"Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can't say—for I live in a very honest neighborhood. The only two thieves that were in it—Charley Folliott and George Austin—were hanged not long ago, and I don't know anybody else in the country side that would stale it." ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform were mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own dead and wounded soldiers. I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own,—but there was something repulsive about the trodden and stained relics of the stale battle-field. It was like the table of some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heeltaps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... middle classes, and even in the manor-houses and parsonages for which he made up the medicine in his master's surgery. But his treatment of the subject was too palpably imitative of one poetic model, already stale from repetition. Not only did he choose Pope's couplet, with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, but frankly avowed it by parodying whole passages from the Essay on Man and The Dunciad, the original lines being ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... by the length of night required; or perhaps it took three nights, like the making of Heracles. What has come over him, that he babbles such puerilities? memorable things indeed, a child in bed, and a very ancient, worn-out dream! what stale frigid stuff! does he take us for interpreters of dreams?' Sir, I do not. When Xenophon related that vision of his which you all know, of his father's house on fire and the rest, was it just by way of a riddle? ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... too much studied at our universities. This seems a science to which the meanest intellects are equal. I forget who it is that says, "All men might understand mathematics if they would."' Goldsmith's Present Stale ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... President, to the exclusion of all other matter. Is that what you mean? How are we going to take care of the news? It is not a magazine of stories and fiction; it is a magazine of news, and the news of the period between August 15th and September 15th, for instance, will become stale if it is not used in the September 15th issue and runs over until the October 15th issue. It is the American Nut Journal. I think your idea can be carried out very fully by featuring the convention as the main thing, but not to use every last page ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn't do at all for our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this clear, fresh air to breathe—"all outdoors," ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... sometimes with instructive correction. What delightful companionship! Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard. He talked of what he was interested in, or else he was silent and bowed with sad civility. To Dorothea this was adorable genuineness, and religious abstinence from that artificiality which uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence. For she looked ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... present, in my opinion, two totally distinct ideas to the English mind in its ordinary mechanical action. "Intelligence" is not necessarily "new", nor indeed is "News:" in the oldest dictionary I possess, Baret's Alvearie, 1573, I find "Olde newes or stale newes." A.E.B. is very positive that "news" is plural, and he cites the "Cardinal of York" to prove it. All that I can say is, that I think the Cardinal of York was wrong: and A.E.B. thought so too, when his object was not to confound me, as may be seen ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various
... it is—"as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." When tenderness fails us, it is—"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time." When humour fails us, it is—"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Henry III. granted a charter and certain privileges in a particular year of his reign, he will write that "he cheard up their blouds with two charters more, and in Anno 1262 and forty-five of his courte keeping, he permitted them to wall in their towne."[269] The pleasure of replacing stale, commonplace expressions by rare, picturesque, live ones, and in lieu of a plain sentence to give an allegorical substitute, has so much attraction for Nash, that clear-sighted as he is, he cannot always avoid the ordinary defects of this particular style, defects which he has in common with ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... witless coxcomb continued the whole day in Harley Street, for the mere pleasure of tormenting Euphemia. From the dinner hour until twelve at night, neither his drowsy fancy nor wakeful malice could find one other weapon of assault than the stale jokes of mysterious chambers, lovers incognito, or the silly addition of two Cupid-struck sweeps popping down the chimney to pay their addresses to the fair friends. Diana talked of Jupiter with his thunder; and patting her sister under ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Exercise. At the same time, the system must be kept well supplied through the stomach with the raw material both for doing this work and for building up this new muscle. When anyone, in training for an event, gets "stale," or overtrained, and loses his appetite and his sleep, he had better stop at once, for that is a sign that he is using more energy than his food is able to give him through his stomach; and the stomach has consequently "gone ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... richest citizen, she is extremely careful and saving. Zenas says a tramp stopped at her door once and asked for food. Miss Cousins—there, I didn't mean to give her name! But no matter—Miss Cousins brought him a slice of stale bread thinly spread with butter. Zenas says the tramp looked from the bread to Miss Cousins, who, I should explain is extremely thin in face and figure, and back to the bread. Then he held it out to her. 'Lady,' he said, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in the Fifteenth Century, p. 105: 'The undrained neglected soil, the shallow stagnant waters which lay on the surface of the ground, the unhealthy homes of all classes, insufficient and unwholesome food, the abundance of stale fish eaten, and the scanty supply of vegetables predisposed rural ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... clapped her hands and laughed with the most contagious little ripple you ever heard. She seemed not to grieve over her defeat, but dimpled as though it were a huge joke, the thought of which rather pleased her than otherwise. Victory had grown stale for ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Polar atmosphere," replied Magee. "Yes, it is pretty stale. Jack London and Doctor Cook have ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... I accept them. Though gas is as dreadful a description of champagne as entomological is of a certain type of secretary, I would venture to point out that it expands, effervesces, soars ever to greater heights; but beer, froth and all, tends to become flat, stale, and unprofitable." ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... You are looking after better bread Than any that is made of wheat? You know that people nowadays To what is old give little praise; All must be new in prose and verse: They want hot bread, or something worse, Fresh every morning, and half baked; The wholesome bread of yesterday, Too stale for them, is thrown away, Nor is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... meant that. She hadn't even thought of it; but, since he had, there was nothing for it but to go in. The door shut behind her sharply, with a click like a little trap; and she breathed such an atmosphere, flat, faint and stale, the mere ghost of some fuller, more fragrant flavor. In the little anteroom where they stood, whose faded ceiling all but brushed their heads, and in the larger little room beyond the Nottingham lace curtains, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... the crowd and whispers in Campbell's ear, "Put Balfour and Martin in the scrim. They are fresher." He has noticed that the scrim line on both sides is growing stale, and can do no more than grimly hold on. At once Campbell sees the wisdom of this suggestion. The Don, though not so heavy as Shock, is quite as strong, and is quicker than the big centre, who ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... of laymen do not so interpret their work in life that in so many cases they are discovered to be in effect living for the sake of their leisure and regarding their daily work as uninteresting drudgery, with the result that life as a whole comes to be for them dreary and profitless and stale. A Christian man's life-work ought not to have the character of drudgery, but of ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Nachor the astrologer; and I marvel how it seemed thee good to act this play, and to think that thou couldst so dull my sight at mid-day, that I should mistake a wolf for a sheep. But well sung is the proverb, 'The heart of a fool will conceive folly.' So this your device and counsel was stale and utterly senseless; but the work that thou hast accomplished is full of wisdom. Wherefore, rejoice, Nachor, and be exceeding glad. I render thee many thanks, that thou hast been to-day advocate of the truth, and hast not polluted thy lips with foul words ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... bell. The instant the blades touched, each felt them tingle to their very points with a personal vitality, as if they were two naked nerves of steel. Evan had worn throughout an air of apathy, which might have been the stale apathy of one who wants nothing. But it was indeed the more dreadful apathy of one who wants something and will care for nothing else. And this was seen suddenly; for the instant Evan engaged he disengaged and lunged with ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... alone with Augustus. The crimson-satin chairs are so uncomfortable that now he leaves us almost directly after dinner to lounge in his "den," and I have to go there and say good-night to him. The place smells of stale smoke, some particularly strong, common tobacco he will have in a pipe. He gets into a soiled, old, blue smoking-coat, and sits there reading the comic papers, huddled in a deep arm-chair, a whiskey-and-soda mixed ready by his side. He is generally half-asleep when I get there. I do not ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... is a Russian, against whom we rail; S is a Spaniard, as slow as a snail; T is a Turk with his wife in a veil; U a United States' Student at Yale; V a Venetian in gondola frail; W Welshman, with coal, slate,—and shale; X is a Xanthian—or is he too stale?— Y is a Yorkshireman, bred by the Swale; Z is a Zulu;—and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... resembling smut: a cirumstance too well known to many farmers. Those who wish to consult the remedies recommended against this, may refer to The Annals of Agriculture, and most other books on the subject. It is usual with farmers to mix the Wheat with stale urine or brine, and to dry it by sifting it with slaked lime, which has the effect of causing it to vegetate quickly, and to prevent the attacks of many insects when the seed is first put into the ground. This is considered as productive of great benefit to ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... drop in, and so pass away the morning, doing pretty nearly the same in the evening, with the addition of punch now and then. After these great people and aristocracy of Kolomna, come the rank and file. It is as difficult to put a name to them as to remember the multitude of insects which breed in stale vinegar. There are old women who get drunk, who make a living by incomprehensible means, like ants, dragging old clothes and rags from the Kalinkin Bridge to the old clothes-mart, in order to sell them for fifteen kopeks—in ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and went to the window, relieved to find that the sun had scattered my morbid fancies with the darkness; and I speculated, as I dressed, whether the thing called conscience were not, after all, a matter of nerves. I went downstairs through the tobacco-stale atmosphere of the lobby into the fresh air and sparkly sunlight of the mild February morning, and leaving the business district I reached the residence portion of the little town. The front steps of some of the comfortable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... They take up the New Testament and read Christ's sermon on the Mount; but they find nothing in it to answer their purpose. It is but an ordinary production in their estimation. They pass on through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. How stale, how dull, how uninteresting these gospels, they are led to exclaim. They see but little beauty in the God-like teaching; or the inimitable example of Christ. His last agonies, his death on the cross is insufficient ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... dropped from Ascham's lips his host looked slowly about the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: "I could ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... all things new. Through eternity, new joys, new knowledge, new progress, new likeness, new service will be ours— and not one leaf shall ever wither in the amaranthine crown, nor 'the cup of blessing' ever become empty or flat and stale. Eternity will be but a continual renewal and a progressive increase of ever fresh and ever familiar treasures. The new and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... club, served by a foreign "chef," a Yorkshire pudding, as hard as a stale loaf of bread, is handed round in slabs with the so-called "roast" beef. It is not roasted: it is baked beef, and the pudding is an ill-tasting baked mess, also. Nowhere in London in public or private house do ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... scale a small salmon, stuff with one-half a loaf of stale bread moistened with hot water, seasoned with one-fourth a cup of butter, salt and pepper to taste, and one-half a cup of capers. Mix all well, and bind with one beaten egg. Place the salmon on the rack of a baking-pan in a very hot oven, cover with thin slices of bacon, and let cook ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... remains of muscular action in the claws, which may be excited by pressing the eyes with the finger; when this cannot be produced, the lobster must have been too long kept. When boiled, the tail preserves its elasticity if fresh, but loses it as soon as it becomes stale. The heaviest lobsters are the best; when light they are watery and poor. Hen lobsters may generally be known by the spawn, or by the breadth ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... from these other fools, and at least you have never wearied me. To have done that is to have done something. I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall if you marry this rose of Languedoc, for I take it that she is too sweet a flower to let wither in the stale atmosphere of Courts. This man, this Vicomte de Lavedan, has earned his death. Why should I not let him die, since if he dies ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... which, according to all appearances, she must have sunk at least ten good years; allowance, too, being made for the havoc which a long course of hackneyship and hot waters must have made of her constitution, and which had already brought on, upon the spur, that stale stage in which those of her profession are reduced to think of showing company, instead ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... Thames in gaiety and old tales. I have quitted the stage, and the Clive is preparing to leave it. We shall neither of us ever be grave: dowagers roost all round us and you could never want cards or mirth. Will you end like a fat farmer, repeating annually the price of oats, and discussing stale newspapers? There have you got, I hear into an old gallery that has not been glazed since Queen Elizabeth, and under the nose of an infant Duke and Duchess, that will understand you no more than if you ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... to leave Ferdinand, but he proved his confidence in that gentleman's fortunes by his continual civility, and in the course of the day brought him a stale newspaper. It seemed to Ferdinand that the day would never close. The waiter pestered him about dinner, eulogising the cook, and assuring him that his master was famous for champagne. Although he had no appetite, Ferdinand ordered dinner ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the first time, but afterwards, as the weather-cock found out, they repeated themselves and always told the same stories, and that's very tedious, and there was no one with whom one could associate, for one and all were stale and small-minded. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... you begin to talk aloud what you think, out you go. There have been more round dances. There has been more indifferent singing and some clog dancing. It is getting late. The fumes of tobacco and of stale beer are stifling. Four-fifths of the men have not moved from the tables since we came in. Here and there one is lopped over asleep. But the waiter in female clothing comes along to wake him up and induce him to order more beer. Your glass must always be before ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... complete weariness of life. I don't know which sounds the most dreadful: being bumped along dusty roads in an ambulance, and sleeping with snakes and toads under a tent; or being stifled in an odious little corrugated-iron hotel, living on poisonous tinned stuffs in a perpetual odour of stale roast nigger. If I am going to endure it for my country, I hope my country will give me the only ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed, extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man's eyes; there was palsy in his trembling limbs; there ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... unfinished end of the telegraph. From that point he sent it over the wire to Washington. It was successfully received at the Washington end, and never were human beings more surprised than were the train passengers on alighting at the capital city to find that they brought stale news, and that Clay's nomination was already known throughout Washington. It was the first public proof in America of the powers of the telegraph, and certainly a vital and ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... dropping from the tree into his bowl. We shifted our seats—and ate some more, and then made the astonishing discovery that the breakfast food was full of worms. We looked at the package and found that the grocers had palmed off some stale goods on us and that the box was fairly alive. We all enjoy the recollection of it more than ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... propitiatory air, not quite sure of his reception. His combination of soft manners and responsive kindliness, with a certain unseizable reserve and a familiar yet foreign chiselling of feature, reveal the Jew: in this instance the handsome gentlemanly Jew, gone a little pigeon-breasted and stale after thirty, as handsome young Jews often do, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... joke, J. J. It was all very well pulling my leg last night, and I didn't mind it a bit; but a thing like that gets to be stale the next morning." ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... much as cruel laws or despotic executives. Thus the legislature has seen fit in certain cases to assign a limit to the period within which actions shall be brought; in order to urge men to vigilance, and to prevent stale claims from being suddenly revived against men whose vouchers are destroyed or whose witnesses are dead. It is true, in foro conscientiae, a defendant, who knows that he honestly owes the debt sued for and that the delay has been caused by indulgence or confidence on the ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... intended. So probably was Uzzah's steadying the ark—But some of these do help on the cause of God, and even more than the stale attendance on Lord's day duties. So thought those who introduced images and paintings into churches. [Some indeed attend those ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... closet and opened the door. On a shelf he saw half a loaf of bread, dry and stale. He took it in ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... long and bare, boarded with rough-sawn cedar, and furnished chiefly by the benches that ran down either side of the plain table; but the aromatic smell of the wood was stronger than that of stale tobacco, and the company avoided more than quietly respectful ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... scene with pleasure. Officials came and studied the situation with appreciation. Then Francis and Aaron returned with a large supply of roast chestnuts, piping hot, and hard dried plums, and good dried figs, and rather stale rusks. They found the water just boiling, Angus just throwing in the tea-egg, and the fellow-passenger just poking his nose right in, he was ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of these minds so remote yet so near, the bony old horse pursued his rounds, and Jude would be aroused from the woes of Dido by the stoppage of his cart and the voice of some old woman crying, "Two to-day, baker, and I return this stale one." ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... And beer that is stale Rosa-solis and damnable hum, But we will rack In the praise of sack 'Gainst Omne quod exit ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... to keep her constantly under the eye of her guardians. This threat was more efficient than all the other means which had been used to keep the child within the bounds of common decency; but even this had grown stale ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... for three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... schooner was called the Lightning, she was by no means a clipper. She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff; would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse, in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head to take to her heels, she would wash ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... and he was apparently quite insensible of her presence. For the first time she was conscious of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room, which reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered it, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move; glanced about her with some curiosity, for this was the first time ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... of memory, however great, are stale compared with those of hope; for hope is the parent of all effort and endeavor; and "every gift of noble origin is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath." It may be said to be the moral engine that moves the world and keeps it in action; and at the end of all there stands ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... an affirmative reply to this question, she was doomed to disappointment. Disgusted with such paltry meanness, Clemence, who had pushed her plate away, unable to partake of the stale food, replied quietly, "I should ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill—a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet—comatose, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... garden, he had the hills and valley, the birds, the flowers, the clouds, the sun, he had the Rampio, he had Annunziata, he even had Annunziata's uncle; and with all this he had a sense of having stepped out of a world that he knew by heart, that he knew to satiety, a world that was stale and stuffy and threadbare, with its gilt rubbed off and its colours tarnished, into a world where everything was fresh and undiscovered and full of savour, a great cool blue and green world that from ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... proclaim, And stammering babes are taught to lisp thy name. How long wilt thou the general joy detain, Starve and defraud the people of thy reign! Content ingloriously to pass thy days, Like one of virtue's fools that feed on praise; Till thy fresh glories, which now shine so bright, Grow stale, and tarnish with our daily sight? Believe me, royal youth, thy fruit must be 250 Or gather'd ripe, or rot upon the tree. Heaven has to all allotted, soon or late, Some lucky revolution of their fate: Whose motions, if we watch and guide with skill, (For human ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... it. But it is a transient feeling compared with that he has when he has made a gift. That substantially ministers to his self-esteem. He follows the gift; he dwells upon the delight of the receiver; his imagination plays about it; it will never wear out or become stale; having parted with it, it is for him a lasting possession. It is an investment as lasting as that in the debt of England. Like a good deed, it grows, and is continually satisfactory. It is something to think of when he ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Prussians the day before, and our fellows had been sore put to it to hold their own against Ney, but had beaten him off at last. It seems an old stale story to you now, but you cannot think how we scrambled round those two men in the barn, and pushed and fought, just to catch a word of what they said, and how those who had heard were in turn mobbed by those who ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... laugh at their laboured jokes or not. Of course, it is pretty manners to do so, be the wit never so stale; but on the other hand it encourages them in their evil habits, and seems to me as doubtful a form of hospitality as offering a ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... herrin'-gutted bush-ranger over yonder? He'd stale the milk out of your tea, he would, be the same token. Well, last night he got vicious and took a crack at my lines. I had rayson to suspect he'd be afther tryin' somethin' on, so I laid for him. I planted a certain mule where he could stale it an' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... what Bill said to us in that letter. We take it out and con it over. Delightful fellow! It is full of his own felicitous kinks of whim, though some of it sounds a little old-fashioned by now. It seems a bit stale, has lost some of its freshness and surprise. Better not answer it just yet, for Christmas will soon be here and we shall have to write then anyway. We wonder, can Bill hold out until Christmas without ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy played long this pattering part of youth. The New-Englander hastened ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... to form a catalogue of them, he was compelled to give up the task in despair; he was constantly adding to the enormous reservoir of knowledge which he had at command, and thus his work never grew stale, and he was ready instantly with a hundred illustrative lights on any point which chanced to crop up either in conversation or in the course of his reading. The cheap and flashy writer is inclined to disdain the men who are thorough in their studies; but, while his work grows thin ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... all blood passes first as chyme up to heart and lungs, directly through the diaphragm, conducted through the thoracic duct, first to heart, thence to lungs, at the same time rivers of blood are pouring into the heart from all of the system. Much of it very impure, from diseased or stale blood. Much of the chyle is dead before it enters the great thoracic duct and goes to the lungs without enough pure blood to sustain life. Then ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... dangerous inaction when they are suddenly deprived of the objects on which their imagination exerted its powers. Yet is this exercise so much the more necessary as the imagination is by far the most lively faculty of the mind. Hence, without doubt, it becomes necessary men should replace stale fooleries by those which are novel. This is, moreover, the true reason why devotion so often affords consolation in great disgraces, gives diversion for chagrin, and replaces the strongest passions, when they have been quenched ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... pamphlet on the Catholic question, with my name to it. There is such an uproar here that I think it is gallant, and becoming a friend of Lord Grey's, to turn out and take a part in the affray.... What a detestable subject!—stale, threadbare, and exhausted; but ancient errors cannot ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... a shout at Charlie's expense, and I resumed my work, grave as an owl. That furnished amusement until it grew stale, when Charlie came to ask me my name, and I told him ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... a ring in it not altogether lovely. "Stand aside, Mr. Devant! See, he must have brought his work out after we left yesterday. It was orderly enough then; but look at it now! Let us examine this upon the easel. But first, open the door. I smell stale wine. The untidy fellow ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... of the over-ripe vegetables and stale hen-fruit which the audience may toss at the performers is liable ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... smell of stale tobacco smoke Ere many days I fear, And hear full many a rattling joke, And feel, ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in that happy valley, its rents being pronounced dubious, and its water communication described as "frequently cut off," we found in respect to the whole picture thus lightly-sketched in, that age did not wither nor custom stale ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins, base treasure ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of hours later, when they halted for their rest and refreshment, it was stale cake, hard biltong, and cool ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... has he been of that amphibious fry, Bold to prescribe, and busy to apply; His shop the gazing vulgar's eyes employs, With foreign trinkets and domestic toys. Here mummies lay, most reverently stale, And there the tortoise hung her coat of mail; Not far from some huge shark's devouring head The flying-fish their finny pinions spread. Aloft in rows large poppy-heads were strung, And near, a scaly alligator hung. In this ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... yoghurt, kefir, albumen cacao, cereals in the form of mush, strained legumes, cooked in soup or milk, all sorts of glutinous soups, farinose dishes prepared from stale rolls, biscuits, zwieback, tender and easily, digestible meats, mashed game meat, chicken, raw beef, ham, meat ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... to your maids and men I bring both points and pins; Come bid me welcome then, The good New Year begins: And for my love Let me approve The friendship of your Maid, Whose nappy ale, So good and stale, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as those of idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroad with a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And on his brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... was long and black and the air was stale and thick with the stench of rodents. Stanton stood still, trying to probe the luminescent gloom that the goggles he wore brought to his eyes. The tunnel stretched out before him—on and on. Around him was the smell of viciousness ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... more than madness through grief and remorse. Below this was a charnel vault where some of the apothecaries had been ground down and stuffed into earthenware pots with Album graecum, dung, and many a stale ointment. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... a rule cooked and cold before they are sauteed. Some prefer them to the French. To many minds they never get quite rid of the stale taste that clings to the cold potato. The same may be said of stewed cold, cooked potatoes. The least objectionable way of serving them as left-overs ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... simply stand by the ditch with their hands in their pockets sucking a stale pipe. They would rather lounge there in the bitterest north-east wind that ever blew than do a single hour's honest work. Blackguard is written in their faces. The poacher needs some courage, at least; he knows a penalty awaits detection. These fellows have no idea of sport, no courage, and no ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow's tooth-brush; an echo of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... infirmary, not being expected with his toothless jaws to munch the dry crusts set before the rest of the house. This, it seems, was a custom which had been learnt from St. Justina's at Padua, to put out the stale crusts first, before the new bread, to break appetite upon: just as in the old Quaker schools a hundred years ago, children were set down to suet-pudding, and then broth, before the joint appeared; the order being, 'No ball, no broth; no broth, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... in town, as the cattleman learned at Monte Joe's dance-hall, piled high with tables and chairs and reeking with the stench, left over from the previous night, of whiskey fumes and stale tobacco smoke. Monte Joe professed not to know where the puncher had gone, but as Trowbridge pressed him for information the voice of a woman, as shrill as the squawk of a parrot, floated ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... done, my bird. Thy shape invisible retain thou still: The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither For stale to ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... neither, are signs visible to the dullest apprehension. The once national sport of horse-racing is being degraded to a trade in which it is difficult to perceive anything either sportive or national. The old pretence about the improvement of the breed of horses has become a delusion, too stale for jesting.' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... deal. Look here, Cyprienne, I am not to be put off with stale, second-hand gossip—the echoes of the Clubs; vague, empty rumours that are on everybody's tongue long before they come to me. I must have fresh, brand-new intelligence, straight from the fountain-head. You must get it ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... Phillis entwyte Demophon / that his father Theseus vn- curteysly and trayterously lefte his loue Ariadna alone in the desert yle of Naxus / & contrary to his promise stale from her by nyght / addynge Heredem patria perfide frau- dis agis. That is to saye / vntrew and false forsworne man / thou playest kyndely the fathers heyre / in deceytable begylynge ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... rushing wind from without, blowing from the waste places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly through the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally cleansing and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off, and Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is that it was not the conquerors who overran the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said the baronet, "we ought to win the seat; and every two new votes won in that way are worth half-a-dozen such as Tom Willoughby's, for instance, whose loyalty is a stale ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Speaking about this, some said, Well enough—he has become quite incompetent of late. Getting stale, probably. Unable to discover the obvious, losing his keenness. Ten years in the Far East about does for one. But with Lawson, the situation was different. He had become so tired of boundary lines, of perpetual ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... shut yourself up in a closet and swallow your own gas? But is it any less stupefying to shut yourself up within the last few thousand years of the history of your own corner of the world, and suck in the stale atmosphere of its own self-generated prejudices? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthropology is like travel. Every one starts by thinking that there is nothing so perfect as his own parish. But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned bird, and John had so evidently brought the little basket as a handful of fresh relief from the stale hot paving-stones and bricks of the jail, that Clennam said, with a smile, 'It was very kind of you to think of putting this between the wires; but I cannot even get ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... at him; he was rather fat: the excitement of his talk with the little lady had made his forehead shine; when he smiled his drooping moustache could not hide a row of blackened, broken teeth. He smelt of stale tobacco, as though he carried old pipes in every pocket. He ate quickly and noisily, his eyes on ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... stone. But the farmer with whom Mr. Hollister had made arrangement, brought up daily from his place fresh meat, milk, and vegetables, and twice a week pot cheese and buttermilk; so the "Ohio Camp Fires" were in clover. Nothing they ate was stale and ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... to be a most venerable pimp, and, I doubt not, hast abundance of discretion. Here is this young whoremaster, a true chip of the old venereal block his father, and myself, come for a comfortable cast of thy function. I don't mean that stale pretence of conjuring—d— futurity; let us live for the present, old Haly. Conjure me up a couple of hale wenches, and I warrant we shall get into the magic circle in a twinkling. What says Galileo? What says the Reverend Brahe? Here is a purse, you pimp. Hark, how it chinks! ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... danger to be avoided, however. We may become so taken up with the overwrought descriptions of the emotions as found in literature or on the stage that the common humdrum of everyday life around us seems flat and stale. The interpretation of the writer or the actor is far beyond what we are able to make for ourselves, so we take their interpretation rather than trouble ourselves to look in our own environment for the material which ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... ushered the detective into a bedroom, which she said was her master's, and where the occupation of the Major was made manifest by divers articles of apparel lying on the chairs and hanging on the pegs, and, furthermore, by a powerful effluvium of stale tobacco, and a collection of pipes and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... very good restaurant and one of the most popular. They serve here a dejeuner at 1 kr. 50 oere consisting of an excellent dish of eggs (a speciality of the place) and meat and cheese or so-called "sweet" (generally a very unwholesome stale cake with cream). The table-d'hote dinners are excellent, one being at 3 kr. 50 oere and the other at 2 kr. 50 oere; the first consisting of soup (thick soups being a speciality of the place), fish, entree, meat, and releve (generally hjaerpe), with ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... loss of whose head saved England from disgrace. How strange, that even in this day of intelligence and liberty-loving, it should stand a shrine before which very respectable old gentlemen poured out their stale patriotism! At last I found myself in Downing street—at the door of a massive and sombre-looking mansion (No. 12) in front of which stood methodical-looking men with grave countenances. And, too, there ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... he believed in his own excellence: and quite justly. What he failed to perceive was that the crowd hated excellence. Woodhouse wanted a gently graduated progress in mediocrity, a mediocrity so stale and flat that it fell outside the imagination of any sensitive mortal. Woodhouse wanted a series of vulgar little thrills, as one tawdry mediocrity was imported from Nottingham or Birmingham to take the place of some tawdry mediocrity which Nottingham and ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... him the key. Jog the foot-path way through Tuscany in my company, it's Lombard Street to my hat I charm you out of your lassitude by my open humour. Things I say will have been said before, and better; my tunes may be stale and my phrasing rough: I may be irrelevant, irreverent, what you please. Eh, well! I am in Italy,—the land of shrugs and laughing. Shrug me (or my book) away; but, pray Heaven, laugh! And, as the young are always very wise ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... original and leading people. They claim to have invented printing (wooden type), oil-painting, liberty, banking, gardening, etc. Above all, years before my tale, they invented cleanliness. So, while the English gentry, in velvet jerkins and chicken-toed shoes, trode floors of stale rushes, foul receptacle of bones, decomposing morsels, spittle, dogs, eggs, and all abominations, this hosier's sitting-room at Tergou was floored with Dutch tiles, so highly glazed and constantly washed, that ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... seldom explicitly conveyed to them at their entry into society. Hence they often throw away capital bargains in their first season, and are compelled to offer themselves at greatly reduced prices subsequently, when their attractions begin to stale. This was the fate which Mrs. Wylie, warned by Mrs. Jansenius, feared for Agatha, who, time after time when a callow gentleman of wealth and position was introduced to her, drove him brusquely away as soon as he ventured to hint that his affections ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... some small cakes of my own baking, which I carried in a bag. I was now in a sad predicament unless I should connect at Lake Bennett with some one who would carry my outfit back to Skagway on credit. I ate my stale cakes and drank lake water, and thus fooled the little Jap steward out of two dollars. It was a sad business, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland |
