"Dinginess" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the green-houses where mushrooms and early vegetables strove to outwit the seasons, and before the brown cottage in which Cavendish had begun a successful career. The black roof-tree of the cottage sagged in the middle, and the weather-boarding was dingy with the streaky dinginess of old paint that has never had enough oil. The fences, too, were unpainted and rudely patched. Nevertheless a second glance told one that there were no gaps in them, that the farm machines kept their bright colors well under cover, and that the garden rows were ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... more closely. I noticed now his frayed cuffs and the dinginess of his over-brushed clothes. Not even the magnetism of his spectacles could conceal it. Perhaps I had been forgetting something, whether the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... that in time Joe might come to be what the town thought him, if it gave him no other chance. Only its dinginess and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the barrooms—except that of the "National House"—welcomed him gratefully and admiringly. Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when nice girls wear pretty spring dresses; it gave him a thrill of delight ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... man, but long since had fallen below that rank. It had a breadth of dirty canvas thrown across it, from under which the occupant had crawled out. Beneath might be seen the edges of two or three worn and dirty cotton quilts and a pair of blankets of like dinginess. Below this lay a worn elk hide, and under all a lower-breadth of the over-lapping canvas. It was such a bed as primarily a cow-puncher might have had, but fallen into such condition that no cow camp would have ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... told of some of their sports in their London home, speaking of them with eagerness and fondness that showed what joys they had been, though to Guy they seemed but the very proof of dreariness and dinginess. She talked of walks to school, when Felix would tell what he would do when he was a man, and how he took care of her at the crossings, and how rude boys used to drive them, and how they would look in at the shop ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upper part of a gable-end somewhat higher than the wing in which they had been confined. Filthy truckle- beds and ragged pallets covered the floor, and, eked out by old saddles and threadbare horserugs, marked the sleeping quarters either of the servants or of travellers of the meaner sort. But the dinginess was naught to the two who knelt looking into it, afraid to move. Was the place empty? That was the point; the question which had first stayed, and then set their ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I mean the needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many of these powerful ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the top of the stairs. Here Esther was waiting for her; and as she pushed wide open a door in front of her, she said brightly, "Here we are," and Laura, turning, stood for a moment dumb with surprise, as she saw a room that by contrast with the dinginess of the halls looked almost luxurious, for it was all lightness and brightness and warmth and sweet odors, with the sunshine streaming in upon a window full of plants, and touching up a quantity of woodcuts, ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... smoky folds of which were visible sheets of unbleached factory muslin, an emaciated mattress, and a pair of lean pillows, which seemed quite lost in the much too large cases which covered them. The boy sighed as he took in all the dinginess and gloom, and his heart throbbed yearningly for the pleasant room which, even in adversity, had been his at home, cheered and enlivened so often, too, by the presence ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... you walk round the cathedral of Seville, noting with dismay the crushed cupolas and unsightly excrescences, the dinginess of colour, is not enthusiastic. It was built by German architects without a thought for the surrounding houses, brilliantly whitewashed, and the blue sky, and it proves the incongruity of northern ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... sun was near its setting when at last she reached the towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ever ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... chamber repaired, one March evening, Mr. Frank Pixley, Republican precinct committee-man, nor was its dinginess an unharmonious setting for that political brilliant. He was a pock-pitted, damp-looking, soiled little fungus of a man, who had attained to his office because, in the dirtiest precinct of the wickedest ward in the city, he had, through the operation of a befitting ingenuity, forced a recognition ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... fireplace, with the space above for ornaments, and the same couple of little windows looking out upon a stretch of the noble river, from which you might have fished. There was the same colour of paint on the walls, which had been so managed as to represent the dinginess of antiquity. There was also, to all appearance, Mrs Roby's own identical bed, with its chintz curtains. Here, however, resemblance ended, for there was none of the Grubb's Court dirt. The craft on the river were not so large or numerous, the reach being above the bridges. If you had ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... sincere admiration of the ungainly pile where the Worthingtons lived; it seemed a superbly beautiful exterior to her ideas. But when George, who for all the dinginess of his skin had a classic countenance and a dignity of bearing which the Prime Minister of England might well have envied him, opened the front door for Arethusa and her cavalcade, Mrs. Cherry was suddenly stricken as tongue-tied ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... it the Hospital, for it seemed to be a receptacle for all the maimed and rickety chairs of the household, footstools in a dilapidated condition, and odd pieces of lumber that had no other place. Archibald regarded it with a troubled gaze; somehow, its dinginess had never before so impressed him; and then as he looked at his sister the frown deepened ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... the wake of his white-robed conductor. As he walked down the long, quiet hall, he said to himself that every step was bringing him nearer to the crisis when he must speak, and still no words came to his lips. When, however, he turned from the dinginess of the passageway into the sunny little room where Lucy lay, he forgot everything ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... even my most protesting friends, that I am not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher |
