elbow a macaw compassing the circle of its tin prison muttered dreadful oaths. Outside, as the washerwomen beat their linen clubs upon the flat rocks of the river, the hot, stale air was spanked with sharp reports. In Camaguay theirs was the only industry, the only sign of cleanliness; and recognizing that another shirt had been thrashed into subjection and rags, Everett winced. No less visibly did his ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... staircase till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work—perhaps through life! A low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... disease from the dead men. They lie so close to the surface that a shell, anywhere near, brings them up. Three quarters of your casualties are from disease. The wound doesn't heal; it gets gangrene and tetanus from the stale old soil. And instead of having a good fighting man back in trim in a fortnight, you have a sick man in a London hospital for a couple of months, and ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... this hour the saloons were well patronized, for not only was the camp astir, but also the usual stale crowd of all-night loiterers was not yet sufficiently intoxicated to go to bed. As 'Poleon neared the first resort, the door opened and a woman emerged. She was silhouetted briefly against the illumination from within, and the pilot ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 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, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... stale here, will be new there a twelvemonth hence; and if a man of the town by chance come amongst them, he's reverenced for teaching them ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Arabian version, the man desires his wife to moisten some stale bread she has set before him for supper, and she refuses. After an altercation it is agreed that the one who speaks first shall get up and moisten the bread. A neighbour comes in, and, to his surprise, finds the couple dumb; he kisses the wife, but the man says nothing; he ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... rave at home, thou art so base a fool I cannot laugh at thee: Sirrah, this comes of couzening, home and spare, eat Reddish till you raise your sums again. If you stir far in this, I'le have you whipt, your ears nail'd for intelligencing o'the Pillory, and your goods forfeit: you are a stale couzener, leave my ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... so?" asked Dick thoughtfully. "It seems to me that we've done enough hard canoe work for to-day. We don't want to go stale ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... to write down a full description of the country immediately behind our present line. The Skipper, for fear we should become stale, allowed us plenty of leave. We would make little expeditions to Bethune for the baths, spend an afternoon riding round Armentieres, or run over to Poperinghe for a chop. We even arranged for a visit to the Belgian lines, but that excursion was forbidden by a new order. Right through the winter ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... jumpy as those of the rest. It isn't too bad cutting out smoking; a man can stand imagining the air is getting stale; but when every unconscious gesture toward cigarettes that aren't there reminds him of the air, and when every imagined stale stench makes him want a cigarette to relax, it gets ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... 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 scent of people. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... veil behind which the truth is hidden. At Bonn young Marx felt as if a blaze of light had flashed before him; and from that moment his studies, his companions, and the ambitions that he had hitherto cherished all seemed flat and stale. At night and in the daytime there was just one thing which filled his mind and heart—the beautiful vision of Jenny ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... health. The dreary, never-changing tale Of mortal maladies is worn and stale. You cannot charm, or interest, or please, By harping on that minor chord, disease. Say you are well, or all is well with you. And God shall hear your words and make ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... beautiful, how eloquent of peace and benediction, the scene that met him as he crossed the threshold of the great quadrangle! Some thousands of times his eyes had rested on it, yet how could it ever stale? ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... see—well, they see Battersea through a kind of a bright gaze. Then comes Sunday, and a dry throat, and waiting for the pubs to open. The streets are all a litter of dirty newspaper and cabbage-stumps, and worse; and the air's kind of sick and stale.' ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... in grace of composition, but frigid, and too evidently the work of an old man. The skill of the drawing and foreshortening is masterly as ever, but he does not appear to have referred to nature for the forms; and even Michael Angelo without nature became stale. Vasari says, after describing the frescoes without his customary enthusiasm, "They were his last productions in painting. He was seventy-five years old when he carried them to completion; and, as he informed me, he did so with great ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... you ever eat a piece of custard pie made out of stale eggs? Well, that is just about the same as the Carlsbad water, only the water is not baked with a raw crust on the bottom. But the doctor dad consulted was the peach. Dad asked him how much of the water he ought to drink, and ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... to a mortal conception of God—a distant glitter of candles beyond colossal pillars, a fragrance of stale incense, a silence in which the shadowy crimson of banners, suspended high in the nave, was like a soft blaring of celestial trumpets. Exaltation took hold of her as she recalled the miracles of orthodox faith and the ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the appearance of energy which momentarily satisfies a public demand that something shall be done. It also afforded Canning the peg on which to hang a grievance, and dexterously to prolong discussion until the matter became stale in public interest. By the irrelevancy of the punishment to the crime, and by the intrusion of secondary matters into the complaint, the "Chesapeake" issue, essentially clear, sharp, and impressive, became hopelessly confused with other considerations. Upon the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... arguments that never convince any one out of his former belief, and serve salutarily to raise the temper, cultivate caloric, and deepen convictions previously held; he must exchange criticisms and discuss standards with others, else he will be eternally making discoveries that are stale and unprofitable to the rest of the world; he will seek to reach men's souls through channels long dammed up, and his achievements will be marred by naive ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with poisonous miasma. Those picturesque villages are generally the perennial hotbeds of fever and ague, of squalid penury, sottish profligacy, dull discontent too stale for words. There is luxury in the park, wealth in the huge farm-steadings, knowledge in the parsonage: but the poor? those by whose dull labour all that luxury and wealth, ay, even that knowledge, is made possible—what ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety; other women Cloy th' appetites they feed; but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. 55 SHAKS.: Ant. and ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... more. Many of the houses are going to ruin. One is an Italian tenement. The others are inhabited by coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, mill-hands, and degenerate Yankees. The inn is a mere barroom. Sounds of revelry and the odor of stale beer come out of it. In front are teams of burden, abandoned, for a time, by their drivers, and sundry human signs of decay loafing in the shadow of the old lindens. Among them are the seedy remnants of a once noble race. They are fettered by 'rheumatiz' ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... have an answer to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men 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 unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... 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 ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... from the closet, dusted and distributed, there were paper cuffs to adjust, and there was sometimes a ten or fifteen-minute delay before the bills for the day began to come up. But the afternoons knew no such delays, the girls were tired, the air in the office stale. Every girl, consciously or not, sighed as she took ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the cant and knavery of the pretenders to religion, what room is there for him to lash the infamies of the law! On this point the French are babes in iniquity compared to us—a counsel prostituting himself for money is a matter with us so stale, that it is hardly food for satire: which, to be popular, must find some much more complicated and interesting knavery whereon to exercise ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... narrative. Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of Ambra. The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists. The poem recounts how the wood-nymph Ambra, beloved of Lauro, is pursued by the river-god Ombrone, one of Arno's tributary divinities, and praying to Diana in her hour of need, is by her transformed into a rock[44]. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... they can be more eloquent than any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men, and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee. Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life, L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of talking the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... sailors, eager to make up so many heads for the voyage, pack them aboard like sheep, and cross the Atlantic, either to New York or to Quebec, just as they have been able to entice a cargo to either port. Then come the horrors of a long voyage and short provisions, and high prices for stale salt junk and biscuit; and, at the end, if illness has been on board, the quarantine, that most dreadful visitation of all—for hope deferred ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... think we just go along with the bombers to catch a bit of fresh air and to keep from going stale. This mission promised to be our chance to crack the enemy, but unfortunately, Weather reports clouds up to our return point." The Old Man stared unwinkingly at his men. He read the disappointment in their faces. "We are hoping that for once ...
— A Yankee Flier Over Berlin • Al Avery
... obscure pedants, who are fond of distinguishing themselves by the fame of an adversary. So nice a taste have these judicious critics, in pretending to discover an author by his style and manner of thinking: not to mention the justice and candour of exhausting all the stale topics of scurrility in reviling a paper, and then flinging at a venture the whole load upon one who is entirely innocent; and whose greatest fault, perhaps, is too much gentleness toward a party, from whose leaders he ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... am reminded that there was but little machinery invented and employed on farms at the date of my narrative; and although our agriculturists, in spite of the stale jokes that have been fathered on them, were in the advance in this department as in others, it was only in the third or fourth year of their occupancy of the farm that they deemed it wise or prudent to purchase a horse rake, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... surrounded. In a brief time his kindly hospitality became a byword in the capital, and fabulous accounts of it were carried home at week ends to toiling wives and sons and daughters, to incredulous citizens who sat on cracker boxes and found the Sunday papers stale and unprofitable for weeks thereafter. The geraniums—the price of which Mr. Crewe had forgotten to find out—were appraised at four figures, and the conservatory became the hanging gardens of Babylon under glass; the functionary ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second—another yet the same—has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... be a familiar sight to see the saloons of Baxter, Mott and Mulberry streets filled with these boys. It was only a few years ago that they had their own theatre, yclept "The Grand Duke's Theatre," at 21 Baxter street, in the cellar under a stale beer dive, where really clever performances were given of an imitative character, by a company of boys; and which, by the way, was the only theatre which for years defied the efforts of the authorities to collect the license. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... despair. In her free hours she sat in their little shelter, her thin, freckly hands busy with the worsted masterpiece that she was working. Pee-wee, at least, had his appetite to console him, but she had no relish for the stale lemonade and melting, oozy taffy which stood pathetically ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... woman trudging from one indifferent editor to another peddling "space." And why not? Mae Smith had been young and good-looking once, also a local celebrity in her way when she had signed a column in a daily. But she had grown stale with the grind, and having no special talent or personality had been easily replaced when a new Managing Editor came. Now, though chipper as a sparrow, she was always in need of ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... 'Twill smell of stale tobacco smoke Ere many days I fear, And hear full many a rattling joke, And feel, ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... Jean-qhristophe's protege, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to aesthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable. If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year at our great universities we see small groups of young men, who, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... ways to cut down crashes was by making sure that the pilot was in good condition physically. Flight surgeons assigned to every camp were detailed to make a study of the very delicate relationship between a sick and stale pilot and the crash. It was discovered, for instance, that a man who went up not in the best condition multiplied by many times the ordinary hazards in the air. It became the duty of these surgeons to conduct recreation and ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... of tea, as too commonly found at our hotels and boarding-houses, are that it is made in every way the reverse of what it should be. The water is hot, perhaps, but not boiling; the tea has a general flat, stale, smoky taste, devoid of life or spirit; and it is served, usually, with thin milk instead of cream. Cream is as essential to the richness of tea as of coffee. We could wish that the English fashion might ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and read today, And stale the news tomorrow!— Upon the sands I build... I play! I play, and weep in sorrow: "Ah God, dear God! to find cessation From this soul-crushing occupation! If but one year ere Thou dost call me Thither, Lord, at this blighting ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... to say, but presume some one has been talking nonsense to him. Let Jim Perry go to Venezuela if he will—he may edit his 'Independent Gazette' amongst the Independents themselves, and reproduce his stale puns and politics without let or hindrance. But our poet is too good for a planter—too good to sit down before a fire made of mare's legs, to a dinner of beef without salt and bread. It is the wildest of all his meditations—pray tell him. The plague and Yellow Jack, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... to the bedroom occupied by Paul Drayton. He opened the door without knocking. It was dark within. Thin streaks of dusty sunlight shot from between a pair of heavy curtains. The air was noisome with dead tobacco smoke and the fumes of stale beer. Hugh's gorge rose, but he conquered ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... an affirmative reply to this question, she was doomed to disappointment. Disgusted with such paltry meanness, Clemence, who had pushed her plate away, unable to partake of the stale food, replied quietly, "I should say they ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... a good talking-to, a bracing-up all along the line. You are going stale, your standards are dropping, your ideals are getting dull, and the worst of it all is that when you do a poor job, or are careless about your dress and indifferent in your manner, you do not feel as troubled as you used to. You are not making good. This lethargy, this inertia, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... news, variety in the manner of stating them, and logical order in arranging and connecting them should be cultivated. The writing of good, plain English, rather than "smart" journalese should be the aim. Stale, vulgar and incorrect phrases, such as "Sundayed," and "in our midst," should be avoided. There are two tests in selecting a news item: (1) Will it interest readers? (2) Ought they to know it? When by these tests an item is proved to be real news that demands publication, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... he said to himself, as he walked, "wouldn't get any fun at all out of a case like this, but I do. That's the way to keep young. It's why I don't grow stale in this town. It is a small puddle for a toad of my size, but I hop around and keep ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... and seats in the form of the letter D. A desk and a spittoon were allowed to each honourable member,—the latter article being deemed as necessary as the former. Whether smoking was suffered during the hours of business or not I cannot tell, but the room smelt horribly of stale tobacco. Between fifty and sixty members were present, and never certainly, either in the Old World or in the New, did I see an assemblage of worse-looking men. They seemed fitted for any deeds of robbery, blood, and death. Several distinguished duellists ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... his best work Shakespeare has more faults than any other poet of England. He is in turn careless, extravagant, profuse, tedious, sensational; his wit grows stale or coarse; his patriotism turns to bombast; he mars even such pathetic scenes as the burial of Ophelia by buffoonery and brawling; and all to please a public ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... variety, subtlety, and suggestiveness; full of delightfulness enough for a lifetime, the lifetime of generations and generations of men; great art is to its true lovers like Cleopatra to Antony—"age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety." Indeed, when it is the greatest art of all, the art produced by the marvellous artist, the most gifted race, and the longest centuries, we find ourselves in presence of something ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... village, by one deriving his support from keep of dancing girls, by persons wedding before their elder brothers are wedded, by professional panegyrists and bards, and by those that are gamblers, the food also which is brought with the left hand or which is stale, the food which is mixed with alcohol, the food a portion of which has been already tasted, and the food that forms the remnant of a feast, should not be taken (by a Brahmana). Cakes, sugarcanes, potherbs, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... to change men's hearts, but to change their opinions. They take up the New Testament and read Christ's sermon on the Mount; but they find nothing in it to answer their purpose. It is but an ordinary production in their estimation. They pass on through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. How stale, how dull, how uninteresting these gospels, they are led to exclaim. They see but little beauty in the God-like teaching; or the inimitable example of Christ. His last agonies, his death on the cross is insufficient to move their callous hearts. ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... in it. She ought not to dine later than half-past one or two o'clock; she should eat, for dinner, either mutton or beef, with either mealy potatoes, or asparagus, or French beans, or secale, or turnips, or broccoli, or cauliflower, and stale bread. Rich pastry, soups, gravies, high-seasoned dishes, salted meats, greens, and cabbage, must one and all be carefully avoided; as they only tend to disorder the stomach, and thus to deteriorate ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... nevertheless, as they were dressed in paint and armour after the manner of the late Mr Richardson's heroes, and as most of the ladies had probably been without previous opportunity of seeing such delights, they had their effect. When they had made their twenty-first procession the thing certainly grew stale, and as they brought with them an infinity of dirt, they were no doubt a nuisance. But no one would have been inclined to judge these amateur actors with harshness who knew how much they themselves were called on to endure, who could appreciate the disgusting misery of a ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... of middle-class London would be complete without mention of that very important factor in its commissariat—beer, or its various species, mild or bitter, pale or stale. Your true Cockney East-Ender, however, likes his 'arf and 'arf, and further admonishes the cheery barmaid to "draw it mild." Brewers, it would seem, like their horses and draymen, are of a substantial race; many of the leading brewers of the middle nineteenth-century ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... smart to bet on any man's trick; and the more they see others doing so, the more sanguine they are that no one could ever catch them with chaff. I have met many of the latter class, and always tried to down them. They, of course, would not bit at the monte bait, for it was too stale for them; so I would study sometimes for hours how to take the ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... brawls impel, Historic data give us warning; The wretch who fights When full, of nights, Is bound to have a head next morning. I do not scorn A friendly horn, But noisy toots, I can't abide 'em! Your howling bat Is stale and flat To one who knows, ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... superfluity of the others. When all was over, he dressed; then played high at piquet or hombre; or rode out, if it was absolutely necessary. All was now over for the day. He supped copiously with his familiars: was a great eater, of wonderful gluttony; a connoisseur in no dish, liked fish much, but the stale and stinking better than the good. The meal prolonged itself in theses and disputes, and above ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dormitory from the fresh, pure, night air he thought at first that he would choke in the atmosphere laden with stale tobacco-smoke and foul odours; but in the end he slept splendidly, despite ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... covered by a faded shawl; and, as he looked down at her, somehow into his memory came the recollection of the first time he ever saw her so—asleep in Casson's rooms, her childish face on the table, the room reeking with tobacco smoke and the stale odour of ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Evening, just when she needed Smelling Salts and Absolute Quiet, her enthusiastic Father would have Fiance up to Dinner to pull the same stale Repertoire and splash around ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... across the last frivolous gossip concerning that poet in the paragraphs of the new journalism, or meet his name in some distinguished bead-roll in The Morning Post, whether Narcissus was not, after all, mistaken about him, and whether he could still, season after season, go through the same stale round of reception, private view, first night, and all the various drill of fashion and folly, if that boy's heart were alive still. One must believe it once throbbed in him: we have his poems for that, and a poem cannot lie; but it is hard to think that it could still keep on its young beating ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... seeking the romance of Berlin's greying night amid the Turkish cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the half-breed cabarets marshalled along the Jaegerstrasse, the Behrenstrasse and their tributaries. You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of the all-night Linden cafes, throwing ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... door, to which many strands of the vine clung, and Florette placed a stick to hold it up at an angle. Peering within by the light of a match, they saw the interior of what appeared to be a mammoth hogshead from which emanated a stale, but pungent odor. It was, perhaps, seven feet in depth and the same in diameter and the ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... went back to his stale question: Could Sybil suggest any other resource? and Sybil sadly confessed that she could not. So far as she could see, they must trust to luck, and she thought it was cruel tor Mr. Carrington ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... the novel delights and dignities of freedom. He has no idea of cares yet, or of bad health, or of roguery, or poverty, or to-morrow's disappointment. The play has not been acted so often as to make him tired. Though the after drink, as we mechanically go on repeating it, is stale and bitter, how pure and brilliant was that first sparkling draught of pleasure!—How the boy rushes at the cup, and with what a wild eagerness he drains it! But old epicures who are cut off from the delights of the table, and are restricted to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done now?" he asked, lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any stale candy ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... me for her pleasant letter. I would answer it if I had anything equally amusing to say in return; but here we have no news, except what comes from London, and is as stale as inland fish before it reaches us. We have circuit anecdotes to be sure; and perhaps you will be pleased to hear that Brougham has been rising through the whole of this struggle. At York Pollock decidedly took the lead. At Durham Brougham overtook him, passed him at Newcastle, and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... stale and old, Often she sits and sighs; Life to me is a tale untold, Each day is a glad surprise. Dell will marry, of course, some day, After her belleship is run; She will cavil the matter in worldly way And wed Dame ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... all right!" declared Joe. "I thought it was getting a bit stale. But if the crowd wants to see ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... from the miserable hut in which they sought shelter and cut loose their horses' halters, and whose hearts were hardly softened by heavy bribes. They were often half-starved; if food was to be had at all, it was at the best stale fish, sour beer and wine, coarse black bread, and meat scarcely eatable, even with the rough appetite of travellers of that age. Matters were made ten times worse by Henry's mode of travelling. "If the king has proclaimed that he intends to stop late in any place, you may ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... such a woman, the father of such heirs, is a fate a man might pray God for," 'twas said. "Love has not grown stale with them. Their children are the very blossoms of it. Her eyes are deeper pools ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Lane" was the street's title to fame. Windows showed dim candles, in the distance a sharp cry broke the silence and then fell away again. The street was very narrow and from the running gutters there stole into the air the odour of stale cabbage. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door, came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wasn't 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 he ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... the king put his hand on his jaw like as he was goin' to see the teeth he had: and thin, that minnit he shlipped the three hairs round the Pooka's jaw, an' whin he done that, he dhrew thim tight, an' said the charm crossin' himself the while, an' immejitly the hairs wor cords av stale, an' held the Pooka tight, be way ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn't do at all for our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother Nature has given us miles upon miles ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... 