"Blankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her hands and looking upwards with a kind of devout blankness, 'I wouldn't lay myself out as she does; I wouldn't be as bold as her; I wouldn't seem to say to all male creeturs "Come and kiss me"'—and here a shudder quite convulsed her frame—'for any earthly crowns as might be offered. Worlds,' Miggs added solemnly, 'should not reduce ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... The luminous blankness circling us continued to remain unflecked for less than an hour. Then out of the horizon toward which we steamed, a small grey vagueness began to grow. It lengthened fast, and seemed a cloud. And a cloud it proved; but slowly, beneath it, blue filmy shapes began to define ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... light and shadow, had sunk beneath another level, but one that glistened, sparkled, was instinct with varying life, and moved and even danced below him. The low palisades of regularly recurring tules that had fenced in, impeded, but never relieved the blankness of his horizon, were forever swallowed up behind him. All trail of past degradation, all record of pain and suffering, all footprints of his wandering and misguided feet were smoothly wiped out in that obliterating sea. He was physically helpless, and he felt it; ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... Again a calm blankness fell upon the psychic's delicate and sensitive face, and the hand once more slowly closed ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Dan stared at him with the blankness of surprise. "Where did you come from, Big Abel?" he questioned at ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... at each other a moment in silence, he appealingly, she, with a cold blankness that seemed to say that not even a look could make her take further notice of him ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... her case beautiful, blankness of fear smoothed Eve's forehead. She said, her voice low, her eyes not meeting his, "Yesterday you'd never have noticed what ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... turning to water, and Zaidos had sneered at the description. It flashed into his mind when he looked into the wild, chalky countenance of the man against the wall. He glanced down the line of soldiers. A stupid blankness seemed to envelop them. Pale as death they stared at the shaking creature before them. There was a terrible silence that sounded as loud and beat as fiercely in their ears as the boom of cannon. Things moved with frightful deliberation. It seemed that they stood for hours staring ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... within, not so much as the faintest rustle of clothing or the flutter of a withheld breath. All was perfectly still—too still. As the full force of this fact impressed itself upon them, a blankness settled over their features. The significance of this undisturbed quiet was making itself felt. If the two were there, or if he were there alone, they would certainly hear some movement, voluntary or involuntary—and they could ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... to be showing a great interest in them, and during the days that followed this did not diminish. For all his years his wits seemed bright; only whenever the suggestion arose that he might be happier if he took up his quarters elsewhere his eyes seemed actually to film over like a bird's with the blankness that descended on them. Indeed, there seemed no real reason for getting rid of him. He was old and strange, but he behaved himself and played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... nonchalantly stated that he was the fiance of Holcomb's daughter; that is, son-in-law-to-be of the prophet Jarados; that he was sort of Junior Rhamda. He declared that he had come from the occult Rhamdas, through the other side of the Spot, in search of the Jarados who had gone before. As to his blankness up to now, and his perplexity—he was but a Junior; and the Spot had naturally benumbed his senses. Even now, he apologised, it was difficult to know and to recall ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... must be a horribly insistent fact to her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment. And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of Brenda in my mind, strong enough to hypnotise ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... plenty of time," she added, more composedly, "but I think I must go now, for I have a package to get from another store. I hope, though, this hasn't been a 'transformation scene' that will turn back to marble or—blankness," she concluded, with a nervous laugh as she glanced towards the curtained alcove where they ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in so short a space to tell what the next ten years did to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses are ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... made a full resignation of his will to God. He had hoped to do much for love of his Lord, to carry the message of the Gospel into the Andredsweald, where the kindred of his mother yet lived, and the thought that he should never see their forest glades again was painful. And the blankness of unconsciousness, the fearful nature of the black death, was in itself repulsive; but it had all been ordered and settled by Infinite Love before ever he was born, probably before the worlds were framed, and Martin said with all his heart the words breathed by the Incarnate God, when ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... sketches under the lamp to the accompaniment of a steady hum of masculine voices from across the hall. Not that she was ignored, of course. Max came in always, before he went, and, leaning over the back of a chair, would inform her of the absolute blankness of life ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lodging?—then why was he so affected by it? He could not tell. He fully realized that the plaintive beauty of the child had its share in the powerful attraction he felt,—but there was something else in the nature of his emotion which he found it impossible to define. It was as though some great blankness in his life had been suddenly filled;—as if the boy whom he had found solitary and weeping within the porch of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, belonged to him in some mysterious way and was linked to his life so closely ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... spirited away as if by some furious and mighty power that had grown impatient in waiting for it. There remained for a few seconds on the collective retina of the spectators a vision of the inclined car swinging near the roof like the tail of a kite. And then nothing! Blankness! Blackness! Already the balloon was lost to sight in the vast stormy ocean of the night, a plaything of the winds. The spectators became once more aware of the dull booming of the cannonade. The balloon was already perhaps flying unseen amid ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the dawn, when the street lamps splutter out and the ruthless morning light reveals us to one another unwashed, unshaven and horribly all-nighty in appearance, it is indeed a grateful relief to sit down on the wooden Windsor chair and wait the six o'clock of release in blankness of mind. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... of reason penetrated into the numbed blankness of his brain. The dark arch of the entrance-way was somehow familiar. Still legible under the verdigris of the bronze plate on the lintel he read, "Transportation Substation—District L2ZX." Now he understood why he had not seen the black flier till it had leaped in pursuit: how it was ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... Unto the moist, chill sod: his fingers clutched A handful of loose weeds and grass and earth, Uprooted in his anguish as he fell, And slowly from his heart the thick stream flowed, Fouling the green, leaving the fair, sweet face Ghastly, transparent, with blue, stony eyes Staring in blankness on that other one Who triumphed over him. With hot desire Of instant vengeance I unsheathed my sword To rush upon the slayer, when he turned In ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... looked across at her with a blankness she took as part of the business. "I've been taking Commercial Spanish at Skerry's. I took a first-class certificate. Maybe I could ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... to Ardingly for tea, the other at 6.45. She was quite determined to see him, but more inflexible than that resolve was the Euclidean postulate that no one in Tilling should think that she had taken any deliberate step to do so. For the present she had disarmed suspicion by the blankness of her indifference as to what might happen on Saturday or Sunday; but she herself strongly suspected that everybody else, in spite of the public attitude of Tilling to such subjects, was determined to see him too. How to see and not be seen was the question which ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... The superficial reason was a belief that Mrs. Steuben would pay her visit first—it was probably only a question of leaving cards—and bring her young friend to the Capitol at the hour when the yellow afternoon light would give a tone to the blankness of its marble walls. The Capitol was a splendid building, but it was rather wanting in tone. Vogelstein's curiosity about Pandora Day had been much more quickened than checked by the revelations made to him in ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... in the world, but I've nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him stare: "To start you it was necessary. From me it has the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in spite of which, speaking with force and as if he must with a minute's reflexion see what she meant, she turned away from him. "I depend ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... had heard say that "a girl has to be dressy if she expects to be seen." This young man was the only one who had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal of a ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... had disappeared stirred and glistened and shuddered, and then the eternal blankness ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... spiritual sight was blinded by a firm, deadening blankness! Whatever was to be the outcome must be of ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the cold silence and blankness surrounding him Richard was grateful. It was restful—after a grim fashion—and he welcomed rest, having passed a but restless night. For Dickie had been the victim of much travail of spirit. His imagination vexed him, pricking up slumbering lusts of the flesh. His conscience vexed him likewise, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Dusty air itself is only a kind of smoke, and it looks bright, and the thicker the smoke the brighter it looks; the blackness is simply the utter absence of smoke; there is nothing at all for the light to illuminate, accordingly we have the blankness of sheer invisibility. Here is a flame burning under the beam, and, to show what real smoke looks like, I will burn also this spirit lamp filled with turpentine instead of alcohol. Why the convention currents were free from dust was unknown; Tyndall thought the dust was burnt and consumed; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... evil. She had reached the mantel-piece; oh, she could not, could not find the matches I Yes, at last her hand closed on them. A blind rush, and she was out again in the passage. She re-entered the front-kitchen with limbs that quivered, with the sound of dreadful voices ringing about her, and blankness before her eyes. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... never any want of conversation, largely due to the fact that no conversation was expected: we most of us know the horrible blankness which comes over our minds when we realize that because we are eating we are also supposed to talk, whether we have anything to say or not. It was also due to the more primitive reason that in a company of specialists, whose travels extended over most parts of the earth, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... window, and looked at the gibbous moon. Pike was there on the broad sill beside him, under his arm, and he could feel the golden collar on the soft fur neck—a wave of perhaps the most hopeless anguish he had yet felt was upon his spirit now. The unutterable blankness—the impossible vista of the endless days to come, with no prospect of meeting—no aim—no hope. Yes, she had said there was one hope—one hope which could bring peace to their crud unrest. But how and when should he ever know? And if it were so—then more than ever he should be by ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... He looked at me with that blankness of incomprehension that must be maddening in a man after ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... bound to say that when we met in the morning for breakfast he showed few traces of ravage. Youth is strange; it has resources that later experience seems only to undermine. One of these is the masterly resource of beautiful blankness. As we grow older and cleverer we think that too simple, too crude; we dissimulate more elaborately, but with an effect much less baffling. My young man looked not in the least as if he had lain awake or had something on ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... sat on the one antimacassared red silk chair and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and desert toilet-table and pictureless walls and stereotyped furnishings, a sudden blankness came upon her as though she didn't matter, and had been thrust away into this impersonal corner, she ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... he kissed her? What had led him into that? Neither love nor passion—utter blankness so far as reducing the act to terms. He had kissed his wife on the mouth ... and had been horrified! There was real ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place to the cool gray blankness which ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... rush in through the thin walls. These and other memories crowded into Charlotte Dexter's brain as she looked around her room, crowded thick and fast, crowded fast and furious, surged, broke, leaving an empty moment of perfect blankness, then crowded again thicker, faster, surged and seethed and then broke again, leaving in the void of perfect blankness this time a fixed idea, a resolve, a determination, seen in the dark like ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... triumphantly into the intent upturned faces into which had crept a look of blankness. There were those who thought vaguely that nitrogen was the scientific name for mosquito, while others confused it with nitre, an excellent emergency ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... The utter blankness of astonishment that crept over Winnie's face when he looked down and saw the mug hanging, Mr. Darley might have made a small fortune out of; but the pen of a Cicero could not attempt it. It appeared to be one of those cases when "the heart feels most though ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... year, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink no port, then what are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the reward of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculate margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of palate God has given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man, confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... now and then at the expressionless face of the curio dealer. Was it merely the natural blankness of his countenance that impressed me, or was there, in fact, something deep and dark hidden in it, something of "East is East and West is West" which I did not and could not understand? Craig was admiring the bronzes. He had ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... accused with sturdy courage of something which he did not do and no one would mind his doing, but under the influence of Fear, to tell the least little truth about him will put a whole assembly into a sort of blankness. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... in a turmoil. Was it all but the floating phantasm of delirium? Or had the horror of the real thing blotted Nils's mind into blankness so far as the events of the night in the Dead Valley were concerned? The latter explanation seemed the only one, else how explain the sudden illness which in a night had struck us both down? I said nothing more, either to Nils or to my own people, but waited, with a growing determination that, ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... remembered that the water-gate was midway the building or thereabouts. He turned his face to the wall and, half clinging, half swimming, edged along it till he reached port. The last ebb of his strength sufficed to drag him up the stair; then he floated off into blankness again. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... 'shakedowns,' as the piles of straw stuffed into bed-ticks are called; but it had nothing whatever beyond these articles. There was not even the remnant of a bedstead; not a cheap print, so common in the hovels of the poor, to relieve the blankness of the rough, whitewashed walls. The bedroom, which was little more than half the size of the other, was that outrage of capital upon poverty known as a 'dark room,' by which is meant that it had no window opening to the outer air; and this ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... dream, which she would not for the wealth of India have revealed to mortal ear, that in the days to come Brian's life would be in somewise linked with hers. Perhaps this foolish thought was engendered of the blankness of her own life, a stage on which the players had been so few that this figure of an unknown ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... in this loveliness, with everything so soft and kind and sweet all round, it would be easier to tell him, to try and explain, to ask for something different, for at least an attempt at something different in their lives in the future, instead of the blankness of separation, the cold—oh, the cold—of nothing at all but the great windiness of faith, the great bleakness of works. Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one's very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Maggie, though he felt she understood it, as she understood, to his view, everything—thus had shaped itself the innocent trick of occasionally making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... probability before many weeks, many days even, were passed, there would be a severance of that friendship which meant so much to him. He forced himself to realize it, to dwell upon it, to bring consciously home to his soul the blankness the severance would bring with it. There was a certain relief in facing the worst; yet he could not always face it. There was the trouble. Now and then a hope, which he told himself was futile, would spring unbidden to his heart, establish itself as ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... truth, the enemy's goal was just before the Sunrise warriors, and half a minute of time remained in which to play. One more line plunge with Burleigh holding the ball! A film came before his eyes. A sudden blankness of failure and despair seized him. In the grandstand, Elinor Wream stood clutching a pennant in both hands, her dark eyes luminous with proud hope. Amid all the yells and cheers, her ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... began to move were of course exactly those she had not foreseen. She had considered that she might take this tone or that tone or even no tone at all; she was quite prepared for her presenting a face of blankness to any form of interrogation and saying, 'What on earth are you talking about?' It was in short conceivable to her that Selina would deny absolutely that she had been in the museum, that they had stood face to face and that she had fled in confusion. She was ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... back to the window, and again they heard the footsteps in the corridor. Hodge went through the window at a flying leap and hurled open the corridor door, only to again find silence and blankness. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... that he was writing or figuring with blue chalk upon the wall's blankness, and although her heart feared the big rough boy she had ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... brand of beer than he could buy locally, but, though he had always heard of Chippenham, he did not know whether it lay north, east, south, or west. This is deplorable, of course, for it was within a twenty-mile radius, but it is astonishing the frequency with which one meets this blankness in England when looking for information. There are tens of thousands like this poor fellow, and one may well defy Rider Haggard to make a "landed proprietor" out of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... years before, but no one had seen it. He carried the manuscript about with him, as Goethe did his "Faust," for years, and added to it, or erased, all according to the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the question ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing—" Pilch paused a moment, then said, "Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... was tortured by remorse, remembered even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it, it will close again immediately. On the following morning, after he had drawn ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... countenance of this anxious candidate for the magisterial bench, but it was not without cunning; just as in the case of a certain class of fools, any one may recollect that anomalous combination of the latter with features whose blankness betokens the natural idiot at a first glance. Crackenfudge, who, on this occasion, felt conscious of the valuable intelligence he was about to communicate, sat with a face in which might be read, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... finisher of his fine work in marble, or metal? She was a treasure in herself. Altogether the heavens were very dark; and it was scarcely possible for any one who knew well his jovial cast of countenance, to keep from laughing, whatever his real sympathy, at the unusual length and blankness which were suddenly imposed ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... meagre monotony of the lines of shingles and clapboards making subdivisions too small to be impressive, and too large to be overlooked,—and finally, the paint, of which the outside really consists, thrusting forward its chalky blankness, as it were a standing defiance of all possibility of assimilation,—all combine to form something that shall forever remain a blot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... over their heads, and galloping and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women gathered about a tent, and a wailing thereafter. After which, in her faint remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of blankness, and then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the doors of a tent, where many people gathered about a great fire, whose flames licked the heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany wagon full ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... His master turned toward the western windows. There the white blankness of the map of Arabia seemed mocking him. The Master's eyes grew hard; he raised his fist against the map, and smote it hard. Then once more he fell to pacing; and as he walked that weary space, up and down, he muttered to himself with ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... goading her to work while she could. She hardly remembered the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. In the blankness of her misery shefelt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and "dependent" ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Her story certainly was remarkable. She remembered every detail up to a certain point—and then, as she said, all was blankness. ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... was using twenty thousand kilofranks. Then, by delicately manipulating the variable condensers and inductances of his sensitive shunting relay circuits, he slowly shifted that frightful rod of energy from frequency to frequency, staring into the brilliant blankness of his micrometer screen as he did so. After a few minutes of search the screen darkened somewhat, revealing the image of the Jovian globe. Brandon instantly shifted into that one channel the entire ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... and close in upon the horror; I heard a sort of wolfish yapping. The Black Death disappeared. And then I, too, was falling, falling into infinite blackness and blankness, with one red flash when ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... the side and looked over, again suddenly overwhelmed by the strangeness of the whole position. Once again there came on him the sense of irresponsible unreality. . . . He stared out, hardly seeing that on which he looked: the grey mass of the lower castle beneath with lighted windows, at the blankness beyond, again with the scattered lights—the nearer ones, within what seemed a stone's throw, along the village street—the farther ones, infinitely remote, out upon the invisible sea. There again too, far off across the land, shone another cluster of lights, seen ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... now. She has not been her natural self for these last few days, but she had other causes for worry, and I have been willing enough to think that these were the occasion of her restless ways and short, sharp speech and the blankness with which she met all my attempts to soothe and encourage her. This evening"—I choked at the word. The day had been one string of extraordinary experiences, accumulating in intensity to the one ghastly discovery which had overtopped and ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... was traced over in many places with tiny red lines which made zig-zags and curves over the blankness of the region south ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... opened it slowly now, smiling as she did so at the quaint inscription on the cover. A folded sheet of paper lay within—she spread the paper before her, expecting to see the three five-pound notes folded within its leaves—blankness and emptiness alone met her view—no money was inside the envelope—the whole thing was a cruel fraud. The poor governess fairly gasped for breath—there lay the bill for six pounds nineteen shillings which she had incurred, making sure that she could meet it out ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... stood out clear above that painful meeting. She was done fighting against the blankness that seemed to surround her since Bill went away. Slowly but steadily it had been forced upon her that much which she deemed desirable, even necessary, was of little weight in the balance with him. Day and night she longed for him, for his cheery voice, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... suffer social indignities from the "army woman," worry and waste money on needless clothes, and expect to end by being shamed or killed under some unfairly promoted incapable. Nothing illustrates the intellectual blankness of the British army better than its absolute dearth of military literature. No one would dream of gaining any profit by writing or publishing a book upon such a subject, for example, as mountain warfare in England, because not a dozen British officers would ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and more rounded, because the man knew he was speaking of his best work. Maisie looked at the blur, and a lunatic desire to laugh caught her by the throat. But for Dick's sake—whatever this mad blankness might mean- -she must make no sign. Her voice choked with hard-held tears as she answered, still gazing at the wreck—"Oh, Dick, it ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... brought picture books with him, illustrated alphabets and one-syllable stories with the thought of possible need for them. And the brown eyes of the two little fellows, so like his own in the old days, as he well knew, in their blankness and wonder, gave eager response to new things. He called the spot "our school," and the two little pupils soon learned their letters, while in a month's time little Steve was reading simple stories telling that "The dog is on the mat," and "The cat is on the rug" with great exhilaration, ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... case, was the blankest of blanks in the lottery of their draw for information. Whether this blankness was real or affected men could not make up their minds. The gambler was so unlike his usual self. The hard, rough, autocratic manner of the man seemed to have undergone a subtle change. He went about ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... don't know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... moved a step forward for a glimpse of Quarrier's face. The face appeared to be a study in blankness. His natural visage was emotionless and inexpressive enough, but this face, from which every vestige of colour had fled, fascinated her with its dead whiteness; and the hair brushed high, the long, black lashes, the silky beard, struck her as absolutely ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... All around him, now, blankness—save for the gray silhouette of the Ariani. A colourless canopy surrounded him, centred by a tiny pool of ocean. Overhead through the vanishing blue, hundreds of wild duck were stringing out to sea; under his ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... assent. Precisely at that moment, owing, perhaps, to her vicissitudes of feeling, all sense of love left her, as in a moment a mist lifts from the earth. And when the mist departed a skeleton world and blankness alone remained—a terrible prospect for the eyes of the living to behold. He saw the look of terror in her face, and without understanding its origin, took her hand in his. With the sense of companionship returned a desire, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... I desperately drew my arm across my eyes, as if to shut out even the darkness and tried to think of nothing. It was in vain. The confounded themes touched on by Hammond in the garden kept obtruding themselves on my brain. I battled against them. I erected ramparts of would-be blankness of intellect to keep them out. They still crowded upon me. While I was lying still as a corpse, hoping that by a perfect physical inaction I should hasten mental repose, an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ridge. Faintly he could see a ghostly outline, much too large for men. It might be a ship, but it would have to be large enough for a space-yacht. No stinking two-man sled like his spacer. And he could not be sure in that eerie blankness if it even ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... went out. I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking. A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not only for the gain ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... Wildeve reached her name the blankness with which he had read the first half of the letter intensified to mortification. "I am made a great fool of, one way and another," he said pettishly. "Do you know ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... in her brave resolve to quit Harbury, she had not thought how she should feel when all was indeed over. She had not pictured the utter blankness of a world wherein Harold was not. The snare broken and her soul escaped, she knew not how it would beat its broken wings in the dun air, meeting nothing but the black, silent waste, ready once more to flutter helplessly down into the ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... smiling comfort, then the years, images of great and near great men, his knowledge of history, pictures of great war of 2074, pictures of the attackers of the Black Star—then calm oblivion, quiet blankness. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... vessel, and a little way past her I spied a long line of white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, but as dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but if already it was putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which seemed to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-glass upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gang-way and the two men in her. The cask was in the stern of the boat. ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... of forbidding politics as a subject for discussion in the house, and confined the general conversation exclusively to fish. That this thoughtful act was appreciated by the overworked politician it is needless to remark; he settled down to his brief respite with a tranquil contentment and complete blankness of mind which only the cleverest of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... said that it "stared" at passers-by—with truth, because very near the roof were two little windows shaped like half-circles. They somehow bore a close resemblance to a pair of eyes that stared and stared and stared with calm, unwinking blankness. ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... rapping sound within, all else was still. The girl knocked softly. There was no response. She turned the handle quietly. If, possibly, her guest were asleep, she would not awaken her. Slowly, slowly she opened the unresisting door, and her expression changed from expectancy to blankness as she perceived that the room was empty. The fair white pillow bore no imprint of a curly head. The curtain ring was striking rhythmically against the window ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... sounded spatting reports of rifles. Casey forgot to dodge into his gravel shelter. He was living a strange, dragging moment—an age. Out shot the car into the light. Likewise Casey's dark blankness of mind ended. His heart lifted with a mighty throb. There shone the gray endless slope, stretching out and down to the black hills in the distance. Shrill wild yells made Casey wheel. The hillside above the cut was colorful ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... entirely exhausted by her emotion, so that all her memories fell away from her and left her in a peaceful blankness. She trusted Prosper's word. With every fiber of her heart she trusted him, as simply, as singly, as foolishly as a ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... not prayer Nor watching could deliver. So I thought To save my soul from murder I must fly— I felt an urging as one does in sleep Pursued by giant things to fly, to fly From terror, death, from blankness on the scene, From emptiness, from beauty gone. The world Seemed something seen in fever, where the steps Of men are muffled, and a futile scheme Impels all steps. So packing up my kit, My Bible in my pocket, secretly I disappeared. Next day took up my life In Barrington, a village thirty miles ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... attitude, all strength of bearing, which were his chief characteristics, seemed to have gone. There was a look of complete blankness, of hopelessness ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Miss Buchanan's London house, and he had come there to call upon young Miss Buchanan. The memory of Helen's unobtrusive, wonderfully understanding kindness to him during his last days at Merriston, remained for him as the only bright spot in a desolate blankness. He had not seen her again. She had been paying visits, but she had written in return to a note of inquiry from Cambridge, to say that she was settled, now, in London for a long time and that she would be delighted ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... orchard, or an exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre. Berridge accepted the offer mechanically—relieved at the prompt fading of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness for the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend's appeal. He was even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at it—only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... impossible for me to describe. Having no poetry in my soul, and being somewhat hardened by years of experience in that inhospitable country, words proper to give you an idea of its unique beauty do not come to mind. Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness. It never seems broad, bright day, even in the middle of June, and the sky has the different effects of the varying hours of morning and evening twilight from the first to the last peep of day. Early in February, at noon, a ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... only by using both hands, as those with palsy do. He swallowed it in great gulps. He felt as though he were burning up inside. The room began to swim around him, but with his hands kneading into the old sofa he warded off unconsciousness. He must not lose a single minute in blankness. He must get back to her—get back to her as soon as he could stand. She was suffering, too, though in another way. He must not let another ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a balcony An hour when the night Died into blankness, And light mist Curling beneath us, hid the earth, And the cold, unburied ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... In the blankness of her disappointment she scarcely grasped what he was saying about the dinner hour being early and his sister being indisposed. She interrupted with a ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on, "but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You must just start from where you are ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... such occasions," pursued Mr. Benny. "And by the way, sir, might I ask you to favour me with the date of your birthday? Your dear father's was the 28th of May." Mr. Sam's stare lost its blankness, and became one ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nobody but himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word "Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the intensity ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... at that moment the others came in from the garden. But Charmian, why she did not know, felt increasing regret for her inadvertence. She even wished that Madame Sennier had shown some emotion, surprise, even contemptuous incredulity. The complete blankness of the Frenchwoman at that ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been—realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Martin Eden, his face buried on his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... conviction was forced upon him that it wasn't as simple as that. At length, when he was well on the way to recovery, he learned to his horror that the interval of mental blankness, instead of being a few hours, or at the most a day or two, had lasted for ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... at him with such a forlorn blankness as he had never seen. "I'd be paying—" she said feebly. ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... spite of her false gayety,—put on to mask the wounded pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with dismay,—flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining hours that rest between her and her maid's ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... him since his entrance, as he followed Lord John upstairs, he left behind that sense of blankness so curiously independent of either words or deeds. Greatorex, in his patent leather shoes and immaculate white gaiters, pattered over to Miss Levering, but she unkindly presented her back, and sat down ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... at his side. For the first time in her life, perhaps, at least for one of the rare moments of it, her face was in no sense vacant. The wide gray eyes that looked forth upon the sordid world of Clark's Field were seeing eyes, though they did not see merely physical facts. Instead of their usual blankness or passive intelligence, they had a quality in them now of dream. And this gave Adelle's pale face a certain rare loveliness that in human faces does not depend upon color or line or emotional vivacity. It is rather the still radiance of the inner spirit, penetrating in some inexplicable ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... upon the grass in the garden under the shade of a tree. The "office" had been stifling hot, and there had been even less to suggest any hope of possible professional business than the blankness of most days held. There never was any business, but at rare intervals someone dropped in and asked him a question or so, his answers to which, by the exercise of imagination, might be regarded as coming under the head of "advice." His clients had no money, however—nobody had any money; ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... year after year washing dishes and clothes— only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... time been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem, and an American commentator may be excused for feeling the desire to construct, from the very scanty material that offers itself, a slight picture of his life there. I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and blankness, but I confess that these observations serve rather to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer has of necessity a relish for detail; his business is to multiply points of characterisation. Mr. Lathrop tells us that our author "had little communication with even ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... a household on a Christmas Day, the very contrast between the time as it now is, and the day as it has often been, gives a poignancy to sorrow—a more utter blankness to the desolation. James Leigh died just as the far-away bells of Rochdale Church were ringing for morning service on Christmas Day, 1836. A few minutes before his death, he opened his already glazing ...
— Lizzie Leigh • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the forest at all—not the cry of a bird, not the rustle of snow falling from a branch—but there was something deeper and remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the face of the forest—an effective silence which was not blankness—a voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... journeyed, chanting low The wail of David's penitential woe, Before him still the old temptation came, And mocked him with the motion and the shame Of such desires that, shuddering, he abhorred Himself; and, crying mightily to the Lord To free his soul and cast the demon out, Smote with his staff the blankness round about. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it with penetrant anxiety. "Did you really enjoy that hymn?" ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in the end, in spite of Mr. Jobson's prevarications." He turned to the witness. "Now, Sir," he said sternly, "you have already told the Court that you have no idea what you were doing on the night of April 24th, 1897. I put it to you once more that this blankness of memory is due to the fact that you were in a state of intoxication on the premises of the Hackney Chess Circle. Can you swear on your oath that ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... could he curse now? Not a soul—no one, at any rate, against whom he could launch an anathema with any real heart in it. Than curse vainly and superficially, far better not to curse at all. He missed Phineas beyond all his conception of the blankness of bereavement. Like himself, Phineas had found salvation in the army. Doggie realized how he had striven in his own queer way to redeem the villainy of his tutorship. No woman could have ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... butler—now on 'temp'ry' service at the Manor,—he became aware that there was also a new and rather pretty housemaid beside the said butler, who whispered when she ought to have been silent,—and he saw blankness on the fat face of Mrs. Spruce, a face which was tied up like a round red damaged sort of fruit in a black basket-like bonnet, fastened with very broad violet strings. Now Mrs. Spruce always paid the most pious attention to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people. He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable. And the end had been a tragedy that oppressed him. He sat staring at the blankness. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... skull-paved shelf, he saw in the center of the vault above the river another of those sinister round holes through which he momentarily expected to see a headless corpse shoot downward in its last plunge to a watery grave. A few feet along the platform a closed door broke the blankness of the wall. As he lay looking at it and wondering what lay behind, his mind filled with fragments of many wild schemes of escape, it opened and a white robed Wieroo stepped out upon the platform. The ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... make me leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkening dankness The yawning blankness Of the ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... should have done without you!" she said, with a gratitude that was almost humble. There'd be a certain blankness, Roger couldn't help seeing, when the time came to ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that the world was all right with him. Who does not know that sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and prospection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word ill-spoken, some money misspent,—or perhaps a cigar too much, or a glass of brandy and soda-water which he should have left untasted? And ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... after it with a sense of blankness. The Chancellor's exordium and the Duke's remarks had rather primed him to a state of expectation, and he felt as if he had been balked of he knew not what. The green light contracted and died away ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... down on Nassau Street, had read that, all of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "Had I not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was still afflicted with a sense of ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... and pulled the blanket over her. The same stolid faces that had refused any satisfaction last night met her gaze again in blankness. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... whole face mirrored forth a genuine and warm self-satisfaction. The thing was as plain as if he had spoken it aloud: he had gotten out of the interview what he wanted. Their recognition of this fact increased their blankness. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... encounter with Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had been before ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... antechamber, the valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly—as it seemed to his friends—to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in the ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... heard some of them talk about it. We're thinking, some of the young people here, about getting up some outdoor theatricals, like Lady Archibald Campbell's, don't you know. You know about them?" he added, at the blankness ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... he was a good woodsman and a good teamster, and his horses followed confidently at his heels like dogs. The second team was led by a tall, gaunt-jawed, one-eyed lumberman named Jim Johnson, but invariably known as "Walley." From the fact that his blind eye was of a peculiar blankness, like whitish porcelain, he had been nicknamed "Wall-Eye"; but, owing to his general popularity, combined with the emphatic views he held on that particular subject, the name had been ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... actually fell upon her,—through it all, she never wavered. When he first told her that he must go, that it was the one thing he held it wise and right to do, she shrunk back affrighted, trembling at the coming blankness of a life without him. But after a while, seeing the misery that came into his face reflected from hers, she rose bravely above the terrible woe, and then, with her arms round him and her eyes looking steadfastly into his, she said, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... which his grandson Nicholas looked forward to the issue. The question to be decided seemed to him of almost as vital importance as if it were: Whether or no the sun should rise again next morning. For him at least, it depended upon that whether his world should loom back again in a dreary blankness, or waken lit with new and wondrous gleams. Nicholas's thirst for knowledge and love of learning were much more essentially part and parcel of him than his hands and eyes, and had so far found little except dreams and desires to thrive upon. Even before ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... few moments neither the girl nor the man spoke, although Annesley felt that there were a thousand things to say. Every second was taking them nearer to Torrington Square; and their parting must come soon. After that, all would be blankness for her, ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... staff a politician may lean upon. Like a brave and honest man he had cast from his thoughts all hope of power. The king might be old, senile, decrepit, but he was none the less the king. If he had moments of blankness of thought, there were other moments when the old man was keen enough; and keen enough he was to realize in these lucid intervals that Ramabai, among all his ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... His dreams were all shattered, the last effort of his life had been in vain. He caught hold of the tumbler with fingers that shook as though an ague were upon him, lifted it to his lips and drank. Then there came the old blankness, and he saw nothing but what seemed to him the face of a satyr—dark and evil—mocking him through the shadows which had surely fallen now for ever. Da Souza lifted him up and conveyed him carefully ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven, so near to hell, always ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... with its trees and kiosque, recalled the Place Verte at Antwerp, I noticed a large building of the pattern so common in France for colleges and convents—a vast expanse of whiteness or blankness, and a yet vaster array of long windows. It appeared to be a cavalry barrack for soldiers. The bugles sounded through the archway, and orderlies were riding in and out. This monotonous building, I found, had once been the English college for priests, where the celebrated ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed—it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Coyote interesting for other reasons. When you see that sleek gray and yellow form among the mounds of the Prairie-dog, at once creating a zone of blankness and silence by his very presence as he goes, remember that he is hunting for something to eat; also, that there is another, his mate, not far away. For the Coyote is an exemplary and moral little beast ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton |
