"Dulled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... taste of the brine on a child's lips! Nowadays, I can take holiday when I will, and go whithersoever it pleases me; but that salt kiss of the sea air I shall never know again. My senses are dulled; I cannot get so near to Nature; I have a sorry dread of her clouds, her winds, and must walk with tedious circumspection where once I ran and leapt exultingly. Were it possible, but for one half-hour, to plunge and bask in the sunny surf, to roll on the silvery sand-hills, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... had grown taciturn because he was always contradicted. The want of congenial company and fellows-in-misfortune gradually dulled his brain; his nerves went to pieces; he neglected his appearance and ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... walks with glad, majestic mien, Proud of her knowledge gained, E'en while she mourns from having seen Man's life so dulled and pained. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... that the man was not in his right senses, or that the blow he had received had so dulled his bump of caution, that he could no longer take care of himself; for the next moment he stumbled over a little child, and would have been hurt severely if I had not broken his fall, by catching his arm before he again measured his length on the deck. My ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... was a sort of mockery of abundance. Dabs of vegetables, sauces, preserves, meats, both hot and cold, in cheap little china dishes fairly elbowed each other for room. It would have dulled a keener appetite ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for surprise and little for emotion. O ye belles of Newport and of Bar Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and agreeable, are you wasting your sweet ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of two things," declared Lefever, whose eyes were never dulled by late hours. "Either they've sent this to lure you into the Gap and 'get' you, or else—and that's a great big 'or else'—she needs you. Henry, did that message—I mean the way it was ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... then on to the next. But here was a wide-spread misery that overwhelmed her. Dr. McDonnell was as silent as the girl. He had a sensitiveness to suffering which twenty years of London practice had not dulled. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... for the goodliest tilting, There the ladies went lightly in glorious array; In the old arms we armed him whose dints well he knew That the night dew had dulled and the sea salt had sullied: On the old roan yet sturdy we set him astride; So he stretched forth his hand to lay hold of the spear Neither laughing nor frowning, as lightly his wont was When the knights are awaiting the voice ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... the front and rear of the various bodies, and inspected them with a minuteness and attention which showed that his years had not dulled his soldier's faculties, the Mayor faced round with the evident intention of addressing us. His clerk instantly darted in front of him, and waving his arms began to shout 'Silence, good people! Silence for ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dulled wits. Phayre! It was the one man who in his father's life had shown him unselfish kindness. Long ago in Paris this Phayre had been his teacher, had saved him from starvation, had treated him with a gentleman's courtesy. Even his crimes had not estranged ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... atmosphere was charged with smoke—probably from some big fire among the spinifex, far away northward—and a nucleus of brighter light on the meridian showed the position of a gibbous moon. Yet the hazy, uniform light, disciplining the eye to its standard, seemed rather like a noonday dulled to the same shade. The temperature was perfect for comfort, so I fared well enough; whilst with respect to my horses, I could only hope that Bert had been unfaithful to ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... until (and strange it is that at a time like this an insignificant detail should stand out in sharp relief against the background of her dulled sensibilities) an hysterical woman ran up to her with ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... with one shoulder against the roof, reaching up into the hole he had made, still cutting away with this once keen knife, which was now dulled ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... and esteemed each other, and made allowances for each other. Their characters had been tested and had stood the test. Affection, love, was not to them a salient phenomenon in their relations. Habit had inevitably dulled its glitter. It was like a flavouring, scarce remarked; but had it been absent, how they would have turned from ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... night on board the Celtic, when Thomas came to her cabin in the dark, she had recognized his voice. In the light the activity of the eye had dulled the keenness of the ear; but in the dark the ear had found the chord. For days she had been subconsciously waiting to hear one or the other of those voices; and Thomas' had come with a shock. The words "Aeneid" ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... fierce as fire before the blast, A storm of missiles thick and fast, Spear, pike and javelin, mace and brand, Came hurtling from the giant's hand. But, mightier still, the arms employed By Raghu's son their force destroyed, And every dart fell dulled and spent By powers the bards of heaven had lent. With his huge mace Vibhishan slew The steeds that Ravan's chariot drew. Then Ravan hurled in deadly ire A ponderous spear that flashed like fire: But Rama's arrows checked its way, And harmless on the earth it lay, The giant seized a mightier ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... that was a hundred thousand little battles, a battle in a sponge of ways and channels, fought out of sight of sky or sun under the electric glare, fought out in a vast confusion by multitudes untrained in arms, led chiefly by acclamation, multitudes dulled by mindless labour and enervated by the tradition of two hundred years of servile security against multitudes demoralised by lives of venial privilege and sensual indulgence. They had no artillery, no differentiation into this force or that; the only weapon on either ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... to London, instead of in the room with him there; and that would not have occurred!" But what 'that' was, she could not have explained. Nevertheless, Mr. Cannon's phrase, "It's a good thing you didn't go to London," still gave her a pleasure, though the pleasure was dulled. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the soul perverted by false conditions and surroundings. Where vice has become congenial and the impure reigns supreme, that which rouses and expresses noble aspirations and pure emotions can find no room. Normal instincts may also be dulled, the inner being made, as it were, musically deaf and dumb, by a false education which stifles and dwarfs the finer feelings, or by circumstances which permit these ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... sense of ownership was dulled in one who had seen magnificent properties masterless, or apparently belonging to some limp, bloodstained bundle of flesh that lay in one of the rooms. In vain Cummings urged the state of the market, repeating with ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... spoken. The latter stood staring down at the patch of ferns into which the cage had rolled. And it was some time before his dulled eyes noticed that there was grass growing there, too—swale grass, which he had not before seen in ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... The man who had led the raid on Pop Annersley's homestead. Pete knew that he would meet Gary some day, and he was curious to see the man who was responsible for the killing of Annersley. He had no definite plan—did not know just what he would do when he met him. Time had dulled the edge of Pete's earlier hatred and experience had taught him to leave well enough alone. But that strident voice, edged with malice, had stirred bitter memories. Pete felt that should he keep silent ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... thy grace be helpyng unto me, And of thy golde dewe lat the lycour wete My dulled breast, that with thyn hony swete Sugrest tongis of rethoricyens, And ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... annals of party strife this report of Lebrun holds a high place. In order to furbish up the dulled prestige of the Gironde he sought to excite national animosity, and to revive the former hatred of the name of Pitt. What could be more criminal than to sneer at the smallness of England's naval preparations? What more false than to charge Pitt and Grenville with secretly begging for interviews ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... journey to pursue them or not. There was nothing left to pursue now, for amid the undulations of the sand-drift the vedettes might have gone in any direction. The Emir galloped back along the line, with exhortations and orders. Then the camels began to trot, and the hopes of the prisoners were dulled by the agonies of the terrible jolt. Mile after mile, mile after mile, they sped onwards over that vast expanse, the women clinging as best they might to the pommels, the Colonel almost as spent as they, but still keenly on the look-out for any ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the wide, sailless expanse of the blue Pacific unbroken in its dreadful loneliness except for a wandering grey-winged booby or flocks of whale-birds floating upon its gentle swell, and within their all but deadened hearts naught but grim despair and a dulled sense ...
— "The Gallant, Good Riou", and Jack Renton - 1901 • Louis Becke
... ashamed—only comfortably dulled and a little tired—dully interested and observant, and hopeful for the sunlight presently. We low persons get too great a contempt for things to feel much ashamed at any time; and this very contempt ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... into that mighty sleep, the last thing I heard on earth was my mother playing and singing, "The Shepherd's Flute." It dulled my worldly senses and I slowly drifted away into the pleasant spiritual valley. Who could drift off in a more beautiful ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... physicians, conference with my creditors and friends about my debts and the necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword-point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I stay within, solitary and comfortless, without company, banished from all opportunities to treat with any to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks." If the Lords would recommend his suit to the King, "You shall do a work of charity and nobility, you shall do me good, you shall do ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... our diamond-fields," he said. "Those, most likely, were little, unconsumed bits of the original mass, afterwards gradually forced up from the interior in the same way that many metals and minerals are forced up, and then rounded and dulled by countless ages of grinding and abrasion, due to the action of rocks ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... make the same effect and produce the same impression on their public? Why, for instance, did the late Mme. Tietjens, when singing the following passage in Handel's Messiah, always begin with very little voice of a dulled quality, and gradually brighten its character as well as augment its volume until she reached the high G-[sharp] which is the culmination, not only of the musical phrase, but also of the tremendous announcement ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... place her under restraint; yet, for the present, there is not quite sufficient evidence of insanity to sign the certificate. Did you overhear her in the next room?" And, seating himself at his table, he looked at me through his glasses with those keen penetrating eyes that age had not dimmed or time dulled. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... an extraordinary grinding noise, that thrilled through every beam of her; next, in the space of a few beats of the heart, she plunged into the sea, raising such a boiling and roaring of waters, as, spite of the sounds being dulled to our ears by our being in the cabin, persuaded us ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... fools beat their brazen gong For gods' ears dulled by blatant praise, Awonder why the scented fumes And surplices at evensong Avail not as in other days. Shrunken and mean the spirit fails Like old snow falling from the crags And priest and pedagog compete With nostrums for the age that ails, But learn not why ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... to be neat, she had smoothed her hair, tidied her dress, and washed the tears from her face, but she could not give brightness to the dulled eye or ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... biting cold morning, wind-swept and gray; and with air so frosty-pure no one might breathe it and stay bilious: neither in body nor bilious in spirit. It was a wind to sweep the yellow from jaundiced cheeks and make them rosy; a wind to clear dulled eyes; it was a wind to lift foolish hearts, to lift them so high they might touch heaven and go winging down the sky, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... had dulled the face of Kitty gave way to a look of understanding and a smile as she remembered having ordered him to get hot water, but the amazement on the faces of Mr. Fenelby and his wife ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... The taste of that crane soup clung to me all day like the memory of an old sorrow dulled by time. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the curb on Broadway just below Fourth and stopped the motor. He leaned back against the tufted arm and stretched himself. Then he idly viewed the passing show before him. It was past mid-afternoon and dry and dusty. The keen edge of the sun had slightly dulled, but a Negro, seated high up on a pile of shabby furniture on a moving van, mopped a shining black face with the end of a very dirty undershirt sleeve. A boy came wavering along on a bicycle, swerved in to the curbing across the street, stopped, got off and went in to the Baptist Seminary, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... he had never felt clearer, never seen things more clearly. The wine gave him what he wanted, an edge to these few hours of pleasure, an exaltation of energy. It dulled his sense of pity, too. It was pity he was afraid of—for himself, and for this girl. To make even this tawdry room look beautiful, with firelight and candlelight, dark amber wine in the glasses, tall ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for him. Dino's hearing was dulled by fatigue and fasting: he did not understand at first what was said. But, by-and-bye, he knew that he was ordered to go into the guest-room, where the Prior awaited his coming. The command gave Dino an additional pang: the guest-room was ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... advantage of his victory to attack the rest of the Roman forces in Mesopotamia, or even to attempt the siege of any large town. Perhaps he had really suffered large losses in the earlier part of the day; perhaps he was too much affected by the miserable death of his son to care, till time had dulled the edge of his grief, for military glory. At any rate, we hear of his undertaking no further enterprise till the second year after the battle, A.D. 350, when he made his third and most ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... and then the voice, its sharpness dulled, said slowly, 'Yes, I told you what I remembered and what I heard afterwards. A hunting accident! It sounds so simple. That's what they call it. Names are useful. We couldn't get on without them. I get such queer ideas, lying here, with nothing to do. Before ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... chin had temporarily dulled Jimmy's mentality. He stood, swallowing and endeavouring to pull himself together and to get rid of a feeling that his head was about to come off. He backed to the desk ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and looked interested. She was certainly a lovely creature—the only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would cross the street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had—curious, penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled by self-conceit. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... living toilfully for time and the things that perish, and hearing the warning voice faintly and ever more faintly as the years pass; the aged, steeped and sodden in sin unrepented of, and with the spiritual senses all dulled and blunted by lifelong rebellion, willing now to hear and obey, it might be, but calling in vain on the merciful and long-suffering God they had so ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... was. He bent it to the right and left, as a heavy fall of rain with a strong wind does a field of corn. Tighter I held my breath, and mercifully, in consequence of my having reserved my fire till the muzzle of my rifle almost touched him, had so nearly blinded him, and so dulled his power of scent, that he was less able to discover me. Had his trunk but grazed me as he struck it about above my head, I should instantly have been discovered, and my fate would have been sealed. Round and round me he walked, roaring away in his fury and disappointment at not finding me. ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... birds—which may have light or white parts—will require care in cleaning, in order that their darker feathers may not be dulled by contact with the white plaster. Should this happen, however, in spite of all pains, it will be found that beating with feathers, and a light touching over with wadding, on which a very little benzoline has been poured, will brighten them up wonderfully. Ostrich and other feathers may be effectually ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... wretched fellows who thus waste time amid sordid surroundings come from refined homes; but music and books and the quiet pleasant talk of mothers and sisters are tame after the delirious rattle of the bar, and thus bright lads go home with-their wits dulled and with a complete incapacity for coherent speech. Now let it be remembered that no real friendships are contracted in those odious drinking-shops—something in the very atmosphere of the place seems to induce selfishness, and a drinker ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... like the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt, is found to be suffering languid decline, the gaps in the dulled historical records are filled with the echoes of the thunder god, whose hammer beating resounds among the northern mountains. As this deity comes each year in Western Asia when vegetation has withered and after fruits have dropped from trees, bringing tempests and black rainclouds to issue ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... to act but to endure. Always I kept telling myself that I must be brave, for Ringan had praised my courage, and I had a conviction that nothing that man could do would shake me. Thanks be to God, my quick fancy was dulled, and I did not try to look into the future. I lived for the moment, and I was resolved that the moment should ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... long on the radiant countenance of the girl from Unaka. Not so the young women looked after a few months of factory life. He was getting to know well the odd jail-bleach the cotton mill puts on country cheeks, the curious, dulled, yet resentful expression of the eyes, begotten by continuous repetition of excessive hours of trivial, monotonous toil. Would this girl come at last to that favour? He was a little surprised at the strength of protest in his own heart. Then MacPherson, coming down the office steps, called ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... passed about the tent. Everybody—married men and women, maidens and young men, girls, boys, and little children—was ravenously hungry, and for a few minutes little could be heard but the plying of the viands. But as the first edge of hunger became dulled the edge of wit sharpened, and laughter and banter rollicked back and forward through the tent. The doctor, now quite sober, took a census, and found the total population to be twenty-eight. These he classified as twelve married, eight eligible, seven children, and himself, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... fell on a paltry handful of silver, with the dulled gold of one worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly, that it was the third time he had counted that ever-lightening handful since partaking of his frugal coffee and rolls that morning. So he dropped the coins back into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and took ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... only the early extinction of the Roman drama, but generally the inferiority of Rome to Greece in every department of the fine arts. The fine temper of Roman sensibility, which no culture could have brought to the level of the Grecian, was thus dulled for every application.] as much as men, and children intermingled with both, looked on with leisurely indifference, with anxious expectation, or with rapturous delight, whilst below them were passing the direct sufferings of humanity, and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... However dulled by earth, each human mind Holds somewhere gems of beauty and of light ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the name had an influence on the weather, I don't know. Perhaps it did rain some years, but, as I remember, County Fair time seems to have had a sky perfectly cloudless, with its blue only a little dulled around the edges where it came close to the ground and the dust settled on it. Things far off were sort of hazy, but that might have been the result of the bonfires of leaves we had been having evenings after supper. In Fair weather, when the sun ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... Challenger as the boom of a gong sounded through the house. "We have a cook whose omelettes are only excelled by her cutlets. We can but trust that no cosmic disturbance has dulled her excellent abilities. My Scharzberger of '96 must also be rescued, so far as our earnest and united efforts can do it, from what would be a deplorable waste of a great vintage." He levered his great ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... here dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty. As the boat swam over the great rollers, the men sat listening to this roar. "We'll swamp sure," ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River. Over all was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the dulled thunder ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... was littered with snaky coils of india-rubber tubing; enormous boots with leaden soles upwards of an inch thick; several diving helmets, two of which were of brightly polished metal, while the others were more or less battered, dulled, and dinted by hard service in the deep. The walls were adorned with large damp india-rubber dresses, which suggested the idea of baby-giants who had fallen into the water and been sent off to bed while their costumes were hung up to dry. In one corner lay several ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor's room, and felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... century was greeted with more enthusiasm than Greuze's Accordee de Village, which was exhibited in 1761. It seems to tell a story, and therefore even to-day, in spite of its dulled pink and lustreless blue, it arrests the visitor to one of the less frequented halls of the Louvre.[33] Paris, weary of mythology and sated with pretty indecencies, was fascinated by the simplicity of Greuze's village tale. "On se sent gagner d'une emotion douce ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the tooth of pain is dulled; Wait till the wound is overgrown: Not in a day the moss hath made So fair this once unsightly stone." Then was I silent, but less wroth, Content my heart should have its way. Believing that in God's fit time We yet should keep ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... and the plain, and when he did his words were full of contempt. One night, when the adventurers were lodged on the land in a cleft of the mountains, he disappeared. The natives who slept on either side of him as guard were both stabbed to the heart. The sight still further dulled the spirits of all. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... my brows went up at the name I caught the old gentleman watching me with an eye which was sharp enough within its dulled rim. "Will you answer that I am at his service, but on the one condition that he comes ashore and ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... been used for years." He thought of the pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... longing to be back. There was a pain sometimes, when in spite of herself she would fall to thinking of Jack Barrow. But that she looked upon as a closed chapter. He had hurt her where a woman can be most deeply wounded—in her pride and her affections—and the hurt was dulled by the smoldering resentment that thinking of him always fanned to a flame. Miss Hazel Weir was neither meek nor mild, even if her environment had bred in her a repression that had ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly scarred. Just such a ship, he thought with a thrill, as the one on which Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... had been organized into an amulet brigade, for what they cannot see is usually not worth seeing at all. But no one could find it, and in the meantime the princess grew pale, and, truth to tell, rather cross. Her hair dulled a little, and her eyes looked like forget-me-nots drowned in the brook. When the court philosopher reasoned the matter out and discovered that the amulet had been carried far away, perhaps outside the kingdom, the king offered the Prize ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the ears of the hermit, albeit somewhat dulled by age, became aware of the tramp of armed men, and at once he drew the girls hastily aside into the bushes; but the bushes at that part happened to be not very thick, and part of Ada's dress, which was a gay one with a good deal of scarlet about it, caught the attention of a sharp-eyed ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... under the rail, which broke the blow of the sea, and holding on too, no mischief befell me, only that for about twenty seconds I stood in a horrible fury and smother of frothing water, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with every faculty in me so numbed and dulled by the wet, cold, and horror of our situation, that I knew not whether in that space of time I was in the least degree sensible of what had happened or ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... had come in the night over the mountain, had arrived, and were ready to fall upon their rear. Closely pressed by the Persians, they drew back to the narrowest part of the pass, where they had fought on the preceding days, and there made their last stand. Their spears were broken, their swords were dulled; but even had their weapons been still of the best, it would have availed them little, for the Persians, all too well acquainted now with the Greek daring, refused to close with their enemies. In their well-nigh useless armour, which had been hacked from their limbs during their earlier encounters, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the town is. There are patches of building—massive structures, monuments, apparently—that are so battered and worn, and seemingly so tired and so burdened with the weight of age, and so dulled and stupefied with trying to remember things they forgot before history began, that they give one the feeling that they must have been a part of original Creation. This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of India, and has always been celebrated for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beyond his sight if not beyond his hearing; and for some time he had strenuously refused to permit the boy to go upon his errand; but the little fellow plead so earnestly, and the father's ever-present apprehensions having gradually dulled by their want of realization, he had given his reluctant consent, until it came to be considered the special province of the boy to bring in the goat every evening ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... forest, and the carrier pigeon to recover his mate and dwelling place from the distance of hundreds of miles away. In civilized men, however, the habit of the home and street and the disuse of the ancient freedom has dulled, and in some instances almost destroyed, all sense of this shape of the external world. The best training to recover this precious capacity will ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... claimed attention, as though never seen properly before; no longer dulled by familiarity, but shaking off its "ordinary" appearance, proud to be looked at, naked and alive. The rivulet ran on, but did not run away; the gravel paths, soft as rolled brown sugar, led somewhere, but led in both directions, each of them inviting; ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... mercifully drugged by her task. She had learned to "converse" all day long, mechanically, absently, as if in a trance. An uneasy trance it must have been! Her worst moments were when off duty—alone in the evening, shut up in her own little room, her dulled thoughts waking up slowly till she started into the full consciousness of her position, like a person waking up in contact with something venomous—a snake, for instance—experiencing a mad impulse to fling the thing away and run off ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... he held most precious of his possessions, and not merely because it would serve as a corroboration of his story to Captain Willoughby, but because the weapon enabled him to believe and realise it himself. A brown clotted rust dulled the whole length of the blade, and often during the first two days and nights of his flight, when he travelled alone, hiding and running and hiding again, with the dread of pursuit always at his heels, he had taken the knife from his breast, and stared at it with incredulous eyes, and clutched ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... case we must seek the exotic in remote places and in exceptional conditions, if we are to observe it at all. But Lafcadio Hearn cultivated in himself and taught his students to cultivate a quick alertness to those qualities of life to which we are usually dulled by habit. Education as he conceived of it had for its purpose what Pater says is the end of philosophy, to rouse the human spirit, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. It is a sign that dulness is already ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... herself swung out of space onto the earth again, through a glare of brightness in which Celia's face seemed to be framed, edged with infernal light. . . . And another face, Camilla's, was there in the confusing brilliancy; and she reeled a little, embraced, held hot and close; and in her dulled ears drummed Celia's voice, murmuring, pitying, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... rifles, bayonets, knives, maces, all bearing scars of battle. Above them, three fragments of Prussian battle-flags formed a kind of frieze, their color softened by the fading sunset, even as the fading of the dream of imperial glory had dulled and dimmed all that for which they ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... by side on the flanks of the Andreasberg; and when, three years before, she had gone with her father and her mother on the long journey westward, the heart of Andreas Stoffel had gone with her, and only his body was left behind among the mountains of the Harz. And Christine had dulled to him a little the keen edge of the sorrow of their parting by admitting that she left her own heart in the place of the heart that she ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... of his wrist he drew from the brown paper a long, thin, highly polished rapier, the highly burnished steel of which was dulled along half its length, as if it had been first dimmed and ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... a Christian who has lost sanctifying grace by a grievous sin. An "obdurate" sinner is one who, by repeatedly and maliciously transgressing the laws of God, has dulled his intellect and hardened his will against salutary inspirations. A man may be an habitual sinner (consuetudinarius) and a backslider, without being obdurate, or, which comes to the same, impenitent. Weakness is not malice, though sinful habits often beget impenitence, which is one of the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... had talked herself into a more emotional mood than she had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her voice had begun to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness that must hitherto have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and self-restraint of the past few days. Now she turned swiftly from the window and faced him as she went on, her beautiful face flushed and animated, her eyes gleaming, her ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... banks of the great river were gray and mysterious under the effulgence of a top-heavy yellow moon. The search-light on the peak pierced out the fact that a low, swirling mist was creeping up from the river's dulled surface. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... at your elbow," said the voice, coming dulled, from a further apartment. "Doubtless you would be more comfortable ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... gravestone was toppling over all that was left of the orator, would still speak of the wonders of his eloquence; were comely women to whom the household was the world and the household task the life's work, but who could now for the moment lift their bent forms and have their dulled eyes turned to higher and better things. Moreover, there were in that room a score of deep eyes that could not but quicken at the sight of a slender, manly figure, clad in scholastic black, of a thin, earnest face, with beetled brows and a classic forehead ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... far as you use it to benefit others less fortunate though equally deserving. It is given you as a trial, not as a reward.'—To you, oh Cynic, this message have I also: 'Your eyes see but through a veil of dulled and vainglorious senses. Some truths you have learned, but in the passage through your mind they take the colour and shape of a distorted and embittered fancy. You have a work to do, and influence to do it; but your will ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... peruerse iudgement, both of wordes and sentences. These Making of // faultes, taking once roote in yougthe, be neuer, or Lattines // hardlie, pluckt away in age. Moreouer, there is marreth // no one thing, that hath more, either dulled the Children. // wittes, or taken awaye the will of children from learning, then the care they haue, to satisfie their masters, in making of latines. For, the scholer, is commonlie beat for the making, ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... before. She had become a little separated from the company as she followed a trail of golden sunflowers down the edge of the wide space between the stream and the foot of the headlands towering far beyond it. The sun had disappeared suddenly and the gleam of the blossoms dulled a trifle. Leigh sat down on a slab of shale to study the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... And yet we may rely upon it, that amongst those most affectionately tended and most generously wept, have been they who have met their last hour under such circumstances. Human hearts all vibrate in harmony to one chord: in the good this sympathy is ready; in the bad it is dulled; but never while life and hope remain, can the silver chord be said to be cut. And so it is, that the same image of the forlorn, which, as affecting any that we love, appeals at once to the deep wells of compassion, will cause the same feeling of compassion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... in what Major Evelyn was saying. Her lips were parted, her eyes and colour bright. The air of slackness which so often dulled her beauty had disappeared. For once ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... exhausted less quickly, as it was no longer to be exposed to the rays of the intense Australian moon. Clouds had gathered over the sky, and though the moon gleamed at times in the gaps that they left in blue air, her beam was more hazy and dulled. The locusts no longer were heard in the grass, nor the howl of the dogs in the forest. Out of the circle, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... flattering picture, that the best school for such writing is an unhappy affection, and that no man can want better luck than to have his heart broken, and so be made proof against lovesickness. An unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the prose of life. A man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his Beloved remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her an unwieldy and wearisome old woman. And when at times he grows sentimental—a bachelor's privilege—he can feel again ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... than to a defect of Nature. But in this position, or mode of placing, I deem the virtues of this stone to be properly conserved, and I believe that in other positions or parts of the sky its virtue is dulled, rather than preserved. By means of this instrument at all events you will be relieved from every kind of clock (horologium), for by it you will be able to know the Ascendant at whatever hour you will, and all other dispositions of the ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... differences only dulled for a while their friendly communications. Time renewed them; and Tickell enjoyed Swift's friendship as a legacy from the man with whose memory ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... But the two had said all they wanted to say, and fortunately their senses were somewhat dulled. They had passed through so much that they were like those who are under the influence of opiates. The path was now dark, although both torches and fires burned in the distance. Presently they heard that chant with which they had become familiar, the ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and she sat down to read Maynard's letter again. She read it two or three times without seeming to take in the sense; her apprehension was dulled by the passion of the last hour, and she found it difficult to call up the ideas suggested by the words. At last she began to have a distinct conception of the impending interview with Sir Christopher. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... man went off dreamily. A heavy grief dulled and blinded his senses; he walked along like one who wanders in his sleep. Christiana's room door was open and a lamp was there. There were dainty knick-knacks on the dressing-table, a vase ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace or refrain from envying their happines. The whole range of these sad truths could be read in the dulled gray eyes of Mademoiselle Gamard; the dark circles that surrounded those eyes told of the inward conflicts of her solitary life. All the wrinkles on her face were in straight lines. The structure of her forehead and cheeks was rigid and prominent. She allowed, with apparent indifference, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... was one of bitter disillusion, though for Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the truth, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... moment she might have seen through his subterfuge; but now, her wits dulled, her mind clouded by the scene through which she had lately passed, she accepted his petition ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing. She sought him everywhere—in others whom she induced to talk about him. She went up in the mornings to Madame Lebrun's room, braving the ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... change his position in the slightest, with Nan's head lying against his shoulder, and her hand in his. Now and again one of the nurses fed him with milk and brandy, and after a time the intolerable torture of his cramped arms and legs dulled ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... sheltered life. The same applies to domesticated sheep contrasted with wild sheep, or even with their own lambs. If we are to form a sound judgment on the intelligence of mammals we must not attend too much to those that have profited by man's training, nor to those whose mental life has been dulled by domestication. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... her at home in England; that in fact she had no home in England, no father nor mother left upon earth; and that she had been bidden by her mother's last words to seek him out, and ask him for a home. Her words came up, half choked from a heavy heart, and his dulled wits could not take their meaning in without several repetitions; and then he cried like a child, rather at his own loss of a sister, whom he had not seen for more than twenty years, than at that of the orphan's ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Gone were all my pigmy troubles, vanished into nothingness. Engulfed in a common ruin lay all fragments of desire; the search for reward, the dread of punishment—all petty figments of the imagination were powerful now no more. The fall of reason crushed every human hope and dulled the edge of every human fear. What cared I now for food, for water; for honor or for shame? My mind, imperial and free from artificial restraints, plunged riotously into forbidden realms, I reveled in the exaltation ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... away from the ranch and made the greater haste when the sound of their galloping could not reach the dulled ears of those who slept. They did not talk much, and when they did it was to tell one another what great fools they were—but even in the telling they urged their horses ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... quality of a working- class; or I might even cite (since, though he is alive in the flesh, he is dead to all heed of criticism) my poor old poaching friend, Zephaniah Diggs, who, between his hare-snaring and his gin-drinking, has got his powers of sympathy quite dulled and his powers of action in any great movement of his class hopelessly impaired. But examples of this defect belong, as I have said, to a bygone age rather ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all—was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... We bade the Sixth Cavalry people once more good-bye, but I was so nearly dead by this time, with the heat, and the fatigue of all this hard travelling and packing up, that the keener edge of my emotions was dulled. Eight days and nights spent in travelling hither and thither over those hot plains in Southern Arizona, and all ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... He started, and consciousness struggled to obtain control over his dulled senses. "Why, is that you, master?" he asked shamefacedly, seizing Pelle's hand. "So you've come back! I suppose you think me a beast, but what can ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there be any exception—and here destiny steps in—it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what special impression or effect I should like to have on a man of the world who had been every where, done every thing, seen every thing, knew every thing (or at least thought so)—in fine, a man with the edge of every desire dulled, the glow of every passion cooled. My answer was simply this: I should try to give him what I constantly and without much effort gave most men—A new sensation. After all it is not such a hard thing to do. Blase men are ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Tilda (she was suffering a reaction, and for a moment it dulled the edge of her wits), "but I know the Good Samaritan, an' ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... if indeed it was the same peace wherewith the king of men regarded his approaching end, that he had left as a heritage to his brothers. Suddenly he was aware that the earth had begun to live again. The hum of insects arose from the heath around him; the odour of its flowers entered his dulled sense; the wind kissed him on the forehead; the sky domed up over his head; and the clouds veiled the distant mountain tops like the smoke of incense ascending from the altars of the worshipping earth. All Nature began to minister to one who had begun to lift his head from the baptism of fire. He ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Arrowhead Ranch—in the tea gown of a debutante and with too much powder on one side of her nose—and she must have at least one cup of tea so corrosive that the Scotch whiskey she adds to it is but a merciful dilution. She now drank eagerly of the fearful brew, dulled the bite of it with smoke from a hurriedly built cigarette, and relaxed gratefully into one of those chairs which are all that most of us remember William Morris for. Even then she must first murmur of the day's annoyances, provided this time by officials of the United ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... misquoted something about the noble two who held the pipes in the brave days of old. But Sarah Emily did not understand the allusion, and the joke fell very flat. Her arms were cramped too, and her sense of humor was becoming dulled. ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... single electric bulb glinted upon an object which threw off dulled translucent tints of bluish-green—not a trade dollar, but a big overcoat button the size of a trade dollar—a flat, smooth, rimless disk of smoked pearl with a tiny depression in the middle where the thread holes went through. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... was always a costly luxury. The details of the famine are scattered broadly through the pages of the contemporaries, and at every point the woman appears, wretched, lamenting, furious, ravenous for food, fighting for it and plundering, her heart dulled with bitterness, and her mouth distorted with curses for those pointed out to her as the cause of all her sufferings. Louis, Marie Antoinette, Brissot, Vergniaud, Hebert, she cared little what the name was, but was equally ready to rend them when told that they stood for the starvation of {85} ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... fell. Ulysses by Telemachus's order had a seat and a mess assigned him in the door-way, and he had his eye ever on the lances. And it moved gall in some of the great ones there present, to have their feast still dulled with the society of that wretched beggar as they deemed him, and they reviled and spurned at him with their feet. Only there was one Philaetius, who had something a better nature than the rest, that spake kindly to ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... had been invested by wintry drifts of twenty feet of snow, cut off equally from incoming teams from the pass and the valley below. During the second year his wife had joined him with four children, but whether the enforced separation had dulled her conjugal affection, or whether she was tempted by a natural feminine longing for the land of promise beyond, she sought it one morning with a fascinating teamster, leaving her two sons and two daughters behind her; two years later ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... understand—revile, trample it underfoot, pay for the visit and walk away in peace, his hands in his pockets, whistling. But the most horrible of all is that all this has come to be a habit with them; it's all one to her, and it's all one to him. The feelings have dulled, the soul has dimmed. That's so, isn't it? And yet, in every one of them perishes both a splendid sister and a sainted mother. Eh? Isn't ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... thickened over the sky, and much of the world was gray beneath, and the scene had dulled in tint and spirit since last they had had some large outlook upon it. Only on the slopes toward the east did the sunshine rest, and in the midst of a sterile, barren slant it flickered on that semblance ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... beldame, left alone with the girl, viewed her with an astonishment which would have been greater if she had not reached that age at which all sensations become dulled. How the Lady of the House, who was to her both Power and Providence, came to be there, and there in that state, passed her conception. But she had the sense to loosen the girl's frock at the neck, to throw water on her face, and to beat her hands. In a very few minutes Flavia, who ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... two the zest of the chase was dulled by the Wildcat's habitual languor. He edged over towards the Mud Turtle. "Mud Turtle, 'spec' dese gen'men gwine to give us fo' bits, mebbe, fo' he'pin 'em hunt dese golfs what we ain't seed. ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... half-barbarous people about him, ridden fiercely by their black thoughts of hate and fear. That it was the same with his comrades he knew from little things they said—and even more from what they did not say. They grew dulled to beauty and suffering alike. There were glorious dawns, that flushed the white walls of a seaport rose- red, above waters of mingled ink and blood that changed as by magic to blue like lapis-lazuli. Then the sky turned saffron and the minarets were of a fleeting gold above the deep blue ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... that Milton, while praising "a graceful and ornate rhetoric," declares that poetry, compared with this, is "more simple, sensuous and passionate." [Footnote: Tract on Education. ] These words "sensuous" and "passionate," dulled as they have become by repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... mission, from the small, redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage in front of the shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up and down the lifeless row of closed and streaming windows, with an expectancy dulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers who seldom alighted. On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary young man stepped out on to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a third-class return ticket ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these authors had outlined. In the prosecution of this undertaking, Lyman C. Draper became so absorbed with the passion of collecting that he found little opportunity for literary effort, and in time his early facility in this direction became dulled. He was the most successful of collectors of materials for Western history, and as such did a work which must earn for him the lasting gratitude of American historical students; but unfortunately he did little more than collect and investigate, and the idea which to the last strongly ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... his wife's remark. His mind dulled by shock and misfortune, was slowly revolving forgotten scenes. He saw with incredible sharpness of view his first home, with its few sticks of second-hand furniture like Pinkey's, and Pinkey's mother, the dead image of her daughter. That was where he belonged—to ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... V.18: The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.] i.e., its "palm less dulled or staled."] ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... either, that of Childe Harold, for this hero of his first poem is, in the first and second canto, the personification of youthful exquisites, with senses dulled and satiated by excesses to which Lord Byron had never yielded when he composed this type, since he was then only twenty-one years of age, and had hardly quitted the university, where he lived surrounded by intellectual friends, who ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... to taunt me, so to express where I was speechless; yet I could not shut it out. A pitiful chill of flesh and sense seized me; I was cold,—oh, how cold!—the fevered veins crept now in sluggish ice; sharp thrills of shivering rigor racked me from head to foot; pain had dulled its own capacity; wrapped in every covering my room afforded, with blunted perceptions, and a dreadful consciousness of lost vitality, which, even when I longed to die, appalled me with the touch of death's likeness, I sunk on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... furniture, delft, china, or silver were unknown; the introduction of delft-ware was considered by many of the backwoods people as a wasteful innovation; it was too easily broken, and the plates dulled ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... even the slightest view of those far-off "Delectable Mountains," towards which they had been journeying. In the face of Jack's misfortune and all that he was giving up, her part of the sacrifice sank into comparative insignificance. Her suffering for him was so great that it dulled the sharpness of her own renunciations, and even dulled her disappointment for Joyce. The year in Paris had meant as much to her as the course at Warwick ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... a network of legal and commercial relations between ourselves and them; we know that they will never confront us and call us to account; it is safe for us to do wrong, and we keep on doing it until our consciences are dulled, and we are not able to see that any wrong has ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... I am weary from it not from arousing, but from restraining my thoughts. For what I write must be clear and orderly and concise. Readers nowadays are impatient and easily bored, and crave excitement. And they are dulled too, and no longer hear so clearly the true ring of sincere conviction. Yet I have peace, for this will be read. It will strike the summits, and the social system of today is still built so that everything ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... said for answer; and her voice, dulled and unnatural, seemed to his strangely confused senses as though it came from a far distance,—"I am suffering: shall we go out to ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... anticipated much enjoyment in Canton, having read of the dirt and smells, but we had not expected to be deafened at our very entrance, and I think for the time being it dulled the consciousness of this wonderful spectacle of a floating independent city just at the door of a city whose name is famous ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... day of November, 1867, witnessed a strange and memorable scene in the great English city of Manchester. Long ere the grey winter's morning struggled in through the crisp frosty air—long ere the first gleam of the coming day dulled the glare of the flaming gas jets, the streets of the Lancashire capital were all astir with bustling crowds, and the silence of the night was broken by the ceaseless footfalls and the voices of hurrying throngs. Through the long, dim streets, and past the tall rows of silent ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... behind; I take up fear with my chisel, fear lies 'twixt me and my plane, And I wake in the merry morning to a new unwonted pain. That's fear: I shall live it down—and many a thing besides Till I win the poor dulled heart which the workman's jacket hides. Were it not for the Hope of Hopes I know my journey's end, And would wish I had ne'er been born ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... was heightened by a robe of black velvet; his brow was like a marble dome. His austere face, illumined by two black eyes which cast a pointed flame, conveyed an impression of genius issuing from solitude, and all the more effective because its power had not been dulled by contact with men. It was like the steel of a blade that ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... their first bewilderment at what has afterwards become as clear as daylight. But we must retain our standards of judgement. We have no right to criticize without familiarity, but we must remember that over-familiarity, mere dulled habitual acceptance, means equal incapacity for criticism. If, after trying our utmost, we still cannot see any sense in some of these modernist pages, there is no reason why we should not say so; it is quite possible that there really is no sense ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... have dreamed the sound, I told myself, for all was silent in the sleeping hotel, and even the rattle of cabs outside was dulled. Still, the impression lingered, and I could hardly persuade myself that I had not heard Harvey Farnham's voice calling my name, and finishing with a gurgling, despairing cry for help, the horror of which had chilled the blood in my ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... guide paused before a heavy door of a typical native house which once had been of some consequence, and which faced the entrance to a mosque, indeed lay in the shadow of the minaret. It was opened from within, although she gave no perceptible signal, and its darkness, to Dr. Cairn's dulled perceptions, seemed to swallow them both up. He had an impression of a trap raised, of stone steps descended, of a new ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer |