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 others are scattered ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... parson-like member of the party, and beloved, as the right sort of parson always is, by everybody): This is stale matter. We went over all that ground yesterday, and agreed to take the modern trout as he is, and make the best of him. Call it education or what you like, trout-fishing ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... stale in London without Barty that I became a quite exemplary young man when I woke up from that long nap on the floor of my laboratory in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury; a reformed character: from sheer grief, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... that pathetic army of book-lovers who subsist on the refuse of the stalls, which he hunted not for rare editions, but for the sheer bread of life, or rather the stale crusts of knowledge. His tastes were not literary in the special sense of the word. For belles-lettres he had no fancy, and fine passages, except in so far as they were controversial, left him cold. His mind was primarily scientific, secondarily ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... his chamber. It was some relief even to promenade the hall, for one so nervous as he was at this time. If any of the Orlando's passengers came near him, he could retreat into his room. He walked up and down several times, but this soon became stale amusement. ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... very cheap pine tables predominated. Greasy kettles and dishes could be discovered just under the flap of the tent, in many instances; and here and there a tent would be passed, emitting odors of rancid grease, stale tobacco and personal foulness, not at all appetizing to visitors unfamiliar with the gutters of Mackerelville or the hold of a ship in ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... word of blame? I come to ask for work to do with thee. Do I not know Prince Kaid? He had come to distrust us all. As stale water were we in his taste. He had no pleasure in us, and in our deeds he found only stones of stumbling. He knew not whom to trust. One by one we all had yielded to ceaseless intrigue and common distrust of each other, until no honest man was left; till all were intent to save their ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Stale bread, pilot-bread, dried corn-cakes, and crumbs, soaked a few minutes in water, or better still in milk, and fried, are ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... and had to serve for 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
... to Heydon Hay, and the few that found their way thither reached the regular subscribers a day or two after their news was stale to London readers. Ezra got his Argus regularly every Tuesday morning, and in fine weather would sit in the garden to read it. It happened that on the Tuesday after the first time of asking of the banns, he sat beneath a full-leaved, distorted old cherry-tree, ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... platform thronged with fellow passengers similarly haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and down another platform—at last into the hot and dusty ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... other maids whom you will meet here in the north. There are plenty who will thank you for them. As for me, I happen to know their value. Come, be sensible! Why, because she is dressed in silk and gauze, should you think that you are compelled to unload your stale compliments on every unfortunate girl? Try to forget my sex. Call me Tom Vernon. Speak to me as to a friend and companion, and you have no idea how much ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 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
... of Ben Jonson's lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country- phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault for a blunder of meaning, with the ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... old parlor with its sporting prints, its glass cases of stuffed squirrels and badgers, and its horsehair-seated chairs with crochet antimacassars hung over the backs. The atmosphere was certainly rather redolent of stale beer and tobacco, but a bunch of crimson wall-flowers on the table did their best to spread a pleasant perfume. The tea, when, after much delay, it arrived, was delicious. The Pelican was a farm as well as an inn, and the rosy-faced servant girl carried in cream, ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... beautiful to look at. You are made to be queen of a ball-room; not a London ball-room, where everything, I take it, is flash and faded, painted and stale, and worn out; but down here in the country, where there is some life among us, and where a girl may be supposed to be excited over her dancing. It is in such rooms as this that hearts are won and lost; a bid made for diamonds is all ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... sleep in the room they gave him (and then he rolled up in his blanket on the floor) until they agreed to let him take out the sashes from all three windows. He says that white people have white faces because they sleep in stale air." ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... 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 were ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... Majesty, this keeps the baker busy day and night baking 'em bread, not to speak of the cakes and pies, and he says he feels he hadn't orter stand it any longer. He's going to strike. As for the populace, your Majesty, they only get the stale loaves or none at all, and they're wild, your Majesty, ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... paper boomerangs they could not have returned with greater accuracy to their unhappy dispatcher. Oh, the vileness and utter degradation of the moment when the stale little cylinder of closely written pages, which seemed so fresh and full of promise a few days ago, is handed in by a remorseless postman! And what moral depravity shines through the editor's ridiculous plea of "want of space!" But the subject is a painful one, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse—the agonized, twisted, dying face ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... conceal My thoughts in passion, 'tis the surest way. I'll bellow out for Rome, and for my country, And mouth at Caesar till I shake the senate. Your cold hypocrisy's a stale device, A ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various |
