"Calloused" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrinkles his eyelids around; A pipe in the teeth that seemed little the worse For Liverpool pantiles and stringy salt-horse; The hairy forearm with its gaudy tattoo Of a bold-looking female in scarlet and blue; The fingers all roughened and toughened and scarred, With hauling and hoisting so calloused and hard, So crooked and stiff you would wonder that still They could handle with cunning and fashion with skill The tiny full-rigger predestined to ride To its cable of thread on its green-painted tide In its wine-bottle world, while the old world went on And the sailor who made it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... cart and the stable, each time with a full sack on her back, and beyond passing the time of day with me she took no notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty, she fumbled for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb. The hands were noteworthy. They were large- knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... whiskered face is such a kindly and woeful and helpless one, while the voice is gentle, so gentle. At last, what do you think? As the girl has become all excited, and has already grown hoarse from tears, and is shy of everybody—he, this same 'roundsman on the beat,' stretches out two of his black, calloused fingers, the index and the little, and begins to imitate a nanny goat for the girl and reciting an appropriate nursery rhyme! ... And so, when I looked upon this charming scene and thought that half ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... a splendid young college graduate introduce his poor, plainly dressed old mother to his classmates with as much pride and dignity as though she was a queen. Her form was bent, her hands were calloused, she was prematurely old, and much of this deterioration was caused by all sorts of drudgery to help her boy to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... women had walked daily over the burning plow shares of duty and domestic tribulation, till their feet had got calloused, and could stand more'n ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... say it? It seems to me that the greater part of us labor for this loss. On all sides, in almost every social rank, I notice that a pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of reciprocal contempt. Here, those who have calloused hands and working-clothes are disdained; there, it is all who do not wear blue jeans. Children educated in this spirit make sad fellow-citizens. There is in all this the want of that simplicity which makes it possible for men of good intentions, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... growled Mac Strann, and lighted a match. The flame spurted in a blinding flash from the head of the match and then settled down into a steady yellow glow. By that brief glow Mac Strann looked up and down the wall. The match burned out against the calloused tips of his fingers. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Never see her again? Then she would become the wife of one of those rough peasants who would make no better use of her beauty than to waste it in daily tasks in the field, gradually converting her into a farm animal, black, calloused, and wrinkled! ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dinner-time," he explained. "Nobody home at The Dreamerie—" He took her face in his calloused hands, drew her to him. "You're sweet in that calico gown," he informed her, waiving a preliminary word of greeting. "I love you," he added softly, and kissed her. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... gone; not a dust left. The man swore a little in a grim monotone, which made the profanity lose its customary effect. He had been, and was, a hard drinker; he had knocked about the world until the marks of its sharp corners were on his very soul, which was thereby calloused, until his very sensibility to loss was dulled. He ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... Tappan stopped, watching the two. Madame Griggs held up, with almost a sublimity of accusation, her tiny, nervous, veinous hands. The fingers were long and the knuckles were slightly enlarged with strenuous pullings of needles and handling of scissors; the forefinger was calloused. "Look at my hands," said she. "See how thin they be. I've worked them 'most to the bone for your folks. I took a lot of pride in havin' your daughter look nice when she was married. If I was a man an' goin' to steal, I'd steal from somebody besides a woman with no more strength ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now. He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft, with long, pliant nails that never broke ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... here?" our girl persisted forlornly, and when Louie failed her, jingling Worth's tip in his calloused palm, she wanted the women asked, and we had a frowsy chambermaid called who denied any acquaintance with our sole leather discovery, insisting, upon definite inquiry, that she had never seen it in Skeels' room, or any other ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... woman, with big breasts and broad hips. Her eyes, the palest blue, were still beautiful. Odin guessed that when she was young her face had matched her eyes. But the face was worn and the hand that she offered him was calloused. She was dressed in linsey-woolsey, and the overalls of the three sons ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... has been removed, cold-water bandages to the injured parts will soon remove the soreness and swelling, especially in recent cases. If, however, the fetlock has become calloused from long-continued bruising, a Spanish-fly blister over the parts, repeated in two or three weeks if necessary, will aid in reducing the leg to ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... way to his advancement in the English Secret Service, he remembered, even at the last, that a few letters were due to those who still watched his little flickering light on its way over the trackless sea of life. For hard-hearted as he was,—benumbed by the blows of fate, his heart calloused with the snapping of cords and ties which once had closely bound him—there were yet loosely knit bonds of the past which tinged with the glow of his dying passions—the unforgotten idols of his ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... returned shortly. "I suppose I'm a perfect fright, too. Long hair, whiskers, grimy, calloused hands, and all the rest of it. A shave and a hair cut, a bath and a new suit of clothes will remedy that. But I'll be the same personality in every essential quality that I was when I sweated over the Klappan with a hundred ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... looking into the muzzle of an old-fashioned long-barreled rifle. But the hammer was cocked, and it was held by a pair of large, calloused, and steady hands, belonging to a tall, thin man with powerful shoulders ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and lay down in his berth, but not to sleep. The pain in his arm was severe enough to keep him awake, but it was no worse than his heartache. It was a tender heart, not yet calloused by constant pursuit of selfish aims. That state would certainly be arrived at, on the road he was travelling, but he was still young and his very soul was longing to go back to his father and Lawyer Ed. Again and again he tried ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one woman. It was glorious and... pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work—she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her husband, worth one billion, eight hundred millions and President of ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the tide brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day. Occasionally came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster. But calloused as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay, I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say. And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met— All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget. Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands; Master, I've done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands— Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich; I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch. I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk; Threescore ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... up and carefully pillowed the squat calloused hand in her soft one. For a moment she studied it, turning it over and back again, running her finger meditatively over the mounds ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... your advice an' gone t' th' high school," he said, extending his calloused hand to shake. "Only I wouldn't ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... Thorwaldsen favored the mating, and did what he could to hasten the nuptials. But when the other man had actually married the girl and carried her away, he had a sick spell to pay for it—he wasn't quite so calloused in heart as he had believed. Like many other men, Thorwaldsen found that such a tie ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... desire because he longed for pain in itself. Paul was not a calloused soul. Few men have ever been more sensitive to pain. He had no more fondness for being shipwrecked than you and I have. He had no more pleasure in being stoned, in being publicly whipped, in being thrown into dark dungeons and stenchful prison cells than you and I have. He ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... side-bone on the outer side of each fore-foot, beginning pretty far forward, and extending to the heel on the inner side, filling up the hollow and reaching nearly to the fetlock, was a big, bulging, hard, calloused enlargement or tumour standing out 3 or 4 inches all round, covered with thick horny skin and stubby hair, and having on its surface the small openings of several sinuses leading deeply down to the ossified and diseased cartilage underneath. ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... the other keenly, but the old man was busy filling his pipe. His eyebrows, to be sure, flicked up as he heard this tragedy announced, and there was a breath from Jud. "I'll tell you, Dozier," said the other, lighting his pipe and then tamping the red-hot coals with his calloused forefinger, "I'm kind of particular about the way people cusses around Jud. He's kind of young, and they ain't any kind of use of him litterin' up his mind with useless words. Don't mean no offense to ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt, Here, pal, is my calloused hand! Oh, I love each day as a rover may, Nor seek to understand. To ENJOY is good enough for me; The gipsy of God am I; Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn! And here's a cheer to the night that's gone! And may I go a-roaming on Until the day ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... graying hair, parted in the middle and done up in a knot in the back, was freshly and sleekly combed. She was brown as a berry and just the type of hard-working woman to make a good homesteader, with calloused, capable, tireless hands. She was round, bustling and kind. The Widow Fergus had taken up a homestead ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... Noting her calloused hands and the too rapid approach of life's midsummer, Selwyn watched her, and wondered what recompense could be offered for those things. In ordinary life, given the privileges and the opportunities which she deserved, she would have been another of those glorious English women whose beauty ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... working girls of England who tired their arms and calloused their hands on the heavy shells. When the work was at its full capacity, a proposition was sent to the women of leisure to undergo three weeks of training in a munitions factory and then take up the work at the week-ends to relieve the regular workers, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... is as unemotional as he is undemonstrative. For a moment Howard, always slow of speech and action, was too nonplussed to know what to do, deeply sorry as he felt for his wife. Then he leaned over and patted her hand—the hand that was scarcely less rough and scarred than his own—with his big calloused one. ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... the incapable, the shiftless, the disabled, and the widowed. In a few cases men came to the mills deliberately intending to exploit their children, to live a life of ease upon their earnings. There were places for the younger members of all these families, but a man with hands calloused and muscles stiffened by the usual round of farm work could seldom learn a new trade after the age of forty, no matter how willing. Often a cotton mill is the only industrial enterprise in the village, and the number of common laborers needed is limited. ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... tried to speak, but he raised his voice. "No, I couldn't stand it all over again. 'Twould cut in to the places where I've got calloused." Seeing through the other's stupor the beginnings of an irresolute opposition, he flung himself upon him in a strange and incredible appeal, crying out, "Oh, you must! You got to go!" commanding and imploring in the same incoherent sentence, struggling for speech, and then ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... getting the fingers to take the place of eyes. But it is only necessary to persevere to get the proper, illuminating "touch" into the finger tips. The men made sightless in the war were in most cases confronted with grave difficulties. Their hands were hardened by toil, and their fingers calloused by work in the trenches. One of my comrades, when given his Braille card, struggled over it for a time, and then exclaimed: "I wish they'd leave this card out in the rain till the dots swelled to the size of door-knobs; then I might be ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... after Deweese, and to-morrow we're going to commence gathering beeves. A few weeks' good hard work will do you worlds of good. In less than a year, you'll look back at this as a splendid lesson. Shucks! boy, a man is a narrow, calloused creature until he has been shook up a few times by love affairs. They develop him into the man he was intended to be. Come on into the house, Tom, and Jean will make us ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... in scanning the features of the large audience assembled in the Tabernacle on Sunday, the obvious want of intelligence in the faces of the women, compared with the men, was certainly striking. One seemed also to read a spirit of discontent or of calloused resignation in some of the better female countenances. Of the thrift, industry, and material success of this community there can be but one opinion. An important statistical item occurs to us in this connection which is highly significant. It appears that while ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... held a lamp that she might see the notes, while his other hand was upon her shoulder, his adoring eyes upon her silly face. He, Smith, was rocking in the blue plush chair for which the fool with the calloused hands had done extra work that he might give it to the woman upon her birthday. Each time that she screeched the refrain, "Love, I will love you always," she lifted her chin to sing it to the man beaming down upon her, while upstairs her ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... same dear lover; another to have a piano; a child to get ginger snaps. I never quite fancied the restriction of musical instruments in visions of heaven to harps alone. They at first blister the fingers until they are calloused. The afflicted washerwoman, whose only daughter had just died, was not in the least consoled by the assurance that Melinda was perfectly happy, playing a harp in heaven. "She never was no musicianer, and I'd rather see her a-settin' by my tub as she used to set when ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... git a chance to put in a word with you ever sence— Well, I expected you'd want to get your feelin's kind o' calloused ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... raising himself on tiptoe, and trying to peer through the windows of the rez-de-chaussee, an old woman at his side, some poor day-worker of the neighborhood, with shapeless form, and hands calloused and distorted by many years of toil, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... talked to him for a space in monotone. She held out her hands; the dry raspy trunk curled out toward them. Rajah was evidently willing to meet her half-way. She ordered him to kneel. Without even pausing to think it over Rajah bent his calloused knees, and gratefully Kathlyn crawled back into the howdah. Food and water: these appeared at hand as if by magic. So she ate and drank. If she could hold Rajah to a walk the howdah would last at least till she came ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... the orders. Heartfelt expressions of regret came from all, for in spite of his constitutional nervousness, Billy was a prime favorite. But I knew that I was the only one with whom the pain and sting would live; the men were so calloused by such happenings that they no ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant |
