"Featureless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... succumbed to sleep equally with her helpless charge in the perambulator beside her. I instantly recognized the infant—a popular organism known as "Baby Buckly"—the prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood. Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in its present repose it looked moist and shiny ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... shadowless light that filtered through the shifting roof of fog. Foolishly, I expected to discover Incan artifacts. The crumbled red stones should have warned me. They were, I think, harder than metal, yet they had been here long enough for the elements to erode them into featureless shards. Had they been of earthly origin they would have antedated Mankind—antedated even ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... perfect master of what not to say to such a personage as Mr. Verver while the particular importance that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves, his repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles, successively, and oh so tenderly, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... turbid Ister whirls his yellow sands, And Rhodope stretched out beneath the pole Comes trending backward. There the herds they keep Close-pent in byres, nor any grass is seen Upon the plain, nor leaves upon the tree: But with snow-ridges and deep frost afar Heaped seven ells high the earth lies featureless: Still winter? still the north wind's icy breath! Nay, never sun disparts the shadows pale, Or as he rides the steep of heaven, or dips In ocean's fiery bath his plunging car. Quick ice-crusts curdle on the running stream, And ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... us every time with all our strength to keep him from bolting when in it. Even at the start of the journey he was as nearly unmanageable as any beast could be, and always liable to bolt from sheer excess of spirits. He is more sober now after three weeks of featureless Barrier, but I think I am more fond of him than ever. He has lost his rotundity, like all the other horses, and is a long-legged, angular beast, very ugly as horses go, but still I would not ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Still Scottish story daintily adorn, Be still a shade—and when this age is fled, When we poor sons and daughters of reality Are in our graves forgotten and quite dead, And Time destroys our mottoes of morality— The lithographic hand of Old Mortality Shall still restore thy emblem on the stone, A featureless death's head, And rob Oblivion ev'n of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... shall one day rise to Him that was slain. 'This company of brethren praising God in the tongues of the whole world represented the whole world which shall one day praise God in its various tongues' (Bengel). Pentecost reversed Babel, not by bringing about a featureless monopoly, but by consecrating diversity, and showing that each language could be hallowed, and that each lent some new strain of music ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... I find a name for that subtle feeling which seized hold upon me this morning in the twilight of waking? It was a reminiscence, charming indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like the figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his darkened room. I had a distinct sense of a form which I had seen somewhere, and which had moved and charmed me once, and then had fallen back with time ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... tubes, transistors, a soldering gun, a couple of meters, and the other various paraphernalia of an electronics workshop. In the center of the table, surrounded by the clutter, sat an oblong box. It didn't look like much; it was just an eighteen by twelve by ten box, made of black plastic, featureless, except for a couple of dials and knobs on the top of it, and a pair of copper studs sticking ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... a silent egg which moves one's deeper emotions—something solemn in its embryotic inertia, something awesome in its featureless immobility. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... on! To Peggy the whole landscape was featureless save for the farmhouse in the far distance. The sand-hills with their pines, and the salt marshes to the eastward blended together in an indistinguishable white blur. The wind whistled in their teeth, a rushing, roaring ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... such influences as these, there is little more distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obvious that it ought to be possible, sooner or later, to formulate these standards at least to some extent, and that to do so must at last be the business of the court. It is equally clear that the featureless generality, that the defendant was bound to use such care as a prudent man would do under the circumstances, ought to be continually giving place to the specific one, that he was bound to use this or that precaution under these or those circumstances. The standard which the defendant ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker. From the towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes, intensifying the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the room would be but a featureless prison-limit. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... conversation had been taking place. It had come to him, too, that she had a mind, and now that he really looked at her he saw that the face was intelligent. Yesterday that face had been no more to him than a smudge, without character, and almost featureless, while to-day.... ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... the neutral American, intent only on finding out the truth, the most thought-provoking feature here (overlooked by foreign correspondents because of its very featureless obviousness) is the fact that Germany today is more confident of winning than at any time in the three months I have been here. This confidence must not be confused with cocksureness; it is rather the "looking forward with quiet confidence to ultimate victory," as General ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that lady, as formed from Esther's letter. The only person in sight was an elderly woman, sitting in a wagon with mail bags piled around her. Two hundred would have been a charitable guess at her weight; her face was as round and red as a harvest-moon and almost as featureless. She wore a tight, black, cashmere dress, made in the fashion of ten years ago, a little dusty black straw hat trimmed with bows of yellow ribbon, and ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... saw three wounded of the war: And the first had lost his eyes; And the second went on wheels and had No legs below the thighs; And the face of the third was featureless, And his mouth ran cornerwise. So I made a rhyme about each one, And this is how my ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... of her father's coming back, David was seized with pity. She could not sit down in these days when her work was out of her hands. Perpetual movement seemed her only relief. The face, that seemed so featureless but was so expressive, had lost its sweet, shining look; the mouth had the pucker of pain; and she had piteous startled ways quite unlike her ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... first ten years of her life had been in a lovely Scottish village, within three miles of the sea on one side and less than three miles from the hills on the other; and the dull, unvaried level, the featureless aspect of her present home, might well ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... place at a high elevation is truly delightful! Mountains and passes, valleys and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages and rice swamps; poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples, prostrate Buddhas, strings of straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey, featureless streets, and quiet, staring crowds, are all jumbled up fantastically in my memory. Fine weather accompanied me through beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa, where I ate my lunch in the street ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,—as ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... winter upon them, searing forever their sight, Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night; Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow, Frozen stiff in the ice pack, brittle and bent like a bow; Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight, Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white; Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair, Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... without a relenting gleam, some lapse of cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... circled serpent, the embodiment of permanence within the changing world of actuality. He represents the nature-philosophy of Romanticism and especially of Schelling, a philosophy so vast and unsubstantial that all values of conduct and all incentives to action disappeared in its featureless abyss. Immermann intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men. The passages in which Klingsor himself, in his moments of despair, and Merlin expose the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... its divinity the honour and title of Creator. Modern religion is like Buddhism in that respect. It offers no theory whatever about the origin of the universe. It does not reach behind the appearances of space and time. It sees only a featureless presumption in that playing with superlatives which has entertained so many minds from Plotinus to the Hegelians with the delusion that such negative terms as the Absolute or the Unconditioned, can assert anything at ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the featureless county of Longford stands the large and handsome but unpretentious house of Edgeworthstown. The scenery here has few natural attractions, but the loving care of several generations has gradually beautified the surroundings of the house, and few homes have been more valued or more the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... directness by night, when the men had to feel with their hands for the goat and Kaffir tracks if astray, but rarely astray, even in the most tangled maze of kopjes, or, still more wonderful, on the broadest savannah of featureless grass. With the Boer, direction had become a sense; not only were topographical features, once seen, engraved indelibly on his memory, but many which would be utterly invisible to untrained eyes were often detected at once ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... and stirred the crackling mass into a featureless heap of black scraps. Then with my chin on my fists and elbows on knees I stared at ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... descend. The waste was featureless, then and for a seemingly interminable time afterward. Then his estimated position matched the site of the static-earth-shock-concussion-wave-occurrence. There seemed nothing about this part of the snow-desert which was different from any other part. No. Over to the ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp, I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked at me again. 'I've done with you,' ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... beautiful drives around Adelaide—at least, as beautiful as is possible when the scenery is marred by a barrenness of soil, a lack of greenness in the grass, an absence of wild flowers, and a dull uniform and sombre tint upon all the trees. The hills, which look somewhat featureless from the city, are riven in a hundred places by rocky gorges or gullies, and many well-made roads cross the range at various points. The roads to Belair and Mount Lofty, to Green Hill, Marble Hill, Moriatta, and a score of other places, give at numerous points fine views of the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the light, swift pressure of cold lips on his mouth.... While the train pulled out, she stood on the rear platform, looking, looking. She was very still. All motion, all expression seemed centered in the steady gaze which dwindled away from him, became vague ... featureless ... vanished in a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... operations of the years 1641, 1642 and 1643 were dilatory and featureless. Both sides were sick of the war and were content to remain on the defensive. This was no doubt largely due to the fact that in rapid succession death removed from the stage many of those who had long played leading parts in the political history of the times. Aerssens died shortly ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... little more than a pale, featureless oval to him in the gloom, but he could divine from the vibrations of her voice that she was as ecstatic as a young maid at her ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... the sun, just sinking behind the pine grove. We mounted and rode home without a word more. But I do not understand Aglauron yet, nor what he expects from this Emily. Yet her character, though almost featureless at first, gains distinctness as I think of it more. Perhaps in this life ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... view before me made itself felt, as a gentle persistent sound might have done: a flat, almost featureless scene—a little village church with cottages and gardens clustering about it, straggling away from it, by copses and meadows in which winter had left only the tenderest shades of the saddest colours. The winding river brightened the dull picture with ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... individuality, and the utter absence of all colors, sounds, and motives by which Russian nationality and life are conveyed. The poetry of this school contains no sharply cut features of spiritual physiognomy. All of them flow together into a featureless mass of elegantly stereotyped forms ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... fact, it is all bone and gristle, and the ravages of cooking minimise its bulk in a disheartening way. One and a half pound of bread is more than the third of a big loaf, but minus butter it makes a featureless repast. Breakfast and tea without butter and milk does not always ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... acquire. There are lives in which the main preoccupation is to get through time. There are others in which it is to find time for all that has to be got through, and most men, in different periods of their lives, are acquainted with both extremes. With some, time is mere duration, a blank, featureless thing, gliding swiftly and insensibly by. With others every day, and almost every hour, seems to have its distinctive stamp and character, for good or ill, in work or pleasure. There are vast differences in this respect between different ages of history, and between different ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... instantaneous glance through the draperies—a fugitive survey that discovered the impasse Stanislas no more abandoned to the wind and rain, but tenanted visibly by one at least who lounged beneath the lonely lamp-post, a shoulder against it: a featureless civilian silhouette with attention fixed to ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... to his visitor's questioning eyes, "was my wife's creation. It was a little featureless agent's house on the edge of these pine-woods. She saw something in the shape of the rooms—and that central hall. We've enlarged it of course. Twice. This was two rooms, that is why there is a step down ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... rack, like the last brown leaf to a frosty tree, while she crunched the toast, spoke dryly of the poor; of how 'interesting many of them are;' how when you take the trouble to understand them, you no longer lump them all together in a featureless misery, you realize how significant and varied are ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... just over. It had been a cold rain, and the snow had crept downward on the heights, and had even powdered the pines of the Cubly. The clouds were sweeping low in the west. Towards Geneva the lake was mere wide and featureless space—a cold and misty water, melting into the fringes of the rain-clouds. But to the east, above the Rhone valley, the sky was lifting; and as Julie sat down upon a midway seat and turned herself eastward, she was met by the full ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... towns without character or amusements. She had kept her eyes open. She had seen that it was from the denizens of the dull streets in these towns that the quack religions won their recruits. Mme. Dauvray's life had been a featureless sort of affair until these experiments had come to colour it. Madame Dauvray must at any rate preserve ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... shall make all these points clear. About Lady Prestongrange (not Lady Grant, only Miss Grant, my dear, though Lady Prestongrange, quoth the dominie) I am taken with your idea of her death, and have a good mind to substitute a featureless aunt. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ugly, featureless boxes built all after the same pattern of dreariness. He looked on this gay bewilderment of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... fiction I have never been fortunate enough to meet with anything which resembled them. The caricatures of enmity and worldly scorn are as crude, to my memory, as the unction of religious conventionality is featureless. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... this could hope to escape instant marriage. Here were features so mathematically flawless that they became practically featureless; here was bodily balance so ideal that the ultimate standards of Greek perfection seemed lop-sided in comparison. No, there could be no doubt about it; this young man was certainly required for the purpose of ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... thinning a little. On either side loom featureless black hills, their summits sharp and ragged. The Great ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... with a smooth, totally featureless face, called a "nopperabo," is a stock part of the Japanese pantheon of ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... difference? harmony without distinction? Are all to have the same face? then why faces at all? If the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the same one face over and over for ever, but one moment will pass ere by monotony bliss shall have grown ghastly. Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather than those multitudinous heads with one face! Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new, each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of the infinite father, each distinct from every other, and therefore all blending toward a full revealing—but ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... voice she lent a careless ear; Her hand within his rosy fingers lay, A chilling weight. She would not turn or hear; But with averted face went on her way. But when pale Death, all featureless and grim, Lifted his bony hand, and beckoning Held out his cypress-wreath, she followed him, And Love was left forlorn and wondering, That she who for his bidding would not stay, At Death's first whisper rose and went ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling |
