"Coarsened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his sensitive infatuation of exotic writing. In the pages of Huysmans, De Gourmont, Flaubert, Gautier, Symons, and Pater he seemed to have found a subtle incense for his deadened nerves. Inside the flabby, coarsened body with its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a recluse. "Too much living has driven him from life," Dorn thought, "and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books—the last debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... and worse," thought Linda as she slowly mounted the stairs. "Nora is anything but a pleasure in the house. At first when she came she was not quite so bad; she had a pretty face, and her manners had not been coarsened from contamination with Molly. Now she is much changed. Yes, I'll go to mother and talk to her. What an awful afternoon we are likely to have with that American girl here and Nora changing for the ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish whims—for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and coarsened and vulgarized their pretty women—or perhaps for a night's gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous caresses of some belle of the other world. Norman fortunately cared not at all for the hugely ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... had lain close to him in one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor; he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... few hours since her arrival, Lily had wondered if her year's experiences had coarsened her. There were so many times when her mother raised her eyebrows. She knew that she had changed, that the granddaughter of old Anthony Cardew who had come back from the war was not the girl who had gone away. She had gone away amazingly ignorant; what little she had known ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Her instinct divined in his apparently sullen attitude the slow intelligence and mental perturbation of a wilful, selfish boy made stupid through idleness and self-indulgence. Even what had been clean-cut, attractive, in his face and figure was being marred and coarsened by his slothful habits to an extent that secretly dismayed her; for she had always thought him very handsome; and, with that natural perversity of selection, finding in him a perfect foil to her own character, had been seriously ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... character, and in any case it is foolish to forget the great virtues of our friend in fretful irritation at a few blemishes. We can keep the first ideal in our memory, even if we know that it is not yet an actual fact. We must not let our intercourse be coarsened, but must keep it sweet and delicate, that it may remain a refuge from the coarse world, a sanctuary where we leave criticism outside, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... ushered into a room on the right of the long passage. A woman was standing by the fireplace. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person she was looking at. Her exquisite figure was enhanced by a ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Anderson to come in, and meanwhile she warmed and comforted the mother. The poor girl looked round her in amazement at the pretty spacious room, as she spread her hands, knotted and coarsened by work, to the blaze. Elizabeth held her sickly babe, rocking it and crooning to it, while upstairs one of kind-eyed Cumberland women was getting a warm bath ready, and lighting a fire ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... empty sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... German and northern Italian art. They knew that it was an effect which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the older land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it in its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the upper lip had been absolutely eaten into, but in spite of this she is now one of the prettiest black children I have ever seen, which is saying a good deal, for negro children are very pretty with their round faces, their large mouths not yet coarsened by heavy lips, their beautifully shaped flat little ears, and their immense melancholy deer-like eyes, and above these charms they possess that of being fairly quiet. This child is not an object of terror, like the twin children; it was just thrown away because no one would ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... whom she so closely scrutinized was slightly undersized, but of close and brawny build. His hands were not so refinedly white as those of certain office bred young men of her acquaintance, yet they were not coarsened by undue toil: it being somewhat an axiom with him to do nothing that an available ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... adorn the pristine annals of her race; while the wife's solicitude to save her husband from a deed of sin associates her with the still nobler women of all ages who have walked like guardian angels by the side of men immersed in the world and liable to be coarsened by its contact, to warn them of the higher laws and the unseen powers. We can hardly doubt that the hand of God was in this dream, or that it was outstretched to save Pilate from the doom to ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... itself. The fine calm forehead and the deep setting of the widely separate eyes gave an impression of intellectual power and balance. But the lower part of the face was mere wreckage; the chin quivering and fallen, from self-indulgence, the fine lines of the nose coarsened by the spreading nostrils; the mouth showing both the soft contours of sensuality and the hard, fine line of craft and cruelty. The man's eyes were unholy. They stared straight before him, and were dead. With his entrance there was infused in the atmosphere a sense of something venomous. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness. He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver; his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage incognito. Now he sat with a bowed ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... abbe?" His speech showed he was French. He wore his cassock with the ease of long habit: he was young. His hand was the delicate hand of a Churchman—not coarsened by manual labour. Fandor, plunged in reflections, lost all sense ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... Barnett, "how a man really could care for a woman who becomes so—so—well, rough and sunburned, and coarsened by sordid work—like that Chandler woman, for instance. I mean, I don't see how any good man could care ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... her. The Marseillaise was leaning heavily on a fauteuil, supported by a hand behind her. A slow, disdainful smile played about her lips, some evil threatening thought expressed itself through every feature of her rounded, coarsened beauty. Kitty's sharp look met hers, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from sources so uncertain that he seemed to maintain his outwardly placid existence only through a series of lucky chances. But adversity had not soured Mr. Dreux; it had not dimmed his pride nor coarsened his appreciation of beauty; he remained the gentle, suave, and agreeably cynical beau. Young girls had been known to rave over him, despite their mother's frowns; fathers and brothers called him Bernie and greeted ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... kind in and about Mauchline. What he saw in some of them, other than the pleasure they felt in his society, it is hard to say; but whatever it was, he liked it and the conviviality to which it led,—which, occasionally coarsened by stories that set the table in a roar, was ever and anon refined by songs that filled his eyes with tears. His life was a hard one,—a succession of dull, monotonous, laborious days, haunted by anxiety and harassed by petty, irritating ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Polytechnic, and one or two first-class schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even see her at times. They could not talk much of him—she and Fanny always spoke of "him," never of Mr. Snooks,—because Helen was apt to say unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days; she had become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted from her that morning—flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it—for she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow |
